evived
ungovernably the remembrances he for ever sought to stifle--all he had
been and all he had seen, now past and gone for ever, as Annapla did
not scruple to tell him when the demands of her Gift or a short temper
compelled her. His boyhood in the dear woods, by the weedy river-banks,
in the hill-clefts where stags harboured, on a shore for ever sounding
with the enchanting sea--oh, sorrow! how these things came before
him. The gentle mother, with the wan, beautiful face; the eager father
looking ardent out to sea--they were plain to view. And then St.
Andrews, when he was a bejant of St. Leonard's, roystering with his
fellows, living the life of youth with gusto, but failing lamentably at
the end; then the despondency of those scanty acres and decayed walls;
his marriage with the dearest woman in the world, Death at the fireside,
the bairn crying at night in the arms of her fosterer; his journeys
abroad, the short hour of glory and forgetfulness with Saxe at Fontenoy
and Laffeldt, to be followed only by these weary years of spoliation by
law, of oppression by the usurping Hanoverian.

A done man! Only a poor done man of middle age, and the fact made all
the plainer to himself by contrast with his guest, alert and even gay
upon a fiery embassy of retribution.

It was exactly the hour of midnight by a clock upon the mantel; a single
candle, by which he had made a show of reading, was guttering all to a
side and an ungracious end in a draught that came from some cranny in
the ill-seamed ingle-walls, for all that the night seemed windless. A
profound stillness wrapped all; the night was huge outside, with the sea
dead-flat to moon and pulsing star.

He shook off his vapours vexatiously, and, as he had done on the first
night of Count Victor's coming, he went to his curious orisons at the
door--the orisons of the sentimentalist, the home-lover. Back he drew
the bars softly, and looked at the world that ever filled him with
yearning and apprehension, at the draggled garden, at the sea, with its
roadway strewn with golden sand all shimmering, at the mounts--Ben Ime,
Ardno, and Ben Artair, haughty in the night.

Then he shut the doors reluctantly, stood hesitating--more the done man
than ever--in the darkness of the entrance, finally hurried to save the
guttering candle. He lit a new one at its expiring flame and left the
_salle_. He went, not to his bedchamber, but to the foot of the stair
that led to the upper flats,