The History of the Lady Betty Stair

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“Are the English in retreat?”

Alas! they were not—though soon Sister Claire was, but meanwhile doing all she could for the wounded among the fugitives.

All this time, no hardened veteran stood fire better than Sister Claire. She adopted that cheerful maxim,—“Every bullet has its billet,”—and went about her business of binding up wounds and staunching blood as calmly under the dropping fire of musketry, or the roar of artillery, as if she were hearing a catechism class in the convent garden.

And how was it with her heart in all those years? She scarcely knew herself. Only that, whenever a sudden wild agony of regret seized her, when she was tempted to rush up the greatest height she could find and throw herself madly from it into the abyss of death, there was always before her some suffering fellow-creature who needed her services at that very moment; whose pain was so great it could not wait, and she must stay and help that agonized soul and body. She counted among her blessings that, whenever these paroxysms of despair had seized her, there would be the ever-present sufferer; and she came to believe silently, and with a tender and reverent superstition, that, like the saint of old who gave his coat to a beggar, and that beggar revealed himself presently as the Man of Sorrows, so was she tending Him in the persons of His poor.

She had not failed to follow De Bourmont’s career, and knew every step of promotion he gained, and thrilled with pride at it. As for De Bourmont, from the day he threw his sword into the scale of the Emperor, he scarcely had time to think, for fifteen years. In all those years he had been in active service, and it was not until after Waterloo, where he had been severely wounded, that the march of events in his career stopped long enough for him to look backward and forward at his life. In the long days of his convalescence in the country, he began to examine himself and what lay before and behind him. Like the Abbé de Ronceray, he scarcely recognized himself for what he had been fifteen years before. He was over forty, a soldier seasoned in battles, and too old to learn anything else. He had been cruelly disappointed in the first and only deep love of his life, and the memory of Lady Betty Stair was still too dear to him for any other woman to have the mastery of his heart. He had learned from the abbé the whole story of her sudden flight from Holyrood, and, manlike, he could not persuade himself that she could be happy after the sacrifice she had made. He imagined her spending a life of calm seclusion in a convent, and did not suspect that she was almost as much of a soldier as himself; and, like her, he came in time to feel that there was but one life before him,—a life of duty. His career in the army had been brilliant up to 1815, but he had been too closely identified with the Emperor to enjoy the favor of the Bourbons, whom he had once served. And so, after that, it was somewhat dull and obscure, until the French dream of conquest in Africa was brought to pass, some years after Waterloo.

In those years Sister Claire went about from one barrack hospital to another, for soldiers need tending in peace as well as in war. The years that made De Bourmont more sombre and taciturn, made her brighter and calmer. So much brightness and calmness of spirit could not but be reflected in her face, and, being beautiful in the beginning, she seemed to grow more so as time went on. Age passed her by. The activity of her life was such that her figure retained its airy slightness, and she continued to walk with the graceful swiftness with which she had moved through the dismal corridors of Holyrood Palace.

In the twenties, France had constant trouble with Algiers, and Sister Claire was sent out to Africa, at the head of a band of sisters, to nurse the sick. She had a fine hospital, though small, and government aid, and never, in all her religious life, was she so comfortable in certain ways; but never did Sister Claire become so nearly dissatisfied.

“I do not understand civilians very well, dear mother,” she wrote to the superior. “I have been used so long to nursing Jean Baptiste, to scolding him, and making him obey the doctor, and take care of his shoes, and even to washing his one shirt for him, that I cannot accustom myself to the dilettante ways of other people, who know as well how to take care of themselves as I do.”

One fine morning in 1827, though, a great French fleet was seen off the town of Algiers, and a cannonade began. It cannot be denied that the first batch of wounded sailors brought into Sister Claire’s hospital caused her to feel at least twenty years younger; and from that on, she had her beloved soldiers, as well as sailors, to nurse, and was correspondingly happy.

When the first advance in force, of twenty thousand men, was determined on, the French surgeon-general, who was an old acquaintance of Sister Claire’s, came to her and said, bluntly: