She was the only one who felt any pleasure in the anticipated change and long journey by post-horses, as it promised at least all that novelty so charming to a young girl.
Poor Lady Rohallion! She knew that by her husband's frequently expressed desire for military employment (parliamentary and diplomatic matters he detested) he was bound in honour—especially at a time when all Britain was in arms—to accept the first command offered him by the Duke of York, his old friend and comrade. She had long feared the crisis, but, as time passed on and no appointment came, she ceased to think of it; but now it had come at last, and when least expected, and she was about to be subjected to a double separation, from her husband and her son.
Cut off as Britain was then from the continent, the majority of its people had few views or sympathies beyond their own fireside or immediate circle. The scene of the probable campaign in which Rohallion would serve, was wild and remote, the people desperate and lawless; our force in the field small, most pitifully so, when compared with the masses of the dreaded and then abhorred French.
She could perceive that her courtly old lord vacillated between sincere sorrow for leaving her and a love for his profession, with a hope of distinguishing himself and trying his strength and skill against some of the famous marshals of the new empire—the heroes of the Italian, German, and Egyptian campaigns—those corporals of le petit caporal, who had picked up their epaulettes on the barricades of Paris, or at the foot of the guillotine on which King Louis and the noblest in France died; for thus were the marshal dukes of the great emperor viewed by the high-flying aristocracy of the Pitt administration, in the old fighting days "when George the Third was king."
Lord Cockburn, in his "Memorials," describes, with happy fidelity, "a singular race of old Scottish ladies," that have completely passed away. "They were," says he, "a delightful set; strong-headed, warm-hearted, and high-spirited; the fire of their tempers not always latent; merry even in solitude; very resolute; indifferent about the modes and habits of the modern world, and adhering to their own ways, so as to stand out like primitive rocks above ordinary society. Their prominent qualities of sense, humour, affection, and spirit, were embodied in curious outsides, for all dressed, and spoke, and did exactly as they chose; their language, like their habits, entirely Scottish, but without any other vulgarity than what perfect naturalness is sometimes taken for."
One of that genuine race was the handsome and stately old Lady Winifred of Rohallion.
A Scottish lady of the kindly old school, one who in infancy had been nursed and fondled by warm-hearted and periwigged old gentlemen and hoopskirted gentlewomen, who boasted that they were the last of the true old Scots, born when a Stuart was on the throne, and before their country was sold by the Whigs, and when her Parliament assembled on the ringing of St. Gileses bell; she who in girlhood had seen and known many of the gallant and loyal who had dined and drunk with Kilmarnock and Balmerino, and who had drawn their swords for James VIII. at Falkirk and Culloden; who treasured in secret the white rose, and yearly drank to "the king ower the water"—she felt now that she would be sadly at a loss and strange among English modern society. Her local ideas and usefulness, her strong Jacobite sympathies and loyalty to a dead race of kings, her nervous terror of democracy and foreigners, might pass for eccentricity; but how could those among whom she would now be thrown know or understand her little weakness for the heraldry, genealogy, connexions, and past glories of the Maxwells of Nithsdale and the Crawfords of Rohallion; for she knew them to be people who spoke of the late cardinal-duke as "the dead Pretender;" who voted all that was not English absurd or vulgar, and who basked in the rays of the star of Brunswick as it beamed on the breast of "the first gentleman in Europe," the future George IV.: with her powder and patches, her broad Scottish accent, and her high-heeled shoes, she felt that she would be, in such an atmosphere, an anachronism—a fish out of water!
These minor considerations of self, however, were completely merged or lost eventually in distress at the prospect of being separated from her husband, and in dread of the perils and hardships he might have to encounter at the seat of war—at his advanced years, too!
To add to her anxiety, the death-watch had ticked for several nights in the four-poster of the great old state bedroom, and this devilish little pediculus wrought the good lady as much alarm as Sir Harry Calvert's missive from the Horse Guards had done.
Amid all this, Flora's chief thought was, that at Shorncliffe she would be nearer Quentin Kennedy, by the entire length nearly of Britain, and as Lord Rohallion was to pass through London, he would see the Duke of York personally about him and his prospects.