The big smoking-room below had presented a most animated scene; groups of old brother officers were discussing various burning questions, and topics ranged, from the new Hussar boot, to the North-west Frontier. Colonel Doran knew a good deal about the frontier, but made no effort to enter the lists. What were possible campaigns to him now? He wandered aimlessly up to the library, and turned over some books; he tried to read—it was no use. Ashamed to appear a sort of no man’s friend, and stray, he made his way to the upper smoking-room, which he was tolerably certain to find empty at that hour. He sauntered round it, gazing indifferently at the pictures and mementoes. A sketch of two elephants in a dust-storm arrested his attention. How he wished himself on the back of one of the old beggars—dust-storm and all! At last he strolled over to the window, and as he stood looking out on a dismal vista of wet slates and an iron-grey sky he heaved an involuntary sigh. So this was the end of his career—idleness, boredom, solitude!
The career of Ulick Doran had commenced at eighteen, when as a cadet he had landed in India—that hospitable godmother of younger sons—and the kindly East had adopted and made him her own for the better part of thirty-four years. He had been gazetted as a mere boy to a crack regiment of Bengal cavalry known as “Holland’s Horse,” and in this corps, his home, he had lived and fought and nearly died: had seen his comrades come and go, marry, and retire. Now it was his own turn. At fifty-two his career was ended, and the curtain rung down. Good-bye to everything he cared for—to the sowars, his children, to the mess, to the horse lines, aye, to the very horses, half of which he had selected—good-bye to all that had made life worth living. Naturally he could not remain in India, that unseemly spectacle, a mere camp follower of the regiment he had so ably commanded, hovering around it like a departed spirit. He must return to England, and range himself decently on the shelf along with most of his contemporaries. Unfortunately Colonel Doran had but few resources apart from his profession; he was a fine horseman, a noted swordsman, a keen and capable officer, and here he stood, a stranded and unhappy pensioner, the very typical dragoon without his horse! What made his position still worse, he was alone in the world. His mother had died when he was a small boy—he scarcely remembered her; his father, on the other hand, had lived to a great age, a red-faced, irascible old gentleman, whose eldest son predeceased him by many years; and thus the family place had come to the Indian officer, after all.
An agent had remitted him spasmodically his somewhat shrunken rents; and recently he had visited Kilmoran Castle, the home of his ancestors, a tumbledown old place six miles from a station, with a defective roof, and a pervading odour of soot and dry rot. He scarcely knew a soul in the neighbourhood: undoubtedly there was good hunting to be had of a somewhat rough-and-ready description that would carry him through the dark winter days; but what of the evenings at home? He recalled the cavernous dining-room, with black horsehair and mahogany furniture, the heavy flock paper, the narrow windows, the glowering family portraits, and, above all, the grim sarcophagus under the sideboard that seemed to await, not the plate, but a corpse! whilst the drawing-room, which had been closed for fifty years, was a ghostly apartment, given over to dust and mice, who played weird tunes among the wires of the ancient Broadwood piano. Ulick Doran shivered as he pictured the dim flagged passages, the damp, desolate bedrooms. If he were to live at Kilmoran alone, he would undoubtedly take to drink or cut his throat! The other alternative was London and a bedroom near his club, where he would see the same faces, hear the same arguments, walk the same streets—every day. Oh, he would soon come to the end of that! This great city had no attractions for him. As he stood gazing out on the streaming rain and leaden clouds he was mentally contrasting Pall Mall with the “eye of his heart”—the Punjaub—and wishing he were back under the deep blue sky, with the first nip of the cold weather in the air, and his new Australian thoroughbred between his knees.
Just at this instant the door opened and a brisk little bald man, with a fair moustache and cheery eye, entered the room. He was Major Sutton—or Johnny Sutton, as his friends called him—late of Holland’s Horse, a comrade who had retired, married, and apparently lived happy ever after.
“I say, old man,” he began, “what are you doing here all by yourself—eh? What’s the matter? Down on your luck?”
“Not much luck to be down on, as far as I know,” growled the other, turning from the window and sinking into a capacious chair.
“Of course it’s just raw to you at present; you miss the old regiment, and, by George! they miss you,” said Johnny Sutton, opening his cigar-case. “We all have a sort of lost, end-of-all-things feeling, when we first come home, but we get over it in time and make a fresh start.”
“That’s all right for the young ’uns, Johnny, but a man of fifty-two has gone over most of the course.”
“Nonsense, Pat. I see you are affected by this beastly weather, and your liver—a man of fifty is in his prime! Why, I’m fifty myself, and can walk and shoot with the best.”
“You were always a great shikari, Johnny.”