DOOM CASTLE
By NEIL MUNRO
Copyright, 1900, 1901, by Doubleday, Page & Co.
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER I — COUNT VICTOR COMES TO A STRANGE COUNTRY ]
[ CHAPTER III — BARON OF DOOM ]
[ CHAPTER IV — WANTED, A SPY ]
[ CHAPTER VII — THE BAY OF THE BOAR'S HEAD ]
[ CHAPTER VIII — AN APPARITION ]
[ CHAPTER X — SIM MACTAGGART, CHAMBERLAIN ]
[ CHAPTER XI — THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW ]
[ CHAPTER XII — OMENS AND ALARMS ]
[ CHAPTER XIII — A LAWYER'S GOOD LADY ]
[ CHAPTER XV — A RAY OF LIGHT ]
[ CHAPTER XVII — A SENTIMENTAL SECRET ]
[ CHAPTER XVIII — “Loch Sloy!” ]
[ CHAPTER XX — AN EVENING'S MELODY IN THE BOAR'S HEAD INN ]
[ CHAPTER XXI — COUNT VICTOR CHANGES HIS QUARTERS ]
[ CHAPTER XXII — THE LONELY LADY ]
[ CHAPTER XXIII — A MAN OF NOBLE SENTIMENT ]
[ CHAPTER XXIV — A BROKEN TRYST ]
[ CHAPTER XXV — RECONCILIATION ]
[ CHAPTER XXVI — THE DUKE'S BALL ]
[ CHAPTER XXVII — THE DUEL ON THE SANDS ]
[ CHAPTER XXVIII — THE DUEL ON THE SANDS—Continued. ]
[ CHAPTER XXIX — THE CELL IN THE FOSSE ]
[ CHAPTER XXX — A DUCAL DISPUTATION ]
[ CHAPTER XXXII — THE INDISCRETION OF THE DUCHESS ]
[ CHAPTER XXXIII — BACK IN DOOM ]
[ CHAPTER XXXIV — IN DAYS OF STORM ]
[ CHAPTER XXXV — A DAMNATORY DOCUMENT ]
[ CHAPTER XXXVII — THE FUTILE FLAGEOLET ]
[ CHAPTER XXXVIII — A WARNING ]
[ CHAPTER XXXIX — BETRAYED BY A BALLAD ]
DOOM CASTLE
CHAPTER I — COUNT VICTOR COMES TO A STRANGE COUNTRY
It was an afternoon in autumn, with a sound of wintry breakers on the shore, the tall woods copper-colour, the thickets dishevelled, and the nuts, in the corries of Ardkinglas, the braes of Ardno, dropping upon bracken burned to gold. Until he was out of the glen and into the open land, the traveller could scarcely conceive that what by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders, the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the faubourgs that were at once his vexation and his joy, and from the eager ride that had brought him through Normandy when its orchards were busy from morning till night with cheerful peasants plucking fruit, his ear had not grown accustomed to the still of the valleys, the terrific hush of the mountains, in whose mist or sunshine he had ridden for two days. The woods, with leaves that fell continually about him, seemed in some swoon of nature, with no birds carolling on the boughs; the cloisters were monastic in their silence. A season of most dolorous influences, a land of sombre shadows and ravines, a day of sinister solitude; the sun slid through scudding clouds, high over a world blown upon by salt airs brisk and tonic, but man was wanting in those weary valleys, and the heart of Victor Jean, Comte de Montaiglon, was almost sick for very loneliness.
Thus it came as a relief to his ear, the removal of an oppression little longer to be endured, when he heard behind him what were apparently the voices of the odd-looking uncouth natives he had seen a quarter of an hour ago lurking, silent but alert and peering, phantoms of old story rather than humans, in the fir-wood near a defile made by a brawling cataract. They had wakened no suspicions in his mind. It was true they were savage-looking rogues in a ragged plaid-cloth of a dull device, and they carried arms he had thought forbidden there by law. To a foreigner fresh from gentle lands there might well be a menace in their ambuscade, but he had known men of their race, if not of so savage an aspect, in the retinues of the Scots exiles who hung about the side-doors of Saint Germains, passed mysterious days between that domicile of tragic comedy and Avignon or Rome, or ruffled it on empty pockets at the gamingtables, so he had no apprehension. Besides, he was in the country of the Argyll, at least on the verge of it, a territory accounted law-abiding even to dul-ness by every Scot he had known since he was a child at Cammercy, and snuff-strewn conspirators, come to meet his uncles, took him on their knees when a lull in the cards or wine permitted, and recounted their adventures for his entertainment in a villainous French: he could not guess that the gentry in the wood behind him had taken a fancy to his horse, that they were broken men (as the phrase of the country put it), and that when he had passed them at the cataract—a haughty, well-setup duine uasail all alone with a fortune of silk and silver lace on his apparel and the fob of a watch dangling at his groin most temptingly—they had promptly put a valuation upon himself and his possessions, and decided that the same were sent by Providence for their enrichment.
Ten of them ran after him clamouring loudly to give the impression of larger numbers; he heard them with relief when oppressed by the inhuman solemnity of the scenery that was too deep in its swoon to give back even an echo to the breaker on the shore, and he drew up his horse, turned his head a little and listened, flushing with annoyance when the rude calls of his pursuers became, even in their unknown jargon, too plainly peremptory and meant for him.
“Dogs!” said he, “I wish I had a chance to open school here and teach manners,” and without more deliberation he set his horse to an amble, designed to betray neither complacency nor a poltroon's terrors.
“Stad! stad!” cried a voice closer than any of the rest behind him; he knew what was ordered by its accent, but no Montaiglon stopped to an insolent summons. He put the short rowels to the flanks of the sturdy lowland pony he bestrode, and conceded not so little as a look behind.
There was the explosion of a bell-mouthed musket, and something smote the horse spatteringly behind the rider's left boot. The beast swerved, gave a scream of pain, fell lumberingly on its side. With an effort, Count Victor saved himself from the falling body and clutched his pistols. For a moment he stood bewildered at the head of the suffering animal. The pursuing shouts had ceased. Behind him, short hazel-trees clustering thick with nuts, reddening bramble, and rusty bracken, tangled together in a coarse rank curtain of vegetation, quite still and motionless (but for the breeze among the upper leaves), and the sombre distance, dark with pine, had the mystery of a vault. It was difficult to believe his pursuers harboured there, perhaps reloading the weapon that had put so doleful a conclusion to his travels with the gallant little horse he had bought on the coast of Fife. That silence, that prevailing mystery, seemed to be the essence and the mood of this land, so different from his own, where laughter was ringing in the orchards and a myriad towns and clamant cities brimmed with life.
CHAPTER II — THE PURSUIT
Nobody who had acquaintance with Victor de Montaiglon would call him coward. He had fought with De Grammont, and brought a wound from Dettingen under circumstances to set him up for life in a repute for valour, and half a score of duels were at his credit or discredit in the chronicles of Paris society.
And yet, somehow, standing there in an unknown country beside a brute companion wantonly struck down by a robber's shot, and the wood so still around, and the thundering sea so unfamiliar, he felt vastly uncomfortable, with a touch of more than physical apprehension. If the enemy would only manifest themselves to the eye and ear as well as to the unclassed senses that inform the instinct, it would be much more comfortable. Why did they not appear? Why did they not follow up their assault upon his horse? Why were they lurking in the silence of the thicket, so many of them, and he alone and so obviously at their mercy? The pistols he held provided the answer.
“What a rare delicacy!” said Count Victor, applying himself to the release of his mail from the saddle whereto it was strapped. “They would not interrupt my regretful tears. But for the true élan of the trade of robbery, give me old Cartouche picking pockets on the Pont Neuf.”
While he loosened the bag with one hand, with the other he directed at the thicket one of the pistols that seemed of such wholesome influence. Then he slung the bag upon his shoulder and encouraged the animal to get upon its legs, but vainly, for the shot was fatal.
“Ah!” said he regretfully, “I must sacrifice my bridge and my good comrade. This is an affair!”
Twice—three times, he placed the pistol at the horse's head and as often withdrew it, reluctant, a man, as all who knew him wondered at, gentle to womanliness with a brute, though in a cause against men the most bitter and sometimes cruel of opponents.
A rustle in the brake at last compelled him. “Allons!” said he impatiently with himself, “I do no more than I should have done with me in the like case,” and he pulled the trigger.
Then having deliberately charged the weapon anew, he moved off in the direction he had been taking when the attack was made.
It was still, he knew, some distance to the castle. Half an hour before his rencontre with those broken gentry, now stealing in his rear with the cunning and the bloodthirstiness of their once native wolves (and always, remember, with the possibility of the blunderbuss for aught that he could tell), he had, for the twentieth time since he left the port of Dysart, taken out the rude itinerary, written in ludicrous Scoto-English by Hugh Bethune, one time secretary to the Lord Marischal in exile, and read:—
... and so on to the Water of Leven (the brewster-wife at the howff near Loch Lomond mouth keeps a good glass of aqua) then by Luss (with an eye on the Gregarach), there after a bittock to Glencroe and down upon the House of Ardkinglas, a Hanoverian rat whom 'ware. Round the loch head and three miles further the Castle o' the Baron. Give him my devoirs and hopes to challenge him to a Bowl when Yon comes off which God kens there seems no hurry.
By that showing the castle of Baron Lamond must be within half an hour's walk of where he now moved without show of eagerness, yet quickly none the less, from a danger the more alarming because the extent of it could not be computed.
In a little the rough path he followed bent parallel with the sea. A tide at the making licked ardently upon sand-spits strewn with ware, and at the forelands, overhung by harsh and stunted seaside shrubs, the breakers rose tumultuous. On the sea there was utter vacancy; only a few screaming birds slanted above the wave, and the coast, curving far before him, gave his eye no sign at first of the castle to which he had got the route from M. Hugh Bethune.
Then his vision, that had been set for something more imposing, for the towers and embrasures of a stately domicile, if not for a Chantilly, at least for the equal of the paternal château in the Meuse valley, with multitudinous chimneys and the incense of kind luxuriant hearths, suave parks, gardens, and gravelled walks, contracted with dubiety and amazement upon a dismal tower perched upon a promontory.
Revealed against the brown hills and the sombre woods of the farther coast, it was scarcely a wonder that his eye had failed at first to find it. Here were no pomps of lord or baron; little luxuriance could prevail behind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance about those walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp, no pleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying man's oldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends and one crenelated bastion or turret betraying its sinister relation to its age, its whole aspect arrogant and unfriendly, essential of war. Caught suddenly by the vision that swept the fretted curve of the coast, it seemed blackly to perpetuate the spirit of the land, its silence, its solitude and terrors.
These reflections darted through the mind of Count Victor as he sped, monstrously uncomfortable with the burden of the bag that bobbed on his back, not to speak of the indignity of the office. It was not the kind of castle he had looked for, but a castle, in the narrow and squalid meaning of a penniless refugee like Bethune, it doubtless was, the only one apparent on the landscape, and therefore too obviously the one he sought.
“Very well, God is good!” said Count Victor, who, to tell all and leave no shred of misunderstanding, was in some regards the frankest of pagans, and he must be jogging on for its security.
But as he hurried, the ten broken men who had been fascinated by his too ostentatious fob and the extravagance of his embroidery, and inspired furthermore by a natural detestation of any foreign duine uasail apparently bound for the seat of MacCailen Mor, gathered boldness, and soon he heard the thicket break again behind him.
He paused, turned sharply with the pistols in his hands. Instantly the wood enveloped his phantom foes; a bracken or two nodded, a hazel sapling swung back and forward more freely than the wind accounted for. And at the same time there rose on the afternoon the wail of a wild fowl high up on the hill, answered in a sharp and querulous too-responsive note of the same character in the wood before.
The gentleman who had twice fought à la barrière felt a nameless new thrill, a shudder of the being, born of antique terrors generations before his arms were quartered with those of Rochefoucauld and Modene.
It was becoming all too awkward, this affair. He broke into a more rapid walk, then into a run, with his eyes intent upon the rude dark keep that held the promontory, now the one object in all the landscape that had to his senses some aspect of human fellowship and sympathy.
The caterans were assured; Dieu du ciel, how they ran too! Those in advance broke into an appalling halloo, the shout of hunters on the heels of quarry. High above the voice of the breakers it sounded savage and alarming in the ears of Count Victor, and he fairly took to flight, the valise bobbing more ludicrously than ever on his back.
It was like the man that, in spite of dreads not to be concealed from himself, he should be seized as he sped with a notion of the grotesque figure he must present, carrying that improper burden. He must even laugh when he thought of his, austere punctilious maternal aunt, the Baronne de Chenier, and fancied her horror and disgust could she behold her nephew disgracing the De Chenier blood by carrying his own baggage and outraging several centuries of devilishly fine history by running—positively running—from ill-armed footpads who had never worn breeches. She would frown, her bosom would swell till her bodice would appear to crackle at the armpits, the seven hairs on her upper lip would bristle all the worse against her purpling face as she cried it was the little Lyons shopkeeper in his mother's grandfather that was in his craven legs. Doubt it who will, an imminent danger will not wholly dispel the sense of humour, and Montàiglon, as he ran before the footpads, laughed softly at the Baronne.
But a short knife with a black hilt hissed past his right ear and buried three-fourths of its length in the grass, and so abruptly spoiled the comedy. This was ridiculous. He stopped suddenly, turned him round about in a passion, and fired one of the pistols at an unfortunate robber too late to duck among the bracken. And the marvel was that the bullet found its home, for the aim was uncertain, and the shot meant more for an emphatic protest than for attack.
The gled's cry rose once more, rose higher on the hill, echoed far off, and was twice repeated nearer head with a drooping melancholy cadence. Gaunt forms grew up straight among the undergrowth of trees, indifferent to the other pistol, and ran back or over to where the wounded comrade lay.
“Heaven's thunder!” cried Count Victor, “I wish I had aimed more carefully.” He was appalled at the apparent tragedy of his act. A suicidal regret and curiosity kept him standing where he fired, with the pistol still smoking in his hand, till there came from the men clustered round the body in the brake a loud simultaneous wail unfamiliar to his ear, but unmistakable in its import. He turned and ran wildly for the tower that had no aspect of sanctuary in it; his heart drummed noisily at his breast; his mouth parched and gaped. Upon his lips in a little dropped water; he tasted the salt of his sweating body. And then he knew weariness, great weariness, that plucked at the sinews behind his knees, and felt sore along the hips and back, the result of his days of hard riding come suddenly to the surface. Truly he was not happy.
But if he ran wearily he ran well, better at least than his pursuers, who had their own reasons for taking it more leisurely, and in a while there was neither sight nor sound of the enemy.
He was beginning to get some satisfaction from this, when, turning a bend of the path within two hundred yards of the castle, behold an unmistakable enemy barred his way!—an ugly, hoggish, obese man, with bare legs most grotesquely like pillars of granite, and a protuberant paunch; but the devil must have been in his legs to carry him more swiftly than thoroughbred limbs had borne Count Victor. He stood sneering in the path, turning up the right sleeve of a soiled and ragged saffron shirt with his left hand, the right being engaged most ominously with a sword of a fashion that might well convince the Frenchman he had some new methods of fence to encounter in a few minutes.
High and low looked Count Victor as he slacked his pace, seeking for some way out of this sack, releasing as he did so the small sword from the tanglement of his skirts, feeling the Mechlin deucedly in his way. As he approached closer to the man barring his path he relapsed into a walk and opened a parley in English that except for the slightest of accents had nothing in it of France, where he had long been the comrade of compatriots to this preposterous savage with the manners of medieval Provence when footpads lived upon Damoiselle Picoree.
“My good fellow,” said he airily, as one might open with a lackey, “I protest I am in a hurry, for my presence makes itself much desired elsewhere. I cannot comprehend why in Heaven's name so large a regiment of you should turn out to one unfortunate traveller.”
The fat man fondled the brawn of his sword-arm and seemed to gloat upon the situation.
“Come, come!” said Count Victor, affecting a cheerfulness, “my waistcoat would scarcely adorn a man of your inches, and as for my pantaloons”—he looked at the ragged kilt—“as for my pantaloons, now on one's honour, would you care for them? They are so essentially a matter of custom.”
He would have bantered on in this strain up to the very nose of the enemy, but the man in his path was utterly unresponsive to his humour. In truth he did not understand a word of the nobleman's pleasantry. He uttered something like a war-cry, threw his bonnet off a head as bald as an egg, and smote out vigorously with his broadsword.
Count Victor fired the pistol à bout portant with deliberation; the flint, in the familiar irony of fate, missed fire, and there was nothing more to do with the treacherous weapon but to throw it in the face of the Highlander. It struck full; the trigger-guard gashed the jaw and the metalled butt spoiled the sight of an eye.
“This accounts for the mace in the De Chenier quartering,” thought the Count whimsically. “It is obviously the weapon of the family.” And he drew the rapier forth.
A favourite, a familiar arm, as the carriage of his head made clear at any time, he knew to use it with the instinct of the eyelash, but it seemed absurdly inadequate against the broad long weapon of his opponent, who had augmented his attack with a dirk drawn in the left hand, and sought lustily to bring death to his opponent by point as well as edge. A light dress rapier obviously must do its business quickly if it was not to suffer from the flailing blow of the claymore, and yet Count Victor did not wish to increase the evil impression of his first visit to this country by a second homicide, even in self-defence. He measured the paunched rascal with a rapid eye, and with a flick at the left wrist disarmed him of his poignard. Furiously the Gael thrashed with the sword, closing up too far on his opponent. Count Victor broke ground, beat an appeal that confused his adversary, lunged, and skewered him through the thick of the active arm.
The Highlander dropped his weapon and bawled lamentably as he tried to staunch the copious blood; and safe from his further interference, Count Victor took to his heels again.
Where the encounter with the obese and now discomfited Gael took place was within a hundred yards of the castle, whose basement and approach were concealed by a growth of stunted whin. Towards the castle Count Victor rushed, still hearing the shouts in the wood behind, and as he seemed, in spite of his burden, to be gaining ground upon his pursuers, he was elate at the prospect of escape. In his gladness he threw a taunting cry behind, a hunter's greenwood challenge.
And then he came upon the edge of the sea. The sea! Peste! That he should never have thought of that! There was the castle, truly, beetling against the breakers, very cold, very arrogant upon its barren promontory. He was not twenty paces from its walls, and yet it might as well have been a league away, for he was cut off from it by a natural moat of sea-water that swept about it in yeasty little waves. It rode like a ship, oddly independent of aspect, self-contained, inviolable, eternally apart, for ever by nature indifferent to the mainland, where a Montaiglon was vulgarly quarrelling with sans culottes.
For a moment or two he stood bewildered. There was no drawbridge to this eccentric moat; there was, on this side of the rock at least, not so little as a boat; if Lamond ever held intercourse with the adjacent isle of Scotland he must seemingly swim. Very well; the Count de Montaiglon, guilty of many outrages against his ancestry to-day, must swim too if that were called for. And it looked as if that were the only alternative. Vainly he called and whistled; no answer came from the castle, that he might have thought a deserted ruin if a column of smoke did not rise from some of its chimneys.
It was his one stroke of good fortune that for some reason the pursuit was no longer apparent. The dim woods behind seemed to have swallowed up sight and sound of the broken men, who, at fault, were following up their quarry to the castle of Mac-Cailen Mor instead of to that of Baron Lamond. He had therefore time to prepare himself for his next step. He sat on the shore and took off his elegant long boots, the quite charming silk stockings so unlike travel in the wilds; then looked dubiously at his limbs and at the castle. No! manifestly, an approach so frank was not to be thought of, and he compromised by unbuttoning the foot of his pantaloons and turning them over his knees. In any case, if one had to swim over that yeasty and alarming barrier, his clothing must get wet. À porte basse, passant courbé. He would wade as far as he could, and if he must, swim the rest.
