"What is the matter?" said he, looking up in wonder.
"He says you have told him he is not to go out to the shooting with you to-morrow; and that is the first time he has been superseded; and he takes it that you think he is an old man; and he talks of going away to Greenock to join a smack."
"Oh, nonsense!" Macleod said. "I was not thinking when I told him. He may come with us if he likes. At the same time, Janet, I should think Norman Ogilvie will laugh at seeing the butler come out as a keeper."
"You know quite well, Keith," said his cousin, "that Hamish is no more a butler than he is captain of the Umpire or clerk of the accounts. Hamish is simply everybody and everything at Castle Dare. And if you speak of Norman Ogilvie—well, I think it would be more like yourself, Keith, to consult the feelings of an old man rather than the opinions of a young one."
"You are always on the right side, Janet. Tell Hamish I am very sorry. I meant him no disrespect. And he may call me at one in the morning if he likes. He never looked on me but as a bit of his various machinery for killing things."
"That is not fair of you, Keith. Old Hamish would give his right hand to save you the scratch of a thorn."
She went off to cheer the old man, and he turned to his book. But it was not to read it; it was only to stare at the outside of it in an absent sort of way. The fact is, he had found in it the story of a young aid-de-camp who was intrusted with a message to a distant part of the field while a battle was going forward, and who in mere bravado rode across a part of the ground open to the enemy's fire. He came back laughing. He had been hit, he confessed, but he had escaped: and he carelessly shook a drop or two of blood from a flesh wound on his hand. Suddenly, however, he turned pale, wavered a little, and then fell forward on his horse's neck, a corpse.
Macleod was thinking about this story rather gloomily. But at last he got up with a more cheerful air, and seized his cap.
"And if it is my death-wound I have got," he was thinking to himself, as he set out for the boat that was waiting for him at the shore, "I will not cry out too soon."