"Awa'! awa'!" he cried, an implacable face against their whining protestations--"Awa', or I'll gie ye the gairde! If I was my uncle Erchie, I wad pit an end to your argy-bargying wi' hail frae a gun!" But to Annapla it was, "Puir deevils, it's gey hard to gie them the back o'

the haun' and them sae used to rougher times in Doom. What'll they think o' us? It's sic a doon-come, but we maun be hainin' seein' Leevie's lost her jo, and no ither way clear oot o' the bit. I'm seein' a toom girnel and done beef here lang afore next Martinmas."

These plaints were to a woman blissfully beyond comprehending the full import of them, for so much was Annapla taken up with her Gift, so misty and remote the realms of Gaelic dream wherein she moved, that the little Lowland oddity's perturbation was beneath her serious attention.

Olivia had that day perhaps the bitterest of her life. With love outside--calling in the evening and fluting in the bower, and ever (as she thought) occupied with her image even when farther apart--she had little fault to find with the shabby interior of her home. Now that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared to him that she had the look of a mountain birch stricken by the first of wintry weather.

"My dear," he said, with a tenderness that had been some time absent from their relations, "you must be taking a change of air. I'm a poor parent not to have seen before how much you need it." He hastened to correct what he fancied from her face was a misapprehension. "I am speaking for your red cheeks, my dear, believe me; I'm wae to see you like that."

"I will do whatever you wish, father," said Olivia in much agitation.

Coerced she was iron, coaxed she was clay. "I have not been a very good daughter to you, father; after this I will be trying to be better."

His face reddened; his heart beat at this capitulation of his rebel: he rose from his chair and took her into his arms--an odd display for a man so long stone-cold but to his dreams.

"My dear, my dear!" said he, "but in one detail that need never again be named between us two, you have been the best of girls, and, G.o.d knows, I am not the pattern parent!"

Her arm went round his neck, and she wept on his breast.

"Sour and dour--" said he.

"No, no!" she cried.

"And poor to penury."

"All the more need for a loving child. There are only the two of us."

He held her at arm's-length and looked at her wistfully in the wet wan face and saw his wife Christina there. "By heaven!" he thought, "it is no wonder that this man should hunt her."

"You have made me happy this day, Olivia," said he; "at least half happy. I dare not mention what more was needed to make me quite content."

"You need not," said she. "I know, and that--and that--is over too. I am just your own Olivia."

"What!" he cried elate; "no more?"

"No more at all."

"Now praise G.o.d!" said he. "I have been robbed of Credit and estate, and even of my name; I have seen king and country foully done by, and black affront brought on our people, and still there's something left to live for."

CHAPTER XXVI -- THE DUKE'S BALL

For some days Count Victor chafed at the dull and somewhat squalid life of the inn. He found himself regarded coldly among strangers; the flageolet sounded no longer in the private parlour; the Chamberlain stayed away. And if Drimdarroch had seemed ill to find from Doom, he was absolutely indiscoverable here. Perhaps there was less eagerness in the search because other affairs would for ever intrude--not the Cause (that now, to tell the truth, he somehow regarded moribund; little wonder after eight years' inaction!) nor the poignant home-thoughts that made his ride through Scotland melancholy, but affairs more recent, and Olivia's eyes possessed him.

A morning had come of terrific snow, and made all the colder, too, his sojourn in the country of MacCailen Mor. Now he looked upon mountains white and far, phantom valleys gulping chilly winds, the sea alone with some of its familiar aspect, yet it, too, leaden to eye and heart as it lay in a perpetual haze between the headlands and lazily rose and fell in the bays.

The night of the ball was to him like a reprieve. From the darkness of those woody deeps below Dunchuach the castle gleamed with fires, and a Highland welcome illumined the greater part of the avenue from the town with flambeaux, in whose radiance the black pines, the huge beeches, the waxen shrubbery round the lawns all shrouded, seemed to creep closer round the edifice to hear the sounds of revelry and learn what charms the human world when the melodious winds are still and the weather is cold, and out of doors poor thickets must shiver in appalling darkness.

A gush of music met Count Victor at the threshold; dresses were rustling, a caressing warmth sighed round him, and his host was very genial.

"M. Montaiglon," said his Grace in French, "you will pardon our short notice; my good friend, M. Montaiglon, my dear; my wife, M.

Montaiglon--"

"But M. Montaiglon merely in the inns, my lord," corrected the Frenchman, smiling. "I should be the last to accept the honour of your hospitality under a _nom de guerre_."

The Duke bowed. "M. le Comte," he said, "to be quite as candid as yourself, I pierced your incognito even in the dark. My dear sir, a Scots traveller named for the time being the Baron Hay once had the privilege of sharing a gla.s.s coach with your uncle between Paris and Dunkerque; 'tis a story that will keep. Meanwhile, as I say, M.

