QUENTIN'S CHILDHOOD.
"Ah, happy time! ah, happy time!
The days of mirth and dream;
When years ring out their merry chime,
And hope and gladness gleam.
Then how we drink the storied page,
In boyhood's happy home:
The marvels of the wondrous age
Of old Imperial Rome."--_All the Year Round_.
The New Year's day of 1801 passed over at Rohallion amid feasting and
revelling, for in the good old fashion the worthy lord, as his
fathers had done before him, entertained all his people in the great
hall of the tower. There the trophies were hung with green holly and
scarlet berries; there the Yule log still smouldered on the hearth,
and there he shook the powder from his hair, while footing it merrily
with the wives and daughters of the fishers and cottars, while old
Girvan hobbled away in his brigadier wig, the dominie screwing up his
fiddle to discourse sweet music with the piper of Maybole, while as
an interlude came the drums and fifes of the Rohallion Volunteers, to
make the old castle ring to the cheering sounds of "Lady Jean o'
Rohallion's Rant;" and this hearty homeliness, together with a free
distribution of gifts on "auld handsel Monday," made the lord and
lady of the manor adored by their tenantry. On that day there was
something for every one: to the dominie a snuff-mull, which he
received with many bows, reminding the donor how "Tacitus affirmed
that Tiberius prohibited the bestowal of new year gifts, which was a
great saving of expense to the knights and senators," To the
quartermaster a gilt-bound "Army List," to keep him in reading and
reference for the ensuing year; to Elsie at the coves a lace-curchie,
and to little Quentin a gallant rocking-horse. So all danced the new
year in hand-in-hand, to the old song,--
"Now Yule has come and Yule has gane,
And we hae feasted weel!
Sae Jock maun to his flail again,
And Jenny to her wheel."
In the ensuing spring, when fresh flowers and budding leaves came "to
deck the dead season's bier;" when the aroma of fertility, warmth,
and verdure came from the sunny upland slopes, and the mountain
burns, as they bore brown leaves along, seemed to brawl louder over
their stony beds towards the Firth of Clyde; when greener tints
spread over the pastoral hills and glens about Rohallion; when the
sky, long chilled by the frost of the past winter, had a richer tone
and colour; when the air was warm and pleasant as it fanned the
new-turned sods--when this sweet season came, we say, the old Lord
had ceased to lament having been refused a brigade in the expedition
to Egypt.
By that time he had heard of the fall of his old friend and brother
officer, the gallant Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and how war and disease
had thinned the ranks of his army. He sorrowed for this: but his old
spirit blazed up anew when he heard of how the 28th or
Gloucestershire Slashers, in the Temple of the Sun, faced their rear
rank about when surrounded, and defended themselves like a double
wall of fire; how the Gordon Highlanders, at the bayonet's point,
carried the cannon of the foe at the Tower of Mandora; how the Black
Watch destroyed the boasted Invincibles, and won their scarlet
plumes; and how the shrill pipes of the Highland Brigade rang in
fierce defiance along the embattled heights of Nicopolis!
One name in the list of casualties made him start.
It was that of his old friend and neighbour, Colonel John Warrender
of Ardgour, who fell, sword in hand, when leading the Corsican
Rangers to a victorious bayonet charge against the 61st Demi-brigade.
"Oh, what a heart-stroke this is for his poor wife, Winny!" he
exclaimed.
"And Flora--poor little Flora, their daughter," added Lady Rohallion,
with her eyes full of tears.
"She is too young to know fully the calamity that has befallen her.
Order the carriage, Andrews; we'll drive up the glen to Ardgour in an
hour after this."
"Poor Mrs. Warrender!--she did so love her husband, and had sore
misgivings that they were parting for the last time."
"A sad morning this will be for her, indeed!" said Lord Rohallion,
laying the gazette upon the breakfast-table and gazing into the
clear, bright fire, full of thought, as the battle of Alexandria
seemed to come in fancy before his practised eye.
"Now Rohallion, bethink you, if circumstances had been reversed,"
said she, laying a hand caressingly on his neck, "and if she had been
reading your name in that paper, what my feelings would have been."
"The carriage would be ordered at Ardgour instead of Rohallion," said
the old Lord, with an affectionate smile; "they may need me yet--but
egad! I am now, perhaps, better pleased that the brigade was refused
me. Warrender gone--poor Jack! and Abercrombie, too--I knew him when
in command of the 69th."
