The Marquis of Lossie eBook

The factor kept raging to himself all the way home, flung himself trembling on his horse, vouchsafing his anxious wife scarce any answer to her anxious enquiries, and galloped to Duff Harbour to Mr Soutar.

I will not occupy my tale with their interview.  Suffice it to say that the lawyer succeeded at last in convincing the demented factor that it would be but prudent to delay measures for the recovery of the yacht and the arrest and punishment of its abductors, until he knew what Lady Lossie would say to the affair.  She had always had a liking for the lad, Mr Soutar said, and he would not be in the least surprised to hear that Malcolm had gone straight to her ladyship and put himself under her protection.  No doubt by this time the cutter was at its owner’s disposal:  it would be just like the fellow!  He always went the nearest road anywhere.  And to prosecute him for a thief would in any case but bring down the ridicule of the whole coast upon the factor, and breed him endless annoyance in the getting in of his rents—­especially among the fishermen.  The result was that Mr Crathie went home—­not indeed a humbler or wiser man than he had gone, but a thwarted man, and therefore the more dangerous in the channels left open to the outrush of his angry power.

When Lizzy reached Scaurnose, her account of the factor’s behaviour, to her surprise, did not take much effect upon Mrs Mair:  a queer little smile broke over her countenance, and vanished.  An enforced gravity succeeded, however, and she began to take counsel with Lizzy as to what they could do, or where they could go, should the worst come to the worst, and the doors, not only of her own house, but of Scaurnose and Portlossie as well, be shut against them.  But through it all reigned a calm regard and fearlessness of the future which, to Lizzy’s roused and apprehensive imagination, was strangely inexplicable.  Annie Mair seemed possessed of some hidden and upholding assurance that raised her above the fear of man or what he could do to her.  The girl concluded it must be the knowledge of God, and prayed more earnestly that night than she had prayed since the night on which Malcolm had talked to her so earnestly before he left.  I must add this much, that she was not altogether astray:  God was in Malcolm, giving new hope to his fisher folk.

CHAPTER XVI:  ST JAMES THE APOSTLE

When Malcolm left his sister, he had a dim sense of having lapsed into Scotch, and set about buttressing and strengthening his determination to get rid of all unconscious and unintended use of the northern dialect, not only that, in his attendance upon Florimel, he might be neither offensive nor ridiculous, but that, when the time should come in which he must appear what he was, it might be less of an annoyance to her to yield the marquisate to one who could speak like a gentleman and one of the family.  But not the less did he love the tongue he had spoken from his