“Come away in, Captain,” said Jean, assuming an air of briskness the confusion of her face belied. “Come away in, I am proud to see you at my door.”
The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled English.
“Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you?” he asked.
“I did, that!” said Jean Clerk, lifting her brattie and preparing to weep, “and it’ll be the last time I’ll ever be inside its hospitable door.”
“And you gave the key to Cameron the shepherd?”
“I did,” said Jean, wondering what was to come next.
The Paymaster changed his look and his accent, and spoke again with something of a pawky humour that those who knew him best were well aware was a sign that his temper was at its worst.
“Ay,” said he, “and you forgot about the boy. What’s to be done with him? I suppose you would leave him to rout with the kye he was bred among, or haunt the rocks with the sheep. I was thinking myself coming down the road there, and this little fellow with me without a friend in the world, that the sky is a damp ceiling sometimes, and the grass of the field a poor meal for a boy’s stomach. Eh! what say you, Mistress Clerk?” And the old soldier heaved a thumbful of snuff from his waistcoat pocket.
“The boy’s no kith nor kin of mine,” said Jean Clerk, “except a very far-out cousin’s son.” She turned her face away from both of them and pretended to be very busy folding up her plaid, which, as is well known, can only be done neatly with the aid of the teeth and thus demands some concealment of the face. The sister passed behind the Paymaster and the boy and startled the latter with a sly squeeze of the wrist as she did so.
“Do you tell me, my good woman,” demanded the Paymaster, “that you would set him out on the road homeless on so poor an excuse as that? Far-out cousin here or far-out cousin there, he has no kin closer than yourself between the two stones of the parish. Where’s your Hielan’ heart, woman?”