“But Lud! ’Tis not fair. You’re mine. I took you, and I want the reward,” cries the little lady with the sparkling eyes.
Aileen stood by my side like a queen cut out of marble, turning neither to the right nor to the left, her head poised regally on her fine shoulders as if she saw none in the room worthy a look.
“This must be the baggage about which they fought. Faith, as fine a piece as I have seen,” said Craven to March in an audible aside, his bold eyes fixed insolently on the Highland girl.
Aileen heard him, and her face flamed. I set my teeth and swore to pay him for that some day, but I knew this to be no fitting time for a brawl. Despite me the fellow forced my hand. He planted himself squarely in our way and ogled my charge with impudent effrontery. Me he quite ignored, while his insulting eyes raked her fore and aft. My anger seethed, boiled over. Forward slid my foot behind his heel, my forearm under his chin. I threw my weight forward in a push. His head went back as though shot from a catapult, and next moment Sir James Craven measured his length on the ground. With the girl on my arm I pushed through the company to the door. They cackled after me like solan-geese, but I shut and locked the door in their faces and led Aileen to her room. She marched up the stairs like a goddess, beautiful in her anger as one could desire. The Gaelic heart is a good hater, and ’twas quite plain that Miss Macleod had inherited a capacity for anger.
“How dare they? How dare they? What have I done that they should talk so? There are three hundred claymores would be leaping from the scabbard for this. My grief! That they would talk so of my father’s daughter.”
She was superbly beautiful in her wrath. It was the black fury of the Highland loch in storm that leaped now from her eyes. Like a caged and wounded tigress she strode up and down the room, her hands clenched and her breast heaving, an impetuous flood of Gaelic pouring from her mouth.
For most strange logic commend me to a woman’s reasoning, I had been in no way responsible for the scene down-stairs, but somehow she lumped me blindly with the others in her mind, at least so far as to punish me because I had seen and heard. Apparently ’twas enough that I was of their race and class, for when during a pause I slipped in my word of soothing explanation the uncorked vials of her rage showered down on me. Faith, I began to think that old Jack Falstaff had the right of it in his rating of discretion, and the maid appearing at that moment I showed a clean pair of heels and left her alone with her mistress.
As I was descending the stairs a flunky in the livery of the Westerleighs handed me a note. It was from Antoinette, and in a line requested me to meet her at once in the summer-house of the garden. In days past I had coquetted many an hour away with her. Indeed, years before we had been lovers in half-earnest boy and girl fashion, and after that the best of friends. Grimly I resolved to keep the appointment and to tell this little worldling some things she needed much to know.
I found her waiting. Her back was turned, and though she must have heard me coming she gave no sign. I was still angry at her for her share in what had just happened and I waited coldly for her to begin. She joined me in the eloquent silence of a Quaker meeting.
“Well, I am here,” I said at last.