"But--he said nothing about my coming to him?"
"Not a word, Joseph!" Stair would answer, as carelessly as might be.
"Then who looks after Mr. Julian? Who lays out his shirts and sees to his studs? Oh, Mr. Stair, that it should come to this! Sometimes I cannot sleep for thinking of it!"
"Mr. Julian looks after himself," said Stair, brusquely; "at present he is wearing one of my grey woollen shirts, and I have not heard him complain. Go home, Joseph, and look after the house. Keep the doors locked, the guns loaded, and the dogs loose. Mr. Julian was never better in his life!"
After this Joseph complained less, and probably slept better. It had always been in his mind that perhaps this unknown Stair Garland might supplant him in the personal service of his master. But when once he understood that Stair was of a breed so extraordinary that he recognized no difference in rank between himself and his guest, that instead of proffering service, he exacted that Mr. Julian should do his fair share of the work, and finally, that many of the books he carried were designed for the enlightenment of Stair Garland, whom his master had taken as a pupil, he ceased to be jealous and became again merely serviceable.
Stair had his full share of the local thirst for knowledge, and the determination to get it in one way or another. So with the self-assertion without which a Scot ceases to be a Scot, he had fastened upon those winter months with Julian Wemyss to fill in the lacunes of Dominie McAll's instruction. A good good deal of classics, daily readings in the French and German tongues, conversation after the Socratic method--these were the pillars of Stair's temple of learning at the Bothy. And because the root of the matter had always been in him--which is the determination to excel--he progressed with a rapidity that astounded his teacher.
Every morning Julian Wemyss said to himself, "It is impossible that he can have remembered and assimilated all that we went over yesterday!" But once the breakfast-things cleared away, he found Stair as sharp-set as a terrier at a rat-hole, as it were, nosing after knowledge. Nothing seemed to come wrong to him, and if he did not understand anything, an apt question set him right, and when Stair flung up his head, his eye misty and his intelligence withdrawn, Julian Wemyss stopped also, because he understood.