THE PAST.
"Still shall unthinking man substantial deem
The forms that flit through life's deceitful dream,
Till at some stroke of Fate, the vision flies,
And sad realities in prospect rise;
And from Elysian slumbers rudely torn,
The startled soul awakes, to think and mourn."
BEATTIE'S _Elegy_, 1758.
Such is the buoyant thoughtlessness of childhood, that a few days
sufficed to console, to soothe, and to reconcile the poor boy to his
new friends and his new habitation. The kindness, tenderness, and
attention of Lady Rohallion did much, if not all, to achieve this;
and doubtless she would have succeeded very well in the same way with
an older personage than little Quentin Kennedy, for she fully
possessed, together with great amiability and sweetness of
disposition, those requisites which Sir William Temple affirmed to be
the three great ingredients of pleasant conversation, viz., good
sense, good humour, and wit.
Secluded and retiring in her habits, simple and old-fashioned in her
tastes, she preferred residing quietly among her husband's tenantry
at Rohallion, to figuring, as had been her wont, in the great world
of fashion, such as it was to be found in the London of old King
George's days, or in the smaller circle of the Scottish metropolis;
and even when parliamentary business compelled Lord Rohallion to
proceed southward, he could scarcely prevail upon her to accompany
him, for travelling was not then the swift and easy process we find
it _now_, in these days of steam and railways.
Thus the advent of her little protégé was quite a boon to her, and
while rapidly learning to love the child, who had a thousand winning
and endearing ways, she relinquished all idea of attempting to
discover his mother till the return of her husband, though the notion
was scarcely conceived, when it was abandoned as simply impossible,
from the want of a distinct clue as to her residence, and the
existence of the bitter and revengeful war that had been waged
between France and Britain for five years now, ever since the siege
of Toulon. Consequently there seemed nothing for it, as
Quartermaster Girvan said, but to make a good Scotsman of the little
Frenchman, (if French, indeed, he was)--and the dominie failed not to
quote Cicero, "anent the _adoptio_ of the Romans."
So Lady Rohallion learned to love the child, and the child to love
her with a regard that was quite filial; and his pretty prattle in
broken English was her chief solace and amusement after the hours of
attendance and _surveillance_ she daily bestowed, like a good
housewife and chatelaine of old, upon her household and her husband's
tenantry; for there was not "a fishwife's bairn" in the hamlet below
could be pilled or powdered for the measles or hooping-cough, without
a due consultation being first held with my lady in the castle.
Sensation novels were then unknown, and Walter Scott was still in
futurity, save as a translator of German ballads. Our respectable
old friends, "Tom Jones," "Roderick Random," and "Peregrine Pickle,"
were still in the flush of their fame; but Lady Rohallion preferred
the works of Mr. Richardson, and deemed the sorrows of Clarissa
Harlowe, and of Fielding's "Amelia," to be sorrows indeed.
Being Winifred Maxwell of the gallant but attainted House of
Nithsdale, her Jacobite sympathies were keen and intense; thus, ten
years before the date of our story she suffered a real grief, and had
worn a suit of the deepest black, on tidings coming from Maybole that
Prince Charles Edward, with whom her mother had flirted in Holyrood,
and for whom her uncles had shed their blood on the fatal field of
Culloden--that the Bonnie Prince Charlie of so many stirring
memories, so many Scottish songs, and so many faithful hearts, an
old, soured, and disappointed man, had been gathered to his fathers,
and was lying cold and dead in his tomb, beneath the dome of St.
Peter.
Though she had somewhat strong ideas on the subject of keeping up
"the old spirit of the Crawfords of Rohallion," a good deal of which,
we are sorry to say, meant looking down on their neighbours: and
though she had an intense estimation for people of "that ilk," and
for coats, quarterings, and family claims, and that kind of blood
which the Scots designated as _gude_, and the Spaniards as _blue_,
she was weak enough, as Lady Eglinton phrased it, to treasure
immensely a copy of very flattering verses, addressed to her in her
beauty and girlhood, by a certain democratic Ayrshire ploughman,
named Mr. Robert Burns, for whose memory she had a very great regard.
She was full of the proud and fiery ideas of a past and manly age,
for she was old enough to remember when the beaus and bloods of
Edinburgh in their periwigs and square-skirted coats of silk or
velvet, squired her and Eleanora Eglinton up the old Assembly Close,
with links flaring and swords flashing round their sedans, swearing,
with such large oaths as were then fashionable, to whip through the
lungs any scurvy fellow who loitered an instant in their way.
But the first years of the present century saw a new world closing
round her, and innovations coming fast, though the old language in
which our laws are written yet lingered in the pulpit and at the bar.
To her aristocratic ideas, and to those of her friends, it seemed as
if the malign influence of the French revolution tainted the very
air, especially in Scotland, where, by the tendency of their
education and religion, the people are naturally democratic in
spirit; and it was pretty apparent, that the decapitation of Robert
Watt at Edinburgh, and the persecution of "citizen Muir" and his
compatriots by the Government, in no way cooled the real ardour of
the Friends of the People.
To Lady Winifred, it appeared also, that while, on one hand, the
humbler classes were less genuinely affectionate and less deferential
to the upper, on the other, they were less kindly and less courteous
to each other. Everything seemed to be done in a hurry too, though
the mail-coaches carrying four inside, usually took a week or more in
rumbling between Edinburgh and London, with the varieties of an
occasional break-down when fording a river, or receiving the contents
of a robber's blunderbuss in a lonely part of the way.
