AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR."

"Half a league, half a league,

Half a league, onward,

Into the Valley of Death,

Rode the Six Hundred!"

TENNYSON.

LONDON:

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS

THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE

NEW YORK: 416 BROOME STREET

1875

*ONE OF THE SIX HUNDRED.*

*CHAPTER I.*

To be handsome, young, and twenty-two,

With nothing else on earth to do;

But all day long to bill and coo,

It were a pleasant calling.--THACKERAY.

I was just in the act of humming the above verse, when the following

announcement was put into my hand--

"Regimental Orders.--Head-quarters, Maidstone, December 31st.

"As the regiment is to be held in readiness for foreign service in

spring, captains of troops will report to Lieutenant and Adjutant

Studhome, for the information of the commanding officer, on the state of

the saddlery, the holsters and lance-buckets; and the horses must be all

re-shod under the immediate inspection of the veterinary surgeon and

Farrier-Sergeant Snaffles.

"Leave of absence to the 31st proximo is granted to Lieutenant Newton

Calderwood Norcliff, in consequence of his urgent private affairs."

"Hah! this is what most concerns _me_," I exclaimed, as I read the

foregoing, and then handed the order-book, a squat vellum-bound quarto,

to the orderly-serjeant who was in waiting.

"Any idea of where we are likely to go, sir?" he asked.

"The East, of course."

"So say the men in the barracks; for the present, good-bye, sir," said

he, as he wheeled about on his spurred heel, and saluted; "I wish you a

pleasant journey."

"Thanks, Stapylton," said I; "and now to be off by the night train for

London and the north. Ugh! the last night of December; I shall have a

cold journey of it."

Despatching my man, Willie Pitblado--of whom more hereafter--to the

mess-house to report that I should not dine there that evening, I

proposed at once to start for home, resolved to make the most of the

favour granted me--leave between returns, as it is technically termed.

I propose to give the story of my own adventures, my experiences of

life, or autobiography (what you will); and this I shall do, in the face

of a certain writer, who asserts, with some truth, doubtless, that she

does not "believe that there was, or could be in the world, a wholly

true, candid, and unreserved biography, revealing all the dispositions,

or even, without exception, _all the facts of any existence_. Indeed,"

she adds, "the thing is next to impossible; since, in that case, the

subject of the biography must be a man or woman without reserve, without

delicacy, and without _those secrets_ which are inevitable even to the

most stainless spirit."

With all due deference to this fair writer, I beg to hope that such a

candid spirit may exist; and that, without violating the delicacy of

this somewhat (externally) fastidious age on the one hand, and without

prudish or hypocritical reserve on the other, I, Mr. Newton Norcliff,

will relate the plain, unvarnished story of a cavalry subaltern's life

during the stirring events of the last ten years.

My regiment was a lancer one. I need not designate it further; though,

by the way, it has always struck me as somewhat peculiar in our cavalry

of the line, that while we have our Scottish corps, the famous old

Greys, and no less than three Irish, we have not one English regiment,

provincially designated as such.

I despatched a note of thanks to the colonel, handed over my cattle to

the care of my friend Jack Studhome, the adjutant, and had a hasty

interview with Saunders M'Goldrick, our Scots paymaster--not that I wish

the reader to infer that he was my chief factor and reliance (heaven

help those in a dragoon regiment who find him so!).

Glad to escape, even for the brief period of a month, from the monotony

of routine parades, the stable duty, the barrack life, and useless

hurly-burly of Maidstone--to be free from all bother, mess, band, and

ball committees, courts-martial, and courts of inquiry; from having to

remember when this parade took place, and when that particular drill,

and all that sort of thing--glad, I say, to escape from being saluted by

soldiers and sentinels at every turn and corner, and to be once again

lord of my own proper person, I relinquished my gay lancer trappings,

and resumed the less pretending mufti of the civilian--a suit of warm

and strong heather-mixture tweed--and about nine o'clock P.M. found

myself, with some light travelling baggage, my gun-case, railway rugs,

&c. (in care of Willie Pitblado, who was attired in very orthodox

livery--boots, belt, and cockade), awaiting the up train for London, at

the Maidstone station, and enjoying a last friendly chat and a cigar

with Studhome, as we promenaded to and fro on the platform, and talked

of the different work that would soon be cut out for us, too probably,

about the time my short leave expired.

The British fleet was already in the Bosphorus; the field of Oltenitza

had seen the terrible defeat of the Russians by the troops of Omar

Pasha, generalissimo of the Porte, avenge the recent naval massacre at

Sinope. Ere long, the Turks were to be again victorious at Citate.

General Luders was about to force his way into the Dobrudcha; Britain,

France, Russia, Turkey, and Sardinia were gathering their hosts for the

strife; and amid these serious events, that absurdity might not be

wanting, the sly broad-brims and popularity-hunters of the Peace Society

sent a deputation to the Emperor Nicholas, to expostulate with him on

the wickedness of his ways.

"Egad! if the weather proves cold here, what will you find it at home,

in Scotland?" said Studhome, as we trod to and fro; for there is no

knocking the idea out of an Englishman's head that the distance of some

four hundred miles or so must make a more than Muscovite difference in

soil and temperature; but it was cold--intensely so.

The air was clear, and amid the blue ether the stars sparkled brightly.

Snow, white and glistening, covered all the roofs of the houses and the

line of the railway, and the Medway shone coldly, like polished silver,

under the seven arches of its bridge, in the light of the rising moon;

and now, with a shrill, vicious whistle, and many a rapidly iterated

grunt and clank, came the iron horse that was to bear me on my way, as

it tore into the station, with its mane of smoke, and its red

bull's-eyes that shed two steady flakes of light along the snow-covered

line of rails.

The passengers were all muffled to their noses, and their breath coated

and obscured the glasses of the carefully-closed windows.

Pitblado brought me _Punch_, the _Times_, and "Bradshaw," and then

rushed to secure his second-class seat; Studhome bade me farewell, and

retired to join Wilford, Scriven, and some others of the corps, who

usually met at a billiard-room, near the barracks, leaving me to arrange

my several wrappers, and enjoy the society of one whom he laughingly

termed my railway belle--a stout female with a squalling imp, whom,

notwithstanding my secret and confidential tip of half-a-crown, the

deceitful guard had thrust upon me; and then, with another shriek and a

steady and monotonous clanking, the train swept out of the station. The

town vanished with its county court house, barracks, river, and the fine

tower of All Saints' Church; and in a twinkling I could survey the

snow-covered country stretching for miles on each side of me, as we

scoured along the branch line to the Paddock Wood, or Maidstone Road

Junction, of the London and Dover Railway, where I got the up train from

Canterbury.

Swiftly went the first-class express. The fifty-six miles were soon

done, and in an hour I was amid the vast world, the human wilderness of

London, even while worthy Jack Studhome's merry smile and hearty

good-bye seemed to linger before me. How glorious it is to travel thus,

with all the speed and luxury that money in these our days can command!

A hundred years hence how will they travel--our grandchildren? Heaven

alone knows.

I was now four-and-twenty. I had been six years with the lancers, and

already the novelty of the service--though loving it not the less--was

gone; and I was glad, as I have said, to escape for a month from a life

of enforced routine, and the nightly succession of balls, card and

supper parties among the garrison hacks or _passe_ belles, whose names

and flirtations are standing jokes at the messes of our ungrateful

lancers, hussars, and dragoon guards, wherever they are stationed, from

Calcutta to Colchester, and from Poonah to Piershill.

A day soon passed amid the whirl of London, and night saw me once more

seated in the _coupe_ of a well-cushioned carriage for the north.

This time I was alone, and had the ample seat all to myself, thereon to

lounge with all the ease of a sybarite; and with the aid of a

brandy-flask, cigars, and warm wrappers and plaids, prepared for the

dreary journey of a winter night.

On, on went the train!

Lights, crimson and green, flashed at times out of the darkness. Here

and there the tall poplars of the midland counties stood up, like

spectres in the moonlight, above the snow-clad meadows. Hollowly we

rumbled through the subterranean blackness of a tunnel; out in the snow

and moonlight again, amid other scenes and places. Anon, a hasty shout

from some pointsman would make me start when just on the eve of dropping

asleep; or it might be a sudden stoppage amid the lurid glare of

furnaces, forges, and coalpits, where, night and day, by spells and

gangs the ceaseless work went on. Then it was the shrill whistling and

clanking of the train, the bustle, running to and fro of men with

lanterns, the banging of doors, tramping, and voices, with the clink of

hammers upon the iron wheels, as their soundness was tested, which

announced that we were at Peterborough, at York, or Darlington.

But every station, whether we tarried or rushed past it, seemed

wonderfully alike. There were always repetitions of the same glazed

advertisements in gilt frames; the same huge purple mangold-wurzel, with

its tuft of green leaves; the same man in the hat and surtout, with the

alpaca umbrella, under the ceaseless shower of rain; Lea and Perrin's

sauce-bottles; somebody else's patent shirt; the florid posters of

_Punch_, the _Illustrated News_, and the _London Journal_; and the same

parti-coloured volumes of railway literature.

Rapidly we rushed through England. Yorkshire and its Ridings were left

behind, and now the Borders, the old land of a thousand battles and a

thousand songs, drew near--the brave green Borders, with all their

solemn hills, upheaved in the light of the faded stars.

Grey dawn of the coming day saw us traversing the fertile Merse, with

glimpses of the gloomy German sea, tumbling its whitened waves upon

bleak promontories of rock, such as Dunbar, Fastcastle, and the bare,

black headland of St. Abb. Then, as I neared home, and saw the sun

brightening on the snow-covered summits of Dirlton and Traprainlaw, many

an old and long-forgotten idea, and many a sad and affectionate thought

of the past years, came back to memory, in the dreary hour of the early

winter morning.

I have said I was but four-and-twenty then. When I had last traversed

that line of rail, it was in the sweet season of summer, when the

heather was purple on the Lammermuirs; and a sea of golden grain clothed

all the lovely valley of the Tyne. I was proceeding to join my

regiment, a raw, heedless, and impulsive boy, with bright hope and vague

ambition in his heart, and with a poor mother's tears yet wet upon his

cheek.

