THE 'SCOTS BRIGADE'

AND OTHER TALES

BY

JAMES GRANT

AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMANCE OF WAR'

'The dying and dead strewed the breach at Meenen, Where our brave Scottish blades met the troops of Turenne; When cannon and firelock and musketoon played, As often, elsewhere, on the old Scots Brigade! Holland's Bulwark—in many a battle of yore— From the woods of Brabant to the far Frisian shore; Never Frenchman, nor Spaniard, nor German essayed To withstand the hot charge of the old Scots Brigade!' Camp Song.

LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL NEW YORK: 9, LAFAYETTE PLACE 1882

CONTENTS.

THE SCOTS BRIGADE: I. THE LOVER II. THE COLONEL-COMMANDANT III. SWORD-PLAY IV. DOLORES V. 'THE BULWARK OF HOLLAND' VI. 'AT THE GOLDEN SUN VII. 'THE GENERAL'S SECRET VIII. 'THE RIDOTTO IX. 'THE ABDUCTORS X. 'THE FAIR WIDOW XI. 'OMNIA VINCIT AMOR XII. 'CONCLUSION

'THE STORY OF THE CID RODRIGO OF BIVAR

THE BOY-GENERAL. THE STORY OF JEAN CAVALIER

THE BUGLE-BOY OF BADAJOZ

THE VOYAGE OF THE 'BON ACCORD'

A TALE OF THE RETREAT FROM CABUL

DICK STAPLES OF THE 'QUEEN'S OWN'

THE STORY OF LIEUTENANT JAMES MOODY OF BARTON'S REGIMENT

'OLD MINORCA;' OR, GENERAL MURRAY OF THE SCOTS FUSILIERS

THE SCOTS BRIGADE.

THE SCOTS BRIGADE.

CHAPTER I. THE LOVER.

'And you will not accompany me to call on these ladies, uncle?' said the young man persuasively.

'Certainly not, boy; do you take me for a fool—der Duyvel!' was the snappish rejoinder, as the General tossed his silver-mounted meerschaum on the table, and thrust his chair back on the polished oak floor, 'I have suspected you for some time past, and know, from old experience, that a young fellow in love is lost to the service and himself; among women he is as helpless as a rudderless ship among the thousand shoals of the Zuyder Zee! You are my heir, as you know, provided your conduct and obedience satisfy me. I am rich enough for both of us, and I had begun to hope that, like me, you would go through the world without the encumbrance of a wife. I shall not see you make a fool of yourself, without making an effort to save you. I shall give you a Beating Order, and send you to recruit for the Brigade in Scotland; or how would you like to roast on detachment at Guayana, or among the Dutch Isles in the Caribbean Sea?'

'Such a separation would be death to me, and to Dolores too.'

'Dol—what?' roared the General, grasping the knobs of his arm-chair and glaring at the speaker; 'how familiar we are, it seems! Where the devil did she get that absurd name?'

'From a Spanish ancestress, and with the name much of her beauty,' replied the younger man, who had a very pleasant voice and manner, which, if somewhat sad and soft, possessed the charm of cultured influences and refinement.

'Dolores—a very Donna Dulcinea, no doubt! Well, my young cock-o'-the-game, it is useless in me to repeat what you don't want to hear, and in you to say the same thing over and over again, as you have been doing for the last hour. So far as you and this—Dolores are concerned, my mind is made up—yes, by the henckers' horns!'

The speaker was no Dutchman, as his interjection might lead the reader to infer, but, like his nephew, a native of the northern portion of our isle, being Lieutenant-General John Kinloch, of Thominean in Fifeshire, Colonel-Commandant of the six battalions of the Scots Brigade, in the service of their High Mightinesses the States-General of Holland—a corps which boasted itself 'the Bulwark of the Republic'—a veteran of more than twenty years' hard service, though still in the flower of manhood.

His hair was powdered and queued, as was then the fashion; his handsome face was well bronzed by long exposure to the tropical sun, and his hands, which had never known gloves, contrasted in their brown hue with snow-white ruffles of the finest lace at the wide cuffs of his uniform coat.

His nose was straight; his mouth expressed firmness and decision, and his dark eyes, which were sparkling then with no small amount of anger, had somewhat shaggy brows that nearly met in one, and gave great character to his face.

His nephew, who stood near him, playing with the gold knot of his sword, and trying to deprecate his anger, was Lewis (or as he was generally called Lewie) Baronald of that Ilk in Lanarkshire (the only son of a baronet attainted after Culloden), and now a handsome young lieutenant in the Earl of Drumlanrig's Battalion of the Scots Brigade, in quarters, where we find him, at the Hague.

