"Kiss our little cherub for me. I am in despair when I think of him, though he is safer with you than with me, in our dreadful France—no longer the land of beauty and gaiety, but of the bayonet and guillotine. He must be our hostage and peace-offering to your family, and I doubt not that his innocent smiles and golden curls may soften their hearts towards us both. La Mère de Dieu take you both into her blessed keeping and hasten our reunion. Till then, and for ever after, I am your own affectionate little wife,
"FIFINE."
This letter, we have said, was undated, but the postscript led Lady Rohallion to suppose it came from a remote part of France. It ran thus:
"Your own petted Fifine sends you a hundred kisses for every mile this has to travel; as many more to little Quentin, as they wont add a franc to the weight in the pocket of M. l'Abbé."
So ended this letter, so sad in its love and its tenor, under the circumstances. With that of the Comte d'Artois, the commission, purse, and ring, Lady Rohallion carefully put it past in her antique buhl escritoire, for her husband's inspection on his return; and, on leaving the castle, the old quartermaster kept his word.
True to his inbred military instincts and impulses, he had the Rohallion company of Volunteers duly paraded, in their cocked hats, short swallow-tailed red coats, white leggings, and long black gaiters; and, with arms reversed, they bore the dead soldier of fortune, shoulder-high, from the old castle-gate, where the scarlet family standard, with its fess ermine, hung half-hoisted on the battery.
Mournfully from the leafless copse that clothed the steep sides of the narrow glen in which the old kirk stood, did the muffled drums re-echo, while the sweet low wail of the fifes sent up the sad notes of the dead march—"The Land o' the Leal."
At one of the drawing-room windows, Lady Rohallion sat, with the child upon her knee—little Quentin Kennedy, our hero, for such he is; and her motherly heart was full, and her kindly tears fell fast on his golden hair, when three sharp volleys that rung in the clear cold air above a yawning grave, and the pale blue distant smoke that she could see wreathing in the November sunshine, announced the last scene of this little tragedy—that the poor drowned wanderer, the Scottish soldier of fortune, who adhered to King Louis in his downfall, had found a last home in his native earth; and that, perhaps, all his secrets, his sorrows, and the story of his life were buried with him.
Then with a burst of sympathy and womanly tenderness, she pressed her lips to the soft cheek of the child, whose eyes dilated with inquiry and wonder, as he heard those farewell volleys that rung in the distant air, but little knew that they were fired above his father's closing grave!