THE WILLOWDEAN.
The manor house of Willowdean is situated in the Merse, which, with
Lauderdale and Lammermuir, forms one of the three great subdivisions
of Berwickshire, each of which possesses distinct natural features;
but the former has been long celebrated in Scottish annals for its
rich scenery, its industrious population, and plentiful harvests,
while the sterner Lauderdale is bold and rugged, and Lammermuir is
lone, bleak, and dreary, all purple morass or pastoral hill, being,
in fact, a vast sheepwalk.
Built on the site of an old Bastile-house, that had many a time been
burned or stormed, restored and stormed again, by English armies and
Warden raiders in the times of old; lastly, when the Bandes
Françaises under D'Esse d'Epainvilliers were in full retreat from
Haddington during the wars of Mary of Lorraine, Willowdean we may
describe as a handsome modern house, of aristocratic appearance, with
a peristyle of eight Ionic pillars, in the pediment above which were
the Wedderburn arms--a chevron between three mullets; while their
motto--_Fortiter et recte_--was carved in large Roman letters on the
frieze. The rooms were lofty, the double drawing-room, when its
folding doors were slid into the wall, forming a stately salon for
dancing, when all its rich furniture was removed, and the Karl
Harrgs, Fosters, and Gilberts, that adorned its walls, were alone
left behind.
There was, of course, a noble billiard-room, where many a game was
played by Cyril and Chesters, not always to the advantage of the
former; and a great conservatory filled with the rarest exotics,
where more than one graceful acacia drooped over statues and
fountains, was lit at night with roses of gas made at the home farm.
The park had been under grass for centuries, if it was ever ploughed
at all. Tradition said that Leslie's six thousand cavalry had
grassed there a night or two before the battle of Philiphaugh; and
there, as its vista stretched far away to where the purple Lammermuir
bounded the distance, far beyond the invisible fence that marked its
actual limits, the brown fallow deer might be seen in summer browsing
or lying under the ancient oaks and beeches, half hidden among the
green fern and pink foxglove; and that nothing might be wanting in
effect, some stately peacocks spread their spotted plumage over the
white balustrades of the terrace before the façade of the mansion, to
which the gravelled carriage-drive approached by a semicircular sweep
on each side, through the smooth and velvet grass.
Every comfort were there, and every luxury--ice-pit, vineries and
forcing-houses, stables and kennel--yet the means of the worthy
Baronet were far from adequate to his expenses in this aspiring age,
and in Willowdean, as in many a less pretentious dwelling, there was
too often a struggle to "keep up appearances."
Perhaps no part of the house was furnished more luxuriously and
elegantly than Lady Wedderburn's boudoir, the hangings and furniture
of which were blue satin and silver; but few objects there were more
treasured than certain Burmese idols, three-headed gods,
triple-trunked elephants, and other hideous little monsters, in
bronze and ivory, which her beloved Cyril had picked up amid the
"loot" at Moulmein, and brought home for "dear mamma," when he was a
boy ensign, in his first red coat.
And now for a little account of some of our _dramatis personæ_.
Captain Weddcrburn, though a frank, honest, and good-hearted young
fellow, was and ever had been a spoiled child of fortune. Pronounced
by aunts and nurses "a love of an infant" when crowing and nestling
in his silk berceaunette, he had gone to Rugby a bold and beautiful
schoolboy, and left college to join his regiment a dangerously
handsome man. He had been pretty successful in all the little
undertakings of the gay life he led--the career of a soldier in the
flirting times of peace. The horse he backed was pretty sure to win;
he could keep his wicket against the prime bowler of the garrison,
and march off the field with his bat on his shoulder; he won the
prize at every pigeon match, rode straight to hounds, pulled a
capital stroke oar, and was deemed one of the best round-dancers in
the Royal Fusileers. There was one thing he had never been able to
do, viz., to beat his acquaintance Chesters at cards or billiards,
"and thereby hangs a tale." Few men among those distinguished
Fusileers had been more petted, spoiled, fallen-in-love-with, or so
lucky among the ladies as handsome Cyril Wedderburn, who became
rather fastidious in consequence.
A prime hand he was in arranging picnics, or a social "spread" on the
roof of a drag at race or review, and he affected to dabble in music
too, for he had a fine voice, and many a mysterious air he had bribed
the band-master to "fudge out of another," and dedicate to some
pretty girl about whom he dangled till the route came; and it was his
great--yet most ungrateful--boast, in mess-room parlance, that "no
bit of white muslin had ever hooked him yet."
There was one sweet, pale face, however--but of _that_ anon.
His cousin and brother-officer, Horace Ramornie, though nearly as
much petted and admired, was much less a man of pleasure than Cyril.
He was by no means so showy an officer or so fashionable a man, yet
he was a lad of very striking and interesting appearance, now in his
twenty-second year; slender, graceful, and gentle-mannered, with
nearly regular features, and skin of an olive tint; yet with bat and
foil he had held his own against the best at Sandhurst. He had
wonderful dark hazel eyes, eyes that, as Cyril said, "were bright
enough and soft enough for a girl, and were quite thrown away upon a
fellow like Horace."
