He lilted the air with indiscreet indifference to being heard within; and “Wheesh! man, wheesh!” expostulated Mungo. “If himsel' was to ken o' me colloguing wi' ye at the door at this 'oor o' the nicht, there wad be Auld Hornie to pay.”
“Oh! there's like to be that the ways it is,” said the Chamberlain, never lifting his shoulder from the door-post, beating his leg with the flageolet, and in all with the appearance of a casual gossip reluctant to be going. “Indeed, and by my troth! there's like to be that!” he repeated. “Do ye think, by the look of me, Mungo, I'm in a pleasant condition of mind?”
“Faith and ye look gey gash, sir,” said Mungo; “there's no denyin' that of it.”
The Chamberlain gave a little crackling laugh, and held the flageolet like a dirk, flat along the inside of his arm and his fingers straining round the thick of it.
“Gash!” said he. “That's the way I feel. By God! Ye fetched down my coat to-day. It was the first hint I had that this damned dancing master was here, for he broke jyle; who would have guessed he was fool enough to come here, where—if we were in the key for it—we could easily set hands on him? He must have stolen the coat out of my own room; but that's no' all of it, for there was a letter in the pocket of it when it disappeared. What was in the letter I am fair beat to remember, but I know that it was of some importance to myself, and of a solemn secrecy, and it has not come back with the coat.”
Mungo was taken aback at this, but to acknowledge he had seen the letter at all would be to blunder.
“A letter!” said he; “there was nae letter that I saw;” and he concluded that he must have let it slip out of the pocket.
The Chamberlain for the first time relinquished the support of the doorway, and stood upon his legs, but his face was more dejected than ever.
“That settles it,” said he, filling his chest with air. “I had a small hope that maybe it might have come into your hands without the others seeing it, but that was expecting too much of a Frenchman. And the letter's away with it! My God! Away with it!
'... Bigged a bower on yon burn-brae,
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes!'”