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Updated: June 8, 2025
The moment the laird heard the douf thuds, he started to his feet, and made for the door, and Cosmo rose to follow. "Stop! stop!" shouted Lord Mergwain, in a quavering, yet, through terror, imperative voice, and looked as if his hair would have stood on end, only that it was a wig. Lady Joan gave Cosmo a glance of entreaty: the shout was ineffectual, the glance was not.
He left the kitchen, and Cosmo followed him. Lord Mergwain turned to his daughter and said, "What does the man mean? I tell you, Joan, I am going at once. So don't you side with him if he wants us to stop. He may have his reasons. I knew this confounded place before you were born, and I hate it." "Very good, papa!" replied Lady Joan, with a slight curl of her lip.
I'm thinkin' by the cry o' the win', it 'll be a wull mirk again. What think ye, laird?" Her son looked up from his book, where he had been beholding a large breadth of light on the spiritual sky, and answered, somewhat abstractedly, but with the gentle politeness he always showed her. "I should not wonder if it came on to snow again!" Lord Mergwain shifted uneasily.
Cosmo cast on her one look of surprise, and obeyed at once, restored it to its place, and had just closed the doors of the cabinet, when Lord Mergwain and his father entered the room.
The laird rose, laid his book down, and moved the table, then helped his guest to rise, moved his chair, and placed the screen again betwixt him and the door. Lord Mergwain re-settled himself to his bottle.
Not too drunk to see where his advantage lay, Lord Mergwain yielded; the thunder of imprecation from bellowing sank to growling, then to muttering, and the storm gradually subsided.
When the laird opened the door of the guest chamber, there was his boy in his clothes, with a candle in his hand, and the lady in her night-gown, standing in the middle of the floor, and looking down with dismayed countenances. There lay Lord Mergwain! or was it but a thing of nought the deserted house, of a living soul?
Her only thoughts of trouble were, that her father's body lay unburied, and that Borland would come and take her away. When the thaw came at last, the laird had the coffin brought again into the guest-chamber, and there placed on trestles, to wait the coming of the new Lord Mergwain. Outstripping the letter that announced his departure, he arrived at length, and with him his man of business.
So the old lord sat in the kitchen and drank his wine; and the old lady sat by the fire and knitted her stocking, went to sleep, and woke up, and went to sleep again a score of times, and enjoyed her afternoon. Not a word passed between the two: now, in his old age, Lord Mergwain never talked over his bottle; he gave his mind to it.
Lord Mergwain gave a grunt, and looked only a little pleased at the news: no discomfort or suffering, mental or spiritual, made him indifferent to luncheon or dinner for after each came the bottle; but the claret had not been brought to the drawing-room as he had requested! When they reached the kitchen, he looked first eagerly, then uneasily round him: no bottle, quart or magnum was to be seen!
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