‘Ah! what will Madame say when she hears that it is to ask a great favour of her.’
‘Madame may reckon on me for whatever she would command.’
‘If you can grant it—oh! Madame,’ cried the Scottish Countess, beginning to drop her formality in her eagerness, ‘we shall be for ever beholden to you, and you will make a wounded heart to sing, besides perhaps saving a noble young spirit.’
‘Madame makes me impatient to hear what she would have of me,’ said the French Countess, becoming a little on her guard, as the wife of a diplomatist, recollecting, too, that peace with George I. might mean war with the Jacobites.
‘I know not whether a young kinsman of my Lord’s has ever been presented to Madame. His name is Arthur Maxwell Hope; but we call him usually by his Christian name.’
‘A tall, dark, handsome youth, almost like a Spaniard, or a picture by Vandyke? It seems to me that I have seen him with M. le Comte.’ (Madame de Bourke could not venture on such a word as Nithsdale.)
‘Madame is right. The mother of the boy is a Maxwell, a cousin not far removed from my Lord, but he could not hinder her from being given in marriage as second wife to Sir David Hope, already an old man. He was good to her, but when he died, the sons by the first wife were harsh and unkind to her and to her son, of whom they had always been jealous. The eldest was a creature of my Lord Stair, and altogether a Whig; indeed, he now holds an office at the Court of the Elector of Hanover, and has been created one of his peers. (The scorn with which the gentle Winifred uttered those words was worth seeing, and the other noble lady gave a little derisive laugh.) ‘These half-brothers declared that Lady Hope was nurturing the young Arthur in Toryism and disaffection, and they made it a plea for separating him from her, and sending him to an old minister, who kept a school, and who was very severe and even cruel to the poor boy. But I am wearying Madame.’
‘Oh no, I listen with the deepest interest.’
‘Finally, when the King was expected in Scotland, and men’s minds were full of anger and bitterness, as well as hope and spirit, the boy—he was then only fourteen years of age—boasted of his grandfather’s having fought at Killiecrankie, and used language which the tutor pronounced treasonable. He was punished and confined to his room; but in the night he made his escape and joined the royal army. My husband was grieved to see him, told him he had no right to political opinions, and tried to send him home in time to make his peace before all was lost. Alas! no. The little fellow did, indeed, pass out safely from Preston, but only to join my Lord Mar. He was among the gentlemen who embarked at Banff; and when my Lord, by Heaven’s mercy, had escaped from the Tower of London, and we arrived at Paris, almost the first person we saw was little Arthur, whom we thought to have been safe at home. We have kept him with us, and I contrived to let his mother know that he is living, for she had mourned him as among the slain.’
‘Poor mother.’