His face wore a droll expression just then, in spite of himself, as he knew that his uncle and patron was well known in the Brigade, and in Dutch society, as a misogynist—a genuine woman-hater, under the influence of some never-forgotten disappointment he had endured in early life, and who never omitted by the exertion of his advice, influence, or actual authority, to mar—if possible—the matrimonial views and wishes of the officers and men under his command.

When any of his brother officers would venture to express their surprise that one who was evidently so good-hearted and warm by nature, and who—though in all things a perfect soldier—was apparently fond of domestic life, should have omitted to share it with a help-mate, their remarks only invoked a torrent of grotesque invectives upon the sex, and put the General in such exceeding bad humour, that they were glad to beat a retreat and leave him to himself.

He had begun to perceive that for some time past, his nephew was abstracted in manner, that he absented himself from his quarters, was rather estranged from his comrades, and was almost neglectful of his military duties; and from rumours that reached him from the idlers and promenaders in the Voorhout and on the Vyverberg, the General was not long in discovering that a charming young girl was the cause of all this, and great was his wrath thereat. And when he found that Lewie Baronald's abstraction increased; that he caught him reading poetry instead of studying the 'Tactique et Discipline dc Prusse'; that he sighed sometimes involuntarily, and more than once had been caught inditing suspicious-looking little missives in the form of delicately folded, tinted and perfumed notes, he took him finally to task, and his indignation found vent, as it did on the present occasion.

'And you fell in with this girl——'

'When our battalion was sharing duty with the Dutch Guards at the Prince of Orange's palace in Amsterdam.'

'And how about her mother?' growled the General.

'She was very averse to my attendance on her daughter till——'

'Till when or what?' snapped the uncle.

'She asked me some questions concerning my name and family, and then suddenly I became quite a favourite.'

'All cunning—all cunning! But our name and our blood are as good as any in Holland, and better than some, I suppose; but every Scot has a pedigree, as King James was wont to say.'

And as General Kinloch spoke, the strong old Scottish accent, which then prevailed at the Bar and in the Pulpit at home (as it had done at Court in the preceding century), deepened with his excitement and irritation.

'And the mother is a widow, Drumlanrig tells me,' he continued; 'a widow who, I doubt not, loves her coffee with a glass of good curaçoa from De Pylsteeg at Amsterdam.'

'Indeed you mistake her, uncle,' replied the young man indignantly.

'Umph—egad—do I?'

'She often speaks to me of you, uncle.'

'Does she? I am greatly honoured.'

'Yes—and seems to know all about you, and your brilliant services to their Mightinesses the States, and so forth.'

'The devil she does! Well, she probably knows also that I never was a lady's man—a lady-killer, a buck, or a blood in my time; so my lady countess may spare her breath to cool her porridge. And who is this Countess van Renslaer? Her name sounds new to me.'

'She has but lately come to Holland.'

'From where?'

'England last, I believe; and none seem to take a higher place at the Court of the Prince of Orange; at the balls of the Grand Pensionary, and of the richest burgers in the Hague and Amsterdam.'

'Ouf! Well, I go to none of them—not even to Court, save once a year, to kiss the Prince's hand, and give in the Brigade Reports. She has a great retinue—keeps a stately coach and two sedans, I hear; and does this artful old—countess seem to tolerate the advances of a penniless sub like you, to her daughter?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because she is interested in me,' replied Lewie Baronald, smiling.

'For what reason?'

'Her first lover had been one of the Scots Brigade, and her heart still warms to the uniform.'

The knitted brow of the General relaxed for a moment, and he said with a grim smile:

'Then there have been two fools at least in the Brigade, to my knowledge. And for this prize, Dolores—I have caught her absurd name, you perceive—have you no rivals—no competitors?'

The young man's brow grew very dark.

'Yes,' said he, after a pause.

'Many?'

'One chiefly.'

'Whom you fear??

'I fear no man that wears a sword, uncle! She has a cousin, called Maurice Morganstjern, whom I greatly distrust.'

'Grandson of that Morganstjern who was one of the assassins of the De Witts in the last century? Avoid the whole brood, I say! If you will not be guided by me, who have your interest at heart, consult your Colonel, Drumlanrig, on this matter, and hear what he will say.'

'The last man to consult on such a topic.'

'Why?'

'Like yourself, he shuns female society. He is a gloomy misanthrope, and one of a fated race.'

