Part 7

Emmy mourned now for Louis as for one who was dead--one who, after all his toil and valour, suffering and constancy (she felt assured he had been constant), was sleeping in the great ocean that had divided them so long.

Tired of all this, her friends had arrayed her in mourning as for one who was really dead; and to carry out a plan of realizing this conviction, her father had erected in the church of St. John a handsome marble tablet to the memory of Charters; and this cold white slab _in memoriam_ met Emmy's heavy eyes every time she raised them from her prayer-book on Sunday. So at last Louis was dead--she felt convinced of it, and, with a reluctant and foreboding mind, she consented to a marriage with Captain Douglas of the Black Watch--a consent in which she had but one thought, that in making this terrible sacrifice she was only seeking to soothe the anxiety and gratify the solicitations of her mother, who was now well up in the vale of years, and who loved her tenderly.

Emmy was placid and content; but though even cheerful in appearance, she was not happy; for her cheek was ever pale and her soft hazel eyes, with their half-drooping lids, failed to veil a restlessness that seemed to search for something vague and undefined.

They were married. We will pass over the appearance of the bride, her pale beauty, her rich lace, the splendour of all the accessories by which the wealth of her father, of her husband, and the solicitude of her kind friends surrounded her, and come to the crisis in our story--a crisis in which a lamentable fatality seemed to rule the destinies of the chief actors in our little drama.

The minister of St. John's Church had just pronounced the nuptial blessing, and the pale bride was in her mother's arms, while the officers of the Black Watch were crowding round Douglas with their hearty congratulations; a buzz of voices had filled the large withdrawing room, as a hum of gladness succeeded the solemn but impressive monotony of the marriage service, when the sharp rattle of drums and the shrill sound of the fifes ringing in the Southgate of Perth struck upon their ears, and the measured march of feet, mingling with the rising huzzahs of the people, woke the echoes of every close and wynd.

A foreboding smote the heart of Captain Douglas. He sprang to a window and saw the gleam of arms--the glitter of bayonets and Lochaber axes, with the waving of plumed bonnets above the heads of a crowd which poured along the sunny vista of the Southgate; and, as the troops passed, led by a mounted officer whose left arm was in a sling--a bronzed, war-worn, and weatherbeaten band--their tartans were recognised as well as the tattered colours which streamed in ribbons on the wind, and their name went from mouth to mouth:--

"The Lost Regiment--the Highlanders of Montgomery!"

A low cry bunt from Emmy; she threw up her clasped hands, and sank in a dead faint at her mother's feet. All was consternation in the house of Stuart of Tullynairn; and the marriage guests gazed at the passing soldiers, as at some fascinating but unreal pageant--but on they marched, cheering, to the barracks, with drums beating and pipes playing; and now the mounted officer, who had been gazing wistfully at the crowded windows, stoops from his saddle and whispers a few words to another--Alaster the One-handed, now a captain--then he turns his horse, and, dismounting at the door, is heard to ascend the stair; and in another moment, Louis Charters, sallow, thin, and hollow-eyed, by long toil and suffering, his left arm in a sling and his right cheek scarred by a shot, stands amid all these gaily-attired guests in his fighting jacket, the scarlet of which had long since become threadbare and purple.

He immediately approached Emmy, who had now partially recovered and gazed at him, as one might gaze at a spectre, when Douglas threw himself forward with a hand on his sword.

"What is the meaning of all this?" said Louis, who grew ashy pale, and whose voice sank into Emmy's soul; "have you all forgotten me--Louis Charters of Montgomery's Regiment?"

"No," replied Douglas, "but your presence here at such a time is most unfeeling and inopportune."

"Unfeeling and inopportune--I--Miss Stuart--Emmy--"

"Miss Stuart has just been made my wedded wife; thus any remarks you have to make, sir, you will please address to _me_."

