At night, having recovered herself, she was able to laugh with the maids at old Huntly, and to look with kind eyes upon the graces of his son Gordon.
‘If I cared to do it,’ she said, ‘I could have that young man at my feet. But I fear he is a fool like his father.’
She tried him: he danced stiffly, talked no French, and did not know what to do with her hand when he had it, or with his own either. She sparkled, she glittered before him, smiled at his confusion, encouraged him by softness, befooled him. It was plain that he was elated; but she held her own powers so lightly, and thought so little of his, that she had no notion of what she was doing—to what soaring heights she was sending him. When she had done with him, a strange tremor took the young lord—a fixed, hard look, as if he saw something through the wall.
‘What you see? What you fear, my lord?’ she stammered in her pretty Scots.
‘I see misfortune, and shame, and loss. I see women at the loom—a shroud for a man—hey, a shroud, a shroud!’ He stared about at all the company, and at her, knowing nobody. Slowly recovering himself, he seemed to scrape cobwebs from his face. ‘I have drunk knowledge this night, I think.’
She plumbed the depth of his case. ‘Go now, my lord; leave me, now.’
‘One last word to you, madam, with my face to your face.’
‘What would you say to me?’
He took her by the hand, with more strength than she had believed in him. ‘Trust Gordon,’ he said, and left her.
‘I shall believe your word,’ she called softly after him, ‘and remember it.’