A BLIGHTED BEING.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1968, 26 April 1875, Page 4

A BLIGHTED BEING.

(feom the wobld.)

Probably no career ever opened more full of brighter promise. A youth endowed with the beauty almost of a god; with a profile of exquisite delicacy; features that were radiant with the sensibility of a fine nature; expressive blue eyes in which, as in a book, you might read the swift changes of the emotions; a wealth of golden hair; and an upright lissom figure that somehow reminded you of a stag—no wonder 'that he went kindly glances greeted him from young and old: And he was born, too, with' the silver spoon in his mouth that makes success comparatively so smooth. He was marquis by courtesy, the eldest son of a Duke of ancient lineage and fair means; a duke also who was at once a Cabinet Minister, the chief of a clan, and the writer of books which people professed to have read and praised as wonderful, especially for a duke. Our fortunate youth had travelled and written a book himself, having recorded the impressions of his journey in a work which reached two editions, onehalf of one of which might have gone off even if the author had not been a marquis. He was a captain of a company in the London Scottish Volunteers, could hold his own with the best at the butts, and bring his Scoto-Cockney command past the saluting point in, first-rate style to that well-known bagpipe harmony, " The Campbells are coming ! " And he could speak in public, young as he was, not indeed as speaks a heaven-born orator, but as speaks a man and a Briton.who has something to say, who has learnt the art of thinking on his legs, and who has the gift of clothing his thoughts in appropriate and fluent words. The faces of old clansmen flushed and their eyes moistened as they listened *to their young" chief when, rising in his place as chairman of the annual supper of his company, he proved his armour at the making of felicitous and unconventional speeches. Presently I c came into Parliament as member for his own county, and went into harness as private secretary to his father at the India Office. He spoke once or twice in the House, well, briefly, and modestly; his painstaking and ability | in his official work earned commendations ' from all under whose cognisance that work came; and they could not be called quixotic enthusiasts who prophesied that he would be in the Ministry in less than four years from his entrance into public life, and a Cabinet Minister when it might please his father,*a few years later, to betake himself wholly to the avocations of grubbing about the outskirts of ethics and screwing up the rack-rent of his cotters. .'■■..'•■• . _, .. • Laudatores temporis acti. The fair promise of the past stands atrophied in the present, with but slender chance of being restored to vitality in the future. We mourn a career, withered ere in full bloom, withered too by no crime or laches on the part of him for whom the future was once so bright. It restv not on him to cry Mea culpa, me maxima culpa.': for in that he erred at all—and the error unwittingly wrought jjh* extinction of his own career just as it had begun to derelop-^he erred by reason of an aecrescence of influence, not one of which was in itself discreditable to him. He loved his parents especially his mother, and had been taught to obey them in everything; he regarded it as not unpleasant to make easy love to a pTetty girl, who had been told that he was to be her husband, and that it wa» wise, if possible, to fall in love with one whose destinies had been settled in that relation; and his brothers, two of whom had already engaged in commerce, added their persuasions from a belief that the projected alliance would add to the range anti value of their business connec-; tions. , .o ■ ' • It happened that the august Sovereign of these realms, having married one' daughter to a noble and powerful prince," a second to a respectable and valiant G-er-man "cock-laird," and a third to a middle aged nonentity who already possessed a morganatic family, became impressed- w^th the idea that it would "be an interesting; experiment to find a husband for a fourth among the higher ranks of the young nobility of our islands. In theory the enterprise had something to recommend it;'its practical demerits it remained for experience*to show. Yet they were appreciated in advance by two nobles, at once sagacious and proud of their order, with a proper pride, whose co-operation in succession was requested ; the contribution asked of them to . the venture being . their eldest sons. ; Probably courtesy at once and respect prevented them from clothing their declinature in the classical aphorism, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes; but at all events; in some form or other of declinature, they bowed their way out of the proffered alliance. Then tie tempting lure was dropped over the Maccallummores, and they rose at it with glad smirks of-proud alacrity. The alliance between a bride of the bloodroyal and a bridegroom of the nobility was celobrated with much pomp and spasmodic hallelujahs. It was to usher in a new era, our journalistic mentors informed us; but they omitted to define what the characteristics: of that era. were to be.. For one individual the event assuredly ushered in a? new era—-for the happy blighted bridegroom. Till he stood at that altar in St. George's Chapel he had his definite position on the social scaffold- 1 ing of our community. He stood firm and safe on the platform next below the j top one of all, a noble among his fellow nobles. When he left that, chapel he was socially enTair. He had, sot© speak, quitted his old, sure footing, and made a spring to reach the top platform of all, but had not succeeded. A hand, indeed, had been reached out to him from it, and thus he dangled, and was doomed to dangle, for the term of his natural life •—a being without a foothold anywhere, an embodied incongruity in the face of a world that first cheered, then smiled, and finally compassionated the unvouched interloper on the skirt of the pale of the blood-royal.