With the boots and the valise and the stockings and the skirts of his coat tucked high in his arms, the Count waded into the tide, that chilled deliciously after the heat of his flight.
But it was ridiculous! It was the most condemnable folly! His face burned with shame as he found himself half-way over the channel and the waves no higher than his ankles. It was to walk through a few inches of water that he had nearly stripped to nature!
And a woman was laughing at him, morbleu! Decidedly a woman was laughing—a young woman, he could wager, with a monstrously musical laugh, by St. Denys! and witnessing (though he could not see her even had he wished) this farce from an upper window of the tower. He stood for a moment irresolute, half inclined to retreat from the ridicule that never failed to affect him more unpleasantly than danger the most dire; his face and neck flamed; he forgot all about the full-bosomed Baronne or remembered her only to agree that nobility demanded some dignity even in fleeing from an enemy. But the shouts of the pursuers that had died away in the distance grew again in the neighbourhood, and he pocketed his diffidence and resumed his boots, then sought the entrance to a dwelling that had no hospitable portal to the shore.
Close at hand the edifice gained in austerity and dignity while it lost the last of its scanty air of hospitality. Its walls were of a rough rubble of granite and whinstone, grown upon at the upper storeys with grasses and weeds wafted upon the ledges by the winds that blow indifferent, bringing the green messages of peace from God. A fortalice dark and square-built, flanked to the southern corner by a round turret, lit by few windows, and these but tiny and suspicious, it was as Scots and arrogant as the thistle that had pricked Count Victor's feet when first he set foot upon the islet.
A low wall surrounded a patch of garden-ground to the rear, one corner of it grotesquely adorned with a bower all bedraggled with rains, yet with the red berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage like grapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door. Its arch, ponderous, deep-moulded, hung a scowling eyebrow over the black and studded oak, and over all was an escutcheon with a blazon of hands fess-wise and castles embattled and the legend—
“Doom
Man behauld the end of All.
Be nocht Wiser than the Priest.
Hope in God”
He stood on tiptoe to read the more easily the time-blurred characters, his baggage at his feet, his fingers pressed against the door. Some of the words he could not decipher nor comprehend, but the first was plain to his understanding.
“Doom!” said he airily and half aloud. “Doom! Quelle félicité! It is an omen.”
Then he rapped lightly on the oak with the pommel of his sword.
CHAPTER III — BARON OF DOOM
Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.
Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at a single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other evidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom.
“M. Bethune's bowl,” he said to himself, “is not likely to be brimming over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much of the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry again for a louis!—Glengarry sans feu ni lieu, but always the most punctilious when most nearly penniless.”
Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; then reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously bare the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, and sheathed the steel.
A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently just inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain clanked. But something informed the Count Victor that he was being observed, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss was missing about the height of his head and that through the hole an eye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with a hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eye apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count Victor saw its owner fully revealed.
A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well as humour. A domestic—a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count Victor could not resist smiling back to it.
And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold, with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a military salute.
“Doom?” inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.
“Jist that,” answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to each other on the quays.
“Is your master at home?” he asked.
“At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken,” said the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural geniality and burlesque importance, “It's the auld styles aboot Doom, sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously before the like o' me could say.”
“My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I—”
“Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon,” cried the little man with a salute more profound than before. “We're prood to see you, and hoo are they a' in France?”
“Tolerably well, I thank you,” said Count Victor, amused at this grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.
Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag. With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared his shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.
“This way, your honour,” said he. “Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi' a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a wasp's byke.”
The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut of itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odour of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was to be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shell that is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasant anticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterly erroneous, mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behind the little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner.
The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance was held half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein were surprise and curiosity.
“The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France,” announced Mungo, stepping aside still with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing by the door to give dignity to the introduction and the entrance.
The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servant when he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller cocked hat in one hand and fondling the upturned moustache with the other; something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly dismissed the man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he turned a questioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing him one of the few chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms.
“You are welcome, sir,” he said simply in a literal rendering of his native Gaelic phrase; “take your breath. And you will have refreshment?”
Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. “It is the custom of the country,” said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling among glasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunity of settling down to his new surroundings—a room ill-furnished as a monk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typical Highland stronghold.
The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head slightly to see what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds. And the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folio of arms, “Les Arts de l'Homme d'Epée; ou, Le Dictionnaire du Gentilhomme,” by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place, but apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described its master as “ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his déjeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug.” A poor Baron (of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a reader of the beau langage, and a student of the lore of arme blanche—come, here was luck!
And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle of quaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners and two glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams upon the table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the book of arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the native tartan of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat and breeches of some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more of the look of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a man at least twenty years the senior of his visitor—a handsome man of his kind, dark, deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, but seemingly, to the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of one unpardonable weakness in a gentleman—a shame of his obvious penury.
“I have permitted myself, M. le Baron, to interrupt you on the counsel of a common friend,” said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to a situation somewhat droll.
“After the goblet, after the goblet,” said Lamond softly, himself but sipping at the rim of his glass. “It is the custom of the country—one of the few that's like to be left to us before long.”
“À la santé de la bonne cause!” said the Count politely, choking upon the fiery liquor and putting down the glass with an apology.
“I am come from France—from Saint Germains,” he said. “You may have heard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon.”
The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion.
“Do you tell me, now?” said he. “Then you are the more welcome. I wish I could say so in your own language—that is, so far as ease goes, known to me only in letters. From Saint Germains—” making a step or two up and down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing. “H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of the Highland gentry about the place.”
“There is one Bethune—Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron,” replied Count Victor meaningly. “Knowing that I was coming to this part of the world, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardly circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast with but one name of a friend, pardieu, to make the strange cliffs cheerful.”
“You are very good,” said the Baron simply, with half a bow. “And Hugh Bethune, now—well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old friend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!”—a strange wistfulness came to the Baron's utterance—“Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail.”
“I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it at a bal masque.”
“So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit.”
Count Victor smiled.
“It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with less dignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit, M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates.”
“Ay, man!” said the Baron, heedless of the irony, “and Hugh wears the tartan?”
“Only in the waistcoat,” repeated Count Victor, complacently looking at his own scallops.
“Even that!” said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. And then he added hurriedly, “Not that the tartan's anything wonderful. It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another. There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks, says I—the douce, honest breeks——”
“Unless it be the petticoats,” murmured the Count, smiling, and his fingers went to the pointing of his moustache.
“Nothing like the breeks. The philabeg was aye telling your parentage in every line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there but any drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family of caterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should be proscribed, but what does it matter?”
“The tartan is forbidden?” guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled.
Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes. He turned to fumble noisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard.
“I thought that was widely enough known,” said he. “Put down by the law, and perhaps a good business too. Diaouil!” He came back to the table with this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film of the peat-fire. “There was a story in every line,” said he, “a history in every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but crotal-colour—the old stuff stained with lichen from the rock.”
“Ah, what damage!” said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. “But there are some who wear it yet?”
The Baron started slightly. “Sir?” he questioned, without taking his eyes from the embers.
“The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must have something of an air of impertinence,” said Count Victor briskly, unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; “but the cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and sans culottes too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings. I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an oyster-man with my bag on my back.”
“Good God!” cried the Baron. “I forgot the tide. Could you not have whistled?”
“Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to be ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. Mon Dieu! but I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first introduction to your tartan among its own mountains.”
“It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some of the king's soldiers,” suggested the Baron.
Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. “I think I know a red-coat when I see one,” said he. “These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's call for signal too.”
“Are you sure?” cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an unbelieving tone.
“My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner of introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to be circumspect; is it not so?”
As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had tried to cloak—by a scarcely perceptible tremour of the hand that drummed the table, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. He saw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to a careless laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points, drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically saluted and lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease.
The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes and talents.
“Still I'm a little in the dark,” he said when the point dropped and Count Victor recovered.
“Pardon,” said his guest. “I am vexed at what you may perhaps look on as a trifle. The ruffians attacked me a mile or two farther up the coast, shot my horse below me, and chased me to the very edge of your moat. I made a feint to shoot one with my pistol, and came closer on the gold than I had intended.”
“The Macfarlanes!” cried Doom, with every sign of uneasiness. “It's a pity, it's a pity; not that a man more or less of that crew makes any difference, but the affair might call for more attention to this place and your presence here than might be altogether wholesome for you or me.”
He heard the story in more detail, and when Count Victor had finished, ran into an adjoining room to survey the coast from a window there. He came back with a less troubled vision.
“At least they're gone now,” said he in a voice that still had some perplexity. “I wish I knew who it was you struck. Would it be Black Andy of Arroquhar now? If it's Andy, the gang will be crying 'Loch Sloy!' about the house in a couple of nights; if it was a common man of the tribe, there might be no more about it, for we're too close on the Duke's gallows to be meddled with noisily; that's the first advantage I ever found in my neighbourhood.”
“He was a man of a long habit of body,” said Count Victor, “and he fell with a grunt.”
“Then it was not Andy. Andy is like a hogshead—a blob of creesh with a turnip on the top—and he would fall with a curse.”
“Name of a pipe! I know him; he debated the last few yards of the way with me, and I gave him De Chenier's mace in the jaw.”
“Sir?”
“I put him slightly out of countenance with the butt and trigger-guard of my pistol. Again I must apologise, dear Baron, for so unceremonious and ill-tempered an approach to your hospitality. You will confess it is a sort of country the foibles of whose people one has to grow accustomed to, and Bethune gave me no guidance for such an emergency as banditti on the fringe of Argyll's notoriously humdrum Court.”
“Odd!” repeated Doom. “Will you step this way?” He led Count Victor to the window that commanded the coast, and their heads together filled the narrow space as they looked out. It was a wondrous afternoon. The sun swung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed to the gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood and heather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him, the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land, the abode of seraphim and the sun's eternal smile.
“God is good!” said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion. “I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradise with open doors.” Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm.
“Ah!” he said airily, “there is civilisation in the land after all.”
“Plenty of law at least,” said the Baron. “Law of its kind—MacCailen law. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-General of the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pit and gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but his Grace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up his dule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It's a fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as the saying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France, that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,' though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grand country out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that tree there and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'm at my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat.”
He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondness that surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo.
In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in his military manner.
“Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?” asked the master indulgently.
“Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided for voluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane's on the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry. There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oors syne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-to wdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies.”
They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor.
“I regret the what-do-you-call-it?—the stoved howtowdy,” said he, laughing, “more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveys to me.”
“There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate the bagpipes,” said Mungo.
“There's waur nor howtowdy. And oh! I forgot the het victual, there's jugged hare.”
“Is the hare ready?” asked the Baron suspiciously.
“It's no jist a'thegether what ye micht ca' ready,” answered Mungo without hesitation; “but it can be here het in nae time, and micht agree wi' the Count better nor the cauld fowl.”
“Tell Annapla to do the best she can,” broke in the Baron on his servant's cheerful garrulity; and Mungo with another salute disappeared.
“How do your women-folk like the seclusion of Doom?” asked Count Victor, to make conversation while the refection was in preparation. “With the sea about you so, and the gang of my marauding obese friend in the wood behind, I should think you had little difficulty in keeping them under your eye.”
The Baron was obviously confused. “Mungo's quite enough to keep his eye on Annapla,” said he. “He has the heart and fancy to command a garrison; there's a drum forever beating in his head, a whistle aye fifing in his lug, and he will amuse you with his conceits of soldiering ancient and modern, a trade he thinks the more of because Heaven made him so unfit to become 'prentice to it. Good Mungo! There have been worse men; indeed what need I grudge admitting there have been few better? He has seen this place more bien than it is to-day in my father's time, and in my own too before the law-pleas ate us up; you will excuse his Scots freedom of speech, Count, he—”
A shot rang outside in some shrubbery upon the mainland, suddenly putting an end to Doom's conversation. Count Victor, sure that the Macfarlanes were there again, ran to the window and looked out, while his host in the rear bit his lip with every sign of annoyance. As Montaiglon looked he saw Mungo emerge from the shrubbery with a rabbit in his hand and push off hurriedly in a little boat, which apparently was in use for communication with the shore under such circumstances.
“And now,” said the Count, without comment upon what he had seen, “I think, with your kind permission, I shall change my boots before eating.
“There's plenty of time for that, I jalouse,” said Doom, smiling somewhat guiltily, and he showed his guest to a room in the turret. It was up a flight of corkscrew stairs, and lit with singular poverty by an orifice more of the nature of a porthole for a piece than a window, and this port or window, well out in the angle of the turret, commanded a view of the southward wall or curtain of the castle.
Montaiglon, left to himself, opened the bag that Mungo had placed in readiness for him in what was evidently the guest-room of the castle, transformed the travelling half of himself into something that was more in conformity with the gay nature of his upper costume, complacently surveyed the result when finished, and hummed a chanson of Pierre Gringoire's, altogether unremembering the encounter in the wood, the dead robber, and the stern nature of his embassy here so far from France.
He bent to close the valise, and with a start abruptly concluded his song at the sight of a miniature with the portrait of a woman looking at him from the bottom of the bag.
“Mort de ma vie! what a fool I am; what a forgetful vengeur, to be chanting Gringoire in the house of Doom and my quarry still to hunt!” His voice had of a sudden gained a sterner accent; the pleasantness of his aspect became clouded by a frown. Looking round the constricted room, and realising how like a prison-cell it was compared with what he had expected, he felt oppressed as with the want of air. He sought vainly about the window for latch or hinge to open it, and as he did so glanced along the castle wall painted yellow by the declining sun. He noticed idly that some one was putting out upon the sill of a window on a lower stage what might have been a green kerchief had not the richness of its fabric and design suggested more a pennon or banneret. It was carefully placed by a woman's hands—the woman herself unseen. The incident recalled an old exploit of his own in Marney, and a flood of humorous memories of amorous intrigue.
“Mademoiselle Annapla,” said he whimsically, “has a lover, and here's his signal. The Baron's daughter? The Baron's niece? The Baron's ward? Or merely the Baron's domestic? M. Bethune's document suffers infernally from the fault of being too curt. He might at least have indicated the fair recluse.”
CHAPTER IV — WANTED, A SPY
The wail of a mountain pipe, poorly played, as any one accustomed to its strains would have admitted, even if the instrument was one he loved, and altogether execrable in the ears of Montaiglon, called him to the salle, where Doom joined him in a meal whereof good Mungo's jugged hare formed no part. Mungo, who had upheld ancient ceremony by his crude performance on the piob mhor, was the attendant upon the table,—an office he undertook with his bonnet on his head, “in token,” as his master whisperingty explained to Count Victor, “of his sometimes ill-informed purpose of conducting every formal task in Doom upon the strict letter of military codes as pertained in camps, garrisons, and strongholds.” It was amusing to witness the poor fellow's pompous precision of movement as he stood behind his master's chair or helped the guest to his humble meal; the rigidity of his inactive moments, or the ridiculous jerkiness with which he passed a platter as 'twere to the time of a drill-sergeant's baton. More amusing still to one able, like Count Victor, to enter into the humour of the experience, was it to have his garrulity get the better of him in spite of the military punctilio.
“The Baron was telling me aboot your exploit wi' the Loch Sloy pairty. Man! did I no' think ye had come by boat,” he whispered over a tendered ale-glass. “It was jist my luck to miss sic a grand ploy. I wad hae backed ye to haud the water against Black Andy and all his clan, and they're no' slack at a tulzie.”
“Ye may be grand in a fight, Mungo, but only a middling man at forage,” interrupted his master. “I think ye said jugged hare?”
“It wasna my faut,” explained the domestic, “that ye havena what was steepulated; the Baron wadna bide till the beast was cooked.”
Doom laughed. “Come, come, Mungo,” said he, “the Count could scarcely be expected to wait for the cooking of an animal running wild in the bracken twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh, it disna tak' sae terrible lang to cook a hare,” said the unabashed retainer.
“But was it a hare after a', Mungo?” asked his master. “Are ye sure it wasna a rabbit?”
“A rabbit!” cried he in astonishment; then more cautiously, “Weel, if it was a rabbit, it was a gey big ane, that's a' I can say,” and he covered his perturbation by a retreat from the room to resume his office of musician, which, it appeared, demanded a tune after dinner as well as before it.
What had seemed to Montaiglon a harsh, discordant torturing of reeds when heard on the stair outside his chamber, seemed somehow more mellowed and appropriate—pleasing even—when it came from the garden outside the castle, on whose grass-grown walk the little lowlander strutted as he played the evening melody of the house of Doom—a pibroch all imbued with passion and with melancholy. This distance lulled it into something more than human music, into a harmony with the monotone of the wave that thundered against the rock; it seemed the voice of choiring mermen; it had the bitterness, the agonised remembrance, of the sea's profound; it was full of hints of stormy nights and old wars. For a little Doom and his visitor sat silent listening to it, the former, with a strain upon his countenance, tapping nervously with his fingers upon the arm of his chair.
“An old custom in the Highlands,” he explained. “I set, perhaps, too little store by it myself, but Mungo likes to maintain it, though he plays the pipe but indifferently, and at this distance you might think the performance not altogether without merit.
“I love all music,” replied Count Victor with polite ambiguity, and he marvelled at the signs of some deep feeling in his host.
Till a late hour they sat together while Count Victor explained his mission to the Highlands. He told much, but, to be sure, he did not at first tell all. He recounted the evidences of the spy's guilt as a correspondent with the British Government, whose pay he drew while sharing the poor fortunes and the secrets of the exiled Jacobites. “Iscariot, my dear Baron,” he protested, “was a Bayard compared with this wretch. His presence in your locality should pollute the air; have you not felt a malaise?”
“It's dooms hard,” admitted the Baron, throwing up distressed hands, “but, man, I'm feared he's not the only one. Do you know, I could mention well-kent names far ben in the Cause—men not of hereabouts at all, but of Lochaber no less, though you may perhaps not guess all that means—and they're in Paris up to the elbow now in the same trade. It's well known to some of yourselves, or should be, and it puzzles me that you should come to the shire of Argyll on account of one, as I take it, no worse than three or four you might have found by stepping across the road to Roisin's coffee-house in the Rue Vaugirard. The commoners in the late troubles have been leal enough, I'll give them that credit, but some of the gentry wag their tongues for Prince Tearlach and ply their pens for Geordie's pay.”
The servant came in with two candles, placed them on the table, and renewed the fire. He had on a great woollen night-cowl of gaudy hue with a superb tassel that bobbed grotesquely over his beady eyes.
“I'll awa' to my bed, if it's your will, Baron,” said he with the customary salute. “I was thinkin' it might be needful for me to bide up a while later in case ony o' the Coont's freends cam' the way; but the tide'll keep them aff till mornin' anyway, and I'm sure we'll meet them a' the baulder then if we hae a guid sleep.” He got permission to retire, and passed into the inky darkness of the corridor, and crept to that part of the vacant dwelling in which he had his bed.
“There might be another reason for my coming here,” said Montaiglon, resuming the conversation where Mungo's entrance had broken it off. “In this affair there was a lady. I knew her once.” He paused with a manner showing discomposure.
“And there was liking; I can comprehend,” said Doom with sympathy.
