The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  The party leaves Rheims at Martinmas, November 11. It is a four-day journey. On November 15 they reach the suburbs of Paris. At the coaching-inn of La Vilette, Colonel John calls a hackney-coach and leaves the chaise and driver. He omits to provide money for their keep. The driver begins to think he will have to sell the horse to pay for the oats. He rambles Paris, on the look-out for his vanished passenger. One day he spots him, and accosts him:

  “Why do you stay so long?”

  “I am not accountable to you,” says Colonel John shortly.

  The rebuked servant goes back to La Vilette and keeps on waiting.

  (On Friday, November 21, the police note the presence of “M. Duvernes” at the Croix de Fer. On Saturday at midnight, “Duvernes” absconds with a boy-child.)

  After eight or nine days at Paris, that is, on November 23 or 24, the Colonel and his party come back to La Vilette with the blond child Sholto. The chaise sets out for Rheims. Colonel John is in fine spirits. He has hired a horse, and bought a saddle, and rides along beside the chaise. Sometimes he makes the driver ride, and himself mounts the box to drive. When they get back to Rheims, he sends back the horse. He forgets to keep the saddle. His mind is not on such details.…

  To Andrew Stuart it was as clear as the sun at noon-day what Colonel John was doing at Paris while the horse was eating his head off at La Vilette. It added up to complete conviction; Sholto was the rope-dancer’s boy. One question only remained:

  Whose child was Archie, the heir of Douglas?

  Having at present some agreeable news to communicate, I cannot think of delaying a moment to communicate them to you, it is no less than the discovery of the father and mother of the eldest of the supposed twins.…

  (ANDREW STUART TO WILLIAM JOHNSTONE, August 11, 1763)

  Chapter IX

  On July 24, 1763, every priest in Paris mounted his pulpit and read a proclamation to the faithful. It was as good as a romance. It recited how “Quidam,” Somebody, in the years 1748 and 1749, had set about lifting French babies for his own nefarious purposes. In 1749 he had lifted the rope-dancer’s boy. Whose child had he lifted in July 1748?

  Every priest in Paris charged his hearers, upon pain of excommunication, to reveal what they might know that would answer that question.

  Having induced the authorities to promulgate this proclamation or “Monitoire,” Andrew Stuart had nothing to do but wait. He had his beautiful Duchess to dance attendance on, for she could no longer linger about the English Court while her boy’s cause thus hung in the balance.

  Nothing happened. On Sunday, July 31, the Monitoire was read again. Still nothing happened. The Douglas front was quiescent; the bustling Duchess Peggy was off for Scotland. Duchess Betty got tired of waiting, and prepared to follow her without delay.

  On August 5 Andrew Stuart was busy among the witnesses at Saint-Laurent. Madame Sanry was in great affliction; someone had told her that her boy had died in Scotland. She tried not to believe it, preferring to think that he was alive, and the heir of Douglas. Stuart could offer her no comfort.

  From this painful scene Andrew Stuart returned at evening to the Hôtel de Tours. He met lawyer Doutremont just coming out at the door. He had come to bid adieu to the departing Duchess of Hamilton—and to tell Andrew Stuart some news of importance. There had been a revelation. It was in the parish of Sainte-Marguerite, and it sounded like their affair.

  Again Andrew Stuart went to a French curé, and again he got but partial satisfaction. There had indeed been a revelation; a glass-worker’s baby had been carried off in July 1748. His name was Jacques Louis Mignon. More the curé would not say; it was his business to impart the matter to the authorities, not to the Hamilton agents.

  From the curé Andrew Stuart hurried to tell the news to lawyer D’Anjou, and then hastened back to the Hôtel de Tours. He found a bustle in the court-yard. The post-horses were set to the coach, the lackeys were running with the cloak-bags; the Duchess of Hamilton was on point of departure.

  When her Grace heard what Andrew Stuart had found out, she ordered the horses back to the stables. England could wait.

  So could her Grace the Duchess of Hamilton and all her lackeys, lawyers, understrappers, and men of business. The curé coolly sent his documents to the authorities by express courier “to prevent all inconveniencies,” and let the Hamilton faction cool their heels.

