Lady Florimel did not confess that she had begun to feel her life monotonous, or mention that she had for some time been cultivating the acquaintance of a few of her poor neighbours, and finding their odd ways of life and thought and speech interesting. She had especially taken a liking to Duncan MacPhail, in which, strange to say, Demon, who had hitherto absolutely detested the appearance of any one not attired as a lady or gentleman, heartily shared. She found the old man so unlike anything she had ever heard or read of!—so full of grand notions in such contrast with his poor conditions; so proud yet so overflowing with service—dusting a chair for her with his bonnet, yet drawing himself up like an offended hidalgo if she declined to sit in it!—more than content to play the pipes while others dined, yet requiring a personal apology from the marquis himself for a practical joke! so full of kindness and yet of revenges!—lamenting over Demon when he hurt his foot, yet cursing, as she overheard him once, in fancied solitude, with an absolute fervour of imprecation, a continuous blast of poetic hate which made her shiver; and the next moment sighing out a most wailful coronach on his old pipes. It was all so odd, so funny, so interesting! It nearly made her aware of human nature as an object of study. But lady Florimel had never studied anything yet, had never even perceived that anything wanted studying, that is, demanded to be understood. What appeared to her most odd, most inconsistent, and was indeed of all his peculiarities alone distasteful to her, was his delight in what she regarded only as the menial and dirty occupation of cleaning lamps and candlesticks; the poetic side of it, rendered tenfold poetic by his blindness, she never saw.
Then he had such tales to tell her—of mountain, stream, and lake; of love and revenge; of beings less and more than natural —brownie and Boneless, kelpie and fairy; such wild legends also, haunting the dim emergent peaks of mist-swathed Celtic history; such songs—come down, he said, from Ossian himself—that sometimes she would sit and listen to him for hours together.
It was no wonder then that she should win the heart of the simple old man speedily and utterly; for what can bard desire beyond a true listener—a mind into which his own may, in verse or tale or rhapsody, in pibroch or coronach, overflow? But when, one evening, in girlish merriment, she took up his pipes, blew the bag full, and began to let a highland air burst fitfully from the chanter, the jubilation of the old man broke all the bounds of reason. He jumped from his seat and capered about the room, calling her all the tenderest and most poetic names his English vocabulary would afford him; then abandoning the speech of the Sassenach, as if in despair of ever uttering himself through its narrow and rugged channels, overwhelmed her with a cataract of soft-flowing Gaelic, returning to English only as his excitement passed over into exhaustion—but in neither case aware of the transition.
Her visits were the greater comfort to Duncan, that Malcolm was now absent almost every night, and most days a good many hours asleep; had it been otherwise, Florimel, invisible for very width as was the gulf between them, could hardly have made them so frequent. Before the fishing-season was over, the piper had been twenty times on the verge of disclosing every secret in his life to the high-born maiden.
“It’s a pity you haven’t a wife to take care of you, Mr MacPhail,” she said one evening. “You must be so lonely without a woman to look after you!”
A dark cloud came over Duncan’s face, out of which his sightless eyes gleamed.
“She’ll haf her poy, and she’ll pe wanting no wife,” he said sullenly. “Wifes is paad.”
“Ah!” said Florimel, the teasing spirit of her father uppermost for the moment, “that accounts for your swearing so shockingly the other day?”
“Swearing was she? Tat will pe wrong. And who was she’ll pe swearing at?”
“That’s what I want you to tell me, Mr MacPhail.”