Dormer Colville

“ Few men knew more of one side of human nature than Dormer Colville, it would appear.
“I am not afraid of that.”
“You can never tell,” laughed Colville, but his laugh rather paled under Barebone’s glance. “You can never tell.”
“Wise men do not attempt to blackmail—kings.”
And Colville caught his breath.
“Perhaps you are right,” he admitted, after a pause. “You seem to be taking to the position very kindly, Barebone. But I do not mind, you know. It does not matter what we say to each other, eh? We have been good friends so long. You must do as you like. ”

“ Again Dormer Colville allowed a glimpse to appear of another man quite different from the easy, indolent man-of-the-world, the well-dressed adventurer of a day when adventure was mostly sought in drawing-rooms, when scented and curled dandies were made or marred by women. ”

“ CHAPTER IV — THE MARQUIS’S CREED
Dormer Colville smiled doubtfully. He was too polite, it seemed, to be sceptical, and by his attitude expressed a readiness to be convinced as much from indifference as by reasoning.
“It is intolerable,” said the Marquis de Gemosac, “that a man of your understanding should be misled by a few romantic writers in the pay of the Orleans.”
“I am not misled, Marquis; I am ignorant,” laughed Colville. “It is not always the same thing.” ”

“ Ah! You smile at my enthusiasm; you do not know what it is to have a great hope dangling before the eyes all one’s life. And that face—that face!”
In which judgment the Marquis was no doubt right. For Dormer Colville was too universal a man to be capable of concentrated zeal upon any one object. He laughed at the accusation.
“After dinner,” he answered, “I will tell you the little story as it was told to me. We can sit on this seat, outside the inn, in the scent of the flowers and smoke our cigarette.” ”

“ And the journey through the valleys of the Garonne and the Dordogne had been undertaken.
Another, greater journey, was now afoot, to end at no less a centre of political life than Paris. A start was to be made this evening, and Dormer Colville now came to report that all was ready and the horses at the gate.
“If there were scenes such as this for all of us to linger in, mademoiselle,” he said, lifting his face to the western sky and inhaling the scent of the flowers growing knee-deep all around him, “men would accomplish little in their brief lifetime.” ”

“ The Captain had changed his clothes, and now wore those in which he went to church and to the custom-house when in London or other large cities.
“There walks a just man,” commented Dormer Colville, lightly, and no longer word could have described Captain Clubbe more aptly. He would rather have stayed in his own garden this evening to smoke his pipe in contemplative silence. But he had always foreseen that the day might come when it would be his duty to do his best by Loo Barebone. ”

“ I have my little household to look after, accounts and taxes to pay—thanks to our kind kinsman abroad (for Birkwoodbrae is entailed) we have no rent to pay; I have my feathered family in the yard to supervise; my garden with its flowers and fruits; my poor pensioners in the village and all round about.'
'A grey life for one so young and winning,' thought Colville; 'and with you,' he added aloud, 'so runs the world away?'
'Yes.'
'And all your people love you, Dr. Wodrow tells me?'
'I hope so—nay, I am sure they do,' replied Mary, with one of her brightest smiles. ”

“ Yet I would rather see my daughter dead, if I had one, than married to a man with eyes so cold, so cruel and shifty.'
'But who is thinking of marriage?' said Mary, with a slight laugh, little knowing that it was a contingency as remote from the thoughts of Sir Redmond as her own.
'And I don't think that Captain Colville—for all that Dr. Wodrow seems to like him so much—can be good in every way if he has such a friend or companion as Sir Redmond Sleath,' said the old lady, shaking her head. ”

“ Amid dinners, garden-parties, the Row, and the general rôle of his life as a Guardsman, the pet of many a woman and her fair brood, all the more that he was now the inheritor of a revenue that was great, he had been conscious of all that.
To Mary—who was a close observer in her way—it sometimes seemed that there was in Captain Colville's face, when he addressed her, a half-amused expression, mingling with much of undoubted admiration. The first was occasionally a source of pique to her; and the other was a source of pique, too, rather than pleasure ”

