valley
and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the
glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the
world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner
of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the
sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods
that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black
as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy
devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on
the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow
which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other
of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison
called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of
doom in the Calvinist.

The priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his
friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with
another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late
Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative
of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them
terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the
sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in
chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up around
Mary Queen of Scots.

The rhyme in the country-side attested the motive and the result of
their machinations candidly:

As green sap to the simmer trees
Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle
Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all
eccentricities were exhausted. The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his
tribal tradition by doing the only thing that was left for him to do; he
disappeared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all accounts he was
still in the castle, if he was anywhere. But though his name was in the
church register and the big red Peerage, nobody ever saw him under the
sun.

If anyone saw him it was a solitary man-servant, something between a
groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like
assumed him to be dumb; while the more penetrating declared him to be
half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin,
but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the name of Israel