resident, Lucy soon eclipsed all the blue-eyed belles of Leyden and
the Hague. Enchanted by the charms of the beautiful brunette, their
country-woman, a crowd of gay fellows belonging to the Scots brigade
in the Dutch service followed her wherever she went; and those who
saw her dancing the last cotillion by M. Brieul of Versailles, the
fashionable composer of the day, or the stately and old-fashioned
_minuet de la cour_, with the bucks of Stuart's regiments or
MacGhie's musketeers, might have been pardoned for supposing that
poor Adam White of Ours, and the dark days of Ticonderoga, were alike
forgotten--as indeed they were; for Time, the consoler, was fast
smoothing over the terrible memories of three years ago; and again
Lucy could listen with a downcast eye and a half-smiling blush to the
voice that spoke of love and admiration.
Thrice the Comte de Montmorin asked her hand in marriage, and thrice
she refused him; but again monseigneur returned to the charge.
"Ah! mademoiselle," said he, "I am lured towards you as the poor moth
is lured towards the light--as an eaglet soars towards the glorious
sun--soars, but to sink panting and hopeless down to earth again.
Never did a Guebre worship the sacred fire with half the tremulous
ardour I worship you; for mine is a worship of the heart and
soul--the love of father, lover, husband, and brother--all combined
in one!"
"And so, M. le Comte, you do admire me," said Lucy, trembling.
"In that, Mademoiselle Fleming, I would only be as other men."
"I love you, mademoiselle."
"But so do many more."
"Mon Dieu! I know that too well; but none love as I do."
It was not in bombast like this that poor Adam White had wooed and
won her love; yet in six months after her arrival at the Hague, to
the dismay and discomfiture of six entire battalions of the Scots
brigade--at least the officers thereof--she became the wife of M. le
Comte Montmorin, Peer of France, Knight of St. Louis, and all the
royal orders--he who in former days had been the trusty grenadier of
Philipsburg and the resolute general at Ticonderoga; and though the
old minister sorrowed in his heart for the brave and leal-hearted lad
she had loved in other days, and who was buried in his soldier's
grave so far away; and though he deemed, too, that the old manse by
Tweedside would be lonely now, without her, as the count belonged to
an ancient Protestant house in Lillebonne, and had a magnificent
fortune, et cetera, he had no solid objection to offer; and so he
pronounced the irrevocable nuptial blessing, and handed over his last
tie on earth--the last flower of a little flock who were all sleeping
"in the auld kirkyard at hame," to the titled stranger.
On the occasion the Scots brigade consoled themselves by giving a
magnificent ball; and none danced more merrily thereat than the
friend of the lost lover, Jack Oswald, late of Ours, who had been
taken prisoner during some of his wanderings, and sent to France; but
had made his escape in the disguise of a poissard, and was wandering
home, _viá_ the Hague and Rotterdam.
"Poor Adam fell at Ticonderoga," said he, in a pause of the
dancing--"I saw him knocked on the head--'tis well he lived not to
see this day!"
"But the count is so rich!" said a disappointed man of the Scots
brigade.
"Tush!" snarled Oswald, "the fellow is a mere Frenchman--a heartless
fool, who would laugh in the face of a corpse, as old Inveraw of Ours
used to say."
Let us change the scene to a period of thirty-one years after.
It is now the year 1789.
M. le Comte de Montmorin, a venerable peer, was then the secretary of
state for the foreign department under Louis XVI. Madame la
Comtesse, after being long the mirror of Parisian fashion, had become
a staid and noble matron, with a son in the French Guards, and two
marriageable daughters, the belles of Paris. The old minister, their
grandsire, had long since been gathered to his fathers, and was
sleeping far away, among the long grass and the mossy headstones of
his old grey kirk on bonny Tweedside. Another occupied his humble
manse, another preacher his pulpit, and other faces filled the old
oak pews around it.
The horrors of the French Revolution were bursting over Paris!
The absolute power of the crown of the Louis; the overweening
privileges of a proud nobility and of a dissipated clergy, with their
total exemption from all public burdens, and the triple tyranny under
which the people groaned, had made all Frenchmen mad. A determined
and fierce contest among the different orders of society ensued; the
mobs rose in arms, and the troops joined them. A new constitution
was demanded, and equality of ranks formed its basis; for the cry was,
"Vive the people! down with the rich, the noble, and the aristocrats!"
