A Modern Telemachus | Page 8

mind, Laurent, Victorine goes with us. She went to be measured
for a new pair of slices on purpose!'
'Ah! I thought I should disembarrass myself of a great troublesome
Irishman!'
'No!' retorted the boy, 'you knew Laurent was going, for Maitre Hebert
had just come in to say he must have a lackey's suit!'
'Yes,' said Estelle, 'that was when you took me in your arms and kissed
me, and said you would follow Madame la Comtesse to the end of the
world.'
The old nurse laughed heartily, but Victorine cried out, 'Does
Mademoiselle think I am going to follow naughty little girls who invent
follies? It is still free to me to change my mind. Poor Simon Claquette
is gnawing his heart out, and he is to be left concierge!'
The clock at the palace chimed eleven, Estelle took her brother's hand,
Honor rose with little Jacques in her arms, Victorine paced beside her,
and Lanty as La Jeunesse followed, puffing out his breast, and wielding
his cane, as they all went home to dejeuner.
Twenty-nine years before the opening of this narrative, just after the
battle of Boyne Water had ruined the hopes of the Stewarts in Ireland,

Sir Ulick Burke had attended James II. in his flight from Waterford;
and his wife had followed him, attended by her two faithful servants,
Patrick Callaghan, and his wife Honor, carrying her mistress's child on
her bosom, and her own on her back.
Sir Ulick, or Le Chevalier Bourke, as the French called him, had no
scruple in taking service in the armies of Louis XIV. Callaghan
followed him everywhere, while Honor remained a devoted attendant
on her lady, doubly bound to her by exile and sorrow.
Little Ulick Burke's foster-sister died, perhaps because she had always
been made second to him through all the hardships and exposure of the
journey. Other babes of both lady and nurse had succumbed to the
mortality which beset the children of that generation, and the only
survivors besides the eldest Burke and one daughter were the two
youngest of each mother, and they had arrived so nearly at the same
time that Honor Callaghan could again be foster-mother to Phelim
Burke, a sickly child, reared with great difficulty.
The family were becoming almost French. Sir Ulick was an intimate
friend of one of the noblest men of the day, James Fitz-James, Marshal
Duke of Berwick, who united military talent, almost equal to that of his
uncle of Marlborough, to an unswerving honour and integrity very rare
in those evil times. Under him, Sir Ulick fought in the campaigns that
finally established the House of Bourbon upon the throne of Spain, and
the younger Ulick or Ulysse, as his name had been classicalised and
Frenchified, was making his first campaign as a mere boy at the time of
the battle of Almanza, that solitary British defeat, for which our
national consolation is that the French were commanded by an
Englishman, the Duke of Berwick, and the English by a Frenchman, the
Huguenot Rubigne, Earl of Galway. The first English charge was,
however, fatal to the Chevalier Bourke, who fell mortally wounded,
and in the endeavour to carry him off the field the faithful Callaghan
likewise fell. Sir Ulick lived long enough to be visited by the Duke, and
to commend his children to his friend's protection.
Berwick was held to be dry and stiff, but he was a faithful friend, and
well redeemed his promise. The eldest son, young as he was, obtained
as wife the daughter of the Marquis de Varennes, and soon
distinguished himself both in war and policy, so as to receive the title
of Comte de Bourke.

The French Church was called on to provide for the other two children.
The daughter, Alice, became a nun in one of the Parisian convents, with
promises of promotion. The younger son, Phelim, was weakly in health,
and of intellect feeble, if not deficient, and was almost dependent on
the devoted care and tenderness of his foster-brother, Laurence
Callaghan. Nobody was startled when Berwick's interest procured for
the dull boy of ten years old the Abbey of St. Eudoce in Champagne.
To be sure the responsibilities were not great, for the Abbey had been
burnt down a century and a half ago by the Huguenots, and there had
never been any monks in it since, so the only effect was that little
Phelim Burke went by the imposing title of Monsieur l'Abbe de St.
Eudoce, and his family enjoyed as much of the revenues of the estates
of the Abbey as the Intendant thought proper to transmit to them. He
was, to a certain degree, ecclesiastically educated, having just memory
enough to retain for recitation the tasks that Lanty helped him to learn,
and