Part 12

The half-drowned man, who had perilled life so gallantly to save the unfortunate soldier, was an officer, and moreover, one that was sure to win favour in French eyes, being young, handsome, and an _Officier d'Ecossais_, as Nanon reported minutely to her startled mistress, who had promptly all her household in attendance on the sufferer, though she dared not peep into his room in person. At last Nanon brought the joyous intelligence that he was "recovering, and had opened a pair of such beautiful eyes!"--so here was a stirring episode for our young demoiselle, who, a half hour before, had been so dull and _ennuyé_ that she was weary of her own charming self and all the world beside.

France and Britain were still, as we last left them twenty-one years ago, engaged in the lively and profitable occupation of fighting battles, battering fleets and burning towns in America, where the subject of taxation had occasioned hostilities between the mother country and her colonies, whose forces, led by Washington, were aided in the strife by the armies and fleets of France, Spain, and Holland.

Some days elapsed before the young officer, who was on his parole of honour, had sufficiently recovered to appear on the terrace of the chateau, where Mademoiselle Therese and the gossiping Nanon received him in due form. He was pale and thin from the effects of a wound, his long sea voyage, and the severe treatment to which prisoners of war were usually subjected in those days; but all this only served to make him the more interesting to the two girls, who were quite flattered by the presence of the chance visitor fortune had sent them to enliven the old chateau. His uniform was sorely dilapidated; the lace and epaulettes of his scarlet coat were blackened by powder and long service, and it consorted oddly with a pair of French hussar pantaloons. Still, notwithstanding these disadvantages, his bearing was free, gallant, and gentlemanly; and in very good French he thanked the lady of Fontbrune for her humanity and hospitality.

"May I ask your name, monsieur?" asked Therese, timidly.

"Munro--Hector Munro."

"And your regiment?"

"The Black Watch--Ecossais."

"Oh, indeed," said Therese, with her dark eyes brightening; for to belong to a Scottish regiment in those days (and even in the _present_) was as sure a guide to French favour as if he could have answered, "The Irish Brigade."

"And you were taken prisoner----"

"In America, mademoiselle, on the Acushnet River, where my regiment was serving with the brigades of grenadiers and light infantry then ordered to destroy a number of pirates who made New Plymouth their haunt. This we achieved successfully, but not without severe loss."

"Were you not dreadfully frightened?"

"I was then under fire for the _first_ time," said the young officer, smiling.

"And how did you feel--oh, pray tell me?"

"A tightening of the breast--a long-drawn breath, as the _first_ shot whizzed past my ear; another as the first cannon-ball seemed to scream in the air overhead, and then I rushed on fearless, filled by a fierce and tumultuous joy. I heard only the din of the bagpipes and the cheers of my comrades. But I lost my way in the wood, and falling among a detachment of the Regiment of Languedoc, was made a prisoner. With many others in the same predicament, I was soon shipped off for France, and so have the honour to appear before you."

"And who was the soldier for whom you risked your life?"

"A sergeant of the Regiment of Languedoc."

"A Frenchman!"

"Yes, mademoiselle; the same man who made me prisoner in America."

"Ah, mon Dieu! and you tried to save him! How noble!"

"Mademoiselle, my father, who was a brave old soldier, taught me that when the sword was in the scabbard _all men are brothers_."

"And your rank?"

"Lieutenant; and now," he added, bitterly, "I may remain a prisoner for ten years perhaps, with my hopes blighted, my promotion stopped, and my pay gone."

"It is very sad," replied Therese, casting down her fine eyes, which she feared might betray the interest she already felt in the young prisoner of war; "but when the baron comes home from Paris--he will be here in three days--we shall see what can be done for you."

Three days--poor little Therese! by that time she was irrevocably in love with young Munro, and Nanon left nothing undone or unsaid to convince her that the passion was quite mutual. Though they did not meet at meals, they, were constantly together on the terraces and in the gardens of the chateau; thus it was impossible for this young man to spend his time in the society of such a girl as Therese, in the full bloom of her youth and beauty (a _fair bloom_ that belonged not to France), without feeling his heart influenced; while her artless and charming manner, which by turns was playful, sad, earnest, or winning, lured him into a passion against which his better judgment strove in vain; for he knew the danger and absurdity of a subaltern--a prisoner of war--a lad without rank, home, friends, or subsistence--and more than all, in that land of tyranny, bastilles, and lettres de cachet, engaging in a love affair with a lady of rank and wealth.