Louis started as if a scorpion had stung him, and his trembling hand sought the hilt of his sword; here the old minister addressed him kindly, imploringly, and the guests crowded between them, but he dashed them all aside and turned from the house, without a word or glance from Emmy. Poor Emmy! dismay had frozen her, and mute despair glared in her haggard yet still beautiful eyes.

"Half an hour earlier and I had saved her and saved myself!" exclaimed Charters, bitterly; "the half-hour I loitered in Strathearn!" for he had halted there to refresh his weary soldiers.

And now to explain this sudden reappearance.

Tempest-tossed and under jurymasts, after long beating against adverse winds, the transport, with the remnant of his regiment, had been driven to 37 and 40 degrees of north latitude, and was stranded on the small isles of Corvo and Flores, two of the most western and detached of the Azores. There they had been lingering among the Portuguese for seven months, unknown to and unheard of by our Government; and it was not until Charters, leaving Alaster Grant in command at Corvo, had visited Angra, the capital of the island, and urged the necessity of having his soldiers transmitted home, that he procured a ship at Ponta del Gada, the largest town of these islands, and sailing with the still reduced remnant of his corps--for many had perished with the foundered transport--he landed at Greenock, from whence he was ordered at once to join the 2nd battalion of the Black Watch, into which his soldiers had volunteered, and which, by a strange fatality, was quartered in Perth--the home of his Emmy, and the place where for five long years he had garnered up his thoughts and dearest hopes.

The reader may imagine the emotions of poor Emmy on finding that her lover lived, and that her heart was thus cruelly wrenched away from all it had treasured and cherished for years. Then, as if to aggravate her sorrow, our battalion marched the next day for foreign service, and Louis again embarked for America, the land of his toil, without relentless fate permitting Emmy to excuse or explain herself.

Douglas left the corps and took his wife to Paris, where he fell in a duel with a Jacobite refugee.

Emmy lived to be a very old woman, but she never smiled again.

Thus were two fond hearts separated for ever.

Three months after Louis landed in America, he died of a broken heart say some; of the marsh fever say others. He was then on the march with a detachment of ours up the Mississippi, a long route of 1500 miles, to take possession of Fort Charters in the Illinois. His friend, a Captain Grant--Alaster the One-handed--performed the last offices for him, and saw him rolled in a blanket, and buried at the foot of a cotton-tree, where the muskets of the Black Watch made the echoes of the vast prairie ring as they poured three farewell volleys over the last home of a brave but lonely heart.

IV.

THE MASSACRE AT FORT WILLIAM HENRY.

When the Black Watch sailed for America, in 1706, to serve under the heroic Wolfe and fight against the Marquis of Montcalm, the lieutenant of the 7th company was Roderick MacGillivray, known in the ranks by his local patronymic, Roderick Ruadh (or the Red) of Glenarrow, a gentleman of the Clan Chattan, who, eleven years before, had been a captain in the army of Prince Charles Edward, and had served throughout the memorable campaign of 1745-6. In his heart Roderick MacGillivray had no love either for the service or sovereign of Britain, whom he considered as the butcher of his countrymen, and the usurper of their crown; but his estate of Glenarrow had been forfeited; he was penniless, and having a young wife to maintain, he was glad to accept a commission in the Royal Highlanders--a favour he procured through the interest of one who has already been mentioned in these pages, Louis Charters, who served at Fort du Quesne, as already related in the legend of the "Lost Regiment."

In those days there were many soldiers in the ranks of our regiment who had served in the army of Prince Charles, and who deemed his father, James VIII., the undoubted sovereign of these realms, by that hereditary right, which, as their Celtic proverb has it, "will face the rocks," and which they deemed as sacred and immutable as if the breath of God had ordained it. Thus they served George II., not because they wavered in their loyalty to their native kings, but because they hated his enemies the French, whom they knew to have betrayed the cause of the clans, and in the hope that a time would yet come when the standard which Tullybardine, the loyal and true, unfurled in Glenfinnan, would again wave over a field in which God would defend the right.

And such thoughts and hopes as these were the theme of many a poor soldier of the Reicudan Dhu, in their tents and bivouacs, on the plains of Flanders, on the Heights of Abraham, and by the vast and then untrodden shores of the American lakes.