Montaiglon will pardon the shortness of our notice; in these wilds one's dancing shoes are presumed to be ever airing at the fire. You must consider these doors as open as the woods so long as your are in this neighbourhood. I have some things I should like to show you that you might not find wholly uninteresting--a Raphael, a Rembrandt (so reputed), and several Venetians--not much, in faith, but regarding which I should value your criticism--"

Some other guests arrived, his Grace's speech was broken, and Count Victor pa.s.sed on, skirting the dancers, who to his unaccustomed eyes presented features strange yet picturesque as they moved in the puzzling involutions of a country dance. It was a n.o.ble hall hung round with tapestry and bossed with Highland targets, trophies of arms and the mountain chase; from the gallery round it drooped little banners with the devices of all those generations of great families that mingled in the blood of MacCailen Mor.

The Frenchman looked round him for a familiar face, and saw the Chamberlain in Highland dress in the midst of a little group of dames.

Mrs. Petullo was not one of them. She was dancing with her husband--a pitiful spectacle, for the lawyer must be pushed through the dance as he were a doll, with monstrous ungracefulness, and no sense of the time of the music, his thin legs quarrelling with each other, his neighbours all confused by his inexpert gyrations, and yet himself with a smirk of satisfaction on his sweating countenance.

"Madame is not happy," thought Count Victor, watching the lady who was compelled to be a partner in these ungainly gambols.

And indeed Mrs. Petullo was far from happy, if her face betrayed her real feelings, as she shared the ignominy of the false position into which Petullo had compelled her. When the dance was ended she did not take her husband's proffered arm, but walked before him to her seat, utterly ignoring his pathetic courtesies.

This little domestic comedy only engaged Count Victor for a moment; he felt vexed for a woman in a position for which there seemed no remedy, and he sought distraction from his uneasy feeling by pa.s.sing every man in the room under review, and guessing which of them, if any, could be the Drim-darroch who had brought him there from France. It was a baffling task. For many were there with faces wholly inscrutable who might very well have among them the secret he cherished, and yet nothing about them to advertise the scamp who had figured so effectively in other scenes than these. The Duke, their chief, moved now among them--suave, graceful, affectionate, his lady on his arm, sometimes squeezing her hand, a very boy in love!

"That's a grand picture of matrimonial felicity, Count," said a voice at Count Victor's ear, and he turned to find the Chamberlain beside him.

"Positively it makes me half envious, monsieur," said Count Victor.

"A following influenced by the old feudal affections and wellnigh worshipping; health and wealth, ambitions gratified, a name that has sounded in camp and Court, yet a heart that has stayed at home; the fever of youth abated, and wedded to a beautiful woman who does not weary one, _pardieu!_ his Grace has nothing more in this world to wish for."

"Ay! he has most that's needed to make it a very comfortable world.

Providence is good--"

"But sometimes grudging--"

"But sometimes grudging, as you say; yet MacCailen has got everything.

When I see him and her there so content I'm wondering at my own wasted years of bachelordom. As sure as you're there, I think the sooner I draw in at a fire and play my flageolet to the guidwife the better for me."

"It is a gift, this domesticity," said Count Victor, not without an inward twinge at the picture. "Some of us have it, some of us have not, and no trying hard for content with one's own wife and early suppers will avail unless one is born to it like the trick of the Sonnet. I have been watching our good friend, your lawyer's wife, distracted over the--over the--_balourdise_ of her husband as a dancer: he dances like a bootmaker's sign, if you can imagine that, and I dare not approach them till her very natural indignation has simmered down."

The Chamberlain looked across, the hall distastefully and found Mrs.

Petullo's eyes on him. She shrugged, for his perception alone, a white shoulder in a manner that was eloquent of many things.

"To the devil!" he muttered, yet essayed at the smile of good friendship which was now to be their currency, and a poor exchange for the old gold.

"Surely Monsieur MacTaggart dances?" said the Count; "I see a score of ladies here who would give their garters for the privilege."

"My dancing days are over," said Sim MacTaggart, but merely as one who repeats a formula; his eyes were roving among the women. The dark green-and-blue tartan of the house well became him: he wore diced hose of silk and a knife on the calf of his leg; his plaid swung from a stud at the shoulder, and fell in voluminous and graceful folds behind him.

His eyes roved among the women, and now and then he lifted the whitest of hands and rubbed his shaven chin.

Count Victor was a little amused at the vanity of this village hero. And then there happened what more deeply impressed him with wonder at the contrarieties of character here represented, for the hero brimmed with sentimental tears!

They were caused by so simple a thing as a savage strain of music from the Duke's piper, who strutted in the gallery fingering a melody in an interval of the dance--a melody full of wearisome iterations in the ears of the foreigner, who could gain nothing of fancy from the same save that the low notes sobbed. When the piece was calling in the hall, ringing stormily to the roof, shaking the banners, silencing the guests, the Duke's Chamberlain laughed with some confusion in a pretence that he was undisturbed.