“Liking is but love without wings,” said Montaiglon. “My regard soared above the clay; I loved her, and I think she was not indifferent to me till this man came in her way. He had, they say, the devil's tongue; at least he had the devil's heart, and she died six months ago with her head on my arm. I could tell you the story, M. le Baron, but it is in all the books, and you can fancy it easily. She died forgiving her betrayer, and sending a message to that effect by me. I come to deliver it, and, by God! to push it to his heart.”
“It is a dangerous errand in this country and at this time,” said Doom, looking into the fire.
“Ah! but you did not know Cecile,” replied Montaiglon, simply.
“But I know the human heart. I know it in any man under the sober age of thirty. Better to let it rest thus. Excuse my interference. It does not matter much to me that it should be out of my house you should go seeking for your vengeance, but I'm an older man than you, and have learned how quickly the worst misfortunes and wrongs may be forgotten. In your place I would leave this man to the punishment of his own conscience.”
Montaiglon laughed bitterly. “That,” said he, “is to assume a mechanism that in his case never existed. Pardon me, I pray you, but I prefer the old reckoning, which will be all the fairer because he has the reputation of being a good swordsman, and I am not without some practice.”
“And the man's name? you have not mentioned it.”
“But there you puzzle me. He was eight months in France, six of these in a lodging beside the Baigneurs on the Estrapade, Rue Dauphine. He came with no credentials but from Glengarry, and now Glengarry can give no account of him except that he had spoken familiarly to him of common friends in the Highlands.”
“Oh, Glengarry—Alasdair Rhuadh!” exclaimed the Baron, dryly.
“And presumed to be burdened with a dangerous name, he passed with the name of Drimdarroch.”
“Drimdarroch!” repeated the Baron with some apparent astonishment.
“I have never seen the man, so far as I know, for I was at Cammercy when he hung about the lady.”
“Drimdarroch!” repeated Doom reflectively, “a mere land title.”
“And some words he dropped in the ear of the lady made me fancy he might be found about the Court of Argyll.”
“Drimdarroch! Drimdarroch! I ken no one of the name, though the name itself, for very good reasons, is well known to me. Have you any description of the man?”
“Not much. A man older than myself, dark, well-bred. I should say a man something like yourself, if you will pardon the comparison, with a less easy mind, if he remembers his friends and his past.”
Doom pushed back his chair a little from the fire, but without taking his eyes from the peats, and made a curious suggestion.
“You would not take it to be me, would you?” he asked.
Count Victor laughed, with a gesture of his hands that made denial all unnecessary.
“Oh, but you do not know,” went on the Baron. “Some months of caballing with our friends—even our Hielan' friends—in the France, left me with an unwholesome heart that would almost doubt my father in his grave. You mentioned the name Drimdarroch—is it not the odd thing that you should speak it to the only man in the shire that ever had the right to use it? Do you see this?” and rising he stepped to a recess in the wall, only half curtained, so that its contents overflowed into the chamber, and by a jerk of the hand revealed a strange accumulation of dusty documents in paper and in parchment. He looked at them with an aspect of disgust, and stirred them with a contemptuous toe as if he meddled with the litter of a stye.
“That's Drimdarroch!” said he, intensely bitter; “that's Drimdarroch, and Duntorvil, that's the Isles, the bonny Isles of Lochow; that's damn like to be Doom too! That and this ruckle of stones we sit in are all that's left of what was my father's and my grandfather's and their forebears back till the dark of time. And how is it, ye may ask? Let us pretermit the question till another occasion; anyway here's Drimdarroch wi' the lave, at any rate the weight of it in processes, records, caveats, multiple poindings, actions of suspension and declator, interim decrees, fugie warrants, compts, and reckonings—God! I have the cackle of the law in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that wi' all my practice?”
He stooped and picked up from the confused heap of legal scrivenings by finger-tips that seemed to fear infection a parchment fouled with its passage through the courts and law offices. “You're in luck indeed,” said he; “for there's Drimdarroch—all that's left of it to me: the land itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and scab seize his bestial!”
Back he threw the relic of his patrimony; he dropped the curtain; he turned on his guest a face that tried to smile. “Come, let us sit down again,” he said, “and never heed my havers. Am I not thankful to have Doom itself left me, and the company of the hills and sea? After all, there are more Drimdarrochs than one in the Highlands, for the name means just 'the place at the back of the oak-wood or the oaken shaw,' and oaks are as plentiful hereabout as the lawyers are in the burgh down-by. I but mentioned it to show you the delicacy of your search, for you do not know but what I'm the very man you want, though I'm sitting here looking as if acting trusty for the Hanoverian cause did not fill my pouches.”
“Tenez! M. Bethune was scarcely like to send me to Doom in that case,” said the Count laughing.
“But Bethune, like yourself, may never have seen the man.”
“But yes, it is true, he did not see him any more than I did. Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a bavard, his great friends, Glengarry and another Scot, Balhaldie—”
“Oh, Balhaldie! blethering Balhaldie!” cried Doom, contempt upon his countenance. “And Balhaldie would sell him, I'll warrant. He seems, this Drimdarroch, to have been dooms unlucky in his friends. I say all I've said to you, Count, because you're bound to find it out for yourself some day if you prosecute your search here, and you might be coming round to me at last with your ower-ready pistol when I was ill-prepared to argue out my identity. Furthermore, I do not know the man you want. About the castle down-by his Grace has a corps of all kinds that you might pick from nine times out of ten without striking an honest man. Some of them are cadets of his own family, always blunt opponents of mine and of our cause here and elsewhere; some are incomers, as we call them; a few of them from clans apparently friendly to us when in other quarters, but traitors and renegades at the heart; some are spies by habit and repute. There's not a friend of mine among them, not in all the fat and prosperous rabble of them; but I wish you were here on another errand, though to Doom, my poor place, you are welcome. I am a widower, a lonely man, with my own flesh and blood rebel against me”—he checked his untimeous confidence—“and yet I have been chastened by years and some unco experiences from a truculent man to one preferring peace except at the last ditch.”
“Eh bien! Monsieur; this is the last ditch!” said Montaiglon. “Spy and murderer, M. le Baron, and remember I propose to give him more than the murderer's chance when I agree to meet him on a fair field with a sword in his hand.”
“I have seen you lunge, sir,” said Doom meaningly; “I ken the carriage of a fencer's head; your eye's fast, your step's light; with the sword I take it Drimdarroch is condemned, and your practice with the pistol, judging from the affair with the Macfarlanes, seems pretty enough. You propose, or I'm mistaken, to make yourself the executioner. It is a step for great deliberation, and for the sake of a wanton woman—”
“Sir!” cried Montaiglon, half rising in his chair.
Doom's eyes gleamed, a quiver ran over his brow, and a furrow came to the jaw; his hand went to his side, where in other days there might have been a dagger. It was the flash of a moment, and died again almost before Montaiglon had seen and understood.
“Mille pardons!” said Doom with uncouth French. “I used the word in its most innocent sense, with its kindliest meaning; but I was a fool to use it at all, and I withdraw it.”
Count Victor bowed his head. “So,” said he. “Perhaps I am too much Quixote, for I saw her but a few times, and that briefly. She was like a—like a fine air once heard, not all to be remembered, never wholly to be forgot. She had a failing, perhaps—the error of undue affection to qualify her for a sinful world. As it was, she seemed among other women some rarity out of place—Venus at a lantern feast.”
“And ye would send this man to hell that he may find his punishment in remembering her? If I thought so much of vengeance I would leave him on the earth forgetting.”
“M. le Baron, I make you my compliments of your complacence,” said Count Victor, rising to his feet and desirous to end the discussion. “I am only Victor de Montaiglon, poorly educated in the forgiveness of treachery, and lamentably incapable of the nobihty de cour that you profess. But I can be grateful; and if you give me the hospitality of your house for a day or two, I shall take care that neither it nor its owner will be implicated in my little affair. Touching retirement “—he went on with a smile—“I regret exceedingly an overpowering weariness. I have travelled since long before dawn, and burning the candle par les deux bouts is not, as Master Mungo hints, conducive to a vigorous reception of the Macfarlanes if they feel like retaliating to-morrow, and making your domicile the victim of my impetuosity and poor marksmanship.”
Doom sighed, took up a candle, and led the way into the passage. A chill air was in the corridor, that smelled like a cellar underground, and as their footsteps sounded reverberant upon the flags uncar-peted, Doom Castle gave the stranger the impression of a vault. Fantastic shadows danced macabre in the light of the candles; they were the only furniture of that part of the rough dwelling that the owner shuffled through as quickly as he could to save his guest from spying too closely the barrenness of the land. He went first to the outer door with the candle before he said good night, drew back great bars, and opened the oak. The sky was studded with pale golden stars; the open air was dense with the perfume of the wood, the saline indication of the sea-ware. On the rocky edge of the islet at one part showed the white fringe of the waves now more peaceful; to the north brooded enormous hills, seen dimly by the stars, couchant terrors, vague, vast shapes of dolours and alarms. Doom stood long looking at them with the flame of the candle blowing inward and held above his head—a mysterious man beyond Montaiglon's comprehension. He stood behind him a pace or two, shivering in the evening air.
“You'll be seeing little there, I'll warrant, Count, but a cold night and inhospitable vacancy, hard hills and the robber haunting them. For me, that prospect is my evening prayer. I cannot go to sleep without it, for fear I wake in Paradise and find it's all by with Doom and the native hills for me.”
And by that he seemed to Montaiglon more explicable: it was the lover he was; the sentimentalist, the poet, knowing the ancient secret of the animate earth, taking his hills and valleys passionately to his heart. The Frenchman bowed his sympathy and understanding.
“It's a wonder Mungo kept his word and went to bed,” said the Baron, recovering his ordinary manner, “for it would just suit his whim to bide up and act sentry here, very well pleased at the chance your coming gave him of play-acting the man of war.”
He bolted the door again with its great bars, then gravely preceded his guest to the foot of the turret stair, where he handed him the candle.
“You're in a dreary airt of the house,” he said apologetically, “but I hope you may find it not uncomfortable. Doom is more than two-thirds but empty shell, and the bats have the old chapel above you. Oidhche mhath! Good night!” He turned upon his heel and was gone into the farther end of the passage.
As Montaiglon went up to his room, the guttering candle flame, puffed at by hidden and mischievous enemies from broken ports and gun-slits, showed upon the landing lower than his own a long corridor he had not observed upon his first ascent. With the candle held high above his head he glanced into the passage, that seemed to have several doors on either hand. In a castle so sparsely occupied the very knowledge of this long and empty corridor in the neighbourhood of his sleeping apartment conferred a sense of chill and mystery. He thought he could perceive the odour of damp, decayed wood, crumbled lime, hanging rotten in stagnant airs and covered with the dust of years. “Dieu!” he exclaimed involuntarily, “this is no Cammercy.” He longed for some relief from the air of mystery and dread that hung about the place. A laugh would have been a revelation, a strain of song a miracle of healing. And all at once he reflected upon the Annapla as yet unseen.
“These might be her quarters,” he reflected, finding a solace in the thought. The chill was at once less apparent, a pleasant glow of companionship came over him. Higher up he held the light to see the farther into the long passage, and as he did so the flame was puffed out. It seemed so human a caprice that he drew himself sharply against the wall, ready by instinct to evade any rush or thrust that was to follow. And then he smiled at his own alarm at a trick of the wind through some of La-mond's ill-patched walls, and found his consolation in the sense of companionship confirmed by sight of a thin line of light below a door mid-way up the curious passage.
“Annapla, for a louis!” he thought cheerfully. “Thank heaven for one petticoat in Doom—though that, in truth, is to concede the lady but a scanty wardrobe.” And he hummed softly as he entered his own room.
Wearied exceedingly by the toils of the day, he had no sooner thrown himself upon the bed than he slept with no need for the lullaby aid of the sea that rumoured light and soothingly round the rock of Doom.
CHAPTER V — THE FLAGEOLET
He woke from a dream of pressing danger and impotent flight to marvel where he was in darkness; fancied himself at first in some wayside inn mid-way over Scotland, and sat up suddenly with an exclamation of assurance that he was awake to the suppositious landlord who had called, for the sense of some sound but stilled on the second of his waking was strong within him. He fastened upon the vague starlit space of the little window to give him a clew to his situation. Then he remembered Doom, and, with the window for his key, built up the puzzle of his room, wondering at the cause of his alarm.
The wind had risen and sent a loud murmur through the trees along the coast; the sea, in breakers again, beat on the rock till Doom throbbed. But there was nothing in that to waken a man who had ridden two days on coarse roads and encountered and fought with banditti. Decidedly there was some menace in the night; danger on hard fields had given him blood alert and unsleeping; the alarum was drumming at his breast. Stealthily he put out his hand, and it fell as by a fiddler's instinct upon the spot desired—the hilt of his sword. There he kept it with his breath subdued, and the alarum severely quelled.
An owl's call sounded on the shore, extremely pensive in its note, and natural, but unusual in the rhythm of its repetition. It might have passed for the veritable call of the woods to an unsuspicious ear, but Montaiglon knew it for a human signal. As if to prove it so, it was followed by the grating of the outer door upon its hinge, and the sound of a foot stumbling among stones.
He reflected that the tide was out in all probability, and at once the notion followed that here were his searchers, the Macfarlanes, back in force to revenge his impetuous injury to their comrades. But then—a second thought almost as promptly told him in that case there should be no door opened.
A sound of subdued voices came from the foot of the tower and died in the garden behind or was swept elsewhere by the wind; then, through the voice of the wave, the moan of the wind, and its whistle in vent and cranny, came a strain of music—not the harsh uncultured pipe of Mungo the servitor, but a more dulcet air of flute or flageolet. In those dark savage surroundings it seemed a sound inhuman, something unreal, something of remembrance in delirium or dream, charged for this Parisian with a thousand recollections of fond times, gay times, passionate times elsewhere. Doom throbbed to the waves, but the flageolet stirred in him not so much surprise at this incongruous experience as a wave of emotion where all his past of gaillard was crystalled in a second—many nights of dance and song anew experienced in a mellow note or two; an old love reincarnated in a phrase (and the woman in the dust); the evenings of Provence lived again, and Louis's darling flute piping from the chateau over the field and river; moons of harvest vocal with some peasant cheer; in the south the nightingale searching to express his kinship with the mind of man and the creatures of the copse, his rapture at the star.
Somehow the elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in passionate crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon—and yet it was too short—the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains. Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with tears at his father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance gave quickness to the execution.
But more haunting than all was one simple strain and brief, indeed never wholly accomplished, as if the player sought to recollect a song forgot, that was repeated over and over again, as though it were the motive of the others or refrain. Sometimes Montaiglon thought the player had despaired of concluding this bewitching melody when he changed suddenly to another, and he had a very sorrow at his loss; again, when its progress to him was checked by a veering current of the wind and the flageolet rose once more with a different tune upon it, he dreaded that the conclusion had been found in the lacuna.
He rose at last and went to the window, and tried in the wan illumination of the heavens to detect the mysterious musician in the garden, but that was quite impossible: too dark the night, too huge and profound the shadows over Doom. He went to his door and opened it and looked down the yawning stairway; only the sigh of the wind in the gun-slits occupied the stairway, and the dark was the dark of Genesis. And so again to bed, to lie with his weariness for long forgotten. He found that tantalising fragment return again and again, but fated never to be complete. It seemed, he fancied, something like a symbol of a life—with all the qualities there, the sweetness, the affection, the passion, the divine despair, the longing, even the valours and the faiths to make a great accomplishment, but yet lacking the round accomplishment. And as he waited once again for its recurrence he fell asleep.
CHAPTER VI — MUNGO BOYD
It was difficult for Count Victor, when he went abroad in the morning, to revive in memory the dreary and mysterious impressions of his arrival; and the melody he had heard so often half-completed in the dark waste and hollow of the night was completely gone from his recollection, leaving him only the annoying sense of something on the tongue's-tip, as we say, but as unattainable as if it had never been heard. As he walked upon a little knoll that lay between the seaside of the castle and the wave itself, he found an air of the utmost benignity charged with the odours of wet autumn woodlands in a sunshine. And the sea stretched serene; the mists that had gathered in the night about the hills were rising like the smoke of calm hearths into a sky without a cloud. The castle itself, for all its natural arrogance and menace, had something pleasant in its aspect looked at from this small eminence, where the garden did not display its dishevelment and even the bedraggled bower seen from the rear had a look of trim' composure.
To add to the morning's cheerfulness Mungo was afoot whistling a ballad air of the low country, with a regard for neither time nor tune in his puckered lips as he sat on a firkin-head at an outhouse door and gutted some fish he had caught with his own hands in a trammel net at the river-mouth before Montaiglon was awake and the bird, as the Gaelic goes, had drunk the water.
“Gude mornin' to your honour,” he cried with an elaborately flourished salute as Montaiglon sauntered up to him. “Ye're early on the move, Monsher; a fine caller mornin'. I hope ye sleepit weel; it was a gowsty nicht.”
In spite of his assumed indifference and the purely casual nature of his comment upon the night, there was a good deal of cunning, thought Montaiglon, in the beady eyes of him, but the stranger only smiled at the ease of those Scots domestic manners.
“I did very well, I thank you,” said he. “My riding and all the rest of it yesterday would have made me sleep soundly inside the drum of a marching régiment.”
“That's richt, that's richt,” said Mungo, ostentatiously handling the fish with the awkward repugnance of one unaccustomed to a task so menial, to prove perhaps that cleansing them was none of his accustomed office. “That's richt. When we were campaignin' wi' Marlborough oor lads had many a time to sleep wi' the cannon dirlin' aboot them. Ye get us'd to't, ye get us'd to't, as Annapla says aboot bein' a weedow woman. And if ye hae noticed it, Coont, there's nae people mair adapted for fechtin' under diffeeculties than oor ain; that's what maks the Scots the finest sogers in the warld. It's the build o' them, 'Lowlan' or 'Hielan', the breed o' them; the dour hard character o' their country and their mainner o' leevin'. We gied the English a fleg at the 'Forty-five,' didnae we? That was where the tartan cam' in: man, there's naethin' like us!”
“You do not speak like a Highlander,” said Montaiglon, finding some of this gasconade unintelligible.
“No, I'm no' exactly a'thegether a Hielan'man,” Mungo admitted, “though I hae freends con-nekit wi' the auldest clans, and though I'm, in a mainner o' speakin', i' the tail o' Doom, as I was i' the tail o' his faither afore him—peace wi' him, he was the grand soger!—but Hielan' or Lowland, we gied them their scuds at the 'Forty-five.' Scots regiments, sir, a' the warld ower, hae had the best o't for fechtin', marchin', or glory. See them at the auld grand wars o' Sweden wi' Gus-tavus, was there ever the like o' them? Or in your ain country, whaure's the bate o' the Gairde Ecossay, as they ca't?”
He spoke with such a zest, he seemed to fire with such a martial glow, that Montaiglon began to fancy that this amusing grotesque, who in stature came no higher than his waist, might have seen some service as sutler or groom in a campaigning regiment.
“Ma foi!” he exclaimed, with his surprise restrained from the most delicate considerations for the little man's feelings; “have you been in the wars?”
It was manifestly a home-thrust to Mungo. He had risen, in his moment of braggadocio, and was standing over the fish with a horn-hilted gutting-knife in his hands, that were sanguine with his occupation, and he had, in the excess of his feeling, made a flourish of the knife, as if it were a dagger, when Montaiglon's query checked him. He was a bubble burst, his backbone—that braced him to the tension of a cuirassier of guards—melted into air, into thin air, and a ludicrous limpness came on him, while his eye fell, and confusion showed about his mouth.
