Warlock o' Glenwarlock, George MacDonald [ebook reader browser txt] 📗

of fit in the night, and if you do not compose yourself, I dread a return of it."

"You well may, if I stop here," he returnedthen, after a pause, "Did I talk?" he asked.

"Yes, my lorda good deal."

"What did I say?"

"Nothing I could understand, my lord."

"And you did your best, I don't doubt!" rejoined his lordship with a sneer. "But you know nothing is to be made of what a man says in a fit."

"I have told your lordship I heard nothing."

"No matter; I don't sleep another night under your roof."

"That will be as it may, my lord."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at the weather, my lord.Cosmo!"

The boy was still asleep, but at the sound of his name from his father's lips, he started at once to his feet.

"Go and wake Grizzie," said the laird, "and tell her to get breakfast ready as fast as she can. Then bring some peat for the fire, and some hot water for his lordship."

Cosmo ran to obey. Grizzie had been up for more than an hour, and was going about with the look of one absorbed in a tale of magic and devilry. Her mouth was pursed up close, as if worlds should not make her speak, but her eyes were wide and flashing, and now and then she would nod her head, as for the Q. E. D. to some unheard argument. Whatever Cosmo required, she attended to at once, but not one solitary word did she utter.

He went back with the fuel, and they made up the fire. Lord Mergwain was again lying back exhausted in his chair, with his eyes closed.

"Why don't you give me my brandydo you hear?" all at once he cried. "Oh, I thought it was my own rascal! Get me some brandy, will you?"

"There is none in the house, my lord," said his host.

"What a miserable sort of public to keep! No brandy!"

"My lord, you are at Castle Warlocknot so good a place for your lordship's needs."

"Oh, that's it, yes! I remember! I knew your father, or your grandfather, or your grandson, or somebodythe more's my curse! Out of this I must be gone, and that at once! Tell them to put the horses to. Little I thought when I left Cairntod where I was going to find myself! I would rather be inand have done with it! Lord! Lord! to think of a trifle like that not being forgotten yet! Are there no doors out? Give me brandy, I say. There's some in my pocket somewhere. Look you! I don't know what coat I had on yesterday! or where it is!"

He threw himself back in his chair. The laird set about looking if he had brought the brandy of which he spoke; it might be well to let him have some. Not finding it, he would have gone to search the outer garments his lordship had put off in the kitchen; but he burst out afresh:

"I tell youand confound you, I say that you have to be told twiceI will not be left alone with that child! He's as good as nobody! What could HE do if" Here he left the sentence unfinished.

"Very well, my lord," responded the laird, "I will not leave you. Cosmo shall go and look for the brandy-flask in your lordship's greatcoat."

"Yes, yes, good boy! you go and look for it. You're all Cosmos, are you? Will the line never come to an end! A cursed line for meif it shouldn't be a rope-line! But I had the best of the game after all!though I did lose my two rings. Confounded old cheating son of a porpus! It was doing the world a good turn, and Glenwarlock a better toLook you! what are you listening there for!Ha! ha! ha! I say, nowwould you hang a man, lairdI mean, when you could get no good out of itnot a ha'p'orth for yourself or your family?"

"I've never had occasion to consider the question," answered the laird.

"Ho! ho! haven't you? Let me tell you it's quite time you considered it. It's no joke when a man has to decide without time to think. He's pretty sure to decide wrong."

"That depends, I should think, my lord, on the way in which he has been in the habit of deciding."

"Come now! none of your Scotch sermons to me! You Scotch always were a set a down-brown hypocrites! Confound the whole nation!"

"To judge by your last speech, my lord,"

"Oh, by my last speech, eh? By my dying declaration? Then I tell you 'tis fairer to judge a man by anything sooner than his speech. That only serves to hide what he's thinking. I wish I might be judged by mine, though, and not by my deeds. I've done a good many things in my time I would rather forget, now age has clawed me in his clutch. So have you; so has everybody. I don't see why I should fare worse than the rest."

Here Cosmo returned with the brandy-flask, which he had found in his greatcoat. His lordship stretched out both hands to it, more eagerly even than when he welcomed the cob-webbed magnum of clarethands trembling with feebleness and hunger for strength. Heedless of his host's offer of water and a glass, he put it to his mouth, and swallowed three great gulps hurriedly. Then he breathed a deep breath, seemed to say with Macbeth, "Ourselves again!" drew himself up in a chair, and glanced around him with a look of gathering arrogance. A kind of truculent question was in his eyesas much as to say, "Now then, what do you make of it all? What's your candid notion about me and my extraordinary behaviour?" After a moment's silence,

"What puzzles me is this," he said, "how the deuce I came, of all places, to come just here! I don't believe, in all my wicked life, I ever made such a fool of myself beforeand I've made many a fool of myself too!"

