Chapter III · LADY WEDDERBURN'S HOPE.

Dinner at Willowdean, even when only the family were present, was rather a stately and cumbersome meal; yet Cyril and Horace, accustomed latterly to the splendour and glitter of the regimental mess, perhaps liked that it should be so. A service of plate covered the great walnut-wood sideboard. The damask cloths, the elaborately cut crystal, the blue and gold china with the Wedderburn arms—crest, an eagle in full flight, with the motto, Fortiter et recte—which figured on everything from the ice-pails to the salt-spoons, all betokened taste, luxury, and moderate wealth; while candelabra lit with gas shed a flood of brilliant light over all. Save a few feet of polished wainscot round the room, the floor was entirely covered by a rich deep Turkey carpet. Long and narrow, the apartment had four lofty windows at one end; these opened towards the Lammermuir Hills, but were now, at six P.M. in the month of March, shrouded by heavy maroon-coloured hangings with broad gold binding.

The three servants in attendance were each a perfect "Jeames" of the most approved order, so far as calves, whiskers, and livery went; for the traditional good old-fashioned servants who lived and died in their masters' household, and were as hereditary as the family pictures and plate, like many other Scottish things of the best kind, exist only in romance, and are gone with the past.

The party which assembled at table when Asloane rang the house-bell at six, was of course somewhat reserved and taciturn for a time. They conversed but little, or in low tones, till the cloth was removed, and that little ran chiefly on the weather, or consisted of the courtesies of the table, till Mr. Asloane had placed the elaborately cut decanters in a row before his master, bowed, and withdrawn.

Sir John, though grave and even sad in expression, had already been able to think calmly over his "poor brother's" death, in conjunction with certain long projected improvements on the property—more particularly the erection of a new wing to the stable-court, and a central clock tower; and yet ever and anon he would come forth with some fond or kind reminiscence of Willie, for he seemed at times to live in the past, and could scarcely realize the idea that he had died an elderly man at last.

Cyril's thoughts rose chiefly upon what the gatekeeper had said so casually; thus he was taciturn, almost morose, and fidgetted with his cuffs and studs or whiskers, viciously cracking walnuts as if in the shell of each he crushed an enemy.

His brother Robert was probably thinking that if their uncle William had left him something out of his lacs of rupees, he might have cut the Bar, for which he had no great fancy, and betaken himself to the profession of a man of pleasure; while young Horace Ramornie had no thoughts of the matter, for he was the least considered in that small family circle, and so made, perhaps, a more substantial dinner than any of them.

Lady Wedderburn (née Katharine Douglas, daughter of a poor but ancient family in one of the Wards of Lanarkshire) was no longer young; she was past the prime even of middle age, but still had great remains of beauty. Her cast of features and the brilliance of her dark grey eyes were unchanged, though wrinkles had taken the place of dimples, and her once black hair was streaked with silvery white.

Her small and ladylike hands showed the minute wrinkles and blue veins of time; yet they were well-shaped and beautiful hands still; and though she had several rings on them, fully a half of these were black enamel and pearls—the rings in memory of friends and relations she had survived.

The great remains which she possessed of a high class of beauty rendered her still pleasing, and Cyril, a very fastidious connoisseur in fine faces, always admired his mother's more than that of any other woman. She was his model, yet men rarely fall in love with their imaginary models. Her dresses were always rich, the colours well chosen, and in fashion adapted to her years, for she had the art which so few possess—that of growing gracefully old. A fall of rich white lace pinned prettily over her stately head fell with lappets at each side, finishing a coquettish demi-toilette that somehow became her matronly character.

"Pass the wine, Cyril; you are very silent," said Sir John: "and let us drink kindly to the memory of your poor uncle Willie."

"My dear Sir John," said Lady Wedderburn, still pursuing her own secret thoughts, after this little ceremony was over, "on again looking over our dear William's will, I observed that his property is conveyed away to certain trustees, of whom you are the chief, for the behoof of that darling child Gwenny, whom I already begin to love—quite as a daughter, indeed."

A grave kind of smile spread over Sir John's face, and Cyril, after a swift but furtive glance at his mother, proceeded to crack more nuts; but no one replied.

"I do so long to see her," resumed Lady Wedderburn, toying the while with some grapes, her head pensively on one side, and her eyes cast down. "If like her mother, she will be a very beautiful girl, Cyril."

"Indeed—I never saw her mother," replied Cyril, with provoking indifference, as he played with his long whiskers.

"I don't think there were many girls who in the bloom of their twentieth year surpassed Gwendoleyne Ap-Rhys!" observed his mother, emphatically.

"Pass the port, Horace," said Cyril; "that Madeira is like our mess tap, rather heady, but makes a capital 'whitewasher,' however."

