Five years! .....
"Emmy must now be nearly nine-and-twenty!" thought Louis; "in a month from this time I shall see her—shall hear her voice—shall be beside her again, assuring her that I am the same Louis Charters of other days."
But month after month passed away, and six elapsed after the sailing of the transport from New York had been duly notified by the London and the Edinburgh Gazettes, and yet no tidings reached Britain of the missing regiment of Montgomery.
During all these five long years—those sixty months—those one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days, every one of which had been counted by poor Louis—how fared it with the beautiful Emmy Stuart, who was still the belle of the fair city?
So far as the defective newspapers of those days, when Edinburgh had only three (and those of London seldom came north), supplied intelligence, she had traced the operations of Montgomery's Highlanders in the Canadas, the States, on the Lakes, and in the West Indies, in the despatches of Brigadier Forbes, of Colonel Bouquet, Lord Rollo, and others; she had frequently seen the name of her lover mentioned, as having distinguished himself, and twice as having been left wounded on the field. I need not dwell on her days and nights of sickening sorrow and suspense, which no friendship could alleviate.
Save once, no letter from Louis had ever reached her; yet poor Louis had written many: from among frozen camps and bloody fields—from wet bivouacs, and places such as Emmy's gentle mind could never conceive—had he written to her the outpourings of his heart, believing that in due time Emmy would be gazing fondly on the words his hand had traced, and endeavouring to conjure up the tones in which he would have said all that distance and separation compelled him to commit to paper; but, by a strange fatality, these letters never reached her; yet Emmy, the belle, the coquette, remained true, for she knew the chances of war; and that, until the regiment returned home and he proved false, she could not desert her lover.
But Willy Douglas of the Black Watch, who had been all this time comfortably recruiting about Perth and Dunkeld (thanks to his uncle, the Duke of Douglas), was wont to remind her that the 40th Regiment had been more than forty years abroad,* and the battalion of Montgomery might be quite as long away.
* Fact in 1764.
After three years had passed without letters arriving, Emmy still mourned and loved Louis more than ever; while well-meaning friends, who never thought of consulting the army list, assured her that he was killed; but it availed them nought.
Then five years elapsed, and in all that time there came no letter; yet, when taunted that Louis had forgotten her, she replied as Cleopatra did to Alexis when he advised her to deem her lover cruel, inconstant, and ungrateful:—