  In five days Andrew Stuart had had enough of that. He had no mind to wait another month upon some priest’s convenience. He determined to track his man down.

  His only clue was that Mignon was a glass-worker. Andrew Stuart resolved to inquire for him at the glass manufactory. He marshalled a party to go thither under the guise of tourists. There was his brother Jack, the French lawyer D’Anjou, and a brace of touring Scotsmen, Mr. John Fordyce, and Mr. George Dempster, M.P. On a beautiful summer day they all went down to the glass manufactory. There the party went on a guided tour to watch the glass-polishers at work. Jack Stuart alone hung behind to pump the porter at the gate.

  “Do you know of a child that was carried away some years ago?”

  “Yes,” said the porter, whose memory had been very recently refreshed. “It was the child of one of the workmen here.”

  “Does he work here still?”

  “No, he works for a man who makes small glasses; but he can be found, he dwells in this quarter. His affair makes a great noise since the Monitoire. Only yesterday Mademoiselle Guynette spoke of it to me. She said she had been in revelation with the curé, for she is the daughter of old Madame Guynette, now dead, and it was Madame Guynette who was first applied to to find a child.”

  “Pray send for this Mademoiselle Guynette.”

  Mademoiselle Guynette soon came, a ribbon-maker about thirty-six years old, clear-minded and positive. The news was spreading in the quarter, and she was followed by a straggle of the curious who had a mind to stare. Many of the workmen downed tools to come and stare too.

  “In the 1748,” she told Jack Stuart, “my late mother and the Mignons lodged in the same house. I have heard her tell it a hundred times. She sold rolls at the door of Notre-Dame, and her friend sold books at a bulk hard by. One day a gentleman came there to my mother. He asked her to find him two children, or one, with blue eyes. My mother was willing, and procured one Madame Charlan to bring her baby to the door of the Cathedral; but he was not taken. Thereupon my mother bethought herself of the Mignon baby, who was then two or three weeks old, and she spoke to Madame Mignon.”

  It was time to hear from the Mignons. Jack Stuart sent Mademoiselle Guynette to fetch the glass-polisher, while he himself hurried to tell the sight-seeing party that there was better sport afoot than watching the glass-workers. They all trooped back to the porter’s lodge, followed by another contingent of the curious.

  At the porter’s lodge they found that Mignon had arrived, a poorly dressed old fellow of perhaps sixty-six, wig-less, so that they could see he had kept his rough head of chestnut hair. They looked with interest at the colour of his eyes. Lady Jane’s eyes had been deep violet; Sir John’s eyes were mismatched, one blue, one hazel. This man’s eyes were brown.

  Old Mignon told his story readily, for it had made a deep impression on him. The British party, and all the gapers, listened intently. When his story was told, he proposed that these gentlemen, who showed such a flattering interest in his family, should step with him to his humble lodging, where perhaps they would find his wife returned from her day’s work as charwoman to the laundresses.

  So the entire crowd moved into the rue Traversière, where the starers had the pleasure of seeing the Britishers meet a woman in the street. She was in working-garb, and she regarded with astonishment the crowd of quality and commonalty following the glass-polisher. It was Madame Mignon.

  Andrew Stuart stared at her in her turn. He saw a countenance a little broad, the colour tawnied by the sun, the features worn by a life of struggle and marred by the small-pox, but still retaining traces of the attract
ion she must have possessed as a girl. He thought she looked remarkably like Archie Douglas.

  They mounted with her to her mean lodging, and entered into a room barely furnished with the simplest necessities of life. There, while the curious milled in the street and choked the stair, she told how a plausible stranger had carried off her child. She shed tears as she spoke.…

  It is a day in July 1748. On the plaza of Notre-Dame are crowded the many basket-women and peddlers who set up their pitch there. The widow Guynette stands at her bulk in the aroma of fresh rolls. Near-by the bookseller spreads her books. Across the plaza comes a soldierly figure, a man of fifty-five or sixty. Widow Guynette notices that he has the air of a Milord Englishman, and when he speaks to her he speaks like a foreigner.

