ISABEL DOUGLAS.
The brave general of the Scots being thus slain by those citizens of
Zaberne, who, as Cardinal de la Valette said, 'had been keeping him
at bay for the last six months by playing at soldiers,' the colonelcy
of his celebrated Scottish regiment devolved upon his cousin, the
Laird of Waughton, and the command of the army upon the Duke of
Saxe-Weimar.
Under the Marquis of Gordon, the cuirassiers of the Garde du Corps
Ecossais continued to serve in Alsace, with the combined army of
French, Scots, Swedes, and Germans in the pay of Louis XIII, during
the year 1637, and in that time, though we fought no general action,
we were severely engaged in many skirmishes and minor affairs. This
army, which occupied Alsace, was ably led by the Duke, who had
suffered many family injuries from the house of Austria, and
fearfully he avenged them in those wars, which devastated the land
with such severity, that the brave old Duke of Lorraine and his fiery
son, deprived of all but their swords and honour, were ere long
reduced to mere private gentlemen, fighting for bread in the Imperial
ranks, while the people of their duchy and of Alsace, were reduced to
such misery, that, in this year 1637, after the capture of Brissac,
the governor was compelled (as the French 'Mercury' records) to place
guards upon the burial-places, to prevent the inhabitants, who were
mad with hunger, tearing the dead from their graves and devouring
them.
Two days after the fall of Zaberne, De Bitche blew up the tower of
Phalsbourg, and crossed the Rhine, retiring into the duchy of Baden.
During my absence, the chevaliers of the Scottish Guard had suffered
severely; their number was considerably below a hundred now, and I
missed many a stalwart form and familiar face from their ranks.
Among those who were absent was Adam Scott, the hardy young Laird of
Tushielaw, who usually rode on my left hand.
One night, several of us sat smoking and drinking in the garden of a
little country-house of which we had taken possession, and there we
were making merry talking of all the beautiful and amiable sinners of
Paris, such as Ninon de l'Enclos, Marion de l'Orme, the Duchess de
Bouillon, Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, and others; of that right royal
glutton, Anne of Austria, who, in her anxiety still to please her
lovers, had discovered the drugs by which Diana of Poictiers
preserved her beauty in extreme old age; a secret written by a
sorcerer on the skin of a dead-born child, and long borne about the
person of Catherine de Medici. I heard, too, that Clara d'Amboise,
my voluptuous, intellectual, and political beauty, still reigned in
the heart of Louis, with other gossip of equal interest to Parisian
absentees.
During a pause in the conversation, I inquired about my comrade
Tushielaw.
'Adam became sick of these fruitless and bootless wars, and went home
to old Scotland,' said Patrick Gordon, gloomily; for, on finding that
a shower of brevets had come from Paris, and that his name was not
among them, our old comrade had of late betaken himself to the
soldier's consolation of grumbling; 'and ere long, Blane, I shall go
home too, for I am now seventy years old at least.'
'Seventy! How, Marechal de Logis, I deemed you but fifty?' said
Dundrennan.
'True; but I have served for twenty years in Denmark, Muscovy, and
Brandenburg, and reckon these as forty; yet I am only a poor Marechal
de Logis of horse, while such boys as those painted fops De Toneins
and Turenne, are camp-masters and knights of all the king's orders.
However, my Lord Dundrennan, we have an auld Scottish proverb, which
saith _a hauf egg is better than a toom doup_, so I must e'en content
me. When we campaigned ten years ago in Westphalia, a place where,
as their own proverb says, you are sure to find bad quarters, worse
rations, and long miles, I often heard the 'half egg' quoted by one
who is now dead and gone--poor Hepburn--than whom no better soldier
ever belted him with steel.'
This compliment to our dead leader was received by all with a silent
bow of assent.
'But Tushielaw was a wise man, and hath gone home four months ago to
his old tower on the Border side,' resumed Gordon; 'I would that I
had some such neuk to hang my sword in when I grow too old to carry
it.'
'Tushielaw,' said Dundrennan, 'was a brave and wild spirit. The last
May-day we were in Paris, how merrily he, De Toneins, the Chevalier,
and I danced with the grisettes round a Maypole cut from the Bois de
Boulogne, and planted just outside the Porte St. Antoine. He was
severely wounded in that affair we had at Mannheim--'
'Ah--you fought that while I was cooling my heels in the Bastille.'
'We were campaigning among the mountains of the Bergstrasse. It was
in the month of December; the country was covered with snow, and our
infantry were busy under Hepburn, de la Force, and de Maille Breze in
the fortification of Heidelberg and Mannheim. We were now in the
land of brutal barons, beer-bloated philosophers, beggarly
mightinesses, devils, ghosts, and doppelgangers.