Similar thoughts, and the memory of all he had endured at the hands of the victorious party, together with the confiscation of his estate, which had descended to him through twelve generations of martial ancestors, made Roderick MacGillivray a grave and somewhat sombre man. He had fought valiantly in the first line at Culloden, where he was one of the guard, the _Leine Chrios_ (_i.e._ Shirt of Mail, or Children of the Belt) around the Laird of Dunmacglas,* who led the Macintoshes, and who was next day murdered by the English soldiers, when found all but dead of wounds upon the field, where they dashed out his brains by the butts of their muskets as he lay in the arms of his distracted wife.

* The Fort of the Greyman's Son.

After that day, MacGillivray became a fugitive and outlaw, but was happy enough to be one of those eight brave men who, with MacDonald of Glenaladale--the faithful, the gentle, and the true Glenaladale--watched, guarded, and tended by night and by day the unfortunate Prince Charles in the wild cavern of Coire-gaoth among the beautiful Braes of Glenmorriston. There these starving and outlawed men made a bed of heather for the royal fugitive, and there he slept and lurked in perfect security, though thirty thousand pounds were set upon his head by George II., and though the Saxon drum was heard, where the flames of rapine were seen rising on the vast steeps of Corryarrack.

The memory of those stirring days--this companionship with the son of his exiled King, with _Prionse Tearlach Righ nan Ghael_, words that were said and promises made, with all that winning charm of manner, for which the princes of the House of Stuart were so remarkable, sank deep in Roderick's heart; and there were times when in his soul he panted for the hour when again the White Rose would shed its bloom upon the wasted Highland hills, when the swift vengeance of the loyal would fall on the faithless clans of the west, and the shrill wild pibroch of the Clan Chattan would ring in fierce triumph above the burial mounds at Culloden.

And so he hoped and thought, and watched and waited, but that new day of battle never came!

His secret aspirations were shared to the full by his young wife, Mary MacDonald, who was a grand-daughter of MacVicIan, the chieftain of Glencoe, the terrible Williamite episode in whoso history can yet make the brow of every Highlander darken. But Mary was gentle and timid; she had seen too much of war and bloodshed, of butchery and terror in her girlhood, during the time that followed Culloden; and though she prayed in her innocent little heart for the restoration of Scotland's exiled kings, it was in peace she would have wished it achieved.

In the ancient fashion of the Highlands, Roderick on the day of their marriage had bestowed on Mary--in addition to the espousal ring--an antique brooch; one of those old marriage gifts which were usually given on such occasions. It had been worn by many matrons of his house, and thus became invested with many deep and endearing memories: association, old tales of the love, the spirit and virtue of the dead, hallowed the gift, for it had shone on many a soft breast that had long since mouldered in the dust. Being circular, it was the mystic emblem of eternity, and bore the crest of the Clan Gillibhreac--a cat, with the significant motto in the old Gaelic letter--

"_Touch not the cat without the glove;_"

and as her own life Mary prized this old bridal brooch, the dearest gift her husband could bestow upon her.

When MacGillivray joined the regiment, Mary was in her twentieth year. She was pale and more than pretty, having that dazzling white skin for which the women of her clan are said to excel all others in Scotland; but of old the same was said of the Campbells and the Drummonds. Her hair was black; her eyes, deep and quiet, were dark hazel, and her features were unexceptionable. She was neither brilliant nor beautiful, but there was a sweetness and delicacy in her smile and manner that touched and won the hearts of all who knew her. There was a sadness, too, in her air and tone, for the most of her kindred had perished in the Glencoe massacre, or at Culloden. She was thus alone in the world, with none to shield or shelter her but her husband--he who was now beginning a life of war and peril--the savage war and double peril of a campaign in America, a wild and untrodden land of barbarous hordes and mighty forests. She shrank with a terror of the prospect before them, and viewed with dismay the many lesser horrors which surrounded her in a crowded transport of those days.