The flower of the French nobles either perished on the scaffold or
fled for safety and for foreign aid; the King himself became a
fugitive, but was arrested on the frontiers and brought back to
Paris. The streets of that city swam in blood, and the son of Lucy
Fleming, a brave young chevalier, perished at the head of his company
in defending the beautiful Marie Antoinette, and his head was made a
foot-ball by the rabble along the Rue St. Jacques. A thousand times
Lucy urged her husband to fly, for Paris had become a mere human
shambles, but the determined old soldier of Ticonderoga and Quebec
stood by his miserable king, and coolly proceeded each day to the
foreign office on foot; for the mobs systematically murdered every
aristocrat who dared to appear in a carriage, sacrificing even the
valets and horses to their mad resentment.
In July, a vast armed multitude assailed the Bastille, and foremost
among the assailants was a Scottish gentleman--known by many as the
notorious Sylvester Otway; by others as Jack Oswald of the Black
Watch.
After quitting the regiment, this remarkable man (whose father was
the keeper of John's coffee-house at Edinburgh) had made himself
perfect master of the Greek, Latin, and Arabic languages; and he
became a vegetarian, in imitation of the Brahmins, some of whose
opinions he had imbibed during service in India. He became a violent
political pamphleteer, and on the outbreak of the French Revolution
repaired at once to Paris, where his furious writings procured him
immediate admission into the Jacobin club, in all the transactions of
which he took a leading part, and was appointed to the command of a
regiment of infantry, which was raised from the refuse, the savage
and infamous population of the purlieus of Paris; and they marched
sans breeches, shoes, and often sans shirts, with their hair loose,
and their arms, faces, and breasts smeared with red paint, blood, and
gunpowder.
At the head of this rabble, on the evening of the 14th of July,
Oswald appeared with other leaders before the walls of the terrible
Bastille; and bearing in his hand a white flag of truce, summoned the
governor, the Marquis de Launay, "to surrender in the name of the
sovereign people;" but that noble proudly and recklessly despised
this motley rout of armed citizens, and opened a fire upon them. The
cannon taken from the Hotel des Invalides soon effected a breach, and
a private of the French Guards, with John Oswald, the _ci-devant_
lieutenant of the Black Watch, were the two first men who entered the
place. The poor garrison were all slaughtered or taken prisoners;
among the latter were De Launay, his master-gunner, and two veteran
soldiers, who were dragged to the Place de la Grêve and ignominiously
beheaded.
The terrible Bastille, for centuries the scene of so many horrors,
and the receptacle of broken hearts, was demolished, sacked, and
ruined! The most active in that demolition was the author of
"Euphrosyne," and the "Cry of Nature"--the wild enthusiast, John
Oswald. Intent on releasing the suffering captives who were believed
to be immured there, he hurried, sword in hand, from tower to tower,
from cell to cell, and vault to vault; through staircases and
corridors, dark, damp, and horrible, where for ages the bloated
spider had spun her web, and the swollen rat squattered in the damp
and slime that distilled from the massive walls to make a hideous
puddle on the floors of clay, amid which the bones of many a hapless
wretch, forgotten and nameless now, lay steeping with their rusted
chains.
In one of these, the darkest, lowest, and most pestilential--for it
was subject to the tides of the Seine, where the oozing water dropped
from the vaulted roof, where the cold slimy reptiles crawled, and
where the massive walls were wet with dripping slime--he found a
human being, almost an idiot, chained to a block of stone. He was
old; his hair and beard were white as the thistle-down: he seemed a
living corpse; his aspect was terrible, for existence seemed a
miracle, a curse in such a place; and on being brought to upper earth
and air by these blood-steeped men of the people, he became senseless
and swooned.
Three other prisoners were found, and then, to its lowest vaults, the
infamous Bastille was levelled--even to its base, and its records of
tyranny, torture, suffering, human crime, and inhuman horror perished
with it.
"The only State prisoners, where so many were supposed to have
entered," says the _Edinburgh Magazine_ for that year, "the only
prisoners that were forthcoming in the general delivery amounted to
four! Major White and Lord Mazarine were two out of that number.
