“Irma!” she answered, some little crestfallen.
“After you?”
She had barely time to nod when we passed in at the lodge gate of the Nun’s House. The old porter came to the gate to make his reverence, and no doubt to wonder who the young lady, his mistress’s kinswoman, had gotten home with her.
I found the Lady Kirkpatrick—Lady by courtesy, but only known thus by all her circle—to be a little vivid spark of a white-haired woman, sitting on a sofa dressed in the French fashion of forty years ago, and with a small plume of feathers in a jewelled turban that glittered as she moved. At first she was kind enough to me.
“Hey, Master-of-Arts Duncan MacAlpine, this is a bonny downcome for your grandfather’s son, and you come of decent blood up in Glen Strae—to be great with the Advocate, and scribbling his blethers! A sword by your side would have suited ye better, I’m thinking!”
“Doubtless, my lady,” I answered, “if such had been my state and fortune. Nevertheless, I can take a turn at that too, if need be.”
“Aha, ye have not lost the Highland conceit, in drawing water from the wells of Whiggery!”
“If I mistake not,” I replied, “your ladyship did not care to bide always about a king’s court when she had the chance.”
For I knew her history, as did everybody in Edinburgh—a little gossiping town at that time—now, they say, purged of scandal—which is a Heaven’s miracle if ever there was one.
“Och, hear him!” she cried, throwing up her fan with a jerk to the end of its tether with a curious flouting disdain, “politics are very well when it is ‘Have at them, my merry men a’!’ But after, when all is done and laid on the shelf like broken bairns’-plaiks, better be a Whig in the West Bow than a Jesuit in a king’s palace abroad!”