’There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians; he was more of a man than my papa!’ he thought.  ’I saw him lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him—­and he died for my papa!  All died for him, or risked the dying, and I lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in heather like a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio—­me, the man of the house, the only king in that king’s race.’  He ground his teeth.  ‘The only king in Europe!’ Who else?  Who has done and suffered except me? who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful subjects, like a second Bruce?  Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France, at least, the lewd effeminate traitor!’ And filling the glass to the brim, he drank a king’s damnation.  Ah, if he had the power of Louis, what a king were here!

The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he persevered in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine:  a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary excess.

From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted him.

’By . . .

HEATHERCAT

CHAPTER I—­TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT

The period of this tale is in the heat of the killing-time; the scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild birds of the moorland that have cried there since the beginning.  It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written there in prehistoric symbols.  Strange green raths are to be seen commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, and still living and active—­a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic population.  These rugged and grey hills were once included in the boundaries of the Caledonian Forest.  Merlin sat here below his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here fell into his enchanted trance.  And the legend of his slumber seems to body forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many centuries of their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate courage.