The first gentleman, a native of Scotland, was in durance for the
space of twenty-eight years; he had never in that time been heard of
by his friends, nor in the least expected thus to be enthralled.
When restored to liberty, he appeared to have lost his mental powers,
and even the vernacular sounds of his own language. The Duke of
Dorset has taken him under his direct protection; this is unasked,
and therefore the more honourable."
So this miserable wreck, aged, pale, and wan, worn almost to a
skeleton, nearly nude, with his limbs fretted by iron fetters, and
all but fatuous; insane, and with scarcely a memory of his native
tongue or past existence; in whose eyes the light of life and
intelligence seemed dead, and who had forgotten the days when he
could weep or feel, was our long-lost comrade, the soldier of
Ticonderoga?
Inspired by just indignation, and determined to unravel this terrible
mystery, the Duke of Dorset took him in a fiacre to the hotel of the
Comte de Montmorin, the only minister then in Paris, to demand the
reason of this outrage upon the laws of war, of peace, and of common
humanity; but the official of the unfortunate Louis could only shrug
his shoulders, make the usual grimaces and apologies, and plead, that
as the records of the Bastille had perished in the sack of that
prison, it was totally beyond his power to explain the affair; for
not a scrap of paper remained to show how or why this brave officer
of the Black Watch, who had been wounded and taken prisoner in action
in 1758, should have been found in that dreadful place thirty-one
years after. The Duke of Dorset perceived, with surprise, that while
speaking the Comte de Montmorin was ghastly pale, and that his eyes
were filled with terror. It would have made a fine subject for a
painter, but a finer still for a novelist--the delineation of this
interview, as it took place in the drawing-room of the Hotel de
Montmorin on the morning after the demolition of the Bastille.
The unfortunate victim of a government which had long made that
infamous prison an engine of tyranny, was introduced by our proud and
determined ambassador, who spoke for him in no measured tones; for
alas! the poor major could scarcely put three words together, and for
some hours seemed to have forgotten the sound of his own voice.
In the stately and now elderly French lady seated on the gilt
fauteuil, between her shrieking and pitying daughters, clad in her
high stays, hooped petticoat, and figured satin, with an esclavage
round her neck, and her white hair powdered and towered up into a
mountain of curls, flowers, and feathers, à la Marquise de Pompadour,
it was impossible for Adam White to recognise the once beautiful and
black-eyed Lucy of his youth--the simple Scottish girl of the quiet
old manse on Tweedside, for whom his sorrowing heart had yearned with
agony, in the long and dreary days of captivity, and in the longer
watches of the silent night, until love and youth and blessed hope
all passed away together.
It was as difficult for her to trace in that wan, aged, and
resuscitated man, the handsome young officer who had left her side to
fight Britain's battles under Amherst and the hero of Quebec. She
was now a white-haired matron, and he a wild-eyed, haggard old
man--old by premature years, for eight-and-twenty in the Bastille had
crushed him by a load of unavailing care and sorrow. How many
seasons had passed over that dark and vaulted solitude during which
his pained and weary eyes had never met a friendly smile, or his ear
welcomed a kindly greeting.
Eight-and-twenty summers had bloomed and withered, and eight-and
twenty winters had spread their snows upon the hills! In that long
space of time, how many had been wedded and given in marriage, or
been laid in their last homes?--how many of the brave and good, the
noble and the beautiful, had gone to "the Land of the Leal," where
there is no dawning or gloaming, where the sun shines for ever, and
the flowers never die!
For eight-and-twenty years all the pulses of life had seemed to stand
still; and now, under their changed aspect and character, and
ignorant of each other's presence, Lucy Fleming and Adam White stood
within the same apartment, without a glance of recognition. Weak,
tottering, and frail, White was placed in a chair, and the countess
brought wine to him from a side table. His aspect was that of a
dying man; her eyes were full of pity, and her daughters wept to see
this poor old man, whose wandering faculties were awaking to a new
existence after the long and dreamless sleep of eight-and-twenty
years, and to whom the upper air, the blessed sunshine, and the
twitter of the happy birds, were all as strange and new as if he had
never known them.
"Your name, monsieur le prisonnier?" asked her husband, coldly, and
with averted eye.
"Adam White--yes, yes--I am sure it was so--Adam White; once a major
in the 42nd Regiment of his Britannic Majesty George II.," he
replied, with great difficulty and long pauses.
