"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!”