"He died on board the flagship, my lord," said Andrews, who, in
virtue of his years and peculiar position, ventured to gratify his
irrepressible curiosity, by taking up the paper, to skim it at his
master's back; "they landed and formed line in the water, bayonets
fixed and colours flying," he continued, with a nervous voice and
kindling eye; "28th and 42nd--Foot Guards and Royal Scots--I think I
see them all--whoop! d--n it--why weren't _we_ there?--I beg pardon,
my lady," he added, in some confusion, as he proceeded in haste to
remove the breakfast equipage, stumping vigorously on his left
leg--in which he received a bullet at Saratoga--as he hurried away to
order the carriage for the proposed visit of condolence, to which we
need not invite the reader.
The treaty of Amiens which followed soon after the Egyptian campaign
brought about a peace for fourteen months, and during that time, Lord
Rohallion wrote repeatedly to our Ambassador at Paris concerning the
little protégé who had now found a home in Carrick; but at a period
when all the powers of Europe were only, as it were, taking breath
and gathering strength for a greater and more deadly contest, such a
trivial matter as the fate of a shipwrecked boy could gain but little
attention. His lordship's letters remained unanswered, and by the
18th of May, 1803, Britain and France again drew the sword, which was
never to be sheathed save on the plains of Waterloo.
Time had made little Quentin as thoroughly at home in the castle and
with the family of Rohallion, as if he had been born there.
The absence of her son with the Guards (Carlton House and the
Pavilion at Brighton were decidedly more amusing than that old castle
by the sea), created a void in Lady Rohallion's heart; so the strange
child came just in time to fill it, and she loved him tenderly and
fondly. The old Lord was never weary of chatting and playing with
Quentin; and he was the especial pet and occasionally tormentor of
the quartermaster, grey-haired Jack Andrews, and of old Dominie
Skaill, who had been long since inducted to the honourable post of
tutor, and as such, after his scholastic duties were over, he daily
visited the castle, in which a room was set apart for study.
The following years saw Quentin Kennedy growing up into a fine and
manly boy, bold in spirit and frank in nature; yet he retained even
after his tenth year much of the chubby bloom, the rosy cheeks, the
plump white skin, and the golden curls of his infancy.
Lady Rohallion and her visitors thought him a perfect Cupid; but her
husband and the quartermaster--particularly the latter--vowed he was
a regular imp, who always broke his tobacco-pipes, tied explosives to
the end of his pigtail, and played him a hundred other tricks, the
result of Jack Andrews' secret education.
The dominie often shook his bag-wig solemnly, for the boy's ways were
at times very erratic and required reprehension; but his constant
friend and adherent was Lady Rohallion, who, when beholding his
beauty, his gambols, and grace, or when listening to his prattle, and
watching all his waggish little ways, could never think but with a
sigh of the widowed and unknown mother whom all these would have
gladdened, and who was, perhaps, still sorrowing for the child who
had forgotten her and transferred his filial love and faith to a
stranger--if, indeed, the royalist sympathies of that unfortunate
mother had not been long since expiated under the guillotine.
Quentin's only annoyance existed when the Master of Rohallion, then a
captain in the Guards, came home on leave, which, sooth to say, the
Honourable Cosmo Crawford did as seldom as possible, the gaieties of
London, club-life, the opera, and the atmosphere which surrounded the
Prince of Wales, proving greater attractions than any to be found
among the Highlands of Carrick. On these occasions, the boy felt
sensibly how secondary a place he bore in the affections of the lady,
and clung more to his friend the quartermaster.
In addition to a cold and chilling stateliness of manner, the
Master--a handsome and gallant soldier, however--disliked children
generally, and half-grown boys in particular; thus if he ever spoke
to Quentin, it was merely to quiz him as a young Frenchman (a
nationality which the boy angrily repudiated), to call him a
frog-eater, or little Boney, a name which, through some childish
memory of the past, always roused his anger.
The Master was not popular in Carrick; on his home visits, the piper
of Maybole never ventured to play before _him_ as before his father;
no mendicant held forth his hand in hope of charity when he passed
the kirk-stile on Sunday; the tenantry never gathered to welcome him
back, and he had been heard to speak of a recently deceased prince as
"the late Pretender," a horrible heresy in the house of Rohallion,
and almost a solecism in Scottish society yet.