I had been six years with the lancers, and four of these were spent in

India. While there, my dear mother died; and the memory of the last

time when I saw her kind and affectionate face, and heard her broken

voice, as she prayed God to bless my departing steps, came vividly,

powerfully, and painfully before me.

It was on the morning when I was to leave home and her to join the

corps. Overnight, with all a boy's vanity and glowing satisfaction, I

had contemplated my gay lancer trappings, had buckled on my sword,

placed the gold cartouche-belt and glittering epaulettes on my

shoulders.

At that moment I would not have exchanged my cornetcy for the kingdom of

Scotland. These alluring trappings were the last things I thought of

and looked on ere my eyes were closed by slumber, and the grey dawn of

the next eventful day saw them still lying unpacked on the floor, when

my poor mother, pale, anxious, unslept, and with her sad eyes full of

tears, and her heart wrung with sorrow, stole softly into my room, to

look for the last time upon her sleeping boy, and her mournful and

earnest face was the first sight that met my waking eyes, when roused by

a tear that dropped upon my cheek.

I started up, and all the consciousness of the great separation that was

to ensue--the terrible wrench of heart from heart that was to

come--burst upon me. Then sword and epaulettes, cap and plume, and the

lancers, were forgotten; and throwing my arms around her neck, as I had

done in the days of childish grief, I wept like the boy I was, rather

than the man I had imagined myself to be.

I was going home now; but I should see that beloved face no more, and

her voice was hushed for ever.

In that home were others, who were kind and gentle, and who loved me

well, awaiting my arrival, and to welcome me. And there was my cousin

Cora Calderwood--she was unmarried still.

Cora I was about to see again. It seemed long, long since we had last

met, though we had frequently corresponded, for my uncle had a horror of

letter-writing; and certain it was that she had inspired the first

emotion of love in my schoolboy heart, and during my sojourn in India,

and amid the whirl and gaiety of barrack-life at Bath, at Maidstone, at

Canterbury and elsewhere, her image had lingered in my mind, more as a

pleasing memory connected with ideas of Scotland and my home, rather

than with those of a passionate or enduring attachment.

Indeed, I had just been on the point of forming that elsewhere; but now,

having no immediate attraction beside me, I began to wonder whether Cora

had grown up a beauty; how tall she was, whether she was engaged, and so

forth; whether she still remembered with pleasure the young playmate who

had left her sorely dissolved in tears, half lover and wholly friend.

As we progressed northward, and crossed the Firth of Forth, the snow

almost entirely disappeared, save on the lofty summits of the Ochil

mountains, whose slopes looked green and pleasant in the meridian sun;

and my friend Studhome, had he been with me, might have been much

surprised in finding the atmosphere warmer north of Stirling Bridge than

we found it at Maidstone--so variable is our climate.

We changed carriages at Stirling, where I was to imbibe some hot coffee,

while Pitblado looked after my baggage, and swore in no measured terms

at the slowness of an old, cynical, and hard-visaged porter, on whose

brass badge was engraved a wolf--the badge of Stirling.

"Now then, look alive, you old duffer!" I heard Willie shouting.

"Ou, aye!" replied the other slowly, with a grin on his weather-beaten

and saturnine face; "ye think yoursel' a braw chiel in your mustaches

and laced jacket--there was a time when I thocht mysel' one too."

"What do you mean?" asked Pitblado, whose dragoon air even his livery

failed to conceal.

"Mean!" retorted the other; "why, I mean that at the point o' the

bayonet I helped to carry Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo to boot; and now,

for sax baubees, I'm thankfu' to carry your bag. Sae muckle for

sodgerin'!"

"It is not very encouraging, certainly," said my man, with a smile.

"Ten years' service, two wounds, and a deferred pension of threepence

per diem," growled the other, as he threw my traps, with an oath, on the

roof of the carriage.

"What regiment, my friend?" I inquired.

"The old Scots brigade, second battalion, sir," he replied, with a

salute, as I slipped a trifle into his hand.

"The weather seems open and fine here."

"Aye," said he, with another saturnine grin; "but a green yule maketh a

fat kirkyard."

In five minutes more we were _en route_, sweeping along the little

lonely branch line, that through grassy glens, where the half-frozen

runnels oozed or gurgled among withered reeds and bracken bushes, led us

into the heart of Fife--"the kingdom," as the Scots call it; not that it

ever was so in any time of antiquity, but because the peninsular county

contains within its compact and industrious self every means and

requisite for the support of its inhabitants, independent of the produce

of the whole external world--at least, such is their boast.

I was drawing nearer and nearer home; and now my heart beat high and

happily. Every local feature and casual sound, the little thatched

cottages, with rusty, antique risps on their doors,[*] and the clatter

of the wooden looms within, were familiar to me. We swept past the

quaint town, and the tall, gaunt castle of Clackmannan, where its aged

chatelaine--the last of the old Bruce line--_knighted_ Robert Burns,

with the sword of the victor of Bannockburn, saying, dryly, that she

"had a better right to do it than _some people_," and ere long I saw the

spires that overshadow the graves of Robert I. and many a Scottish

monarch, as we glided past Dunfermline, old and grey, with its glorious

ruined palace, where Malcolm drank the blood-red wine, and where Charles

I. was born, and its steep, quaint streets covering the brow of a

sloping ridge that ends abruptly in the wooded glen of Pittencrief.

[*] The old Scottish tirling-pin--to be found now nowhere save in

Fife--in lieu of bells and knockers.

My delight was fully shared in by Willie Pitblado, my servant, the son

of old Simon, my uncle's keeper. He was a lancer in my troop, for whom

I had procured a month's furlough; thus the hedgerows where he had

bird-nested, the fields where he had sung and whistled at the plough,

the farm-gates on which he had swung for hours--a truant boy from

school--the woods of Pitrearie and Pittencrief, the abbey's old grey

walls, and the square tower that covers Bruce's grave, were all hailed

by Willie as old friends; and strange to say, his Doric Scotch came back

to his tongue with the air he breathed, though it had been nearly

well-nigh quizzed out of him by our lancers, nearly all of whom were

English.

He was a smart, handsome, and soldier-like fellow, who bade fair to be

"the rage" among the servant-girls at the old house, the home-farm, and

the adjacent village, and a source of vexation to their hobnailed

country admirers.

A few miles beyond the old city I quitted the train, and leaving him to

follow with my baggage in a dog-cart, I struck across the fields by a

near path that I remembered well, and which I knew would bring me

straight to Calderwood Glen, the residence of my uncle, Sir Nigel--save

Cora, almost the last relation I had now on earth.

*CHAPTER II.*

Pure as the silver wreath of snow

That lies on yonder wintry hill,

Are all the thoughts that peaceful flow,

And with pure joy my bosom fill.

Soft as the sweet spring's morning breath,

Or summer's zephyr, forth they roam;

Until my bosom grows more kind,

And dreams of thee and all at home.

The winter day was cold and clear, but without frost, save on the

mountain tops, where the snow was lying. Though vegetation should have

been dormant, the swelling uplands, the pastoral hills and braes of

Fife, looked green and fertile; and there was a premature budding of

young shoots, which the bitter frost of to-morrow might totally destroy.

Fires glowed redly through the little square windows of the wayside

cottages, and from their massive stone chimneys the smoke ascended into

the thin air in heavy volumes, that told of warmth, of comfort, and

industry within. Ere long I could see the woods, all bare and leafless,

that covered the slopes of Calderwood Glen, and the vanes of the old

house shining in the light of the setting sun, which streamed along the

green slope of the western Lomond.

I passed unnoticed through the secluded village which stood, I knew,

upon the verge of my good uncle's property, and where the old signboards

of the smithy, the bakery, and alehouse were familiar to me. The clock

of the old Gothic kirk struck the hour of three, slowly and

deliberately, as only such clocks do in the country.

Many years ago, in boyhood, I remembered the familiar voice of that

village monitor. What changes had taken place since then, in myself and

others, and even in the scene around me! How many, whose daily routine,

and whose labours--the heritage of toil--were timed by its bell and

dial, were now in other lands, or sleeping in their humble graves

beneath the shadow of the spire, and yet the old moss-grown clock ticked

on!

Since then I had grown to manhood, had seen many of the dearest of my

kindred die. Since then I had become a soldier, and had served in

India, and on the staff in the late Burmese war. At the bombardment of

Rangoon, I received a wound in the night attack made by the enemy on our

camp at the heights of Prome.

Thousands of stirring scenes and strange faces had flitted before me. I

had traversed twice the great Atlantic and Indian oceans, and had twice

passed the Cape, on the first occasion looking with anxious eyes and

envious heart at every homeward-bound sail; and now all these events

seemed as a long dream, and as if it were but yesterday when last I

heard the voice of the old village clock.

In that timeworn fane, Row, the Covenanter, had preached, and the great

archbishop, too--Sharpe, the recreant, or the martyr (which you will),

who died on Magus Muir; and, that the marvellous may not be wanting,

there is a legend which tells us that, in the year before the

Covenanters invaded England, and stormed Newcastle, thereby seriously

injuring the London coal market, there used to issue from the empty loft

where, in old Catholic times, the organ stood, the sound of such an

instrument in full play, together with the voices of the choristers

singing a grand old Gregorian chant. These sounds were only heard in

the night, or at other times when Calderwood kirk was empty, for the

moment any one entered they ceased, and all became still--still as the

dead Calderwoods of the Glen and of Piteadie, stretched in effigy, each

upon his pedestal of stone, in St. Margaret's aisle; but this marvel was

universally believed to portend the ultimate return of prelacy.

So rapidly and totally does the speed of the railway annihilate alike

the extent of time and space, that it seemed difficult to embody the

fact that, but four-and-twenty hours ago, I had been in my quarters at

Maidstone barracks, or amid the splendour of a fashionable hotel in

London; and yet it was so.