“ Mary had felt that she had cause to be indignant and to feign indifference. As the lover who had trifled with her, as she thought, and gone to the very verge of a declaration or proposal, and then paused, and he—the obnoxious cousin, the heir of entail, one and the same person—stood before her, in her eyes of deep violet blue there came for a brief space the light of a sudden determination, with something of a horrified stare; but ere Mrs. Deroubigne could approach an explanation or introduction, Colville sprang towards the pale and trembling girl, and took both her hands within his own. ”

“ Colville, when in the solitude of his own room, overlooking the woods of Craigmhor, was full of his own thoughts, some of which were not very pleasant, as he was dissatisfied with himself. He had a little plan he wished to carry out, as we shall show in time, and he felt perhaps that he was acting foolishly. He had come from London with the Dunkeld family, who evidently expected more from him in regard to Blanche than he had yet evinced, and the rumour of their engagement was a false one. ”

“ So he took a huge beaker of brandy pawnee, as he reclined in the cane easy-chair in his well tattied bungalow, with punkah wallahs crouching in the verandah outside, and smoked his hookah, for he preferred such a residence to a double-poled tent or a tumble-down brick house in that city of earthquakes, till the troops marched.
'I knew your uncle, Wellwood, thoroughly,' said the colonel to Colville. ”

“ Despite the disparaging remarks or comments so ungenerously made by Lady Dunkeld and her daughter, a subsequent afternoon saw both Sir Redmond Sleath and Leslie Colville seated in the pretty drawing-room of the sisters at Birkwoodbrae.
Sir Redmond had inadvertently dropped a hint that he meant to visit there, and, greatly to his annoyance, Colville proposed to accompany him.
It was an early day in August, and every breath of air was still; not a leaf was stirring in the silver birches without, or among the monthly roses that clambered round the open windows which faced the pretty garden. ”

“ When the time came to depart, Mary left Mrs. Deroubigne with a heart too full of regard and gratitude for utterance in words. She could only sob on her ample and motherly breast; and Colville, when conveying her in a cab to that home which he had resolved she must change for one more suitable, heard of its locality with sorrow and dismay, and with emotions very different from those of Sir Redmond Sleath when he obtained the address of Ellinor. ”

“ In the glance they exchanged each read the other's secret, and he drew her towards him and kissed her. 'There are moments in life,' it is said, 'when joy makes us afraid: and this was one'—to Mary at least, and she shrank back—all the more quickly and confusedly that a visitor was approaching; and a half-suppressed malediction hovered on the lips of Colville as the portly Mrs. Wodrow was ushered in—ushered in at that moment! ”

“ These amusements, with fancy work, music, and novels—Tauchnitz editions, of course—made the sweet spring days pass quickly with Mary and Ellinor in that gay city, where, it is said, that in summer the inhabitants appear to work all day and amuse themselves all night.
Before their departure to the Continent, great had been the astonishment of Lady Dunkeld and the fair Blanche Galloway when they heard of the near relationship of Colville to the sisters, of his engagement to Mary, and that they were to be chaperoned by Mrs. Deroubigne till the marriage came to pass. ”

“ THE HADJI.
'The world is a small place, after all!' thought Colville, as he left the Colonel's bungalow behind him. 'Think of hearing here that anecdote of dear Mary's father from that old subadar! Well, well, "life," as some one says, "is a perpetual enigma, to which no theological system offers a satisfactory solution—against the reefs of which all philosophies break into foam and empty bubbles." ”

“ When, in broken accents and with mingled emotions of anger and shame, while her head reclined upon his breast, Mary told Colville of Sir Redmond Sleath's systematic attempts, though secretly married, to lure away her unsuspecting sister Ellinor, great was the wrath and fury of her lover. ”

“ Colville looked as if he thought there was a good deal to attract, and his dark eyes seemed to say so as he looked into Mary's, which drooped beneath his gaze.
'Your presents came, Captain Colville. They are beautiful, and fit to perfection. Ellinor and I cannot sufficiently thank you,' she said, in a low voice.
'Oho!' thought Sir Redmond, 'he has been sending them presents. Eh! a sly dog.'
'A few gloves are not worth mentioning,' replied Colville, hurriedly. ”

