Peace with Honour by Sydney C. Grier - HTML preview

EPILOGUE.

(Being part of a letter addressed by Mr Fitzgerald Anstruther, about a year after the return of the English Mission from Kubbet-ul-Haj, to Mrs North, M.D., British Residency, Iskandarbagh.)

“... I have just come back from my visit to Sir Dugald and Lady Haigh at Inverconglish. The Chief is all right again, and looks quite bucolic in knickerbockers and a deerstalker—a regular ‘tyrant of his little fields,’ indeed. I had promised myself the pleasure of seeing him in a kilt, but he says that his tenants are a serious-minded people, unaccustomed to laughter, and he is afraid the sight of him so arrayed might do them severe physical injury. He is a great power in the neighbourhood, and the people bring their disputes to him to settle instead of going to law, so that he is quite busy and happy, though he has not got his peerage. Lady Haigh, who directs the affairs (particularly the love affairs) of the locality generally, told me something about Stratford that will amuse you and North. He is destined, so they say, to get a high appointment before long, and meanwhile he has devoted his leave to falling in love with a girl just out of the schoolroom, who is desperately frightened by his attentions, and won’t have a word to say to him. Lady Haigh says she is rather like a lady whom Stratford knew long ago, and who died. She is a hero-worshipper, and has adored him from a distance since Hicks first made him known to the British public, but she doesn’t want him to come any closer. However, if old Stratford makes up his mind to stick to a thing, I fancy he is pretty sure to get it. By the bye, I met Hicks the other day. He was just off to Thracia again, drawn by the rumour of these new disturbances. He quite considers himself as one of us, and says that when we of the old Kubbet-ul-Haj gang meet next to celebrate the signing of the treaty, he will be there, if he has to come from the other side of the world in order to be present....”

THE END