“A woodpecker,” he cried, directing momentarily a sedulous, clear eye on me.  And lo, “inviolable quietness” and the smooth beech-boughs!  “And thus,” he said, sitting closer, “the martlets were wont to whimper about the walls of the castle of Inverness, the castle of Macbeth.”

“Macbeth!” I repeated—­“Macbeth!”

“Ay,” he said, “it was his seat while yet a simple soldier—­flocks and flocks of them, wheeling hither, thither, in the evening air, crying and calling.”

I listened in a kind of confusion. “...  And Duncan,” I said....

He eyed me with immense pleasure, and nodded with brilliant eyes on mine.

“What looking man was he?” I said at last as carelessly as I dared. “...  The King, you mean,—­of Scotland.”

He magnanimously ignored my confusion, and paused to build his sentence.

“’Duncan’?” he said.  “The question calls him straight to mind.  A lean-locked, womanish countenance; sickly, yet never sick; timid, yet most obdurate; more sly than politic.  An ignis fatuus, sir, in a world of soldiers.”  His eye wandered.... “’Twas a marvellous sanative air, crisp and pure; but for him, one draught and outer darkness.  I myself viewed his royal entry from the gallery—­pacing urbane to slaughter; and I uttered a sigh to see him.  ’Why, sir, do you sigh to see the king?’ cried one softly that stood by.  ‘I sigh, my lord,’ I answered to the instant, ‘at sight of a monarch even Duncan’s match!’”

He looked his wildest astonishment at me.

“Not, I’d have you remember—­not that ’twas blood I did foresee....  To kill in blood a man, and he a king, so near to natural death ... foul, foul!”

“And Macbeth?” I said presently—­“Macbeth...?”

He laid down his viol with prolonged care.

“His was a soul, sir, nobler than his fate.  I followed him not without love from boyhood—­a youth almost too fine of spirit; shrinking from all violence, over-nicely; eloquent, yet chary of speech, and of a dark profundity of thought.  The questions he would patter!—­unanswerable, searching earth and heaven through....  And who now was it told me the traitor Judas’s hair was red?—­yet not red his, but of a reddish chestnut, fine and bushy.  Children have played their harmless hands at hide-and-seek therein.  O sea of many winds!

“For come gloom on the hills, floods, discolouring mist; breathe but some grandam’s tale of darkness and blood and doubleness in his hearing:  all changed.  Flame kindled; a fevered unrest drove him out; and Ambition, that spotted hound of hell, strained at the leash towards the Pit.

“So runs the world—­the ardent and the lofty.  We are beyond earth’s story as ’tis told, sir.  All’s shallower than the heart of man....  Indeed, ’twas one more shattered altar to Hymen.”

“‘Hymen!’” I said.

He brooded long and silently, clipping his small beard.  And while he was so brooding, a mouse, a moth, dust—­I know not what, stirred the listening strings of his viol to sound, and woke him with a start.