"Dalhousie, Cortachy Castle is burnt to the ground; the Dudleys are here and you must come at once."
At the drawing-room door stood Lady Dudley, pale and beautiful, and warned us that her husband knew as yet nothing of what had happened, and asked us to be careful to say nothing which should alarm him. He was at that time very ill, and his mind was affected. The rest of the evening after we went into the drawing-room passed without any mention of the disaster to Cortachy. Lord Dudley sat down to his rubber of whist, won it, and went to bed not knowing that the house in which he had expected to sleep had been destroyed by fire. When he was told next morning he said, "Very well," and turned again to his newspaper.
The explanation was this: After Lady Dalhousie and I left Cortachy Lady Dudley took her husband for a drive, as usual. As they were returning, late, they were stopped by a messenger who handed Lady Dudley a note from the factor, saying the castle was on fire and there was no hope of saving it.
"What is it?" asked Lord Dudley.
"Oh, nothing much," answered his wife. "The kitchen chimney has been on fire and the place is in a mess. I think we had better drive over to Brechin and ask the Dalhousies to give us dinner."
This ready wit carried the day and saved Lord Dudley the shock which his wife dreaded. But the whole company of guests at Cortachy were also left homeless, and they also came to Brechin and slept there. I never quite understood how, for Brechin Castle can put up, in a normal way, fourteen people, and we slept that night fifty-six. But Lady Dalhousie besides being a reigning beauty, had practical talents and managed it all as if an inundation of unexpected guests were an everyday affair.
There is one thing to be added. Past Cortachy Castle flows a shallow stream with a stony bed. It was early in September. The water was very low, and what there was rippled and broke over the stones with a noise which, at night and amid uncertain slumbers, might easily be mistaken for the beating of a drum by a man whose mind was full of the drummer-boy story. After I had heard about Lord Hardwicke at luncheon I had walked along the banks of this burn, and the faint likeness of the waters beating on the stones to the beating of a drum occurred to me. Perhaps a mere fancy on my part. I don't press it. If anybody prefers to believe in the legend I don't ask him to believe in my conjecture. By all means let him nourish his own faith in his own way.
He may like to know, moreover, that Lord Hardwicke, now dead, was one of the last persons in the world to conceive or cherish an illusion. A well-known man of the world; in his way a celebrity, if only known for his hats, which were the glossiest ever seen outside of the stock Exchange. He had gone the pace; "climbed outside of every stick of property he possessed," said one of his friends, and had acquired a vast and varied stock of experience in the process. On the face of it, not at all the kind of man to believe too much; nor to believe in anything, as was said of Mr. Lowe, which he could not bite.
He came into the dining-room that night at Brechin and stayed on the next day. Among Lady Dalhousie's guests was Mr. Huxley. Certainly a man of the world was Mr. Huxley, but of a different world from Lord Hardwicke's. They had never met. You might have said they had not a subject in common. But they talked to each other, and to the surprise of the company it presently became evident that they got on together. I said as much to Mr. Huxley afterward. He answered in his decisive way:
"Don't make any mistake. Lord Hardwicke has powers of mind for which even his own set, so far as I know, has never given him credit. We did not talk about the weather. He was a man who would put his mind to yours no matter what you talked about, and it would take you all your time to keep up with him."