Holidays were kept in a hearty old fashion, and there was no sour
Sabbatarianism to excite the wrath of the liberal-minded Scots, and
the wonder and derision of their English neighbours. There were
democrats and demagogues in every village, it is true; but
patriotism, and a genuine British spirit rendered their revilings
innocuous and all but useless.
Where now the dun deer rove in the desert glens, the Highland Clans
existed in all their hardihood and numerical strength, to fill by
thousands the ranks of our kilted regiments. The flags of "Duncan,
Nelson, Keppel, Howe, and Jervis" were sweeping the sea. Beacons
studded all the hills, and every village cross was the muster-place
of volunteer corps; and there are yet those alive who remember the
great night of the _false alarm_ when it was supposed the French had
landed, when the bale-fire on Hume castle sent its blaze upon the
midnight sky; when the alarm-drum, the long roll which a soldier
never forgets, was beat in town and hamlet, and all Scotland stood to
arms: and when the brave Liddesdale yeomanry swam the Liddle, then in
full and roaring flood, every trooper riding with his sword in his
teeth, as if to show that the old spirit yet lived upon the Borders,
unchanged as in those days when the Lords Marchers blew their
trumpets before the gates of Berwick or Carlisle.
And as it came to pass, it was in those stirring times of war and
tumult--times not now very remote, good reader--that our little hero
found a home in the old manor of Rohallion.
His mother sorrowed for him in sunny France beyond the sea, where she
may never see him more, or know that he survived the wreck in which
her husband perished; and now daily another received his morning
kiss, and watched his footsteps and gambols; and nightly hushed him
to sleep, smoothed the coverlet, caressed his ruddy cheeks and golden
hair; yet that poor bereaved mother was never absent from the
thoughts of good Lady Rohallion, who had now taken her place.
Of his many kisses and caresses, she felt that she was robbing that
poor unknown, the affectionate "Fifine" of the dead man's letter; but
how to find her, how to restore him, stultified and rendered every
way impossible as all such attempts must be, by the war now waged by
every sea and shore between the two countries?
Though little Quentin, we grieve to say, was gradually forgetting his
own mother and learning to love his adopted one, there were times
when, natheless all Lady Rohallion's sweetness and tenderness, he
felt that there was something lacking--something he missed; he knew
not what, unless it were that he longed
"For the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."
A fortnight had passed away since the letter of Lord Rohallion had
been brought by John Girvan from Maybole, and still there were no
further tidings of his return; so the lady became sad and anxious,
for she trembled at the idea of his returning by sea.
On one of the first nights of December, when the wind was moaning
about the old walls of the castle, and the angry hiss of the sea was
heard on the rocks below, she sat alone, by Quentin's little bed. He
had just dropped asleep.
He occupied the same cot in which her own son Cosmo, Master of
Rohallion, had been wont to sleep when a child about the same age.
It was prettily gilt and surmounted by a coronet; the curtains were
drawn apart, and by the subdued light of a night-lamp, she could see
the pure profile and rosy cheeks of the boy, as he reposed on a soft
white pillow, in the calm sleep of childhood.
She could almost imagine that her son Cosmo, the tall captain of the
Guards, was again a child and sleeping there, or that she was a young
wife again and not an old woman, and so, as thoughts that came
unbidden poured fast upon her, she began to recal the years that had
rolled away.
Then out of the thronging memories of the past, there arose a vision
of a fair-haired and handsome young man--one who loved her well
before Rohallion came--his younger brother; and with this image came
the memory of many a happy ramble long, long ago, in the green summer
woods of pleasant Nithsdale, when the sunshine was declining on the
heights of Queensberry, or casting shadows on the plains of Closeburn
or the grassy pastoral uplands through which the blue stream winds to
meet the Solway--and where the voices of the mavis, the merle, and
the cushat-dove were heard in every coppice.
She thought of those sunset meetings, and of one who was wont to sit
beside her then for hours, lost in love and happiness. Lady
Rohallion loved her husband well and dearly; but there were times
when conscience upbraided her, and she pitied the memory of that
younger brother whom she had deceived and deluded, and whom, like a
thoughtless young coquette, she had permitted--it might be, lured--to
love her.
In fancy she traced out what her path--a less splendid one,
assuredly--might have been, had Rohallion not won her heart, and most
unwittingly broken his brother's, for so the people said. And thus,
while "speculating on a future which was already a _past_," the
handsome, the gallant, and earnest young Ranulph Crawford, the lover
of her girlhood, rose before her in fancy, and her eyes grew moist as
she thought of his fatal end, for he died, a self-made exile, an
obscure soldier of fortune, in defence of the Tuileries, and the
public papers had recorded the story of his fall--not in the flowery
language of the present, but in the cold brevity of that time--"as
one Captain Crawford, a Scot, whose zeal outran his discretion, who
in charging the populace, was wounded, taken, and beheaded by them."
"Clarissa Harlowe" had fallen from her hand, and the mimic sorrows of
the novel were forgotten in the real griefs of Lady Winifred's waking
dream. From these, however, she was roused by the clatter of a
horse's hoofs at the haunted gate beside the gun-battery, and almost
immediately after a servant announced the glad tidings,
"My Lady Rohallion, his lordship has arrived!"