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It is a far cry to Lochawe, as you know; how shall we find the passes, and where shall we find food as we go?" Then up spoke Angus MacCailen Duibh, a warrior from dark Glencoe. "I know," he said, "every farm in the land of MacCallummore; and, if tight houses, fat cattle, and clean water will suffice, you need never want." And so it was resolved, and done.
Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into great good fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bears his name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste to envy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to the south of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, with oddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner of his escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen.
There it was the writers met their clients and cozened them into costly law pleas over the genial jug or chopine; the through-going stranger took his pack there and dwelt cheaply in the attics that looked upon the bay and upon the little harbour where traffic dozed upon the swinging tide, waiting the goodwill of mariners in no hurry to leave a port so alluring; in its smoke-grimed public-room skippers frequented, full of loud tales of roving, and even the retinue of MacCailen was not averse from an evening's merriment in a company where no restraint of the castle was expected, and his Grace was mentioned but vaguely as a personal pronoun.
He found himself regarded coldly among strangers; the flageolet sounded no longer in the private parlour; the Chamberlain stayed away. And if Drimdarroch had seemed ill to find from Doom, he was absolutely indiscoverable here. A morning had come of terrific snow, and made all the colder, too, his sojourn in the country of MacCailen Mor.
Is he to lie in the fosse till the Sheriff sends for him or till the great MacCailen Mor has forgiven him for telling him he was a little over the age of thirty?" "For once, my dear, you cannot have your way," said the Duke firmly. "Be reasonable! We could not tolerate so scandalous an affair without some show of law and " "Tolerate!" said the Duchess.
A man of great heart, as you say, though with a reputation for oddity. If I were not the well-wisher of his house, I could make some trouble about his devotion to the dress and arms forbidden here to all but those in the king's service, as I am myself, being major of the local Fencibles. And by the Lord! here's MacCailen!" They had by this time entered the policies of the Duke.
Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm. "Ah!" he said airily, "there is civilisation in the land after all." "Plenty of law at least," said the Baron. "Law of its kind MacCailen law.
"Ay! he has most that's needed to make it a very comfortable world. Providence is good " "But sometimes grudging " "But sometimes grudging, as you say; yet MacCailen has got everything. When I see him and her there so content I'm wondering at my own wasted years of bachelordom. As sure as you're there, I think the sooner I draw in at a fire and play my flageolet to the guidwife the better for me."
As he had walked to this place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea was now a fleet of fishing-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting out upon their evening travail a heartening spectacle; and that on either side of him once the squalid huts of Doom were behind was a more dainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was not wholly unprepared for the noble view revealed when he turned the point of land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.
It was a noble hall hung round with tapestry and bossed with Highland targets, trophies of arms and the mountain chase; from the gallery round it drooped little banners with the devices of all those generations of great families that mingled in the blood of MacCailen Mor.
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