'Right: a curse fell on his house, for the duke's share in the Union of 1707. I thought your family troubles were at an end when you joined the Brigade; but, der Duyvel! they seem only beginning, with this Dolores. To me it appears that there are some families—in Scotland more especially—whom misfortune—fate—which you will—pursueth to utter destruction.'

'The fate of mine was their own choosing: it lay between prudence and loyalty, and ill would it have become my people to have wavered when the Royal Standard was unfurled in Glenfinnan.'

'Your father's views and mine were different in that matter,' said the General in a softer tone.

'Give me your hand. I do not despair of your favour for us yet.'

'Indeed!'

'Tyne heart, tyne all, as we say at home.'

'In old Scotland, yes—and before the enemy, that is well enough; but anent a woman—go—go—or I shall lose my temper again. Besides, Lewie, there is a cloud on the horizon—the political horizon, I mean—which, though as yet no bigger than a man's hand, may expand into a dark and mighty one of storm and bloodshed. A revolution is at hand in France, and a time is coming when we—the Scots Brigade—will have other work than love-making cut out for us, and we shall have to choose between casting our lot forever with the States-General or with his Majesty George III.; for there is not a tavern and not a caserne in Holland in which the matter is not debated keenly and hotly now.'

Though the steady opposition and hostility of his uncle and patron, on whom all his hopes depended, left the young man depressed in spirit and heavy in heart, and inspired by no small dread of separation from the object of his love, he quitted the General's house, and set forth to visit her.

CHAPTER II. THE COLONEL-COMMANDANT.

The General refilled his glass and his meerschaum, and remained sunk in thought after the departure of his nephew, and more than once he sighed heavily, knit his brows, and shook his head.

He was not drinking schiedam with water, but good Farintosh whisky, kegs of which were regularly sent to him by a Scottish merchant from the Scotsch Dyk at Rotterdam—Farintosh which was then free from all Excise duty, and remained so till five years after the period of our story.

We have said that General Kinloch was a handsome man and in the flower of manhood; and a fine picture he would have made as he sat there, in his graceful old-fashioned uniform, with heavily-laced lapels and skirts, his hair powdered and queued, with a Khevenhüller hat (not unlike that of Napoleon I.) close by, adorned with a stiff upright feather and Dutch cockade, and his silk sash worn crossways in the old Scottish fashion.

The old Scottish officer who took a turn of service in France was jaunty in air, tone, and bearing, as Scott describes his Baron of Bradwardin to have been; but his countryman who served the States of Holland became, under the influence of his flat, stale and stolid surroundings, rather another style of man—equally brave and gallant in war, but less gallant in the ball-room or the boudoir—often grave, grim, and starched amid the influence of Dutch society and Presbyterianism.

It was only thirty-four years before that Culloden had been fought; and though his political sympathies were not with the exiled King James VIII., his mind was full of the bitter memories of that atrocious field left in every right-thinking Scottish heart; and his orphan nephew, Lewie Baronald, was the son of his only sister, one of those enthusiastic Jacobite ladies who kept guard at Edinburgh Cross with a drawn sword when the King was proclaimed, who danced at the famous Holyrood ball, and who, like more than one old lady in Scottish history and tradition, had never allowed her husband to kiss her, after the Prince did so, and after making his bed, when an exile and fugitive, with her own hands, had laid aside the sheets thereof to be a shroud for herself, in the true spirit of loyalty 'and that sublime devotion which the Saxon never knew.'

Long as he had been in Holland, the eyes of our Scot—accustomed as he had been to the grand mountain scenery of his native land—had never become accustomed to the utter monotony, flatness, and insipidity of the Dutch landscape, or to the brusqueness of the natives, their stolidity and general dulness of demeanour; but the pay was good, the quarters were comfortable, and—when not fighting—the service was easy enough. His sword was almost his inheritance, as the estate he inherited, Thominean, was drowned in debt; and their High Mightinesses the States-General were sure and generous paymasters.

Yet, times there were when he thought with the author of 'Vathek,' that there must have been a period when Holland was all water, 'and the ancestors of the present inhabitants fish. A certain oysterishness of eye and flabbiness of complexion are almost proof-sufficient of this aquatic descent; and pray tell me for what purpose are such galligaskins as the Dutch burthen themselves with contrived, but to tuck up a flouncing tail, and thus cloak the deformity of a dolphin-like termination.'