MacGillivray sailed on board the _Mercury_, the master of which was James Cooke, afterwards the celebrated navigator.

"Twain of heart and of purpose," husband and wife were to each other all in all; and the Celtic soldiers, who knew their story well, said in their own forcible language, that if the bullet of a Frenchman or the arrow of an Indian brought death to Roderick Ruadh, the daughter of MacVicIan would not survive him long.

Each scarcely knew how deep was the love of the other; for the Scots are not a demonstrative people, and the most powerful emotions of the heart are those which they have been taught, perhaps erroneously, to conceal; but of this negative quality we find less in the more impulsive Celt. The ardour of love had now been succeeded by the affection of marriage, and the sincerity of friendship had replaced the glow of passion; but Roderick's enthusiasm in the estimate of perfect excellence by which he judged his own little wife was only equalled by the standard which she had formed for him. To make her happy was to be himself happy, and it was the study of his life to surround her with such comforts as a camp and barrack or transport afforded upon the pay of a lieutenant of the line in the days of George II. "England," says honest Harry _Coverdale_, "expects every man to do his duty, and occasionally recompenses him for it with honourable starvation." And such was indeed a subaltern's pay in 1757.

In their new mode of existence all seclusion was destroyed; and amid the whirl of a military life, the hurry of embarkation for foreign service, and in the narrow recess allotted to her in the transport, odious by the odour of tar, tobacco, and bilge water, poor Mary sighed for the hum of the summer bee, and for the free, pure breeze that waved the heather bells in Glencoe, or for her husband's once happy home in Glenarrow, roofless and ruined now, as the flames and the devastators of the ducal butcher had left it.

"We have lost all, Mary," said Roderick, bitterly, as one evening she sat on deck, nestled in his plaid, and whispering of these things and of other times; "all but the name of our fathers have gone to the Campbells of Breadalbane, for they have become the lords of all."

"But a time shall come, Roderick, when these usurpations and another still greater shall end, and then the Clan Donald, the MacGregors, the MacIntyres of Glen O, and the race of MacVicar, like the King, shall enjoy their own again."

"Mhari, laoghe mo chri--Mary, calf of my heart," replied the husband, folding her, with a smile, to his breast; "but this will never be----"

"Until the _fatal plaid_ floats down Loch Fyne," she added, with a smile.

There is a Highland prophecy, that a time is coming when a plaid of many colours shall float down Loch Fyne from the Ara to the Firth of Clyde, and then the eagles from a thousand hills shall assemble, and each take therefrom a piece of his own colour; and this is to be the day of general restoration by the Campbells of all of which they have dispossessed the clans of the west.

Under Colonel Francis Grant of Grant (afterwards a lieutenant-general) the regiment landed in America, where the peculiar garb of the Highlanders astonished the Indians, who, during the march to Albany, "flocked from all quarters to see these strangers, who they believed were of the same extraction as themselves, and therefore received as brothers;" for the long hunting-shirt of the Indians resembled the kilt, as their moccassins did the gartered hose, their striped blanket the shoulder plaid, and they too had round shields and knives, like the target and dirk of the Celt; hence, according to General Stewart, "the Indians were delighted to see a European regiment in a costume so similar to their own."

At this period our officers wore a narrow gold braiding round their jackets, but all epaulettes and lace bad been laid aside to render them less conspicuous to the Canadian riflemen. The sergeants laced their coats with silver, and still carried the terrible _tuagh_ or Lochaber axe, the head of which was fitted for hooking, hewing, or spearing an enemy.

After remaining in quarters at Albany for some months, during the winter and spring of 1757, the Black Watch were exercised in bush-fighting and sharpshooting; and amid the dense copsewood or jungle which covered the western margin of the Hudson, on the rugged, stern, and sterile banks of the Mohawk, among woods of stunted pine, dwarf shrubs, and sedge grass, they soon revived the skill they had attained as hardy hunters, deerstalkers, and deadly shots on their native hills; but when they fairly took the field, their ardour and impatience often lured them within the fire of the more wary and cunning Indians who served the Marquis of Montcalm.

