Thus, for White to marry would have been madness; and as he had only his sword, and that poor inheritance of pride, high spirit, and pedigree, which falls to the lot of most Scottish gentlemen—for he was descended from that Quhyt, to whom King Robert I. gifted the lands of Stayhr, in the county of Ayr—poor Lucy Fleming and he had agreed to wait, in hope that his promotion could not be far distant now, when he had served six years as a subaltern, and the army had every prospect of a long and severe war with France for the conquest of North America. With the minstrel he had said—
"Have I not spoke the live-long day,
And will not Lucy deign to say
One word her friend to bless?
I ask but one—a simple sound,
Within three little letters bound,
Oh let that word be YES."
Lucy answered in the affirmative, and so they parted.
Lucy Fleming, the only daughter of a clergyman of the Scottish Church, lived at her father's secluded manse in Berwickshire, among woods that lie on the margin of the Tweed, in a beautiful and sequestered glen, where tidings of the distant strife came but seldom, save when the Laird of Overmains, and Rowchester, or some other neighbouring proprietor, sent "with his compliments to the minister" an old and well-read copy of the London Gazette, or more probably the Edinburgh Evening Courant, "sair thumbed by ilka coof and bairn;" for newspapers were few and scarce in those days, and the tidings they contained were often vague, marvellous, or unsatisfactory. But Lucy was only eighteen; and she lived in hope, while her lover in a crowded and miserable transport was ploughing down the North Channel, making a vain attempt to remedy sea-sickness by brandy and water, endeavouring to forget his melancholy among comrades who were full of bilious recollections of the last night's hock and champagne, and were seeking to drown their sense of discomfort in rough practical jokes, mad fun, and fresh jorums of eau de vie.
Done in the best style of Sir John de Medina, a famous foreign artist, who in those days resided in Edinburgh, and who now sleeps there in a quiet corner of the old Greyfriars Kirk-yard, a miniature of Lucy in a gold locket, with a braid of her black hair, was White's best solace; and for many an hour he lay in his swinging hammock, apart from all, gazing upon the soft features Medina's hand had traced. This miniature cost our poor subaltern half-a-year's pay; but the prize-money of Trichinopoli had paid for it; and now when rocking far, far at sea, oblivious of the ship's creaking timbers, the groaning of blocks, and jarring sounds of the main-deck guns, as they strained in their lashings; the whistling of the wind through the rigging; and the varied din of laughter, occasional oaths and hoarse orders bellowed from the poop, he abandoned himself, lover-like, to the sad and pleasing employment of poring over that little memento, until the dark hazel eyes seemed to smile, the red lips to unclose, the light of love and joy to spread over all her features, and her parting tears seemed to fall again, hot and bitterly from her cheek upon his; yet the last recollection of his dear little Lucy was her pale, wan face, with eyes red and swollen by weeping, as she stood on the stone stile of the old kirkyard wall, when he bade her farewell, just as the lumbering stage from Berwick bore him away, perhaps—for ever.
In the same spirit did he brood over the thousand trifles that the lover treasures up in memory, and on none more than the love-music of Lucy's voice, which he might never hear again.
Never again!—he shrank from those terrible words, and, trusting through God's grace to escape the chances of the war that were before him, he endeavoured to reckon over the days, the weeks, the months, and it might be the years (oh what a prospect for a newly separated lover!) that must pass, before he should again see the little secluded kirk-hamlet, with its blue-slated manse, half buried among the coppice; the Tweed brawling over its pebbled bed in front, under the white-blossomed hawthorns and green bourtree foliage; the ancient church with its stone spire, its old sepulchral yews, and black oak pulpit, where for more than forty years the father of his Lucy had ministered unto a poor but pious flock.
He was an old and white-haired pastor, whose memory went back to those terrible times, when Scotland drew her sword for an oppressed kirk and broken covenant—
"When the ashes of that covenant were scattered far and near,
And the voice spoke loud in judgment, which in love she would
not hear."
Adam White saw in fancy the dark oak pew, where on Sunday Lucy sat near her father's pulpit, and close to a gothic window, from which the sun, each morning in the year, cast the red glow of a painted cross on her pure and snow-white brow; and so, with his mind full of these things, with a tear in his eye and a prayer of hope on his lip, "rocked on the stormy bosom of the deep," our military pilgrim went to sleep in his cot, as the Lizard light faded away, and word went round from ship to ship that Old England had sunk into the waste of sky and water, far, far astern.