At that she dashed her hand across her eyes and boldly faced him, smiling.
“That would be a shameful thing in a Baron's daughter,” said she. “No, indeed! when we must rise and go away, here is the woman who will go bravely! We live not in glens, in this house nor in that, but in the hearts that love us, and where my father is and friends are to be made, I think I can be happy yet. Look at the waves there, and the snow and the sea-birds! All these are in other places as well as here.”
“But not the same, but not the same! Here I swear I could live content myself.”
“What!” said she, smiling, and the rogue a moment dancing in her eyes. “No, no, Count Victor, to this you must be born like the stag in the corrie and the seal on the rock. We are a simple people, and a poor people—worse fortune!—poor and proud. Your world is different from ours, and there you will have friends that think of you.”
“And you,” said he, all aglow in passion but with a face of flint, “you are leaving those behind that love you too.”
This time he watched her narrowly; she gave no sign.
“There are the poor people in the clachan there,” said she; “some of them will not forget me I am hoping, but that is all. We go. It is good for us, perhaps. Something has been long troubling my father more than the degradation of the clans and all these law pleas that Petullo has now brought to the bitter end. He is proud, and he is what is common in the Highlands when the heart is sore—he is silent. You must not think it is for myself I am vexing to leave Doom Castle; it is for him. Look! do you see the dark spot on the side of the hill yonder up at Ardno? That is the yew-tree in the churchyard where my mother, his wife, lies; it is no wonder that at night sometimes he goes out to look at the hills, for the hills are over her there and over the generations of his people in the same place. I never knew my mother, mothruaigh! but he remembers, and it is the hundred dolours (as we say) for him to part. For me I have something of the grandfather in me, and would take the seven bens for it, and the seven glens, and the seven mountain moors, if it was only for the sake of the adventure, though I should always like to think that I would come again to these places of hered-ity.”
And through all this never a hint of Simon Mac-Taggart! Could there be any other conclusion than the joyous one—it made his heart bound!—that that affair was at an end? And yet how should he ascertain the truth about a matter so close upon his heart? He put his pride in his pocket and went down that afternoon with the Chamberlain's coat in his hands. There was a lull in the wind, and the servitor was out of doors caulking the little boat, the argosy of poor fortunes, which had been drawn up from the menacing tides so that its prow obtruded on the half-hearted privacy of the lady's bower. Deer were on the shore, one sail was on the blue of the sea, a long way off, a triumphant flash of sun lit up the innumerable glens. A pleasant interlude of weather, and yet Mungo was in what he called, himself, a tirravee. He was honestly becoming impatient with this undeparting foreigner, mainly because Annapla was day by day the more insistent that he had not come wading into Doom without boots entirely in vain, and that her prediction was to be fulfilled.
“See! Mungo,” said the Count, “the daw, if my memory fails me not, had his plumes pecked off him, but I seem fated to retain my borrowed feathers until I pluck myself. Is it that you can have them at the first opportunity restored to our connoisseur in contes—your friend the Chamberlain? It comes to occur to me that the gentleman's wardrobe may be as scanty as my own, and the absence of his coat may be the reason, more than my unfortunate pricking with a bodkin, for his inexplicable absence from—from—the lady's side.”
Mungo had heard of the duel, of course; it was the understanding in Doom that all news was common property inasmuch as it was sometimes almost the only thing to pass round.