Chapter II · 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.