It was a trying position in which Olivia found herself when first she
sat at the same table with the stranger whose sense of humour, as she
must always think, was bound to be vastly entertained by her ridiculous
story. Yet she carried off the situation with that triumph that ever
awaits on a frank eye, a good honest heart, and an unfailing trust in
the ultimate sympathy of one's fellow-creatures. There was no _mauvaise
honte_ there, Count Victor saw, and more than ever he admired, if that
were possible. It was the cruel father of the piece who was uneasy. He
it was who must busy himself with the feeding of an appetite whose like
he had not manifested before, either silent altogether or joining in the
conversation with the briefest sentences.
There was never a Montaiglon who would lose such a good occasion, and
Count Victor made the most of it. He was gentle, but not too gentle--for
this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many
of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the
more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere
meaningless _blague_ that no one could better employ with the creatures
of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons
and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and
shining influence Olivia soon forgot the ignominy of these recent days,
and it was something gained in that direction that already she looked
upon him as a confederate.
“I am so glad you like our country, Count Victor,” she said, no way
dubious about his praise of her home hills, those loud impetuous
cataracts, and that alluring coast. “It rains--oh! it rains--”
“_Parfaitement_, mademoiselle, but when it shines!” and up went his
hands in an admiration wherefor words were too little eloquent: at that
moment he was convinced truly that the sun shone nowhere else than in
the Scottish hills.
“Yes, yes, when it shines, as you say, it is the dear land! Then the
woods--the woods gleam and tremble, I always think, like a girl who has
tears in her eyes, the tears of gladness. The hills--let my father tell
you of the hills, Count Victor; I think he must love them more than he
loves his own Olivia--is that not cruel of a man with an only child? He
would die, I am sure, if he could not be seeing them when he liked. But
I cannot be considering the hills so beautiful as my own glens, my own
little glens, that no one, I'll be fancying, is acquainted with to the
heart but me and the red deer, and maybe a hunter or two. Of course, we
have the big glens, too, and I would like it if I could show you Shira
Glen--”
“The best of it was once our own,” said Doom, black at brow.
“--That once was ours, as father says, and is mine yet so long as I can
walk there and be thinking my own thoughts in it when the wood is green,
and the wild ducks are plashing in the lake.”
Doom gave a significant exclamation: he was recalling that rumour had
Shira Glen for his daughter's favourite trysting-place.
“Rain or shine,” said Count Victor, delighting in such whole-souled
rapture, delighting in that bright, unwearied eye, that curious turn of
phrase that made her in English half a foreigner like himself--“Rain or
shine, it is a country of many charms.”
“But now you are too large in your praise,” she said, not quite so
warmly. “I do not expect you to think it is a perfect country-side at
any time and all times; and it is but natural that you should love
the country of France, that I have been told is a brave and beautiful
country, and a country I am sometimes loving myself because of its
hospitality to folk that we know. I know it is a country of brave men,
and sometimes I am wondering if it is the same for beautiful women. Tell
me!” and she leaned on an arm that shone warm, soft, and thrilling from
the short sleeve of her gown, and put the sweetest of chins upon a hand
for the wringing of hearts.
Montaiglon looked into those eyes, so frank and yet profound, and
straight became a rebel. “Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he, indifferently
(oh, Cecile! oh, Cecile!), “they are considered not unpleasing; but for
myself, perhaps acquaintance has spoiled the illusion.”
She did not like that at all; her eyes grew proud and unbelieving.
“When I was speaking of the brave men of France,” said she, “I fancied
perhaps they would tell what they really thought--even to a woman.” And
he felt very much ashamed of himself.
“Ah! well, to tell the truth, mademoiselle,” he confessed, “I have known
very beautiful ones among them, and many that I liked, and still must
think of with affection. _Mort de ma vie!_ am I not the very slave of
your sex, that for all the charms, the goodness, the kindnesses and
purities, is a continual reproach to mine? In the least perfect of them
I have never failed to find something to remind me of my little mother.”