Treading deep among the last year's crisp and withered leaves, I

proceeded down the sombre and winding avenue, with a heart that beat

quicker as I drew near a man, whose figure I remembered instantly, for

he was my early friend, my second father, my maternal uncle, good old

Sir Nigel Calderwood. Occupied with a weeder, which he always carried,

and with which the ends of all his walking-sticks were furnished, he was

intent on up-rooting some obnoxious weed; thus I could approach him

unobserved. He seemed as stout and hale as when I saw him last. The

grey hair, that was wont to escape under his well-worn wide-awake, was

thinner and more silvery, perhaps; but the old hat had its usual row of

flies and fishhooks, and his face was as ruddy as ever, and spoke of

high health and spirits. He stooped a little more, certainly; but his

figure was still sturdy, and clad, as usual, in a rough suit of grey

tweed, with his stout legs encased in long brown leather leggings, that

had seen much service in their time among the turnips and heather in the

shooting season, and in the trouting streams that traverse the fertile

Howe of Fife.

An old, half-blind, and wheezing otter terrier crept close to his heels

as I came up. With a polite bow the worthy baronet surveyed, but failed

to recognise me, and waited, with a glance of inquiry, until I should

speak; for, sooth to say, in the tall, rather well-knit figure, bronzed

face, and heavy moustaches I exhibited, he could scarcely be expected to

recognise the slender and beardless lad, whose heart was so heavy when

he was conveyed away from his mother's arms, to push his way in the

world as a cornet of cavalry some six years before.

"Uncle--Sir Nigel!" said I, in a voice that became tremulous.

"Newton--my dear boy, Newton--am I blind that I did not recognise you?"

he exclaimed, while he grasped my hand and threw an arm round me;

"welcome back to Calderwood--welcome home--and on the second day of the

New Year, too! may many many joyous returns of the season be yours,

Newton! What a manly fellow you have become since I saw you last in

London--quite a dragoon!"

"And how is Cora--she is with you, of course?"

"Cora is well; and though not a dashing girl, she has grown up an

amiable and gentle little pet, who is worth her weight in gold; but you

shall see--you shall see, and judge for yourself. The house is full of

visitors just now--I have some nice people to present you to."

"Thanks, uncle; but you and Cora were all I cared to see."

"But how came you to be here alone, and on foot too?"

"I left the train at Calderwood station, and wished to come quietly back

to the old house, without any fuss."

"To steal a march upon us, in fact?"

"Yes, uncle, you understand me," said I, looking into his clear dark

eyes, which were regarding me with an expression of great affection,

which recalled the memory of my mother, his youngest and favourite

sister. "Pitblado will drive over with my traps before dinner."

"Ah, Willie, the old keeper's son?"

"Yes."

"And how is he?"

"Quite well, and become so smart a lancer, that I fear there will be a

great pulling of caps among the housemaids. I am loth to keep him out of

the ranks, but the worthy fellow won't leave me."

"Many a good bag of grouse from yonder fields and the Lomonds, and many

a good basket of trout from the Eden, has poor Willie carried for me.

But, come this way; we shall take the near cut by the keeper's lodge to

the house; you have not forgotten the way?"

"I should think not, uncle; by the Adder's Craig and the old Battle

Stone."

"Exactly. I am so glad you have come at this time; I have such news for

you, Newton--such news, boy."

"Indeed, uncle?"

"Yes," he continued, laughing heartily.

"How?"

"Calderwood Glen is a mere man-trap at present."

"In what manner?"

"We have here old General Rammerscales, of the Bengal army, who has come

home with the liver complaint, and a face as yellow as a buttercup, and

his pale niece--a girl worth heaven knows how many sacks or lacs of

rupees (though, for the life of me, I never knew what or how much a lac

is.) We have also Spittal of Lickspittal and that Ilk, M.P. for the

Liberal interest (and more particularly for his own), with his two

daughters, rather pretty girls; and we have that beautiful blonde, Miss

Wilford, who has a cousin in your regiment--a Yorkshire heiress, whom

all the men agree would make such a wife! We have also the Countess of

Chillingham, and her daughter, Lady Louisa Loftus, really a very

charming girl; so, as I told you, Newton, the old house is baited like a

regular man-trap for you."

Had my uncle's perception been clearer, or had he been less vigorously

using his weeder, as he ran on thus, he could not have failed to observe

how powerfully the last name he uttered affected me.

After a pause--"In none of your letters," said I, "did you mention that

Lady Loftus was here."

"Did I not? But Cora is your chief correspondent, and no no doubt she

did."

"On the contrary, my cousin never once referred to her."

"Strange! Lord Chillingham left us a week ago in haste to attend a

meeting of the Cabinet; but his women folks have been rusticating here

for nearly three months. Charming person the countess--charming,

indeed; but the daughter is quite a Diana. You have met her before--she

told us so, and I have made up my mind--ah, you know for what, you

rogue--eh?"

What my uncle had made up his mind for was not very apparent; but he

concluded his sentence by poking the weeder under my short ribs.

"To have me marry in haste and repent at leisure, eh, uncle--is it for

this that your mind is made up?"

"I am a man of the old school, Newton; yet I hate proverbs, and

everything old, except wine and good breeding."

"You are aware, uncle," said I, to change the subject, "that the lancers

are under orders for Turkey?"

"Where women are kept under lock and key, bought, and secluded from

society; just as in Britain they are thrust into it for sale."

"And so, my dear uncle, supposing that a lively young lancer will make a

most excellent husband for your noble and beautiful _protegee_, you are

resolved to make a victim of me, is it not so?"

"Precisely; but according to the old use and wont in drama and romance,

you must not be a willing one; you must be prepared to hate her

cordially at first sight, and to prefer some one else--of course, some

amiable village damsel, of humble but respectable parentage," replied

Sir Nigel, laughing.

"Hate _her_--prefer another!" I exclaimed; "on the contrary, I--I----"

I know not what I was about to say, or how far I might have betrayed

myself. The blood rushed to my temples, and I felt giddy and confused,

for the kind old baronet knew little of the hopeless passion with which

the fair one of whom he spoke had inspired me already.

"You have met the Lady Lousia before, you say?"

"Nay, 'twas she who said she had met me," said I, glad to recall by this

trifling remark that I was not forgotten by her.

"Ah, indeed--indeed; where?"

"Oh, at Canterbury, at Tunbridge Wells, Bath; all those places where

people are to be met. In London, too, I saw her presented at Court."

"The deuce! You and she seem to have gone in a leash," said Sir Nigel,

laughing, while the colour deepened on my cheek again; "but you must

look sharp, for one of your fellows who is here is for ever dangling

after her."

"One of _ours_?" I exclaimed, with astonishment.

"Yes; a solemn, dreary, dandified fellow, whom I met at Chillingham's

shootings in the north, and invited to spend the last weeks of his leave

of absence here, as we were to have you with us; and he spared no pains

to impress upon me that he was a particular chum of yours."

"Is he Captain Travers--Vaughan Travers? He is on leave."

"No; he is Lieutenant De Warr Berkeley."

"Berkeley!" I repeated, with some disgust, and with an emotion of such

inconceivable annoyance that I could scarcely conceal it; for decidedly

he was the last man of ours whom I should have liked to find

domesticated at Calderwood Glen.

Berkeley was well enough to meet with in men's society, at mess, on

parade, on the turf, or in the hunting-field; but though handsome and

perfectly well-bred, for his manners were generally unexceptionable, he

was not a man for the drawing-room. He was master of a splendid fortune,

which was left him by his father, a plain old Scotchman, who had begun

life as a drayman, and whose patronymic was simply John Dewar Barclay.

He became a wealthy brewer, and somehow his son like all such

_parvenus_, despising his name, was gazetted to the lancers as De Warr

Berkeley, and as such his name figured in the "Army List."

The carefully-acquired fortune of the plodding old brewer he spent

freely, and without being lavish, though as an Eton boy, and afterwards

as a gentleman commoner of Christchurch, he had plunged into dissipation

that made his name proverbial. He was one of those systematic _roues_

whom prudent mothers would carefully exclude from the society of their

daughters, nathless his commission, his cavalry uniform, his fortune,

his decidedly handsome person and bearing, which had all the "tone of

society"--whatever that may mean.

Hence I was rather provoked to find that the kind and well-meaning but

blundering old baronet had, as a favour to me, installed him at

Calderwood, as a friend for my pretty cousin Cora, and an admirer of

Lady Louisa. As I thought over all this, her name must have escaped me,

for my uncle roused me from a reverie by saying--

"Yes; she is a charming, a splendid girl, really! A little too stately,

perhaps; but I would rather have my little rosebud, Cora, with her

peculiar winning ways. Lady Louisa may be all head--as I believe she

is; but our Cora is all heart, Newton--all heart!"

"And Lady Louisa is all head, you think, uncle?"

"I could see that at a glance--yes, with half an eye; and yet there are

times when I wish Cora had been a boy----"

My uncle leaned on his stick, and sighed.

His eldest son had been killed in the 12th Lancers, at the battle of

Goojerat; the other had died prematurely at College--a double loss,

which had a most fatal effect on their delicate mother, then in the last

stage of a mortal disease. Now the affection of the lonely Sir Nigel

was centred in Cora, his only daughter, the child of his declining

years; and thus he had a great regard for me as the son of his youngest

sister; but he sorrowed in secret that his baronetcy--one of the oldest

in Scotland, having been created in 1625 by Charles I.--should pass out

of his family.

Sir Norman Calderwood of the Glen, who had attended the Scottish

princess, Elizabeth Stuart, to Bohemia, was the first patented among the

baronets of Nova Scotia; and was therefore styled _Primus Baronettorum

Scotiae_, a prefix of which my uncle, as his ancestors had been, was not

a little vain.

"The estates are entailed," said he, pursuing this line of thought;

"they were among the first that were so, when the Scottish parliament

passed the Entail Act in 1685; and though they go, as you know, to a

remote collateral branch, the baronetcy ends with myself. Cora shall be

well and handsomely left; for she shall have the Pitgavel property,

which, with its coal and iron mines, yields two thousand per annum

clear. And you, my boy, Newton, shall find that, tide what may, you are

not forgotten."

"Uncle, you have already done so much for me----"

"Much, Newton?"

"Yes, my dear sir."

"Stuff! fitted you out for the lancers--that is all."

