Alastair hoped that he had.
"Then let us get the first plunge over. Suffer me to introduce you to the company."
The sound of their steps on the terrace halted the strollers. A lady turned, and at the sight of the young man her eyebrows lifted. She was a slight figure about the middle size, whose walking clothes followed the new bergère fashion. Save for her huge hooped petticoats, she was the dainty milkmaid, in her flowered chintz, her sleeveless coat, her flat straw hat tied with ribbons of cherry velvet, her cambric apron. A long staff, with ribbons at the crook, proclaimed the shepherdess. She came toward them with a tripping walk, and Alastair marked the delicate bloom of her cheeks, unspoiled by rouge, the flash of white teeth as she smiled, the limpid depth of her great childlike eyes. His memory told him that the Duchess had passed her fortieth year, but his eyes saw a girl in her teens, a Flora of spring whose summer had not begun.
"Kitty, I present to you Captain Maclean, a gentleman in the service of His Majesty of France. He has come to me on a mission from Paul de Tremouille—a mission of the arts."
The lady held out a hand. "Are you by any happy chance a poet, sir?"
"I have made verses, madam, as young men do, but I halt far short of poetry."
"The inspiration may come. I had hoped that Harry would provide me with a new poet. For you must know, sir, that I have lost all my poets. Mr. Prior, Mr. Gay, Mr. Pope—they have all been gathered to the shades. I have no one now to make me verses."
"If your Grace will pardon me, your charms can never lack a singer."
"La, la! The singers are as dry as a ditch in mid-summer. They sigh and gloom and write doleful letters in prose. I have to fly to Paris to find a well-turned sonnet. … Here we are so sage and dutiful and civically minded. Mary thinks only of her lovers, and Mr. Murray of his law-suits, and Mr. Kyd of his mortgage deeds, and Kit Lacy of fat cattle—nay, I do not think that Kit's mind soars even to that height."
"I protest, madam," began a handsome sheepish young gentleman behind her, but the Duchess cut him short.
"Harry!" she cried, "we are all Scotch here—all but you and Kit, and to be Scotch nowadays is to be suspect. Let us plot treason. The King's Solicitor cannot pursue us, for he will be criminis particeps."
Mr. Murray, a small man with a noble head and features so exquisitely moulded that at first sight most men distrusted him, pointed to an inscription cut on the entablature of the house.
"Deus haec nobis otia fecit," he read, in a voice whose every tone was clear as the note of a bell. "We dare not offend the genius loci, and outrage that plain commandment."
"But treason is not business."
"It is apt to be the most troublous kind of business, madam."
"Then Kit shall show me the grottos." She put an arm in the young man's, the other in the young girl's, and forced them to a pace which was ill suited to his high new hunting boots. Alastair was formally introduced to the two men remaining, and had the chance of observing the one whom the Duchess had called Mr. Kyd. He had the look of a country squire, tall, heavily built and deeply tanned by the sun. He had brown eyes, which regarded the world with a curious steadiness, and a mouth the corners of which were lifted in a perpetual readiness for laughter. Rarely had Alastair seen a more jovial and kindly face, which was yet redeemed from the commonplace by the straight thoughtful brows and the square cleft jaw. When the man spoke it was in the broad accents of the Scotch lowlands, though his words and phrases were those of the South. Lord Cornbury walked with Mr. Murray, and the other ranged himself beside Alastair.
"A pleasant habitation, you will doubtless be observing, sir. Since you're from France you may have seen houses as grand, but there's not the like of it in our poor kingdom of Scotland. In the Merse, which is my country-side, they stick the kitchen-midden up against the dining-room window, and their notion of a pleasance is a wheen grosart bushes and gillyflowers sore scarted by hens."
Alastair looked round the flowery quincunx and the trim borders where a peacock was strutting amid late roses.
"I think I would tire of it. Give me a sea loch and the heather and a burn among birchwoods."
"True, true, a man's heart is in his calf-country. We Scots are like Ulysses, and not truly at home in Phaeacia." He spoke the last word with the slightest lift of his eyebrows, as if signalling to the other that he was aware of his position. "For myself," he continued, "I'm aye remembering sweet Argos, which in my case is the inconsiderable dwelling of Greyhouses in a Lammermoor glen. My business takes me up and down this land of England, and I tell you, sir, I wouldn't change my crow-step gables for all the mansions ever biggit. It's a queer quirk in us mercantile folk."
"You travel much?"
"I needs must, when I'm the principal doer of the Duke of Queensberry. My father was man of business to auld Duke James, and I heired the job with Duke Charles. If you serve a mighty prince, who is a duke and marquis in two kingdoms and has lands and messuages to conform, you're not much off the road. Horses' iron and shoe-leather are cheap in that service. But my pleasure is at home, where I can read my Horace and crack with my friends and catch trout in the Whitader."
Mr. Kyd's honest countenance and frank geniality might have led to confidences on Alastair's part, but at the moment Lord Cornbury rejoined them with word that dinner would be served in half an hour. As they entered the house, Alastair found himself beside his host and well behind the others.
"Who is this Mr. Kyd?" he whispered. "He mentioned Phaeacia, as if he knew my character."
Lord Cornbury's face wore an anxious look. "He is my brother Queensberry's agent. But he is also one of you. You must know of him. He is Menelaus."
Alastair shook his head. "I landed from France only three weeks back, and know little of Mr. Secretary Murray's plans."
"Well, you will hear more of him. He is now on his way to Badminton, for he is said to have Beaufort's ear. His connection with my brother is a good shield. Lord! how I hate all this business of go-betweens and midnight conclaves!" He looked at his companion with a face so full of a quaint perplexity that Alastair could not forbear to laugh.
"We must creep before we can fly, my lord, in the most honest cause. But our wings are fledging well."
A footman led him to his room, which was in the old part of the house called the Leicester Wing, allotted to him, he guessed, because of its remoteness. His baggage had been brought from the inn, and a porcelain bath filled with hot water stood on the floor. He shaved, but otherwise made no more than a traveller's toilet, changing his boots for silk stockings and buckled shoes, and his bob for an ample tie-wig. The mirror showed a man not yet thirty, with small sharp features, high cheek bones, and a reddish tinge in skin and eyebrows. The eyes were of a clear, choleric blue, and the face, which was almost feminine in its contours, was made manly by a certain ruggedness and fire in its regard. His hands and feet were curiously small for one with so deep a chest and sinewy limbs. He was neat and precise in person and movement, a little finical at first sight, till the observer caught his quick ardent gaze. A passionate friend, that observer would have pronounced him, and a most mischievous and restless enemy.
His Highland boyhood and foreign journeyings had not prepared him for the suave perfection of an English house. The hall, paved with squares of black and white marble, was hung with full-length pictures of