“In the wars!” he repeated. “Weel—no jist a'thegether what ye micht call i' the wars—though in a mainner o' speakin', gey near't. I had an uncle oot wi' Balmerina; ye may hae heard tell o'm, a man o' tremendous valour, as was generally al-ooed—Dugald Boyd, by my faither's side. There's been naethin' but sogers in oor family since the be-ginnin' o' time, and mony ane o' them's deid and dusty in foreign lands. It it hadnae been for the want o' a half inch or thereby in the height o' my heels “—here he stood upon his toes—“I wad hae been in the airmy mysel'. It's the only employ for a man o' spunk, and there's spunk in Mungo Boyd, mind I'm tellin' ye!”
“It is the most obvious thing in the world, good Mungo,” said Montaiglon, smiling. “You eviscerate fish with the gusto of a gladiator.”
And then an odd thing happened to relieve Mungo's embarrassment and end incontinent his garrulity. Floating on the air round the bulge of the turret came a strain of song in a woman's voice, not powerful, but rich and sweet, young in its accent, the words inaudible but the air startling to Count Victor, who heard no more than half a bar before he had realised that it was the unfinished melody of the nocturnal flageolet. Before he could comment upon so unexpected and surprising a phenomenon, Mungo had dropped his gutting-knife and made with suspicious rapidity for the entrance of the castle, without a word of explanation or leave-taking.
“I become decidedly interested in Annapla,” said Montaiglon to himself, witnessing this odd retreat, “and my host gives me no opportunity of paying my homages. Malediction! It cannot be a wife; Bethune said nothing of a wife, and then M. le Baron spoke of himself as a widower. A domestic, doubtless; that will more naturally account for the ancient fishmonger's fleet retirement. He goes to chide the erring Abigail. Or—or—or the cunning wretch!” continued Montaiglon with new meaning in his eyes, “he is perhaps the essential lover. Let the Baron at breakfast elucidate the mystery.”
But the Baron at breakfast said never a word of the domestic economy of his fortalice. As they sat over a frugal meal of oat porridge, the poached fish, and a smoky, high-flavoured mutton ham, whose history the Count was happy not to know, his host's conversation was either upon Paris, where he had spent some months of sad expatriation, yawning at its gaiety (it seemed) and longing for the woods of Doom; or upon the plan of the search for the spy and double traitor.
Montaiglon's plans were simple to crudeness. He had, though he did not say so, anticipated some assistance from Doom in identifying the object of his search; but now that this was out of the question, he meant, it appeared, to seek the earliest and most plausible excuse for removal into the immediate vicinity of Argyll's castle, and on some pretext to make the acquaintance of as many of the people there as he could, then to select his man from among them, and push his affair to a conclusion.
“A plausible scheme,” said Doom when he heard it, “but contrived without any knowledge of the situation. It's not Doom, M. le Count—-oh no, it's not Doom down by there; it's a far more kittle place to learn the outs and ins of. The army and the law are about it, the one about as numerous as the other, and if your Drimdarroch, as I take it, is a traitor on either hand—to Duke Archie as well as to the king across the water, taking the money of both as has happened before now, he'll be no Drimdarroch you may wager, and not kent as such down there. Indeed, how could he? for Petullo the writer body is the only Drimdarroch there is to the fore, and he has a grieve in the place. Do you think this by-named Drimdarroch will be going about cocking his bonnet over his French amours and his treasons? Have you any notion that he will be the more or the less likely to do so when he learns that there's a French gentleman of your make in the country-side, and a friend of Doom's, too, which means a Jacobite? A daft errand, if I may say it; seeking a needle in a haystack was bairn's play compared to it.”
“If you sit down on the haystack you speedily find the needle, M. le Baron,” said Montaiglon playfully. “In other words, trust my sensibility to feel the prick of his presence whenever I get into his society. The fact that he may suspect my object here will make him prick all the quicker and all the harder.”
“Even yet you don't comprehend Argyll's court. It's not Doom, mind you, but a place hotching with folk—half a hundred perhaps of whom have travelled as this Drimdarroch has travelled, and in Paris too, and just of his visage perhaps. Unless you challenged them all seriatim, as Petullo would say, I see no great prospect.”
“I wish we could coax the fly here! That or something like it was what I half expected to be able to do when Bethune gave me your address as that of a landlord in the neighbourhood.”
Doom reddened, perhaps with shame at the altered condition of his state in the house of his fathers. “I've seen the day,” said he—“I've seen the day they were throng enough buzzing about Doom, but that was only so long as honey was to rob with a fair face and a nice humming at the robbery. Now that I'm a rooked bird and Doom a herried nest, they never look the road I'm on.”
Mungo, standing behind his master's chair, gave a little crackling laugh and checked it suddenly at the angry flare in his master's face.
“You're mighty joco!” said the Baron; “perhaps you'll take my friend and me into your confidence;” and he frowned with more than one meaning at the little-abashed retainer.
“Paurdon! paurdon!” said Mungo, every part of the chart-like face thrilled with some uncontrollable sense of drollery, and he exploded in laughter more violent than ever.
“Mungo!” cried his master in the accent of authority.
The domestic drew himself swiftly to attention.
“Mungo!” said his master, “you're a damned fool! In the army ye would have got the triangle for a good deal less. Right about face.”
Mungo saluted and made the required retreat with a great deal less than his usual formality.
“There's a bit crack in the creature after all,” said the Baron, displaying embarrassment and annoyance, and he quickly changed the conversation, but with a wandering mind, as Count Victor could not fail to notice. The little man, to tell the truth, had somehow laughed at the wrong moment for Count Victor's peace of mind. For why should he be amused at the paucity of the visitors from Argyll's court to the residence of Doom? Across the table at a man unable to conceal his confusion Montaiglon stole an occasional glance with suspicion growing on him irresistibly.
An inscrutable face was there, as many Highland faces were to him, even among old friends in France, where Balhaldie, with the best possible hand at a game of cards, kept better than any gambler he had ever known before a mask of dull and hopeless resignation. The tongue was soft and fair-spoken, the hand seemed generous enough, but this by all accounts had been so even with Drimdarroch himself, and Drimdarroch was rotten to the core.
“Very curious,” thought Montaiglon, making poor play with his braxy ham. “Could Bethune be mistaken in this extraordinary Baron?” And he patched together in his mind Mungo's laughter with the Baron's history as briefly known to him, and the inexplicable signal and alarm of the night.
“Your Mademoiselle Annapla seems to be an entrancing vocalist,” said he airily, feeling his way to a revelation.
The Baron, in his abstraction, scarcely half comprehended.
“The maid,” he said, “just the maid!” and never a word more, but into a new topic.
“I trust so,” thought the Count; “but the fair songster who signals from her window and has clandestine meetings at midnight with masculine voices must expect some incredulity on that point. Can it be possible that here I have Bluebeard or Lothario? The laughter of the woman seems to indicate that if here is not Lothario, here at all events is something more than seems upon the surface. Tonnerre de dieu! I become suspicious of the whole breed of mountaineers. And not a word about last night's alarm—that surely, in common courtesy, demands some explanation to the guest whose sleep is marred.”
They went out together upon the mainland in the forenoon to make inquiries as to the encounter with the Macfarlanes, of whose presence not a sign remained. They had gone as they had come, without the knowledge of the little community on the south of Doom, and the very place among the bracken where the Count had dropped his bird revealed no feather; the rain of the morning had obliterated every other trace. He stood upon the very spot whence he had fired at the luckless robber, and restored, with the same thrill of apprehension, the sense of mystery and of dread that had hung round him as he stole the day before through voiceless woods to the sound of noisy breakers on a foreign shore. He saw again the brake nod in a little air of wind as if a form was harboured, and the pagan rose in him—not the sceptic but the child of nature, early and remote, lost in lands of silence and of omen in dim-peopled and fantastic woods upon the verge of clamorous seas.
“Dieu!” said he with a shiver, turning to his host. “This is decidedly not Verrays in the Rue Conde. I would give a couple of louis d'or for a moment of the bustle of Paris.
“A sad place yon!” said Doom.
And back they went to the castle to play a solemn game of lansquenet.
CHAPTER VII — THE BAY OF THE BOAR'S HEAD
A solemn game indeed, for the Baron was a man of a sobriety unaccountable to Montaiglon, who, from what he knew of Macdonnel of Barisdel, Mac-leod, Balhaldie, and the others of the Gaelic gang in Paris, had looked for a roysterer in Doom. It was a man with strange melancholies he found there, with a ludicrous decorum for a person of his condition, rising regularly on the hour, it seemed, and retiring early to his chamber like a peasant, keeping no company with the neighbouring lairds because he could not even pretend to emulate their state, passing his days among a score of books in English, some (as the Sieur de Guille) in French, and a Bedel Bible in the Irish letter, and as often walking aimlessly about the shore looking ardently at the hills, and rehearsing to himself native rhymes that ever account native women the dearest and the same hills the most beautiful in God's creation. He was the last man to look to for aid in an enterprise like Montaiglon's: if he had an interest in the exploit it seemed it was only to discourage the same, and an hour or two of his company taught the Count he must hunt his spy unaided.
But the hunting of the spy, in the odd irrelevance or inconsistency of nature, was that day at least an enterprise altogether absent from his thoughts. He had been diverted from the object of his journey to Scotland by just such a hint at romance as never failed to fascinate a Montaiglon, and he must be puzzling himself about the dulcet singer and her share in the clandestine midnight meeting. When he had finished his game with his host, and the latter had pleaded business in the burgh as an excuse for his absence in the afternoon, Count Victor went round Doom on every side trying to read its mystery. While it was a house whose very mortar must be drenched with tradition, whose every window had looked upon histories innumerable worth retelling, nothing was revealed of the matter in hand.
Many rooms of it were obviously unoccupied, for in the domestic routine of the Baron and of Mungo and the lady of song there were two storeys utterly unoccupied, and even in the flats habited there were seemingly chambers vacant, at least ever unopened and forlorn. Count Victor realised, as he looked at the frowning and taciturn walls, that he might be in Doom a twelvemonth and have no chance to learn from that abstracted scholar, its owner, one-half of its interior economy.
From the ground he could get no clear view of the woman's window: that he discovered early, for it was in the woman he sought the key to all Doom's little mystery. He must, to command the window, climb to his own chamber in the tower, and even then it was not a full front view he had, but a foreshortened glance at the side of it and the signal, if any more signalling there might be. He never entered that room without a glance along the sun-lit walls; he never passed the mouth of that corridor on the half landing where his candle had blown out without as curious a scrutiny as good-breeding might permit. And nothing was disclosed.
Mungo pervaded the place—Mungo toiling in the outhouses at tasks the most menial, feeding the half-dozen moulting poultry, digging potatoes in the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairs with backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; and in the salle the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholy by rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking with pensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon his knee—that was Doom as Count Victor was permitted to know it.
He began at last to doubt his senses, and half believe that what he had heard on the night of his arrival had been some chimera, a dream of a wearied and imperilled man in unaccustomed surroundings.
Mungo saw him walk with poorly concealed curiosity about the outside of the stronghold, and smiled to himself as one who knows the reason for a gentleman's prying. Montaiglon caught that smile once: his chagrin at its irony was blended with a pleasing delusion that the frank and genial domestic might proffer a solution without indelicate questioning. But he was soon undeceived: the discreet retainer knew but three things in this world—the grandeur of war, the ancient splendour of the house of Doom, and the excellent art of absent-mindedness. When it came to the contents of Doom, Mungo Boyd was an oyster.
“It must have been a place of some importance in its day,” said Count Victor, gazing up at the towering walls and the broken embrasures.
“And what is't yet?” demanded Mungo, jealously, with no recollection that a moment ago he had been mourning its decline.
“Eh bien! It is quite charming, such of it as I have had the honour to see; still, when the upper stages were habitable———” and Count Victor mentally cursed his luck that he must fence with a blunt-witted scullion.
“Oh, ay! I'll alio' I've seen it no' sae empty, if that's what ye mean; but if it's no' jist Dumbarton or Dunedin, it's still auld bauld Doom, and an ill deevil to crack, as the laddie said that found the nutmeg.”
“But surely,” conceded Montaiglon, “and yet, and yet—have you ever heard of Jericho, M. Boyd? Its capitulation was due to so simple a thing as the playing of a trumpet or two.”
“I ken naething aboot trumpets,” said Mungo curtly, distinguishing some arrière pensée in the interrogator.
“Fi donc! and you so much the old sabreur! Perhaps your people marched to the flageolet—a seductive instrument, I assure you.”
The little man betrayed confusion. “Annapla thrieps there's a ghaistly flageolet aboot Doom,” said he, “but it'll hae to toil away lang or the wa's o' oor Jericho fa',—they're seeven feet thick.”
“He plays divinely, this ghostly flageoleteer, and knows his Handel to a demi-semi-quaver,” said Count Victor coolly.
“O Lord! lugs! I told them that!” muttered Mungo.
“Pardon!”
“Naething; we're a' idiots noo and then, and—and I maun awa' in.”
So incontinently he parted from Count Victor, who, to pass the afternoon, went walking on the mainland highway. He walked to the south through the little hamlet he and Doom had visited earlier in the day; and as the beauty of the scenery allured him increasingly the farther he went, he found himself at last on a horn of the great bay where the Duke's seat lay sheltered below its hilly ramparts. As he had walked to this place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea was now a fleet of fishing-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting out upon their evening travail—a heartening spectacle; and that on either side of him—once the squalid huts of Doom were behind—was a more dainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was not wholly unprepared for the noble view revealed when he turned the point of land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.
But yet the sight somewhat stunned. In all his notions of Drimdarroch's habitation, since he had seen the poverty of Doom, he had taken his idea from the baron's faded splendour, and had ludicrously underestimated the importance of Argyll's court and the difficulty of finding his man. Instead of a bleak bare country-side, with the ducal seat a mean tower in the midst of it, he saw a wide expanse of thickly-wooded and inhabitable country speckled for miles with comfortable dwellings, the castle itself a high embattled structure, clustered round by a town of some dimensions, and at its foot a harbour, where masts were numerous and smoke rose up in clouds.
Here was, plainly, a different society from Doom; here was something of what the exiled chiefs had bragged of in their cups. The Baron had suggested no more than a dozen of cadets about the place. Grand Dieu! there must be a regiment in and about this haughty palace, with its black and yellow banner streaming in the wind, and to seek Drimdarroch there and round that busy neighbourhood seemed a task quite hopeless.
For long he stood on the nose of land, gazing with a thousand speculations at where probably lay his prey; and when he returned to the castle of Doom it looked all the more savage and inhospitable in contrast with the lordly domicile he had seen. What befell him there on his return was so odd and unexpected that it clean swept his mind again of every interest in the spy.
CHAPTER VIII — AN APPARITION
The tide in his absence had come in around the rock of Doom, and he must signal for Mungo's ferry. Long and loud he piped, but there was at first no answer; and when at last the little servitor appeared, it was to look who called, and then run back with a haste no way restrained by any sense of garrison punctilio. He was not long gone, but when he came down again to the boat his preparations for crossing took up an unconscionable time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and then a thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bow unaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo, though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality. He seemed to be the family's friend resenting, as far as politeness might, some inconvenience to which it was being subjected without having the power to prevent the same.
Before they had gained the rock, dusk was on the country, brought the sooner for a frost-fog that had been falling all afternoon. It wrapped the woods upon the shore, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doom itself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a place less hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peace it seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drab sky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen, flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the shore side no light illumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in what he fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless in the chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance on which Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.
Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observation of anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenest interest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as it reached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo had left open.
What had been a crêpe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. The corridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was like a wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a door somewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment a gleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately by a hurried step coming down the stair.
At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, but the masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.
“M. le Baron,” he concluded, “and home before me by another route,” and he stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give passage. But the darkness made identity impossible, and he waited the recognition of himself. It never came. He was brushed past as by a somnambulist, without greeting or question, though to accomplish it the other in the narrow stairway had to rub clothes with him. Something utterly unexpected in the apparition smote him with surprise and apprehension. It was as if he had encountered something groping in a mausoleum—something startling to the superstitious instinct, though not terrific in a material way. When it passed he stood speechless on the stair, looking down into the profound black, troubled with amazement, full of speculation. All the suspicions that he had felt last night, when the signal-calls rose below the turret and the door had opened and the flageolet had disturbed his slumbers, came back to him more sinister, more compelling than before. He listened to the declining footfall of that silent mystery; a whisper floated upwards, a door creaked, no more than that, and yet the effect was wildly disturbing, even to a person of the sang froid of Montaiglon.
At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood a space on the floor, lost in thought. When he looked at his face, half unconscious that he did so, in a little mirror on a table, he saw revealed there no coward terrors, but assuredly alarm. He smiled at his pallid image, tugged in Gascon manner at his moustache, and threw out his chest; then his sense of humour came to him, and he laughed at the folly of his perturbation. But he did not keep the mood long.
“My sans culottes surely do not share the hospitality of Doom with me in its owner's absence,” he reflected. “And yet, and yet—! I owe Bethune something for the thrill of the experiences he has introduced me to. Now I comprehend the affection of those weeping exiles for the very plain and commonplace life of France they profess to think so indifferent a country compared with this they have left behind. A week of these ghosts would drive me to despair. To-morrow—to-morrow—M. de Montaiglon—to-morrow you make your reluctant adieux to Doom and its inexplicable owner, whose surprise and innuendo are altogether too exciting for your good health.”
So he promised himself as he walked up and down the floor of his chamber, feeling himself in a cage, yet unable to think how he was to better his condition without the aid of the host whose mysteries disturbed so much by the suspicions they aroused. Bethune had told him Lamond, in spite of his politics and his comparative poverty, was on neighbourly terms with Argyll, and would thus be in a position to put him in touch with the castle of the Duke and the retinue there without creating any suspicion as to the nature of his mission. It was that he had depended on, and to no other quarter could he turn with a hope of being put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom was apparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, at variance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuits with which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesome old manner with the sword, indulged their contestful passions, and he presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his most hopeless moments had never allowed for—he did not know the identity of the man sought for, and he questioned if it could easily be established. All these considerations determined Count Victor upon an immediate removal from this starven castle and this suspicious host. But when he joined Doom in the salle he constrained his features to a calm reserve, showing none of his emotions.
He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciously loud but abstracted interest in his ramble.
“Well, Count,” said he, “ye've seen the castle of the King o' the Hielan's, as we call him, have you? And what think ye of MacCailen's quarters?”
Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at his interrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessed them charming.
A bitter smile came on the face of his host. “They might well be that,” said he. “There's many a picking there.” And then he became garrulous upon the tale of his house and family, that seemed to have been dogged by misfortune for a century and a half; that had owned once many of these lush glens, the shoulders of these steep bens, the shores of that curving coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed off in successive generations, lost to lust, to the gambler's folly, the spendthrift's weakness.
“Hard, is it not?” questioned his host. “I'm the man that should have Doom at its very best, for I could bide among my people here, and like them, and make them like me, without a thought of rambling about the world. 'Mildewing with a ditch between you and life' my grandfather used to call it, when old age took him back from his gaieties abroad. Faith! I wish I had the chance to do it better than I may. All's here I ever wanted of life, and I have tasted it elsewhere, too. Give me my own acres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeed from the rise of the sun till bedtime—a short day and a happy. My father used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point of Strome where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in the port down-by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood of him. If he saw a light out there at sea—the lamp of a ship outbound—he would stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As for me, no ship-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star coming up above the hill Ardno.”