“And now I think that is much better,” said Olivia, heartily, her eyes
sparkling at that concluding filial note. “I would not care at all for a
man to come from his own land and pretend to me that he had no mind for
the beautiful women and the good women he had seen there. No; it would
not deceive me, that; it would not give me any pleasure. We have a
proverb in the Highlands, that Annapla will often be saying, that the
rook thinks the pigeon hen would be bonny if her wings were black; and
that is a _seanfhacal_--that is an old-word that is true.”
“If I seemed to forget France and what I have seen there of Youth and
Beauty,” said Count Victor, “it is, I swear it is--it is--”
“It is because you would be pleasant to a simple Highland girl,” said
Olivia, with just a hint of laughter in her eyes.
“No, no, _par ma foi!_ not wholly that. But yes, I love my country--ah!
the happy days I have known there, the sunny weather, the friends so
good, the comradeship so true. Your land is beautiful--it is even more
beautiful than the exiles in Paris told me; but I was not born here, and
there are times when your mountains seem to crush my heart.”
“Is it so, indeed?” said Doom. “As for me, I would not change the
bleakest of them for the province of Champagne.” And he beat an
impulsive hand upon the table.
“Yes, yes, I understand that,” cried Olivia. “I understand it very well.
It is the sorrow of the hills and woods you mean; ah! do I not know it,
too? It is only in my own little wee glens among the rowans that I can
feel careless like the birds, and sing; when I walk the woods or stand
upon the shore and see the hills without a tree or tenant, when the land
is white with the snow and the mist is trailing, Olivia Lamond is not
very cheery. What it is I do not know--that influence of my country; it
is sad, but it is good and wholesome, I can tell you; it is then I
think that the bards make songs, and those who are not bards, like poor
myself, must just be feeling the songs there are no words for.”
At this did Doom sit mighty pleased and humming to himself a bar of
minstrelsy.
“Look at my father there!” said Olivia; “he would like you to be
thinking that he does not care a great deal for the Highlands of
Scotland.”
“Indeed, and that is not fair, Olivia; I never made pretence of that,”
said Doom. “Never to such as understand; Montaiglon knows the Highlands
are at my heart, and that the look of the hills is my evening prayer.”
“Isn't that a father, Count Victor?” cried Olivia, quite proud of the
confession. “But he is the strange father, too, that will be pretending
that he has forgotten the old times and the old customs of our dear
people. We are the children of the hills and of the mists; the hills
make no change, the mists are always coming back, and the deer is in the
corrie yet, and when you will hear one that is of the Highland blood say
he does not care any more for the old times, and preferring the
English tongue to his own, and making a boast of his patience when the
Government of England robs him of his plaid, you must be watchful of
that man, Count Victor. For there is something wrong. Is it not true,
that I am saying, father?” She turned a questioning gaze to Doom, who
had no answer but a sigh.
“You will have perhaps heard my father miscall the _breacan_, miscall
the tartan, and--”
“Not at all,” cried the Baron. “There is a great difference between
condemning and showing an indifference.”
“I think, father,” said Olivia, “we are among friends. Count Victor, as
you say, could understand about our fancies for the hills, and it would
be droll indeed if he smiled at us for making a treasure of the tartan.
Whatever my father, the stupid man, the darling, may be telling you of
the tartan and the sword, Count Victor, do not believe that we are such
poor souls as to forget them. Though we must be wearing the Saxon in our
clothes and in our speech, there are many like me--and my dear father
there--who will not forget.”
It was a curious speech all that, not without a problem, as well as the
charm of the unexpected and the novel, to Count Victor. For, somehow
or other, there seemed to be an under meaning in the words; Olivia was
engaged upon the womanly task--he thought--of lecturing some one. If he
had any doubt about that, there was Mungo behind the Baron's chair, his
face just showing over his shoulder, seamed with smiles that spoke of
some common understanding between him and the daughter of his master;
and once, when she thrust more directly at her father, the little
servitor deliberately winked to the back of his master's head--a very
gnome of slyness.