Reflecting angrily and sadly upon the recent conversation with his favourite, the General continued to smoke and gaze down the long vista of the quaint Dutch street, with its stiff rows of trees reflected downward in the canal that lay parallel with them, and its quaint gables on each of which, nearly, a stork was perched; the little mirrors projecting from the windows to enable the ladies within to see those who passed outside; the knockers tied up with pincushions and plaited lace to indicate that a 'goodwife was in the straw.'

There were women in the mobcaps, print-gowns, and gaudy satin aprons wore by all ranks alike; men in broad, round, conical hats, puckered jackets, and capacious breeches, now no longer to be seen but in very remote districts; an occasional dominie or clergyman in his court-like costume, ruff and cocked hat, passing homeward after having a pipe with some parishioner, or a dish of coffee with his vrouw.

There was the clatter of wooden shoes in the ill-paved street; the oil-lamps were beginning to glimmer like glow-worms, and were reflected in the slime of the canals; the drums and fifes of the Scots Brigade, in the adjacent caserne, were playing out the dying day, and sweetly stole upon the ambient evening the old air:

'Oh, the Lowlands o' Holland Hae parted my love and me;'

but the General was in shadow-land, thinking of other times and long-vanished faces, and wondering when the guilders of their High Mightinesses, and the prize-money won from the French and Spaniards, would free his inheritance from all its wadsets and incumbrances, and he would be able to hang his sword, where still his father's hung, in the old dining-hall of Thominean.

He saw it in fancy, that old house of Thominean ('the hill of birds'), with its grey crow-stepped gables and conical pepper-box turrets of the days of James VI., overlooked by the green range of the lovely Ochills; and he laughed softly as he remembered how in boyhood there he had trembled at the thought of the tiny elves, who, on their festival nights, were alleged to make great noises under the green turf, opening and shutting large chests of gold, and clattering with goblets and copper kettles; and how still more did he tremble at the story of a mysterious mirror, in which occasionally the figure of a pale woman, clad in white, could be distinctly seen behind the reflection of the person who stood before the glass, and how it was said to have appeared therein on the night his beloved sister, the Lady Baronald, died, and left her only son penniless in the world.

Thus Lewie, in his boyhood, became a soldier. On an evening that he never forgot, there came marching bravely down the quaint High Street of Kinross a recruiting-party of the Scots Brigade, with ribbons fluttering, drawn swords gleaming, the shrill pipes and hoarse drums, making every lane and alley bordering on Loch Leven to re-echo 'The Lowlands o' Holland;' and halting in front of the Bruce Arms Inn, a portly sergeant, after a libation of Farintosh had been duly poured forth, harangued the gathered rustics. He invited 'all lads of spirit to join that battalion of the Scots Brigade, commanded by the noble and valiant Henry Douglas, Earl of Drumlanrig, under their High Mightinesses the States-General of Holland, to fight the frog-eating French and popish Spaniards; all who so entered to have complete new clothing, arms and accoutrements as became a gentleman and soldier, two guineas bounty, and a crown to drink to the health of their High Mightinesses, and to the confusion of their enemies!'

A loud hurrah and much brandishing of broadswords followed this invitation, and ere 'The Point of War' was fully beaten, Lewie Baronald had shaken hands with this Scottish Sergeant Kite, and had the Dutch cockade pinned on his blue bonnet by a cunning corporal, who showed him an old watch like a silver turnip, and worth half-a-crown, which he boldly alleged had been presented to him 'by his Royal Highness the Prince of Orange in person.'

His uncle's influence soon procured him 'a pair of colours,' as the phrase was then, for a commission; and he soon proved himself worthy of the distinction by the daring and courage he displayed, when the battalion of Drumlanrig was employed with other Dutch troops in 1774, at the Cape of Good Hope, in driving the natives from the Bokkeveld and Roggeveld, back into the deserts on the south-west coast of Africa; and since his return to Holland his name, the popularity of his regiment, his handsome face and figure, were equally passports to the best society in the Hague and at Amsterdam.

But now, it seemed to his uncle and patron, the Colonel-Commandant of the Brigade, that his prospects were on the point of being marred by this unlucky passion for the daughter of the Countess van Renslaer.

Kinloch's antipathy to women was well known in the Brigade, and it was a standing joke among the battalions, that once, when the coquettish wife of the Grand Pensionary of Amsterdam had lured him into a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and contrived to let the latter drop into her ample bosom, and pointing thereto, piteously besought the General to take it out, that he—obtuse as Uncle Toby with the Widow Wadman—deftly abstracted it with the tongs.