"You have done more than that, uncle----"

"I have lodged the purchase money for your troop with Messrs. Cox and

Co.; but most of this money must, under other circumstances, have been

spent on your cousins, had they lived. So, thank fate and the fortune

of war, not me, boy, not me. But there are times, especially when I am

alone, that it grieves me to think that instead of leaving an heir to

the old title, one boy lies in his grave in the old kirk yonder; and the

other, far, far away on the battle-field of Goojerat."

He shook his white head, and his voice became tremulous, his chin sank

on his breast, and he added--

"My poor Nigel!--my bonnie Archie!"

The baronet was a handsome man, above six feet in height, and, though he

stooped a little now, had been erect as a pike. He possessed fine

aquiline features, a ruddy and healthy complexion; clear, and bright

dark grey eyes; a well-shaped, though not very small, mouth; and a

Scottish chin, of a curve that evinced perseverance and decision. His

hair was nearly white, but there was plenty of it; his hands, though

browned by exposure and seldom gloved--for the gun, the rod, the

riding-whip, and the curling stone were ever in them by turns--were well

shaped, and showed by their form and nails that he was a gentleman of

good blood and breeding. His plain costume I have described, and he was

without ornament, save a silver dog-whistle at his button-hole, and a

large gold signet-ring, which belonged to his grandfather, Sir Alexander

Calderwood, who commanded a frigate under Admiral Hawke, in the fleet

which, in 1748, fought and vanquished the Spanish galleons between

Tortuga and the Havannah.

A sturdy old Fifeshire laird, proud of a long line of warlike Scottish

ancestors, uncrossed by any taint of foreign blood, he was fond of

boasting that neither Dane nor Norman--the Englishman's strange vaunt

and pride--could be found among them; but that he came of a race,

which--as our Highlanders forcibly phrase it--had sprung from the soil,

and were indigenous to it.

But, indeed, the alleged foreign descent of nearly the whole Scottish

aristocracy is a silly sham, existing in their own imagination, having

arisen from the ignorance of the monkish Latin writers, who in rolls and

histories prefixed the Norman _de_ or _le_, in many instances, to the

most common Celtic patronymics and surnames.

Sir Nigel had "paraded," to use a barrack phrase, more than one man in

his youth, and enjoyed the reputation of being an unpleasantly good shot

with his pistol. He could remember sharing in the rage of the

high-flying Tory party among the Fife lairds, when Sir Alexander

Boswell, of Auchinleck, was shot by James Stuart, of Dunearn, in a

solemn duel, where personal and political rancour were combined, at

Balmuto, for which the victor had to fly to England, and from thence to

France.

"It seemed strange on reflection, Newton," I have frequently heard Sir

Nigel, say, "that poor Boswell was the first to propose in Parliament

the repeal of our old Scottish statutes anent duelling, and that, after

all, he should fall by the pistol for a mere newspaper squib, in which

Sir Walter Scott was, perhaps, as much to blame as he."

*CHAPTER III.*

Sing on, thou sweet mavis, thy song to the ev'ning,

Thou'rt dear to the echoes of Calderwood Glen;

Sae dear to this bosom, sae heartless and winning,

Is charming young Jessie, the flower o' Dunblane.

TANNAHILL.

"Here is the old house, and here we are at last, Newton," said my uncle,

as an abrupt turn of the private path through the woodlands brought us

suddenly in front of the ancient mansion, in which, after the early

death of my father, I had spent my boyhood.

It stands in a well-wooded hollow, or glen, overlooked by the three

Lomonds of Fife--a county which, though not renowned for its picturesque

scenery, can show us many peaceful and beautiful landscapes.

Calderwood is simply an old manor-house, or fortalice, like some

thousand others in Scotland, having a species of keep, with adjacent

buildings, erected during quieter or more recent periods of Scottish

history than the first dwelling, which had suffered severely during the

wars between Mary of Guise and the Lords of the Congregation, when the

soldiers of Desse d'Epainvilliers blew up a portion of it by

gunpowder--an act terribly revenged by Sir John Calderwood of the Glen,

who had been chamberlain of Fife and captain of the castle of St.

Andrew's for Cardinal Beaton. Overtaking a party of the Bandes

Francaises in Falkland Woods, he routed them with considerable

slaughter, and hung at least a dozen of them on the oak trees in the

park of the palace.

The latest additions had been made under the eye of Sir William Bruce of

Kinross, the architect of Holyrood--the Scottish Inigo Jones--about a

hundred and ninety years before the present period, and thus were

somewhat florid and Palladian in their style, their fluted pilasters and

Roman cornices and capitals contrasting singularly with the grim

severity and strongly-grated windows of the old tower, which was founded

on a mass of grey rock, round which a terraced garden lies.

Within this, the older portion, the rooms were strange and quaint in

aspect, with arched roofs, wainscoted walls, and yawning fireplaces,

damp, rusty, cold, and forlorn, where the atmosphere felt as if the dead

Calderwoods of other times visited them, and lingered there apart from

the fashionable friends of their descendants in the more modern mansion;

and within the tower Sir Nigel treasured many old relics of the palace

of Dunfermline, which, when its roof fell in, in 1708, was literally

plundered by the people.

Thus, in one room, he had the cradle of James VI., and the bed in which

his son, Charles I., had been born; in another, a cabinet of Anne of

Denmark, a chair of Robert III., and a sword of the Regent Albany.

The demesne (Scotice, "policy") around this picturesque old house was

amply studded with glorious old timber, under which browsed herds of

deer, of a size, strength, and ferocity unknown in England. The stately

entrance-gate, bearing the palm-tree of the Calderwoods, a crusading

emblem, and the long avenue, of two Scottish miles, and the

half-castellated mansion which terminated its leafy vista, well befitted

the residence of one whose fathers had ridden forth to uphold Mary's

banner at Langside, and that of James VIII. at the battle of Dunblane.

Here was the well where the huntsman and soldier, James V., had slaked

his thirst in the forest; and there was the oak under which his

father--who fell at Flodden--shot the monarch of the herd by a single

bolt from his crossbow.

In short, Calderwood, with all its memories, was a complete epitome of

the past.

The Eastern Lomond (so called, like its brothers, from Laomain, a Celtic

hero), now reddened by the setting sun, seemed beautiful with the green

verdure that at all seasons covers it to the summit, as we approached

the house.

Ascending to the richly-carved entrance-door, where one, whilom of oak

and iron, had given place to another of plate-glass, a footman,

powdered, precise, liveried, and aiguilletted, with the usual amplitude

of calf and acute facial angle of his remarkable fraternity, appeared;

but ere he could touch the handle it was flung open, and a handsome

young girl, with a blooming complexion, sparkling eyes, and a bright and

joyous smile, rushed down the steps to meet us.

"Welcome to Calderwood, Newton," she exclaimed; "may our new year be a

happy one."

"Many happy ones be yours, Cora," said I, kissing her cheek. "Though I

am changed since we last met, your eyes have proved clearer than those

of uncle, for, really, he did not know me."

"Oh, papa, was it so?" she asked, while her fine eyes swam with fun and

pleasure.

"A fact, my dear girl."

"Ah! I could never be so dull, though you have those new dragoon

appendages," said she, laughingly, as I drew her arm through mine, and

we passed into a long and stately corridor, furnished with cabinets,

busts, paintings, and suits of mail, towards the drawing-room; "and I am

not married yet, Newton," she added, with another bright smile.

"But there must be some favoured man, eh, Cora?"

"No," she said, with a tinge of hauteur over her playfulness, "none."

"Time enough to think of marrying, Cora; why, you are only nineteen, and

I hope to dance at your wedding when I return from Turkey."

"Turkey," she repeated, while a cloud came over her pure and happy face;

"oh, don't talk of that, Newton; I had forgotten it!"

"Yes; does it seem a long, or a doubtful time to look forward to?"

"It seems both, Newton."

"Well, cousin, with those soft violet eyes of yours, and those black,

shining braids (the tempting mistletoe is just over your head), and with

loves of bonnets, well-fitting gloves and kid boots, dresses ever new

and of every hue, you cannot fail to conquer, whenever you please."

She gave me a full, keen glance, that seemed expressive of annoyance,

and said, with a little sigh--

"You don't understand me, Newton. We have been so long separated that I

think you have forgotten all the peculiarities of my character now."

"What the deuce can she mean?" thought I.

My cousin Cora was in her fullest bloom. She was pretty, remarkably

pretty, rather than beautiful; and by some women she was quite eclipsed,

even when her cheek flushed and her eyes, a deep violet grey, were most

lighted up.

She was fully of the middle height, and finely rounded, with exquisite

shoulders, arms, and hands. Her features were small, and perhaps not

quite regular. Her eyes were alternately timid, inquiring, and full of

animation; but, in fact, their expression was ever varying. Her hair

was black, thick, and wavy; and while I looked upon her, and thought of

her present charms and of past times--and more than all of my uncle's

fatherly regard for me--I felt that, though very fond of her, but for

another I might have loved her more dearly and tenderly. And now, as if

to interrupt, or rather to confirm the tenor of such thoughts as these,

she said, as a lady suddenly approached the door of the drawing-room,

which we were about to enter--

"Here is one, a friend, to whom I must introduce you."

"No introduction is necessary," said the other, presenting her hand. "I

have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Norcliff before."

"Lady Louisa!" I exclaimed, in a breathless voice, and a heart that

trembled with sudden emotion, as I touched her hand.

"I am so glad you have come before we leave. I shall have so much to

ask you about our mutual friends--who are engaged, and who have

quarrelled; who have come home, and who gone abroad. We have been no

less than four months in Scotland. Meantime," she added, glancing at

her tiny watch, "we must dress for dinner. Come, Cora; we have barely

half an hour, and old General Rammerscales is so impatient--he studies

'military time,' and with a 'military appetite.'"

And with a bow and smile of great brightness and sweetness she passed

on, taking with her Cora, who playfully kissed her hand to me as they

glided up the great staircase into which the long corridor opened.

