In the Valley | Page 9

with him this time a son of eight years--my Mr. Stewart. This
boy, called Thomas, was reared on the skirts of the vicious French
court, now in a Jesuit school, now a poor relation in a palace, always
reflecting in the vicissitudes of his condition the phases of his sire's
vagrant existence. Sometimes this father would be moneyed and
prodigal, anon destitute and mean, but always selfish to the core, and
merrily regardless alike of canons and of consequences. He died, did
this adventurous gentleman, in the very year which took off the first
George in Hanover, and left his son a very little money, a mountain of
debts, and an injunction of loyalty to the Stewarts.
Young Thomas, then nearly twenty, thought much for a time of
becoming a priest, and was always a favorite with the British Jesuits
about Versailles, but this in the end came to nothing. He abandoned the
religious vocation, though not the scholar's tastes, and became a soldier,
for the sake of a beautiful face which he saw once when on a secret
visit to England. He fell greatly in love, and ventured to believe that the

emotion was reciprocated. As Jacob served Laban for his daughter, so
did Tom Lynch serve the Pretender's cause for the hope of some day
returning, honored and powerful, to ask the hand of that sweet daughter
of the Jacobite gentleman.
One day there came to him at Paris, to offer his sword to the Stewarts, a
young Irish gentleman who had been Tom's playmate in
childhood--Anthony Cross. This gallant, fresh-faced, handsome youth
was all ablaze with ardor; he burned to achieve impossible deeds, to
attain glory at a stroke. He confessed to Tom over their dinner, or the
wine afterward perhaps, that his needs were great because Love drove.
He was partly betrothed to the daughter of an English Jacobite--yet she
would marry none but one who had gained his spurs under his rightful
king. They drank to the health of this exacting, loyal maiden, and Cross
gave her name. Then Tom Lynch rose from the table, sick at heart, and
went away in silence.
Cross never knew of the hopes and joys he had unwittingly crushed.
The two young men became friends, intimates, brothers, serving in half
the lands of Europe side by side. The maiden, an orphan now, and of
substance and degree, came over at last to France, and Lynch stood by,
calm-faced, and saw her married to his friend. She only pleasantly
remembered him; he never forgot her till his death.
Finally, in 1745, when both men were nearing middle age, the time for
striking the great blow was thought to have arrived. The memory of
Lynch's lineage was much stronger with the romantic young Pretender
of his generation than had been the rightfully closer tie between their
more selfish fathers, and princely favor gave him a prominent position
among those who arranged that brilliant melodrama of Glenfinnan and
Edinburgh and Preston Pans, which was to be so swiftly succeeded by
the tragedy of Culloden. The two friends were together through it
all--in its triumph, its disaster, its rout--but they became separated
afterward in the Highlands, when they were hiding for their lives. Cross,
it seems, was able to lie secure until his wife's relatives, through some
Whig influence, I know not what, obtained for him amnesty first, then
leave to live in England, and finally a commission under the very
sovereign he had fought. His comrade, less fortunate, at least contrived
to make way to Ireland and then to France. There, angered and
chagrined at unjust and peevish rebukes offered him, he renounced the

bad cause, took the name of Stewart, and set sail to the New World.
This was my patron's story, as I gathered it in later years, and which
perhaps I have erred in bringing forward here among my childish
recollections. But, it seems to belong in truth much more to this day on
which, for the first and last time I beheld Major Cross, than to the
succeeding period when his son became an actor in the drama of my
life.
* * * * *
The sun was now well up in the sky, and the snow was melting. While I
still moodily eyed my young enemy and wondered how I should go
about to acquit myself of the task laid upon me--to play with him--he
solved the question by kicking into the moist snow with his boots and
calling out:
"Aha! we can build a fort with this, and have a fine attack. Bob, make
me a fort!"
Seeing that he bore no malice, my temper softened toward him a little,
and I set to helping the negro in his work. There was a great pile of logs