"In three days," thought he, "this deuced old baron returns; but in three days I shall be well enough to be out of the sick list, to march off from here, and report myself at the Chateau de Trompette."

According to the author of _Dream Life_, "Youthful passion is a giant! It overleaps all the dreams and all the resolves of our better and quieter nature, and madly drives toward some wild issue that lives only in its own frenzy. How little account does passion take of goodness! It is not within the cycle of its revolution--it is below--it is tamer--it is older--it wears no wings."

So the evening of the sixth day passed into twilight, and found M. Hector Munro, of his Britannic Majesty's 42nd Highlanders, still lingering by the side of Therese in the garden of that delightful old chateau by the "silvery Garonne," when the ominous sound of horses' hoofs, and of wheels rasping on the gravel under the antique porte cochère, announced the return of the Baron de Beauchatel!

Therese grew deadly pale.

"Your father--he has arrived, and I must bid you farewell," said Munro, kissing her trembling hands with sudden emotion.

"Stay, monsieur," said Therese, in an imploring voice. So "monsieur" stayed; to go was impossible.

"M. le Baron!" exclaimed Nanon, rushing towards them, while her round black eyes dilated with excitement; "M. le Baron, and oh, mon Dieu, M. le Comte d'Arcot is with him!"

"M. d'Arcot!" murmured poor Therese, and stood rooted to the spot, the statue of terror and grief; for, after six days such as the last, to meet an old and previously unknown _fiancé_ with the cordiality requisite, was more than poor human nature could bear or achieve.

The baron, who was considerably changed in person since we last had the pleasure of seeing him, having become stout and paunchy, abrupt and irritable in manner, now approached, leading, and indeed almost pulling forward a tall, thin, and soldier-like Chevalier of St. Louis, whose form and face seemed wasted by inward thought and care, by exposure to the burning sun of India and the toils of war, rather than by lapse of time; yet he seemed quite old, though in reality not much more than fifty years of age. His hair, which he wore unpowdered, was white as snow, and was simply tied behind by a black ribbon. He wore the undress uniform of a French Maréchal du Camp, and leaned a little on his cane as he walked.

"Mademoiselle de Beauchatel--my daughter--M. le Comte d'Arcot," said the baron, introducing them, and kissing Therese.

"M. le Comte is most welcome to Fontbrune," said Therese, presenting her trembling hand to the tall old soldier, who kissed it respectfully; and after a few polite commonplaces, muttered hurriedly, on the calmness of the evening, the beauty of the chateau, its gardens, the scenery, &c., she drew aside to wipe away her tears, and desire Nanon to conceal Munro or get him quietly away.

"What think you of her?" asked the baron, covertly.

"She is most lovely; but now, my dear Beauchatel, though I have come to visit you, pray forget your project of the marriage."

"Forget the object nearest my heart!" exclaimed the impetuous baron.

"To unite an old veteran, a man of a withered heart, to a blooming young girl--December to May--it is absurd, my dear baron!" replied the Maréchal du Camp, laughing.

"Absurd--parbleu! do not say so."

"I assure you it is."

"When you know her, you will be charmed."

"I do not doubt it," replied D'Arcot; "but oh! what is this that moves me? Her face seems more than familiar to me, and recals some old friend or relative."

"Impossible, comte; you have been more than twenty years in India, and she is barely twenty-one."

Therese came forward again, and the comte began to examine her features with a fixed and earnest gaze, which filled her timid heart with inexpressible fear and confusion.

At that moment the baron's eye caught the red coat of poor Munro, who had withdrawn a little way back, and was irresolute whether to advance or retire on finding himself so suddenly _de trop_ where hitherto he had been so much at home.

"Oh, _sacre bleu_!" exclaimed Beauchatel, drawing his sword in a sudden gust of fury and suspicion, as he rushed upon the stranger: "whom have we here?"

Therese uttered a cry and sprang forward; but she was less alert than Count d'Arcot, who, at that moment, threw himself between the baron and the object of his jealous anger.