“ Sleath had been told plainly enough, and sternly too, by Colville, at Lady Dunkeld's ball, that Mary and Ellinor were his cousins, who were ignorant of his identity; but the too-knowing baronet did not believe a word of his assertions, and, seeing the matter through the medium of his own evil mind, supposed the story was 'only a red herring drawn across the scent'—a dodge for purposes of the Guardsman's own—so he sought counsel of Mr. John Gaiters, while the latter prepared for him some brandy and seltzer-water.
'I am awfully spoony on a girl, Gaiters,' said he. ”

“ For a man like Sir Redmond there was a strange fascination in achieving the conquest of, or in 'running to earth,' as he would have phrased it, a girl so pure and confiding as Ellinor, and whose beauty and helplessness inspired him with a kind of love, as he thought it, but a selfish love peculiarly his own.
It may excite surprise that such worldlings as Lord and Lady Dunkeld did not prefer a baronet as a parti for their daughter's hand; but Leslie Colville was by far the richer of the two, and possessed landed property in various directions ”

“ At the foot of the bed stands an old crone with gray elf-locks floating under a tawdry black lace cap. Wrinkled, and bent, and witch-like, with beady black eyes and parchment-like skin, she is frightful to look at as she peers curiously into the beautiful white face lying on the pillow.
"Pratt, you have deceived me," Colville breaks out sternly; "all your restoratives have failed, all your potent art is at fault. Look at that marble face, those breathless lips. It is death, not life, we look upon." ”

“ He found him one day whistling loudly while grooming his horse in the stables of the Bala Hissar.
'Wodrow, old man,' said Colville, laughingly, 'by Jove, I am glad to hear you whistling. Your lips seemed only capable of sighing once. But the air you indulge in is a sad one.'
'It is "The Birks of Invermay," sir. ”

“ Wodrow, condoling with her on the sad news from Cabul, all ignorant as he was yet of the escape of his son amid the new calamity in that fatal city—fatal to Britons, at least.
'Any place in which we are perfectly happy is a place we glorify and transform,' says a writer: and in the joy of her engagement to Leslie Colville, notwithstanding the perils he had to face, Mary had glorified their pretty abode by the Elbe at Altona. ”

“ Wodrow, who was indulging the while in a few peculiar and not very well-bred, if knowing, nods and smiles in the direction of Miss Galloway, over whose chair on the terrace Captain Colville was stooping, she overheard him say, while the former was prettily making up for him a button-hole of stephenotis, with a white rosebud and maiden-hair fern—and say—with empressement but laughingly,
'If lusty love should go in search of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche? ”

“ Wodrow, to be sold for their behoof; but, for reasons to be given, strange to say, nothing was sold.
Though the apparently strange conduct of Captain Colville in teaching her to love him, and exciting brilliant hopes in her heart only to let them fade, had so deeply mortified Mary that already his image was passing out of her busy thoughts, or seemed as only something to be forgotten as soon as possible, she was not without strong though vague hope of the future for Ellinor and herself; but hope has often been likened to the mirage of the desert, and as being often quite as illusory. ”

“ Why you’ve been lighting, sir, and are partly intoxicated! Disgusting! you shall disgrace my school no longer. Stradwick! with Biggington, of course. At all events, I am glad to perceive you are sober—fighting is a vice I never suspected you of. Terry! have all the pains I have taken with you led to no better result than this? but I suppose you chose to copy Norman, even in his faults! And lastly, who is this poor child you have suborned to aid you in your nefarious practices? The younger Colville! ”

“ A man of undoubted wealth, he has lately succeeded to property of various kinds, and means, it is said, to urge his claim in the female line to the peerage of Ochiltree, which has been dormant since the death of David, fourth lord, in 1782. He has thus assumed the name of Colville.'
'Lord Colville of Ochiltree,' said Mary, softly and thoughtfully.
'Yes—he claims that peerage, my dear,' replied Dr. Wodrow. 'I have a great and melancholy respect for our dormant, extinct, and—more than all—for our attainted peerages. ”