'But Tushielaw was a wise man, and hath gone home four months ago to his old tower on the Border side,' resumed Gordon; 'I would that I had some such neuk to hang my sword in when I grow too old to carry it.'
'Tushielaw,' said Dundrennan, 'was a brave and wild spirit. The last May-day we were in Paris, how merrily he, De Toneins, the Chevalier, and I danced with the grisettes round a Maypole cut from the Bois de Boulogne, and planted just outside the Porte St. Antoine. He was severely wounded in that affair we had at Mannheim—'
'Ah—you fought that while I was cooling my heels in the Bastille.'
'We were campaigning among the mountains of the Bergstrasse. It was in the month of December; the country was covered with snow, and our infantry were busy under Hepburn, de la Force, and de Maille Breze in the fortification of Heidelberg and Mannheim. We were now in the land of brutal barons, beer-bloated philosophers, beggarly mightinesses, devils, ghosts, and doppelgangers.
'Now this town of Mannheim, until we girt it by ramparts, was nothing more than a pretty village, guarded by the old castle of Rheinhausen; and our proceedings there, in stone and lime, were so highly resented by the Imperialists, that they never left us an hour in peace. Our boots were never off, and we slept in our frozen tents, with belts and harness on, till we were weary of our lives, and furious at the foe.
'One evening, when the sun was setting behind the mountains, and when the ice lay deep and strong upon the waters of the frozen Rhine and Neckar, a party of Austrian horse, led by young Count Pappenheim, with furred roquelaures over their black iron trappings, came suddenly upon our quarters, and gave us an alerte. On the right flank which, as you know, is always our post, the Marquis of Gordon ordered the trumpets to sound 'to horse;' and after some smart piqueering with our pistols, we fell on with our rapiers, at full gallop, and routed three hundred of Goetz's dragoons, driving them across the valley of the Rhine in full and disastrous flight.
'Brave Tushielaw, being better mounted than any of us, and being used of old to border-pricking by Ettrick wood and Solway sands, led the van of this pursuit, till a few of the Imperialists turned upon him. Nothing daunted, he encountered them all. In three minutes he had slain, or at least unhorsed, four; but a fifth proved a very evil-disposed fellow, who, with peculiar vindictiveness, ran him fairly through the body, and laid him at his horse's heels, bleeding on the snow which whitened all the mountain-side.
'We stripped the warm furs off the dead dragoons, and carefully rolling up Tushielaw, brought him back with us to the camp, when the physician of the Marquis declared him unfit for the king's service; and so, after lingering among us for a month or two, he went home to Tushielaw to breathe once more of the breeze that comes down the heathery glen from those green hills that look on lovely Yarrow—home, where many a Scottish exile, now far away, would gladly be—home to his old tower, so famed in song and story, that stands in the solitude where Rankleburn joins the Ettrick.'
'So we shall see him no more?' said I.
'Not in France, at least: but his story is not yet told,' continued the Viscount. 'Poor Adam had been outlawed, and driven from Scotland mainly by the exertions and influence of William Douglas, Earl of March, who had conceived a hatred for him, and whose eldest daughter Isabel he had ventured to love; for he had frequently met her in Peebles at the play, where the football, the golf, the shooting for the silver arrow, and all our old Scottish manly games, yearly attract the flower of the Borderside.