In that home were others, who were kind and gentle, and who loved me well, awaiting my arrival, and to welcome me. And there was my cousin Cora Calderwood—she was unmarried still.
Cora I was about to see again. It seemed long, long since we had last met, though we had frequently corresponded, for my uncle had a horror of letter-writing; and certain it was that she had inspired the first emotion of love in my schoolboy heart, and during my sojourn in India, and amid the whirl and gaiety of barrack-life at Bath, at Maidstone, at Canterbury and elsewhere, her image had lingered in my mind, more as a pleasing memory connected with ideas of Scotland and my home, rather than with those of a passionate or enduring attachment.
Indeed, I had just been on the point of forming that elsewhere; but now, having no immediate attraction beside me, I began to wonder whether Cora had grown up a beauty; how tall she was, whether she was engaged, and so forth; whether she still remembered with pleasure the young playmate who had left her sorely dissolved in tears, half lover and wholly friend.
As we progressed northward, and crossed the Firth of Forth, the snow almost entirely disappeared, save on the lofty summits of the Ochil mountains, whose slopes looked green and pleasant in the meridian sun; and my friend Studhome, had he been with me, might have been much surprised in finding the atmosphere warmer north of Stirling Bridge than we found it at Maidstone—so variable is our climate.
We changed carriages at Stirling, where I was to imbibe some hot coffee, while Pitblado looked after my baggage, and swore in no measured terms at the slowness of an old, cynical, and hard-visaged porter, on whose brass badge was engraved a wolf—the badge of Stirling.
"Now then, look alive, you old duffer!" I heard Willie shouting.
"Ou, aye!" replied the other slowly, with a grin on his weather-beaten and saturnine face; "ye think yoursel' a braw chiel in your mustaches and laced jacket—there was a time when I thocht mysel' one too."
"What do you mean?" asked Pitblado, whose dragoon air even his livery failed to conceal.
"Mean!" retorted the other; "why, I mean that at the point o' the bayonet I helped to carry Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo to boot; and now, for sax baubees, I'm thankfu' to carry your bag. Sae muckle for sodgerin'!"
"It is not very encouraging, certainly," said my man, with a smile.