“To-morrow,” said Montaiglon—“to-morrow is another day; that's my consolation in every trial.”
“At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that,” admitted Doom; “at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it.”
Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that sometimes swept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back and back at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him, he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plotting something? And with whom? What was the secret of that wind-blown castle, its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning there, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrilling moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway; but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless of reading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room for some clue to what he found nowhere else.
A chamber plain to meanness—there seemed nothing here to help him to a solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangey and dusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a window only sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentious interior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dog-eared documents of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a downfallen house had come about.
Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.
“Ay!” he said, “that's the ashes of Doom, all that's left of what we burned in fiery living and hot law-pleas. We have the ash and the others have warm hands.”
Count Victor, who had been warming his chilled fingers at the fire, moved to the curtain and drew it back, the better again to see that doleful cinerary urn.
His host rose hurriedly from his chair.
“Trash! trash! Only trash, and dear bought at that,” said he, seeing his guest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness.
But the deed was done before the implied protest was attended. The Count's movements revealed a Highland dagger concealed beneath one of the parchments! It was a discovery of no importance in a Highland castle, where, in spite of the proscription of weapons, there might innocently be something so common as a dagger left; but a half-checked cry from the Baron stirred up again all Count Victor's worst suspicions.
He looked at Doom, and saw his face was hot with some confusion, and that his tongue stammered upon an excuse his wits were not alert enough to make.
He stooped and picked up the weapon—an elegant instrument well adorned with silver on the hilt and sheath; caught it at the point, and, leaning the hilt upon his left wrist in the manner of the courtier slightly exaggerated, and true to the delicacies of the salle-d'armes, proffered it to the owner.
Doom laughed in some confusion. “Ah!” said he, lamely, “Mungo's been at his dusting again,” and he tried to restore the easiness of the conversation that the incident had so strangely marred.
But Montaiglon could not so speedily restore his equanimity. For the unknown who had so unceremoniously brushed against him on the dark stair had been attired in tartan clothes. It had been a bare knee that had touched him on the leg; it had been a plaid-fringe that had brushed across his face; and his knuckles had been rapped lightly by the protuberances upon the sheath and hilt of a mountain dagger. M. le Baron's proscription of arms seemed to have some strange exceptions, he told himself. They were not only treated with contempt by the Macfarlanes, but even in Doom Castle, whose owner affected to look upon the garb of his ancestors as something well got rid of. For the life of him, Count Victor could not disassociate the thought of that mysterious figure on the stair, full clad in all Highland panoply against the law, and the men—the broken men—who had shot his pony in the wood and attempted to rob him. All the eccentricities of his host mustered before him—his narrow state here with but one servant apparent, a mysterious room tenanted by an invisible woman, and his coldness—surely far from the Highland temper—to the Count's scheme of revenge upon the fictitious Drimdarroch.
There was an awkward pause even the diplomacy of the Frenchman could not render less uncomfortable, and the Baron fumbled with the weapon ere he laid it down again on the table.
“By the way,” said Count Victor, now with his mind made up, “I see no prospect of pushing my discoveries from here, and it is also unfair that I should involve you in my adventure, that had much better be conducted from the plain base of an inn, if such there happens to be in the town down there.”
A look of unmistakable relief, quelled as soon as it breathed across his face, came to the Baron. “Your will is my pleasure,” he said quickly; “but there is at this moment no man in the world who could be more welcome to share my humble domicile.”.
“Yet I think I could work with more certainty of a quick success from a common lodging in the town than from here. I have heard that now and then French fish dealers and merchants sometimes come for barter to this coast and——”
The ghost of a smile came over Doom's face. “They could scarcely take you for a fish merchant, M. le Count,” said he.
“At all events common fairness demands that I should adopt any means that will obviate getting your name into the thing, and I think I shall try the inn. Is there one?”
“There is the best in all the West Country there,” said Doom, “kept by a gentleman of family and attainments. But it will not do for you to go down there without some introduction. I shall have to speak of your coming to some folk and see if it is a good time.”
“Eh bien! Remember at all events that I am in affairs,” said Montaiglon, and the thing was settled.
CHAPTER IX — TRAPPED
It was only at the dawn, or the gloaming, or in night itself—and above all in the night—that the castle of Doom had its tragic aspect. In the sun of midday, as Count Victor convinced himself on the morrow of a night with no alarms, it could be almost cheerful, and from the garden there was sometimes something to be seen with interest of a human kind upon the highway on the shore.
A solitary land, but in the happy hours people were passing to and fro between the entrances to the ducal seat and the north. Now and then bands of vagrants from the heights of Glencroe and the high Rest where Wade's road bent among the clouds would pass with little or no appeal to the hospitality of Doom, whose poverty they knew; now and then rustics in red hoods, their feet bare upon the gravel, made for the town market, sometimes singing as they went till their womanly voices, even in airs unfamiliar and a language strange and guttural, gave to Count Victor an echo of old mirth in another and a warmer land. Men passed on rough short ponies; once a chariot with a great caleche roof swung on the rutless road, once a company of red-coat soldiery shot like a gleam of glory across the afternoon, moving to the melody of a fife and drum.
For the latter Mungo had a sour explanation. They were come, it seemed, to attend a trial for murder. A clansman of the Duke's and a far-out cousin (in the Highland manner of speaking) had been shot dead in the country of Appin; the suspected assassin, a Stewart of course, was on trial; the blood of families and factions was hot over the business, and the Government was sending its soldiery to convoy James Stewart of the Glen, after his conviction, back to the place of execution.
“But, mon Dieu! he is yet to try, is he not?” cried Count Victor.
“Oh ay!” Mungo acquiesced, “but that doesna' maitter; the puir cratur is as guid as scragged. The tow's aboot his thrapple and kittlin' him already, I'll warrant, for his name's Stewart, and in this place I would sooner be ca'd Beelzebub; I'd hae a better chance o' my life if I found mysel' in trouble wi' a Campbell jury to try me.”
Montaiglon watched this little cavalcade of military march along the road, with longing in his heart for the brave and busy outside world they represented. He watched them wistfully till they had disappeared round the horn of land he had stood on yesterday, and their fife and drum had altogether died upon the air of the afternoon. And turning, he found the Baron of Doom silent at his elbow, looking under his hat-brim at the road.
“More trouble for the fesse checkey, Baron,” said he, indicating the point whereto the troops had gone.
“The unluckiest blazon on a coat,” replied the castellan of Doom; “trouble seems to be the part of every one who wears it. It's in a very unwholesome quarter when it comes into the boar's den—”
“Boar's den?” repeated Montaiglon interrogatively.
“The head of the pig is his Grace's cognisance. Clan Diarmaid must have got it first by raiding in some Appin stye, as Petullo my doer down-by says. He is like most men of his trade, Petullo; he is ready to make his treasonable joke even against the people who pay him wages, and I know he gets the wages of the Duke as well as my fees. I'm going down to transact some of the weary old business with him just now, and I'll hint at your coming. A Bordeaux wine merchant—it will seem more like the thing than the fish dealer.”
“And I know a good deal more about wine than about fish,” laughed Count Victor, “so it will be safer.”
“I think you would be best to have been coming to the town when the Macfarlanes attacked you, killed your horse, and chased you into my place. That's the most plausible story we can tell, and it has the virtue of being true in every particular, without betraying that Bethune or friendship for myself was in any part of it.”
“I can leave it all to your astuteness,” said Montaiglon.
The Baron was absent, as he had suggested was possible, all day. The afternoon was spent by Count Victor in a dull enough fashion, for even Mungo seemed morose in his master's absence, perhaps overweighted by the mysteries now left to his charge, disinclined to talk of anything except the vast wars in which his ancestors had shone with blinding splendour, and of the world beyond the confines of Doom. But even his store of reminiscence became exhausted, and Count Victor was left to his own resources. Back again to his seat on the rock he went, and again to the survey of the mainland that seemed so strangely different a clime from this where nothing dwelt but secrecy and decay.
In the afternoon the traffic on the highway had ceased, for the burgh now held all of that wide neighbourhood that had leisure, or any excuse of business to transact in the place where a great event was happening. The few that moved in the sun of the day were, with but one exception, bound for the streets; the exception naturally created some wonder on the part of Count Victor.
For it was a man in the dress (to judge at a distance) of a gentleman, and his action was singular. He was riding a jet-black horse of larger stature than any that the rustics and farmers who had passed earlier in the day bestrode, and he stood for a time half-hidden among trees opposite the place where Count Victor reclined on a patch of grass among whin-bushes. Obviously he did not see Montaiglon, to judge from the calmness of his scrutiny, and assuredly it was not to the Frenchman that, after a little, he waved a hand. Count Victor turned suddenly and saw a responsive hand withdrawn from the window that had so far monopolised all his interest in Doom's exterior.
Annapla had decidedly an industrious wooer, more constant than the sun itself, for he seemed to shine in her heavens night and day.
There was, in a sense, but little in the incident, which was open to a score of innocent or prosaic explanations, and the cavalier was spurring back a few minutes later to the south, but it confirmed Count Victor's determination to have done with Doom at the earliest, and off to where the happenings of the day were more lucid.
At supper-time the Baron had not returned. Mungo came up to discover Count Victor dozing over a stupid English book and wakened him to tell him so, and that supper was on the table. He toyed with the food, having no appetite, turned to his book again, and fell asleep in his chair. Mungo again came in and removed the dishes silently, and looked curiously at him—so much the foreigner in that place, so perjink in his attire, so incongruous in his lace with this solitary keep of the mountains. It was a strange face the servant turned upon him there at the door as he retired to his kitchen quarters. And he was not gone long when he came back with a woman who walked tiptoe into the doorway.
“That's the puir cratur,” said he; “seekin' for whit he'll never find, like the man with the lantern playin' ki-hoi wi' honesty.”
She looked with interest at the stranger, said no word, but disappeared.
The peats sunk upon the hearth, crumbling in hearts of fire: on the outer edges the ashes grew grey. The candles of coarse mould, stuck in a rude sconce upon the wall above the mantelshelf, guttered to their end, set aslant by wafts of errant wind that came in through the half-open door and crevices of the window. It grew cold, and Montaiglon shook himself into wakefulness. He sat up in his chair and looked about him with some sense of apprehension, with the undescribable instinct of a man who feels himself observed by eyes unseen, who has slept through an imminently dangerous moment.
He heard a voice outside.
“M. le Baron,” he concluded. “Late, but still in time to say good-night to the guest he rather cavalierly treats.” And he rose and went downstairs to meet his host. The great door was ajar. He went into the open air. The garden was utterly dark, for clouds obscured the stars, and the air was laden with the saline odour of the wrack below high-water mark. The tide was out. What he had expected was to see Mungo and his master, but behind the castle where they should have been there was no one, and the voices he heard had come from the side next the shore. He listened a little and took alarm, for it was not one voice but the voices of several people he heard, and in the muffled whispers of men upon some dishonest adventure. At once he recalled the Macfarlanes and the surmise of Baron Doom that in two nights they might be crying their slogan round the walls that harboured their enemy. He ran hastily back to the house, quickly resumed the sword that had proved little use to him before, took up the more businesslike pistol that had spoiled the features of the robber with the bladder-like head, and rushed downstairs again.
“Qui est la?” he demanded as he passed round the end of the house and saw dimly on the rock a group of men who had crossed upon the ebb. His appearance was apparently unexpected, for he seemed to cause surprise and a momentary confusion. Then a voice cried “Loch Sloy!” and the company made a rush to bear him down.
He withdrew hastily behind the wall of the garden where he had them at advantage. As he faced round, the assailants, by common consent, left one man to do his business. He was a large, well-built man, so far as might be judged in the gloom of the night, and he was attired in Highland clothes. The first of his acts was to throw off a plaid that muffled his shoulders; then he snapped a futile pistol, and fell back upon his sword, with which he laid out lustily.
In the dark it was impossible to make pretty fighting of the encounter. The Frenchman saw the odds too much against him, and realised the weakness of his flank; he lunged hurriedly through a poor guard of his opponent's, and pierced the fleshiness of the sword-arm. The man growled an oath, and Count Victor retreated.
Mungo, with a blanched face, was trembling in the entrance, and a woman was shrieking upstairs. The hall, lit by a flambeau that Mungo held in one hand, while the other held a huge horse-pistol, looked like the entrance to a dungeon,—something altogether sinister and ugly to the foreigner, who had the uneasy notion that he fought for his life in a prison. And the shrieks aloft rang wildly through the night like something in a story he had once read, with a mad woman incarcerated, and only to manifest herself when danger and mystery threatened.
“In ye come! in ye come!” cried the servant, trembling excessively till the flambeau shook in his hand and his teeth rattled together. “In ye come, and I'll bar the door.”
It was time, indeed, to be in; for the enemy leaped at the oak as Count Victor threw it back upon its hinges, rather dubious of the bars that were to withstand the weight without.
The sight of them reassured, however: they were no light bars Mungo drew forth from their channels in the masonry, but huge black iron-bound blocks a foot thick that ran in no staples, but could themselves secure the ponderous portals against anything less than an assault with cannon.
It was obvious that the gentry outside knew the nature of this obstruction, for, finding the bars out, they made no attempt to force the door.
Within, the Count and servant looked at each other's faces—the latter with astonishment and fear, the former with dumb questioning, and his ear to the stair whence came the woman's alarms.
“The Baron tell't us there would be trouble,” stammered the retainer, fumbling with the pistol so awkwardly that he endangered the body of his fellow in distress. “Black Andy was never kent to forget an injury, and I aye feared that the low tides would bring him and his gang aboot the castle. Good God! do you hear them? It's a gey wanchancy thing this!” he cried in terror, as the shout “Loch Sloy!” arose again outside, and the sound of voices was all about the castle.
The woman within heard it too, for her cries became more hysterical than ever.
“D—n ye, ye skirlin' auld bitch!” said the retainer, turning in exasperation, “can ye no steeck your jaw, and let them dae the howlin' outside?” But it was in a tone of more respect he shouted up the stair some words of assurance.
Yet there was no abatement of the cries, and Montaiglon, less—to do him justice—to serve his curiosity as to Annapla than from a natural instinct to help a distressed woman, put a foot on the stair to mount.
“Na, na! ye mauna leave me here!” cried Mungo, plucking at his sleeve.
There was something besides fear in the appeal, there was alarm of another sort that made Montaiglon pause and look the servitor in the eyes. He found confusion there as well as alarm at the furore outside and the imminent danger of the castle.
“I wish to God he was here himser,” said Mungo helplessly, but still he did not relinquish his hold of Count Victor's sleeve.
“That need not prevent us comforting the lady,” said Count Victor, releasing himself from the grasp.
“Let her alane, let her alane!” cried the servant distractedly, following the Frenchman upstairs.
Count Victor paid no heed: he was now determined to unveil a mystery that for all he knew might menace himself in this household of strange midnight happenings. The cries of the woman came from the corridor he had guessed her chamber to occupy, and to this he hastened. But he had scarcely reached the corridor when the flambeau Mungo held was suddenly blown out, and this effectively checked his progress. He turned for an explanation.
“D—n that draught!” said Mungo testily, “it's blawn oot my licht.”
“We'll have to do without it, then,” said the Count, “but you must show me the way to this shrieking woman.”
“A' richt,” said Mungo, “mind yer feet!” He passed before the Count and cautiously led him up to the passage where the woman's cries, a little less vehement, were still to be heard.
“There ye are! and muckle gude may it dae ye,” he said, stopping at a door and pushing it open.
Count Victor stepped into darkness, thrust lightly as he went by the servant's hand, and the door closed with a click behind him. He was a prisoner! He had the humour to laugh softly at the conventionality of the deception as he vainly felt in an empty room for a non-existing doorhandle, and realised that Mungo had had his own way after all. The servant's steps declined along the corridor and down the stair, with a woman's to keep them company and a woman's sobs, all of which convinced the Count that his acquaintance with Annapla was not desired by the residents of Doom.
CHAPTER X — SIM MACTAGGART, CHAMBERLAIN
On the roof of a high old church with as little architectural elegance as a dry-stone barn, a bell jerked by a rope from the church-yard indicated the close association of law and the kirk by ringing a sort of triumphal peal to the procession of the judges between the court-room and the inn. Contesting with its not too dulcet music blared forth the fanfare of two gorgeous trumpeters in scarlet and gold lace, tie wigs, silk stockings, and huge cocked hats, who filled the street with a brassy melody that suggested Gabriel's stern and awful judgment-summons rather than gave lightness and rhythm to the feet of those who made up the procession. The procession itself had some dreadful aspects and elements as well as others incongruous and comical. The humorous fancy might see something to smile at in the two grey-wigged bent old men in long scarlet coats who went in front of the trumpeters, prepared to clear the way if necessary (though a gust of shrewd wind would have blown them off their feet), by means of the long-poled halberts they carried; but this impression of the farcical was modified by the nature of the body whereof they were the pioneers or advance guard. Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and silver-buckled shoes, the provost ermined at their head, showed the way to the more actual, the more dignified embodiment of stern Scots law. At least a score of wigs were there from the Parliament House of Edinburgh, a score of dusty gowns, accustomed to sweep the lobbies of the Courts of Session, gathered the sand of the burgh street, and in their midst walked the representatives of that old feudal law at long-last ostensibly abandoned, and of the common law of the land. Argyll was in a demure equivalent for some Court costume, with a dark velvet coat, a ribbon of the Thistle upon his shoulder, a sword upon his haunch, and for all his sixty-six years he carried himself less like the lawyer made at Utrecht—like Justice-General and Extraordinary Lord of Session—than like the old soldier who had served with Marlborough and took the field for the House of Hanover in 1715. My Lords Elchies and Kilkerran walked on either side of him—Kilkerran with the lack-lustre eye of the passionate mathematician, the studious moralist devoted to midnight oil, a ruddy, tall, sturdy man, well filling the crimson and white silk gown; Elchies, a shrivelled atomy with a hirpling walk, leaning heavily upon a rattan, both with the sinister black tri-corne hats in their hands, and flanked by a company of musketeers.
A great band of children lent the ludicrous element again to the company by following close upon its heels, chanting a doggerel song to the tune of the trumpets; the populace stood at the close-mouths or leaned over their windows looking at the spectacle, wondering at the pomp given to the punishment of a Stewart who a few years ago would have been sent to the gallows by his Grace with no more formality than might have attended the sentence of a kipper salmon-poacher to whipping at the hands of Long Davie the dempster.
His Grace was entertaining the Lords, the Counsel (all but the convict's lawyers—a lot of disaffected Jacobites, who took their food by themselves at the inn, and brusquely refused his Grace's hospitality), the magistracy, and some county friends, to a late dinner at the castle that night, and an hour after saw them round the ducal board.
If Count Victor was astonished at the squalid condition of things in the castle of the poor Baron of Doom, he would have been surprised to find here, within an hour or two's walk of it, so imposing and luxuriant a domesticity. Many lands, many hands, great wealth won by law, battle, and the shrewdness of generations, enabled Argyll to give his castle grandeur and his table the opulence of any southern palace. And it was a bright company that sat about his board, with several ladies in it, for his duchess loved to have her sojourn in her Highland home made gay by the company of young women who might by their beauty and light hearts recall her own lost youth.
A bagpipe stilled in the hall, a lute breathed a melody from a neighbouring room, the servants in claret and yellow livery noiselessly served wine.
Elchies sourly pursed his lips over his liquor, to the mingled amusement and vexation of his Grace, who knew his lordship's cellar, or even the Justiciary Vault in the town (for the first act of the Court had been to send down bins from Edinburgh for their use on circuit), contained no vintage half so good, and “Your Grace made reference on the way up to some one killed in the neighbourhood,” he said, as one resuming a topic begun elsewhere.
