"Enough is as good as a feast!" said he to himself every now and then while he gazed, with gloom in his soul, at the cut-crystal decanters on a salver of solid silver which was never far from his elbow; and, with that wise saw on his lips, he would continue to drown his contradictory sorrows as deeply as possible.
But there was luckily room and to spare in the castle for all its inmates. Slyne and he kept as much as possible out of each other's way, although they had resumed a spasmodic outward semblance of amity, a steadfast inward determination to get the better of one another, whether by fair means or foul. He could scarcely seek Sallie's company now that she knew his treacherous intentions toward her. The sick man, Herries, was still in bed, in a sufficiently precarious state. So that he lived very much alone with his various grievances, since his walks abroad, as far as the Jura Arms,--where he soon became almost popular among the occasional profligates of the village,--were not so frequent as they would probably have been in better weather.
A bitter east wind, bringing always more snow, had blown almost ceaselessly for the best part of a fortnight before any change came in the wildest weather that had befallen Loquhariot in long years.
The mountain roads for miles in all directions were quite impassable. The mail-cart, with its driver and horses, and also the hastily improvised snow-plough which had attempted their rescue, lay buried deep below the ever deepening drift into which it had plunged on its last outward journey. The single telegraph-line that served the locality had broken down at a dozen points which were quite unapproachable. Stress of weather had prevented the weekly steamer from making its usual call. Loquhariot was absolutely cut off from the outer world.
And then, with a wet westerly wind which soon grew into a gale, the snow on the mountains began to melt and floods made matters still worse, swelling every unconsidered stream into a destructive torrent, cutting wide chasms across the precipitous main-road over the Pass, under-mining its bridges and even washing some of them away bodily. In several of the more outlying districts sheer famine began to grow imminent. The flocks and herds of the countryside were in still worse case than the wild deer which had escaped from their forest sanctuaries before the first of the snow and had been huddling about the village while it endured.