FIRST IMPRESSIONS.
The sense of having borne a part in a scene--an event which is
dreaded by well-bred folks--prevented Mary from making her appearance
till dinner-time, when, after achieving a most effective toilette,
she entered the lighted drawing-room.
Though almost totally unembarrassed by any memory of Hew's absurd
love-making, she had nevertheless been provoked that the new guest
should have been cognisant of his gallantry in the avenue. She could
but hope that he had forgotten it, which was certainly not the case,
and ere she had left her dressing-closet, she paused before the
pier-glass to peep at her own sweet face and all her bravery, ere she
swept away down the great staircase to the drawing-room, where
already the general and their visitor were on the best of terms,
laughing and, as Mrs. Garth phrased it, 'talking shop in full swing.'
'Yes, yes,' she heard Sir Piers saying, 'it was there at the storming
of that hill-fort that the notable dispute took place between Douglas
of "Ours" and Bruce of the Bengal Infantry, as to which was senior
and who should lead the stormers; till Douglas, when the bullets,
egad! were flying like hail down the breach, lowered his sword and
said, "When a Bruce is to lead, a Douglas may be proud to follow;
lead on, and I shall follow you!" He was shot down a minute after,
and the next who was knocked over was your good-man, Mrs. Garth--poor
John! Ah! my niece,' he interrupted himself, on seeing the suddenly
arrested gaze of their guest. 'Mr. Falconer of "Ours," Mary--Miss
Montgomerie.'
Mary gave him her hand and a smile of welcome, and was at once put at
her ease, as Sir Piers resumed his anecdote, to which, though she had
heard it a hundred times before, Mrs. Garth listened with rapt
attention, as became an 'old campaigner,' while Annabelle Erroll, who
seemed already to have discovered that she and Mr. Falconer had some
friend or friends in common, was conversing away with more than her
usual fluency and animation.
'Is she already smitten by our new sub?' thought Mary.
Falconer had certainly a striking face and striking figure, and both
were well calculated to please a woman's eye. In plain but accurate
evening costume, the funereal costume of festive civilisation, he
seemed every inch a gentleman and a handsome fellow; calm,
self-possessed, and in about his twenty-fifth year; soldier-like,
perfectly well-bred, as it eventually proved, was well-read and a
skilful musician.
His nose was somewhat aquiline; his eyes and close-shaven hair were,
like Mary's, of the darkest brown, and his moustaches, as Annabelle
afterwards whispered to her, were 'the perfection' of such
appendages. He had a placid and perfectly assured manner, very
different from Hew's alternate restlessness and _insouciance_; yet
his eyes bespoke a latent fire of character and a spirit that was
full of courage and energy; and now Hew, who had been preparing for
the coming meal by having either sherry and bitters, or a hideous
compound called a 'cocktail,' which he had taught the butler, Tunley,
to make up, came lounging in, with scrutiny and gloom in his eyes, to
complete the little circle grouped near the fire.
By nature suspicious and envious, he barely accorded their visitor a
touch of his hand, and from that moment these two young men
felt--they knew not why--an instinctive dislike of each other.
The dinner-gong cut short another anecdote of the general's, and
recalled his thoughts from pig-sticking and Central India; he gave,
with courtly old-fashioned politeness, his arm to Mrs. Garth; Mary
took that of Cecil Falconer, and smiling Annabelle Erroll fell to the
lot of the amiable Hew, while Mr. Tunley and the servants drew up
rank entire in the vestibule; then, of course, the meal that followed
was like any other in such an establishment, perfect, from the soup
and dry sherry to the coffee and Maraschino.
'Tunley,' said Sir Piers, 'fill Mr. Falconer's glass. Glad to
welcome you to Eaglescraig,' he added, bowing over a brimming glass
of sherry; 'glad, indeed, to welcome one of my old Cameronians. I
hope that, like me, you are proud of the old corps?'
'I am indeed, Sir Piers!' responded the young fellow with a kindling
eye, that doubtless, like his heart, brightened under the genial and
charming influences of his surroundings. 'I share, sir, to the full,
the opinion of someone who says that no soldier is worth his salt
unless he feels that he is as good as any man about him, and twice as
good as any opposed to him.'
'Bravo, Falconer I you are one after my own heart! Gad, but he is a
fine fellow,' he added in a low voice to Mrs. Garth; 'reminds me
powerfully of some one I knew, long ago. _Who_ the deuce can it be?'
In the extremity of his kindness at that moment, he actually thought
him like his dead son, so the old man's whole heart went out to the
new-comer, in whose favour this fanciful idea operated powerfully.
'His father and mother have long been dead, I understand, and he
joined the Cameronians fresh from school--a mere boy, as I did
myself.'