“Not six miles from where we sit,” replied the Duke, his cultivated English accent in a strong contrast with the broad burr of the Edinburgh justiciar, “and scarcely a day before you drove past. The man shot, so far as we have yet learned, was a Macfarlane, one of a small but ancient and extremely dishonest clan whose country used to be near the head of Loch Lomond. Scarcely more than half a hundred of them survive, but they give us considerable trouble, for they survive at the cost of their neighbour's gear and cattle. They are robbers and footpads, and it looks as if the fatality to one of their number near Doom has been incurred during a raid. We still have our raids, Lord Elchies, in spite of what you were saying on the bench as to the good example this part of the country sets the rest of the Highlands—not the raids of old fashion, perhaps, but more prosaic, simply thefts indeed. That is why I have had these troops brought here. It is reported to me pretty circumstantially that some of the Appin people are in the key to attempt a rescue of James Stewart on his way to the place of execution at Lettermore. They would think nothing of attempting it once he was brought the length of Benderloch, if only a law officer or two had him in charge.”
“I would have thought the duty of keeping down a ploy of that kind would have been congenial to your own folk,” said Elchies, drenching his nostrils vulgarly with macabaw.
Argyll smiled. “You may give us credit for willingness to take our share of the responsibility of keeping Appin in order,” said he. “I should not wonder if there are half a hundred claymores with hands in them somewhere about our old barracks in Maltland. Eh! Simon?” and he smiled down the table to his Chamberlain.
“Five-and-forty, to be strict,” said the gentleman appealed to, and never a word more but a sudden stop, for his half-eaten plum had miraculously gone from his plate in the moment he had looked up at the Duke.
“Was't in your lands?” asked Elchies, indifferent, but willing to help on a good topic in a company where a variety of classes made the conversation anything but brisk.
“No,” said Argyll, “it was in Doom, the place of a small landowner, Lamond, whose castle—it is but a ramshackle old bigging now—you may have noticed on your left as you rode round. Lamond himself is a man I have a sort of softness for, though, to tell the truth, he has forced me into more litigation than he had money to pay for and I had patience to take any lasting interest in.”
“The Baron of Doom, is that the man?” cried Elchies, dryly. “Faith, I ken him well. Some years syne he was living months at a time in the Court of Session, and eating and sleeping in John's Coffee-house, and his tale—it's a gey old one—was that the litigation was always from the other side. I mind the man weel; Baron he called himself, though, if I mind right, his title had never been confirmed by the king n liberam baroniam He had no civil nor criminal jurisdiction. A black-avised man; the last time he came before me—Mr. Petullo, ye were there—it was in a long-standing case o' multiple poinding, and if I'm no'mistaken, a place ca'd Drimadry or Drimdarry, or something like that, changed hands ower the head o't.”
Petullo the writer, shrinking near the foot of the table in an adequate sense of his insignificance, almost choked himself by gulping the whole glass of wine at his lips in his confusion, and broke into a perspiration at the attention of the company thus drawn to him. He squeaked back an unintelligible acquiescence; and completed his own torture by upsetting a compote of fruit upon his black knee-breeches.
Opposite the unhappy lawyer sat a lady of extraordinary beauty—a haughty, cold, supercilious sort of beauty, remarkable mainly from the consciousness of its display. Her profile might have been cut from marble by a Greek; her neck and bust were perfect, but her shoulders, more angular than was common in that time of bottle-shape, were carried somewhat too grandly for a gentle nature. The cruelty of her character betrayed itself in a faint irrestrainable smile at Petullo's discomfiture, all the more cruel because his eyes were entreatingly on hers as he mopped up awkwardly the consequences of his gaucherie. She smiled, but that was not the strangest part of her conduct, for at the same time she nudged with her knee the Chamberlain who sat next to her, and who had brought her into the room. To cap the marvel, he showed no surprise, but took her hint with a conspirator's enforced composure. He looked at the little, dried-up, squeaking creature opposite, and—refused the lady the gratification of a single sign of the amusement she had apparently expected. She reddened, bit her nether lip, and “Your poor man of business is in a sore plight,” she whispered, using the name Sim with significant freedom.
“My dear Kate,” said he quietly, “as God's my judge, I can find nothing to laugh at in the misery of a poor wretch like yon.”
“That's the second time!” she whispered with well-concealed ill-humour, a smile compelled upon her face but a serpent in her voice.
“The second time?” he repeated, lifting his eyebrows questioning, and always keeping a shoulder to her—a most chilly exterior. “Your ladyship is in the humour to give guesses.”
She gave a swift reply to some only half-heard remark by her next-hand neighbour, then whispered to him, “It's the second time you have been cruel to me to-day. You seem bent on making me unhappy, and it is not what you promised. Am I not looking nice?”
“My dear girl,” said he calmly, “do you know I am not in the mood for making sport of an old fool to prove my Kindness of heart to you.”
“To me, Sim!” she whispered, the serpent all gone from her voice, and a warm, dulcet, caressing accent in it, while her eyes were melting with discreetly veiled love. “And I plotted so much to get beside you.”
“That is the damned thing,” he replied between his teeth, and smiling the while to some comment of his other neighbour, “you plot too much, my dear. I do not want to be unkind, but a little less plotting would become you more. I have no great liking for your husband, as you may guess; but there he's covered with compote and confusion, and for the look of the thing, if for no more, it would suit his wife to pretend some sympathy. In any case, for God's sake do not look at me as if I shared your amusement at his trouble. And I'm sure that Elchies by his glowering saw you eat my plum.”
Mrs. Petullo cast a glance of disdain at the poor object she was bound to by a marriage for position and money, and for a moment or two gave no attention to the society of his Grace's Chamberlain, who was so suspiciously in her confidence.
Simon MacTaggart played idly with the stem of his glass. He was odd in that bibulous age, inasmuch as he never permitted wine to tempt his palate to the detriment of his brains, and he listened gravely to the conversation that was being monopolised at the head of the table round the Duke.
Women liked him. Indeed women loved this Chamberlain of Argyll readily, more for his eyes and for his voice and for some odd air of mystery and romance in his presence than for what generally pass for good looks. He had just the history and the career and reputation that to men and women, except the very wisest and the somewhat elderly, have an attraction all unreasonable; for his youth had been stormy; he had known great dangers, tremendous misfortunes, overcoming both by a natural—sometimes spendthrift—courage; he was credited with more than one amorous intrigue, that being in high quarters was considered rather in his favour than otherwise; he was high in the esteem of families in the social scale considerably above his own (that had greatly declined since his people could first boast a coat impaled with the galley of Lome); he was alert, mind and body, polite to punctilio, a far traveller, a good talker, and above all a lover of his kind, so that he went about with a smile (just touched a little by a poetic melancholy) for all. To the women at Argyll's table he was the most interesting man there, and though materially among the least eminent and successful, had it been his humour to start a topic of his own in opposition to his patron's, he could have captured the interest of the gathering in a sentence.
But Simon MacTaggart was for once not in the mood for the small change of conversation. Some weighty thought possessed him that gave his eye a remote quality even when he seemed to be sharing the general attention in the conversation, and it was as much resentment at the summons from his abstraction and his mood as a general disinclination to laugh at a wretch's misery on the bidding of the wretch's wife, that made him so curt to Mrs. Petullo's advances. To him the dinner seemed preposterously unending. More than once his hand went to his fob with an unconscious response to his interest in the passage of the time; with difficulty he clenched his teeth upon the yawns that followed his forced smiles at the murmured pleasantries of the humble bailies and town councillors in his midst, who dared only venture on a joke of their own, and that discreetly muffled, when there was a pause in the conversation of the Duke and the Judges. And to the woman at his shoulder (the one on his left—the wife of the Provost, a little fair-haired doll with a giggling appreciation of the importance of her situation in such grand company, and a half-frightened gladness at being so near MacTaggart) he seemed more mysterious and wonderful than ever. Mrs. Petullo, without looking at his half-averted face, knew by the mere magnetic current from his cold shoulder that of her he was just now weary, that with his company as a whole he was bored, and that some interest beyond that noisy hall engaged his abstracted thought.
“No,” the Duke was saying; “the murderer has not been discovered, nor indeed have we the most important evidence that there was a murder at all—for the body itself is as yet a mere matter of rumour, though of its existence there is no reasonable ground for doubt. It was carried off, as I am informed, by the Macfarlanes, whose anxiety to hush the affair is our main proof that they were on no honest expedition when this happened. But an affair like that gets bruited abroad: it came to us from Cairndhu that the corpse of a Macfarlane was carried past in the gloaming by some of his friends, anxious to get it smuggled through Ard-kinglas with as little public notice as possible.”
“Acta exteriora indicant interiora seceta, to somewhat misapply a well-kent maxim. The res gesto show, I think, that it was a murder on the part of the robbers themselves.” It was Elchies who spoke, cracking filberts the while with his great yellow teeth that gave him so cruel a look upon the bench.
“As a matter of fact,” said the Chamberlain suddenly, “the man was shot by a French pistol,” and a hush fell on the table in expectation of further details, but they were not forthcoming.
“Well, I'm astonished to hear it, and I hope you know where to lay hands on the homicide,” said the Duke.
“It's none of our affair—nowadays,” said the Chamberlain. “And, forbye, I'm only telling a carried tale after all. There may be no more in it than the fancy of the Glen Fyne folk who told me of it.”
The Duke looked at his Chamberlain, saw that the topic, so far as he was concerned, was ended, and signalled to the Duchess. It was not the custom of the time, but her Grace had introduced into her Highland court the practice of withdrawing the ladies for some time after dinner, and leaving the men to their birling of the wine, as they phrased it. Out she swept at her husband's signal with her company—Lady Strachur, Lady Charlotte, Mrs. Petullo, the Provost's wife, and three or four of no greater importance to our story—and of all that were left behind, perhaps there was none but her husband, who, oddly' enough (as people thought) for a duke, loved her as if he were a boy courting still, to reflect that the room was colder and less human wanting the presence of her and her bright company. His Grace, who cared for the bottle even less than did his Chamberlain, slid round the wine sun-wise for a Highlander's notion of luck; the young advocates, who bleared somewhat at the eyes when they forgot themselves, felt the menacing sleepiness and glowing content of potations carried to the verge of indiscretion; Kilkerran hummed, Petullo hawed, the Provost humbly ventured a sculduddery tale, the Duke politely listening the while to some argument of Elchies upon the right of any one who had been attacked by the Macfarlanes to use arms against them.
“It's a well-allowed principle, your Grace,” he maintained. “Arma in armatos sumere jura sinunt—the possessor may use violence to maintain his possession, but not to recover that of which he has been deprived.” He looked like a Barbary ape as his shrunk jaws masticated the kernels he fed to his mouth with shaking claws: something deep and foxishly cunning peered forth below his bristling red eyebrows. The Duke could not but look at his protruding ears and experience an old sensation of his in the company of the more animal of his fellows, that, after all, man with a little practice might easily swing among trees or burrow in the earth.
An ill-trained servant removing empty bottles left the door open behind his Grace's chair, and through it came the strains of a duet in women's voices, accompanied by the strumming of a harp. They sang an English air touching upon groves and moonlit waterfalls, Lady Charlotte lending a dulcet second to the air of the Duchess, who accompanied them upon her instrument in sweeping chords and witching faint arpeggios. Into the room that fumed with tobacco and wine (and the Provost at the second of his tales in the ear of the advocate) the harmony floated like the praise of cherubim, and stilled at once the noisy disquisition round the board.
“Leave the door open,” said the Duke to his servants, and they did so. When the song was done he felt his Jean was calling to him irresistible, and he suggested that they had better join the ladies. They rose—some of them reluctantly—from the bottles, Elchies strewing his front again with snuff to check his hiccoughs. MacTaggart, in an aside to the Duke, pleaded to be excused for his withdrawal immediately, as he felt indisposed.
“I noticed that you were gey glum to-night,” said Argyll with a kind and even fraternal tone, for they were cousins and confidants as well as in a purely business relation to each-other. “I'm thinking we both want some of the stimulant Elchies and the Provost and the advocate lads take so copiously.”
“Bah!” said the Chamberlain; “but Sassenachs, Argyll, but Sassenachs, and they need it all. As for us, we're born with a flagon of heather ale within us, and we may be doing without the drug they must have, poor bodies, to make them sparkle.”
Argyll laughed. “Good-night, then,” said he, “and a riddance to your vapours before the morning's morning.”
Mrs. Petullo had begun a song before the Duke entered, a melody of the Scots mode, wedded to words that at that period hummed round the country. It was the one triumphant moment of her life—her musically vocal—when she seemed, even to the discriminating who dive for character below the mere skin, to be a perfect angel. Pathos, regret, faith, hope, and love, she could simulate marvellously: the last was all that was really hers, and even that was lawless. She had not half-finished the air when the Duke came into the room softly on his tiptoes, humming her refrain. A keen ear might have perceived the slightest of alterations in the tone of her next stanza; a quick eye might have noticed a shade of disappointment come to her face when her intent but momentary glance at the door revealed that some one she sought was not entering. The only ear that heard, the only eye that saw, was Kilkerran's. He was a moralist by repute, and he would have suspected without reasons. When Mrs. Petullo broke down miserably—in her third verse, he smiled to himself pawkily, went up to her with a compliment, and confirmed his suspicions by her first question, which was as to the Chamberlain's absence.
As for the Chamberlain, he was by now hurrying with great speed through the castle garden. Only once he slacked his pace, and that was when the garden path joined the more open policies of the Duke, and another step or two would place a thicket of laburnums and hawthorns between him and the sight of the litten windows. He hung on his heel and looked back for a minute or two at the castle, looming blackly in the darkness against the background of Dunchuach; he could hear the broken stanza of Mrs. Petullo's ballad.
“Amn't I the damned fool?” said he half-aloud to himself with bitter certainty in the utterance. “There's my punishment: by something sham—and I ken it's sham too—I must go through life beguiled from right and content. Here's what was to be the close of my folly, and Sim MacTaggart eager to be a good man if he got anything like a chance, but never the chance for poor Sim MacTaggart!”
He plunged into the darkness of the road that led to the Maltland barracks where the fifty claymores were quartered.
CHAPTER XI — THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW
Count Victor heard the woman's lamentation die away in the pit of the stair before he ceased to wonder at the sound and had fully realised the unpleasantness of his own incarceration. It was the cries of the outer assault that roused him from mere amazement to a comprehension of the dangers involved in his being thus penned in a cell and his enemies kept at bay by some wooden bars and a wooden-head. He felt with questioning fingers along the walls, finding no crevice to suggest outer air till he reached the window, and, alas! an escape from a window at that height seemed out of the question without some machinery at hand.
“I suspected the little clown's laughter,” said he to himself. “The key of the mystery lies between him and this absurd Baron, and I begin to guess at something of complicity on the part of M. Bethune. A malediction on the whole tribe of mountaineers! The thing's like a play; I've seen far more improbable circumstances in a book. I am shot at in a country reputed to be well-governed even to monotony; a sombre host puzzles, a far too frank domestic perplexes; magic flutes and midnight voices haunt this infernal hold; the conventional lady of the drama is kept in the background with great care, and just when I am on the point of meeting her, the perplexing servitor becomes my jailer. But yes, it is a play; surely it is a play; or else I am in bed in Cammercy suffering from one of old Jeanne's heavy late suppers. It is then that I must waken myself into the little room with the pink hangings.”
He raised the point of the sword to prick his finger, more in a humorous mood than with any real belief that it was all a dream, and dropped it fast as he felt a gummy liquor clotting on the blade.
“Grand Dieu!” said he softly, “I have perhaps pricked some one else to-night into his eternal nightmare, and I cannot prick myself out of one.”
The noise of the men outside rose louder; a gleam of light waved upon the wall of the chamber, something wan and elusive, bewildering for a moment as if it were a ghost; from the clamour he could distinguish sentences in a guttural tongue. He turned to the window—the counterpart of the one in his own bedroom, but without a pane of glass in its narrow space. Again the wan flag waved across the wall, more plainly the cries of the robbers came up to him. They had set a torch flaring on the scene. It revealed the gloomy gable-end of Doom with a wild, a menacing illumination, deepening the blackness of the night beyond its influence, giving life to shadows that danced upon rock and grass. The light, held high by the man Count Victor had wounded, now wrapped to his eyes in a plaid, rose and fell, touched sometimes on the mainland showing the bracken and the tree, sometimes upon the sea to show the wave, frothy from its quarrel with the fissured rock, making it plain that Doom was a ship indeed, cast upon troubled waters, cut off from the gentle world.
But little for the sea or for the shore had Count Victor any interest; his eyes were all for the wild band who clamoured about the flambeau. They wore such a costume as he had quarrelled with on his arrival; they cried “Loch Sloy!” with something of theatrical effect, and “Out with the gentleman! out with Black Andy's murderer!” they demanded in English.
He craned his head out at the Window and watched the scene. The tall man who had personally assailed him seemed to lead the band in all except their clamour, working eagerly, directing in undertones. They had brought a ladder from the shore, apparently provided for such an emergency, and placed it against the wall, with a view to an escalade. A stream of steaming water shot down upon the first who ventured upon the rounds, and he fell back with ludicrous whimperings. Compelled by the leader, another ventured on the ladder, and the better to watch his performance Count Victor leaned farther out at his window, secure from observation in the darkness. As he did so, he saw for the first time that on his right there was a lighted window he could almost touch with his hand as he leaned over. It flashed upon him that here was the woman's room, and that on the deep moulding running underneath the windows he could at some little risk gain it, probably to find its door open, and thus gain the freedom Mungo had so unexpectedly taken from him. He crept out upon the ledge, only then to realise the hazards of such a narrow footing. It seemed as he stood with his hands yet grasping the sides of the window he sought to escape by, that he could never retain his balance sufficiently to reach the other in safety. The greatest of his physical fears—greater even than that of drowning which sometimes whelmed him in dreams and on ships—was the dread of empty space; a touch of vertigo seized him; the enemy gathered round the torch beneath suddenly seemed elves, puny impossible things far off, and he almost slipped into their midst. But he dragged back his senses. “We must all die,” he gasped, “but we need not be precipitate about the business,” and shut his eyes as he stood up, and with feet upon the moulding stretched to gain grip of the other window. Something fell away below his right foot and almost plunged him into space. With a terrific effort he saved himself from that fate, and his senses, grown of a sudden to miraculous acuteness, heard the crumbled masonry he had released thud upon the patch of grass at the foot of the tower, apprising the enemy of his attempt. A wild commingling of commands and threats came up to him; the night seemed something vast beyond all former estimates, a swinging and giddy horror; the single star that peered through the cloud took to airy dancing, a phantom of the evening heavens; again he might have fallen, but the material, more deadly, world he was accustomed to manifested itself for his relief and his salvation. Through the night rang a pistol shot, and the ball struck against the wall but an inch or two from his head.
“Merci beaucoup!” he said aloud. “There is nothing like a pill,” and his grasp upon the sides of the illuminated window was quite strong and confident as he drew himself towards it. He threw himself in upon the floor just in time to escape death from half a dozen bullets that rattled behind him.
Safe within, he looked around in wonder. What he had come upon was not what he had expected,—was, indeed, so incongruous with the cell next door and the general poverty of the castle as a whole that it seemed unreal; for here was a trim and tasteful boudoir lit by a silver lamp, warmed by a charcoal fire, and giving some suggestion of dainty womanhood by a palpable though delicate odour of rose-leaves conserved in pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste.
