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Updated: June 13, 2025
The artillery included the 32nd Field Battery R.A. of six 15-pounders under Major Williams; the 37th Field Battery R.A. of six 5-inch howitzers under Major Elmslie, and two 40-pounders R.A. Armstrong guns under Lieut. Weymouth. The ten Maxims, or at least six of them, were mounted upon galloping carriages drawn by horses.
Her late husband had been distantly related to Mrs. Monkton, and my father was her daughter's guardian. But even these claims to friendship and regard never seemed to me strong enough to explain the intimacy between Mrs. Elmslie and the inhabitants of the Abbey.
Elmslie's more intimate friends, who were acquainted with the reports affecting the Monkton family, ventured to mingle with their formal congratulations one or two significant references to the late Mrs. Monkton and some searching inquiries as to the disposition of her son. Mrs. Elmslie always met these polite hints with one bold form of answer.
"I do know a little of him," I answered; "he was engaged to Miss Elmslie when I was last in the neighborhood of Wincot. Is he married to her yet?" "No, and he never ought to be. He has gone the way of the rest of the family or, in plainer words, he has gone mad." "Mad! But I ought not to be surprised at hearing that, after the reports about him in England."
The buyer said that a glimmer came over his eyes, and he thought them better when he offered the price. However, he got ashamed, and took the cattle. An old respected servant of my own, who assisted me for years in the buying and selling of cattle James Elmslie, very well known here and in the south had sold twenty beasts very well at Hallow Fair for me.
The reasons for doing so which had suggested themselves to me after my first interview with him seemed, however, on reflection, to be valid reasons still. The only way of hastening his return to England and to Miss Elmslie, who was pining for that return, was the way I had taken. It was not my fault that a disaster which no man could foresee had overthrown all his projects and all mine.
Little as I knew of Miss Elmslie, the mere thought of her situation, as I now reflected on it, made me feel sick at heart. "They call me Mad Monkton!" he exclaimed, suddenly breaking the silence between us during the last few minutes, "Here and in England everybody believes I am out of my senses except Ada and you. She has been my salvation, and you will be my salvation too.
"You can't sneer," Elmslie told him brutally; "and you can't draw lines; and what on earth you hang about with so many different sorts of idiots for I don't know.... I think, if circumstances absolutely compelled me to make bosom friends of either, I should choose the under-bred poor rather than the over-bred rich. That's the sort of man I've no use for.
Was this curable? Miss Elmslie, who knew him far better than I did, seemed by her conduct to think so. Had I any reason or right to determine offhand that she was mistaken?
They began to suspect, what was indeed the actual truth, that Mrs. Elmslie was a selfish, worldly, grasping woman, who wanted to get her daughter well married, and cared nothing for consequences as long as she saw Ada mistress of the greatest establishment in the whole county. It seemed, however, as if there was some fatality at work to prevent the attainment of Mrs.
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