  “Might you know, Madame, of anyone who could lend for a time two young infants newly born?”

  Madame Guynette stares at this odd request. Rumors are rife that there is a Prince in France stricken with leprosy, and his doctors have prescribed for it baths of the blood of babies. Perhaps this is one of his minions assigned to this loathsome traffic. The stranger sees her surprise, and hastens to come forward with an explanation:

  “My wife has lain in of twins, and they are dead. She will be so afflicted should she find it out, that there is reason to fear for her life if we do not present her with living children, and make her think they are hers, until she is quite recovered.”

  Madame Guynette shrugs; it is a difficult assignment.

  “Or,” says the persuasive stranger, “if two cannot be found, one would keep her happy, and I will tell her the other is too feeble to be brought to her.”

  That sounds easier. Madame Guynette promises to look out for a brace of boy babies; no commodity is commoner than beggar’s brats in the quarter where she dwells.

  “Let them be blond babies,” adds the stranger, who is himself white and ruddy, “and resembling each other as much as possible.”

  Widow Guynette executes her commission. She goes to Madame Charlan, and asks her to bring her baby, Anthony, to the church of Notre-Dame. Anthony is rising six weeks old, a handsome blue-eyed child. Madame Charlan brings him, and carries him away again.

  In the same crowded ant-hill with Widow Guynette lives Madame Mignon. Two weeks ago she bore a boy child. He is a fine bouncing child, and his eyes are blue enough. Madame Guynette talks to Madame Mignon.

  “If you incline to make your child’s fortune, and perhaps your own, you have no more to do but lend your child to this gentleman, it is just such a blond baby as he is seeking.”

  “The gentleman may go to the foundling hospital,” replies Madame Mignon, very dubious, “there he will find them of all colours.”

  “Think of it, Madame,” Guynette urges her.

  “I will speak of it to my husband.”

  The young woman, toying with the temptation, goes right off to her husband where he is polishing glasses at the glass-works, and tells him of this strange proposal to borrow their child. Mignon is a poor man, and has more children than one.

  “If it could take me away from my work, which is very severe, and do good to my child, I will see to it. If it be an advantage to him, we will reap benefit from it. Whatever you do in it will be well.”

  The mother goes home, and takes counsel with the neighbours. She cannot make up her mind. She consults an influential friend, a tipstaff, and he makes up her mind for her.

  “It could be an advantageous opportunity for your child,” says he.

  Shortly a daughter of Guynette’s comes for her. The gentleman is there, and wishes to see her child. She bundles the little thing into her apron, and goes.

  There is the gentleman with Mother Guynette, near the end of the portal in the church. Madame Mignon produces her boy-child with pride. He is strong and sturdy beyond his age, and has been so from birth. When they christened him on the third day they could not swathe him in a bundle like an ordinary baby; already he must have his solid little arms free.

  The gentleman examines little Jacques Louis, and finds him to his mind.

  While the gentleman is studying the child, the mother is studying the gentleman. She sees a man tall and strong-made, wearing a plain chestnut-coloured coat without garnish, and over his wig a hat with large brims but no lace. His skin is fair, but a little sun-burned. He is of good mien, and well-built. Something about him decides her to trust him. She agrees to hand over her child on the morrow.

  Early the next day she goes to Mass at the church of Saint-Esprit, to know what God will inspire her to do. God seems to be of one mind with the tipstaff. She goes home and asks her husband to hurry to the glass-works and come home early to help her. He cannot stay home; today is Thursday, the day when they take in the piecework and pay the workers; but he promises to report early, and get his pay, and be back betimes.

  Madame Mignon dresses the baby in his best for his big adventure. His best is poor enough. She is so ashamed of his rags that she borrows a napkin from a neighbour to wrap him in.

  “Are you going to give your child,” demands the neighbour incredulously, “to a man of whom you know neither the name nor the abode?”

  “I will take care of that,” says Madame Mignon confidently.

