The Forlorn Hope: A Novel (Vol. 1 of 2)

The half-hour dressing-bell rung out as Sir Duncan Forbes jumped from the hired carriage which had borne him the last stage of his journey to Kilsyth, and immediately followed his servant, who had put in a pantomimically abrupt appearance at the carriage-door, to his room. The steaming horses shook their sides, and rattled their harness dismally, in the dreary autumnal evening; but a host of gillies and understrappers had hurried out at the noise of the approaching wheels, and so quickly despoiled the carriage of its luggage, that within a very few minutes its driver--comforted by something over his fare, in addition to a stiff glass of the incomparable Kilsyth whisky--was slowly wending his way back, over a road which to any one but a Highlander would have seemed impassable in the fog that had begun to cloud the neighbouring mountains in an almost impenetrable shroud of misty gray. From the cold, chilly, damp mountain air, from the long solitary ride, for the last twenty miles of which he had not met a human creature, to the airy bedroom with its French paper, the bright wood-fire burning on its hearth, the wax candles on the dressing-table, the drawn chintz curtains, the neat writing-table, the little shelf of prettily-bound well-chosen books, was a transition indeed for Duncan Forbes. One glance around sufficed to show him all these things, and to show him in addition the steaming bath, the warmed linen, the other various arrangements for his comfort which the forethought of Dixon his servant had prepared for him. He was used to luxuries, and thoroughly accustomed to rough it; he was not an impressionable young man; but there are times, even if we be only eight-and-twenty, good-looking, and in the Household Brigade, when we feel a kind of sympathy with the working-man who declared that "life was not all beer and skittles," and are disposed to look rather more seriously than usual upon our own condition and our surroundings. The journey from Glenlaggan--it is, it must be confessed, an awful road--had had its effect on Duncan Forbes. Why he should have permitted himself to be worked upon either by a sense of solitude, or by an involuntary tribute to the wildness of the scenery, or perhaps by dyspepsia, arising a recent change of living, to fall temporarily into a low state of mind; to think about his duns, debts, and difficulties; to wonder why he was not at that moment staying with his mother in Norfolk, instead of plunging into the depths of the Highlands; to think of his cousin Ethel Spalding, and to clench his fists violently and mutter strong expressions as the image of a certain Dundas Adair, commonly called Lord Adair, rose before him simultaneously with that of his said cousin; why he then fell into a state which was half lachrymose and half morose, impelling him to refresh himself from a silver flask, and to make many mental resolutions as to his future life,--why he did all this is utterly immaterial to us, as Sir Duncan Forbes is by no manner of means our hero, in fact has very little to do with our story. But the journey had its effect upon him, and rendered the comfort and luxury of Kilsyth doubly precious in his eyes. So that when he had had his bath, and, well advanced in his dressing, was luxuriating in the comfort of cleanliness and fresh linen, and the prospect of an excellent dinner, he had sufficiently returned to his normal condition to ask Dixon--who had preceded him by a couple of days--whether the house was full, and who were there.

"House quite full, sir," replied Dixon. "Colonel Jefferson, sir, of the First Life-guards; Capting Severn, sir, of the Second Life-guards, and his lady; Markis Towcester, as have jist jined the Blues; Honble Capting Shaddock, of the Eighteenth 'Ussars; Lord Roderick Douglas, of the Scots Fusiliers; and--"

"Drop the Army List, Dixon," growled his master, at that moment performing heavily on his head with a pair of hair-brushes; "who else is here?"

"There's the Danish Minister, sir--which I won't try to pronounce his name--and his lady; and there's the Dook and Duchess of Northallerton--which the Dook has the gout that bad, his man told me--used to be in our ridgment, Sir Duncan, and was bought out by his mother on his father's death--as to be past bearin' sometimes; and Lady Fairfax, sir; and Lady Dunkeld, as is Lady Muriel's cousin, sir; and a Mr. Pitcairn, as is a distant relation of the family's; and a Mr. Fletcher, as is, I'm told, a hartist, or something of that kind, sir--he hasn't brought a man here, sir; so I'm unable to say; but he seems to be well thought of, sir; quite at his ease, as they say, among the company, sir."

"Dear me!" said Duncan Forbes, suspending the action of the hair-brushes for a moment, while he grinned grimly; "you seem to be a great observer, Dixon."

"Well, sir, one can't keep one's hears shut entirely, nor one's eyes, and I noticed this gentleman took a kind of leading part in the talk at dinner, sir, yesterday. O, I forgot, sir; Miss Kilsyth have not been well for the last two or three days, sir; kep' her room, havin' caught cold returnin' from a luncheon-party up at what they call a shealing--kind of 'ut, sir, in the 'ills, where they put up when stalkin', as I make out, sir,--and her maid says is uncommon low and bad."

"Ill, is she?--Miss Kilsyth? Jove, that's bad! Haven't they sent for a doctor, or that kind of thing?"