"Permit _me_ to arrange this matter," said the Marshal du Camp, unsheathing his sword; "officer, answer me truly on your honour--on your life--how long you have been here."

"Six days, M. le Comte."

"Oh, _sang Dieu_!" swore the baron, pirouetting about in a fresh gust of fury; "six whole days."

"How came you here?"

"On a litter, insensible--being half-drowned, in attempting to save the life of a French soldier in the Garonne."

"You are a prisoner--"

"On my parole," interrupted Munro, bowing.

"One of those who were landed at Castillon from America, and were _en route_ for the Chateau de Trompette?"

"Exactly, M. le Comte."

"You are named--"

"Munro--Hector Munro, lieutenant in the 42nd Highlanders."

"The old Black Watch!" said the Maréchal du Camp, sheathing his sword, while an inexplicable expression came over his grave features; "I once knew well an officer who bore the good old name of Munro."

"My father, perhaps," said the prisoner, anxiously; "he was a brave soldier."

"_Was_--he is, then, dead?"

"He fell in action against the Spaniards!"

"Where?"

"At the storming of the Moro Castle."

"And what was his rank?"

"Colonel of his Britannic Majesty's 60th Regiment of Infantry."

"Or Royal Americans?" continued the count, with a kindling eye.

"The same, M. le Comte."

"Did he command at Fort William Henry, where the defeated troops were so shamefully abandoned by General Webb, and were afterwards massacred by the Iroquois?"

"He did. I was saved from that massacre by the wife of a French soldier. It was my second narrow escape from the Iroquois, then; for once before two Indians bore me into the forest, and my life was spared by the luckiest chance in the world."

"You must have been very young," said Beauchatel; "I too, served there, and am quite an old fellow now."

"I was a mere child, messieurs, in those days."

"Ah, they will soon be friends now!" thought Therese; "already they are comrades."

"And you were saved--" resumed D'Arcot.

"By an officer named MacGillivray, who was on his march to join that ill-fated garrison with a party of the Black Watch, the same regiment to which I have now the honour to belong. Then followed that unparalleled massacre, the memory of which seems like a horrible dream to me."

"And to me, too, boy; for I, also, was at the siege of Fort William Henry, and I was that lieutenant of the Black Watch who saved you from the Iroquois," said Count d'Arcot, taking the hand of Munro in his; "I had, then, a wife--perhaps a child," he added in a troubled voice; "but both lie buried in the forest by the shore of Lake George!"

"Your wife, M. le Comte," said Beauchatel; "how did she die?"

"Not as the leaves die when the summer is over; for she was torn from me by the hands of the accursed Iroquois--my beloved Mary! After the lapse of one and twenty years, baron, her image, so noble, so gentle, and so womanly, fills up my past, as once it filled my future. I was taken prisoner, as you know, and joining the French army in sheer disgust of the British, whose conduct, under Webb, maddened me, I have attained in India the rank I now bear, and which I never could have won in the armies of the House of Hanover."

"Stay--_peste!_ a sudden light breaks in upon me!" exclaimed the baron, smiting his forehead; "ah, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ if it should be!"

"What?"

"Excuse me, messieurs, for one moment; a thought has struck me!" said the impulsive Frenchman, and rushing into the house, he returned in a few moments, bearing in his hands an antique oak casquet, in which he kept his commissions, his diplomas, orders of knighthood, and other objects of value; and, drawing therefrom the brooch which had been found upon the dress of Therese when a child, he placed it in the hands of the count.

As Roderick MacGillivray, now M. le Comte d'Arcot, Governor of Pondicherry, Maréchal du Camp, and Colonel of the Regiment du Roi, a man grown old by war and thought and time, saw the ancient and well-known heirloom of his house--the marriage-brooch of the brides of Glenarrow--the same mystic symbol which, in youth, he had bestowed upon his wife, a sudden tremor came over him, and a flush and then a pallor crossed his wrinkled face.

"_Lochmoy!_" he muttered in his native language, which he had so long unused; "_touch not the cat without the glove_. Oh my God! whence came this trinket, Beauchatel?"

