“Thank you, Paul Greig,” said she softly, for now the Swiss had opened the door, and she squeezed my wrist.
“Benedicite!” cried his reverence and came in, puffing hugely after his climb, his face now purple almost to strangulation. “May the devil fly away with turnpike stairs, Madame!—puff-puff—I curse them whether they be wood or marble;—puff-puff—I curse them Dunkerque; in Ostend, Paris, all Europe itself, ay even unto the two Americas. I curse their designers, artisans, owners, and defenders in their waking and sleeping! Madame, kindly consider your stairs anathema!”
“You need all your wind to cool your porridge, as we say in Scotland, Father Hamilton,” cried Miss Walkinshaw, “and a bonny-like thing it is to have you coming here blackguarding my honest stairs.”
He laughed enormously and fell into a chair, shaking the house as if the world itself had quaked. “Pardon, my dear Miss Walkinshaw,” said he when his breath was restored, “but, by the Mass, you must confess 'tis the deuce and all for a man—a real man that loves his viands, and sleeps well o' nights, and has a contented mind and grows flesh accordingly, to trip up to Paradise—” here he bowed, his neck swelling in massive folds—“to trip up to Paradise, where the angels are, as easily as a ballet-dancer—bless her!—skips to the other place where, by my faith! I should like to pay a brief visit myself, if 'twere only to see old friends of the Opéra Comique. Madame, I give you good-day. Sir, Monsieur Greig—'shalt never be a man like thine Uncle Andrew for all thy confounded elixir. I favour not your virtuous early rising in the young. There! thine uncle would a-been abed at this hour an' he were alive and in Dunkerque; thou must be a confoundedly industrious and sober Greig to be dangling at a petticoat-tail—Pardon, Madame, 'tis the dearest tail, anyway!—before the hour meridian.”
“And this is France,” thought I. “Here's your papistical gospeller at home!” I minded of the Rev. Scipio Walker in the kirk of Mearns, an image ever of austerity, waling his words as they had come from Solomon, groaning even-on for man's eternal doom.
The priest quickly comprehended my surprise at his humour, and laughed the more at that till a fit of coughing choked him. “Mon Dieu” said he; “our Andy reincarnate is an Andy most pestilent dull, or I'm a cockle, a convoluted cockle, and uncooked at that. Why, man! cheer up, thou croque mort, thou lanthorn-jaw, thou veal-eye, thou melancholious eater of oaten-meal!”
“It's a humblin' sicht!” said I. The impertinence was no sooner uttered than I felt degraded that I should have given it voice, for here was a priest of God, however odd to my thinking, and, what was more, a man who might in years have been my father.
But luckily it could never then, or at any other time, be said of Father Hamilton that he was thin-skinned. He only laughed the more at me. “Touche!” he cried. “I knew I could prick the old Andy somewhere. Still, Master Paul, thine uncle was not so young as thou, my cockerel. Had seen his world and knew that Scotland and its—what do you call them?—its manses, did not provide the universal ensample of true piety.”
“I do not think, Father Hamilton,” said I, “that piety troubled him very much, or his shoes had not been so well known in Dunkerque.”
Miss Walkinshaw laughed.