"Yes, sir, they have sent for a doctor; and he's been, sir; leastways when I say doctor, sir, I mean to say the 'pothecary from the village, sir. Comes on a shady kind of a cob, sir, and I shouldn't say knew much about it. Beg your pardon, sir--dinner gong!"

Sir Duncan Forbes' toilette is happily complete at the time of this announcement, and he sallies downstairs towards the drawing-room. Entering, he finds most of the company already assembled; and in the careless glance which he throws around as the door closes behind him, he recognises a bevy of London friends, looking, with perhaps the addition of a little bronze in the men, and a little plumpness in the ladies, exactly as he left them at the concluding ball of the season two months ago. Some he has not seen for a longer period, his host among them. Kilsyth of Kilsyth, keen sportsman, whether with rod or gun; landlord exercising influence over his tenants, not by his position alone, but by the real indubitable interest which he takes in their well-being; lord-lieutenant of his county, first patron and best judge at its agricultural meetings, chairman of the bench of magistrates, prime mover in the herring fishery,--what does Kilsyth of Kilsyth do in London? Little enough, truth to tell; gives a very perfunctory attendance at the House of Commons, meets old friends at Brookes's, dines at a few of the earlier meetings of the Fox Club, and does his utmost to keep out of the way of the Liberal whip, who dare not offend him, and yet grieves most lamentably over his shortcomings at St. Stephen's. See him now as he stands on the hearth-rug, with his back to the drawing-room fire, a hale hearty man, whose fifty years of life have never bent his form nor scarcely dimmed the fire in his bright blue eye. Life, indeed, has been pretty smooth and pleasant to Kilsyth since, when a younger son, he was gazetted to the 42d; and after a slight sojourn in that distinguished regiment, was sent for by his father to take the place of his elder brother, killed by the bursting of a gun when out on a stalk. A shadow--deep enough at the moment, but now mercifully lightened by Time, the grim yet kindly consoler--had fallen across his path when his wife, whom he loved so well, and whom he had taken from her quiet English home, where, a simple parson's daughter, she had captivated the young Highland officer, had died in giving birth to a second child. But he had survived the shock; and long afterwards, when he had succeeded to the family title and estates, and was, indeed, himself well on the way to middle age, had married again. Kilsyth's second wife was the sister of a Scottish earl of old family and small estate, a high-bred woman, much younger than her husband, who had borne him two children (little children at the time our story opens), and who, not merely in her Highland neighbourhood, but in the best society of London, in which she was ungrudgingly received, was looked upon as a pattern wife. With the name of Lady Muriel Kilsyth the most inveterate scandalmongers had never ventured to make free. The mere fact of her being more than twenty years younger than her husband had given them the greatest hope of onslaught when the marriage was first announced; but Lady Muriel had calmly faced her foes, and not the most observant of them had as yet espied the smallest flaw in her harness. Her behaviour to her husband, without being in the least degree gushing, was so thoroughly circumspect, they lived together on such excellent terms of something that was evidently more than amity, though it never pretended to devotion, that the scandalmongers were utterly defeated. Balked in one direction, they launched out in another; they could not degrade the husband by their pity, but they could mildly annoy the wife with reflections on her conduct to her step-children. "Poor little things," they said, "with such an ambitious woman for stepmother, and children of her own to think of! Ronald may struggle on; but as for poor Madeleine--" and uplifted eyebrows and shrugged shoulders completed the sentence. It is needless to say that Kilsyth himself heard none of these idle babblings, or that if he had, he would have treated them with scorn. "My lady" was to him the incarnation of every thing that was right and proper, that was clever and far-seeing; he trusted her implicitly in every matter; he looked up to and respected her; he suffered himself to be ruled by her, and she ruled him very gently and with the greatest talent and tact in every matter of his life save one. Lady Muriel was all-powerful with her husband, except when, as he thought, her views were in the least harsh or despotic towards his daughter Madeleine; and then he quietly but calmly held his own way. Madeleine was his idol, and no one, not even his wife, could shake him in his adoration of her. As he stands on the hearth-rug, there is a shadow on his bright cheery face, for he has had bad news of his darling since he came in from shooting,--has been forbidden to go to her room lest he should disturb her; and at each opening of the door he looks anxiously in that direction, half wishing, half fearing Lady Muriel's advent with the doctor's latest verdict on the invalid.

The thin slight wiry man talking to Kilsyth, and rattling on garrulously in spite of his friend's obvious preoccupation, is Captain Sèvern, perhaps the best steeple-chase rider in England, and untouchable at billiards by any amateur. He is a slangy, turfy, raffish person, hating ladies' society, and using a singular vocabulary full of Bell's-Life idioms. He is, however, well connected, and has a charming wife, for whose sake he is tolerated; a lovely little fairy of a woman, whose heart is as big as her body; the merriest, most cheerful, best-tempered creature, trolling out her little French chansons in a clear bird-like voice; acting in charades with infinite character and piquancy; and withal the idol of the poor in the neighbourhood of their hunting-box in Leicestershire; and the quickest, softest, and most attentive nurse in sickness, as a dozen of her friends could testify.