Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century by Walter Scott (classic novels .TXT) 📕
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- Author: Walter Scott
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‘I wish, then,’ said Charles, ‘only another companion. Redgauntlet, the air of this country is as hostile to you as it is to me. These gentlemen have made their peace, or rather they have done nothing to break it. But you—come you and share my home where chance shall cast it. We shall never see these shores again; but we will talk of them, and of our disconcerted bull-fight.’
‘I follow you, sire, through life,’ said Redgauntlet, ‘as I would have followed you to death. Permit me one moment.’
The prince then looked round, and seeing the abashed countenances of his other adherents bent upon the ground, he hastened to say, ‘Do not think that you, gentlemen, have obliged me less because your zeal was mingled with prudence, entertained, I am sure, more on my own account and on that of your country, than from selfish apprehensions.’
He stepped from one to another, and, amid sobs and bursting tears, received the adieus of the last remnant which had hitherto supported his lofty pretensions, and addressed them individually with accents of tenderness and affection.
The general drew a little aloof, and signed to Redgauntlet to speak with him while this scene proceeded. ‘It is now all over,’ he said, ‘and Jacobite will be henceforward no longer a party name. When you tire of foreign parts, and wish to make your peace, let me know. Your restless zeal alone has impeded your pardon hitherto.’
‘And now I shall not need it,’ said Redgauntlet. ‘I leave England for ever; but I am not displeased that you should hear my family adieus.—Nephew, come hither. In presence of General Campbell, I tell you, that though to breed you up in my own political opinions has been for many years my anxious wish, I am now glad that it could not be accomplished. You pass under the service of the reigning monarch without the necessity of changing your allegiance—a change, however,’ he added, looking around him, which sits more easy on honourable men than I could have anticipated; but some wear the badge of their loyalty on their sleeve, and others in the heart. You will, from henceforth, be uncontrolled master of all the property of which forfeiture could not deprive your father—of all that belonged to him—excepting this, his good sword’ (laying his hand on the weapon he wore), ‘which shall never fight for the House of Hanover; and as my hand will never draw weapon more, I shall sink it forty fathoms deep in the wide ocean. Bless you, young man! If I have dealt harshly with you, forgive me. I had set my whole desires on one point,—God knows, with no selfish purpose; and I am justly punished by this final termination of my views, for having been too little scrupulous in the means by which I pursued them.—Niece, farewell, and may God bless you also!’
‘No, sir,’ said Lilias, seizing his hand eagerly. ‘You have been hitherto my protector,—you are now in sorrow, let me be your attendant and your comforter in exile.’
‘I thank you, my girl, for your unmerited affection; but it cannot and must not be. The curtain here falls between us. I go to the house of another. If I leave it before I quit the earth, it shall be only for the House of God. Once more, farewell both! The fatal doom,’ he said, with a melancholy smile, ‘will, I trust, now depart from the House of Redgauntlet, since its present representative has adhered to the winning side. I am convinced he will not change it, should it in turn become the losing one.’
The unfortunate Charles Edward had now given his last adieus to his downcast adherents. He made a sign with his hand to Redgauntlet, who came to assist him into the skiff. General Campbell also offered his assistance, the rest appearing too much affected by the scene which had taken place to prevent him.
‘You are not sorry, general, to do me this last act of courtesy,’ said the Chevalier; ‘and, on my part, I thank you for it. You have taught me the principle on which men on the scaffold feel forgiveness and kindness even for their executioner. Farewell!’
They were seated in the boat, which presently pulled off from the land. The Oxford divine broke out into a loud benediction, in terms which General Campbell was too generous to criticize at the time, or to remember afterwards;—nay, it is said, that, Whig and Campbell as he was, he could not help joining in the universal Amen! which resounded from the shore.
CONCLUSION, BY DR. DRYASDUST IN A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY
I am truly sorry, my worthy and much-respected sir, that my anxious researches have neither, in the form of letters, nor of diaries or other memoranda, been able to discover more than I have hitherto transmitted, of the history of the Redgauntlet family. But I observe in an old newspaper called the WHITEHALL GAZETTE, of which I fortunately possess a file for several years, that Sir Arthur Darsie Redgauntlet was presented to his late Majesty at the drawing-room, by Lieut.-General Campbell—upon which the editor observes, in the way of comment, that we were going, REMIS ATQUE VELIS, into the interests of the Pretender, since a Scot had presented a Jacobite at Court. I am sorry I have not room (the frank being only uncial) for his further observations, tending to show the apprehensions entertained by many well-instructed persons of the period, that the young king might himself be induced to become one of the Stuarts’ faction,—a catastrophe from which it has pleased Heaven to preserve these kingdoms.
I perceive also, by a marriage-contract in the family repositories, that Miss Lilias Redgauntlet of Redgauntlet, about eighteen months after the transactions you have commemorated, intermarried with Alan Fairford, Esq., Advocate, of Clinkdollar, who, I think, we may not unreasonably conclude to be the same person whose name occurs so frequently in the pages of your narration. In my last excursion to Edinburgh, I was fortunate enough to discover an old caddie, from whom, at the expense of a bottle of whisky and half a pound of tobacco, I extracted the important information, that he knew Peter Peebles very well, and had drunk many a mutchkin with him in Caddie Fraser’s time. He said ‘that he lived ten years after King George’s accession, in the momentary expectation of winning his cause every day in the session time, and every hour in the day, and at last fell down dead, in what my informer called a ‘perplexity fit,’ upon a proposal for a composition being made to him in the Outer House. I have chosen to retain my informer’s phrase, not being able justly to determine whether it is a corruption of the word apoplexy, as my friend Mr. Oldbuck supposes, or the name of some peculiar disorder incidental to those who have concern in the courts of law, as many callings and conditions of men have diseases appropriate to themselves. The same caddie also remembered Blind Willie Stevenson, who was called Wandering Willie, and who ended his days ‘unco beinly, in Sir Arthur Redgauntlet’s ha’ neuk.’ ‘He had done the family some good turn,’ he said, ‘specially when ane of the Argyle gentlemen was coming down on a wheen of them that had the “auld leaven” about them, and wad hae taen every man of them, and nae less nor headed and hanged them. But Willie, and a friend they had, called Robin the Rambler, gae them warning, by playing tunes such as
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