Receiving no answer, he took another pull at his flask. The laird stood a little behind and watched him, harking back upon old stories, putting this and that together, and resolving to have a talk with old Grannie.

A minute or two more, and his lordship got up, and proceeded to wash his face and hands, ordering Cosmo about after the things he wanted, as if he had been his valet.

"Richard's himself again!" he said in a would-be jaunty voice, the moment he had finished his toilet, and looked in a crow-cocky kind of a way at the laird. But the latter thought he saw trouble still underneath the look.

"Now, then, Mr. Warlock, where's this breakfast of yours?" he said.

"For that, my lord," replied the laird, "I must beg you to come to the kitchen. The dining-room in this weather would freeze the very marrow of your bones."

"And look you! it don't want freezing," said his lordship, with a shudder. "The kitchen to be sure!I don't desire a better place. I'll be hanged if I enter this room again!" he muttered to himselfnot too low to be heard. "My tastes are quite as simple as yours, Mr. Warlock, though I have not had the same opportunity of indulging them."

He seemed rapidly returning to the semblance of what he would have called a gentleman.

He rose, and the laird led the way. Lord Mergwain followed; and Cosmo, coming immediately behind, heard him muttering to himself all down the stairs: "Mere confounded nonsense! Nothing whatever but the drink!I must say I prefer the daylight after all.Yes! that's the drawing-room.What's done's doneand more than done, for it can't be done again!"

It was a nipping and an eager air into which they stepped from the great door. The storm had ceased, but the snow lay much deeper, and all the world seemed folded in a lucent death, of which the white mounds were the graves. All the morning it had been snowing busily, for no footsteps were between the two doors but those of Cosmo.

When they reached the kitchen, there was a grand fire on the hearth, and a great pot on the fire, in which the porridge Grizzie had just made was swelling in huge bubbles that burst in sighs. Old Grizzie was bright as the new day, bustling and deedy. Her sense of the awful was nowise to be measured by the degree of her dread: she believed and did not fearmuch. She had an instinctive consciousness that a woman ought to be, and might be, and was a match for the devil.

"I am sorry we have no coffee for your lordship," said the laird, "To tell the truth, we seldom take anything more than our country's porridge. I hope you can take tea? Our Grizzie's scons are good, with plenty of butter."

His lordship had in the meantime taken another pull at the brandy-flask, and was growing more and more polite.

"The man would be hard to please," he said, "who would not be enticed to eat by such a display of good victuals. Tea for me, before everything!How am I to pretend to swallow the stuff?" he murmured, rather than muttered, to himself."But," he went on aloud, "didn't that cheating rascal leave you"

He stopped abruptly, and the laird saw his eyes fixed upon something on the table, and following their look, saw it was a certain pepper-pot, of odd devicea piece of old china, in the shape of a clumsily made horse, with holes between the ears for the issue of the pepper.

"I see, my lord," he said, "you are amused with the pepper-pot. It is a curious utensil, is it not? It has been in the house a long timelonger than anybody knows. Which of my great-grandmothers let it take her fancy, it is impossible to say; but I suppose the reason for its purchase, if not its manufacture, was, that a horse passant has been the crest of our family from time immemorial."

"Curse the crest, and the horse too!" said his lordship.

The laird started. His guest had for the last few minutes been behaving so much like a civilized being, that he was not prepared for such a sudden relapse into barbarity. But the entrance of Lady Joan, looking radiant, diverted the current of things.

The fact was, that, like not a few old people, Lord Mergwain had fallen into such a habit of speaking in his worse moods without the least restraint, that in his better moods, which were indeed only good by comparison, he spoke in the same way, without being aware of it, and of himself seldom discovering that he had spoken.

The rest of the breakfast passed in peace. The visitors had tea, oatcake, and scons, with fresh butter and jam; and Lady Joan, for all the frost and snow, had yet a new-laid eggthe only one; while the laird and Cosmo ate their porridge and milkthe latter very scanty at this season of the year, and tasting not a little of turnipand Grizzie, seated on a stool at some distance from the table, took her porridge with treacle. Mrs. Warlock had not yet left her room.

When the meal was over, Lord Mergwain turned to his host, and said,

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Warlock, by sending orders to my coachman to have the horses put to as quickly as possible: we must not trespass more on your hospitality.Confound me if I stop