“Annapla becomes more interesting,” he reflected, but he spent no time in her boudoir; he made to try the door. It was locked; nor did he wonder at it, though in a cooler moment he might have done so. Hurriedly he glanced about the room for something to aid him to open the door, but there was nothing to suit his purpose. In his search his eye fell upon a miniature upon the mantelshelf—the work, as he could tell by its technique and its frame, of a French artist. It was the presentment of a gentleman in the Highland dress, adorned, as was the manner of some years back before the costume itself had become discredited, with fripperies of the mode elsewhere—a long scalloped waistcoat, a deep ruffled collar, the shoes buckled, and the hair en queue,—the portrait of a man of dark complexion, distinguished and someways pleasant.
“The essential lover of the story,” said Count Victor, putting it down. “Now I know my Annapla is young and lovely. We shall see—we shall see!”
He turned to the door to try its fastenings with his sword, found the task of no great difficulty, for the woodwork round the lock shared the common decay of Doom, and with the silver lamp to light his steps, he made his way along the corridor and down the stair. It was a strange and romantic spectacle he made moving thus through the darkness, the lamp swaying his shadow on the stairway as he descended, and he could have asked for no more astonishment in the face of his jailer than he found in Mungo's when that domestic met him at the stair-foot.
Mungo was carrying hot water in a huge kettle. He put down the vessel with a startled jolt that betrayed his fright.
“God be aboot us! Coont, ye near gied me a stroke there.”
“Oh, I demand pardon!” said Count Victor ironically. “I forgot that a man of your age should not be taken by surprise.”
“My age!” repeated Mungo, with a tone of annoyance. “No' sae awfu' auld either. At my age my grandfaither was a sergeant i' the airmy, and married for the fourth time.”
“Only half his valour seems to run in the blood,” said Count Victor. Then, more sternly, “What did you mean by locking me up there?”
Mungo took up the kettle and placed it to the front of him, with some intuition that a shield must be extemporised against the sword that the Frenchman had menacing in his hand. The action was so droll and futile that, in spite of his indignation, Count Victor had to smile; and this assured the little domestic, though he felt chagrin at the ridicule implied.
“Jist a bit plan o' my ain, Coont, to keep ye oot o' trouble, and I'm shair ye'll excuse the leeberty. A bonny-like thing it wad be if the maister cam' hame and foun' the Macfarlanes wer oot on the ran-dan and had picked ye oot o' Doom like a wulk oot o' its shell. It wisna like as if ye were ane o' the ordinar garrison, ye ken; ye were jist a kin' o' veesitor—”
“And it was I they were after,” said Count Victor, “which surely gave me some natural interest in the defence.”
“Ye were safer to bide whaur ye were; and hoo ye got oot o't 's mair than I can jalouse. We hae scalded aff the rogues wi' het water, and if they're to be keepit aff, I'll hae to be unco gleg wi' the kettle.”
As he said these words he saw, apparently for the first time, with a full understanding of its significance, the lamp in Count Victor's hands. His jaw fell; he put down the kettle again helplessly, and, in trembling tones, “Whaur did ye get the lamp?” said he.
“Ah, mon vieux!” cried Count Victor, enjoying his bewilderment. “You should have locked the lady's door as well as mine. 'Art a poor warder not to think of the possibilities in two cells so close to each other.”
“Cells!” cried Mungo, very much disturbed. “Cells! quo' he,” looking chapfallen up the stairway, as if for something there behind his escaped prisoner.
“And now you will give me the opportunity of paying my respects to your no doubt adorable lady.”
“Eh!” cried Mungo, incredulous. A glow came to his face. He showed the ghost of a mischievous smile. “Is't that way the lan' lies? Man, ye're a dour birkie!” said he; “but a wilf u' man maun hae his way, and, if naething less'll dae ye, jist gang up to yer ain chaumer, and ye'll find her giein' the Macfarlanes het punch wi' nae sugar till't.”
The statement was largely an enigma to Count Victor, but he understood enough to send him up the stairs with an alacrity that drove Mungo, in his rear, into silent laughter. Yet the nearer he came to his door the slower grew his ascent. At first he had thought but of the charming lady, the vocalist, and the recluse. The Baron's share in the dangerous mystery of Doom made him less scrupulous than he might otherwise have been as to the punctilio of a domestic's introduction to one apparently kept out of his way for reasons best known to his host; and he advanced to the encounter in the mood of the adventurer, Mungo in his rear beholding it in his jaunty step, in the fingers that pulled and peaked the moustachio, and drew forth a somewhat pleasing curl that looked well across a temple. But a more sober mood overcame him before he had got to the top of the stair. The shouts of the besieging party outside had declined and finally died away; the immediate excitement of the adventure, which with Mungo and the unknown lady he was prepared to share, was gone. He began to realise that there was something ludicrous in the incident that had kept him from making her acquaintance half an hour ago, and reflected that she might well have some doubt of his courage and his chivalry. Even more perturbing was the sudden recollection of the amused laughter that had greeted his barefooted approach to Doom through two or three inches of water, and at the open door he hung back dubious.
“Step in; it's your ain room,” cried Mungo, struggling with his kettle; “and for the Lord's sake mind your mainners and gie her a guid impression.”
It was the very counsel to make a Montaiglon bold.
He entered; a woman was busy at the open window; he stared in amazement and chagrin.
CHAPTER XII — OMENS AND ALARMS
Beaten back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound silence on the shore and all along the coast—a silence the more sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle, his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads; it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor scrutinised the ground beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead.
He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere else the desolation was pitiful—the hips glowing crimson on their stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green with damp and the base growths of old and mouldering situations, the seat decayed and broken, but propped at its feet as if for recent use. All seemed to express some poignant anguish for lost summers, happy days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the rain and sea saddened the moment—the rain dripping through the ragged foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw.
He held high the lantern, and to a woman at her darkened window her bower seemed to glow like a shell lit in the depths of troubled ocean. He swung the light; a footstep, that he did not hear, was checked in wonder. He came out, and instinct told him some one watched him in the dark beyond the radiance of his lantern.
“Qui est la?” he cried, forgetting again the foreign country, thinking himself sentinel in homely camps, and when he spoke a footstep sounded in the darkness.
Some one had crossed from the mainland while he ruminated within. He listened, with the lantern high above his head but to the right of him for fear of a pistol-shot.
One footstep.
He advanced slowly to meet it, his fingers tremulous on his sword, and the Baron came out of the darkness, his hands behind his back, his shoulders bent, his visage a mingling of sadness and wonder.
“M. le Baron?” said Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer. Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that showed him for the moment incapable of calm utterance.
“You—you—are late,” stammered Count Victor, putting the sword behind him and feeling his words grotesque.
“I took—I took you for a wraith—I took you for a vision,” said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. “Oh, man!” said he, “if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from things new and thriving, and above all the castle of his Grace flaring from foundation to finial like a torch, though murder was done this day in the guise of justice: I came through the rain and the wet full of bitterness to my poor black home, and find no light there where once my father and my father's father and all the race of us knew pleasant hours in the wildest weather. Not a light, not a lowe—” he went on, gazing upward to the frowning walls dark glistening in the rain—“and then the bower must out and shine to mind me—to mind me—ah, Mont-aiglon, my pardons, my regrets! you must be finding me a melancholy host.”
“Do not mention it,” said Count Victor carelessly, though the conduct of this marvel fairly bewildered him, and his distress seemed poorly accounted for by his explanation. “Ah, vieux blagueur!” he thought, “can it be Balhaldie again—a humbug with no heart in his breast but an onion in his handkerchief?” And then he was ashamed of suspicions of which a day or two ago he would have been incapable.
“My dear friends of Monday did me the honour to call in your absence,” he said. “They have not gone more than twenty minutes.”
“What! the Macfarlanes,” cried Doom, every trace of his softer emotion gone, but more disturbed than ever as he saw the sword for the first time. “Well—well—well?” he inquired eagerly.
“Well, well, well?” and he gripped Count Victor by the arm and looked him in the eyes.
“Nothing serious happened,” replied Count Victor, “except that your domestics suffered some natural alarms.”
Doom seemed wonderously relieved. “The did not force an entrance?” said he.
“They did their best, but failed. I pricked one slightly before I fell back on Mungo's barricades; that and some discomfiture from Mistress Annapla's punch-bowl completed the casualties.”
“Well? well? well?” cried Lamond, still waking something. Count Victor only looked at him in wonder, and led the way to the door where Mungo drew back the bars and met his master with a trembling front. A glance of mute inquiry and intelligence passed between the servant and his master: the Frenchman saw it and came to his own conclusions, but nothing was said till the Baron had made a tour of investigation through the house and come at last to join his guest in the salle, where the embers of the fire were raked together on the hearth and fed with new peat. The Count and his host sat down together, and when Mungo had gone to prepare some food for his master, Count Victor narrated the night's adventure. He had an excited listener—one more excited, perhaps, than the narrative of itself might account for.
“And there is much that is beyond my poor comprehension,” continued Count Victor, looking at him as steadfastly as good breeding would permit.
“Eh?” said Doom, stretching fingers that trembled to the peat-flame that stained his face like wine.
“Your servant Mungo was quite unnecessarily solicitous for my safety, and took the trouble to put me under lock and key.”
Doom fingered the bristles of his chin in a manifest perturbation. “He—he did that, did he?” said he, like one seeking to gain time for further reflection. And when Count Victor waited some more sympathetic comment, “It was—it was very stupid, very stupid of Mungo,” said he.
“Stupid!” echoed Count Victor ironically. “Ah! so it was. I should not have said stupid myself, but it so hard, is it not, for a foreigner to find the just word in his poor vocabulary? For a bêtise much less unpleasant I have scored a lackey's back with a scabbard. Master Mungo had an explanation, however, though I doubted the truth of it.”
“And what was that?”
“That you would be angry if he permitted me to get into danger while I was your guest,—an excuse more courteous than convincing.”
“He was right,” said Doom, “though I can scarcely defend the manner of executing his trust: I was not to see that he would make a trepanning affair of it. I'm—I'm very much grieved, Count, much grieved, I assure you: I shall have a word or two on the matter the morn's morning with Mungo. A stupid action! a stupid action! but you know the man by this time—an oddity out and out.”
“A little too much so, if I may take the liberty, M. le Baron,—a little too much so for a foreigner's peace of mind,” said Count Victor softly. “Are you sure, M. le Baron, there are no traitors in Doom?” and he leaned forward with his gaze on the Baron's face.
The Baron started, flushed more crimson than before, and turned an alarmed countenance to his interrogator. “Good God!” he cried, “are you bringing your doubts of the breed of us to my hearthstone?”
“It is absurd, perhaps,” said Count Victor, still very softly, and watching his host as closely as he might, “but Mungo—”
“Pshaw! a good lowland heart! For all his clowning, Count, you might trust him with your life.”
“The other servant then—the woman?”
Doom looked a trifle uneasy. “Hush!” said he, with half a glance behind him to the door. “Not so loud. If she should hear!” he stammered: he stopped, then smiled awkwardly. “Have ye any dread of an Evil Eye?” said he.
“I have no dread of the devil himself, who is something more tangible,” replied Count Victor. “You do not suggest that malevolent influence in Mistress Annapla, do you?”
“We are very civil to her in these parts,” said Doom, “and I'm not keen to put her powers to the test. I have seen and heard some droll things of her.”
“That has been my own experience,” said Count Victor. “Are you sure her honesty is on more substantial grounds than her reputation for witchcraft? I demand your pardon for expressing these suspicions, but I have reasons. I cannot imagine that the attack of the Macfarlanes was connived at by your servants, though that was my notion for a little when Mungo locked me up, for they suffered more alarm at the attack than I did, and the reason for the attack seems obvious enough. But are you aware that this woman who commands your confidence is in the practice of signalling to the shore when she wishes to communicate with some one there?”
“I think you must be mistaken,” said Doom, uneasily.
“I could swear I saw something of the kind,” said Count Victor. He described the signal he had seen twice at her window. “Not having met her at the time, I laid it down to some gay gillian's affair with a lover on the mainland, but since I have seen her that idea seem—seems—”
“Just so, I should think it did,” said the Baron: but though his words were light, his aspect was disturbed. He paced once or twice up and down the floor, muttered something to himself in Gaelic, and finally went to the door, which he opened. “Mungo, Mungo!” he cried into the darkness, and the servant appeared with the gaudy nightcap of his slumber already on.
“Tell Annapla to come here,” said the Baron.
The servant hesitated, his lip trembled upon some objection that he did not, however, express, and he went on his errand.
In a little the woman entered. It was not surprising that when Count Victor, prepared by all that had gone before to meet a bright young creature when he had gone into his chamber where she was repelling the escalade of the enemy, had been astounded to find what he found there, for Mistress Annapla was in truth not the stuff for amorous intrigues. She had doubtless been handsome enough in her day, but that was long distant; now there were but the relics of her good looks, with only her eyes, dark, lambent, piercing, to tell of passions unconsumed. She had eyes only for her master; Count Victor had no existence for her, and he was all the freer to watch how she received the Baron's examination.
“Do you dry your clothes at the windows in Doom?” asked her master quietly, with none of a master's bluntness, asking the question in English from politeness to his guest.
She replied rapidly in Gaelic.
“For luck,” said the Baron dubiously when he had listened to a long guttural explanation that was of course unintelligible to the Frenchman. “That's a new freit. To keep away the witches. Now, who gave ye a notion like that?” he went on, maintaining his English.
Another rapid explanation followed, one that seemed to satisfy the Baron, for when it was finished he gave her permission to go.
“It's as I thought,” he explained to Count Victor. “The old body has been troubled with moths and birds beating themselves against her window at night when the light was in it: what must she be doing but taking it for some more sinister visitation, and the green kerchief is supposed to keep them away.”
“I should have fancied it might have been a permanency in that case,” suggested Count Victor, “unless, indeed, your Highland ghosts have a special preference for Mondays and Wednesdays.”
“Permanency!” repeated the Baron, thoughtfully. “H'm!” The suggestion had obviously struck him as reasonable, but he baulked at any debate on it.
“There was also the matter of the horseman,” went on Count Victor blandly, pointing his moustache.
“Horseman?” queried the Baron.
“A horseman sans doute. I noticed most of your people here ride with a preposterously short stirrup; this one rode like a gentleman cavalier. He stopped opposite the castle this forenoon and waved his compliments to the responsive maid.”
The effect upon the Baron was amazing. He grew livid with some feeling repressed. It was only for a moment; the next he was for changing the conversation, but Count Victor had still his quiver to empty.
“Touching flageolets?” said he, but there his arrow missed.
Doom only laughed.
“For that,” said he, “you must trouble Annapla or Mungo. They have a story that the same's to be heard every night of storm, but my bed's at the other side of the house and I never heard it;” and he brought the conversation back to the Macfarlanes, so that Count Victor had to relinquish his inquisition.
“The doings of to-night,” said he, “make it clear I must rid you of my presence tout à l'heure. I think I shall transfer me to the town to-morrow.”
“You can't, man,” protested Doom, though, it almost seemed, with some reluctance. “There could be no worse time for venturing there. In the first place, the Macfarlanes' affair is causing a stir; then I've had no chance of speaking to Petullo about you. He was to meet me after the court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin', as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle, though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will have to be put off a day or two longer.”
CHAPTER XIII — A LAWYER'S GOOD LADY
The remainder of the night passed without further alarm, but Count Victor lay only on the frontiers of forgetfulness till morning, his senses all on sentry, and the salt, wind-blown dawn found him abroad before the rest of Doom was well awake. He met the calesh of the Lords going back the way it had come with an outrider in a red jacket from the stable of Argyll: it passed him on the highway so close that he saw Elchies and Kilkerran half sleeping within as they drove away from the scene of their dreadful duties. In a cloak of rough watchet blue he had borrowed from his host and a hat less conspicuous than that he had come in from Stirling, he passed, to such strangers in the locality, for some tacksman of the countryside, or a traveller like themselves. To have ventured into the town, however, where every one would see he was a stranger and speedily inquire into his business there, was, as he had been carefully apprised by Doom the night before, a risk too great to be run without good reason. Stewart's trial had created in the country a state of mind that made a stranger's presence there somewhat hazardous for himself, and all the more so in the case of a foreigner, for, rightly or wrongly, there was associated with the name of the condemned man as art and part in the murder that of a Highland officer in the service of the French. There had been rumours, too, of an attempted rescue on the part of the Stewarts of Ardshiel, Achnacoin, and Fasnacloich—all that lusty breed of the ancient train: the very numbers of them said to be on the drove-roads with weapons from the thatch were given in the town, and so fervently believed in that the appearance of a stranger without any plausible account to give of himself would have stirred up tumult.
Count Victor eluded the more obvious danger of the town, but in his forenoon ramble stumbled into one almost as great as that he had been instructed to avoid. He had gone through the wood of Strongara and come suddenly upon the cavalcade that bore the doomed man to the scene of his execution thirty or forty miles away.
The wretch had been bound upon a horse—a tall, middle-aged man in coarse home-spun clothing, his eye defiant, but his countenance white with the anxieties of his situation. He was surrounded by a troop of sabres; the horses' hoofs made a great clatter upon the hard road, and Count Victor, walking abstractedly along the river-bank, came on them before he was aware of their proximity. As he stood to let them pass he was touched inexpressibly by the glance the convict gave him, so charged was it with question, hope, dread, and the appetite for some human sympathy. He had seen that look before in men condemned—once in front of his own rapier,—and with the utmost feeling for the unhappy wretch he stood, when the cavalcade had gone, looking after it and conjuring in his fancy the last terrible scene whereof that creature would be the central figure. Thus was he standing when another horseman came upon him suddenly, following wide in the rear of the troops—a civilian who shared the surprise of the unexpected meeting. He had no sooner gazed upon Count Victor than he drew up his horse confusedly and seemed to hesitate between proceeding or retreat. Count Victor passed with a courteous salute no less formally returned. He was struck singularly by some sense of familiarity. He did not know the horseman who so strangely scrutinised him as he passed, but yet the face was one not altogether new to him. It was a face scarce friendly, too, and for his life the Frenchman could not think of any reason for aversion.
He could no more readily have accounted for the action of the horseman had he known that he had ridden behind the soldiers but a few hundred yards after meeting with Count Victor when he turned off at one of the hunting-roads with which the ducal grounds abounded, and galloped furiously back towards the castle of Argyll. Nothing checked him till he reached the entrance, where he flung the reins to a servant and dashed into the turret-room where the Duke sat writing.
“Ah, Sim!” said his Grace, airily, yet with an accent of apprehension, “you have come back sooner than I looked for: nothing wrong with the little excursion, I hope?”
MacTaggart leaned with both hands upon the table where his master wrote. “They're all right, so far as I went with them,” said he; “but if your Grace in my position came upon a foreigner in the wood of Strongara—a gentleman by the looks of him and a Frenchman by his moustachio, all alone and looking after Sergeant Donald's company, what would your Grace's inference be?”
Argyll, obviously, did not share much of his Chamberlain's excitement. “There was no more than one there?” he asked, sprinkling sand upon his finished letter. “No! Then there seems no great excuse for your extreme perturbation, my good Sim. I'm lord of Argyll, but I'm not lord of the king's highway, and if an honest stranger cares to take a freeman's privilege and stand between the wind and Simon MacTaggart's dignity—Simon MacTaggart's very touchy dignity, it would appear—who am I that I should blame the liberty? You did not ride ventre à terre from Strongara (I see a foam-fleck on your breeches) to tell me we had a traveller come to admire our scenery? Come, come, Sim! I'll begin to think these late eccentricities of yours, these glooms, abstractions, errors, and anxieties and indispositions, and above all that pallid face of yours, are due to some affair of the heart.” As he spoke Argyll pinched his kinsman playfully on the ear, quite the good companion, with none of the condescension that a duke might naturally display in so doing.
