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 spent on your cousins, had they lived. So, thank fate and the fortune of war, not me, boy, not me. But there are times, especially when I am alone, that it grieves me to think that instead of leaving an heir to the old title, one boy lies in his grave in the old kirk yonder; and the other, far, far away on the battle-field of Goojerat."
He shook his white head, and his voice became tremulous, his chin sank on his breast, and he added--
"My poor Nigel!--my bonnie Archie!"
The baronet was a handsome man, above six feet in height, and, though he stooped a little now, had been erect as a pike. He possessed fine aquiline features, a ruddy and healthy complexion; clear, and bright dark grey eyes; a well-shaped, though not very small, mouth; and a Scottish chin, of a curve that evinced perseverance and decision. His hair was nearly white, but there was plenty of it; his hands, though browned by exposure and seldom gloved--for the gun, the rod, the riding-whip, and the curling stone were ever in them by turns--were well shaped, and showed by their form and nails that he was a gentleman of good blood and breeding. His plain costume I have described, and he was without ornament, save a silver dog-whistle at his button-hole, and a large gold signet-ring, which belonged to his grandfather, Sir Alexander Calderwood, who commanded a frigate under Admiral Hawke, in the fleet which, in 1748, fought and vanquished the Spanish galleons between Tortuga and the Havannah.
A sturdy old Fifeshire laird, proud of a long line of warlike Scottish ancestors, uncrossed by any taint of foreign blood, he was fond of boasting that neither Dane nor Norman--the Englishman's strange vaunt and pride--could be found among them; but that he came of a race, which--as our Highlanders forcibly phrase it--had sprung from the soil, and were indigenous to it.
But, indeed, the alleged foreign descent of nearly the whole Scottish aristocracy is a silly sham, existing in their own imagination, having arisen from the ignorance of the monkish Latin writers, who in rolls and histories prefixed the Norman _de_ or _le_, in many instances, to the most common Celtic patronymics and surnames.