“Come now! none of your Scotch sermons to me! You Scotch always were a set of 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 claret—hands 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 eyes—as 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 before—and 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.”