The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales Part 8

One of his first acts was to give my father the boat in which he had come, reserving only the right to have it back in case he should have need of it. The herring were down on the coast that autumn, and my uncle before he died had given us a fine set of nets, so the gift was worth many a pound to us. Sometimes de Lapp would go out in the boat alone, and I have seen him for a whole summer day rowing slowly along and stopping every half-dozen strokes to throw over a stone at the end of a string. I could not think what he was doing until he told me of his own freewill.

"I am fond of studying all that has to do with the military," said he, "and I never lose a chance. I was wondering if it would be a difficult matter for the commander of an army corps to throw his men ash.o.r.e here."

"If the wind were not from the east," said I.

"Ah! quite so, if the wind were not from the east. Have you taken soundings here?"

"No."

"Your line of battleships would have to lie outside; but there is water enough for a forty-gun frigate right up within musket range. Cram your boats with tirailleurs, deploy them behind these sandhills, then back with the launches for more, and a stream of grape over their heads from the frigates. It could be done! it could be done!"

His moustaches bristled out more like a cat's than ever, and I could see by the flash of his eyes that he was carried away by his dream.

"You forget that our soldiers would be upon the beach," said I indignantly.

"Ta, ta, ta!" he cried. "Of course it takes two sides to make a battle.

Let us see now; let us work it out. What could you get together?

Shall we say twenty, thirty thousand. A few regiments of good troops: the rest, _pouf!_--conscripts, bourgeois with arms. How do you call them--volunteers?"

"Brave men!" I shouted.

"Oh yes, very brave men, but imbecile. Ah, _mon Dieu_, it is incredible how imbecile they would be! Not they alone, I mean, but all young troops. They are so afraid of being afraid that they would take no precaution. Ah, I have seen it! In Spain I have seen a battalion of conscripts attack a battery of ten pieces. Up they went, ah, so gallantly! and presently the hillside looked, from where I stood, like-- how do you say it in English?--a raspberry tart. And where was our fine battalion of conscripts? Then another battalion of young troops tried it, all together in a rush, shouting and yelling; but what will shouting do against a mitraille of grape? And there was our second battalion laid out on the hillside. And then the foot cha.s.seurs of the Guard, old soldiers, were told to take the battery; and there was nothing fine about their advance--no column, no shouting, n.o.body killed--just a few scattered lines of tirailleurs and pelotons of support; but in ten minutes the guns were silenced, and the Spanish gunners cut to pieces.

War must be learned, my young friend, just the same as the farming of sheep."

"Pooh!" said I, not to be out-crowed by a foreigner. "If we had thirty thousand men on the line of the hill yonder, you would come to be very glad that you had your boats behind you."

"On the line of the hill?" said he, with a flash of his eyes along the ridge. "Yes, if your man knew his business he would have his left about your house, his centre on Corriemuir, and his right over near the doctor's house, with his tirailleurs pushed out thickly in front.

His horse, of course, would try to cut us up as we deployed on the beach. But once let us form, and we should soon know what to do.

There's the weak point, there at the gap. I would sweep it with my guns, then roll in my cavalry, push the infantry on in grand columns, and that wing would find itself up in the air. Eh, Jack, where would your volunteers be?"

"Close at the heels of your hindmost man," said I; and we both burst out into the hearty laugh with which such discussions usually ended.

Sometimes when he talked I thought he was joking, and at other times it was not quite so easy to say. I well remember one evening that summer, when he was sitting in the kitchen with my father, Jim, and me, after the women had gone to bed, he began about Scotland and its relation to England.

"You used to have your own king and your own laws made at Edinburgh,"

said he. "Does it not fill you with rage and despair when you think that it all comes to you from London now?"

Jim took his pipe out of his mouth.

"It was we who put our king over the English; so if there's any rage, it should have been over yonder," said he.

This was clearly news to the stranger, and it silenced him for the moment.

"Well, but your laws are made down there, and surely that is not good,"

he said at last.

"No, it would be well to have a Parliament back in Edinburgh," said my father; "but I am kept so busy with the sheep that I have little enough time to think of such things."

"It is for fine young men like you two to think of it," said de Lapp.

"When a country is injured, it is to its young men that it looks to avenge it."

"Aye! the English take too much upon themselves sometimes," said Jim.