"Makes a what?" asked Lady Wedderburn, with a tone of pique. "But a girl with three hundred thousand pounds will prove a serious responsibility to us."

"Get her married offhand," said Robert, bluntly.

"That is the very kind of marriage to be guarded against," replied his mother. "Thus we must be careful whom we introduce to her. She will prove a great comfort to us, however, Wedderburn, when the dear boys are back to their regiment and Robert is at College."

"I quite concur with you, Katharine, about the introductions," said Sir John. "One thing is clear, that after Cyril goes I shall not have that person Chesters coming about Willowdean."

"He is no particular friend of mine," retorted Cyril, almost haughtily, while he coloured with annoyance. "I only met him at the Lothian Racing Club: he knew Probyn and other fellows of ours, and so we came to talk of horses, and turn a card or two, that is all."

"A card or two to your loss, as I am aware; but he is a bad style of man, and not the kind of companion I wish you or Horace to make."

"My dear papa," replied Cyril, who, when in his father's presence, never forgot the influences of boyhood, "after a fellow has been eight years in the line, been round the Sand Heads at the mouth of the Hooghly, and marched all through Central India, if he can't take care of himself, he never will."

"I know that Chesters got into a scrape in his regiment, and then into the hands of the 'Chosen People,'" said Horace, laughing.

"An easy matter to do so," added Sir John. "Chesterhaugh, with its rents, wont stand a stud of horses, a pack of harriers, a yacht on the Clyde——"

"Besides a French danseuse," interrupted Cyril, under his breath and with a swift glance at his cousin.

"He rooked that young French officer who was travelling here," said Sir John—"what was his name?"

"The Captain De la Fosse," said Miss M'Caw, softly, for the flatteries of the Frenchman were still deep and soft in her memory, when he spent a week at Willowdean.

"Thank you—yes, De la Fosse. He rooked him so completely that, but for my assistance, he would have had serious difficulty in getting home to France."

"Ah, well; don't let him marry cousin Gwenny," said Cyril, once more applying himself to the port. "But here is a chance for you young fellows, Bob and Horace. Why don't you toss up for who is to enter stakes for the heiress?"

"Fie, Cyril! How can you talk thus—how make a jest so unseemly at such a time—of your own cousin, too?" exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, with heightened colour and unusual asperity of tone.

"Why, mother dearest——" began Cyril, with surprise.

"You might give yourself the preference."

"The right of the first-born," added Robert, sententiously.

"Nay, nay, I am not a marrying man. What the deuce should I do with a wife, when the regiment has got its 'Letters of Readiness,' too?" asked Cyril, again having recourse to the nuts, with a gloom in his dark blue eyes.

"Or Horace either, if it comes to that," said Lady Wedderburn, a little pointedly. "But under all the circumstances, I do not see why you should now go to the East at all, Cyril."

"Why now more than yesterday?" asked Cyril, who seemed to be in a cynical mood of mind. "I daresay you think me far too fine and handsome a fellow to be shot or bayonetted by some filthy Russian linesman, and then flung into a hole or a trench by the wayside, as better men have been."

"Oh, Cyril, what a horrible idea!" exclaimed his mother, while tears started to her eyes; "but there is our neighbour, Lady Juliana Ernescleugh, on the first rumour of war she had her son, the Master, transferred to the Scots Fusileer Guards, and I don't see why I should be worse treated than she is."

Cyril and Horace laughed on hearing this, and the former said, contemptuously—

"I do not think Lady Juliana made much by that move, as the Brigade of Guards are also under orders for European Turkey."

"At all events, when Gwenny comes home—for this house is of course her home, Sir John being her nearest kinsman and chief trustee—I trust that you two boys will do all in your power to soothe and console her after the terrible loss and affliction she has undergone."

Horace Ramornie coloured, for he felt himself omitted in this charge; but then she was no relation of his.

"Of course," replied Cyril, who, after a pause, began now for the first time to perceive how the current of these remarks tended; "but our time for all that sort of thing—at least, mine and Horace's—will be short, and a telegram from the Colonel may whisk us off by the first train at any moment. Gwenny—Gwendoleyne—the name is pretty enough, smacks of Mudie's, and the novel in three volumes octavo—we must leave the care and the reversion of her to you, Bob."

"She won't have any tinge of colour about her, I hope?" said that personage, simply.

"What a griff you are! Come out for the Scotch Bar; you would certainly shine there, Bob, if nowhere else," said Cyril.

"Well, a Welsh girl," persisted Bob, who was at the age when most young men are flippant; "she'll have black eyes, of course, with the proverbial cheek bones of the Celt and the Cymri—a high-crowned hat, and a scarlet handkerchief."

