THE DYING SOLDIER.
The count had been conveyed on board of the _Anna Catharina_, where
Dr. Pennicuik examined his wound, and at once declared him to be past
all recovery.
As I have much to relate, instead of impertinently thrusting any more
love scenes before the reader, I must beseech him or her to imagine
all my meeting with Ernestine, and to believe that the keen sense of
joy which the poor girl experienced on beholding me again, was
considerably abated and tempered by the terrible plight in which her
father's oldest and best friend was brought on board of the king's
ship.
Phadrig knocked at the cabin door, and with the most soldier-like
unconcern announced that the count was dying, and required my
presence. Ernestine burst into tears, and threw herself upon her
knees to pray, while I hurried along the lower deck (breaking my
shins against stray shot, coils of rope, and buckets of wadding) to
reach the poor and comfortless berth, in which one of the bravest
spirits that ever endued with life a Scottish breast was hovering
between Eternity and Time.
As I went into the little cabin, the doctor was coming softly and
slowly out, with the air of a man who could do no more. His sleeves
were tucked up, and his hands were covered with blood.
"Doctor!" said I; he shook his head, and passed on.
Swinging by a rusty chain from a beam of the main deck, an iron lamp
lighted the scene I am about to describe. Its smoky and sickly
radiance shed a wavering and yellow gloom on the sloping walls of
dark Memel wood, the strong transverse beams, the knotty planks, and
iron bolts of the ship; on the brass culverins, which were laid
alongside the closed parts, the rammers, spunges, and other et
cetera, beside them; and on the poor pallet spread on the cabin
floor, whereon lay Kœningheim, breathing heavily; his features
ghastly, and sharpened by pain and loss of blood, and contrasting by
their pallor with the blackness of his mustaches and hair, the long
cavalier locks of which were scattered over the pillow like those of
a girl. His eyes were closed. His fine manly neck and breast were
bare, save where the latter was crossed by a bandage, from beneath
which the blood was oozing.
Several officers were standing near; Danes in red dresses; Dutchmen
in yellow; and two of ours--these were Kildon and Culcraigie, who
were as soldier-like as their weatherbeaten visages, grizzled beards,
and picturesque costume--steel cuirasses and buff coats laced with
silver--could make them. They stood placidly waiting until the poor
Scoto-Imperialist should die.
Though I trod lightly, his ear detected the sound as I entered, and
knelt down by his side.
"Ah!" said he, opening his eyes; "it is you--I had almost forgotten;
but for this exquisite agony I could imagine that a sleep was coming
over me. It is the sleep, Rollo--the drowsy sleep--of death!"
I took his hand in mine; alas! it was cold and clammy. "Count
Kœningheim, you wished to speak with me."
"I have something to tell you," said he; "something which I do not
wish others to hear."
I looked at Kildon and the group who stood with him; they immediately
retired on tiptoe, and closed the cabin door. I was left alone with
the dying man, who seemed to be considerably relieved by their
absence, and said--
"I will see them all once more; but give me that cup again--the
wine-and-water--thank you."
The draught revived him, and he said with a bitter smile--
"After all my fighting and all my battles, I die in my bed, like
other people."
"Scarcely, Kœningheim, with that frightful wound."
"I was not always, as you may suppose, Albert Count of
Kœningheim," said he with an effort, and a voice that trembled.
"At home, in that dear land I never more shall see, I was but Habbie
Cunninghame of the Boortree-haugh, a name which many in the north of
Scotland must remember--but, alas! with abhorrence and reprobation.
Yet, if you knew all--you would pity me."
He paused, and seemed to be gathering his thoughts; and, as he did
so, an expression of dark despair and agony stole over his beautiful
face--for it _was_ beautiful in its supreme manliness.
"You may know what it is to feel love, and I have felt it too--and
rage and hatred; but you can never have known what it is to feel, as
I now do, the horrors of remorse. Oh, may you never, never know it!"
He grasped my hand convulsively, and fixed upon me his dark and
agonized eyes. "I would rather wish that even my worst enemy should
die, than do as I have done--and endure what I have endured!.....
Never until this hour have I told my secret to any one; it has been
locked in my own breast. I have had none to whom I could confide it,
or in whose presence I might without shame shed a tear. Laughter,
sleep, drunkenness, the bottle, any thing was welcome, that would
make me forget myself; for to be in solitude--to be left for one
moment to reflection--was to be in--horror! and thus for thirty years
I have borne grief, rankling like a poisoned arrow in my heart."
"Can this be the lion-hearted soldier of the Empire!" thought I.
"I am a murderer--I have been an assassin!" said he, in a low and
terrible whisper; "do you not shrink from me?" His eyes closed, for
they were full of tears, and thus he did not see the startled
expression of my face. "Tears--tears! oh, that they fell on _her_
grave! but do not shrink from me," he continued. "(I feel your hand
relaxing.) I deserve your pity--rather than your scorn. Ah,
yes!--if you knew all--if you only knew all! I have been bad--I have
been passionate--wilful--obstinate--imperious! but not for many a
long, long year."
"Do not, I beseech you, add to the agonies of the present, by
recalling the bitterness of the past."
He was sinking rapidly; the slow, heavy, and painful effort of
respiration increased; his lower jaw quivered at times, and then his
eye remained fixed, even when he was addressing me. Never, but in
the eyes of the dying, is that wild, imploring, and unearthly glance
visible. They seemed larger than usual; brighter and more
glistening. On closer examination, I was surprised to find that,
since the shot had struck him, he looked much older. Since yesterday
his hair had actually become grizzled, and his whole aspect was that
of a man bordering on fifty years of age.