The lad had been a hard student, for he knew--and had perhaps been
taught to know from his boyhood--that he was dependent on the
Wedderburn family for his commission, in the first place, and for his
little yearly allowance in the second; therefore, he was chiefly vain
of having won a step in the regiment, that he was a lieutenant, and
that three letters, _p.s.c._, after his name in the Army List, showed
that he had already passed his final examination at the Staff
College, and was fit for any appointment the Commander-in-Chief might
bestow upon him.
Though amid the expense which their household and Cyril's
allowance--especially when on home service--entailed, together with
Robert's prospects, Lady Wedderburn did sometimes deem Horace
somewhat of "a drag," she could not forget that he was her dead
sister's only son; and as she doted on the tomes of Douglas, Burke,
and Debrett, she was vain of his direct descent from an old, old
Scottish line, that stretched far beyond the Wedderburns of the Merse
into remote antiquity; for the lad was descended from fierce Sir John
Ramornie, the audacious and implacable, the companion and false
friend of the helpless Duke of Rothesay, whom, as history tells us,
he seized near Strathtyrum, and starved to death in the Castle of St.
Andrew's in 1402, and from Alexander de Ramorgny, who had a free gift
of Pitglassie in Fife from Robert Duke of Albany, and so forth; so
Horace, though only a subaltern in Her Majesty's service, enjoyed an
historical name, one among the best of many of Scotland's "unlanded
gentry," though Pitglassie and all had gone in recent bank failures,
very little store he set thereon, as he walked to and fro on the
terrace on that breezy March morning, enjoying a pipe of Cavendish
and listening to Chesters, who was descanting most fluently on the
merits of certain horses and dogs, and on certain races that were on
the _tapis_, but descanting in vain, for Horace was not a betting man.
Ralph Rooke Chesters, of Chesterhaugh, a neighbouring proprietor,
whose lands were deeply dipped in debt, enjoyed the local rank of
Captain, having once been a cornet in a cavalry corps, which he had
left "somehow under a cloud," as the phrase went. He was not without
a certain amount of good looks, and had undoubtedly a gentlemanly
exterior. Yet he was a _blasé_ man, of some forty or five-and-forty
years, who had seen and known a vast deal of the world ere half that
time was past. His nose was very red, his cheeks were blotchy, and
his sandy-coloured hair was already thickly seamed with grey. There
was a perpetual sinister and watchful expression in his pale grey
eyes, and usually a compression about his thin, cruel lips, the
secret workings of which his sandy moustache, luckily for himself,
concealed.
On this morning he wore a rough suit of heather-coloured tweed, with
leather gaiters and baggy knickerbockers, a round jacket, scarlet
shirt, and Glengarry bonnet, the vile composite costume of the fast
Scotchman "of the period" whose limbs will not pass muster in the
kilt; and on the left side of the said Glengarry he wore a huge and
pretentious silver badge, the crest of the Chesters (a tower), to
whose line he certainly was no ornament; and Cyril Wedderburn, who
was very fastidious in his own toilette, disliked this style of dress
intensely, and even when shooting or fishing never adopted it.
His new horse--a fine bay hunter, with dark legs--had fully met
Chesters' approval. The stables, the dog-kennel, and the loose box
had been duly visited; they had tried a stroke or two in the
billiard-room, with a glass of Madeira and a biscuit, ere the Captain
again announced his intention of going.
"I daresay, Wedderburn," said he, "you must feel it a thundering
bore, this death of an old uncle you scarcely ever saw? It will
spoil all your fun, having to play propriety here till your leave is
up."
Cyril, like Robert, was perhaps thinking so, but had not the
coarseness to put his thoughts in words.
"Uncle William was my father's favourite brother," said he, evasively.
"Order my horse, Asloane," said Chesters, as the butler was leaving
the billiard-room with the salver and decanters.
"Are you going already?" asked Cyril, in a tone of equal indifference
and politeness.
"Yes, if you will allow me. I am rather _de trop_ here--family
grief, house of mourning, and all that sort of thing," said Chesters,
smiling as much as he ever smiled; "but perhaps you will look me up
at Chesterhaugh to-morrow, and pot with me at six, and then we'll
have a little mild play; not extravagant, remember; only guinea
points."
"All right, I'll be there; thanks," replied Cyril, but in a tone of
more indifference than cordiality.
Cyril Wedderburn courteously accompanied Chesters to the nearest
gate-lodge on the verge of the park, and then he galloped off.
"That is not the way to Chesterhaugh," said Cyril to the lodgekeeper.
"No, Maister Cyril," replied that official, with a leer; "but the
Captain gangs as often by the road that leads to Lonewoodlee."
The man did not speak unthinkingly, for his tone and manner made the
brow of Cyril contract, and he felt his cheek flush with anger, for
the inference to be drawn from these simple words was far from being
a pleasant one to him.
"Chesters at Lonewoodlee! By Heaven, I must look to this!" he
muttered, as he turned and walked slowly back to the house.