Chapter LXI: Isabel Douglas

The brave general of the Scots being thus slain by those citizens of Zaberne, who, as Cardinal de la Valette said, 'had been keeping him at bay for the last six months by playing at soldiers,' the colonelcy of his celebrated Scottish regiment devolved upon his cousin, the Laird of Waughton, and the command of the army upon the Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

Under the Marquis of Gordon, the cuirassiers of the Garde du Corps Ecossais continued to serve in Alsace, with the combined army of French, Scots, Swedes, and Germans in the pay of Louis XIII, during the year 1637, and in that time, though we fought no general action, we were severely engaged in many skirmishes and minor affairs. This army, which occupied Alsace, was ably led by the Duke, who had suffered many family injuries from the house of Austria, and fearfully he avenged them in those wars, which devastated the land with such severity, that the brave old Duke of Lorraine and his fiery son, deprived of all but their swords and honour, were ere long reduced to mere private gentlemen, fighting for bread in the Imperial ranks, while the people of their duchy and of Alsace, were reduced to such misery, that, in this year 1637, after the capture of Brissac, the governor was compelled (as the French 'Mercury' records) to place guards upon the burial-places, to prevent the inhabitants, who were mad with hunger, tearing the dead from their graves and devouring them.

Two days after the fall of Zaberne, De Bitche blew up the tower of Phalsbourg, and crossed the Rhine, retiring into the duchy of Baden.

During my absence, the chevaliers of the Scottish Guard had suffered severely; their number was considerably below a hundred now, and I missed many a stalwart form and familiar face from their ranks. Among those who were absent was Adam Scott, the hardy young Laird of Tushielaw, who usually rode on my left hand.

One night, several of us sat smoking and drinking in the garden of a little country-house of which we had taken possession, and there we were making merry talking of all the beautiful and amiable sinners of Paris, such as Ninon de l'Enclos, Marion de l'Orme, the Duchess de Bouillon, Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, and others; of that right royal glutton, Anne of Austria, who, in her anxiety still to please her lovers, had discovered the drugs by which Diana of Poictiers preserved her beauty in extreme old age; a secret written by a sorcerer on the skin of a dead-born child, and long borne about the person of Catherine de Medici. I heard, too, that Clara d'Amboise, my voluptuous, intellectual, and political beauty, still reigned in the heart of Louis, with other gossip of equal interest to Parisian absentees.

During a pause in the conversation, I inquired about my comrade Tushielaw.

'Adam became sick of these fruitless and bootless wars, and went home to old Scotland,' said Patrick Gordon, gloomily; for, on finding that a shower of brevets had come from Paris, and that his name was not among them, our old comrade had of late betaken himself to the soldier's consolation of grumbling; 'and ere long, Blane, I shall go home too, for I am now seventy years old at least.'

'Seventy! How, Marechal de Logis, I deemed you but fifty?' said Dundrennan.

'True; but I have served for twenty years in Denmark, Muscovy, and Brandenburg, and reckon these as forty; yet I am only a poor Marechal de Logis of horse, while such boys as those painted fops De Toneins and Turenne, are camp-masters and knights of all the king's orders. However, my Lord Dundrennan, we have an auld Scottish proverb, which saith _a hauf egg is better than a toom doup_, so I must e'en content me. When we campaigned ten years ago in Westphalia, a place where, as their own proverb says, you are sure to find bad quarters, worse rations, and long miles, I often heard the 'half egg' quoted by one who is now dead and gone--poor Hepburn--than whom no better soldier ever belted him with steel.'

This compliment to our dead leader was received by all with a silent bow of assent.

'But Tushielaw was a wise man, and hath gone home four months ago to his old tower on the Border side,' resumed Gordon; 'I would that I had some such neuk to hang my sword in when I grow too old to carry it.'

'Tushielaw,' said Dundrennan, 'was a brave and wild spirit. The last May-day we were in Paris, how merrily he, De Toneins, the Chevalier, and I danced with the grisettes round a Maypole cut from the Bois de Boulogne, and planted just outside the Porte St. Antoine. He was severely wounded in that affair we had at Mannheim--'

'Ah--you fought that while I was cooling my heels in the Bastille.'

'We were campaigning among the mountains of the Bergstrasse. It was in the month of December; the country was covered with snow, and our infantry were busy under Hepburn, de la Force, and de Maille Breze in the fortification of Heidelberg and Mannheim. We were now in the land of brutal barons, beer-bloated philosophers, beggarly mightinesses, devils, ghosts, and doppelgangers.