"Well, if there are many of that way of thinking about, why should we not form them into battalions and march them upon London?" cried de Lapp.

"That would be a rare little picnic," said I, laughing. "And who would lead us?"

He jumped up, bowing, with his hand on his heart, in his queer fashion.

"If you will allow me to have the honour!" he cried; and then seeing that we were all laughing, he began to laugh also, but I am sure that there was really no thought of a joke in his mind.

I could never make out what his age could be, nor could Jim Horscroft either. Sometimes we thought that he was an oldish man that looked young, and at others that he was a youngish man who looked old. His brown, stiff, close-cropped hair needed no cropping at the top, where it thinned away to a shining curve. His skin too was intersected by a thousand fine wrinkles, lacing and interlacing, and was all burned, as I have already said, by the sun. Yet he was as lithe as a boy, and he was as tough as whalebone, walking all day over the hills or rowing on the sea without turning a hair. On the whole we thought that he might be about forty or forty-five, though it was hard to see how he could have seen so much of life in the time. But one day we got talking of ages, and then he surprised us.

I had been saying that I was just twenty, and Jim said that he was twenty-seven.

"Then I am the most old of the three," said de Lapp.

We laughed at this, for by our reckoning he might almost have been our father.

"But not by so much," said he, arching his brows. "I was nine-and-twenty in December."

And it was this even more than his talk which made us understand what an extraordinary life it must have been that he had led. He saw our astonishment, and laughed at it.

"I have lived! I have lived!" he cried. "I have spent my days and my nights. I led a company in a battle where five nations were engaged when I was but fourteen. I made a king turn pale at the words I whispered in his ear when I was twenty. I had a hand in remaking a kingdom and putting a fresh king upon a great throne the very year that I came of age. _Mon Dieu_, I have lived my life!"

That was the most that I ever heard him confess of his past life, and he only shook his head and laughed when we tried to get something more out of him. There were times when we thought that he was but a clever impostor; for what could a man of such influence and talents be loitering here in Berwickshire for? But one day there came an incident which showed us that he had indeed a history in the past.

You will remember that there was an old officer of the Peninsula who lived no great way from us, the same who danced round the bonfire with his sister and the two maids. He had gone up to London on some business about his pension and his wound money, and the chance of having some work given him, so that he did not come back until late in the autumn.

One of the first days after his return he came down to see us, and there for the first time he clapped eyes upon de Lapp. Never in my life did I look upon so astonished a face, and he stared at our friend for a long minute without so much as a word. De Lapp looked back at him equally hard, but there was no recognition in his eyes.

"I do not know who you are, sir," he said at last; "but you look at me as if you had seen me before."

"So I have," answered the Major.

"Never to my knowledge."

"But I'll swear it!"

"Where then?"

"At the village of Astorga, in the year '8."

De Lapp started, and stared again at our neighbour.

"_Mon Dieu_, what a chance!" he cried. "And you were the English parlementaire? I remember you very well indeed, sir. Let me have a whisper in your ear."

He took him aside and talked very earnestly with him in French for a quarter of an hour, gesticulating with his hands, and explaining something, while the Major nodded his old grizzled head from time to time. At last they seemed to come to some agreement, and I heard the Major say "_Parole a'honneur_" several times, and afterwards "_Fortune de la guerre_," which I could very well understand, for they gave you a fine upbringing at Birtwhistle's. But after that I always noticed that the Major never used the same free fashion of speech that we did towards our lodger, but bowed when he addressed him, and treated him with a wonderful deal of respect. I asked the Major more than once what he knew about him, but he always put it off, and I could get no answer out of him.

Jim Horscroft was at home all that summer, but late in the autumn he went back to Edinburgh again for the winter session, and as he intended to work very hard and get his degree next spring if he could, he said that he would bide up there for the Christmas. So there was a great leave-taking between him and Cousin Edie; and he was to put up his plate and to marry her as soon as he had the right to practise. I never knew a man love a woman more fondly than he did her, and she liked him well enough in a way--for, indeed, in the whole of Scotland she would not find a finer looking man--but when it came to marriage, I think she winced a little at the thought that all her wonderful dreams should end in nothing more than in being the wife of a country surgeon. Still there was only me and Jim to choose out of, and she took the best of us.