When the Kilsyths were in London, which, according to their general practice, was only from February until June, they lived in a big square house in Brook-street,--an old-fashioned house, with a multiplicity of rooms, necessary for their establishment, which demanded besides the ordinary number of what were known in the house-agent's catalogue as "reception rooms," a sitting-room for Kilsyth, where he could be quiet and uninterrupted by visitors, and read the Times, and Scrope's Salmon Fishing, and Colonel Hawker on Shooting, and Cyril Thornton, and Gleig's Subaltern, and Napier's History of the Peninsular War, and one or two other books which formed his library; where he could smoke his cigar, and pass in review his guns and his gaiters and his waterproofs, and hold colloquy with his man, Sandy MacCollop, as to what sport they had had the past year, and what they expected to have the next--without fear of interruption. This sanctuary of Kilsyth's lay far at the back of the house, at the end of a passage never penetrated by ordinary visitors, who indeed never inquired for the master of the house. Special guests were admitted there occasionally; and perhaps two or three times in the season there was a council-fire, to which some of the keenest sportsmen, who knew Kilsyth, and were about to visit it in the autumn, were admitted,--round which the smoke hung thick, and the conversation generally ran in monosyllables.
Lady Muriel's boudoir--another of the extraneous rooms, which the house-agent's catalogue wotteth not of--led off the principal staircase through a narrow passage; and, so far as extravagance and good taste could combine in luxury, was the room of the house. When you are not an appraiser's apprentice, it is difficult to describe a room of this kind; it is best perhaps to follow little Lord Towcester's description, who, when the subject was being discussed at mess, offered to back Lady Muriel's room for good taste against any in London; and when asked to describe it, said,
"Lots of flowers; lots of cushions; lots of soft things to sit down upon, and nice things to smell; and jolly books--to look at, don't you know: needn't say I haven't read any of 'em; and forty hundred clocks, with charming chimin' bells; and china monkeys, you know; and fellows with women's heads and no bodies, and that kind of thing; and those round tables, that are always sticking out their confounded third leg and tripping a fellow up. Most charmin' place, give you my word."
Lord Towcester's description was not a bad one, though to the initiated in his peculiar phraseology it scarcely did justice to the room, which was in rose-coloured silk and walnut-wood; which had étagères, and what-nots, and all the frivolousness of upholstery, covered with all the most expensive and useless china; which opened into a little conservatory, always full of sweet-smelling plants, and where a little fountain played, and little gold-fish swam, and the gas-jets were cunningly hidden behind swinging baskets on pendent branches. There was a lovely little desk in one corner of the room, with a paper-stand on it always full of note-paper and envelopes radiant with Lady Muriel's cipher and monogram worked in all kinds of expensive ways, and with a series of drawers, which were full of letters and sketches and albums, and were always innocently open to everybody; and one drawer, which was not open to everybody,--which was closed indeed by a patent Bramah lock, and which, had it been inspected, would have been found to contain a lock of Stewart Caird's hair (cut from his head after death), a packet of letters from him of the most trivial character, and a copy of Owen Meredith's Wanderer, which Lady Muriel had been reading at the time of her first and only passion, and in which all the passages that she considered were applicable to or bearing on her own situation were thickly pencil-scored. But it never was inspected, that drawer, and was understood by any who had ever had the hardihood to inquire about it, to contain household accounts. Lady Muriel Kilsyth in connection with a lock of a dead man's hair, a bundle of a dead man's letters, a pencil-marked copy of a sentimental poet! The idea was too absurd. Ah, how extraordinarily wise the world is, and in what a wonderful manner our power of reading character has developed!
