“That's as Heaven, which arranges these things without consulting us, may have decided, my lord; on my honour, I had much preferred never to have set eyes on your Chamberlain.”
“Come, come!” said the Duke with a high head and slapping with open hand the table beside him—“Come, come! I am not a fool, Montaiglon—even at my age. You deliberately sought this unfortunate man.”
“Monsieur the Duke of Argyll has my word that it was not so,” said the Count softly.
“I fancy in that case, then, you had found him easy to avoid,” said the Duke, who was in an ir-restrainable heat. “From the first—oh, come! sir, let us not be beating about the bush, and let us sink all these evasions—from the first you have designed a meeting with MacTaggart, and your every act since you came to this country has led up to this damned business that is likely to rob me of the bravest of servants. It was not the winds of heaven that blew you against your will into this part of Scotland, and brought you in contact with my friend on the very first night of your coming here.”
“And still, M. le Duc, with infinite deference, and a coolness that is partly due to the unpleasant fact (as you may perceive) that I have no coat on, 'twas quite the other way, and your bravest of servants thrust himself upon my attention that had otherwise been directed to the real object of my being in Scotland at all.”
The Duke gave a gesture of impatience. “I am not at the heart of these mysteries,” said he, “but—even at my age—I know a great deal more about this than you give me credit for. If it is your whim to affect that this wretched business was no more than a passage between gentlemen, the result of a quarrel over cards or the like in my house—”
“Ah!” cried the Count, “there I am all to blame. Our affair ought more properly to have opened elsewhere. In that detail your Grace has every ground for complaint.”
“That is a mere side affair,” said the Duke, “and something else more closely affects me. I am expected to accept it, then, that the Comte de Mont-aiglon, travelling incognito in the unassuming rôle of a wine merchant, came here at this season simply from a passion for our Highland scenery. I had not thought the taste for dreary mountains and black glens had extended to the Continent.”
“At least 'twas not to quarrel with a servant I came here,” retorted Count Victor.
“That is ill said, sir,” said his Grace. “My kinsman has ten generations of ancestry of the best blood of Scotland and the Isles underground.”