Lady Louisa was taller and larger in person than Cora. Her features were

singularly beautiful, and clearly cut; her forehead was low; and her

nose had the gentlest approach to the aquiline. She was without colour,

her complexion being pale, perhaps creamy; while in strange contrast to

this aristocratic pallor of delicacy, her thick, wavy hair, her long

double eyelashes, and her ever-sparkling eyes, were black as those of a

Spanish gitano or a Welsh gipsy.

To this pale loveliness was added a bearing alternately haughty and

playful, but at all times completely self-possessed; an exquisite taste

in dress and jewellery; a very alluring voice; a power of investing even

trifles with interest, and of conversing fluently and gracefully on any

subject--whether she was mistress of it or not mattered little to Lady

Louisa.

She was about my own age, perhaps a few months younger; but in

experience of the fashionable world, and in knowledge of the manners and

ideas of the upper ten thousand, she was a hundred years my senior.

Suffice it to say that I had lost my heart to her--that I thought she

knew it well, but feared or disdained to acknowledge a triumph so small

as the conquest of a lieutenant of lancers among the many others she had

won. So thought I, in the angry humility and jealous bitterness of my

heart.

For a minute I felt as one in a dream. I was sensible that my uncle had

said something about changing his costume, and, suggesting some change

in mine, had apologised, and left me to linger in the corridor, or in

the drawing-room, as I chose; but now a personage, who had been lounging

on a _fauteuil_ in the latter, intent on a volume of _Punch_, and the

soles of whose glazed boots had been towards me, suddenly rose and

approached, in full evening costume.

He proved to be no other than Berkeley of ours, who had been in the room

alone, or, at least, alone with Lady Louisa Loftus. He came slowly

forward, with his sauntering air, as if the exertion of walking was a

bore, and with his eyeglass retained in its place by a muscular

contraction of the right eyebrow. His whole air had the "used-up"

bearing of those miserable Dundrearys who affect to act as if youth,

wealth, and luxury were the greatest calamities that flesh is heir to,

and that life itself was a bore.

"Ah, Norcliff--haw--glad to see you here, old fellow. Haw--heard you

were coming. How goes it with you, and how are all at Maidstone?"

"Preparing for foreign service," said I, curtly, as the tip of his

gloved hand touched mine.

"Horrid bore! Too late to send in one's papers now, or, by Jove, I'd

hook the service. Don't think I was ever meant for it."

"Ere long many more will be of your way of thinking," said I, coolly.

Berkeley had a cold and cunning eye, which never smiled, whatever his

mouth might do. His face was, nevertheless, decidedly handsome, and a

thick, dark moustache concealed a form of lip which, if seen, would have

indicated a thorough sensualist. His head was well shaped; but the

accurate division of his well-oiled head over the centre of the caput

gave him an air of intense insipidity. Mr. De Warr Berkeley never was a

favourite of mine, though we had both joined the lancers on the same

day, and it was with very ill-concealed annoyance I found myself

compelled, with some apparent cordiality, to greet him as a brother

officer and an inmate of my uncle's mansion.

"And--haw--what news from the regiment?" he resumed.

"I really have no news, Berkeley," said I.

"Indeed. You have got a month's leave?"

"Between returns, yes."

"Is the route come?"

"A strange question, when you and I are here."

"Haw--yes, of course--how devilish good."

"It has _not_," said I, coldly; "but we are under orders for foreign

service, and may look to have our leaves cancelled by a telegram any day

or hour."

"The devil--really!"

"Fact, though, however unpleasant it may be. So my uncle, Sir Nigel,

met you at--where was it?"

"Chillingham's shooting-box, in the Highlands."

"I was not aware that you knew the earl."

"Losing my gillies--I think you call them in Scotland--one evening in

the dark, I lost my way, and luckily stumbled on his lordship's shooting

quarters, in a wild and savage place, with one of your infernally

unpronounceable Scotch names."

"Oh, you think changes more euphonious at times; but I suppose your

father, honest man, could have pronounced it with ease," said I,

quietly, for Berkeley's, or Barclay's affectation of being an Englishman

was to me always a source of amusement. "You have to learn Russ yet,

and it will prove, doubtless, more unpalatable than the tongue your

father spoke. In the north, did you appear _en montagnad_?"

"Hey--haw, the devil! no; as the Irish Gil Blas says, 'Every one's legs

can't afford publicity,' and mine are among the number. Leather

breeches, when I don the pink, must be all the length. I don't care

about going, though Lady Louisa pressed me hard to join the Mac Quaig,

the Laird of Mac Gooligan, and other natives in tartan at a gathering.

I had a letter from Wilford yesterday. He writes of a famous match

between Jack Studhome and Craven, on which the whole mess had a heavy

book, that great stakes were pending, and that Craven won, scoring

forty-two running off the red ball; and considering that the pockets of

the table were not bigger than an egg-cup, I think Craven a trump."

"I heard something of this match at morning parade on the day I left;

but being a bad stroke, you know, I seldom play billiards."

"Why was Howard's bay mare scratched at the last regimental race?"

"Don't know," said I, so dryly that he bit his nether lip.

"Some nice people visiting here," said he, staring at me steadily, so

that his eyeglass glared in the light of the lustre, which was now lit;

"and some very odd ones too. Lady Loftus is here, you see, in all her

glory, and with her usual come-kiss-me-if-you-dare kind of look."

"Berkeley, how can you speak thus of one in her position?"

"Well, you-don't-dare-to-do-so-again sort of expression."

"She is my uncle's guest; not a girl in a cigar-shop or a casino!" said

I, with growing _hauteur_.

"Sir Nigel's guest--haw--so am I, and I mean to make the best use of my

time as such. Nice girl, Miss Wilford, from York--cousin of Wilford of

ours--a doocid good style of girl; but have no intentions in that

quarter--can't afford to chuck myself away, as I once heard my groom

observe."

"You must learn to quote another style of people to make yourself

understood here. You don't mean to infer that you have any intentions

concerning Lady Louisa!" said I, with an air which was really

impertinent.

"Why not?" he asked, failing completely to see it. "I have often such

attacks, or affections of the heart, as she has given me."

"How?"

"Just as I had the measles or the chicken-pox in childhood--a little

increase of the pulse, a little restlessness at night, and then one gets

over it."

"Take care how you address her in this bantering fashion," said I,

turning sharply away; "excuse me, but now I must dress for dinner."

And preceded by old Mr. Binns, the white-headed old butler, who many a

time in days of yore had carried me on his back, and who now welcomed me

home with a hearty shake of the hand, in which there was nothing

derogatory to me, though Berkeley's eyes opened very wide when he saw

our greeting, I was conducted to my old room in the north wing, where a

cheerful fire was blazing, with two lights on each side of the

toilette-table (the manor-house was amply lit with gas from the

village), and there was Willie Pitblado arranging all my traps and

clothes. But dismissing him to visit his family (to his no small joy),

I was left to my own reflections and proceeded to dress. A subtle and

subdued tone of insolence and jealousy that pervaded the few remarks

made by Berkeley irritated and chafed me; yet he had said nothing with

which I could grapple, or with which I could openly find fault. I was

conscious, too, that my own bearing had been the reverse of courteous

and friendly, and that, if I showed my hand thus, I might as well give

up the cards. Suspicion of his native character, and a foreknowledge of

the man, had doubtless much to do with all this; and while making my

toilet with more than my usual care--conscious that Lady Louisa was

making hers in the next room--I resolved to keep a lynx-like eye upon

Mr. De Warr Berkeley during our short sojourn at Calderwood Glen. My

irritation was no way soothed, or my pique lessened, by the information

that for some time past, and quite unknown to me, he had been residing

here with Lady Louisa, enjoying all the facilities afforded by hourly

propinquity and the seclusion of a country house.

Had he already declared himself? Had he already proposed? The deuce! I

thrust aside the thought, and angrily gave my hair a finishing rasp with

a pair of huge ivory-handled hair-brushes.

*CHAPTER IV.*

And, oh! the memories that cling

Around this old oak-panelled room!

The pine logs flashing through the gloom,

Sun sparkles from life's early spring.

After long years I rest again;

This ancient home it seems to me,

Wearied with travel o'er the sea.

Holds anodyne for carking pain.

As I surveyed my old apartment the memories of other years stole over me

with somewhat of a soothing influence, for when I thought of the past,

the littleness of the present, the evanescent nature of all things could

not fail to impress me.

It was in that room I had the last vivid recollection of my dear

mother's face, on that farewell morning, when with early dawn she stole

in on tiptoe to look for the last time upon her boy as he slept, and

before he went forth into the world beyond her maternal care for ever.

The thunder of a gong in the corridor cut short further reflections,

recalling me to the present; and giving a finishing touch to my costume,

which was not the blue lancer uniform, faced with white, and laced with

gold, but the solemn funereal suit and white necktie of civil life--a

horrid costume that has crept among us, heaven knows how--I descended to

the outer drawing-room, where I found my uncle and cousin marshalling

their guests, of whom there appeared to be a goodly number.

Berkeley had already monopolized Lady Louisa, with whom he was

conversing in a low tone, while busy stroking his moustaches, which were

darkened by the "Guards' dye," and the pointing and twirling of which

afforded him endless employment.

There was no denying that the fellow looked well, and that the result of

riding, drilling, dancing, and fencing had been to impart to him much of

that unmistakable air which, I may say without vanity, belongs

particularly to the officers of our branch of the service.

The odd minutes which precede dinner are seldom very lively, and rather

depress than raise the spirits. To Cora I was a species of "lion;" and

as such underwent, through her, a process of introduction to several

people I cared not a jot about, and never would.

I discussed the weather with General Rammerscales, as if I kept a

rain-gauge and barometer, and was own brother to Admiral Fitzroy;

touched on politics with the M.P., and on clerical innovations with a

divine; kissed Cora's hand in play, and drew near to Lady Louisa, nearer

still to her awful mother, whom I felt the necessity of conciliating to

the utmost. Every one talked in a monotone, except jovial Sir Nigel,

who was always cheery, brisk and bustling about from guest to guest.

With the Countess of Chillingham (who accorded me a calm, but courteous

bow), my uncle, whose costume was a suit of accurate black, led the way

past Binns and a line of liveried and powered gentlemen drawn up in the

corridor.

