One of the Six Hundred: A Novel
I have said I was but four-and-twenty then. When I had last traversed
that line of rail, it was in the sweet season of summer, when the
heather was purple on the Lammermuirs; and a sea of golden grain clothed
all the lovely valley of the Tyne. I was proceeding to join my
regiment, a raw, heedless, and impulsive boy, with bright hope and vague
ambition in his heart, and with a poor mother's tears yet wet upon his
cheek.
I had been six years with the lancers, and four of these were spent in
India. While there, my dear mother died; and the memory of the last
time when I saw her kind and affectionate face, and heard her broken
voice, as she prayed God to bless my departing steps, came vividly,
powerfully, and painfully before me.
It was on the morning when I was to leave home and her to join the
corps. Overnight, with all a boy's vanity and glowing satisfaction, I
had contemplated my gay lancer trappings, had buckled on my sword,
placed the gold cartouche-belt and glittering epaulettes on my
shoulders.
At that moment I would not have exchanged my cornetcy for the kingdom of
Scotland. These alluring trappings were the last things I thought of
and looked on ere my eyes were closed by slumber, and the grey dawn of
the next eventful day saw them still lying unpacked on the floor, when
my poor mother, pale, anxious, unslept, and with her sad eyes full of
tears, and her heart wrung with sorrow, stole softly into my room, to
look for the last time upon her sleeping boy, and her mournful and
earnest face was the first sight that met my waking eyes, when roused by
a tear that dropped upon my cheek.
I started up, and all the consciousness of the great separation that was
to ensue--the terrible wrench of heart from heart that was to
come--burst upon me. Then sword and epaulettes, cap and plume, and the
lancers, were forgotten; and throwing my arms around her neck, as I had
done in the days of childish grief, I wept like the boy I was, rather
than the man I had imagined myself to be.
I was going home now; but I should see that beloved face no more, and
her voice was hushed for ever.
In that home were others, who were kind and gentle, and who loved me
well, awaiting my arrival, and to welcome me. And there was my cousin
Cora Calderwood--she was unmarried still.
Cora I was about to see again. It seemed long, long since we had last
met, though we had frequently corresponded, for my uncle had a horror of
letter-writing; and certain it was that she had inspired the first
emotion of love in my schoolboy heart, and during my sojourn in India,
and amid the whirl and gaiety of barrack-life at Bath, at Maidstone, at
Canterbury and elsewhere, her image had lingered in my mind, more as a
pleasing memory connected with ideas of Scotland and my home, rather
than with those of a passionate or enduring attachment.
Indeed, I had just been on the point of forming that elsewhere; but now,
having no immediate attraction beside me, I began to wonder whether Cora
had grown up a beauty; how tall she was, whether she was engaged, and so
forth; whether she still remembered with pleasure the young playmate who
had left her sorely dissolved in tears, half lover and wholly friend.
As we progressed northward, and crossed the Firth of Forth, the snow
almost entirely disappeared, save on the lofty summits of the Ochil
mountains, whose slopes looked green and pleasant in the meridian sun;
and my friend Studhome, had he been with me, might have been much
surprised in finding the atmosphere warmer north of Stirling Bridge than
we found it at Maidstone--so variable is our climate.
We changed carriages at Stirling, where I was to imbibe some hot coffee,
while Pitblado looked after my baggage, and swore in no measured terms
at the slowness of an old, cynical, and hard-visaged porter, on whose
brass badge was engraved a wolf--the badge of Stirling.
"Now then, look alive, you old duffer!" I heard Willie shouting.
"Ou, aye!" replied the other slowly, with a grin on his weather-beaten
and saturnine face; "ye think yoursel' a braw chiel in your mustaches
and laced jacket--there was a time when I thocht mysel' one too."
"What do you mean?" asked Pitblado, whose dragoon air even his livery
failed to conceal.
"Mean!" retorted the other; "why, I mean that at the point o' the
bayonet I helped to carry Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo to boot; and now,
for sax baubees, I'm thankfu' to carry your bag. Sae muckle for
sodgerin'!"
"It is not very encouraging, certainly," said my man, with a smile.
"Ten years' service, two wounds, and a deferred pension of threepence
per diem," growled the other, as he threw my traps, with an oath, on the
roof of the carriage.
"What regiment, my friend?" I inquired.
"The old Scots brigade, second battalion, sir," he replied, with a
salute, as I slipped a trifle into his hand.
"The weather seems open and fine here."
"Aye," said he, with another saturnine grin; "but a green yule maketh a
fat kirkyard."
In five minutes more we were _en route_, sweeping along the little
lonely branch line, that through grassy glens, where the half-frozen
runnels oozed or gurgled among withered reeds and bracken bushes, led us
into the heart of Fife--"the kingdom," as the Scots call it; not that it
ever was so in any time of antiquity, but because the peninsular county
contains within its compact and industrious self every means and
requisite for the support of its inhabitants, independent of the produce
of the whole external world--at least, such is their boast.