Madeleine's rooms--by her stepmother's grace she had two, a sitting-room and a bedroom--are upstairs. Small rooms, but very pretty, and arranged with all the simple taste of a well-bred, right-thinking girl. Her hanging book-shelves are well filled with their row of poets, their row of "useful" works, their Thomas à Kempis, their Longfellow's Hyperion, their Pilgrim's Progress, their Scenes of Clerical Life--with all the Amos Barton bits dreadfully underscored--their Christmas Carol, and their Esmond. The neat little writing-table, with its gilt mortar inkstand, and its pretty costly nicknacks--birthday presents from her fond father--stood in the window; and above it hung the cage of her pet canary. There were but few pictures on the walls: a water-colour drawing of Kilsyth, bad enough, with impossible perspective, and a very coppery sunset over very spotty blue hills, but dear to the girl as the work of the mother whom she had scarcely known; a portrait of her father in his youth, showing how gently time had dealt with the brave old boy; a print from Grant's portrait of Lady Muriel; and a photograph of Ronald in his uniform, looking very grim and stern and Puritan-like. There is a small cottage-piano too, and a well-filled music-stand,--well-filled, that is to say, according to its owner's ideas, but calculated to fill the souls of musical enthusiasts with horror or pity; for there is very little of the severe and the classical about Madeleine even in her musical tastes: Gluck's Orfeo, some of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, and a few selections from Mozart, quite satisfied her; and the rest of the music-stand was filled with Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi, English ballads, and even dance music. Upon all the room was the impress and evidence of womanly taste and neatness; nothing was prim, but everything was properly arranged; above all, neither in books, pictures, music, nor on the dressing-table or in the wardrobe in the bedroom, was there the smallest sign of fastness or slanginess, that almost omnipresent drawback to the charms of the young ladies of the present day.
Nigh to Madeleine's rooms was a big airy chamber with a shower-bath, an iron bedstead, a painted chest of drawers, and a couple of common chairs, for its sole furniture. This was the room devoted to Captain Kilsyth whenever he stayed with his relatives, and had been furnished according to his exact injunctions. It was like Roland himself, grim and stern, and was regarded as a kind of Blue Chamber of Horrors by Lady Muriel's little children, who used to hurry past its door, and accredited it as a perfect stronghold of bogies. This feeling was but a reflection of that with which the little girls Ethel and Maud regarded their elder brother. His visits to their schoolroom, periodically made, were always looked forward to with intense fright both by them and by their governess Miss Blathers--a worthy woman, untouchable in Mangnall, devoted to the backboard, with a fair proficiency in music and French, but with an unconquerable tendency towards sentimentality of the most snivelling kind. Miss Blathers' sentiment was of the G.P.R. James's school; she was always on the look-out for that knight who was to come and deliver her from the bonds of governesshood, who was to fling his arm over her, as Count Gismond flung his round Mr. Browning's anonymous heroine, and lead her off to some land, where Ollendorf was unknown, and Levizac had never been heard of. A thoroughly worthy creature, Miss Blathers, but horribly frightened of Ronald, who would come into the schoolroom, make his bow, pull his moustache, and go off at once into the questions, pulling his moustache a great deal more, and shrugging his shoulders at the answers he received.
It was not often, however, that Ronald came to Brook-street, at all events for any length of time. When he was on duty, he was of course with his regiment in barracks; and when he had opportunities of devoting himself to his own peculiar studies and subjects, he generally took advantage of those opportunities with his own particular cronies. He would ride with Madeleine sometimes, in a morning, occasionally in the Row, but oftener for a long stretch round the pretty suburbs; and he would dine with his father now and then; and perhaps twice in the season would put in an appearance in Lady Muriel's opera-box, and once at a reception given by her. But, except perhaps by Madeleine, who always loved to see him, he was not much missed in Brook-street, where, indeed, plenty of people came.
Plenty of people and of all kinds. Constituents up from Scotland on business, or friends of constituents with letters of introduction from their friends to Kilsyth; to whom also came old boys from the clubs, who had nothing else to do, and liked to smoke a morning cigar or drink a before-luncheon glass of sherry with the hospitable laird; old boys who never penetrated beyond the ground-floor, save perhaps on one night in the season, which Lady Muriel set apart for the reception of "the House" and "the House" wives and daughters, when they would make their way upstairs and cling round the lintels of the drawing-room, and obstruct all circulation, and eat a very good supper, and for three or four days afterwards wag their heads at each other in the bow-windows of Brookes's or Barnes's, and inform each other with great solemnity that Lady Muriel was a "day-vilish fine woman," and that "the thing had been doosid well done at Kilsyth's the other night, eh?" Other visitors, nominally to Kilsyth, but in reality after their reception by him relegated to Lady Muriel, keen-looking, clear-eyed, high-cheek-boned men, wonderfully "canny"-looking, thoroughly Scotch, only wanting the pinch of snuff between their fingers, and the kilt round their legs, to have fitted them for taking their station at the tobacconists' doors,--factors from different portions of the estate, whom Lady Muriel took in hand, and with them went carefully through every item of their accounts, leaving them marvellously impressed with her qualities as a woman of business.
