In an hour be rejoined us, looking rather grave and a little ashamed of himself and of his prank.
'How about our little bet?' asked Livingstone.
'You have lost, Chevalier,' said Dundrennan; 'so order dinner for us all at the hotel.'
He had fully succeeded; but the nuns proved to be all old women; there was not a novice in the house, and the abbess was in her sixty-seventh year. She was a lady of noble and magnificent presence, and on discovering her visitor to be a gentleman of the Scottish Guard, announced herself to be Mary Stuart—that mysterious nun who was then so well known in France as the Mother of Resurrection, and who was openly affirmed to be the daughter of the wicked Earl of Bothwell, and the unhappy Mary Queen of Scots—born in Lochleven, and kidnapped to France—a descent also claimed by an eminent divine in Scotland.
She had received the Viscount kindly, gracefully, and told him who she was supposed to be; and he returned to us, in a more sober mood than we had seen him in for many a day.
During our halt, the convent parlour was thronged by the gentlemen of the Scottish forces; and our illustrious Camp-Marechal Hepburn presented to the abbess a valuable gold medal, which, in the German wars, he had torn from the neck of the terrible Count Pappenheim, the hero of a hundred wounds.
Weary with marching in all our harness, half choked by the spring dust, that rolled along the roads of Upper Champagne, under the feet of so many thousand infantry, and the wheels of many powder-waggons, baggage-wains, and field-pieces, just as the sun was setting, we gladly halted one evening, in the little town of La Fere Champenoise, and resigned our horses to our grooms, servants, or pages.
As we rambled along the streets in search of refreshment, the welcome voice of a tapster, shouting to passengers in the old fashion, drew us towards a tavern or hostelry.
'Messieurs,' he continued to cry, 'we have here good wine and good oats! will you have a chopin for yourself and a measure for your charger? enter, messieurs, enter!'
This tavern was styled the Count of Champagne, from its sign-board, which bore an imaginary head of that personage in a barbed helmet of the middle ages; and from the circumstance of the quaint old house having been a residence of Theobauld V., last Count of Champagne and Brie; consequently our tavern was quite historical, and at least four hundred years old.