“Look here, Erskine,” said Beaufort; “I thought you were seeing a great deal of—your neighbours: and that Millefleurs would have come to me before now. I shall have to send him word I am here.”
“To be sure. I had forgotten Millefleurs,” said John. “You forget I only knew of your coming a few hours before you arrived.”
“But I thought—people in the country see so much of each other generally.”
“They have been—engaged—with family matters,” said John.
“Do you mean to say it is all settled?—and that Millefleurs is to marry—”
“I know nothing about marrying,” cried John, harshly; and then, recollecting himself, he added, in a subdued tone, “There can be nothing of that sort going on at present. It is death, not marriage, that occupies them now.”
Beaufort opened his languid eyes and looked with curiosity in his friend’s face. “Is it so? Yet Millefleurs stays on. That looks as if very intimate relations had been established, Erskine.”
“Does it? I don’t know what relations have been established,” John said, with visible impatience. And he got up and went out of the room abruptly, breaking off all further discussion. Beaufort sent a note to his pupil that evening. It was the fourth or fifth day after his arrival. “I made sure I should have seen you, or I would have let you know my whereabouts sooner,” he wrote. He was himself oppressed by the atmosphere round him, without knowing why. He had expected a genial Scotch house, full of company and life, with something of that exaggeration of fancy which had made Dalrulzian so wonderfully disappointing to John himself—a house where, amid the movement of lively society, his own embarrassing position would have been softened, and he might even have met his former love in the crowd without special notice or more pain than was inevitable. But he seemed to have dropped instead into a hermitage, almost into a tomb.
Millefleurs made his appearance next morning, very grave too, as everybody seemed in this serious country, and with none of his usual chirruping confidence. “I never guessed you were here,” he said; “everything of course, at Lindores, is wrapped in gloom.”
“There has been a death—” said Beaufort.
“A death!—yes. Has not Erskine told you? A tragedy: nothing so terrible has happened here for ages. You’ve heard, Erskine,” he said, turning round suddenly upon John, who was in the background, “that there are suspicions of foul play.”
John came forward into the light; there was embarrassment and annoyance in his face. “I have said nothing to Beaufort about it—he did not know the man—why should I? What did you say there were suspicions of?”
Millefleurs looked him full in the face, with a curious direct look, and answered, with a certain sternness, oddly inappropriate to his cast of countenance, “Foul play.”
John was startled. He looked up with a movement of surprise, then returned Millefleurs’s gaze with a mingled expression of astonishment and displeasure. “Foul play!” he said; “impossible!”—then added, “Why do you look at me so?”
Millefleurs did not make any reply. He turned to Beaufort, who stood by puzzled, looking on. “I ought not to stay,” he said; “but Lord Lindores seems to wish it, and there are some things to be settled; and I am very much interested besides. There is no coroner in Scotland, I hear. How will the investigation be managed?” he said, turning to John again.
“Lord Millefleurs,” said John, who was not unwilling, in his general sense of antagonism and annoyance, to pick a quarrel, “your look at me requires some explanation. What does it mean?”
There was a moment’s silence, and they stood opposite to each other, little Millefleurs’s plump person, with all its curves, drawn up into an attitude of dignity, his chubby countenance set, while John looked down upon him with an angry contempt, merging towards ridicule. The group was like that of an indignant master and schoolboy; but it was evident that the schoolboy meant defiance.
“It means—just such an interpretation as you choose to give it,” said Millefleurs.
“For heaven’s sake,” said Beaufort, “no more of this! Millefleurs, are you out of your senses? Erskine, you must see this is folly. Don’t make up a quarrel out of nothing.”
John made a distinct effort to control himself. “To me it appears nothing,” he said; “I cannot even guess at any meaning that may be in it; but Millefleurs means something, Beaufort, as you can very easily see.”
At this moment Rolls put his head in at the door. “It’s Sir James Montgomery come to see you. I have showed him into the drawing-room, for it’s on business,” the old man said. He was standing behind the door when John came out, and his master could not help remarking that he was trembling in every limb. “The Lord help us a’! you’ll be cautious, sir,” Rolls said.
John, in his perplexity and gathering wonder, seized him by the arm. “In God’s name, Rolls, what do you mean?”
“Swear none, sir,” said the old servant—“swear none; but oh, be cautious, for the love of God!”
John Erskine walked into the room in which Sir James awaited him, with a sense of wonder and dismay which