"I found it fastened to the dress of a newly-born babe in the forest near Lake George--a babe that lay on the breast of its dead mother, in the wigwam of an Iroquois, and on her finger was this ring, inscribed--"

"Roderaick Ruodh MacGillibhreac--my own name, and my gift it was to Mary, the grand-daughter of the murdered MacIan of Glencoe," exclaimed MacGillivray, in an agonized voice, as his eyes filled with tears; "and you buried her--"

"By my own hands, at the foot of a tree, which I marked with a cross--"

"God bless thee, my brave and honest Beauchatel!" exclaimed Roderick.

"And there she lies in peace."

"But the babe, baron--the little babe?"

"Therese--she stands before you."

The veteran Comte d'Arcot opened his arms, and the pale and agitated girl found herself pressed to the breast of her newly-discovered father.

* * * *

Our readers may guess the sequel.

Hector Munro of the Black Watch remained a prisoner of war in France until the autumn of 1782, when a general peace was concluded. He was on parole not to pass beyond two miles from the gates of the Chateau de Trompette. As the mansion of Therese was within that boundary, he found his limits ample enough, and long before that auspicious day when the cannon on the ramparts of Bourdeaux announced the peace of the two countries, and the independence of America, he had become the son-in-law of Count d'Arcot.

The latter, soon after, seeing the approaching storm of the Revolution, transferred himself and all his property to Britain, and thus escaped the fate of the loyal and gallant Beauchatel, whose noble chateau was destroyed, and whose fate is thus recorded in a despatch of the Comte d'Artois, dated Coblentz, 10th June, 1793.--

"M. Beauchatel rivalled his forefathers in glory and in faith. He died in battle, at the head of his Emigrant Regiment, and lies in the trenches of Lisle, a fitting grave for the _premier Chevalier de St. Louis_."

V.

THE WIFE OF THE RED COMYN.

MY GRANDFATHER'S STORY.

The old gentleman had served in the 42nd Highlanders, or old Black Watch, in early life, and could spin to us endless yarns of the bloody affair of Ticonderoga, where the regiment had no less than six hundred and forty-seven officers and soldiers killed or wounded; the expedition to the Lakes; the surrender of Montreal; the siege of the Moro, and the scalping, flaying alive, the tomahawking, and other little pleasantries incidental to the relief of Fort Pitt in 1763; and of that devilish business with the Red Indians amid the swamps and rocks at Bushy Run, all of which were "familiar in our mouths as household words;" while, to the venerable narrator, the smell of gunpowder, the flavour of Ferintosh, or the skirl of a bagpipe were like the _elixir vitæ_ of the ancients, and seemed to renew his youth, strength, and spirit for a time; and thus the fire of other years would flash up within him, like the last gleam of a sinking lamp, as we sat by our bogwood fire in the long winter nights of the North.

In the year 1768, his regiment was cantoned in Galway, where it was reviewed by Major-General Armiger, and the old gentleman was wont to boast, that except two Lowland Scots, every soldier in its ranks was from the clans that dwell northward of the Tay, "and happily for the corps," he used to add, "these two were knocked on the head during the onfall at Long Island." The regiment, then for the _third_ time in Ireland, remained there for seven years. During 1772, it was employed in suppressing tumults occasioned by the complicating interests and adverse views of the Catholic and Protestant landlords and tenants in Antrim and elsewhere; and in this delicate service their Highlanders were found particularly useful, from the knowledge of the language and their gentle bearing towards the people, whom by old tradition they believed to be sprung from the same stock as themselves. Though some of the Highland tribes have a proverb which says, _cha b'ionann OBrien is na Gaël_--that O'Brien and the Gael are not alike, yet they found many sympathies in common--to wit, a love of fun and breaking heads; a jealousy of the English; an aversion to still-hunting, and a just, laudable, and commendable antipathy to all gangers and tax-gatherers.

