For the second time that day Baptiste was distractedly polishing his silver. About every six minutes a tear rolled off his sharp nose on to salver or tankard and had to be wiped off, and the dull patch rubbed up again. Lal Khan, putting Mr. Elphinstone's bedroom to rights with long, dusky fingers, stared mournfully at a miniature propped on the dressing-table, and shook his head. And still further upstairs Mrs. Elspeth Saunders was mending stockings; her nose was red, so too her eyes. In the kitchen the cook and the rest of the domestics were discussing the situation, as they had almost unceasingly discussed it for the last few days since Elspeth's return. Her own account of what had happened they had long ago threshed bare: had thrilled to hear how, when she reached Rose Cottage at seven o'clock that fateful morning, as arranged, she had been met by one of the old ladies with the horrifying news that their guest had evidently spirited Anne-Hilarion away in the night; how, almost beside herself at this intelligence, she had suffered them to hustle her into a postchaise on a totally false scent, which caused her to traverse many miles of the county of Kent until, half-crazed and wholly destitute of money, she returned at last in sheer desperation to London, there to hear that La Vireville had already started to France in pursuit of the child. The opinion of the region was divided, some of its inmates inclining to blame Mrs. Saunders, some to commiserate. And it was either the consciousness of unjust condemnation or of her own innate superiority which kept Elspeth so much alone in the big house over which hung that piercing sense of something gone that would never, perhaps, come back again. . . .
"'Twas but a few days syne A was tellin' a piece to the bairn in his bed!" Elspeth rapped her thimble suddenly against her teeth, flung down her mending, and marched downstairs. At the library door she knocked, and, receiving no answer, looked in. The room was empty and the fire burnt low. Muttering to herself anent the negligence of "yon black heathen," she made it up. There was a book open on the table, but no signs that Mr. Elphinstone had been occupied, as of custom, with his memoirs. Elspeth left the library and went to the pantry.
"Where is the maister, d'ye ken?" she asked of the polisher.
"I tink he go again to the ministère, I do not know," responded Baptiste, sighing.
"Tae the meenister!" retorted Elspeth. "What wad be the sense in that noo? Gif prayin' could bring the wean back, A reckon he'd been here these mony days!" (Had not she herself, descendant of the Covenanters, taken the incredible step of removing Our Lady of Pontmain from the back of the drawer where, immediately upon the Marquis's departure, she had been stowed away, and putting her in the very centre of the mantelpiece in the lost child's room—a deed for which she nightly besought forgiveness?)
"That is ver' true," agreed the Frenchman, "but it is not that which I mean, Madame Saundair. I mean he go to the—how do you call it?—there where are the State Secretaries."
"Why for canna ye say what ye mean, then?" snapped the lady. "That mebbe will dae gude. At least they arena French there. A've had eno' o' yer Frenchies tae last ma life!"
Baptiste withered.
"Those . . . those weemen at Canterbury!" proceeded Elspeth. "And then—what d'ye call him, the Chevaleer . . . what gar'd Glenauchtie send him after the bairn instead o' an Englishman? Him that jockeyed the wean oot o' his bed at nicht! Belike 'tis he's spirited him awa the noo!"
Baptiste made no effort to defend his compatriot. He had long ago realised that to live in peace with Mrs. Saunders required a policy of thoroughgoing self-effacement, and had decided that on the whole it was worth it. Otherwise he might have retorted that she, pure of any Gallic strain though she was, had not proved singularly successful in her guardianship. Instead, he feebly used his wash-leather on a ladle.