"Is it not strange," said he, "that all the old Scottish prayers my
poor mother taught me when a child--prayers which I have never
remembered since--are crowding on my mind to-night, and hovering on
my tongue, with many of her pious and simple thoughts, just as if her
voice had uttered them yesterday, though the flowers of thirty
summers have bloomed upon her grave? Those prayers, to me so
meaningless when I was a _wee an' wilfu' tot_, find a terrible echo
in my heart to-night----"
"Sensibility," said he, after a long pause, "is often a source of the
deepest unhappiness. I have eaten and drunken; I have sung and
roistered among my comrades--and that passed for _mirth_, for they
knew not my inner heart, and the source of secret sorrow within me.
I have often been glad to escape from present thought by rushing into
revelry, leaving to the future those mental reproaches that revel was
sure to cost me...... I can now look back with pity and contempt on
that devil-may-care exterior, which threw a thin veil over my
remorse."
He paused frequently, and his voice sometimes died away; but the
night wind, which blew through a chink of an adjacent gunport,
re-animated him from time to time.
"Oh! in an hour like this, how awful it seems to see behind me the
remembrance of a life misspent, and before me the dim and shadowy
future--the horrors--the ages--the uncounted ages of eternity! Oh,
yes!" he continued in a voice that was weaker, and broken by many a
convulsive sob; "the assumption of a reckless military character
humiliated me. Ernestine--poor Ernestine! when I am no more, and she
has read these papers, will see how unworthy I have been of the
honour her good father intended for me."
With hands that trembled, and frequently failed in their office, he
drew from his breast a small horn case about three inches square. It
was suspended to his neck by a slender chain of steel; and, opening
it, he showed me that it was a book, containing some thirty-five or
forty pages, closely filled with writing in a small and distinct hand.
"Take this," said he; "it is the story--the sad secret--of my life.
It is, moreover, a memorandum of all I possess, which I leave equally
between Ernestine and Gabrielle. I have three estates, two in poor
old Scotland, (the best blessings of God and Saint Andrew be on it!)
I have a third at Vienna; but I am the last of my race, and have left
these girls, whom I have loved as sisters--all--every thing!"
He gave me the volume, which was stained with his blood, (and had
been bruised by the death-shot in its passage through his breast,)
and then sank back exhausted. A violent shivering passed over his
features; I thought he was about to expire, and was hurrying to
summon aid, when he rallied, and again begged (what he had thrice
before implored) that a Catholic clergyman might be brought to him;
but there was no such person to be found either on board the _Anna
Catharina_, or within cannon-shot of the Danish posts. This was a
source of terrible affliction to poor Kœningheim, who belonged to
the ancient faith; and his moans of mental agony were greater than
those conduced by the pain of his wound.
After being informed by the weeping Ernestine that all hope of
obtaining a priest was over, he never spoke again, but expired just
as the ship's bell uttered the first stroke of midnight.
It was a scene that I shall long remember. The yellow gleam of the
murky lamp that swung from the deck above; the grim and comfortless
cabin, with its starboard cannon; the blood-stained pallet, and the
grim corpse that lay upon it, stiffening into the cold, white, and
marble rigidity of death. No near or dear hand was there to do the
last act of kindness, so his eyes were closed by me. On her knees
near the pallet was Ernestine, in tears and prayer--young, beautiful,
and with many years before her; while the remains of that gallant and
noble, but unhappy and remorse-stricken man, were now only a
breathless piece of clay.
To draw Ernestine away from this sad scene; to occupy her mind; to
gratify my own anxiety and curiosity to learn the story of poor
Kœningheim, that crime--the terrible memory of which had haunted
him through life, which had clouded the brilliancy of his
achievements and the splendour of his rank, shedding a horror and a
bitterness over his dying hour--I led her into the great cabin, which
the royal kindness of Christian had surrendered to her use; and
there--after the pause of an hour or so--we examined together the
little manuscript book, and read it by turns; for I had but a short
time to tarry, as honour and duty required that I should repair to my
colours, and command my company in the redoubt upon the shore.
Written as sudden impulses of thought inspired, and in detached
pieces, but written with the faint hope that it might fall into the
hands of some kind comrade or pitying friend, the little secret
manuscript of Kœningheim (or Halbert Cunninghame) was a very
remarkable--and to me interesting--production; but as the story might
seem incoherent as he narrated it, I have told it here partly in my
own way, and have used the second person, whereas he wrote in the
_first_. The chances that it would never have met a human eye, were
as a hundred to one; for it might have been plundered from him on
some field of battle by a dead-stripper, or have been buried with him
there; and then the secret of his life would have been hidden with
him in his bloody and unknown grave.
Much that he relates is part of our Scottish history.
His account of the battle of Glenlivat is among the most succinct and
correct I have seen; and, to preserve the unity of the whole, I have
placed the secret history of the Count in the Tenth Book of my
narrative, instead of an appendix, as I first intended. It shews the
terrible circumstances by which he was forced to fly his native
country, and seek service and shelter in foreign armies--and, as an
outlaw and outcast, to change even his name, lest some of the many
Scotsmen who, as soldiers of Fortune, followed the great princes of
the German war, might discover him, and remember the dark blot by
which, in a fatal moment of recklessness and passion, he had brought
ruin and dishonour upon an ancient race and venerated name.