For the ticklish service of settling disputes in the neighbourhood of Antrim, it pleased his Majesty George III. to order that an additional company of the Black Watch should be raised among the Breadalbane Campbells; and it was soon seen, that though the slaughter of Ticonderoga had carried woe and desolation to many a lonely hearth and loving heart in the country of the clans, so far from extinguishing the military ardour of the Highland youth, it made them more than ever anxious to enrol themselves in the ranks of the _Reicudan Dhu_, for so was the regiment named, from the dark colours of its plumes and tartans, in contradistinction to the troops of the line, who wore scarlet coats, white waistcoats, pipeclayed breeches and flour-powdered wigs, with queues, pomatumed curls, and looped-up hats, having the true Blenheim cock and the star of Brunswick--_i.e._ the black leather cockade of the Protestant succession, which still survives on the chapeaux of the penny postman.

My grandfather was popular among the Breadalbane men, to please whom he had, at various times, hanged sundry MacNabs and Mac Alpines, whose ideas of the eighth commandment were somewhat vague; thus on being sent into "the marquis's country" to recruit, he raised the required company in three days, and marched down from the hills of Glen Urcbai with pipes playing, across the dreary Braes of Rannoch, and down by the Brig of Tay with a hundred of the handsomest men that ever became food for gunpowder, all clad in their native tartans, and well armed, each with his own sword, dirk and pistols, to which the Government added the usual arms and accoutrements of the line. From Perth, the captain was ordered to march his company to Glasgow, there to embark for Ireland; and proceeding en route, after leaving Falkirk and traversing the remains of the Torwood, he found himself, with his little command, approaching the burgh of Kirkintulloch one dreary November evening, just as the dusk was closing in, while the rain fell in torrents, and the wind swept in gusts through the pastoral hollows and hurled the wet and withered leaves furiously before it. There he was compelled to halt, and oblige the authorities to procure immediate quarters for a hundred Highlanders--a race of whom the westland Whigs had harboured a holy aversion and wholesome terror, since the epoch of the Great Montrose and his daredevil Cavaliers, one hundred and twenty years before.

"But what has all this to do with the Wife of the Red Comyn?" the reader may ask. I answer, everything--for had not my grandfather halted on that wet November night in the ancient burgh of Kirkintulloch, that good lady--though she made some noise in her time--had never been introduced to the reader's notice. So patience yet awhile.

The soldiers were soon distributed among the people by the town constable, and in a few minutes after seeing the last man off to his billet, my grandfather found himself standing before the gate of the Castle of Kirkintulloch drenched through plaid and philabeg, while the rain dripped gracefully from his long feathers into the nape of his neck, and the water spouted from his scabbard as from a syringe when he sheathed his claymore. Draggled and weary, he knocked furiously against the gate of the huge mansion, on which, as being the most important in the town, he was billeted as commander of the forces. Being a Celt, and not blessed with overmuch patience, he thrust his billet-order almost into the mouth of the servant who opened the door, and then swaggered in with all the air of a man who had heard the forty days' cannonade at the Moro; but a couple of good drams from a jolly magnum bonum of Ferintosh, which were given to him without delay, at once restored his equanimity, and, chucking the plump housekeeper under the chin, my grandfather--or, as I shall call him in future, the captain--proceeded upstairs.

This ancient Castle of Kirkintulloch, which had been stormed by Edward I. of England, but re-taken by the Scots, was a good specimen of the gloomy mansions of the Middle Ages, when every Scotsman was forced to keep watch and ward against his neighbour, and, more than all, against Southern invasion; for it was built by the Comyns, who flourished in the days of Malcolm III., and were Lords of Linton Roderick and of Badenoch, and who made a great figure during the reigns of the three Alexanders and Robert I.

In those turbulent times every Scotsman was a soldier, and a brave one, too; every house was a fortress, every fortress a citadel, and its inmates were a garrison, while the urgent necessity for security caused the Scottish baron literally to found his dwelling on a rock.

A site alike remote and inaccessible was usually selected, on the isle of some deep lake, or the brow of a sequestered hill, and there the Scottish feudatory raised the mansion in which his race were to dwell, to be married and given in marriage, to be born and to die, "while grass grew and water ran"--the strong square peel-house, with its corbelled battlements, through the openings of which missiles could be shot securely; its stone-flagged roof; its irregular slits or windows, all strongly grated, though ninety or a hundred feet from the base, and girdled by a barbican, having an arched gate and flanking towers. Such was unvaryingly the external aspect of the dwelling of a Scottish baron, and such was the Castle of Kirkintulloch.