Part 42 (1/2)
”There is some good in everybody,” said Willet. ”We'll remember that and forget the rest.”
But Robert's friends in the Royal Americans had a hard time of it in the battle of Ste. Foy, even harder than in Wolfe's battle on the Plains of Abraham. They were conspicuous for their valor and suffered many casualties. Colden, Cabell and Stuart were wounded, but took no permanent hurt. Charteris also received a slight wound, but he recovered entirely before his marriage in the summer with the lovely Louise de St.
Maur, the daughter of the Seigneur Raymond de St. Maur, in whose house he had been a prisoner a long time in Quebec.
It was Robert's own personal contact and his great friends.h.i.+p for Charteris, continuing throughout their long lives in New York, that caused him to take such a strong and permanent interest in this particular regiment which had been raised wholly in the colonies and which fought so valiantly at Duquesne, Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, Quebec, Ste. Foy, and in truth in nearly all the great North American battles of the Seven Years' War.
It was at first the Sixty-Second Regular Regiment of the British Army, ”Royal American Provincials,” but through the lapsing of two other regiments it soon became the Sixtieth. Its valor and distinction were so high when composed wholly of Americans, except the superior officers, that nearly seventy years subsequent to the fall of Quebec the Englishmen, who after the great quarrel had replaced the Americans in it, asked that they be allowed to use as their motto the Latin phrase, _Celer et audax_, ”Swift and Bold,” ”Quick and Ready,” which Wolfe himself was said to have conferred upon it shortly before his fall upon the Plains of Abraham. And in memory of the great deeds of their American predecessors, the gallant Englishmen who succeeded them were permitted by the British government to use that motto.
Despite their defeat at Ste. Foy, the English and Americans held the capital against De Levis until another British fleet arrived and compelled the retreat of the brave Frenchmen. More reenforcements came from England, the powerful army of Amherst advanced from the south, Montreal was taken, and it was soon all over with New France.
Canada pa.s.sed to England, and after its fall English and American troops, men of the same blood, language and inst.i.tutions, did not stand together again in a great battle for more than a century and a half, and then, strangely enough, it was in defense of that France which under one flag they had fought at Duquesne and Ticonderoga, at Quebec and Ste.
Foy.
Robert, Tayoga and Willet went back to the colonies by land, and after a long journey stopped at Albany, where they received the warmest of welcomes from Master Jacobus Huysman, Master Alexander McLean and Caterina.
”I knew Robert that some time you would come into your own. I hold some of the papers about you in my great chest here,” said Jacobus Huysman.
”Now it iss for you to show that you understand how to use great fortune well.”
”And never forget your dates,” said Master Alexander. ”It is well to know history. All the more so, because you have had a part in the making of it.”
Warm as was their welcome in Albany, it was no warmer than that given them in New York by Benjamin Hardy and Jonathan Pillsbury. The very next day they went to the house of Adrian Van Zoon for a reckoning, only to find him dead in his bed. He had heard the night before of Robert's arrival; in truth, it was his first intimation that young Lennox was alive, and that all his wicked schemes against him had failed.
”It may have been a stroke of heart disease,” said Benjamin Hardy, as they turned away, ”or----”
”He has gone and his crimes have gone with him,” said Robert. ”I don't wish ever to know how he went.”
A little later the Chevalier Raymond Louis de St. Luc, Marquis de Clermont, the war now being over, sailed with his faithful Canadian attendant, Dubois, from New York for France. The parting between him and his nephew was not demonstrative, but it was marked by the deepest affection on either side.
”France has been defeated, but she is the eternal nation,” said St. Luc.
”She will be greater than ever. She will be more splendid than before.”
The De Clermonts were a powerful stock, with their roots deep in the soil. A son of St. Luc's became a famous general under Napoleon, a great cavalry leader of singular courage and capacity, and a lineal descendant of his, a general also, fought with the same courage and ability under Joffre and Foch in the World War, being especially conspicuous for his services at both the First and Second Marne. At the Second Marne he gave a heartfelt greeting to two young American officers named Lennox, calling them his cousins and brothers-in-arms, in blood as well as in spirit. They were together in the immortal counter-stroke on the morning of July 18, 1918, when Americans and French turned the tide of the World War, and sealed anew an old friends.h.i.+p. They were also together throughout those blazing one hundred and nineteen days when British, French and Americans together, old enemies and old friends who had mingled their blood on innumerable battle-fields, destroyed the greatest menace of modern times and hurled the pretender to divine honors from his throne.
Robert found his fortune to be one of the largest in the New World, but he kept it in the hands of Benjamin Hardy and David Willet, who increased it, and he became the lawyer, orator and statesman for which his talents fitted him so eminently. A marked characteristic in the life of Robert Lennox, noted by all who knew him, was his liberality of opinion. He had his share in public life, but the bitterness of politics, then so common in this country as well as others, seemed never to touch him. He was always willing to give his opponent credit for sincerity, and even to admit that his cause had justice. In his opinion the other man's point of view could always be considered.