CHAPTER VIII.
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.