'Now this town of Mannheim, until we girt it by ramparts, was nothing
more than a pretty village, guarded by the old castle of Rheinhausen;
and our proceedings there, in stone and lime, were so highly resented
by the Imperialists, that they never left us an hour in peace. Our
boots were never off, and we slept in our frozen tents, with belts
and harness on, till we were weary of our lives, and furious at the
foe.
'One evening, when the sun was setting behind the mountains, and when
the ice lay deep and strong upon the waters of the frozen Rhine and
Neckar, a party of Austrian horse, led by young Count Pappenheim,
with furred roquelaures over their black iron trappings, came
suddenly upon our quarters, and gave us an _alerte_. On the right
flank which, as you know, is always our post, the Marquis of Gordon
ordered the trumpets to sound 'to horse;' and after some smart
piqueering with our pistols, we fell on with our rapiers, at full
gallop, and routed three hundred of Goetz's dragoons, driving them
across the valley of the Rhine in full and disastrous flight.
'Brave Tushielaw, being better mounted than any of us, and being used
of old to border-pricking by Ettrick wood and Solway sands, led the
van of this pursuit, till a few of the Imperialists turned upon him.
Nothing daunted, he encountered them all. In three minutes he had
slain, or at least unhorsed, four; but a fifth proved a very
evil-disposed fellow, who, with peculiar vindictiveness, ran him
fairly through the body, and laid him at his horse's heels, bleeding
on the snow which whitened all the mountain-side.
'We stripped the warm furs off the dead dragoons, and carefully
rolling up Tushielaw, brought him back with us to the camp, when the
physician of the Marquis declared him unfit for the king's service;
and so, after lingering among us for a month or two, he went home to
Tushielaw to breathe once more of the breeze that comes down the
heathery glen from those green hills that look on lovely
Yarrow--home, where many a Scottish exile, now far away, would gladly
be--home to his old tower, so famed in song and story, that stands in
the solitude where Rankleburn joins the Ettrick.'
'So we shall see him no more?' said I.
'Not in France, at least: but his story is not yet told,' continued
the Viscount. 'Poor Adam had been outlawed, and driven from Scotland
mainly by the exertions and influence of William Douglas, Earl of
March, who had conceived a hatred for him, and whose eldest daughter
Isabel he had ventured to love; for he had frequently met her in
Peebles at the play, where the football, the golf, the shooting for
the silver arrow, and all our old Scottish manly games, yearly
attract the flower of the Borderside.
'They had exchanged rings and locks of hair, and broken a piece of
money between them, in the old superstitious fashion at
Allhallowmass; but the ring given to Isabel was ominously inscribed,--
'_The eye finds;
The heart chooseth;
The hand binds;
But death looseth._'
And these foreboding words were ever before her, on her lips and in
her heart.
'Isabel Douglas had the black, sparkling eyes and dark eyebrows of
her race; but her skin was fair, and her tresses were like
golden-coloured silk.'
'_Were_, say you?'
'Listen. She was more than lovely, for I, who have seen her, know
all this: and know that she possessed the _thirty_ points of feminine
beauty which Brantome declares we shall never meet with in one woman.
But though she had the dark Douglas' eyes and their black brows, she
was feeble, gentle, and timid in spirit: so her father, knowing the
daring and pride of Tushielaw, shut her up in his strong castle of
Neidpath. There she was beyond the reach of the moss-trooping
Scotts, whose hero, Adam, became involved in some vile border brawl
or plot against the government; and with the servile Lords of Council
at Edinburgh, when a personage styling himself William Earl of March,
Lord Douglas of Neidpath, Lyne, and Manorheid, opposed himself to
simple Adam Scott, of Tushielaw, proscription and banishment were
sure to follow; so our Border chieftain sailed to France, and took
service in our Scottish Guard.
'In his absence I need scarcely relate to you how Isabel Douglas,
still shut up in the gloomy tower of Neidpath, pined; how the
brilliance of her beauty faded; how her eyes lost their lustre, and
her lips their enchanting bloom; and how she repeated, ever and anon,
the ominous legend inscribed on her betrothal ring. No amusement
roused her from the apathy and consumption into which she seemed to
be fast hurrying. My lord of March, when he beheld Isabel, on his
return from a year's absence in London, was pleased to be mightily
shocked and repentant. He removed her to his livelier mansion in the
busy little burgh of Peebles, and endeavoured, but in vain, to lead
her from her own thoughts and the secret sorrow that preyed upon her;
till, finding that every means failed, he at last consented to bring
home Tushielaw, and wrote to Acheson, the Secretary of State at
Edinburgh, who, by one dash of his pen, restored the estates of
Scott, but failed to cure the worm that preyed upon the heart of the
poor girl whom that year of sorrow in Neidpath Peel had destroyed.
