The treatment to which she has been submitted at home has naturally been extremely trying and painful to her;[[4]] but she has endured it with admirable patience, being reinforced and supported by the remarkable kindness of her brother. Loudoun's behaviour has indeed been considerate to a degree that can hardly be imagined, and far more so than could have been at all expected. You will understand, without my saying more, what we all feel about this. Norfolk has been kindness itself to her, and so, too, have others.
An interesting sequel to the reference in the last sentence was the happy engagement concluded in 1877 between the Duke of Norfolk and Lady Flora. As first cousins respectively to the bride and bridegroom, Lord and Lady Bute were of course very specially interested in this marriage, which took place at the Oratory on November 21, 1877. "We are all occupied all day here," Bute wrote from a London hotel on November 16, "talking about the wedding next week, and some of us with other things besides talk, for there is much business to be done and settled."
Neither on this nor on any other occasion did Lord and Lady Bute care to remain away from their own home longer than was absolutely necessary. Bute wrote a few days afterwards from Lord Glasgow's seat in Fife, where they were paying a short visit:
We quitted London—as usual, with much satisfaction—the very day after the ceremony, which was decorously done, and the mob of sightseers was, I am inclined to think, better behaved (anyhow inside the church) than at our marriage five years ago. Lord Beaconsfield, who was in the front row next to Princess Louise, sat throughout the function wrapped in his long drab overcoat, and gazing at the altar with Sphinx-like immobility. He told me at the reception afterwards that he had thought the music (which at Norfolk's express wish was plain-chant throughout) "strangely impressive."
The bridegroom, by the way, forgot to order a carriage to take them away after the ceremony, but finding his father-in-law's carriage at the church door, handed in the bride with great presence of mind. They were just driving off when Mr. Hastings came out fuming, and insisted on a seat in his own carriage. So they all drove away together, quite in violation, I imagine, of the established etiquette on such occasions.
1877, Burning of Mountstuart
Bute's hopes of spending the winter of 1877-1878 quietly at his old home near Rothesay were rudely frustrated by the catastrophe of December 3, 1877, when Mountstuart House was practically burnt to the ground, only the two wings (one of them containing the little private chapel) escaping the flames. He wrote early in December, in reply to a letter of condolence:
Many thanks for the kind expressions in your letter. It has all been, of course, very distressing. Nearly all moveables (including books and pictures) were most fortunately saved,[[5]] but the confusion is and has been so great that I am practically bookless for a while, and feel like a snail that has lost its shell. But the Breviary is slowly proceeding.
The destruction of his birthplace was, of course, far from leaving Bute in any sense homeless; for Cardiff Castle as well as Dumfries House, the fine old seat of the Crichtons, were still at his disposition, and to these he added in course of time two other country-places in Scotland, besides leasing for a term of years first the Duke of Devonshire's cedar-shaded villa at Chiswick, and later the beautiful domain of St. John's Lodge, in Regent's Park, which was almost as much a rus in urbe as Holland House itself. Superficially, and in one respect, he may thus be said to have resembled the anonymous duke in Disraeli's most popular novel, who was the owner of so many magnificent seats that he could never feel (it was his one grievance) that he possessed a home. But Bute, who considered it a matter of duty and conscience to spend a certain time at all his places in turn, contrived to find in each of them the Lar domestico (as the Portuguese call it) which makes a house a veritable home. Happy in the society of his wife and growing family (three sons were born to him between 1880 and 1887) and surrounded by the books which he loved, he was well contented to live remote from cities, although quite devoid of any instincts whatever for the sports which alone make country life tolerable to so many Englishmen. A good swimmer and fencer (as we have seen) in his early manhood, he indulged in middle life in no other bodily exercise than that of country walks; and even in these, given a congenial companion, what is called the "object of the walk" was often forgotten in the interest of some conversation on topics strangely remote from the picturesque surroundings of a Scottish country house. One who was often his associate in such rambles, perhaps on the high moorlands above Mountstuart, recalls how they would pause at some notable point of view, and how his companion, gazing with unseeing eye (though in reality far from insensible to the beauties of nature) at the matchless panorama of woods and mountains, sea, and sky spread out before them, would dismiss the prospect, as it were, with a wave of the hand, and continue his discourse on the claim of some mediæval anti-pope to the recognition of Christendom, or the precise relation between the liturgical language employed by the Coptic Church and the tongue of ancient Egypt as spoken by the Pharaohs.