He looked almost tenderly on the young man, who was quite unconscious
that he was an object of any particular interest; and his eyes
kindled, but a sigh escaped as he recalled his own hot youth, and
'Thought of the days that were long since gone by,
When his limbs were strong and his courage was high,'
and ere his once firm and stately stride had given place to what he
called 'a species of half-pay shamble.'
'By the way, Falconer,' said Sir Piers, whose pet weakness was
pedigree, 'there was an old family of your name, who had an estate in
this Bailiwick of Cunninghame--perhaps you are a branch of it?'
The young man coloured rather perceptibly (as Hew was not slow to
perceive and make a note of), and said with a smile:
'I was educated out of Scotland; my father died in my youth, and my
mother set no store on such fortuitous things as name or pedigree.'
'A sad mistake,' said Sir Piers, shaking his white head. 'The
Falconers I speak of were a branch of the Falconers, lords of
Halkertoun, who took their name from their office, being falconers to
our kings of old, as we learn from Douglas--aye, so far back as the
twelfth century.'
'I know not, general, of what Falconers I come,' replied the young
officer a little curtly; then he added, with a smile: 'I only know
that I was not born with the proverbial silver spoon, but with a
wooden one, of the largest size.'
Sir Piers felt intuitively that he had touched a delicate subject,
and changed it at once, though for a Scotsman not to know what kith
or kin he came of seemed certainly incomprehensible; but Hew, aware
of the vast value he attached to the most fortuitous circumstances of
birth, family, and position, thought:
'No pedigree! By Jove! our Cameronian will find but small favour
here now.'
'Tunley has got some magnificent Marcobruner and Lafitte in the
cellar, Falconer,' said Sir Piers; 'I must have your opinion--but if
I only look at them, I should have a twinge of my old enemy the gout.'
Falconer bowed his thanks, and was turning again to address Mary,
when Sir Piers took his attention by plunging once more into Central
India, and a stream of anecdotes about 'what the service and the
regiment were in _my_ time,' till the ladies withdrew, and, to Hew's
disgust, there followed, of course, a professional conversation, on
which he was totally unable to enter; thus he could only sip his
wine, toy with the grape-scissors, or crack an occasional nut, while
hearing Sir Piers laughing at jokes that seemed destitute of all fun
to him, and all matters of 'shop' were discussed with the keenest
relish--the new head-dress for the Line, the new pattern musket, and
endless anecdotes of the mess-room and parade, to all of which Hew,
not unnaturally, perhaps, listened with ill-disguised impatience; and
even when the conversation halted irregularly between music and
literature, or art and politics, home and foreign, he could not enter
thereon, as Hew abhorred all books save a betting one, and read no
journal save the _Sporting Times_.
Cecil Falconer rose to rejoin the ladies, but the general was in no
mood to spare him, and insisted again and again on one more glass of
dry sherry, 'just as a white-washer;' and of course that, 'by the
way,' reminded him of 'how we used to be annoyed at Agra by the
musk-rats running over the wine-bottles, and communicating a
confounded flavour of musk to the sherry, which is no improvement to
the wine, I can tell you; and it is a curious fact that every English
resident in India tastes musk in his wine at some time or other,
though there are some who assert it is a mere superstition. When we
were at Agra and elsewhere up country, we had deuced little money
among us in the Cameronians, yet somehow we always spent a devil of a
lot of it; for every fellow drew a bill on every other fellow, so
there was a regular crossfire of blue paper from right to left.'
To these and other reminiscences Falconer listened with his mind full
of the bright smile accorded to him by Mary Montgomerie, when he had
adroitly anticipated Hew in opening the door when the ladies departed
to the drawing-room, whither he longed to follow them, and from
whence the notes of the piano seemed to come as an invitation to do
so, but he was compelled to endure anecdotes about India _ad nauseam_.
'By Jove, Sir Piers,' said Hew, wearily, 'I detest India; I've had
enough of it!'
'I don't mean you to have any more of it, Hew, and you know that
well,' replied Sir Piers kindly, his heart mellowed with wine; 'but
you are mistaken in your views of it. "India," says a writer,
correctly, I think, "is quite a misrepresented country, and has
nothing objectionable in it, but a tiger or two, and a little heat in
the warm part of the day."
The night was considerably advanced when they joined the ladies.
Mrs. Garth had already retired; and the jolly old general, who had
fully partaken of more wine than he usually did, stood in
orderly-room fashion, with his feet apart on the rich hearthrug and
his back to the fire, winking, blinking, smiling blandly, and not
sure whether he was expected to take the field at the head of the
Cameronians to-morrow; while at the piano there was performed a
little brilliant singing, which Hew, with growing irritation,
secretly stigmatised as 'the most duffing caterwauling!' and sat
apart sulking (wine had usually this effect upon him), and leaving to
Falconer the inevitable and pleasant task of turning the music
leaves, and his eyes watched alternately the handsome and well-formed
young fellow, who bent with ease and confidence admiringly over the
singers, who, with voices sweetly attuned, were performing a duet,
and the forms of the latter, so different in the character of their
beauty--Mary with her hair of rich dark brown, and Annabelle, the
blonde, with her sunny coils, that shone with a remarkable sheen in
the flood of radiance that fell from the chandelier.
