With the civil war in Canada, our story has little more to do.
Suffice it that for a brief time, Roland Ruthven, after seeing Madame Darnel and her daughter safe in their chateau of St. Eustache at Montreal, had again to join the troops, who advanced to St. Benoit, where, so great was the terror excited by the recent victorious assault, that no opposition was offered, and the rebels sent delegates to say humbly, that they would, without conditions, lay their arms down, and they were conveyed under escort to Montreal, to meet the meed of their crimes.
The good result of all these operations was the return of the colonists to their homes, and the disappearance of all armed parties of insurgents. About the same season, however, in the following year, when the deep snows of the Canadian winter began to fall, there was a second rising in Lower Canada; but it was again crushed by the energy and gallantry of Sir John Colborne at Napierville, and for these and other services, the Queen created the fine old soldier a peer of Great Britain.
Prior to these events some startling changes occurred in the history of the two principal characters in our little narrative.
The Darnel estate at St. Eustache was utterly destroyed; the mansion had been ruined or burned, the lands ravaged, and the circumstances of the once wealthy widow were sorely impaired; her horses, carriages, and many other luxuries had to be dispensed with and economy become the new order of the day; but now, safe at her own home at Montreal, all the beauty and gaiety of Aurelia returned, and after all she had undergone, even poverty seemed, a slight matter to face—as yet.
"O Roland darling!" said she, with a little laugh, as they stood together in a window of the château one evening in the spring, looking towards Montreal steeped in the sunset, and where the greenery of the woods was deepening faster than it ever does in Britain at the same season, vegetation maturing with wondrous rapidity the moment the snow disappears; "O, Roland—I am poor as yourself now, and yet you still talk of marrying me and going to India; but could I take my poor mamma there?"
Roland's loving countenance fell.
"You lost your noble estate by a will; I my seigniory—or nearly all of it—by civil war; our fortune is ruined."
"Yet—we must not—cannot part, after all—after all!"
"Oh no—no!" murmured the girl, fondly and plaintively, with her sweet face pillowed on his breast.