THE CAMERONIANS.
It was the morning after Cecil Falconer's detachment had come in to
headquarters overnight.
In the mess-room about a dozen officers in their blue patrol jackets,
all more or less good-looking, even handsome young fellows, each and
all having a certain joyous and straightforwardness of manner, were
at breakfast, singly or in groups, and all greeted Falconer and
Fotheringhame warmly, for both were prime favourites with the corps,
and there was much shaking of hands and slapping on the back, with
'Welcome, old fellow!' 'How goes it?' and so forth, while an aroma
of coffee and devilled bones pervaded the long room which had windows
at each end, and where each officer seemed to be economising time, by
reading during the meal, with a daily paper or comic serial--_Punch_,
of course--propped against his coffee-pot or sugar-basin. All were
discussing the repast in haste, as the hour of morning parade was
close at hand.
'Here you are again, Falconer and Fotheringhame!' cried one; 'the
Damon and Pythias--the David and Jonathan of the Cameronians! The
very men we wanted; you have just come in time for the ball
committee!'
'Heard the good news, Falconer, old fellow?' asked Dick Freeport.
'No--what is it? One of the three girls you proposed to accepted
you?' said Falconer, leisurely tapping an egg.
'Ah, you've heard that story; nothing so stupid. But is it possible
you don't know?'
'What?'
'That your name is in the _Gazette_; but here you are, as large as
life,' added Freeport, reading aloud: '"Lieutenant Cecil Falconer to
be Captain, vice Brevet Major Balerno seconded for service on the
Staff." I congratulate you.'
'And so do we all!' cried Acharn, a frank, jolly captain, though not
yet eight-and-twenty.
'Thanks; I knew not that Balerno was leaving us so soon,' said
Falconer, whose first thoughts were of Mary Montgomerie.
'This will rouse your spirits,' resumed Freeport.
'Do they want rousing?'
'Well, you looked rather glum last night. Been spoony on some girl
in the West, I suppose?'
'Perhaps I was,' replied Cecil, laughing, with a chivalrous idea that
to deny his secret love might prove that he was not worthy of it;
'you know that I varied the tedium of country quarters by a visit to
the general--old Sir Piers Montgomerie. But I wish you would fall in
love, in downright earnest, yourself, Freeport.'
'What harm have I done you that you should wish me this, Falconer?'
asked Dick, drily.
'Any fine girls there--at the general's, I mean?' asked a cheeky
young sub, of Falconer, who coloured with annoyance, though the
boy--a man in his own estimation and that of fast chums, touting
tradesmen and money-lenders--was but a boy after all. 'I have heard
that his niece, or grand-niece rather, is a stunner. By Jove, he
grows absolutely red! Were you writing verses to her eyebrows, and
sighing like a furnace, Falconer?'
'You would have sighed like two or three had _you_ tried the
process,' said Falconer, turning away.
'I do wish you joy, Falconer,' said his friend Fotheringhame, in a
low voice; 'and your promotion puts me one step nearer the rank I
held when I first knew Annabelle Erroll, and--and--well, played the
fool, or worse!'
Cecil thought, would Mary see the _Gazette_? The general, he knew,
was certain to do so; and Mrs. Garth too, who read it as regularly as
an old Chelsea pensioner; but neither might speak of the event, or
deem it wise to revive his name at Eaglescraig.
Falconer was somewhat of a pet among the Cameronians. Excellence in
all manly sports ever makes a British officer a favourite with his
men; thus, as Falconer could keep a wicket well, was also a prime
bowler, a good horseman (though he generally owed his mounts to a
friend), and could pull a good oar; moreover, as he joined his men in
many a match at tennis, football and shinty, he was popular with
them, and the eyes of his company seemed to brighten that morning
when he came upon parade, and discipline alone repressed the
inclination to give him something like a hearty cheer, and for nearly
each and all he had some kind word or inquiry--for the officers and
men of a regiment should ever feel as one large family. 'Their hopes
and fears are similar,' says a writer; 'their turns of exile will
come at the same time. Their good and bad quarters will be enjoyed
and endured together, and each one shares, in common with the rest,
the proud privilege of perchance some day furnishing in his own
person that billet to which, the proverb tell us, every bullet is
entitled, or of being "wiped out" by sickness in some pestilential
clime, or of going down to the bottom of the sea in some rotten old
transport. There is something in their order--a distinctiveness, a
speciality about it--which makes them cling together, and stand by
one another all the faster; for, although mixing freely with the
outer world, there is yet an inner one that is entirely their own.'
All troops like Edinburgh, and the national regiments, from their
popularity, more than all. The regimental ball was on the tapis when
Falconer and his friend rejoined, and nothing else was spoken of in
the fortress, or the gay circle outside it; for the corps, as a
national and ancient one, was deservedly popular in the Scottish
metropolis, the gay season of which is during the winter, and ends
with the opening of summer--a metropolis where the people are all
devoted to music and song, and where dancing is a passion with all
classes and ages, so that even a baby has been taken from its cradle,
that the boast might be fulfilled of _four_ generations being on the
floor at once.
'Our regimental hop will be _the_ ball of the season,' said Freeport;
'so I am glad you have come back, Falconer: the committee could never
have done without you. But once it is over, I fear there will be a
general flight from town, and we shall be reduced to the melancholy
promenade of the Scottish Academy.'
'Is it open?'
'Yes, with the usual kit-kats of local nonentities, and the
invariable yearly amount of Bass Rock, Ben Lomond, and the Water of
Leith, without which no exhibition of pictures here would be
complete.'