"George II. has been dead these twenty-eight years, sir," replied the
Duke of Dorset, kindly placing an arm upon his shoulder, while, with
outspread hands and eyes dilated with terror, the countess started
back as if a spectre had risen before her.
"Dead! dead!" muttered the major. "I too have been dead, I
think--and who now is on the throne?"
"His grandson, George III."
"Know you the crime for which you were arrested, monsieur?" asked the
count, who did not seem to notice the agitation of the countess.
The sunken eyes of Major White flashed, but the emotion died at once,
for his heart seemed broken and his spirit crushed.
"Crime!" said he; "I was wounded and taken in the assault on
Ticonderoga by the Comte de Montmorin."
"I commanded there, and I am he."
"This was thirty-one years ago--my God! oh, my God!"
"Be calm, dear sir," said the Duke of Dorset.
"And you have been all that time in the Bastille?"
"Yes, monseigneur."
"Horrible!" exclaimed the duke.
"You were arrested"--
"One night in the streets of Paris, near the Port St. Antoine, when I
was at liberty upon parole, as a prisoner of war."
"When was this?"
"In 1761--three years after Ticonderoga."
"Ah, we had peace with Britain in 1768," said the count, averting his
eyes, and endeavouring to assume a composure which he did not feel
under the keen scrutiny of Dorset's eye. "And so we meet
again--fortune has cast us together once more."
"Fortune--say rather fatality," replied White, as some old memory
shook his withered heart.
"Did you ever hear how or why you were arrested?"
"Once, and once only--I was told--I was told that it was on the
authority of a _lettre de cachet_, filled up by King Louis in the
name of the Comte de Montmorin."
"It is an infamous falsehood!" exclaimed the count, passionately.
"Perhaps so," sighed White, meekly; "the man who told me so has been
dead twenty-three years."
"And this arrest was"--
"On the anniversary of Ticonderoga--the night of the 15th of July,
1761."
"The 15th of July!" exclaimed the countess, wildly, and in a piercing
voice; "on the morning of that very day my desk was rifled of your
letters, and your miniature, Adam White!--O my friend--I see it
all--I see this horrible mystery!"
White turned his hollow eyes and haggard visage towards her in
wonder. He passed a hand repeatedly across his eyes, as if to clear
his thoughts, then shook his white head, and relapsed into dreamy
vacancy. After a painful pause, "That voice," said he, "is like one
which used to come to me often--very often--in the Bastille; in my
dreams it used to mingle with the rustle of the straw I slept on."
He smiled with so ghastly an expression that the Duke of Dorset grew
pale with anger and compassion. He had gleaned from White the story
of his life, and discovered in a moment that the countess was the
Lucy Fleming of his early love; and that the count, on discovering
the wounded and long-missing major to be in Paris in 1761, to
preclude all chance of the lovers ever meeting again, had consigned
him to the Bastille, there to be detained for life, as it was termed
"IN SECRET."
"Monseigneur," said he, sternly, "I see a clue to this dark story;
and believe me, that the king, whom I have the honour to represent,
will take sure vengeance for this act of more than Italian jealousy,
and for an atrocity which cannot be surpassed in the annals of yonder
accursed edifice, which the mob of yesterday have happily hurled to
the earth."
With these words he retired, taking with him Adam White, who seemed
reduced to mere childhood, for recollection and animation came upon
him only by gleams and at unexpected times. As they withdrew, the
countess turned away in horror from her husband, and fainted in the
arms of her terrified daughters.
The inquiry threatened by our ambassador was never made. Paris was
then convulsed, and France was trembling on the brink of anarchy,
even as the weak Louis trembled on his crumbling throne. The
exertions of his Grace of Dorset to unravel more of the mystery, and
the fears of the Comte de Montmorin, were alike futile, for next
morning the poor major was found dead in his bed. He had expired in
the night. The sudden revulsion of feeling produced by a release,
after so many years of blank captivity, had proved too much for his
weak frame and shattered constitution. He was buried in the church
of St. Germain de Prez; and when Oswald's sans-culottes lifted the
dead man from the bed, to lay him in the humble shell provided by the
curé of the parish, there dropped from his breast a locket It
contained a miniature and a withered tress of black hair--the last
mementoes left to him of all that he had loved in the pleasant days
of youth and hope, and prized beyond even blessed hope itself, in the
solitude and horror of the long years that had followed Ticonderoga.