I was drawing nearer and nearer home; and now my heart beat high and
happily. Every local feature and casual sound, the little thatched
cottages, with rusty, antique risps on their doors,[*] and the clatter
of the wooden looms within, were familiar to me. We swept past the
quaint town, and the tall, gaunt castle of Clackmannan, where its aged
chatelaine--the last of the old Bruce line--_knighted_ Robert Burns,
with the sword of the victor of Bannockburn, saying, dryly, that she
"had a better right to do it than _some people_," and ere long I saw the
spires that overshadow the graves of Robert I. and many a Scottish
monarch, as we glided past Dunfermline, old and grey, with its glorious
ruined palace, where Malcolm drank the blood-red wine, and where Charles
I. was born, and its steep, quaint streets covering the brow of a
sloping ridge that ends abruptly in the wooded glen of Pittencrief.
[*] The old Scottish tirling-pin--to be found now nowhere save in
Fife--in lieu of bells and knockers.
My delight was fully shared in by Willie Pitblado, my servant, the son
of old Simon, my uncle's keeper. He was a lancer in my troop, for whom
I had procured a month's furlough; thus the hedgerows where he had
bird-nested, the fields where he had sung and whistled at the plough,
the farm-gates on which he had swung for hours--a truant boy from
school--the woods of Pitrearie and Pittencrief, the abbey's old grey
walls, and the square tower that covers Bruce's grave, were all hailed
by Willie as old friends; and strange to say, his Doric Scotch came back
to his tongue with the air he breathed, though it had been nearly
well-nigh quizzed out of him by our lancers, nearly all of whom were
English.
He was a smart, handsome, and soldier-like fellow, who bade fair to be
"the rage" among the servant-girls at the old house, the home-farm, and
the adjacent village, and a source of vexation to their hobnailed
country admirers.
A few miles beyond the old city I quitted the train, and leaving him to
follow with my baggage in a dog-cart, I struck across the fields by a
near path that I remembered well, and which I knew would bring me
straight to Calderwood Glen, the residence of my uncle, Sir Nigel--save
Cora, almost the last relation I had now on earth.
*CHAPTER II.*
Pure as the silver wreath of snow
That lies on yonder wintry hill,
Are all the thoughts that peaceful flow,
And with pure joy my bosom fill.
Soft as the sweet spring's morning breath,
Or summer's zephyr, forth they roam;
Until my bosom grows more kind,
And dreams of thee and all at home.
The winter day was cold and clear, but without frost, save on the
mountain tops, where the snow was lying. Though vegetation should have
been dormant, the swelling uplands, the pastoral hills and braes of
Fife, looked green and fertile; and there was a premature budding of
young shoots, which the bitter frost of to-morrow might totally destroy.
Fires glowed redly through the little square windows of the wayside
cottages, and from their massive stone chimneys the smoke ascended into
the thin air in heavy volumes, that told of warmth, of comfort, and
industry within. Ere long I could see the woods, all bare and leafless,
that covered the slopes of Calderwood Glen, and the vanes of the old
house shining in the light of the setting sun, which streamed along the
green slope of the western Lomond.
I passed unnoticed through the secluded village which stood, I knew,
upon the verge of my good uncle's property, and where the old signboards
of the smithy, the bakery, and alehouse were familiar to me. The clock
of the old Gothic kirk struck the hour of three, slowly and
deliberately, as only such clocks do in the country.
Many years ago, in boyhood, I remembered the familiar voice of that
village monitor. What changes had taken place since then, in myself and
others, and even in the scene around me! How many, whose daily routine,
and whose labours--the heritage of toil--were timed by its bell and
dial, were now in other lands, or sleeping in their humble graves
beneath the shadow of the spire, and yet the old moss-grown clock ticked
on!
Since then I had grown to manhood, had seen many of the dearest of my
kindred die. Since then I had become a soldier, and had served in
India, and on the staff in the late Burmese war. At the bombardment of
Rangoon, I received a wound in the night attack made by the enemy on our
camp at the heights of Prome.
Thousands of stirring scenes and strange faces had flitted before me. I
had traversed twice the great Atlantic and Indian oceans, and had twice
passed the Cape, on the first occasion looking with anxious eyes and
envious heart at every homeward-bound sail; and now all these events
seemed as a long dream, and as if it were but yesterday when last I
heard the voice of the old village clock.
In that timeworn fane, Row, the Covenanter, had preached, and the great
archbishop, too--Sharpe, the recreant, or the martyr (which you will),
who died on Magus Muir; and, that the marvellous may not be wanting,
there is a legend which tells us that, in the year before the
Covenanters invaded England, and stormed Newcastle, thereby seriously
injuring the London coal market, there used to issue from the empty loft
where, in old Catholic times, the organ stood, the sound of such an
instrument in full play, together with the voices of the choristers
singing a grand old Gregorian chant. These sounds were only heard in
the night, or at other times when Calderwood kirk was empty, for the
moment any one entered they ceased, and all became still--still as the
dead Calderwoods of the Glen and of Piteadie, stretched in effigy, each
upon his pedestal of stone, in St. Margaret's aisle; but this marvel was
universally believed to portend the ultimate return of prelacy.
So rapidly and totally does the speed of the railway annihilate alike
the extent of time and space, that it seemed difficult to embody the
fact that, but four-and-twenty hours ago, I had been in my quarters at
Maidstone barracks, or amid the splendour of a fashionable hotel in
London; and yet it was so.