So Falconer and Fotheringhame were put on the ball committee, and
became forthwith immersed in programmes, invitation lists, and
interviews with Herr Von Humstrumm, the German bandmaster, the
quarter-master and messman.
The castle of Edinburgh may well be deemed the cradle of the
Cameronian Regiment, which received its first 'baptism of fire' amid
the fierce and protracted siege endured there by the loyal and
gallant Duke of Gordon in 1689. The corps, though now Cameronians
but in name, have in that title a glorious inheritance of Scottish
and military history, that springs from Richard Cameron's bloody
grave in lone and wild Airs Moss, where he fell with Bible and sword
in hand, in defence of an 'oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant,' and
fell bravely, with his face to the enemy, in July, 1680. As a ballad
says:
'Oh, weary, weary was the lot of Scotland's true ones then,
A famine-stricken remnant with scarce the guise of men;
They burrowed, few and lonely, in the chill, dark mountain caves,
For those who once had sheltered them were in their martyr-graves!'
When the landing of William of Orange became known in the West of
Scotland, a great body of Cameronians assembled on a holm near the
village of Douglas, in Lanarkshire, and, to the number of some
thousands, joined the revolted troops who besieged King James's
garrison in Edinburgh Castle during the winter of 1688. Out of
these, two regiments, now respectively the 25th, and 26th or
Cameronians, were constituted in the March and April of the following
year. The latter stipulated that their officers should be
exclusively men 'such as, in conscience,' they could submit to, as
staunch Presbyterians, and great care was taken in the selection of
them, while an 'elder' was appointed to every company, so that the
whole battalion should be precisely under the moral discipline of a
parish, and a Bible formed a part of the necessaries in every
private's knapsack. 'It is impossible,' says the Domestic Annalist
of Scotland, 'to read the accounts that are given of this Cameronian
Regiment without sympathising with the earnestness of purpose, the
conscientious scruples and heroic feeling of self-devotion under
which it was established, and seeing in them demonstrations of what
is highest and best in the Scottish character.'
Their first colonel was James, Earl of Angus, heir of the lordly line
of Douglas, who fell at their head in his twenty-second year, at
Steinkirk, but a mullet, or five pointed star, in memory of him, is
still one of the badges of the regiment. Their first
lieutenant-colonel, Clelland, an accomplished soldier and poet, who
had fought under the banner of the Covenant at Drumclog and Bothwell,
fell at their head, defending Dunkeld; and their first chaplain was
Alexander Shiells, a well-known Scottish divine.
They were clad in red, faced with yellow, the royal colours of
Scotland; they wore yellow petticoat-breeches tied below the knee,
with monstrous periwigs, and hats of the Monmouth cock, and small
Geneva bands at the neck. The captains wore gold-coloured
breastplates; those of the lieutenants were of white, and the ensigns
of black steel. A proportion of pikemen and halberdiers were in
every company, and the bayonets were still cross-hilted daggers, till
the socket-bayonet, first adopted by the 25th, or Edinburgh Regiment,
was introduced by its colonel, Maxwell, in Flanders.
The Cameronians fought with valour and distinction in the wars of
William and Anne; James, Earl of Stair, commanded them in the year of
the union, and 1720 saw them at Minorca, under Philip Anstruther of
that Ilk, three of whose family have been at their head. Under
Preston of Valleyfield they fought valiantly in the American War, and
how their major, the unfortunate André, perished is well-known to the
historical reader. John Lord Elphinstone led them on the plains of
Egypt, and Colonel William Maxwell amid the horrors of the retreat to
Corunna. In China, under Colonel Mountain, than whom no better or
braver officer ever wore scarlet, they won the dragon which adorns
their colours, and the scene of their last active service was amid
the arid mountains of Abyssinia. And now, as the Cameronians were
originally mustered on the holm of Douglas, they are, at this day,
linked in brigade with the Lanarkshire Militia.
Though changed in character and impulse, the regiment is 'the
Cameronians' still; but its ranks are no longer manned by the sturdy
Covenanters--'men who prayed bare-headed as the troopers of
Claverhouse aimed at their hearts--prayed a prayer begun on earth and
ended in heaven!'
Local and national regard for the corps caused, we have said, a deep
interest to be taken in the forthcoming regimental ball; but, while
working on the committee therefor, Cecil Falconer could little
foresee the effect that festive occasion was to have on his future
career.
He felt his hand actually tremble as he addressed the invitation
cards, handsomely embossed with the crested sphinx of the regiment,
to Eaglescraig, for the general and his family. He knew that the
former would be certain to appear, but felt doubts if Mary
Montgomerie would be permitted to accept for herself; and great was
his surprise and joy when, next day, acceptances came promptly from
Sir Piers for Mary, Miss Erroll, and Hew Montgomerie, dated, not from
Eaglescraig, but from the general's town residence at the west-end of
the city.
_She_ was to be in Edinburgh for the remainder of the season; balls,
assemblies, drums, and parties at which they would be sure to meet,
were before her and Falconer, and he contemplated the coming weeks as
being pregnant with every enjoyment, with many a charm and source of
pleasure.
And greater would his present joy have been had he known how Mary
treasured the invitation his hand had addressed, with a wistful
yearning for his presence, for the pressure of his hands, and the
sound of his love-words over again. For since his advent at
Eaglescraig, Mary had begun a new existence--a new life of
self-devotion and romance.