One of the Six Hundred: A Novel

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