But our young friend was always relieved of his presence when the
shooting season was over, when the summer drills of the Guards began,
or when urgent letters from great but unknown friends required his
return to London; and whither he departed with baggage enough for a
regiment, and his English valet, whose finery, foppery, and town airs
always excited the risible faculties of Lord Rohallion, and the grim
contempt of the cynical veteran, Jack Andrews.
Though bright and intelligent, Quentin was too erratic to be an
industrious or plodding scholar; thus his Euclid and Cornelius Nepos,
&c., were frequently left to themselves, that he might act the
"truant," and have a day's fly-fishing in the Girvan or the winding
Doon: or a ramble with his friend the gamekeeper through the
preserves, where the deer came out of the fir woods to steal the
dominie's turnips, and where the dark plover and the golden pheasant
lurked among the sombre whin or feathery bracken bushes.
Then the "Life of Valentine and Orson," with the achievements of
gallant Jack, the foe of all giants, together with similar ancient
lore, in which the ex-quartermaster indulged him (generally about the
time when his poor half-pay became due) together with the pungent
military yarns of Jack Andrews, always proved sad opponents to the
ponderous classics of Dominie Skaill; and, as Quentin grew older,
Cornelius Nepos, Tacitus, Æschylus, and others, were alike neglected,
and frequently neither entreaties or threats would substitute them
for the pages of Smollett and Fielding--the Dickens and Thackeray of
the preceding age.
Then the dominie would grow wrathful; but all without avail, for the
boy was droll and loveable in his ways, and as the old Lord said,
"would wind them all round his little finger." Thus in the
oddly-assorted society of that sequestered castle he picked up a
strange smattering of knowledge on many subjects.
Sometimes he was present when Lord Rohallion and John Girvan had long
consultations concerning farming and stock management, arable and
pastoral; planting belts of pine for sheltering corn and deer;
draining bogs and swamps; embanking or reclaiming; thatching
farm-towns anew, and so forth--consultations which always ended in a
jorum of hot toddy, and a reference to the war and chances of
invasion, which naturally led to a mental parade of his majesty's
25th Foot, and old personal reminiscences, varying from the days of
Minden down to Saratoga, Bunker's Hill, and Brandywine, with Corporal
O'Lavery of the 17th, and Lord Rawdon's famous despatch. _Then_
agriculture and its patron, the Baronet of Ulbter, were voted a
double bore, and everything gave place to "shop" and pipeclay.
At other times Quentin was present when curious arguments ensued over
a pipe and glass of grog between his preceptor and the ruddy-visaged
quartermaster, who was wont to treat the ancients and their modes of
warfare with supreme contempt. Thus, if he extolled Brown Bess and
her bayonet, which the French could never withstand, Dominie Skaill
brought the Parthians into the field, and told him how at close
quarters with the Roman Legion they were broken; but how the troops
of Crassus broke those same legions in turn, by the dexterity with
which they used their bows, never failing to wind up with a reference
to the Caledonian warriors who routed the Romans in the days of old,
and the schiltrons or massed spearmen of Wight Wallace in later
times, for the dominie had all the history of Harry the Minstrel by
heart, and like the quartermaster, his patriotism had been no way
lessened by many a jovial night spent with their friend Burns in his
old farm-house of Lochlea or Mossgiel.
Thus Quentin's mind became gradually imbued by quaint ideas, and
filled with a curious mixture of military, legendary, and historic
lore. The very air he breathed was full of patriotism, for he was in
the land of Burns--in Carrick, the ancient lordship of the kingly
Bruces; and many a story the dominie told him of the time when the
Earls of Cassilis, the Lords of Rohallion, the Lairds of Blairquhan,
and other noblesse of Carrick, had their town mansions in Maybole;
when love was made through barred helmets, and when there were
hunting, and hosting and foraying; when castles were stormed and
granges burned; when the Black Vault of Dunure saw Danish blood
stream from its gutters after Largs was won; and the Abbot of
Corseregal roasting on an iron grille ten years after the
Reformation. But the story that Quentin loved best was of the Gipsy
King who lured away the fair Countess of Cassilis, and of the long
years of captivity she spent in the grim old tower of Maybole, where,
to this day, we may see the likenesses of herself and her rash lover,
carved in stone upon the upper oriel.
