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Presently word came to The McTavish, in the Seventh Drawing Room, that an American gentleman named McTavish, who had come all the way from America for the purpose, desired to read the inscriptions upon the McTavish tombstones in the chapel of Brig O'Dread Castle.
She stepped into the open, and, jangling her keys occasionally, led him along an almost interminable path of green turf bordered by larkspur and flowering sage, which ended at last at a somewhat battered lead statue of Atlas, crowning a pudding-shaped mound of turf. "When the Red Currie sacked Brig O'Dread Castle," said The McTavish, "he dug a pit here and flung the dead into it.
"They shoot three thousand at Brig O'Dread in the season." After certain difficulties, during which their hands touched, the greatest key in Mrs. Nevis's bunch was made to open the chapel door, and they went in. The place had no roof; the flagged floor had disappeared, and it had been replaced by velvety turf, level between the graves and headstones.
"Why, there'll be a more generous master than I in Beem-Tay and in Brig O'Dread that's all." She leaped into the car, and a minute later they were flying along the narrow, tortuous North Road like a nightmare.
That is why I have to hurry over the preliminaries." "The preliminaries," she cried, almost in tears. "Do you know who I am that you treat me like a barmaid?" "Ladies," said McTavish, "who masquerade as housekeepers ought to know what to expect." Her face was a blank of astonishment. "Traquair told," she said indignantly. "Wait till I " "No," said McTavish; "the porter at Brig O'Dread told.
If the air at Beem-Tay was too formal, or the keep at Brig O'Dread too gloomy, she could put up at any of her half-dozen shooting lodges, built in wild, inaccessible, wild-fowly places, and shake the dust of the world from her feet, and tread, just under heaven, upon the heather. But mixed up with all this fine estate was one other temporal trouble.
Sir Walter Scott mentions, in his Border Minstrelsy, that there is a curious MS. Metrical Romance, in the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh, called, "The Legend of Sir Owain," relating his adventures in St. Patrick's Purgatory; he gives some stanzas from it, descriptive of the knight's passage of "The Brig O'Dread;" which in the legend, is placed between Purgatory and Paradise.
And her laugh was like an echo of the sounds that the River Tay makes when it goes among the shallows. From most of her houses she could see nothing but her own possessions, but from Brig O'Dread Castle, standing, as it did, in one corner of her estates, she could see past her entrance gate, with its flowery, embattled lodge, a little into the outside world.
"Is it being a bad lot to have a red nose?" exclaimed Miss MacNish. "At twenty-two?" McTavish looked at her in surprise and horror. "I ask you," he said. "There was the porter at Brig O'Dread, and your sister they gave her a pair of black eyes between them, and here you give her a red nose. When the truth is probably the reverse."
All in a burst then, half laughing, half in a grave kind of excitement, she told her old friend how she had played housekeeper first at Brig O'Dread and later at Beem-Tay. And how, on the latter occasion, McTavish had displayed his admiration so openly that there could be but the one climax.
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