"A nice costume to wear at the Choultry, when the thermometer is at 108° in the shade. Bob, you are the veriest griff I have met since I left Chowringee."

"I am getting utterly provoked by this tone and the tenor of these remarks. Really the young men of the present day are becoming quite insufferable!" said Lady Wedderburn, actually darting an angry glance at poor Horace, who had scarcely spoken. "Cyril, and you especially, Robert, seem to forget that her mother was a lady of one of the best families in Wales, and that her father was your uncle."

"Yes," added Sir John, stiffly; "Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd is a name second to none in the annals of the old Principality."

"Then, papa," continued Bob, "when Gwenny comes home, we'll all have to go in for Burke, Debrett, and pedigree?"

"Reared in India, and away from all home influences, the girl will too probably place such things at their true value," said Cyril, still more unwittingly shocking his aristocratic mother; "though of course she may, if she please, go far beyond the Wedderburns up to the first Prince of Wales, or Howel Dha, at least."

"Come, come; no quizzing," said Sir John, a little severely. "Remember that she is an orphan."

"And so rich," added Lady Wedderburn, plaintively. "Miss M'Caw," she continued, with a bow understood by that lady, who, when no other was present, always sat on Sir John's right hand; and then the four gentlemen rose as ceremoniously as if they were all strangers, while she retired to the drawing-room with her companion.

The latter, who had been pretty when young, was now well past her fortieth year, and having a pedigree—as what Highlander has not?—she had sighed with secret impatience and envy, perhaps bitterness, while listening to much that we have recorded; for she too, as well as the heiress, had come of an old Celtic line that had furnished its patriotic victims for the field and scaffold; and among her private lares she treasured an old locket of red gold, containing a lock of "the Prince's" golden hair, given by his own hand, on the retreat from Derby, to her great-grandsire, the great M'Caw of the '45, who died like a hero in the human shambles at Carlisle.

She had resided some ten years of an aimless and hopeless life at Willowdean, and had not been without secret thoughts on one or two occasions of entangling Cyril in a matrimonial affair; but he had seen too much of the world even as a boy, and was daily seeing too many fresh young faces to be caught so easily—so all such hopes were past and vanished now.

She was a calm, quiet person, who, under a tolerably ladylike exterior, concealed much of that discontented pride, fawning, and subservience, which are too often the leading characteristics of the modern Celt.

"I do beg that you will not consider Ralph Chesters as in any way a friend of mine," said Cyril, resuming a thread of the past conversation, after his brother and Horace had betaken them to the billiard-room; "for I fully agree with you that he is not the style of man to meet ladies."

"Especially one who is such a monetary prize as your cousin," said Sir John, pointedly.

"But he talks of going to the army of the East."

"In what capacity?"

"An officer of the Bashi Bozooks, or some such distinguished force," said Cyril, with a hearty fit of laughter.

"And a good riddance his absence will prove to the Merse," added Sir John, as he rose to join Lady Wedderburn, leaving Cyril to smoke on the terrace, where he walked to and fro in the clear, cold starlight, with his eyes fixed on a dark spot that was barely distinguishable on the hill side, two or three miles off. It was a dense grove of trees, which seemed to have a peculiar attraction for him, and its outline became more distinct when the moon arose.

"Have you been talking to Cyril?" asked the lady, as her husband entered her boudoir, and, not without some doubt and hesitation, deposited his burly person in his rough tweed suit on one of her blue and silver fauteuils.

"Yes," said he, rubbing his forehead with an air of perplexity.

"Seriously, I hope?"

"About Chesters—oh, yes."

"Tush! I mean about Gwendoleyne."

"No; but it seems to me that you are already—even on the first day our melancholy news has come—disposed to press your views or wishes too plainly upon Cyril."

"How so?" asked Lady Wedderburn, curtly.

"In the choice of a wife, most men like to please themselves, not other persons."

"But surely, Wedderburn, you would wish to see this alliance brought about?" said she, earnestly.

"Undoubtedly; but Cyril is just the style of young fellow to run rusty—to kick over the traces—if worried about the matter. I know that I should have done so."

"He can have no previous attachment, for never a letter comes here, save from some of his regimental friends, and Horace and Robert see them all."

"But, my dear Katharine," urged Sir John, gently, as he stirred his cup of coffee, "we must consider also the girl's inclinations, her tastes, her sympathies."

"What right has she to have any at her years? I am sure I had none!"

"Complimentary, Kate, for you were just about her age when you married me."

"Ah, but that was a very different thing. I did not possess three hundred thousand pounds."

"You possessed much that had far more value in the eyes of John Wedderburn," said the old gentleman, as he stooped, kissed her upturned forehead gallantly, and to end this matter, went forth to have a look at his horses, and think over the proposed additions to the already magnificent stable-court.