“But you have not told me about the ladies of France,” said she. “Stay!
you will be telling me that again; it is not likely my father would be
caring to hear about them so much as about the folk we know that have
gone there from Scotland. They are telling me that many good, brave men
are there wearing their hearts out, and that is the sore enough trial.”
Count Victor thought of Barisdale and his cousin-german, young
Glengarry, gambling in that frowsiest boozing-ken in the Rue Tarane--the
Café de la Paix--without credit for a _louis d'or_; he thought of James
Mor Drummond and the day he came to him behind the Tuileries stable
clad in rags of tartan to beg a loan; none of these was the picturesque
figure of loyalty in exile that he should care to paint for this young
woman.
But he remembered also Cameron, Macleod, Traquair, a score of gallant
hearts, of handsome gentlemen, and Lochiel, true chevalier--perhaps a
better than his king!
It was of these Count Victor spoke--of their faith, their valiancies,
their shifts of penury and pride. He had used often to consort with them
at Cammercy, and later on in Paris. If the truth were to be told, they
had made a man of him, and now he was generous enough to confess it.
“I owe them much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “When
first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a
scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young,
that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in an _ennui_ and the nights
below the lamps? Well, I met your Scots after Dettingen, renewed the old
acquaintance I had made at Cam-mercy, and found the later exiles better
than the first--than the Balhaldies, the Glengarries, Mur-rays,
and Sullivans. They were different, _ces gens-là_. Ordinarily they
rendezvoused in the Taverne Tourtel of St. Germains, and that gloomy
palace shared their devotions with Scotland, whence they came and of
which they were eternally talking, like men in a nostalgia. James and
his Jacquette were within these walls, often indifferent enough, I fear,
about the cause our friends were exiled there for; and Charles, between
Luneville and Liege or Poland and London, was not at the time an
inspiring object of veneration, if you will permit me to says so, M. le
Baron. But what does it matter? the cause was there, an image to keep
the good hearts strong, unselfish, and expectant. Ah! the songs they
sang, so full of that hopeful melancholy of the glens you speak of,
mademoiselle; the stories they told of Tearlach's Year; the hopes that
bound them in a brotherhood--and binds them yet, praise _le bon Dieu!_
That was good for me. Yes; I like your exiled compatriots very much,
Mademoiselle Olivia. And yet there was a _maraud_ or two among them; no
fate could be too hard for the spies who would betray them.”
For the first time in many hours Count Victor remembered that he had an
object in Scotland, but with it somehow Cecile was not associated.
“Mungo has been telling me about the spy, Count Victor. Oh, the
wickedness of it! I feel black, burning shame that one with a Highland
name and a Highland mother would take a part like yon. I would not think
there could be men in the world so bad. They must have wicked mothers to
make such sons; the ghost of a good mother would cry from her grave to
check her child in such a villany.” Olivia spoke with intense feeling,
her eyes lambent and her lips quivering.
“Drimdarroch's mother must have been a rock,” said Count Victor.
“And to take what was my father's name!” cried Olivia; “Mungo has been
telling me that. Though I am a woman, I could be killing him myself.”
“And here we're in our flights, sure enough!” broke in the father, as he
left them with a humorousous pretence at terror.
“Now you must tell me about the women of France,” said Olivia. “I have
a friend who was there once, and tells me, like you, he was indifferent;
but I am doubting that he must have seen some there that were worth his
fancy.”
“Is it there sits the wind?” thought Montaiglon. “Our serene angel is
not immune against the customary passions.” An unreasonable envy of
the diplomatist who had been indifferent to the ladies of France took
possession of him; still, he might have gratified her curiosity about
his fair compatriots had not Doom returned, and then Olivia's interest
in the subject oddly ceased.