  When the husband comes back from the glass manufactory, they are ready to depart. The child is swaddled in the neighbour’s napkin; his elder brother of six is slicked in his best. They take up the child and all set out for that fatal rendezvous before Notre-Dame.

  The gentleman is waiting for them at the same place. With him is a woman. The Mignons study her too. She has something the air of a chambermaid, a woman bulky enough, with a broad white face and powder in her hair. She has augmented her bulk by wearing a white summer dress, with ruffles. Her clothes and head-dress seem to Mignon entirely like a foreigner, and not in the fashion of a lady of Paris. Mignon thinks she is English. He thinks he knows how to recognize the English: they wear little hats, sleeves like a bundle, and clothes of a bluish colour. Besides, the man speaks French with an accent, and the woman speaks it not at all.

  The gentleman has a mind to the child; but he wants to make sure it is without blemish.

  “Where can we change his clothes?”

  The bookseller has been staring with all her eyes. Now she gets into the affair:

  “Take him to my lodging, it is hard by.”

  Accordingly they go thither, led by the bookseller with her key, and the others in her wake, the father and mother with the sturdy baby, the go-between Guynette, and the wide-eyed little tag-tail of six. The foreign woman looks at the lad, and offers her only intelligible remark:

  “What a pretty little chap!”

  Arrived in the room, the strangers make much of the baby, praising him in their own language.

  “What does the lady say?” asks the mother.

  “Mademoiselle says,” translates the gentleman, “that the child resembles me.”

  Madame Mignon takes offence. She seems to feel that this careless remark may reflect on her, and lead the bystanders to suspect that this transaction is a farce in which the gentleman is recovering a by-blow of his own.

  “You are not his father,” she retorts saucily, “you did not beget him. When the child shall have had the smallpox,” she adds argumentatively, “as his father and mother have, he may resemble us.”

  Then she undresses her baby. The foreign man and woman look him over, and see that he is sound and without flaw. The gentleman produces a basket of baby clothes. He says they are the clothes of his twins that are dead, and all shall belong to her son. The foreign woman begins to dress the child in his new clothes. The mother watches closely. She approves of the dimity and fustian, the hippons and barrow-coats; but the swathe-band horrifies her. Instead of good strong, if coarse, quilted cloth, such as she had upon him, they propose to swathe him in a flimsy fold of linen, like a pillow-case doubled over. She thinks it too flimsy to support the child’s back. She takes the child and dresses him herself, determinedly
bracing him in her own heavy quilted swathe-band before she puts on the daintier new outside garments. Then he is ready to go.

  “We will keep him six weeks,” says the gentleman, “or two months at most, and when I return him, I will deliver you from poverty, and do good to all your family.”

  They ask him for his address; but this the gentleman seems unwilling to give. “I will let you see him under the trees in the public walk of the half-moon at the Porte Saint-Antoine any time you please,” he offers instead.

  “You will need a wet-nurse,” says Mignon. “You may present the mother as the wet-nurse.”

  “No,” says the gentleman, and offers a plausible reason: “My lady will ask why we have changed the nurse; and in taking care of the child, you may give yourself away, and cause her pain before she is able to bear it. Nay, Madame, take confidence,” says the gentleman, throwing three golden louis into her lap.

  The eyes of the parents are blinded; they succumb to the gentleman’s charm. Madame Mignon regards the gold in her lap.

  “I will not take it,” says she, “for I am not a seller of human flesh, and I will not sell my child.”

  “It is not for that,” says the gentleman, “but to pay for putting away your milk, and make you easy.”

  He distributes more largesse. Mignon gets twenty-four sous to drink the gentleman’s health. The gentleman turns to the six-year-old.

  “For you, twelve sous to buy cherries.”

  “By putting something to it,” observes his mother suggestively, “it will serve to buy a hat to my son, to have the honour of saluting the gentleman when he sees him again.”

  The gentleman waives the salute and puts nothing to the twelve sous.

  Now the silent foreign woman takes up the new-bought child, and the strangers depart. On the way down the gentleman pauses in a window embrasure for an afterthought. He pulls out a pencil and a green note-book, and writes down the address of the child’s parents.