“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 himself—not 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 day-light after all.—Yes! that’s the drawing-room.—What’s done’s done—and 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 fear—much. 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 device—a 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 time—longer 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.”