Struck senseless by a piece of falling timber, as I have related, I lay in a state of blessed unconsciousness of the horrors and of the carnage around me; but I can still remember the gradual struggling back to life again, and a partial relapse into insensibility—a vibrating of the pendulum, as it were, between life and inanity, while many a strange vision floated around me.
My home came before me, and the pleasant voices of other days were in my ears, mingling with the hum of bees, and the rustling leaves of my native forests. I wept with joy to find my feet again on the purple heather—again on Scottish earth; but that joy was tinged with fear and doubt, lest the vision would pass away; for the distant and the present—the past and the future—were conflicting for place and coherence in my mind. I beheld my own home, and the roof beneath which my mother bore me into this world of sorrow; the morning sun seemed to redden the walls of the old grey tower, that rose above the woods of Scottish pine; its dun smoke was curling in the pure air of the mountains. Then methought I was at sea in a small shallop, and I felt the waters heaving beneath me. The Sutors of Cromartie, whose ivied fronts of rock—the home of the sea-bird—guard the Portus Salutis of the ancients, rose before me, with their bases wreathed in surf; mists came around me; the shore receded, and I felt myself alone on the ocean. Farther and farther the boat went seaward, and the shore diminished to a speck. I was feeble and unable to use hand or voice, and I felt that the moment was approaching when I would perish, and the waters close over me.
Then the current of the tide seemed to turn again; the boat was wafted slowly towards the shore; emotions of joy and pain arose within me; old voices came to my ear, and among them were the soft tones of Ernestine. I strove to speak, but my tongue was feeble and fettered; and I tried vainly to embrace her through the mist that enveloped us.
Her voice became more distinct—the shore was very close then; the visionary boat grounded; I felt her hands upon me, and awoke from a stupor, to find myself in the military hospital of Eckernfiörd, with Ernestine kneeling beside me, pale as death—pale as the dead soldiers near us; but bathing my temples with some cool and aromatic essence.
Now, I have no doubt that the imaginary shore from which I seemed to recede, and again approached, was this world; and that in reality my spirit hovered between time and eternity; for, as Doctor Pennicuik informed me afterwards, the contusion on my head, notwithstanding my bonnet of steel, was a very severe one, being upon the very place where I was struck before.
The dead, half stripped, with eyes unclosed and glazed, and with their coagulated blood forming black pools among the straw on which they lay, were stretched at intervals between the wounded and dying. One of the former was a muscular Highlander from the braes of Lochaber, whose breast was gored by three pike wounds; another, close by me also, was a handsome young chevalier of Montgomerie's French musketeers, whose head had been partially fractured by a spirole shot, and his brains were actually oozing over his eyes.
Father d'Eydel had taken off his masquerading doublet, tucked up his shirt sleeves, and like a thoroughly good, but somewhat long-legged and long-armed Samaritan, was dressing wounds and bruises, tying up cuts and slashes, distributing food, refreshments, clean shirts, and dry straw, with a celerity that made old Pennicuik of that Ilk, our chirurgeon-general, declare him well worth a dozen of doctors.
A bed being found for me in an adjacent house, Ian and Phadrig Mhor took me up between them, as if I had been a child, and conveyed me there. Being anxious to have some conversation with Ernestine, I would not permit them to undress me, but lay on the mattress in my doublet and kilt, with a plaid spread over me; and after kind old Sandy Pennicuik (afterwards chief Medico to the Scottish army which invaded England) had dressed my wound, the dear girl was permitted to visit me for a half hour, during which she gave me a brief sketch of her adventures; but, to avoid agitating me unnecessarily, concealed for the present the mystery which involved the fate of Gabrielle.
The half hour during which we were permitted to be alone, passed like a minute; and yet the excitement of it nearly put me into a fever. In fact, Pennicuik fully expected that it would do so; but believed, as he afterwards said, that if the interview was withheld, a fever from vexation might prove more fatal. We embraced each other repeatedly, with that full and impassioned tenderness which the dangers we had both encountered and escaped, and the separation we had endured, made more endearing to us than ever.
For a time we could do nothing but sigh and utter tender appellations, which would seem very droll even to lovers if transferred to paper; although, moreover, none but lovers could understand them.