"About a woman! Pah! women," said the dominie, cynically, "according to a German philosopher, are only like works carved of fine ivory: nothing is whiter or smoother, and nothing sooner turns yellow."
"Are ye sure he was not a Roman philosopher?" asked the quartermaster, drily.
"I am: yet Petronius and Ovid both say——"
"Bother them both, dominie! leave Greek roots and Latin verbs alone, now that the poor boy is gone—God bless and watch over him! I know he'll ever have a warm corner in his heart for us both, and that, go wherever he may, he'll neither forget you nor the poor old quartermaster; but now to have a glass of grog, and then to set about this search that my lord has ordered—a search which I know right well will prove a bootless one."
A vigorous pursuit and inquiry along all the highways were now instituted. Girvan, the dominie, the gardener, gamekeepers, grooms, Jack Andrews, Irvin the fisherman, the running footman, the parish minister on his puffy Galloway cob, and even Spillsby, the portly and unwieldy butler, were all despatched in various directions to the neighbouring farms, mansion sand villages, without avail.
John Legat, usually known in the Bailiwick as Lang Leggie, the running footman (for one of those officials still lingered in the old-fashioned household of Rohallion), scoured all Kyle and Cunninghame, with hard boiled eggs and sherry in the silver bulb that topped his long cane, scarcely pausing to imbibe these, his sustenance when on duty; and though he returned thrice to the castle, he was despatched like a liveried Mercury, thrice again, but without hearing tidings of the missing one.
Since the last Duke of Queensberry ("old Q.") who died in 1810, Lord Rohallion was perhaps the last Scottish peer who retained such an old state appendage as a running footman.
Long did they all, save the sullen Master, hope, and even flatter themselves, that the wanderer would return; but days became weeks, and no trace could be discovered and no tidings were heard of him anywhere.
An armed lugger that did not display her colours, but was very foreign in her build and in the rake of her masts, had been seen standing off and on near Rohallion Head. About midnight she was close in shore, steering clear of the Partan Craig, and burning a blue light. By sunrise she was far off at sea: could he have gone with her?
There had been a numerous and somewhat lawless body of gipsies encamped near the oakwood shaw on the night of his disappearance, for the ashes of their night-fires had been found, together with well-picked bones and broken bottles, the usual débris of their suppers al fresco; but there were other traces more alarming: several large pools of blood, which showed that there had been a fight—perhaps murder—committed among them. These wanderers had departed by sunrise, and passed beyond the craigs of Kyle, where all traces of them were lost. The quartermaster thought of the money he had given Quentin, and trembled lest the gold had only ensured his destruction, till the dominie reassured him by remembering that there were more Kennedies than Faas among those gipsies, and the former would be sure to protect him for the sake of his name.