"Reynold—my lord—look here—you know this face!" she exclaimed.
"My brother Ranulph, for a thousand guineas! Why, madame, this is a miniature of my brother Ranulph Crawford, who was killed, we were told, in the defence of the Tuileries."
"No—no—impossible! impossible! Captain Crawford who fell there was our dear friend—he commanded the grenadiers of the regiment de Berwick. My husband took, I know not why, his mother's name in France; and that miniature he hung round my neck on the day we were married in Arques by the good Abbé Lebrun."
"I can swear that it was painted for me, about three years after Minden, by honest David Allan of Alloa, whose name should be within it."
"True, monsieur, behold!" she added, opening the locket by a spring; "there is the name of Monsieur Allan, and this is Quentin's hair, when it was the colour of gold, woven up with—with his poor father's."
"This is wonder upon wonder!" exclaimed Flora Warrender, as she hung on the neck of Madame de Ribeaupierre, who kept the right hand of Quentin pressed upon her heart, while Eugene, who stood by, was stroking his moustache, and thinking if he had anything to do in the way of kissing, he would certainly prefer Flora.
Lady Rohallion was silent.
So the boy, by whose cradle in infancy she had watched with such motherly solicitude, was the nephew of her husband, the cousin-german of Cosmo; the son of that younger brother who had been the first love of her girlish days—the worshipper of her girlish beauty, in the pleasant times long past in sunny Nithsdale, the courtly gentleman and gallant soldier of fortune, over whose life she had cast a shadow. It was a strange mystery!
Some such idea was passing in the mind of her husband.
"Good heavens, Winny! so that poor father, whose fate is yet a legend among our tenantry—the poor man who struggled so bravely to save his child, when the ship was shattered on the Partan Craig—who died in sight of Rohallion, and whom honest John Girvan buried as became a soldier in the old kirkyard—our own ancestral burying-place—was my dear brother Ranulph!" exclaimed Lord Rohallion, with a sudden gush of affection and emotion; "and 'tis his boy we have so loved and protected, Winny! Poor Ranulph—poor Ranulph! I should like to have looked on your handsome and honest face once again ere it was laid in the grave; but it could not be, for I was absent. Madame, do you know that his drowned corpse was carried forth by his father's people from the gate of the house in which he was born, and every room of which has echoed to his voice in boyhood, and past the very haunts in which we played together, under the old sycamores of the avenue, by the Lollards' Linn and the Kelpie's Pool, on the Girvan Water. Thank God, poor Ranulph, you found a grave at last among your own people, and where your forefathers lie; but we have much to make amends for," added the old Lord, as he placed Flora's hand in that of Quentin; "may you both live long to enjoy all the happiness you deserve; and be assured that my last prayer will be for both of you!"