“Now this Miss Walkinshaw—” I went on, determined to have some satisfaction from my interview.
“Confound your Miss Walkinshaw, by your leave, Mr. Greig,” he interrupted. “Can you speak of Miss Walkinshaw when the glory of the comet is still trailing in the heavens? And—hum!—I mind me of a certain engagement, Mr. Greig,” he went on hurriedly, drawing a horologe from his fob and consulting it with a frowning brow. “In the charm of your conversation I had nigh forgot, so adieu, adieu, mon ami!”
He gave me the tips of his fingers, and a second later he was gone, stepping down the street with a touch of the minuet, tapping his legs with his cane, his sword skewering his coat-skirts, all the world giving him the cleanest portion of the thoroughfare and looking back after him with envy and admiration.
CHAPTER XVII
WITNESSES THE LAST OF A BLATE YOUNG MAN
And all this time it may well be wondered where was my remorse for a shot fired on the moor of Mearns, for two wretched homes created by my passion and my folly. And where, in that shifting mind of mine, was the place of Isobel Fortune, whose brief days of favour for myself (if that, indeed, was not imagination on my part) had been the cause of these my wanderings? There is one beside me as I write, ready to make allowance for youth and ignorance, the untutored affection, the distraught mind, if not for the dubiety as to her feelings for myself when I was outlawed for a deed of blood and had taken, as the Highland phrase goes, the world for my pillow.
I did not forget the girl of Kirkillstane; many a time in the inward visions of the night, and of the day too, I saw her go about that far-off solitary house in the hollow of the hills. Oddly enough, 'twas ever in sunshine I saw her, with her sun-bonnet swinging from its ribbons and her hand above her eyes, shading them that she might look across the fields that lay about her home, or on a tryst of fancy by the side of Earn, hearing the cushats mourn in a magic harmony with her melancholy thoughts. As for the killing of young Borland, that I kept, waking at least, from my thoughts, or if the same intruded, I found it easier, as time passed, to excuse myself for a fatality that had been in the experience of nearly every man I now knew—of Clancarty and Thurot, of the very baker in whose house I lodged and who kneaded the dough for his little bread not a whit the less cheerily because his hands had been imbrued.
The late Earl of Clare, in France called the Maréchal Comte de Thomond, had come to Dunkerque in the quality of Inspector-General of the Armies of France, to review the troops in garrison and along that menacing coast. The day after my engagement with Father Hamilton I finished my French lesson early and went to see his lordship and his army on the dunes to the east of the town. Cannon thundered, practising at marks far out in the sea; there was infinite manoeuvring of horse and foot; the noon was noisy with drums and the turf shook below the hoofs of galloping chargers. I fancy it was a holiday; at least, as I recall the thing, Dunkerque was all en fête, and a happy and gay populace gathered in the rear of the maréchales flag. Who should be there among the rest, or rather a little apart from the crowd, but Miss Walkinshaw! She had come in a chair; her dainty hand beckoned me to her side almost as soon as I arrived.