It no doubt, at first, aeemed as if the game was worth the pandlle. If he was no longer "one of us " to his old peers, no longer, indeed, " one of us" to any definite order in all the land; if he had to resign his pleasant training'in the India Office; if he had laid down for ever the despatch-hdx in which there ia the chance of a premiership for every young noble who gives himself to statecraft—in the other shell of the scales were a queen for mother-in-law and a beautiful and accomplished princess for wife. : It cannot truly Be said that the acquisition of princes as brothers-in-law added to the credit side of the reckoning. The surface-cordiality which marked the visit to Ireland presently grew cold, and in no long time

died a natural death. Then there came to this young man the sad realisation that the creature in nature to which he bore most resemblance was a dove of the ark, which could "find no rest for the sole of her foot." Bitter experiences were in store for him in his character of social aaomaly. Ho was a Campbell, a race proverbially " upsetting," and female influence on both sides of the house—he was the apple of his mother's eye, and his mother-in law, who had created the embodied anomaly, had taken it to her heart — pressed him to assert hmself. That equefry's peremptory message when he entered the tent of the blood-royal on the occasion of a Buckingham Palace garden-party, stabbed like a knife a nature of feminine sensitiveness, crossed by a strain of bourgeois cockiness. To use a fencing phrase, he acknowledged the hit. It was true chivalry that made him bear the hurt in silence, and that kept him from embarrassing the relations — we do not mean the relatives —of the Princess hi* wife by reporting the slight to her. In the language of the penny-a-liner, he quitted the festive scene, having learnt a lesson that his previous education had not comprehended. He is a student of Scottish history, in which his ancestor's played a conspicuous, if not uniformly creditable part, and he must have been familiar with the quaint proverb fathered upon King James VI., of happy memory, that "kings are kittle cattle to shoe be f hind." There are points, as it befel him to discover, in which the sonspf sovereigns take after their parents. Snubbed thus at a home, there was yet another buffet in the' quiver of malign fortune for this Mahomet's coffinbetween royalty and nobility. The linked entities went.abroad, and after a little zigzaging, put in an appearance, at the Court over which bluffEaiser Wilhelm presided and of which the chiefest ornament is our own kindly, comely, Princess Victoria. Herd was a new and surely unprejudiced field, which could grow no equerries with a knack for literally delivering unpleasantlyworded messages. No aspiration could be more delusive. Elsewhere our anomalous youth had been objected to merely in the vindication of a principle ; but in this German Court, whose male scions and cadets have been wont to look upon Britain's royal daughters as their own peculiar and unalienable perquisites, there was not unnaturally a bitterness of personal animosity against the presumptuous youth who was an embodied infraction of the monopoly, On State nights, in the reception-rooms of that ugly yet historic pile, the Imperial Schloss of Berlin, there were wont to be formed three " circles," the inner one limited to persons oFrbyal blood, the middle one composed of dignitaries, and the outer one the polloi of invited militaryism and officialism. In none save the first could the daughter of the Queen of England find fitting station; to the husband of that daughter it was formally intimated that he was required to find his metier in the zweite Staffel of the intermediate circle. Bemonstrance from the lady who considered herself to have a righYto remonstrance availed.: not against the rigid bonds of German Court ceremonial; and again the iron entered into the: soul of the Scottish Phaeton.

There was yet one further opportunity for at least the local toning down of the incongruity. The Princess had asked that, when her husband should bring her under the roof-tree of his ancestral home, she might be allowed to be no longer the princess, but merely the marchioness. But Maccallummore had not married his heir into the royal family that the bride of that heir sheuld hide her royal effulgence under the bushel of a marchioness. Standing on the doorstep of his castle, with the aspect of a bantam cock, into whose breed has been infused a cross of the pouter pigeon, he demanded from his tenants "Three cheers for ,the Princess, my daughter," as the carriage' containing that lady (along with an incidental chattle in the shape of a marquishusband) drove up the avenue. The jackanapes brother of that husband had no other name for his queen than that of "Lome's mother-in-law." And so the' anomaly, was ruthlessly perpetuated in all its intensity - where a means offered at least for its mitigation, and the fetters of the blight were rivetted on the limbs of the unfortunate victim of a rash experiment. He lives' tohand into her carriage the Princess whom he married, when that lady goes to a drawing-room to join her august kinsfolk on the dias, if haply her equerry happens to be out for a stroll. The equerry, retired marching captain as he is, has' a more defined position than he who is the nominal head of the household; for the former knows that the latter, although he feeds him, owns not the title of him. The blight of false position has withered even the fluency of the once-ready speaker who occupies it. He seldom essays oratory now; when he does, he stammers feebly through futile efforts to fix fugitive fragments of flaccid platitudes. No new edition of his book has been lately called for, and he Has never written another , work. If he ever does, we may hope it may be an autobiography.