'"He will never return to me, father," said she, and showed the Earl
the legend on her ring, while her tears fell fast, for she had long
been confined to bed, and was so weak and feeble that the heart of
the old Earl was wrung on beholding the mischief he had wrought. At
last there came tidings that Tushielaw had sailed from France, that
he had landed in Scotland, and the day on which he was to pass
through Peebles on his way to the forest was known.
'On that day there was an unusual bustle and commotion visible in and
about the old castellated mansion of the Earl of March, which is
sufficiently remarkable in the town by its curious turret that
overhangs the street.
'At an early hour of the morning, poor Lady Isabel caused herself to
be dressed and conveyed into a stone balcony, that projected in front
of the house; and there, on a couch, she sat for hours, with her wan
face, her black and now ghastly eyes fixed upon the vista of the
sunlit thoroughfare, that she might be the first to see her lover as
he rode up. At that time the town was lonely and dull; few noises
woke the echoes of its streets; but so much had disease, anxiety, and
love sharpened and rendered unnaturally acute the senses of this
feeble girl, that she was able to detect the steps of her lover's
horse at an incredible distance, and long before any such sound
reached the ears of the anxious Earl, or her two sisters who attended
her.
'A sudden flush crossed her cheek, her dark eyes sparkled with
somewhat of their former beauty, and clasping the hands of her
youngest sister, she exclaimed--
'"He comes, Jeanie! I hear his horse; but, oh, it is far off yet!"
Then, closing her eyes, she almost swooned. Yet the Earl and his
pale daughters heard nothing, for at that moment Tushielaw was fully
three miles distant, galloping along the highway that wound by hill
and wood, and feeling his heart expand with anxiety and joy as he saw
fair Teviotdale, with all its pastoral beauties, deepening in the
summer sun.
'After landing at Eskmouth from a ship of the States-General,
Tushielaw, still suffering from his wound received at Mannheim,
became suddenly oppressed by one of those gloomy presentiments of
approaching evil, which at times come unbidden to the Scottish mind,
and so mysteriously affect it. He endeavoured to shake off this
solemn oppression, but in vain. An uncontrollable conviction of the
necessity of reaching home without delay made him ride fast and
furiously; and thus, without presenting himself at the capital to
thank the servile placeman who had recalled him, he crossed the
Lammermuirs and rode straight towards Peebles, which he entered about
sunset.
'A half-stifled exclamation of joy burst from Isabel Douglas when his
tall figure, with cloak and plume, was seen to ride up the street at
a rapid pace towards her father's house. Full of his own thoughts,
and haunted by that presentiment of coming sorrow--all unaware that
Isabel was in the town, or, if he saw her, all unprepared for the sad
change in her appearance, the war-worn cavalier rode rapidly past,
without seeming once to lift his eye to the stone balcony, where the
poor trembling girl cast her hollow eyes and thin, wan hands towards
him in an agony of joy that could never find utterance in words.
'Poor Isabel! Alas! though his soul was full of her image, Adam
Scott beheld her not, and spurred out of sight without according a
word, a glance, a smile of recognition! And this was the hour, the
time, the meeting to which she had so long looked forward during the
age of separation that had passed!
'Isabel gazed after his retiring figure in silence and speechless
sorrow; and then, crushed by the sudden shock of his apparent
heedlessness, she exclaimed, that in France he had forgotten her, and
murmuring the legend on her ring, she threw up her white hands wildly
towards heaven--there was a gush of blood from her lips, and she
expired in the arms of the Earl and her sisters before they could
bear her in from the balcony.
'She was interred among her ancestors in the burial vault of the
ducal house of Queensberry, and a plate on her coffin--a plate to
which her sorrowing lover pressed his lips again and again--bore the
simple legend--
'The eye finds;
The heart chooseth;
The hand binds;
But death looseth!' *
and since then,' concluded Dundrennan, 'we have heard no more of our
comrade, who, though at home in beautiful Ettrick forest, would, I
doubt not, willingly be with us to-night; for the tower of Tushielaw,
with the brawl of Rankleburn, and the sough of the old oaks that
shade it, must be but a lonely place wherein to brood over the loss
of a heart we have loved.'
* A copper plate, bearing this inscription, was recently found in a
grave in Inveresk churchyard.