She was a stately woman, of ample proportions, with a diamond tiara

glittering on her grey hair.

Her face was fine in feature, and very noble in expression, showing that

in youth she must have been beautiful. Her costume was magnificent,

being maroon-coloured velvet over white satin, trimmed with the richest

lace. I rather dreaded her.

She had all the peerage--"the Englishman's second Bible"--committed to

memory; and, through the pages of Burke and Debrett, knew all the

available and suitable heirs presumptive by rote--their ages, rank,

title, and order of precedence; for it was among the strawberry leaves

she chiefly expected to find a husband for her daughter--a marquis at

least; and as she swept out of the room, with a velvet train like a

coronation robe, she cast a backward glance to see to whose care that

fair lady was confided.

Seeing Berkeley paired off with Miss Wilford, I hastened towards Lady

Louisa. With her I was sufficiently intimate to have offered my arm.

As I have stated, we had met frequently before, at Canterbury, Bath, and

elsewhere. Her society had been to me a source of greater pleasure and

excitement than that of any other woman in whose way chance had thrown

me.

Her rank, as the daughter of an earl, and her rare beauty had dazzled

me, while her coquetry had piqued my vanity; though I imagined that,

without discovering the deep interest she excited in my heart, I had

taught her to view me as an object of more interest than other men.

I approached, and she received me calmly, placidly, with a bright but

conventional smile, from which I could augur or gather nothing.

In her there was none of the clamorous tremor which I felt in my own

breast, where something of annoyance at the coldness of her mother's bow

was rankling.

"Lady Louisa--permit me," said I, proffering my arm.

"Too late, Mr. Norcliff. I am already engaged," she replied, rising,

and placing her pretty gloved hand on the arm of old General

Rammerscales, who, bowing and smiling with gratified vanity, remarked to

me in passing--

"Been to India, I presume?"

"Yes, general, and Rangoon, too."

"Bah! 'tisn't what it used to be in my time--the Indian service is going

to the deuce."

"But I belong to the Lancers."

"Ah!"

A daughter of the liberal M.P., Spittal, of Lickspittal, fell to my

lot--a pretty piece of muslin and insipidity; but luckily we were seated

not far from Lady Loftus. Near us were Miss Wilford and Berkeley, who

proved less inattentive than I during the dinner, which proceeded with

more joviality and laughter than is usual in such society; but the

guests, twenty-four in number, were somewhat varied, for on this

occasion the minister, doctor, and lawyer of the parish, the provost of

a neighbouring burgh, and other persons out of the baronet's circle,

were present.

In that old Scottish chateau, the mode of life was deprived of all

ostentation, though luxurious and even fashionable.

The great oak table in the dining-room was covered with plenty, and with

every delicacy of the season; but in its details it partook more of the

baronial hall than such apartments usually do.

It was floored with encaustic tiles, amid the pattern of which the arms

of the Calderwoods were reproduced again and again; and at each end

sparkled and glowed a great fire of coals from the baronet's own pits,

with the smouldering remains of a great yule log that had grown in his

own woods, and had been perhaps a green sapling when James V. kept court

in Falkland.

In the centre of this dining-hall lay a soft Turkey carpet for the feet

of those who were seated at table.

The chairs were all square backed, well cushioned with green velvet, and

dated from the time of James VII.; the walls were of dark varnished

wainscot, decorated with old portraits and stags' antlers; for there was

here a curious blending of old baronial state with the comforts and

tastes of modern times and modern luxury.

Above each of the great fireplaces, carved in stone, were the arms of

the Calderwoods of Calderwood and Piteadie; _argent_ a palm-tree growing

out of a mount in base, surmounted by a saltire gules; on a chief azure,

three mullets, the crest being a hand bearing a palm branch, with the

motto, "_Veritas premitur non apprimitur_."

Amid the buzz of tongues around me--for, sooth to say, some of my

uncle's country guests made noise enough--I looked from time to time

beyond the great epergne to where Lady Louisa sat, evidently bored and

amused by turns with the laboured conversation of the old sepoy general.

It was impossible to refrain from turning again and again to admire that

pale and creamy complexion, those deep black eyes and eyelashes, the

small rosy mouth, the thick dark hair that grew in a downward peak, the

lovely little ears with their diamond pendants, those hands and arms,

which were perfection in colour, delicacy, and symmetry.

Twice her eyes met mine, giving me each time a bright glance of

intelligence, and making my heart beat happily.

I fear that the young lady by whose side I was seated must have found me

anything but a satisfactory companion, and her simple remarks concerning

the coming war, our chances of going abroad, the latest novelty in music

or literature--Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, and so forth--fell on a dull

or inattentive ear.

The dinner passed away as others do; the dessert was discussed. The

fruit came, and now, as this was but the second eve of the new year, the

old family wassail-bowl was placed before my uncle. Thanks to railway

speed, I was enabled to partake of this old-fashioned libation. The

great silver vessel in which it was compounded was the pride of Sir

Nigel's heart, having been taken by an ancestor at the storming of

Newcastle by the Scots in 1640, when the "Fife regiment entered by the

great breach in the fore wall." It had four handles of chased silver,

each representing a long, lanky hound, with his hind feet on the bulb of

the cup, and his nose and fore paws on the upper rim.

It held four bottles of port, which were spiced with cloves, nutmeg,

mace, and ginger; the whites of six eggs well whisked and sugared; and

six roasted apples were swimming on the top.

To prepare this potent draught was the yearly task of old Mr. Binns, the

butler, and my cousin Cora. Sir Nigel rose, and filling his glass from

the gigantic tankard, exclaimed, ere he drained it--

"A happy new year to you all, my friends! May the year that is gone be

the worst of our lives, and may the new one, that opens full of promise,

give joy to all!"

"A happy new year to all, Sir Nigel," went round the table, as we

emptied our glasses; and as Binns replenished them from the

wassail-bowl, the conversation became more free and unrestrained, for

the celebration of the new year is a festival which has not yet fallen

into desuetude in Scotland, though it has nearly done so in the sister

kingdom.

Wherever Scotchmen go, they never forget the associations or the customs

of their fatherland; thus, in England and Ireland, and still more amid

the goldfields of Australia, or the rice-swamps of Hong Kong, in the

cities, camps, and barracks of India and America--ay, and in our ships

far out upon the lonely sea, ten thousand miles, perhaps, from Forth, or

Tay, or Clyde, on New Year's morning there are claspings of

toil-hardened hands, good wishes exchanged, with the thoughts of home,

its familiar faces, and its old fireside; the heather hills, and the

deep grassy glens, that some may never see more; but still, amid joy and

revelry, and, perhaps, the songs of Burns, the new year is ushered in.

On that morning, as soon as the clocks strike twelve, a cheer passes

over all the towns and hamlets of Scotland, from the German to the

Atlantic sea; many a bottle is broached, and many a bagpipe blown; and

though the wild orgies and uproar, and sometimes the discharge of

firearms, with which it used to be welcomed at every market-cross, are

passing away, still the New Year's tide is a time of feasting,

merry-making, and congratulations with all.

Even that solemn "Dundreary," my brother officer, Berkeley, thawed under

the jovial influence of the society around him; but I was provoked to

find that it led simply to very animated conversation between himself

and Lady Louisa across the table. It referred to a past hunting affair,

in which they had had some adventures together.

"We--haw--had not been there more than half an hour before there was a

find," said he; "you remember, Lady Louisa?"

"How could I forget?" she responded, with charming animation. "The fox,

a dull, reddish fawn one, with black back and shoulders, broke cover

from among some gorse at the foot of the Mid Lomond."

"The hounds were instantly in full cry, and away we went. By Jove, it

was beautiful! We cleared some garden-walls, where we left the general

up to the chin in somebody's hothouse; and after that we took the lead

of the entire field."

"We?" said I, inquiringly.

"Lady Louisa and myself," replied Berkeley, with one of his quiet, deep

smiles; "we were better mounted, and in riding I--haw--flatter myself

that few--few even of your Fifeshire hunt will surpass me."

"Well?" I said, impatiently, crushing a walnut to pieces.

"The meet was at the base of the Mid Lomond; the morning was everything

that could be desired; the field was very small, but select; Sir Nigel,

the general, Mr. Spittal, Lady Louisa, Miss Calderwood, Miss Wilford,

and--haw--a few others. The pack was in a most workman-like condition,

and, as Lady Louisa remembers, they soon proclaimed a find, with open

mouth."

"Yes," said she, with her dark eyes lighting up; "away we went at racing

speed, through the park of Falkland, a two miles open run at least, on,

on, over 'bank, bush, and scaur----'"

"But the fox was evidently an old one. He tried some old coal mines,

and then some field drains; but they had been carefully stopped by old

Pitblado, the keeper. Yet we lost him at a deep pool on the banks of

the Eden."

"But for a time only, Mr. Berkeley," resumed Lady Louisa. "You remember

how oddly he was found in a cabbage-garden, and how we cleared the

hedges at a flying leap, you and I going neck and neck; you must

remember, too, how Sir Nigel's shout made all our hearts rebound!"

"Quitting the river-side, he broke southward for two fields, and ran

straight through the home farm of Calderwood; on, on we rode, and drove

him right in Kinross-shire; but doubling on the dogs, he led us back.

Doubling again, we pursued him once more into Kinross; what did you

think of that, general?"

"Left to my own reflections among the melon-beds, ten miles in your

rear, I thought it devilish poor work when compared to tiger-hunting,"

growled the general.

"In and out of each county he went no less than three times in as many

half-hours," said Lady Louisa; "and but for the darkness of the December

evening, he would have been compelled to yield up his brush, had we not

lost him in a thicket near Kinies Wood, at Loch Leven side."

"We lost more," said Miss Wilford, with a very decided expression of

mischief in her very beautiful blue eyes; "for when the whole hunt

assembled, Lady Louisa and Mr. Berkeley were nowhere to be found--the

keepers shouted, and horns were blown in vain. Having taken the wrong

road, they did not reach the Glen till half-past nine, when a storm of

snow was falling."

