CHAPTER III.
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.