'Now this town of Mannheim, until we girt it by ramparts, was nothing more than a pretty village, guarded by the old castle of Rheinhausen; and our proceedings there, in stone and lime, were so highly resented by the Imperialists, that they never left us an hour in peace. Our boots were never off, and we slept in our frozen tents, with belts and harness on, till we were weary of our lives, and furious at the foe.

'One evening, when the sun was setting behind the mountains, and when the ice lay deep and strong upon the waters of the frozen Rhine and Neckar, a party of Austrian horse, led by young Count Pappenheim, with furred roquelaures over their black iron trappings, came suddenly upon our quarters, and gave us an _alerte_. On the right flank which, as you know, is always our post, the Marquis of Gordon ordered the trumpets to sound 'to horse;' and after some smart piqueering with our pistols, we fell on with our rapiers, at full gallop, and routed three hundred of Goetz's dragoons, driving them across the valley of the Rhine in full and disastrous flight.

'Brave Tushielaw, being better mounted than any of us, and being used of old to border-pricking by Ettrick wood and Solway sands, led the van of this pursuit, till a few of the Imperialists turned upon him. Nothing daunted, he encountered them all. In three minutes he had slain, or at least unhorsed, four; but a fifth proved a very evil-disposed fellow, who, with peculiar vindictiveness, ran him fairly through the body, and laid him at his horse's heels, bleeding on the snow which whitened all the mountain-side.

'We stripped the warm furs off the dead dragoons, and carefully rolling up Tushielaw, brought him back with us to the camp, when the physician of the Marquis declared him unfit for the king's service; and so, after lingering among us for a month or two, he went home to Tushielaw to breathe once more of the breeze that comes down the heathery glen from those green hills that look on lovely Yarrow--home, where many a Scottish exile, now far away, would gladly be--home to his old tower, so famed in song and story, that stands in the solitude where Rankleburn joins the Ettrick.'

'So we shall see him no more?' said I.

'Not in France, at least: but his story is not yet told,' continued the Viscount. 'Poor Adam had been outlawed, and driven from Scotland mainly by the exertions and influence of William Douglas, Earl of March, who had conceived a hatred for him, and whose eldest daughter Isabel he had ventured to love; for he had frequently met her in Peebles at the play, where the football, the golf, the shooting for the silver arrow, and all our old Scottish manly games, yearly attract the flower of the Borderside.

'They had exchanged rings and locks of hair, and broken a piece of money between them, in the old superstitious fashion at Allhallowmass; but the ring given to Isabel was ominously inscribed,--

'_The eye finds;
The heart chooseth;
The hand binds;
But death looseth._'

And these foreboding words were ever before her, on her lips and in her heart.

'Isabel Douglas had the black, sparkling eyes and dark eyebrows of her race; but her skin was fair, and her tresses were like golden-coloured silk.'

'_Were_, say you?'

'Listen. She was more than lovely, for I, who have seen her, know all this: and know that she possessed the _thirty_ points of feminine beauty which Brantome declares we shall never meet with in one woman. But though she had the dark Douglas' eyes and their black brows, she was feeble, gentle, and timid in spirit: so her father, knowing the daring and pride of Tushielaw, shut her up in his strong castle of Neidpath. There she was beyond the reach of the moss-trooping Scotts, whose hero, Adam, became involved in some vile border brawl or plot against the government; and with the servile Lords of Council at Edinburgh, when a personage styling himself William Earl of March, Lord Douglas of Neidpath, Lyne, and Manorheid, opposed himself to simple Adam Scott, of Tushielaw, proscription and banishment were sure to follow; so our Border chieftain sailed to France, and took service in our Scottish Guard.

'In his absence I need scarcely relate to you how Isabel Douglas, still shut up in the gloomy tower of Neidpath, pined; how the brilliance of her beauty faded; how her eyes lost their lustre, and her lips their enchanting bloom; and how she repeated, ever and anon, the ominous legend inscribed on her betrothal ring. No amusement roused her from the apathy and consumption into which she seemed to be fast hurrying. My lord of March, when he beheld Isabel, on his return from a year's absence in London, was pleased to be mightily shocked and repentant. He removed her to his livelier mansion in the busy little burgh of Peebles, and endeavoured, but in vain, to lead her from her own thoughts and the secret sorrow that preyed upon her; till, finding that every means failed, he at last consented to bring home Tushielaw, and wrote to Acheson, the Secretary of State at Edinburgh, who, by one dash of his pen, restored the estates of Scott, but failed to cure the worm that preyed upon the heart of the poor girl whom that year of sorrow in Neidpath Peel had destroyed.

