CHAPTER VIII.
AN OLD FRIEND ARRIVES.
According to his invitation, I dined with the brave Duc de Broglie, in the hall of the old Schloss, the walls and roof of which still bore all the frescoes, heraldic devices and ornaments with which Count Josias had decorated it many years before. Bourgneuf declined to be present, and I cannot say that I regretted his absence; but we had M. Monjoy and some officers of the Regiments of Clermont and Bretagne, all pleasant, gay and affable men save the engineer, who was somewhat reserved, even sad in manner.
The Duke talked freely of the folly and loss of life occasioned by our unmeaning expeditions to the coast of France, and dilated particularly on the third (a service which the Greys escaped, by receiving the route for Germany), which ended in the unfortunate battle of St. Cas, where General Durie, Sir John Armitage, and one thousand of our finest troops, particularly of the 1st Foot Guards, were slaughtered on the beach, while four hundred were drowned in their disastrous flight.
Minden, however, he and those present tacitly ignored; the defeat there was too recent to be a pleasant French souvenir.
He spoke frequently and always with praise of my regiment, the Ecossais Gris, which he knew well, having often encountered them on service. He knew Colonel Preston too, and laughed at his quaint old buff coat. He had met the corps at Dettingen, and acknowledged that it was from his hand that one of the Greys wrenched away the famous White Standard—the Cornette Blanche—of the Gendarmes du Roi, and he perfectly remembered the retort, recorded in our first volume as having been made by Colonel Preston to Louis Philippe Duc d'Orleans, at the review of the Scots Greys in Hyde Park.
"A greater dishonour than the loss of that banner was never suffered by the Household Cavalry of France," continued the Duc de Broglie; "the Cornette Blanche is a royal standard, which was substituted for the ancient Pennon Royal, and was never unfurled save when the King in person led the army; those who served immediately under it were the princes, nobles, and maréchals of France, with old field-officers who received orders from his Majesty direct; so, messieurs, you may imagine what I felt on finding myself unhorsed, and seeing it borne through the slaughter in the hands of a Scottish Grey trooper!"
Amid all the topics which we discussed over the wine of the defunct Prince of Ysembourg, with the contents of whose cellars, hewn deep in the old castle rock, Monseigneur le Duc and his epauletted and aiguiletted staff made most free, I could glean nothing about Jacqueline, where she resided, how she had married her cousin, the stern Count, or why, or wherefore; nor did I venture to ask—a natural delicacy, with a difficulty of approaching the subject, together with something of pique, restrained me.
When I looked on the old Duc de Broglie, dispensing the honours of his table with an air so courtly in his powdered hair, with his star and ribbon of St. Louis, and when I thought of the passionate love I had borne his daughter, and how she had responded to it—how I had sorrowed for her supposed death, and so terribly avenged it—of all that had been and never could be again,—I asked of myself, were not all those days we had spent together at that quaint château in Brittany, amid its arbours trained by old Urbain, its rose-gardens and leafy labyrinth, a dream, or was I dreaming now?
That she should be the wife of this Count de Bourgneuf—a Frenchman all the more jealous because his mother was a Spanish lady of Alava—who knew more than I wished him to know about those love passages in Brittany, and thus hated me accordingly, seemed strange and difficult to realize; but of that hate I had good proof ere long.
Dinner was nearly over when the Chevalier de Boisguiller, of the Hussars de la Reine, was announced, and this gay fellow, all travel-stained and with his face looking very red, after a long ride against a keen, frosty wind, entered with his sabre under his left arm, and carrying his fur cap with plume and scarlet kalpeck, in his right hand.