Many a day they spent together, this patient dominie and his playful
pupil, wandering among the ruins of the Castle of Kilhenzie, in
feudal times a stronghold of the Kennedies, and there for hours they
were wont to sit, under the aged and giant tree which still stands
near its southern wall--a tree twenty-two feet in girth, and so vast
that it covers nearly the eighth of an acre.
"On that tree many a bold reiver, gipsy loon, and landlouping
Southron has been hung in his boots by the auld Kennedies o'
Kilhenzie," the dominie would say; "they were a dour, stern, and
warlike stock, boasting themselves to be kean-na-tigh, or, as the
name bears, 'head of the race,' and who can say, Quentin, but you may
be their lineal descendant, and if every head wears its ain bonnet,
be Laird of Kilhenzie yet? yea, restored to your proper estate after
all your wanderings, even as Telemachus was, who in childhood was
also saved miraculously from the sea."
Then the boy would look up to the ivy-covered masses of the crumbling
wall, with its gaping windows, through which the gleds and
hoodie-crows were flying, and feel strange throbbings and emotions
wakened in his heart by the dominie's words; and there he often came
alone to loiter, and think and dream over what his friend had said,
till his musings took a tangible form, and ultimately, in all his
day-dreams, he came to identify the old castle with _himself_--he
knew not why.
When Quentin was brought first to Rohallion, he was wont to pray to
his "blessed Mother who was in heaven," and to lisp the name of "la
Mère de Dieu" with great reverence, to the utter scandal and
bewilderment of Dominie Skaill, who smelt the old leaven of Prelacy
and Popery strong in this, for he believed only in the Kirk of
Scotland as by law established, confirmed by the Revolution
Settlement and Treaty of Union (though sadly outraged by the
restoration of patronage in 1712); and such language, he averred, was
rank hanging matter in an adult!
Quentin's dark eyes were wont to sparkle and flash on hearing these
rebukes, or France abused, as she was pretty sure to be, daily, by
every one in those days; but after a time all these emotions and
ideas gave place to local influences, and he settled down into a
quiet little Scottish schoolboy, though, as we have said, somewhat of
a truant withal.
His mind sobered and changed even as his clustering golden curls grew
into dark and shining chestnut though dreamlike memories would still
steal upon his mind--memories that came he knew not whence.
Once when the dominie pointed to a Vandyke that hung in the great
hall, representing Lady Jean of Rohallion, and told him that "she was
an evil-minded woman, who persecuted the saints of God in her time;
and that the cross at her girdle was the hammer of Beelzebub, and an
emblem of her damnable apostasy from the pure and covenanted Kirk of
Scotland," the boy's eyes would assume their gleam, and then a pure,
soft smile, as he said that "his mother in France wore just such a
cross as that, and that he would love the picture for her sake."
Then Dominie Skaill would groan in spirit over "the bad bluid" that
boiled in a heart so young and tender, and stamping up and down the
hall in his square-toed shoes, would openly express his fears that
"the bairn was a veritable young Claverhouse!"
On other occasions, and they were many, when Quentin was alone, and
gazing on the sea that frothed so white about the Partan Craig, out
of the perplexing mists of memory came the dream-like incidents of
the wreck on that gloomy November night; his loving father's pale and
despairing face, when the ship went down and left them all struggling
amid the cold waves of a dark and stormy sea; and with these memories
came others beyond that time, softer and dearer, like the
recollections of a prior existence.
There was the cathedral, with its lights and music at mass; the
bridge, the river, and the windmill; how surely he should know them
all again! And so pondering and dreaming thus, he would lie for
hours on the sunny bank that sloped southward from the cliff of
Rohallion, while the blue Firth of Clyde that chafed upon the rocks
below, came faintly and dreamily to his ear.
Thus his vision was turned inward, though his eyes were perhaps fixed
on the blue ether overhead, where the sea mews were revolving and the
great eagle soaring aloft; or on the distant tower and Tolbooth of
Maybole that stood clear and dark against the sunset-flush--the wavy
undulations of the Carrick hills: the blue peaks of Arran that rose
afar off, or the nearer coast of Cunninghame, chequered by golden
light on violet coloured shadow.