This John Kirkland had sacrificed all things, and, alone with his
beloved dead in the darkness of that narrow charnel house, it seemed to
him that there was nothing left for him except to cleave to those fallen
fortunes and patiently await the issue.
He had fought in many battles and had escaped with a few scars; and he was
carrying his daughter to Louvain, intending to place her in the charge of
her great-aunt, Madame de Montrond's half sister, who was head of a convent
in that city, a safe and pious shelter, where the child might be reared in
her mother's faith.
Lady Kirkland, the only daughter of the Marquise de Montrond, one of Queen
Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting, had been a papist, and, although Sir
John had adhered steadfastly to the principles of the Reformed Church,
he had promised his bride, and the Marquise, her mother, that if their
nuptials were blessed with offspring, their children should be educated
in the Roman faith--a promise difficult of performance in a land where a
stormy tide ran high against Rome, and where Popery was a scarlet spectre
that alarmed the ignorant and maddened the bigoted. And now, duly provided
with a safe conduct from the regicide, Bradshaw, he was journeying to the
city where he was to part with his daughter for an indefinite period.
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