“Not so far as I am concerned, certainly.”
Mungo looked incredulous. That any one should let go the chance of conveying so rare a piece of gossip to persons so immediately concerned was impossible of belief. “Na, na,” said he, shaking his head; “she has every word o't, or her faither at least, and that's the same thing. But shoon or nae shoon, yon's the man for my money!”
“Again he has my felicitations,” said Count Victor, with a good humour unfailing. Indeed he could afford to be good-humoured if this were true. So here was the explanation of Olivia's condescension, her indifference to her lover's injury, of which her father could not fail to have apprised her even if Mungo had been capable of a miracle and held his tongue. The Chamberlain, then, was no longer in favour! Here was joy! Count Victor could scarce contain himself. How many women would have been flattered at the fierceness of devotion implied in a lover's readiness to commit assassination out of sheer jealousy of a supposititious rival in her affections? But Olivia—praise le bon Dieu!—was not like that.
He thrust the coat into Mungo's hands and went hurriedly up to his room to be alone with his thoughts, that he feared might show themselves plainly in his face if he met either the lady or her father, and there for the first time had a memory of Cecile—some odd irrelevance of a memory—in which she figured in a masque in a Paris garden. Good God! that he should have failed to see it before; this Cecile had been an actress, as, he told himself, were most of her sex he had hitherto encountered, and 'twas doubtful if he once had touched her soul. Olivia had shown him now, in silences, in sighs, in some unusual aura of sincerity that was round her like the innocence of infancy, that what he thought was love a year ago was but its drossy elements. Seeking the first woman in the eyes of the second, he had found the perfect lover there!
CHAPTER XXXV — A DAMNATORY DOCUMENT
Mungo took the coat into the castle kitchen, the true arcanum of Doom, where he and Annapla solved the domestic problems that in later years had not been permitted to disturb the mind of the master or his daughter. An enormous fireplace, arched like a bridge, and poorly enough fed nowadays compared with its gluttony in those happier years of his continual bemoaning, when plenty kept the spit perpetually at work, if it were only for the good of the beggars who blackened the road from the Lowlands, had a handful of peat in its centre to make the yawning orifice the more pathetic to eyes that had seen the flames leap there. Everywhere the evidence of the old abundant days—the rusting spit itself, the idle battery of cuisine, long rows of shining covers. Annapla, who was assumed to be true tutelary genius of these things, but in fact was beholden to the martial mannikin of Fife for inspiration and aid with the simplest of ragouts, though he would have died sooner than be suspected of the unsoldierly art of cookery,—Annapla was in one of her trances. Her head was swathed mountainously in shawls; her wild, black, lambent eyes had the look of distant contemplation.
“Lord keep 's!” said Mungo, entering, “what are ye doverin' on noo? Wauken up, ye auld bitch, and gie this coat a dight. D'ye ken wha's ocht it? It belangs to a gentleman that's no' like noo to get but this same, and the back-o'-my-haun'-to-ye oot o' Doom Castle.”
She took the coat and brushed it in a lethargy, with odd, unintelligible chanting.
“Nane o' your warlock canticles!” cried Mungo. “Ye gied the lassie to the man that cam' withouten boots—sorrow be on the bargain! And if it's cast-in' a spell on the coat ye are, I'll raither clean't mysel'.”