g
garnished with the heads of the Scottish rebels executed in 1746.] and
even its bleak and mouldered jaws command you to be a man. I ask you,
in the name of God and of your country, will you draw your sword and
go with me to Carlisle, were it but to lay your father's head, now the
perch of the obscene owl and carrion crow and the scoff of every ribald
clown, in consecrated earth as befits his long ancestry?'

Darsie, unprepared to answer an appeal urged with so much passion, and
not doubting a direct refusal would cost him his liberty or life, was
again silent.

'I see,' said his uncle, in a more composed tone, 'that it is not
deficiency of spirit, but the grovelling habits of a confined education,
among the poor-spirited class you were condemned to herd with, that
keeps you silent. You scarce yet believe yourself a Redgauntlet; your
pulse has not yet learned the genuine throb that answers to the summons
of honour and of patriotism.'

'I trust,' replied Darsie, at last, 'that I shall never be found
indifferent to the call of either; but to answer them with effect--even
were I convinced that they now sounded in my ear--I must see some
reasonable hope of success in the desperate enterprise in which you
would involve me. I look around me, and I see a settled government--an
established authority--a born Briton on the throne--the very Highland
mountaineers, upon whom alone the trust of the exiled family reposed,
assembled into regiments which act under the orders of the existing
dynasty. [The Highland regiments were first employed by the celebrated
Earl of Chatham, who assumed to himself no small degree of praise for
having called forth to the support of the country and the government,
the valour which had been too often directed against both.] France has
been utterly dismayed by the tremendous lessons of the last war, and
will hardly provoke another. All without and within the kingdom is
adverse to encountering a hopeless struggle, and you alone, sir, seem
willing to undertake a desperate enterprise.'

'And would undertake it were it ten times more desperate; and have
agitated it when ten times the obstacles were interposed. Have I forgot
my brother's blood? Can I--dare I even now repeat the Pater Noster,
since my enemies and the murderers remain unforgiven? Is there an art I
have not practised--a privation to which I have not submitted, to bring
on the crisis, which I now behold arrived? Have I not been a vowed and a