The Light of Scarthey: A Romance. Castle Egerton

parts!

      The mechanical instrument directed by the ingenious mind of Cécile de Savenaye; the discreet minister who, for all his young years, secured the help of some important political sympathiser one day, scoured the country for arms and clothing, powder and assignats another; who treated with smuggling captains and chartered vessels that were to run the gauntlet on the Norman and Breton coast, and supply the means of war to struggling and undaunted loyalists. All this relentless work, little suited, on the whole, to an Englishman, and in a cause the rights of which he himself had, up to then, refused to admit, was then repaid a hundredfold by a look of gratitude, of pleasure even, a few sweet moments of his lady's company, before being sent hence again upon some fresh enterprise.

      Ah, how he loved her! He, the youth on the threshold of manhood, who had never known passion before, how he loved this young widowed mother who used him as a man to deal for her with men, yet so loftily treated him as a boy when she dealt with him herself. And if he loved her in the earlier period of his thraldom, when scarce would he see her one hour in the twenty-four, to what all-encompassing fervour did the bootless passion rise when, the day of departure having dawned and sunk, he found himself on board the privateer, sailing away with her towards unknown warlike ventures, her knight to protect her, her servant to obey!

      On all these things mused the recluse of Scarthey, sinking deeper and deeper into the past: the spell of haunting recollection closing on him as he sat by his hearthside, whilst the increasing fury of the gale toiled and troubled outside fighting the impassable walls of his tower.

      Could it have been possible that she – the only woman that had ever existed for him, the love for whom had so distorted his mind from its natural sympathies, had killed in him the spring of youth and the savour of life – never really learnt to love him in return till the last?

      And yet there was a woman's soul in that delicious woman's body – it showed itself at least once, though until that supreme moment of union and parting, it seemed as if a man's mind alone governed it, becoming sterner, more unbendable, as hardships and difficulties multiplied.

      In the melancholy phantasm passing before his mind's eye, of a period of unprecedented bloodshed and savagery, when on the one side Chouans, Vendéens, and such guerillas of which Madame de Savenaye was the moving spirit, and on the other the colonnes infernales of the revolutionary leaders, vied with each other in ferocity and cunning, she stood ever foremost, ever the central point of thought, with a vividness that almost a score of years had failed to dim.

      When the mood was upon him, he could unfold the roll of that story buried now in the lonely graves of the many, or in the fickle memories of the few, but upon his soul printed in letters of fire and blood – to endure for ever.

      Round this goddess of his young and only love clustered the sole impressions of the outer world that had ever stirred his heart: the grandeur of the ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze, and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever of thirst, of approaching sleep in exhaustion – and, mixed with these, the acrid emotions of fight and carnage, anguish of suspense, savage exultation of victory – all the doings of a life which he, bred to intellectual pleasures and high moral ideas, would have deemed a nightmare, but which, lived as it was in the atmosphere of his longing and devotion, yet held for him a strange and pungent joy: a cup of cruel memories, yet one to be lingered over luxuriously till the savour of each cherished drop of bitterness be gathered to the uttermost.

      Now, in the brightness of the embers, between the fitful flames of crumbling wood, spreads before his eyes the dreary strand near Quiberon, immense in the gathering darkness of a boisterous evening. Well hidden under the stone table of a Druidical men-hir glows a small camp-fire sedulously kept alive by René for the service of The Lady. She, wrapped up in a coarse peasant-cloak, pensively gazes into the cheerless smoke and holds her worn and muddy boots to the smouldering wood in the vain hope of warmth.

      And Adrian stands silently behind her, brooding on many things – on the vicissitudes of that desultory war which has left them not a roof whereunder they can lay their heads, during which the little English contingent has melted from them one by one; on the critical action of the morrow when the republican columns, now hastening to oppose the landing of the great royalist expedition to Quiberon (that supreme effort upon which all their hopes centre) must be surprised and cut off at whatever cost; on the mighty doings to follow, which are to complete the result of the recent sea fight off Ushant and crown their devoted toil with victory at last…

      And through his thoughts he watches the pretty foot, in its hideous disguise of patched, worn, ill-fitting leather, and he sees it as on the first day of their meeting, in its gleaming slipper and dainty silken stocking.

      Now and then an owl-cry, repeated from point to point, tells of unremitting guard, but for which, in the vast silence, none could suspect that a thousand men and more are lying stretched upon the plain all around them, fireless, well-nigh without food, yet patiently waiting for the morrow when their chiefs shall lead them to death; nor that, in a closer circle, within call, are some fifty gars, remnant of the indomitable "Savenaye band," and tacitly sworn bodyguard to The Lady who came back from ease and safety over seas to share their peril.

      No sound besides, but the wind as it whistles and moans over the heath – and the two are together in the mist which comes closing in upon them as if to shroud them from all the rest, for even René has crept away, to sleep perhaps.

      She turns at last towards him, her small face in the dying light of this sullen evening, how wan and weather-beaten!

      "Pensive, as usual, cousin?" she says in English, and extends her hand, browned and scratched, that was once so exquisite, and she smiles, the smile of a dauntless soul from a weary body.

      Poor little hands, poor little feet, so cold, so battered, so ill-used! He, who would have warmed them in his bosom, given his heart for them to tread upon, breaks down now, for the first time; and falling on his knees covers the cold fingers with kisses, and then lays his lips against those pitiful torn boots.

      But she spurns him from her – even from her feet:

      "Shame on you!" she says angrily; and adds, more gently, yet with some contempt: "Enfant, va!– is this the time for such follies?"

      And, suddenly recalled to honour and grim actuality, he realises with dismay his breach of trust – he, who in their earlier days in London had called out that sprightly little émigré merely for the vulgar flippancy (aimed in compliment, too, at the grave aide-de-camp), "that the fate of the late Count weighed somewhat lightly upon Madame de Savenaye;" he, who had struck that too literary countryman of his own across the face – ay, and shot him in the shoulder, all in the secret early dawn of the day they left England – for daring to remark within his hearing: "By George, the handsome Frenchwoman and her cousin may be a little less than kin, but they are a little more than kind."

      But yet, as the rage of love contending in his heart with self-reproach, he rises to his feet in shame, she gives him her hand once more, and in a different voice:

      "Courage, cousin," says she, "perhaps some day we may both have our reward. But will not my knight continue to fight for my bidding, even without hope of such?"

      Pondering on this enigmatic sentence he leaves her to her rest.

      When next he finds himself by her side the anticipated action has begun; and it is to be the last day that those beautiful burning eyes shall see the glory of the rising sun.

      The Chouans are fighting like demons, extended in long skirmishing lines, picking out the cluster of gunners, making right deadly use of their English powder; imperceptibly but unflinchingly closing their scattered groups until the signal comes and with ringing cries: "Notre Dame d'Auray!" and "Vive le roi!" they charge, undismayed by odds, the serried ranks of the Republicans.

      She, from the top of the druidical stone, watches