CHAPTER VI
“THERE WAS NO MASSACRE IN GLENCOE”
In the back parlor of Lumley’s shop in the Cannon Gate, Lord Stair sat with his elbows on the table, smoking a long clay-pipe.
Along the oak settle which was drawn up close to the fire lay Delia with her head motionless on a pile of brilliant cushions and her hands slackly clasped on her bosom.
For her pallor and her stillness she might have been of marble, but now and then she moaned a little and her breast rose with her troubled breath.
Sweeping the great bruise on her temple the long hazel curls fell straightly to the floor and glimmered in the firelight.
It was a little room hung with thick and very rich stamped leather and containing the choicest of Lumley’s stock as silversmith and jeweler; on the wide mantelshelf stood a full-rigged ship in beaten gold, a great crystal glowing at the poop; either side of this were two bloodstone candlesticks finely set in silver.
A handsome walnut sideboard held goblets and vessels of all sizes and shapes, glasses cut and painted and a huge china punch-bowl decorated with flowers.
On the table at which Lord Stair sat were curios of beautiful workmanship: a salt-cellar in the form of a silver whale with a mother-of-pearl body; a warrior in rock crystal with an agate helmet; a dish of Limoges enamel, purple and green; a gold embossed vase with a ruby-eyed nymph curling round it; a Venice glass, milk-white and blue; a bronze clock with an enamel face; an Eastern dagger and women’s ornaments.
Lord Stair gazed at these things with vacant eyes; in and out of the gold and silver ran the little black cat, lightly in a ghostly silence.
There were arms and swords against the wall, flashings of steel, bronze and gold came from them as the candles flickered in their massive stand; the room was strange, gloomy, full, it seemed, of memories and ghosts of the past.