They descended the stairs in silence; below the secretary met them with an attempt to keep the Earl within the house.
The footmen had refused to ride behind the coach (the Earl was not beloved by his servants). Yet to go unattended: Lord Stair smiled unpleasantly.
“Dismiss them,” he said briefly, and himself opening the door stepped out into the portico.
Between him and the mob was the cobbled yard, behind the high iron railings, yet it seemed as if this would little assure him safety so fierce a shout burst forth when it beheld him.
The Master of Stair had always been hated; though his magnificence, his generosity with money, his recklessness in politics were qualities likely to be beloved by the populace, his excessive arrogance, the horrible tales connected with his house, his aloofness, his lack of amiable vices, his swift and brilliant rise from a mere advocate to the most powerful man in Scotland, were things not to be forgiven by either high or low.
And he had always been on the unpopular side, always served the law not the people; he was merciless too, and reckless in making enemies; they who for two years had been working to spread the tale of Glencoe, found that to give some or any point to the general hate of the Master of Stair was as easy as putting a match to gunpowder; the mob shouted “Glencoe!”—as they would have shouted anything that voiced their long dislike; high and low, all Edinburgh, had combined on this pretext to pull the Dalrymple down.
The Earl stared at the mob a moment and his blue eyes darkened; he knew well enough the value of their shout of horror at Glencoe and despised them the more utterly; he was not afraid that all his enemies together could accomplish his ruin; he had England behind him; and during these three years his worldly success had swept him on and up beyond all meddling with.
He helped his wife into the coach; she had turned even whiter: as the crowd shouted she trembled: her husband took no heed of her.
One of the servants ran forward to open the gates: the people drew back quietly, waiting in an ominous hush.
The coachman whipped up his horses and dashed through the gates at a gallop. Howls, curses, shrieks arose and the mob made a wild onset, but the hoofs of the four plunging horses kept a passage clear and the coach swept free. But the crowd followed and closed about it. Lady Stair cowered in a corner. Stones rattled on the roof and mud was flying at the windows; stones and sticks struck the coachman, the carriage came to a standstill and a wild shout burst forth.