CHAPTER XVIII.
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.