"They've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every member of the minister's household.
Napier laughed. "_She_ would set your mind at rest on that score. Only the other day she got me into a corner. 'What have you got against me, Mr. Napier?' she said. 'You don't like me.' It took me so by surprise, I stammered: '_I?..._ What an idea!' '_Why_ don't you like me, Mr. Napier?' Mercifully just then Wildfire McIntyre flamed across our path."
When the young men reached Kirklamont, the McIntyres were already gathered about the tea-table in the hall of the big, ugly, Scotch country house. "The family" consisted at the moment only of three, the fourth person present being Miss von Schwarzenberg, for it was mid-July. In another month the absent sons (two soldiers and a sailor) would come up for the shooting and bring their friends.
All this presupposed--as nobody found the least difficulty in doing--that Sir William's recent "little heart attack" would leave no legacy more destructive of the usual routine than abandonment of London a fortnight or so earlier than had been planned. A more acute anxiety might have touched Lady McIntyre had her husband not deliberately thrown her off the track. He dubbed the great specialist "a verra reasonable fella," who didn't make a mountain out of a molehill. The patient did not add the means by which he had been coerced into turning his back on public affairs at a moment made so critical for the Government by Irish affairs.
"A break in the London strain, at once and often, or else smash."
That was the dour deliverance which had installed the McIntyres in their beloved Kirklamont two weeks earlier than they could have hoped. It was a party which, with a single exception (again Miss von Schwarzenberg), had shaken off London by every token of tweed garment, stout boots, of golf stockings, and of gaiters.
Cup in hand, Sir William, as became the head of the house, stood planted on wide-apart legs in front of the fireplace--a sanguine-colored, plump, little partridge of a man with a kind, rather _rusé_ face.
Lady McIntyre, behind the urn--fair, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed--looked, as such women will, far older in the country than she did in her "London clothes." But she was far too correct not to make any sacrifice called for by the unwritten law of her kind. Behold her, therefore, bereft of all fripperies save the dangling diamond ear-rings, which emphasized painfully an excuse for frivolity which had been outlived. To tell the blunt truth, Lady McIntyre looked like some shrunken little duenna, attendant on the opulent majesty of the heavy-braided, ox-eyed Juno at her side. For Miss von Schwarzenberg shared the High Seat--otherwise Lady McIntyre's carved settle. At her feet sat Madge, her pupil, and an Aberdeen terrier.