And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been before. Several times he was on the point of speaking on the subject. Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.
A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his gun was to be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly for “her ladyship” Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant conversation—otherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia alone. For the father relapsed anew into his old strange melancholies, dozing over his books, indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily along the imprisoned coast.
That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were clandestine; now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways in the breacan as of old. But that was not his only distress, Count Victor was sure.
“What accounts for your father's melancholy?” he had the boldness one day to ask Olivia.
They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden, bent upon its slaughter.
“And do you not know the reason for that?” she asked, with her humour promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at the figure bent beside the fire. “What is the dearest thing to you?”
She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it was no wonder he stammered in his reply.
“The dearest,” he repeated. “Ah! well—well—the dearest, Mademoiselle Olivia; ma foi! there are so many things.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “but only one or two are at the heart's core.” She saw him smile at this, and reddened. “Oh, how stupid I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a lady—if there is a lady.”
“There is a lady,” said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.