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I have escaped at length and am once more master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I hope so." Perhaps the lapse may have been worse by contrast than in itself. The intensity of pure affection which pervades all Wolfe's letters is sufficient proof that he had never abandoned himself to sensuality to an extent sufficient to corrupt his heart.
The cloud fell from Wolfe's brow, and his eye gazed, musingly and rapt, upon vacancy.
In them the writer professed to be actuated by no other feeling than admiration for the unbending integrity which had characterized Wolfe's life, and the desire that sincerity in any principles, however they might differ from his own, should not be rewarded only with indigence and ruin.
The barbarities in question consisted in the frequent scalping and mutilating of sentinels and men on outpost duty, perpetrated no less by Canadians than by Indians. Wolfe's object was twofold: first, to cause the militia to desert, and, secondly, to exhaust the colony. Rangers, light infantry, and Highlanders were sent to waste the settlements far and wide.
He glanced at Montcalm on the black horse, and St. Luc on the white, and then at the scarlet and silent ranks of Wolfe's army. But the French were coming fast, and he knew that silence would soon burst into sudden and terrible action. "The French lines are being thrown into confusion by the unevenness of the ground and the rapidity of their advance," said Willet.
But the worst can by constant intercourse corrupt the best; and the barriers of good and evil, often confused in Wolfe's mind by the blindness of his passions, seemed, as his intercourse with these lawless and ruffian associates thickened, to be at last utterly broken down and swept away.
He read Wolfe's victory aright, and divined its far-reaching consequence.
Wolfe's army consisted of only 4,828 men, Montcalm's of 7,520 men, exclusive of Indians. The English loss amounted to 55 killed and 607 wounded, that of the French to nearly a thousand killed and wounded; and a thousand made prisoners.
Lawrence; the frigate Lizard and the sloop-of-war Hunter, pigmy representatives at Quebec of Britain's might upon the sea, lay near Wolfe's Cove ready to attack him if he tried to cross. But the Indians brought canoes and on the night of November 13th, silently and unobserved, they carried Arnold's force across the river almost under the bows of the ships watching for them.
'I leave to Colonel Oughton, Colonel Carleton, Colonel Howe, and Colonel Warde a thousand pounds each. 'All my books and papers, both here and in England, I leave to Colonel Carleton. Wolfe's mother, who died five years later, showed the same confidence by appointing Carleton her executor. With the fall of Quebec in 1759 Carleton disappears from the Canadian scene till 1766.
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