Chapter XII · CONCLUSION.

With the civil war in Canada, our story has little more to do.

Suffice it that for a brief time, Roland Ruthven, after seeing Madame Darnel and her daughter safe in their chateau of St. Eustache at Montreal, had again to join the troops, who advanced to St. Benoit, where, so great was the terror excited by the recent victorious assault, that no opposition was offered, and the rebels sent delegates to say humbly, that they would, without conditions, lay their arms down, and they were conveyed under escort to Montreal, to meet the meed of their crimes.

The good result of all these operations was the return of the colonists to their homes, and the disappearance of all armed parties of insurgents. About the same season, however, in the following year, when the deep snows of the Canadian winter began to fall, there was a second rising in Lower Canada; but it was again crushed by the energy and gallantry of Sir John Colborne at Napierville, and for these and other services, the Queen created the fine old soldier a peer of Great Britain.

Prior to these events some startling changes occurred in the history of the two principal characters in our little narrative.

The Darnel estate at St. Eustache was utterly destroyed; the mansion had been ruined or burned, the lands ravaged, and the circumstances of the once wealthy widow were sorely impaired; her horses, carriages, and many other luxuries had to be dispensed with and economy become the new order of the day; but now, safe at her own home at Montreal, all the beauty and gaiety of Aurelia returned, and after all she had undergone, even poverty seemed, a slight matter to face—as yet.

"O Roland darling!" said she, with a little laugh, as they stood together in a window of the château one evening in the spring, looking towards Montreal steeped in the sunset, and where the greenery of the woods was deepening faster than it ever does in Britain at the same season, vegetation maturing with wondrous rapidity the moment the snow disappears; "O, Roland—I am poor as yourself now, and yet you still talk of marrying me and going to India; but could I take my poor mamma there?"

Roland's loving countenance fell.

"You lost your noble estate by a will; I my seigniory—or nearly all of it—by civil war; our fortune is ruined."

"Yet—we must not—cannot part, after all—after all!"

"Oh no—no!" murmured the girl, fondly and plaintively, with her sweet face pillowed on his breast.

Next day Roland arrived with a face full of such excitement, wonder, and so many varying expressions, that Aurelia knew not what to make of him and his incoherences for some time at least.

That morning the regimental postman brought him a letter, the first words of which, however much expected, made a lump rise in his throat.

It was from his legal agents, Messrs. Hook and Crook, Writers to the Signet, and dated from Edinburgh:—

"DEAR SIR,"—(It used to be my dear sir once) "We beg to acquaint you, with much regret, that we have now traced out and learned authentically who are the heirs of the marriage of your deceased uncle, the late Mr. Philip Ruthven, eldest son of General Roland Ruthven, who went to Jamaica."

Roland felt very sick as he read, and paused; then summing up courage, he resumed the obnoxious epistle, and read on.

"From the latter place that gentleman went to Canada, where he married a lady of Montreal, by whom he had several children, all of whom are dead save one, Miss Aurelia Darnel de St. Eustache" ("Oh, my God!" thought Roland, "what miracle is this?"), for he took the name of Darnel to please the family of his wife, who was the daughter of a wealthy French seigneur.

"We regret to be the medium of such very bad news, but of course are now taking the usual legal measures to execute the will of the late General Ruthven, according to your own instructions."

So Aurelia was his cousin, the daughter of the lost Philip, who had quitted Scotland in disgust, never to return, and she was the heiress of Ardgowrie!

And he—what was he? For weal or woe her affianced husband. It was all like the plot of a drama; and some time elapsed before Roland could realise the whole situation; but there was the prosaic letter of the lawyers, which, under other circumstances, might have seemed to cut his very heart-strings.

Now how innocuous it was!

Another hour found him by the side of Aurelia, and to attempt to record all the explanations and loving incoherences, astonishment and joy of that particular interview would be a difficult task indeed; but even while speaking to her, and while her voice was in his ear, Roland seemed to see before him the cabinet of Scindia, with the now baffled secret it contained.

If Roland had now, in a modified sense, to blush at, and feel shame, for his father's duplicity in the matter of the will—a duplicity born of the various emotions we have already described, dislike between brothers, temptation offered on one hand, the dread of losing the ambitious girl he loved on the other—and then the total disappearance of Philip, he had to blush before one who had accepted him as a husband when their positions were very different, when all the odds of wealth and landed property were, as once again, in her favour, and he was still the penniless soldier with his sword alone.

And Roland, as he looked on Aurelia again, recalled the youthful portrait of his lost uncle Philip at Ardgowrie, and saw, or thought he saw, how closely she resembled it.

We have little more to add.

The Darnel estates, we have said, were ruined; but Ardgowrie was yet in all its baronial glory; to Ardgowrie they would go, and sell the former, so it was all settled ere the Canadian summer came swiftly on; thus the reader may be assured that they were married long before the month of August, so old Elspat Gorm's "fatal day" of the Ruthvens was fully evaded. Nor need we add, though we do so, that jolly Hector Logan was groomsman, and old General Colborne gave the bride away.

In winning Aurelia, Poland regained his inheritance, but he never left the old Royal Regiment, or returned finally to Ardgowrie, till he had, like his father before him, been long a popular colonel of the corps.