The ruffians who had desecrated the regal sepulchres of St. Denis
respected the heritage of the dead soldier, so that the locket was
buried with him; and there, in the ancient church of St. Germain,
Oswald, the political enthusiast, interred his old and long-lost
comrade with all the honours of war.
The stone which was erected in the church, and of which I have given
the brief inscription, is said, traditionally, to have been the gift
of a lady--who, need scarcely be mentioned. How long this lady and
the count her husband survived the disclosures consequent to the
destruction of the Bastille, I have no means of knowing; but French
history has recorded the fate of Jack Oswald.
His two sons left Edinburgh and joined him at Paris, where, to
illustrate the complete system of equality and fraternity, he made
them both drummers in his regiment, among the soldiers of which his
severe discipline soon rendered him unpopular; and on his attempting
to substitute pikes for muskets, the whole battalion refused to obey,
and then officers and men broke out into open mutiny.
"Colonel Oswald's corps," continues the editor of the "Scottish
Biographical Dictionary," "was one of the first employed against the
royalists in La Vendée, where he was killed in battle. It is said
that his men took advantage of the occasion to rid themselves of
their obnoxious commander, and to despatch also his two sons, and an
English gentleman who was serving in his regiment."
And thus ends another legend of the Black Watch.
VIII.
ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN GRANT.
Colquhoun Grant, a captain of one of our battalion companies during
the Peninsular war, was a hardy, active, strong, and handsome
Highlander, from the wooded mountains that overlook Strathspey.
Inured from childhood to the hardships and activity incidental to a
life in the country of the clans, where the care of vast herds of
sheep and cattle, or the pursuit of the wild deer from rock to rock,
and from hill to hill, are the chief occupations of the people;--a
deadly shot with either musket or pistol, and a complete swordsman,
he was every way calculated to become an ornament to our regiment and
to the service. General Sir William Napier, in the fourth volume of
his "History of the Peninsular War," writes of him as "Colquhoun
Grant, that celebrated scouting officer, in whom the utmost _daring_
was so mixed with subtlety of genius, and both so tempered by
_discretion_, that it is difficult to say which quality predominated."
In the spring of 1812, when Lord Wellington crossed the Tagus, and
entered Castello Branco, rendering the position of Marshal Marmont so
perilous that he retired across the Agueda, by which the general of
the allies, though his forces were spread over a vast extent of
cantonments, was enabled to victual the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo
and Almieda, the 42nd, or old Black Watch, were with the division of
Lieutenant-General Grahame, of Lynedoch. The service battalion
consisted of 1160 rank and file, and notwithstanding the fatigues of
marching by day and night, of fording rivers above the waist-belt,
and all those arduous operations by which Wellington so completely
baffled and out-generalled Marmont in all his attempts to attack
Rodrigo--movements in which the sagacity of the "Iron Duke" appeared
so remarkable, that a brave old Highland officer (General Stewart of
Garth) declared his belief that their leader had the _second
sight_,--not a man of our regiment straggled or fell to the rear,
from hunger, weariness, or exhaustion; all were with the colours when
the roll was called in the morning.
The information that enabled Wellington to execute those skilful
manoeuvres which dazzled all Europe, and confounded, while they
baffled, the French marshal, was supplied from time to time by
Colquhoun Grant, who, accompanied by Domingo de Leon, a Spanish
peasant, had the boldness to remain in rear of the enemy's lines,
watching all their operations, and noting their numbers; and it is a
remarkable fact that while on this most dangerous service he
constantly wore _the Highland uniform, with his bonnet and
epaulettes_; thus, while acting as a scout, freeing himself from the
accusation of being in any way a spy, "for," adds Napier, "he never
would assume any disguise, and yet frequently remained for three days
concealed in the midst of Marmont's camp."
Hence the secret of Wellington's facility for circumventing Marmont
was the information derived from Colquhoun Grant; and the secret of
Grant's ability for baffling the thousand snares laid for him by the
French, was simply that he had a Spanish love, who watched over his
safety with all a woman's wit, and the idolatry of a Spanish woman,
who, when she loves, sees but _one_ man in the world--the object of
her passion.