"Dundas," said I; "Claude Dundas."
"Of the 62nd Foot?" His eyes were now starting in his head, so intensely he gazed on me.
"Yes, sir," I replied sharply; "I am not ashamed to acknowledge myself."
"Taunt me not—taunt me not!" he exclaimed, wildly; "God! I am your brother—I am Frank, who was dismissed from the Corsicans so unjustly. This hour—this agony—my wound—O say, in ten years have you quite forgotten my features?"
For a moment I regarded, with wonder, his bronzed and bearded visage, now covered with blood; then, appalled by his words, I endeavoured to trace in his features those of the fair-haired and light-hearted boy who used to carry me on his back to school, and was my champion and protector in many a fisticuff battle and bicker: who was so often flogged by the grim old janitor for taking my faults and blunders on himself, and for whom I wept like a girl through many a long weary night, when, as a stripling ensign, he joined the army under the good Duke of York, and first fired my boyish ardour by being gazetted for his valour at Valenciennes.
For a time, memory carried me back to the pleasant days of our childhood, and my heart, which a moment before had been strung for stirring deeds of carnage and death, relaxed and melted within me: in that terrible hour, in the gory breach of Scylla, surrounded by the dying and dead, with the uproar of the assault yet sounding above and around me, I threw away my sabre, and weeping, as I had done in my boyish days, embraced that brother over whom all believed the grave had closed, and whom I had never expected to meet again on earth.
"Happy as I am to meet you, Frank, I would rather that we had never met, than that I should meet you thus. The French uniform——"
"Is that of as brave an army as the sun shines on!" he replied, enthusiastically. "Insulted pride, necessity, and revenge, forced me into its ranks, where I have served faithfully and honourably; as the high civil and military rank I have attained, together with these badges, received some of them from Napoleon's hand on the Champ de Mars, and some on the battle-fields of Holland and Italy, can amply testify. Our mother," he added, in a broken voice, "tell me, our mother——"
"Lives still; but old and sorrowing."
"And Kranz—my evil genius?"