'A garden-party by all means, Blanche.'
And Blanche shrugged her shoulders with the quaint foreign gesture which she inherited with her French blood, and took a sheet of paper from her desk to make out a list of names, to which her father, the old peer, listened with perfect indifference, if he listened at all.
Though descended from Patrick Galloway, who was minister of the Gospel at Edinburgh in the reign of James VI., the Dunkeld family, as the Scottish Peerage tells us, were first ennobled in the person of Sir James Galloway of Carnbee, in Fifeshire, who was Master of the Requests to James VI. and Charles I., Secretary of State and Clerk to the Bills, and was 'created Lord Dunkeld by patent on the 15th of May, 1645.' After intermarriages with the families of Duddingston and Dudhope, we come to 'James, third Lord Dunkeld, who was bred to the army, and was accounted a very good officer,' says Douglas; 'he joined Lord Dundee when he raised forces for King James VII., and was with him at the battle of Killiecrankie.'
There he was one of the foremost in that heroic charge, before which
'Horse and man went down like drift-wood
When the floods are black at Yule,
And their carcases were whirling
In the Garry's deepest pool.'
Outlawed, he became a colonel in the French service, and fell in battle but long after; his name appears as 'my Lord Dunkell' in the Liste des Officiers Genereaux for May 10, 1748.
James, the fourth lord, was also a general in the French army, and was a Grand Cross of St. Louis.
His grandson, the present lord, proved—untrue to the old traditions of his race—a very different, useless, and mediocre Scottish peer, of the type too well known in our day. He had no property in Scotland, and no more interest in her people, morally, practically, or politically, than a Zulu chief. He was proud of his descent and title, nothing more, and, not being very wealthy, thought, like his wife, that Leslie Colville would be a very eligible son-in-law; while at his death his title would inevitably pass to a second cousin, Colonel Charles Edward Galloway, chef d'escadron of a cavalry regiment, then quartered at Chalons-sur-Marne.
Lord Dunkeld had one pet vanity—a real or fancied resemblance in his profile to those of the Grand Monarque and the later Louis of France; a facial angle indicative of weakness certainly, if not of worse; but, if the idea pleased him, it did no one any harm.
Though thoroughly English bred, and English in all her ideas, as taken from her mother, the Hon. Blanche Gabrielle—so called from her grandmother, Gabrielle de Fontaine-Martel (daughter of the marquis of that name)—had considerable French espièglerie in her manner, and many pretty foreign tricks of it, with her eyebrows and hands, but she was naturally cold, ambitious, selfish, and vain.