"'Tis his espadone on the stair."
"Dioul!" said my cousin; "and now let us to dinner."
We all rose to receive this personage, whom our Highland education made us disposed to treat with the utmost respect as the master of the house, or husbonde, as the Danes would call him (though only his deputy); Ian bade him welcome in Gaëlic, and Phadrig Mhor, whose vast stature made the Northman open wide his eyes, placed a chair for him, and we proceeded to dine.
I have said each of the five or six stories of the mansion had two dwellings, consisting of several apartments. Phadrig Mhor had ransacked the whole place, and collected within our chamber such furniture and utensils as he could procure among the vacated and desolate rooms. From one he brought a table; from another a high-backed antique chair; from a third a stool; from a fourth a tabourette; from another a pot, a kettle, and so on, until he had almost furnished our damp chamber, which overlooked the row of poplars, beyond which, in the Platz, we saw a regiment of Scottish pikemen being drilled to the use of the pike, according to the new fashion, as laid down in the Pallas Armata of that eminent tactician, Captain Sir Thomas Kellie of Edinburgh and that Ilk.
Our dinner dishes had been borrowed from the old housekeeper of Otto Roskilde; for knives each of us had his skene-dhu, and for cups each had his hunting-quaigh or shell, hooped with silver; but Otto Roskilde brought his own pewter pot which reminded me of a Low lander's beechwood bicker. A saddle of mutton, which Phadrig had procured (Heaven alone knows how), with boiled Russian tongues, bread and cheese, composed a repast on which Fingal himself might have fared with satisfaction; and we brewed a brave tappit hen in a gigantic Flemish jug, with Dutch skeidam and hot water in equal proportions, sweetened with sugar from the Indian isles. Beside this, we had four bulbous-looking flasks of French brandy, which Phadrig had found when foraging about the rooms, and to the evident chagrin of our host, whose grey eyes glistened with surprise at the discovery, and anger at our henchman.
As neither M'Farquhar nor Phadrig Mhor (whom as his fosterer we always treated as an equal) could speak one word of any language but their native Gaëlic, nearly the whole conversation fell to the share of the lieutenant, M'Alpine, and myself. He spoke a little German, having served in the Low Countries under Sir James Ramsay, and I knew a little Spanish, having acquired it at King's College.
Now it chanced that both these languages were spoken by the Hausmeister, who, though at first somewhat reserved even to sullenness and silence, when his heart warmed by the contents of our gallant tankard, became loquacious in the extreme.
Though his name was Scandinavian enough in its sound, having imbibed certain undefinable suspicions about this man—awakened doubtless by the deep and secret smiles which I detected stealing over his sallow and swarthy face, like the quiet ripples on the surface of a Dutch canal—I found myself baffled in deciding to what country he belonged; for one moment there was something of the Danish softness in his voice, the next it had the deep twang of the Swedish, or the harsh growl of the German; and all these various tones were least discernible in his Spanish, which he spoke with the greatest fluency.
Filling up his quaigh to the brim, my cousin Ian, believing that we were in presence of a Holsteiner, stood up and drank courteously—
"To the honour of the brave and faithful Holsteiners."