It was a scene that I shall long remember. The yellow gleam of the murky lamp that swung from the deck above; the grim and comfortless cabin, with its starboard cannon; the blood-stained pallet, and the grim corpse that lay upon it, stiffening into the cold, white, and marble rigidity of death. No near or dear hand was there to do the last act of kindness, so his eyes were closed by me. On her knees near the pallet was Ernestine, in tears and prayer—young, beautiful, and with many years before her; while the remains of that gallant and noble, but unhappy and remorse-stricken man, were now only a breathless piece of clay.
To draw Ernestine away from this sad scene; to occupy her mind; to gratify my own anxiety and curiosity to learn the story of poor Kœningheim, that crime—the terrible memory of which had haunted him through life, which had clouded the brilliancy of his achievements and the splendour of his rank, shedding a horror and a bitterness over his dying hour—I led her into the great cabin, which the royal kindness of Christian had surrendered to her use; and there—after the pause of an hour or so—we examined together the little manuscript book, and read it by turns; for I had but a short time to tarry, as honour and duty required that I should repair to my colours, and command my company in the redoubt upon the shore.
Written as sudden impulses of thought inspired, and in detached pieces, but written with the faint hope that it might fall into the hands of some kind comrade or pitying friend, the little secret manuscript of Kœningheim (or Halbert Cunninghame) was a very remarkable—and to me interesting—production; but as the story might seem incoherent as he narrated it, I have told it here partly in my own way, and have used the second person, whereas he wrote in the first. The chances that it would never have met a human eye, were as a hundred to one; for it might have been plundered from him on some field of battle by a dead-stripper, or have been buried with him there; and then the secret of his life would have been hidden with him in his bloody and unknown grave.
Much that he relates is part of our Scottish history.
His account of the battle of Glenlivat is among the most succinct and correct I have seen; and, to preserve the unity of the whole, I have placed the secret history of the Count in the Tenth Book of my narrative, instead of an appendix, as I first intended. It shews the terrible circumstances by which he was forced to fly his native country, and seek service and shelter in foreign armies—and, as an outlaw and outcast, to change even his name, lest some of the many Scotsmen who, as soldiers of Fortune, followed the great princes of the German war, might discover him, and remember the dark blot by which, in a fatal moment of recklessness and passion, he had brought ruin and dishonour upon an ancient race and venerated name.
CHAPTER XXII.
COUNT KŒNINGHEIM'S STORY—THE LILY OF CULBLEINE.
Few kirkyards in Scotland are more solemn or pleasing in aspect, or more romantically situated, than that of Logie, which lies four miles from the river Dee, in the parish of Logie-colstaine, in Aberdeenshire. It once surrounded the kirk of St. Woloc, the bishop and confessor; but every vestige of that ancient fane has now disappeared from the little mound of rich holm land, that rises above the small hills and broad muirs of the district, and from the bosom of which flows a miraculous spring called the Poldow, which yet enjoys a high reputation among the peasantry, for the cures it has wrought since the days when the good bishop blessed it, and rested from his pious labours in Strathdon, Balvenie, and Mar.
On the holm of Logie Kirk, the mouldering tombs, the old headstones—green with moss, or half sunk among the long dog-grass and broad-leaved dockens—the hedges that in summer are white with blossoms of the fragrant hawthorn, and one old gnarled yew, are all indicative of its being an ancient burial-ground. Here and there a broad throchstone, resting on four stunted balusters, spotted by grey lichens, and covered with letters half defaced by mischief or by time, yet remain to indicate where some valiant Knight of Cromar or Laird of the Garioch are lying; while the almost flattened mounds, the small round headstones with unpretending and unlettered fronts, taken perhaps from the bed of the adjacent burn, remain to shew where many a shepherd, patient, poor and God-fearing, and many a brave forester of Culbleine, who hacked and hewed, burned and shot as his laird or leader commanded him; harrying the lands of the Gordons to-day, and besieging the towers of the Leslies to-morrow—with many a bien bonnet laird, stern in purpose, unflinching as Brutus, and true to Scotland's kirk and king—yea, true as the steel of his good broadsword—are mouldering, or have mouldered into dust.
Rest them, God!