"Which compelled us, Miss Wilford, to take shelter in wayside cottages

at Balgedie and at Orphil," said Lady Louisa, with a tone of real

annoyance, while her eye, like a gleam of light, dwelt for an instant on

me; but the hunting anecdote and its conclusion piqued--cut me to the

heart.

With such opportunities could Berkeley have failed to press his suit?

I glanced at him. His temporary animation had subsided; his pale and

impassive face wore its usual quiet and cold expression; yet his eyes

were keen, restless, and watchful, even cunning at times. He smiled

seldom, and laughed--so to say--never.

Whether it was simply the memory of that winter day's sport, with all

its excitement and concomitant danger, in counties so rough and hilly as

Fife and Kinross, or whether it was some particular incident connected

therewith that inspired her, I know not; but a flush on the usually pale

cheek of Louisa Loftus made her look radiantly beautiful--like a dash of

rouge, lending a glorious lustre to her deeply-lashed dark eyes. But

now my Lady Chillingham, who evidently did not share her daughter's

enthusiasm for field sports, exchanged an expressive glance with Cora,

who, of course, occupied the head of the table, with the parish minister

in the post of honour at her right hand.

Then we all rose like a covey of partridges, while the ladies retired in

single file to the drawing-room, whither I longed to accompany them; but

now the gentlemen drew their chairs closer together, side by side; Sir

Nigel announced that "the business of the evening was only beginning;"

the wine decanters and the claret jugs were replenished; Binns appeared

with water steaming hot in an antique silver kettle, followed by a

servant bearing liqueur-frames, filled with "mountain dew," for those

who preferred toddy, the national beverage, to which fully half the

company, including my jolly old kinsman, at once betook themselves.

Somehow those "trifles light as air," which are the torments of the

jealous and the doubtful, were added to fears, to crush me now.

Even without the danger of a rival, I knew that "La Mere Chillingham,"

as the mess called her, would keep a sharp eye upon me, as the possessor

of only my subaltern's commission in the lancers, with a couple of

hundred or so per annum; for she believed that all men so circumstanced

were little better than well-accredited sharpers, and, as such, certain

to have nefarious designs upon her wealthy and beautiful

daughter--designs which our plumes, epaulettes, and lancer trappings

were every way calculated to render more dangerous.

I felt sure that, by such as she, even the wealthy parvenu, De Warr

Berkeley, would be less dreaded than I; and as I looked round the old

hall of Calderwood, and saw the grim portraits of those who had preceded

me, looking disdainfully out of their stiff ruffs and long doublets, and

thought of my rival's puerile character, and his father's beer vats, an

emotion of real contempt for the cold-blooded and match-making countess

stole into my heart.

Louisa Loftus was, indeed, a proud and glorious beauty. I knew not yet

what were my chances of success with her, and, in short, I "had nothing

for it but to wait and try my best to be sanguine."

The brave old axiom, that "no fortress is impregnable," is a valuable

worldly lesson, and one ought never to forget that a storming party

rarely fails.

There was some consolation in this reflection.

I took another glass of sparkling hock, another, and another, and

somehow through their medium the world began to look more bright and

cheering.

*CHAPTER V.*

Come, let us enjoy the fleeting day,

And banish toil, and laugh at care,

For who would grief and sorrow beat

When he can throw his griefs away?

Away, away! begone, I say!

For mournful thought

Will come unsought.

BOWRING'S "POETRY OF SPAIN."

"Provost," said my uncle to the jovial and rubicund magistrate who sat

on his left hand, now that he had taken Cora's place at the head of the

table, "try the Johannisberg. It is some given to me by Prince

Metternich when I was at Vienna, and is from grapes raised in his own

vineyards. Rare stuff it is for those who like such light wines."

"Thank you, Sir Nigel; but Binns, I see, has brought the three elements,

so I'll e'en brew some whisky-toddy," replied the magistrate.

The conversation now became more noisy and animated. The approaching

war, the treaty of neutrality between the Scandinavian and the Western

Powers, whether our fleet had yet entered the Euxine, or whether Luders

had yet burst into the Dobrudscha, became the prevailing topics, and in

interest seemed fully to rival that never-failing subject at a country

table, fox-hunting.

The county pack, the meet of the Fifeshire hounds at the kennels, or on

the green slopes of Largo; of the Buccleuch pack at Blacklaw, Ancrum,

and so forth; their runs by wood and wold, loch and lee, rock and river,

with many a perilous leap and wild adventure in the field, over a rough

and hilly country, were narrated with animation, and descanted on with

interest, though all such sank into insignificance beside the history of

a hunt in Bengal, where General Rammerscales had figured in pursuit of a

tiger (long the terror of the district), seated in a lofty _howdah_ of

basket-work, strapped on the back of an elephant, twelve feet high to

the shoulder, accompanied by the major of his regiment, each armed with

two double-barrelled guns.

The tiger, which measured nine feet from his nose to the tip of his

tail, and five in height, had been roused from among the jungle grass,

and was a brute of the most ferocious kind, yellow in hide, and striped

with beautiful transverse bars of black and brown. He was well-known in

that district. With his tremendous jaws he had carried off many a foal

and buffalo; by a single stroke of his claws he had disembowelled and

rent open the body of more than one tall dark sowar of the 3rd Bengal

Light Cavalry; and as for sheep and goats, he made no more account of

them than if they had been so many shrimps.

With a shrill, short scream of rage, on finding that he was brought to

bay at last, he threw himself in cat-fashion on his back, belly upwards,

his small and quivering ears close on the back of his head, his dreadful

claws thrust out, his eyes glaring like two gigantic carbuncles, his

wide, red mouth distended, and every wiry whisker bristling with rage

and fury.

The general fired both barrels of his first gun. One shot failed; but

the other wounded the tiger in the shoulder, and only served to make him

more savage; though, instead of springing upwards, he lay thus on the

defensive, gathered up in a round ball.

The major, an enormously fat man, weighing more than twenty stone, now

leant over the _howdah_ to take a cool and deliberate aim; but the

elephant in the same moment happened to bend his fore-knees, for the

claws of the tiger were inserted in his trunk.

Losing all balance by this unlucky motion, the poor major toppled

headlong over the _howdah_, just as both barrels of his gun exploded

harmlessly, amid a yell from the Indian hunters as they thought of his

fate.

But, "with a mighty squelch," as the general phrased it, the major, with

his twenty-two stone weight of flesh and bone, fell prone upon the fair,

white, upturned belly of the tiger!

Terrified, breathless, and bewildered by an antagonist so ponderous, and

by such an unexpected mode of attack, the tiger started up, and fled

from the scene, leaving the major untouched and unharmed, but seated

ruefully among the jungle grass, and with considerable doubts as to his

safety and his own identity.

The parish minister fairly overmatched this story by the narrative of a

fox which had been drowned by a mussel.

Prior to being appointed pastor of Calderwood Kirk, through the favour

of its patron, Sir Nigel, he had been an assistant in a parish situated

on the borders of one of the great salt lochs in the western highlands.

When riding one morning along the shore, opposite the Summer Isles, he

was surprised to see a large grey fox busy among the basket-mussels,

thick clusters of which were adhering to the dark whin rocks which the

ebb tide had left dry. The sea was coming in fast; but, strange to say,

Reynard seemed to be so much engaged in breakfasting on shell-fish that

he was heedless of that important circumstance.

Dismounting, and tying his horse to a tree, the minister made a circuit

to reach the place, and being armed with a heavy-handled riding-whip, he

had no fear of the encounter; but by the time he arrived at the

mussel-beds, the rapid tide had overflowed them, and the fox had

disappeared. So, remounting, the minister pursued his way into the

mountains.

Returning along the shore by the same path in the evening, when the tide

had ebbed, he again saw Reynard in the same place, but lying quite dead,

and, on examination, discovered that he was held fast by the tongue

between the sharp shells of one of the basket-mussels, which are

sometimes seven inches long, and adhere with intense strength to the

rocks by the beard, known to the learned as a powerful _byssus_. Seized

and retained thus, as if in the grasp of a steel vice, the fox, which

had been in the habit of seeking the sea shore to feed on the mussels,

had been held fast, until drowned by the advancing tide, which there

flows rapidly in from the Atlantic.

This story elicited roars of laughter from the fox-hunters, who had

never heard of a brush being taken in such a fashion; and Berkeley

expressed astonishment that the anecdote had never found its way into

the columns of _Bell's Life_, or other sporting journals.

The provost and minister gabbled about presbyteries and synods, the

moderation of calls, elders, deacons, and overtures to the General

Assembly, anent sundry ecclesiastical matters, particularly the adoption

of organs, and other innovations that savoured of prelacy, making up a

jargon which, to many present, and even to me, proved quite

unintelligible; but now, as a military man, old Rammerscales seized me

by a button, for there was no eluding being bored by him.

He had been so many years in India that he found a difficulty in

assuring himself that he was not "up country" and in cantonments still.

Thus, if the rooms were warm, the general grumbled that there was no

_punkah_ to swing over his head, the baldness of which he polished

vigorously, and muttered about "tatties of iced water."

He calculated everything by its value in rupees, and talked much of

compounds and cantonments; of _batta_ and marching money, of _chutney_

and _chunam_, and all manner of queer things, including sepoys and

_sowars_, _subadars_, _havildars_, and _jemidars_; thus the most casual

remark drew forth some Indian reference.

The cold of last night reminded him of what he had endured in the

mountains of Affghanistan; and the dark clouds of this morning were

exactly like some he had seen near Calcutta, when a sepoy was killed by

his side by a stroke of lightning, which twisted up the barrel of his

musket like a screw--"yes, sir, like a demmed corkscrew!"

Next, the gas offended his eyes, which had been so long accustomed to

the oil lamps or oil-shades of his bungalow; and then he spoke to all

the servants, even respectable old Mr. Binns (who had been for forty

years like Sir Nigel's shadow) as if they had been so many _sycees_,

grass-cutters, or tent-pitchers, making them start whenever he addressed

them; for he seemed to bark or snap out his words and wishes at "the

precious Griffs," as he termed them.