So expert, brave, and active did the soldiers of the Black Watch prove themselves in skirmishing, that when, in the beginning of summer, a plan was formed to reduce Louisbourg, and they joined the army destined for that purpose under Major-General Abercrombie, a detachment of fifty chosen men, under the orders of MacGillivray of Glenarrow, departed to reinforce the little garrison in Fort William Henry, on the southern bank of the beautiful Lake George, a sheet of clear water, which is thirty-three miles long and two miles broad, and which, on its northern quarter, near Ticonderoga (that place of fatal memory to the Royal Highlanders), discharges itself into Lake Champlain. It is surrounded by high mountains of the most romantic beauty.

Here, then, lay a garrison of nearly three thousand British soldiers, commanded by Colonel Munro, a veteran Highland officer of great courage and experience, who had for some time successfully protected the frontier of the English colonies, and by his cannon covered the waters of the lake, the double purpose for which the fort had been built. Before the departure of MacGillivray, a serious _malheur_ had occurred near this place.

Munro having heard that the French advanced guard, composed of regulars and Indians, had reached Ticonderoga, sent Colonel John Parker, with four hundred soldiers, down the lake in bay-boats to beat up their quarters; but three of his boat crews being captured, his design became known to M. Beauchatel, the officer in command. Parker was lured into an ambush, and the most dreadful scene of massacre and scalping ensued. His detachment was literally cut to pieces, only two officers and seventy privates escaping, of the four hundred who left the garrison of Munro.

It was on a beautiful evening when MacGillivray's party of Highlanders, marching from the mountains that look down on Lake Champlain, came suddenly in view of Lake George. They had their muskets slung, and were encumbered by their knapsacks, havresacks, canteens, and blankets, and the live-long day had toiled to reach the fort ere night fell; for to halt in that woody district, teeming as it was with the savage Iroquois of Montcalm, would have been a measure fraught with danger and death. MacGillivray came in rear of his little band, leading by the bridle a stout pony, on the pad of which his wife was mounted, for she was ever the object of his tenderest solicitude. This pony was a sturdy little nag, but the long march from Albany had somewhat impaired its vigour, and now it was beginning to fail when almost at the end of the journey.

With the detachment of MacGillivray were two of his comrades in the late civil war, Alaster MacGregor, from Glengyle, and Ewen Chisholm, one of the faithful men of Glenmorriston, who guarded the Prince in the Coire-gaoth.

The sun was setting, and his gorgeous disc seemed for a time to linger among clouds of saffron, crimson, and purple, that were piled in glowing masses above the wooded hills, some of which were a thousand feet in height, and surrounded the waters and islets of Lake George--named by the Indians of old the Horican, and by the Pilgrim Fathers the Lake of the Sacrament; for, charmed by the limpid purity of the water and the sylvan beauty of the scenery, it had been selected, especially by the Jesuits, as a place for procuring the element of baptism. But now for the old Indian name had been substituted that of his Majesty George II.; while, to awe the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Tuscaroras, and to keep the French in check, Fort William Henry--named after another prince of the House of Brunswick--had been built, as related, upon the southern margin of the lake.

Like all American forts, it was formed with earthen ramparts, covered by rich green turf, and defended by tall stockades of dry white timber. Within were seen the shingle-covered roofs of the low barrack buildings, tarred and painted black, and all glistening in the sunshine. Two of the lower bastions were faced with stone and washed by the azure water of Lake George, while a deep fosse secured the fort on the landward, and dangerous morasses protected its flanks. Beyond lay a cleared space, where the timber of the old primeval forest had been cut down for garrison purposes. The bayonets of the sentinels flashed like stars on the green ramparts ever and anon, while some thirty or forty lines of steady horizontal light marked where the setting sun shone on the iron guns that peered through the embrasures, or frowned _en barbette_ above the slope of the parapets.