My brave comrades! who among them were now alive, and who were slain? In fancy they all came before me, that brilliant line of horsemen—old Patrick Gordon with gray locks, and eagle eye; the fiery Sir Quentin Home; Viscount Dundrennan, so handsome and gay; Tushielaw, and Raynold Cheyne of Dundargle; the brilliant Chevalier Livingstone d'Angoulême, and other Scottish hearts, all charging holster to holster, and bridle to bridle!
These achievements made my breast swell with agony, and pant with impatience.
The Marquis d'Aytona was so repeatedly baffled by Hepburn's flying column, that the Emperor of Germany, reflecting on his lack of skill, put his finger on a part of the map, saying,
'You ought to have anticipated him, by crossing the Rhine there.'
'True,' replied the Marquis; 'but your imperial finger is not a pontoon bridge, and Hepburn, with all his devilish Scots, are not here to cut it off.'
When the last tidings left the army of Lorraine, (as I learned from the envelope of my butter for breakfast,) Hepburn with his regiment of Scots, eight thousand strong, the Cardinal Duke de Lavalette, and Bernard Duke of Saxe Weimar, were besieging the strong town of Elsace-Zaberne, which was expected daily to capitulate; and in the assault of which Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Hanna of Kirkdale, and other gallant Scots, had left their bodies in the breach. I learned, too, how the government of Louis XIII. watched with growing interest the expected war between England and Scotland, for France yet held—or pretended to hold—to her ancient alliance with the latter. As a proof of this, in 1626, during the quarrel which brought Marshal Bassompierre to England, when the British merchant ships were suddenly seized in all the ports of France, those of Scotland, on hoisting St. Andrew's Cross above the Union flag, were at once released by the French admirals, and stood out to sea.
These scraps of the French Mercury, which told of politics, war, and battle, and of all the busy life that was still revolving round my silent and solitary prison, were to me a far greater source of interest than the musty miracles of Monseigneur St. Fiacre.
Poor Martin Omelette had now become rather friendly to me, and this served to lighten the tedium of my confinement, but when I hinted at a bribe, and strove to tempt him about winking at an escape, he was wont to smile, shrug his shoulders, and say,
'You are brave, M. Blane; but wealth and bravery, like a long sword and a long purse, seldom go together. You cannot offer me aught that would compensate for the loss of my head, by the executioner's sword, in the Place de la Grève—no—no!'
So months wore slowly, heavily, and miserably away. They seemed a long, long unmarked lapse of time, for nothing broke the monotony to me. I had ceased to reckon days and weeks; but I knew that the spring of 1635 was passing into summer, and I began to fear my poor heart would burst in its throbbings after freedom and my home!