But the night waned apace, and at last it was necessary to separate,
if any justice was to be done to the cover shooting on the morrow,
now close at hand.
Hew gave Falconer his hand, which to the latter seemed clammy and
quite like the tail of a fish; but the general insisted on escorting
him to his 'quarters,' as he said, and conducted him, candle in hand,
along one or two stately corridors adorned with fine paintings--two,
that were of Cardinal York and King James VIII., evinced the Jacobite
proclivities of Sir Piers' ancestors--and there, too, were trophies
of the chase, both European and Asiatic. Never had Hew or the girls
known the usually grave and rather stately old baronet 'in such a
merry pin' (Hew suggested 'so screwed'); but as he threaded the
corridors he was heard to sing a scrap of an old Anglo-Indian ditty:
'Good-bye to the _batta_!--to lighten
The pangs of each blooming cadet;
And the brows of the captains to brighten,
They've doubled the one epaulette;
They've added some lace to our jackets,
Augmented the price of our caps,
In the hope that the half-batta rackets
Will merge in the glare of our "traps."
Just as any new plaything bewitches
The sulks out of little boys whipped;
And before they've well pulled up their breeches,
They wholly forget they've been stripped.'
'Ah, yes, Falconer, my lad, that song was known long before your day,
when the beggars cut down the _batta_. But here you are--no, here;
this is the door. Good-night; hope you'll sleep sound. No need for
a chowree to whisk inside the curtains here, as in India, and after
making them safe all round the mattress, spring in through the hole
you leave (like Harlequin through his hoop), lest a cloud of
mosquitoes follow. I remember, at Dumdum--no, at Dinapore, my son
Piers and Ballachulish of the Cameronians----' Then his voice broke
as he spoke of his son, and he added: 'But I'll tell you about it
to-morrow. Breakfast at nine, and then--hey for the covers!'
And now Sir Piers, whose voice had become certainly somewhat
'feathery,' betook him to his own room, pausing on the way more than
once, candle in hand, as his aristocratic ideas of family, and that
pride of birth which had been his ruling passion and sin in early
life, occurred to him, and he muttered, pausing in his progress to
bed, and shaking his white head:
'Doesn't know what Falconers he's of--a strange thing--a pity. My
boy Piers forgot, too, what Montgomeries he was of, once on a time.
A fine fellow, though!'
As for the latter, he was simply enchanted with Eaglescraig and all
the details thereof: the beauty of the two girls, each so different
in its character, and the _savoir vivre_ of the old general. As for
Hew, he forgot all about him.
Meanwhile, a few rooms distant, the lady's-maid was sleepily combing
out the dark and luxuriant tresses of Mary Montgomerie, and the light
of a shaded lamp fell softly and tenderly upon the graceful figures
of herself and Annabelle, seated in their _robes de chambre_
(chatting as young girls will always do when preparing for rest), on
the looped-up lace curtains of their pretty beds, knotted one with
blue and the other with rose-coloured ribbons; on the toilet-tables,
with their glittering trinkets, and crystal bottles with gold or
silver stoppers; on vases of conservatory flowers, and all the pretty
luxuries which are usually to be found in the vicinity of youth,
wealth, and beauty, as each girl sat smilingly contemplating herself
in a long looking-glass, with all her rippling hair floating down
over her white shoulders.
'And you like him?' said Mary, after the maid had withdrawn.
'Oh, so much!' exclaimed Annabelle; 'he is quite a dear fellow.'
'He has a gentle voice and gentle eyes, certainly,' said Mary,
musingly.
'And to me looks somehow like one who has a history beyond that of
other young men.'
'A history--what a funny idea! Of course he'll have a history,
which, perhaps, like other young subs, he would rather not have made
patent to everyone. But you and he seemed to have some little
interest in common, Annabelle?'
'Had we?' said the latter, colouring a little.
'He spoke to you often of his friend, the other sub--what is his
name?'
'Leslie Fotheringhame,' replied Annabelle in a low voice.
'Do you wish Sir Piers had invited him?'
'Perhaps, Mary,' said Annabelle, with a little forced laugh. 'Yet
better not, better not,' she thought, with a memory of the days when
her hand had thrilled at the touch of Leslie's, even before words of
love had been spoken, and there had only been in her ear those broken
utterances which a woman seldom, perhaps never, forgets.
So, save in the instance of Hew, all their first impressions of each
other were favourable, and the young girls, as each laid her head on
her pillow, began already to scheme out pleasant little visions, they
scarcely knew of what.