“What a fellow you are!” cried the baronet, “you bring a man round to your views, and then cast him off and declare a contrary opinion. Now I’m all for the Guards and the Regent’s Park barracks. He’s a handsome fellow enough, I suppose, and I know he’s not very clever. Of course, he’s taken in by the superior corps, and high reputation, and all that sort of thing. I’ll bet you something he’s a Guardsman. Now, what’s to be done? If you want me to start for town directly and hunt him up, I say thank you, my excellent friend, I am exceedingly comfortable here; travelling bad for my health—beginning of March the worst season in the year—and so on, to any extent you please. But I don’t want the boy to slip through our fingers, mind you. What’s to be done? Don’t you think he’ll write again?”
“Very doubtful,” said Colonel Sutherland.
“Doubtful?—doubtful’s something,” said Sir John. “It can do no harm, so far as I can perceive, to wait and see. Let’s be quiet for a little, and keep on the look-out. Of course, had I known what had happened I might have stayed in town,” he added, with a slightly injured air, “and settled that concern before I came on here. But, of course, as I did not know—”
“I did not know either; nobody knew—he only left home the day before yesterday,” interrupted the Colonel.
“To be sure; and yet it would have been very convenient could I have been informed of it while in town,” proceeded the baronet, still in a tone of injury; “really at this time of the year—and I don’t see there can be any damage done by waiting to see if he writes again.”
“Only that he might enter a regiment going to India, or Canada, or Australia, and might write on the eve of the voyage, as is most likely, and be lost beyond remedy,” said the Colonel, anxiously.
Sir John scratched his head. “That would be a bore,” he admitted; “at all events, let’s wait—we’ll say a week; a recruit can’t be off to the end of the world in that time. Then there’s a little leisure to think; and I say, Sutherland, keep your interest for your own occasions, old fellow—you may want it yet for one of those everlasting boys of yours. I’ve a strong confidence Tom will take you in, and go for a soldier like the rest of his race. What would you make the boy a parson for? A Scotch parson too!—whom nobody can be of the least benefit to. Wait a little—he’ll change his mind, that fellow will, or he’s not the boy I took him for. Let’s join the—hum—I forgot—no ladies to join,” he muttered, in as low a tone as he could drop his voice to so suddenly. “Play chess still, Sutherland?—let’s try a game.”
CHAPTER XIV.
SIR JOHN ARMITAGE found Milnehill an exceedingly agreeable habitation. He fell into the routine of the Colonel’s habits as a man long accustomed to a life and duties similar to those of his host only could have done. Day by day he recovered of his querulousness and invalidism. He even forgot the dreaded heir who had driven him from his new inheritance, and began to be able to speak on ordinary subjects without much allusion to the dreadful subject of marriage, and his own perplexities in respect to it. Then Sir John, when once delivered from himself, was a little of a humorist, and enjoyed the peculiarities of the society in which he found himself. Numberless old Indian officers, members of the Civil service, families who, without being of that origin, had two or three sons in our oriental empire, and people more or less connected with India, were to be found in the neighbourhood. Indeed, with the mixture of a clergyman or two, a resident landed proprietor, linked to the community by means of a son in the B.N.I., or a daughter married in Calcutta, and one or two stray lawyers from Edinburgh—this formed the whole of Colonel Sutherland’s society, and no small part of the general society of the neighbourhood.
These excellent people, to the greater part of whom the world consisted of India and Edinburgh, whose associations were all connected either with the kindly and limited circle of home, or with the bizarre and extraordinary life of the East, and to whom the rest of the world came in by the way, a sort of unconsidered blank of distance between the two points of interest, were as original and agreeable a community as one could wish to meet with; experienced, for years of travel, of intercourse with primitive people, and of universal command and authority, had given a certain decision and authority to their judgment; yet so singularly simple in respect to this European world and its centres of civilisation, and so innocent of all public sentiment other than the dominant Anglo-Saxon instinct of sway and rule over an inferior race, that their views on general subjects had a freshness and novelty which, if sometimes a little amusing, was always racy and original. Knowing very little, except in words, of the races who contest with us the supremacy of the modern world; of those powers so equally balanced whose slightest move on either side sets all the kingdoms of Christendom astir, and threatens contests bigger and more ominous than any conquering campaign of the East; this community was good-humouredly contemptuous of the incomprehensible ignorance of those dwellers at home who knew no difference between Tamul and Hindostani, who innocently imagined that a man at Agra, being in the same country with his brother at Madras, might have a chance of meeting with him some day, or who could not be made to comprehend the difference between a Dhobi and a man of high caste. These strange ignorances they laughed at among themselves with a pleasant feeling of superiority, and contested Indian appointments and the new regulations of the Company with far greater interest than the state of Europe could excite them into. One and another had charge of a little troop of children, “sent home” for their education. Somebody was always returning, somebody always “going out.” There was great talk, especially among the ladies, of outfits and their comparative cheapness, and of the respective advantages and disadvantages in travelling overland or by the Cape. Sir John, who was Indian enough to find himself much at home in this society, was at the same time man of the world enough to be amused by its characteristics. He found it more entertaining to listen to a lady’s troubles in a journey to the hills, to the adventures of the dàkh, or the misbehaviour of the Syces, than he had found it in recent days to bewail the afflictions of a continental tour, the impositions of the inns, and the failure of the cooks. Palanquins and howdahs were unquestionably more picturesque than travelling carriages and vetturini, and the Dakh Bungalow ten times more original than the Hôtel d’Angleterre or the Römische Kaiser. Sir John, for the moment, found himself so famously entertained, that he showed no inclination whatever to abridge his stay at Milnehill.