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The Chamberlain nodded. Mrs. Petullo's fingers rushed the life out of her knitting. "If I thought if I thought!" she said, leaving the sentence unfinished. No more was necessary; Sim MacTaggart thanked heaven he was not mated irrevocably. "Is it true?" she asked. "Is it true of you, Sim, who did your best to make me push Petullo to Doom's ruin?"
The cruelty of her character betrayed itself in a faint irrestrainable smile at Petullo's discomfiture, all the more cruel because his eyes were entreatingly on hers as he mopped up awkwardly the consequences of his gaucherie.
With never a word more said MacTaggart clapped on his hat, withdrew in an elation studiously concealed from his master, and fared at a canter to Petullo's office in the town. He fastened the reins to the ring at the door and entered.
Some weighty thought possessed him that gave his eye a remote quality even when he seemed to be sharing the general attention in the conversation, and it was as much resentment at the summons from his abstraction and his mood as a general disinclination to laugh at a wretch's misery on the bidding of the wretch's wife, that made him so curt to Mrs. Petullo's advances.
"To that much at least I can help you, though in the other affair I'm neutral in spite of my interest in any ploy of the kind. There's Petullo's house across the way; I'm on certain terms with him; if you care, we could see him now." "Le plus tôt sera le mieux!" said Count Victor. The Chamberlain led the way.
It was not on the happiest of errands he came down on the first day of favouring weather; it was to surrender the last remnant of his right to the home of his ancestors. With the flourish of a quill he brought three centuries of notable history to a close. "Here's a lesson in humility, Mr. Campbell," said he to Petullo's clerk. "We builded with the sword, and fell upon the sheep-skin.
Since then I've seen enough of him at a distance to read the plausible rogue in his very step. The man wears every bawbee virtue he has like a brooch in his bonnet; and now when I think of it, I would not dirty my boots with him." Mrs. Petullo's lips parted.
The tale went seaward on the gabbards, and landward, even to Lorn itself, upon carriers' carts and as the richest part of the packman's budget. Furthermore, a song or two was made upon the thing, that even yet old women can recall in broken stanzas, and of one of these, by far the best informed, Petullo's clerk was the reputed author.
"Oh, I could be pushed to an obvious enough retort," he said, losing patience, for now it was plain that they were outraging every etiquette by so long talking together while others were in the room. "I was to blame, Heaven knows! I'm not denying that, but you but you " And his fingers nervously sought in his coat for the flageolet. Mrs. Petullo's face flamed.
He hung on his heel and looked back for a minute or two at the castle, looming blackly in the darkness against the background of Dunchuach; he could hear the broken stanza of Mrs. Petullo's ballad. "Amn't I the damned fool?" said he half-aloud to himself with bitter certainty in the utterance.
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