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.
The gaudy Union Jack hung unwaved upon its staff. As evening closed
in, masses of vapour ascended from the bosom of the deep blue water,
and wreathed like white and golden scarfs about the summits of the
mountains, whose tops were mellowed in the distance, and those rocky
bluffs that start forward from the wooded slopes, as if to break the
harmony of the scenery by a few darker and bolder features. As the
last vestige of the sun sank, and its rays alone remained to play
upon the clouds above and the ripples of the Horican below, the boom
of the evening gun was heard pealing through the wilderness with a
hundred solemn reverberations; and as the flag descended from its
staff on the fort, a sound on the soft and ambient air came floating
up the mountainside.
"The drummers are beating the evening _retreat_, Mary," said
MacGillivray to his wife, who was looking pale and weary; "in
half-an-hour we shall be with old Munro."
"Yonder fort is like some place I have seen before," said she,
pressing her husband's hand.
"Aye, Lady Glenarrow," responded Ewen Chisholm, coming close with the
easy familiarity of a Highlander--a familiarity that is destitute of
all assurance; "you are thinking of Fort George, for there are the
same palisades and the same fashion of ramparts washed by the waves
of the Moray Firth; but oich! oich! we miss green Ard-na-saor."
"And the Black Isle, and the Chanonry-ness, Ewen," added MacGillivray.
"Yes, yes," said Mary, thoughtfully, to the soldiers in their own
language; "the land is beautiful; but it is not _home_. Then what is
it to us?"
"Yet," said Ewen, "here is a badge for your bonnet, MacGillivray,
and, though of American growth, you cannot despise it."
"Thanks, Ewen," said the officer, with a kindling eye, as he placed
the gift in his bonnet.
It was a sprig of the red whortleberry, the badge of those of his
name in Scotland, where they are styled the _Clann Gillibhreac_, "or
the Sons of the Freckled Man."
The elm, the ash, the cypress, the chesnut, the pine, and the beech,
all mingled their varied foliage above the narrow track or Indian
trail the soldiers were pursuing, while a thousand flowers and
shrubs, to them unknown, flourished in all the rich luxuriance of
this new world into which they were penetrating, and the musk-rat,
the racoon, and the fox scampered before them from tree to tree as
they proceeded.
"Hark!" exclaimed Alaster MacGregor, a wary old forester, "something
on two feet stirs in the bush!"
"Dioul! and see, Alaster, the objects are close enough," added the
officer.
At a part of the wood where it became more open by the trees having
been cut away, and where the ground shelved abruptly down to the
depth of eighty or a hundred feet, they suddenly came in view of two
Indians gliding stealthily from stem to stem, as if seeking to elude
observation. Their wild and horrid aspect caused the timid wife of
MacGillivray to utter a faint cry of terror, while the whole
detachment halted simultaneously to observe them, and began
instinctively to handle their muskets.
"They are Iroquois," whispered MacGillivray to his sergeant; "I was
told that Montcalm had filled all the woods around Lake George with
the cursed tribes of that race."
"One of them is carrying something," replied the sergeant, as he
shred away by his Lochaber axe a magnificent azalea, the flowers and
foliage of which obscured his view.
"It is a child--a poor little child," exclaimed Mary, piteously.
"Listen to its cry of despair!"
"The child of a white man, by Heaven!" added MacGillivray. "Come
hither you that are the best shots, and bring yonder rascals down;
but fire one it a time, lest we needlessly alarm the fort, or, what
is worse, bring all the tribes of the Iroquois upon us."
Both these savages were nearly nude. Their skins had the deep and
tawny red of their race, but were streaked with war paint. One was
daubed over red and blue, and the other who bore the child was
striped with white lines, and these glaring upon a background so
sombre, gave him the horrible aspect of a walking skeleton. Their
heads were closely shaved, or by some other process divested of all
hair, save the scalp-lock, in which was tied a tuft of eagles'
feathers. Each had the terrible tomahawk and scalping-knife
glittering at his gay wampum girdle, and each bore a French musket
ornamented with brass rings. One wore over his shoulder the fur of a
wild animal; the other had nothing across his bare, brawny chest but
the buff belt of a cartridge-box. By their weapons they were at once
known to be allies of the Marquis de Montcalm, who with a policy,
alike dangerous and ungenerous, had armed the six nations of the
Iroquois against the British.