'"He will never return to me, father," said she, and showed the Earl the legend on her ring, while her tears fell fast, for she had long been confined to bed, and was so weak and feeble that the heart of the old Earl was wrung on beholding the mischief he had wrought. At last there came tidings that Tushielaw had sailed from France, that he had landed in Scotland, and the day on which he was to pass through Peebles on his way to the forest was known.

'On that day there was an unusual bustle and commotion visible in and about the old castellated mansion of the Earl of March, which is sufficiently remarkable in the town by its curious turret that overhangs the street.

'At an early hour of the morning, poor Lady Isabel caused herself to be dressed and conveyed into a stone balcony, that projected in front of the house; and there, on a couch, she sat for hours, with her wan face, her black and now ghastly eyes fixed upon the vista of the sunlit thoroughfare, that she might be the first to see her lover as he rode up. At that time the town was lonely and dull; few noises woke the echoes of its streets; but so much had disease, anxiety, and love sharpened and rendered unnaturally acute the senses of this feeble girl, that she was able to detect the steps of her lover's horse at an incredible distance, and long before any such sound reached the ears of the anxious Earl, or her two sisters who attended her.

'A sudden flush crossed her cheek, her dark eyes sparkled with somewhat of their former beauty, and clasping the hands of her youngest sister, she exclaimed--

'"He comes, Jeanie! I hear his horse; but, oh, it is far off yet!" Then, closing her eyes, she almost swooned. Yet the Earl and his pale daughters heard nothing, for at that moment Tushielaw was fully three miles distant, galloping along the highway that wound by hill and wood, and feeling his heart expand with anxiety and joy as he saw fair Teviotdale, with all its pastoral beauties, deepening in the summer sun.

'After landing at Eskmouth from a ship of the States-General, Tushielaw, still suffering from his wound received at Mannheim, became suddenly oppressed by one of those gloomy presentiments of approaching evil, which at times come unbidden to the Scottish mind, and so mysteriously affect it. He endeavoured to shake off this solemn oppression, but in vain. An uncontrollable conviction of the necessity of reaching home without delay made him ride fast and furiously; and thus, without presenting himself at the capital to thank the servile placeman who had recalled him, he crossed the Lammermuirs and rode straight towards Peebles, which he entered about sunset.

'A half-stifled exclamation of joy burst from Isabel Douglas when his tall figure, with cloak and plume, was seen to ride up the street at a rapid pace towards her father's house. Full of his own thoughts, and haunted by that presentiment of coming sorrow--all unaware that Isabel was in the town, or, if he saw her, all unprepared for the sad change in her appearance, the war-worn cavalier rode rapidly past, without seeming once to lift his eye to the stone balcony, where the poor trembling girl cast her hollow eyes and thin, wan hands towards him in an agony of joy that could never find utterance in words.

'Poor Isabel! Alas! though his soul was full of her image, Adam Scott beheld her not, and spurred out of sight without according a word, a glance, a smile of recognition! And this was the hour, the time, the meeting to which she had so long looked forward during the age of separation that had passed!

'Isabel gazed after his retiring figure in silence and speechless sorrow; and then, crushed by the sudden shock of his apparent heedlessness, she exclaimed, that in France he had forgotten her, and murmuring the legend on her ring, she threw up her white hands wildly towards heaven--there was a gush of blood from her lips, and she expired in the arms of the Earl and her sisters before they could bear her in from the balcony.

'She was interred among her ancestors in the burial vault of the ducal house of Queensberry, and a plate on her coffin--a plate to which her sorrowing lover pressed his lips again and again--bore the simple legend--

'The eye finds;
The heart chooseth;
The hand binds;
But death looseth!' *

and since then,' concluded Dundrennan, 'we have heard no more of our comrade, who, though at home in beautiful Ettrick forest, would, I doubt not, willingly be with us to-night; for the tower of Tushielaw, with the brawl of Rankleburn, and the sough of the old oaks that shade it, must be but a lonely place wherein to brood over the loss of a heart we have loved.'

* A copper plate, bearing this inscription, was recently found in a grave in Inveresk churchyard.