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had withdrawn a little way back, and was irresolute whether to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.
Above the gate, which bristled with loopholes for musketry, were the
armorial bearings of Robert Comyn, who was slain at the battle of
Alnwick, and the monogram of his descendant, the black Lord of
Badenoch, who married the Princess Marjorie, daughter of King John
Baliol, and whose son was the last of his race.
After taking a draught from the cup of ale which was filled for him,
as for all other visitors, from a barrel which stood in a recess of
the entrance lobby, the captain ascended the hollow-stepped stair to
the common hall of the venerable tower.
Internally the accommodation and construction were of the plainest
description. A narrow turnpike stair gave access to the various
floors of the keep. The first of these being the levelled rock on
which the edifice was founded, was vaulted, and contained the pit or
dungeon, with cellars for the stores necessary to a crowded household
during the long northern winter, and there was also a deep draw-well
hewn through the living rock. The next contained the arched hall
into which our wet and weary captain was ushered with much formality.
Its floor was paved; the fireplace was of stone, and had ingle-seats
within its arch. The windows were deeply embayed, and were secured
by shutters within and iron bars without. The sun, when it shone
through the half-darkened halls of those days, must have imparted to
the dwelling of the Scottish baron the aspect of a prison; thus their
prisons became dungeons, for the good folks of the olden time knew no
medium in anything.
A gigantic fire blazed redly on the hearth, and by its light the
captain could discern a number of those unfortunate wights who, as
casual guests, trenchermen, or boys-of-the-belt, in that year, 1772,
shared the old-fashioned hospitality of the Flemings of
Kirkintulloch; but not being of sufficient consequence to have
separate apartments, lay rolled up in their plaids on the benches, or
among the stag-hounds that nestled together on the warm hearthstone.
The reader may deem my description somewhat minute, but the events
which occurred to my venerable kinsman in the old stronghold of the
Comyns, and a tale which he heard there, served to impress every
feature of it on his memory, and thus it bore a prominent place in
his narrative.
As he entered the hall, a stout and jolly-looking old man, who sat
with his sturdy legs stretched out before the fire, one hand
supporting a long pipe in his mouth, the other resting on a silver
tankard of mulled claret, rose up at his approach and bade him
welcome. The fashion of this person's dress was old--for still the
Scots are always a year or two behind every innovation; his red vest
was deeply flapped, his coat of brown broadcloth was square-tailed,
with enormous cuffs and silver buttons; he wore a brown bob periwig
with a single row of curls round the bottom thereof; square buckles
on his square-toed shoes, and a hat cocked with great exactness in
the form of an equilateral triangle, completed the costume of the old
chamberlain or castle bailie of the Laird of Kirkintulloch.
"A cold night, bailie," said the captain; "I am sorely chilled,
having marched from the Torwood amid this tempest of wind and rain."
"The more are you welcome, sir, to the Castle of Kirkintulloch,"
replied the bailie, placing a chair; "and if a draught from this
tankard of hot mulled claret will comfort you, take it and welcome,
while something better is preparing."
"A thousand thanks, good bailie," replied the captain, as he drained
the silver pot which came seething from the glowing hob.
Being thoroughly drenched, he begged the bailie would have him shown
to an apartment where he might change certain portions of his attire.
A boy in the livery of the Flemings, with their goat-head worked on
his sleeves, appeared to conduct him, and, taking a candle, the lad,
who was evidently displeased at being summoned from the warm fire of
the kitchen, which in the Scoto-French fashion adjoined the hall,
hurried up the staircase before the captain, leaving him to follow as
he pleased.
I have already hinted that my grandfather was somewhat
short-tempered, so he swore one of those hearty oaths which our army
picked up so glibly in Flanders, adding, "Hollo! you young devil--do
you mean to leave me here in the dark?"
Without heeding him, the lad sprang to the top of the stairs, and
hastened across the landing-place into an apartment, leaving the
captain to ascend by no other light than the feeble rays that fell
from a candle in a tin sconce, which hung on the wall in the first
turn of the spiral stair. Looking angrily up in search of his guide,
the captain saw--or thought he saw--a lady cross the landing-place.
She was tall, and her white profile was stern and grave, and she was
attended by the most diminutive black dwarf in the world--a little
creature who appeared absolutely to perspire under the weight of her
enormous train, which was of some dark rich stuff, but brilliantly
brocaded with white stars. The captain paused and bowed very low,
lifting up the end of his long claymore, believing that this stately
dame might wish to descend; but when he raised his head again she was
gone! Her disappearance was so sudden that he was confounded, and
rubbed his eyes.
"Can the long march against a chill November wind have affected my
vision?" thought he; "or has that brimming tankard of hot claret
affected my nerves? Impossible! Tush--the dame has been scared by
my draggled appearance, and has hastened into one of these
apartments;" so the old gentleman swore another Flemish oath, and
reached the top of the stairs.
The guide now reappeared, and he would certainly have had his ears
pulled, but the captain's mind was strangely agitated by thoughts of
the lady, whose tall aristocratic figure, and pure, cold, and almost
sublime profile seemed to be still before him in the dusk.
He was shown into a handsome bed-chamber, which was lighted by four
candles in brass-mounted holders of carved oak. The walls were hung
with antique leather, of a pale yellow colour, embossed with red
flowers; the bed was very ancient, and resembled the canopied tombs
one occasionally sees in old churches. Over the mantelpiece was a
Latin legend, informing the visitor that in this chamber the wife of
the Red Comyn had died a prisoner in the year of our redemption 1310.
"Four hundred and sixty-two years ago," quoth the captain, after
airing his subtraction a little; "ugh! how gloomy the place looks,
compared to the cheerful hall--so gloomy, indeed, that I shall be
here as little as possible before marching to-morrow."
He flung off his belted plaid, badgerskin sporan, and sword-belt,
wrung the water from his kilt and from the curls of his periwig,
smoothed his queue, donned a pair of dry hose, and, after giving a
casual glance to the primings and charges of his pistols, which were
a pair of true steel-butted Doune pops, from the armoury of old
Thomas Caddel, he turned to leave the chamber, from the ceiling of
which a dried kingfisher hung by a thread; for it is an old
superstition that the bird will turn his bill to _that_ point from
which the wind blows.