No very special visitors to Lady Muriel. Plenty of carriages with women, young and old, elegant and dowdy, aristocratic and plebeian, on the front seat, and the Court Guide in all its majesty on the back. Plenty of raps, preposterous in their potency, delivered with unerring aim by ambrosial mercuries, who disengaged quite a cloud of powder in the operation; packs of cards, delivered like conjuring tricks into the hands of the hall-porter, over whose sleek head appeared a charming perspective of other serving-men; kind regards, tender inquiries, congratulations, condolence, P.P.C.'s, all the whole formula duly gone through between the ambrosial creatures who have descended from the monkey-board and the plethoric giant who has extricated himself from the leathern bee-hive--one of the principals in the mummery stolidly looking on from the carriage, the other sitting calmly upstairs, neither taking the smallest part, or caring the least about it. The lady visitors did not come in, as a rule, but the men did, almost without exception. The men arrived from half-past four till half-past six, and, during the season, came in great numbers. Why? Well, Lady Muriel was very pleasant, and Miss Kilsyth was "charmin', quite charmin'." They said this parrotwise; there are no such parrots as your modern young men; they repeat whatever they have learnt constantly but between their got-by-rote sentences they are fatally and mysteriously dumb.
"Were you at the Duchess's last night, Lady Muriel?"
"Yes! You were not there, I think?"
"No; couldn't go--was on duty."
Pause. Dead silence. Five clocks ticking loudly and running races with each other.
"Yes, by the way, knew you were there."
"Did you--who told you?"
"Saw it in the paper, 'mongst the comp'ny, don't you know, and that kind of thing."
Awful pause. Clocks take up the running. Lady Muriel looks on the carpet. Visitor calmly scrutinises furniture round the room, at length he receives inspiration from lengthened contemplation of his hat-lining.
"Seen Clement Penruddock lately?"
"Yes, he was here on--when was it?--quite lately--O, the day before yesterday."
"Poor old Clem! Going to marry Lady Violet Dumanoir, they say. Pity Lady Vi don't leave off putting that stuff on her face and shoulders, isn't it?"
"How ridiculous you are!"
"No, but really! she does!"
"How can you be so silly!"
Grand and final pause of ten minutes, broken by the visitor's saying quietly, "Well, good-bye," and lounging off to repeat the invigorating conversation elsewhere.
Who? Youth of all kinds. The junior portion of the Household Brigade, horse and foot, solemn plungers and dapper little guardsmen; youth from the Whitehall offices, specially diplomatic and erudite, and disposed to chaff the military as ignorant of most things, and specially of spelling; idlers purs et simples, who had been last year in Norway, and would be the next in Canada, and who suffered socially from their perpetual motion, never being able to retain the good graces which they had gained or to recover those they had lost; foreign attachés; junior representatives of the plutocracy, who went into society into which their fathers might never have dreamed of penetrating, but who found the "almighty dollar," or its equivalent, when judiciously used, have all the open-sesame power; an occasional Scotch connection on a passing visit to London, and--Mrs. M'Diarmid.
Who was Mrs. M'Diarmid? That was the first question everyone asked on their introduction to her; the second, on their revisiting the house where the introduction had taken place, being, "Where is Mrs. M'Diarmid?" Mrs. M'Diarmid was originally Miss Whiffin, daughter of Mrs. Whiffin of Salisbury-street in the Strand, who let lodgings, and in whose parlours George M'Diarmid, second cousin to the present Kilsyth, lived when he first came to London, and enrolled himself as a student in the Inner Temple. A pleasant fellow George M'Diarmid, with a taste for pleasure, and very little money, and an impossibility to keep out of debt. A good-looking fellow, with a bright blue eye, and big red whiskers (beards were not in fashion then, or George would have grown a very Birnam-Wood of hair), and broad shoulders, and a genial jovial manner with "the sex." Deep into Mrs. Whiffin's books went George, and simultaneously deep into her daughter's heart; and finally, when Kilsyth had done his best for his scapegrace kinsman, and could do no more, and nobody else would do anything, George wiped off his score by marrying Miss Whiffin, and, as she expressed it to her select............