On the other hand, I was bored by the provost, who, like the M.P. (a

peace-at-any-price man), by no means approved of the expected war, and

informed Berkeley and myself that--

"Our trade--soldiering, to wit--was a deuced poor one--a speculation, a

loss, and never profit to any one, individually or collectively."

Berkeley smiled superciliously, eyed the provost through his glass, and

blandly asked him to repeat his remark twice over, professing that he

did not understand the worthy man.

"If you mean that you disapprove of the intended war, my good friend,"

said he, "I--haw--quite agree with you, Why the deuce should I fight for

the 'sick man' at Constantinople; or for the Turks or the Tartars of the

Crimea? It's a horrid bore."

Amid all this uncongenial conversation, I longed for the time when the

seniors would move towards the drawing-room, from whence the sounds of

music and of voices sweetly attuned were heard to issue at times; for

there my star was shining--Louisa Loftus, so beautiful to look upon, and

yet whom it seemed so hopeless in me to love!

Lost in reverie, and full of her image, it was some time before I became

aware that my distinguished brother in arms, Mr. De Warr Berkeley, was

addressing me.

"I beg your pardon," said I, nervously; "did you speak?"

"I was remarking," he lisped, languidly, "that these good people here

are--haw--very pleasant, and all that sort of thing; but have little of

the--haw--the--haw----"

"What?"

"Oh--the _odeur de la bonne societe_ about them."

"The deuce!" said I, with some annoyance, for I was conscious that at

our end of the table were really gathered the lions of my uncle's dinner

party. "I hope you don't include our host in this--he represents the

oldest line of baronets in Scotland."

"In Scotland--haw--very good," he drawled.

"Sir Nigel is my uncle," said I, pointedly.

"Yes, by the way, I crave pardon; so deuced stupid of me, when I know

well that there are no such sticklers about precedence and dignity as

your little baronets."

Coming from a conceited _parvenu_, the cool impudence of this remark was

so amusing that I burst into a fit of laughter; and at that moment, by a

singular coincidence, Sir Nigel, who had been engaged in an animated

discussion, almost amounting to a dispute, with Spittal of Lickspittal,

the M.P., now suddenly raised his voice, and without at all intending

it, sent one random shot after another at my fashionable comrade.

"I can assure you, sir," he continued, "that such cosmopolitan views as

yours, politically and socially, can never be endorsed by me. Thackeray

says--and he says truly--that God has created no more offensive creature

than a Scotch snob, and I quite agree with him. The chief aim of such

is to be thought an Englishman (just as some Englishmen affect the

foreigner), and a deplorable caricature he makes of the Englishman in

language, bearing, and appearance. An English snob, in whatever his

line may be, is, as Thackeray has shown us, a great and amusing

original; but a Scotch snob is a poor and vile imitation, and like all

counterfeits is easily discernible: Birmingham at once. I know no

greater hot-bed of snobbery than our law-courts, sir, especially those

of Edinburgh. Binns, pass the claret."

The M.P. bowed, and smiled deprecatingly, for he had long figured among

the said courts as one who would joyfully have blacked the boots of the

lord advocate or the ministry.

I felt almost sorry for Berkeley while my uncle spurred his hobby

against the M.P.; the ugly cap fitted so exactly.

"I know," resumed Sir Nigel, "that in a nation of tuft-hunters like the

British, whose Bible is the 'Peerage,' a man with a handle to his name,

however small it may be, is a trump card indeed; hence the adoration of

rank, which, as some one says, 'if folly in London, deepens into

positive vice in the country.'"

"Then what do you say of your poor Scottish metropolis, whose

aristocracy consists of a few psalm-singing--aw--bailies and young legal

prigs of the bar, whose importance is only equalled by their

necessities--boiled mutton and thin Cape Madeira?" said Berkeley, glad

of an opportunity to sneer at something Scotch.

"I have known a few honest fellows--and men of first-rate ability,

too--connected with the Scottish Parliament House," said Sir Nigel.

"But that, I suppose, was in the old Tory days, when all Edinburgh fell

down in the mud to worship George IV., the first gentleman in Europe,"

said the M.P. as a retort, at which my uncle laughed loudly.

But thus, by his remarks at the fag end of some discussion, Sir Nigel

had the effect of completely silencing, and unintentionally mortifying,

Berkeley, who continued to sip his wine in silence, and with something

of malevolence in his eye, till Binns announced coffee, and we repaired

to the drawing-room.

*CHAPTER VI.*

No, tempt me not--love's sweetest flower

Hath poison in its smile;

Love only woos with dazzling power,

To fetter hearts the while.

I will not wear its rosy chain,

Nor e'en its fragrance prove;

I fear too much love's silent pain--

No, no! I will not love.

Through the cool and airy corridor, with its cabinets full of Sevres

jars, Indian bowls, and sculptured marble busts--on one side the Marli

horses in full career crowning a buhl pedestal; on the other a bronze

Laocoon, with his two sons, in the coils of the brazen serpents--we

proceeded to the drawing-room, a merry and laughing party, for it was

impossible to resist the influence of a good dinner, good wines, and

jovial company.

On entering we found the ladies variously engaged. A graceful group was

about the piano; the Countess of Chillingham was half hidden in the soft

arms of a vast velvet chair, where she was playing indolently with her

fan, and watching her daughter; others were busy with books of

engravings, and some were laughing at the pencil sketches of a local

artist, who portrayed the wars of the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, and other

nude barbarians, while old Binns and two powdered lacqueys served the

tea and coffee on silver trays.

I had hoped to meet Lady Louisa's eye on entering, but the first smile

that greeted me was the sweet one of Cora, who, approaching me, put her

plump little arm through mine, and said, half reproachfully and half

jestingly--

"How long you have lingered over that odious wine, and you have not been

here for six years, Newton. Think of that--for six years."

"How many may elapse before I am here again? Do you reproach me, Cora?"

I was beginning, for her voice and smile were very alluring.

"Yes, very much," she said, with playful severity.

"Your papa, my good uncle, is somewhat of a stickler for etiquette,

consequently I could not rise before the seniors; and then this is the

festive season of the year. But hush; Lady Louisa is about to sing, I

think."

"A duet, too."

"With whom?"

"Mr. Berkeley. They are always practising duets."

"Always?"

"Yes; she dotes on music."

"Ah, and he pretends to do so, too."

Spreading her ample flounces over the carved walnut-wood piano stool,

Lady Louisa ran her white fingers rapidly and with some brilliancy of

execution--certainly with perfect confidence--over the keys of a

sonorous grand piano; while Berkeley stood near, with an air of

considerable affectation and satisfaction, to accompany her, his

delicate hands being cased in the tightest of straw-coloured kid gloves;

and all the room became hushed into well-bred silence, while they

favoured us with the famous duet by _Leonora_ and the _Conde di Luna_,

"Vivra! Contende il Guibilo."

Berkeley acquitted himself pretty well; so well, that I regretted my own

_timbre_ tones. But I must confess to being enchanted while Louisa

sang; her voice was very seductive, and she had been admirably trained

by a good Italian master. I remained a silent listener, full of

admiration for her performance, and not a little for the contour of her

fine neck and snowy shoulders, from which her maize-coloured opera cloak

had fallen.

"Lady Loftus," said Berkeley, "your touch upon the piano is

like--like----"

"What, Mr. Berkeley? Now tax your imagination for a new compliment."

"The fingers--haw--of a tenth muse."

She uttered a merry laugh, and continued to run those fingers over the

keys.

"Homely style of thing, the baronet's dinner," I heard him whisper, as

he stooped over her, with a covert smile in his eyes.

"Ah, you prefer the continental mode we are adopting so successfully in

England?"

"The dinner _a la Russe_; exactly."

"Ah, you will get dinners enough of that kind in the Crimea, more than

you may have appetite for," she replied, with a manner so quiet, that it

was difficult to detect a little satire.

"Most likely," drawled Berkeley, as he twirled his moustaches, without

seeing the retort to his bad taste; and then, without invitation, the

fair musician gave us a song or two from the "Trovatore;" till her

watchful mother advancing, contrived to end her performance, and,

greatly to my satisfaction, marched her into the outer drawing-room.

"Cora must sing something now," said I; "her voice has long been strange

to me."

"I cannot sing after Lady Loftus's brilliant performance," she said,

nervously and hurriedly. "Don't ask me, pray, Newton, dear."

"Nonsense! she shall sing us something. We were talking about snobbish

people in the other room," said honest, old blundering Sir Nigel. "I

have observed it is a peculiarity of that style of society in Scotland

to banish alike national music and national songs. But such is not our

_role_ in Calderwood Glen. A few of our girls certainly attempt with

success such glorious airs as those we have just heard, or those from

"Roberto il Diavolo" and "Lucia;" but I have heard men, who might sing a

plain Scottish song fairly enough, and with credit, make absolute

maniacs of themselves by attempting to howl like _Edgardo_ in the

churchyard, or like _Manrico_ at the prison-gate--an affectation of

operatic excellence with which I have no patience."

"To take out in fashion what we lose in genuine amusement and enthusiasm

is an English habit becoming more common in Scotland every day," said

the general.

"So, Cora, darling, sing us one of our songs. Give Newton the old

ballad of 'The Thistle and the Rose.' I am sure he has not heard it for

many a day."

"Not since I was last under this roof, dear uncle," said I.

This ballad was one of the memories of our childhood, and a great

favourite with the old Tory baronet; so I led Cora to the piano.

"It will sound so odd--so primitive, in fact--to these people,

especially after what we have heard, Newton," she urged, in a whisper;

"but then papa is so obstinate."

"But to please me, Cora."

"To please you, Newton, I would do anything," she replied, with a blush

and a happy smile.

I stood by her side while she sang a simple old ballad, that had been

taught her by my mother. The air was plaintive, and the words were

quaint. By whom they were written I know not, for they are neither to

be found in Allan Ramsay's "Miscellany," or any other book of Scottish

songs that I have seen. Cora sang with great sweetness, and her voice

awakened a flood of old memories and forgotten hopes and fears, with

many a boyish aspiration, for music, like perfume, can exert a wonderful

effect upon the imagination and on the memory.