MacTaggart reddened and Argyll laughed, “Ah!” he cried. “Can I have hit it?” he went on, quizzing the Chamberlain. “See that you give me fair warning, and I'll practise the accustomed and essential reel. Upon my soul, I haven't danced since Lady Mary left, unless you call it so that foolish minuet. You should have seen her Grace at St. James's last month. Gad! she footed it like an angel; there's not a better dancer in London town. See that your wife's a dancer, whoever she may be, Sim; let her dance and sing and play the harpsichord or the clarsach—they are charms that will last longer than her good looks, and will not weary you so soon as that intellect that's so much in fashion nowadays, when every woman listens to every clever thing you say, that she may say something cleverer, or perhaps retail it later as her own.”
MacTaggart turned about impatiently, poked with his riding crop at the fire, and plainly indicated that he was not in the mood for badinage.
“All that has nothing to do with my Frenchman, your Grace,” said he bluntly.
“Oh, confound your Frenchman!” retorted the Duke, coming over, turning up the skirts of his coat, and warming himself at the fire. “Don't say Frenchman to me, and don't suggest any more abominable crime and intrigue till the memory of that miserable Appin affair is off my mind. I know what they'll say about that: I have a good notion what they're saying already—as if I personally had a scrap of animosity to this poor creature sent to the gibbet on Leven-side.”
“I think you should have this Frenchman arrested for inquiry: I do not like the look of him.”
Argyll laughed. “Heavens!” he cried, “is the man gane wud? Have you any charge against this unfortunate foreigner who has dared to shelter himself in my woods? And if you have, do you fancy it is the old feudal times with us still, and that I can clap him in my dungeon—if I had such a thing—without any consultation with the common law-officers of the land? Wake up, Sim! wake up! this is '55, and there are sundry written laws of the State that unfortunately prevent even the Mac-Cailen Mor snatching a man from the footpath and hanging him because he has not the Gaelic accent and wears his hair in a different fashion from the rest of us. Don't be a fool, cousin, don't be a fool!”
“It's as your Grace likes,” said MacTaggart. “But if this man's not in any way concerned in the Appin affair, he may very well be one of the French agents who are bargaining for men for the French service, and the one thing's as unlawful as the other by the act of 'thirty-six.”
“H'm!” said Argyll, turning more grave, and shrewdly eyeing his Chamberlain—“H'm! have you any particularly good reason to think that?” He waited for no answer, but went on. “I give it up, MacTaggart,” said he, with a gesture of impatience. “Gad! I cannot pretend to know half the plots you are either in yourself or listening on the outside of, though I get credit, I know, for planning them. All I want to know is, have you any reason to think this part of Scotland—and incidentally the government of this and every well-governed realm, as the libels say—would be bettered by the examination of this man? Eh?”
MacTaggart protested the need was clamant. “On the look of the man I would give him the jougs,” said he. “It's spy—”
“H'm!” said Argyll, then coughed discreetly over a pinch of snuff.
“Spy or agent,” said the Chamberlain, little abashed at the interjection.
“And yet a gentleman by the look of him, said Sim MacTaggart, five minutes syne.”
“And what's to prevent that?” asked the Chamberlain almost sharply. “Your Grace will admit it's nothing to the point,” said he, boldly, and smilingly, standing up, a fine figure of a man, with his head high and his chest out. “It was the toss of a bawbee whether or not I should apprehend him myself when I saw him, and if I had him here your Grace would be the first to admit my discretion.”
“My Grace is a little more judicious than to treat the casual pedestrian like a notour thief,” said Argyll; “and yet, after all, I dare say the matter may be left to your good judgment—that is, after you have had a word or two on the matter with Petullo, who will better be able to advise upon the rights to the persons of suspicious characters in our neighbourhood.”
With never a word more said MacTaggart clapped on his hat, withdrew in an elation studiously concealed from his master, and fared at a canter to Petullo's office in the town. He fastened the reins to the ring at the door and entered.
The lawyer sat in a den that smelt most wickedly of mildewed vellum, sealing-wax, tape, and all that trash that smothers the soul of man—the appurtenances of his craft. He sat like a sallow mummy among them, like a half-man made of tailor's patches, flanked by piles of docketed letters and Records closed, bastioned by deed-boxes blazoned with the indication of their offices—MacGibbon's Mortification, Dunderave Estate, Coil's Trust, and so on; he sat with a shrieking quill among these things, and MacTaggart entering to him felt like thanking God that he had never been compelled to a life like this in a stinking mortuary, with the sun outside on the windows and the clean sea and the singing wood calling in vain. Perhaps some sense of contrast seized the writer, too, as he looked up to see the Chamberlain entering with a pleasant, lively air of wind behind him, and health and vigour in his step, despite the unwonted wanness of his face. At least, in the glance Petullo gave below his shaggy eyebrows, there was a little envy as well as much cunning. He made a ludicrous attempt at smiling.
“Ha!” he cried, “Mr. MacTaggart! Glad to see you, Mr. MacTaggart. Sit ye down, Mr. MacTaggart. I was just thinking about you.”
“No ill, I hope,” said the Chamberlain, refusing a seat proffered; for anything of the law to him seemed gritty in the touch, and a three-legged stool would, he always felt, be as unpleasant to sit upon as a red-hot griddle.
“Te-he!” squeaked Petullo with an irritating falsetto. “You must have your bit joke, Mr. MacTaggart. Did his Grace—did his Grace—I was just wondering if his Grace said anything to-day about my unfortunate accident with the compote yestreen.” He looked more cunningly than ever at the Chamberlain.
“In his Grace's class, Mr. Petullo, and incidentally in my own, nothing's said of a guest's gawkiness, though you might hardly believe it for a reason that I never could make plain to you, though I know it by instinct.”
“Oh! as to gawkiness, an accident of the like might happen to any one,” said Petullo, irritably.
“And that's true,” confessed the Chamberlain. “But, tut! tut! Mr. Petullo, a compote's neither here nor there to the Duke. If you had spilt two of them it would have made no difference; there was plenty left. Never mind the dinner, Mr. Petullo, just now, I'm in a haste. There's a Frenchman—”
“There's a wheen of Frenchmen, seemingly,” said the writer, oracularly, taking to the trimming of his nails with a piece of pumice-stone he kept for the purpose, and used so constantly that they looked like talons.
“Now, what the devil do you mean?” cried Mac-Taggart.
“Go on, go on with your business,” squeaked Petullo, with an eye upon an inner door that led to his household.
“I have his Grace's instructions to ask you about the advisability of arresting a stranger, seemingly a Frenchman, who is at this moment suspiciously prowling about the policies.”
“On whatna charge, Mr. MacTaggart, on whatna charge?” asked the writer, taking a confident, even an insolent, tone, now that he was on his own familiar ground. “Rape, arson, forgery, robbery, thigging, sorning, pickery, murder, or high treason?”
“Clap them all together, Mr. Petullo, and just call it local inconduciveness,” cried MacTaggart. “Simply the Duke may not care for his society. That should be enough for the Fiscal and Long Davie the dempster, shouldn't it?”
“H'm!” said Petullo. “It's a bit vague, Mr. MacTaggart, and I don't think it's mentioned in Forbes's 'Institutes.' Fifteen Campbell assessors and the baron bailie might have sent a man to the Plantations on that dittay ten years ago, but we live in different times, Mr. MacTaggart—different times, Mr. MacTaggart,” repeated the writer, tee-heeing till his bent shoulders heaved under his seedy, ink-stained surtout coat.
“Do we?” cried the Chamberlain, with a laugh. “I'm thinking ye forget a small case we had no further gone than yesterday, when a man with the unlucky name of Stewart—” He stopped, meaningly smiled, and made a gesture with his fingers across his neck, at the same time giving an odd sound with his throat.
“Oh! You're an awfu' man,” cried Petullo, with the accent of a lout. “I wonder if you're on the same track as myself, for I'm like the Hielan' soldier—I have a Frenchman of my own. There's one, I mean, up by there in Doom, and coming down here to-morrow or the day after, or as soon as I can order a lodging for him in the town.”
“Oh, hell!” cried the secretary, amazingly dumfoundered.
“There's nothing underhand about him, so far as I know, to give even his Grace an excuse for confining him, for it seems he's a wine merchant out of Bordeaux, one Montaiglon, come here on business, and stopped at Doom through an attack on his horse by the same Macfarlanes who are of interest to us for another reason, as was spoken of at his Grace's table last night.”
“And he's coming here?” asked MacTaggart, incredulous.
“I had a call from the Baron himself to-day to tell me that.”
“Ah, well, there's no more to be said of our suspicions,” said MacTaggart. “Not in this form, at least.” And he was preparing to go.
A skirt rustled within the inner door, and Mrs. Petullo, flushed a little to her great becoming in spite of a curl-paper or two, and clad in a lilac-coloured negligee of the charmingest, came into the office with a well-acted start of surprise to find a client there.
“Oh, good morning! Mr. MacTaggart,” she exclaimed, radiantly, while her husband scowled to himself, as he relapsed into the chair at his desk and fumbled with his papers. “Good morning; I hope I have not interrupted business?”
“Mr. MacTaggart was just going, my dear,” said Mr. Petullo.
A cracked bell rang within, and the Chamberlain perceived an odour of cooking celery. Inwardly he cursed his forgetfulness, because it was plain that the hour for his call upon the writer was ill-chosen.
“My twelve-hours is unusual sharp to-day,” said Petullo, consulting a dumpy horologe out of his fob. “Would ye—would ye do me the honour of joining me?” with a tone that left, but not too rudely, immediate departure as the Chamberlain's only alternative.
“Thank you, thank you,” said MacTaggart. “I rose late to-day, and my breakfast's little more than done with.” He made for the door, Mrs. Petullo close in his cry and holding his eye, defying so hurried a departure, while she kept up a chattering about the last night's party. Her husband hesitated, but his hunger (he had the voracious appetite of such shrivelled atomies) and a wholesome fear of being accused of jealousy made him withdraw, leaving the office to the pair.
All MacTaggart's anger rose against madame for her machination. “You saw me from the window,” said he; “it's a half-cooked dinner for the goodman to-day, I'll warrant!”
She laughed a most intoxicating laugh, all charged with some sweet velvety charm, put out her hands, and caught his. “Oh, Lord! I wish it would choke him, Sim,” said she, fervently, then lifted up her mouth and dropped a swooning eyelash over her passionate orbs.
“Adorable creature,” he thought: “she'll have rat-bane in his broth some day.” He kissed her with no more fervour than if she had been a wooden figurehead, but she was not thus to be accepted: she put an arm quickly round his neck and pressed her passionate lips to his. Back he drew wincing. “Oh, damnation!” he cried.
“What's the matter?” she exclaimed in wonder, and turned to assure herself that it was not that some one spied from the inner door, for Mac-Taggart's face had become exceeding pale.
“Nothing, nothing,” he replied; “you are—you are so ferocious.”
“Am I, Sim?” said she. “Who taught me? Oh, Sim,” she went on, pleadingly, “be good to me. I'm sick, I'm sick of life, and you don't show you care for me a little bit. Do you love me, Sim?”
“Heavens!” he cried, “you would ask the question fifty times a-day if you had the opportunity.”
“It would need a hundred times a-day to keep up with your changing moods. Do you love me, Sim?” She was smiling, with the most pathetic appeal in her face.
“You look beautiful in that gown, Kate,” said he, irrelevantly, not looking at it at all, but out at the window, where showed the gabbarts tossing in the bay, and the sides of the hill of Dunchuach all splashed with gold and crimson leafage.
“Never mind my gown, Sim,” said she, stamping her foot, and pulling at the buttons of his coat. “Once—oh, Sim, do you love me? Tell me, tell me, tell me! Whether you do or not, say it, you used to be such a splendid liar.”
“It was no lie,” said he curtly; then to himself: “Oh, Lord, give me patience with this! and I have brought it on myself.”
“It was no lie. Oh, Sim!” (And still she was turning wary eyes upon the door that led to her husband's retirement.) “It was no lie; you're left neither love nor courtesy. Oh, never mind! say you love me, Sim, whether it's true or not: that's what it's come to with me.”
“Of course I do,” said he.
“Of course what?”
“Of course I love you.” He smiled, but at heart he grimaced.
“I don't believe you,” said she, from custom waiting his protestation. But the Duke's Chamberlain was in no mood for protestations. He looked at her high temples, made bald by the twisted papilottes, and wondered how he could have thought that bold shoulder beautiful.
“I'm in a great hurry, Kate,” said he. “Sorry to go, but there's my horse at the ring to prove the hurry I'm in!”
“I know, I know; you're always in a hurry now with me: it wasn't always so. Do you hear the brute?” Her husband's squeaky voice querulously shouting on a servant came to them from behind.
The servant immediately after came to the door with an intimation that Mr. Petullo desired to know where the spirit-bottle was.
“He knows very well,” said Mrs. Petullo. “Here is the key—no, I'll take it to him myself.”
“It's not the drink he wants, but me, the pig,” said she as the servant withdrew. “Kiss me good afternoon, Sim.”
“I wish to God it was good-bye!” thought he, as he smacked her vulgarly, like a clown at a country fair.
She drew her hand across her mouth, and her eyes flashed indignation.
“There's something between us, Simon,” said she, in an altered tone; “it used not to be like that.”
“Indeed it did not,” he thought bitterly, and not for the first time he missed something in her—some spirit of simplicity, freshness, flower-bloom, and purity that he had sought for, seen in many women, and found elusive, as the frost finds the bloom of flowers he would begem.
Her husband shrieked again, and with mute gestures they parted.
The Chamberlain threw himself upon his horse as 'twere a mortal enemy, dug rowel-deep in the shuddering flesh, and the hoof-beats thundered on the causey-stones. The beast whinnied in its pain, reared, and backed to the breast wall of the bay. He lashed it wildly over the eyes with his whip, and they galloped up the roadway. A storm of fury possessed him; he saw nothing, heard nothing.
CHAPTER XIV — CLAMOUR
Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbed by the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meeting with the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with hints of rain on the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a storm not far distant. Children were in the wood of Dunderave—ruddy, shy children, gathering nuts and blackberries, with merriment haunting the landscape as it were in a picture by Watteau or a tale of the classics, where such figures happily move for ever and for ever in the right golden glamour. Little elves they seemed to Count Victor as he came upon them over an eminence, and saw them for the first time through the trees under tall oaks and pines, among whose pillars they moved as if in fairy cloisters, the sea behind them shining with a vivid and stinging blue.
He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to the hazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron of Doom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no more hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and played upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched the thickets with romance.
In other circumstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victor might have been a good man—a good man not in the common sense that means paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand, respecting the law, going to Mass, loyalty to the woman and to a friend, but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has its growth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animals ever found him soft-handed; as for children—the petites—God bless them! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to see them playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood of Dunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouth language whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt an elevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the grass above them, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if it were an opera.
He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ignoble little emprise of revenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall ever have who sits a space with childish merriment and woodland innocence. In his case it was something more direct and tangible than the immaterial efflux of the soul, though that too was not wanting: he saw the signal kerchief being placed outside the window, that otherwise, reaching home too early, he had missed.
“It is my last chance, if I leave to-morrow,” he thought. “I shall satisfy myself as to the nocturnal visitor, the magic flautist, and the bewildering Annapla—and probably find the mystery as simple as the egg in the conjurer's bottle when all's ended!”
That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of his host's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who had promised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and the Baron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederunt and consent to an early retirement.
“I have something pressing to do before I go to bed myself,” he said, restoring by that simple confession some of Count Victor's first suspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.
He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's sordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself that there was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyons shopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the steps he proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debated the situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candles lasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stair suggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above. Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had before him a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a great plaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!
Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.
“Pardon!” said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he saw his host's abashed countenance. “I fear I intrude on a masquerade. Pray, do not mind me. It was that I thought the upper flat uninhabited, and no one awake but myself.”
“You have me somewhat at a disadvantage,” said Doom coldly, resenting the irony. “I'll explain afterwards.”
“Positively, there is no necessity,” replied Count Victor, with a profound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.
There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had seen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaid itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his candles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signal he expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and he awakened each time to find an hour was gone.
It was a night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window, a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair—the sound of a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels—decided him, and he waited to confound the master of Doom.
In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon his heart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword. A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, but left the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front of his door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was not the Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had any reason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered each other simultaneously,—she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put a rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this savage domicile.
In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her eyes had first given him the embarrassment that kept him dumb in her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes—the eyes of the woman born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet always inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise—that told him first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the average of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; instead there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely low.
“Madame; pardon! I—I—was awakened by music, and—”
Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature of the recontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to a bolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.
“I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame's permission, I shall return to earth.”
His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully understand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, not a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count Victor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt that there were lines upon his face betraying him.
“I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance,” she said at last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain melody but adding to the charm of her accent.
Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by this sang froid where he might naturally have looked for perturbation.
“Pardon! I demand your pardon!” was all that he could say, looking at the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze, instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so doing.
He had the woman there!
“Pardon!” he repeated. “It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know”—he smiled the smile of the flâneur—“I did not know it was, let me say, Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I hope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading.”
Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled—an indescribable thing, but a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in that haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue Beautreillis.
“I fear I have not intruded for the first time,” he went on, in a different tone. “It must have been your chamber I somewhat unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me—at least I had come to consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here.”
“It is easily explained,” said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.
“There is positively not the necessity,” protested Count Victor, realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.
“But you must understand that—” she went on.
Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. “The explanation is due from me, madame: I protest,” said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now. France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy waters—but this—but this was Paradise!
“The explanation must be mine,” said he. “I was prying upon no amour, but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions.”
“They were, perhaps, connected with my father,” she said, with a divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.
“Your father!” he exclaimed, astonished that one more of his misconceptions should be thus dispelled. “Then I have been guilty of the unpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess.”
“A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the black-affronted woman,” said she, “but through no fault of mine. I am in my own good father's house, and still, in a way, a stranger in it, and that is a hard thing. But you must not distrust my father: you will find, I think, before very long, that all the odd affairs in this house have less to do with him than with his daughter Olivia.”
She blushed again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitiveness that Count Victor found perfectly entrancing.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said, wishing the while he had had a friseur at the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran his fingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curled above his brow,—“my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fool and a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to your annoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom of proffering an adequate apology.”
He expected her to leave him then, and he had a foot retired, preparing to re-enter his room, but there was a hesitancy in her manner that told him she had something more to say. She bit her nether lip—the orchards of Cammercy, he told himself, never bred a cherry a thousandth part so rich and so inviting, even to look at in candle-light; a shy dubiety hovered round her eyes. He waited her pleasure to speak.
“Perhaps,” said she softly, relinquishing her brave demeanour—“perhaps it might be well that—that my father knew nothing of this meeting, or—or—or of what led to it.”
“Mademoiselle Olivia,” said Count Victor, “I am—what do you call it?—a somnambulist. In that condition it has sometimes been my so good fortune to wander into the most odd and ravishing situations. But as it happens, helas! I can never recall a single incident of them when I waken in the morning. Ma foi!” (he remembered that even yet his suspicions of the Baron were unsatisfied), “I would with some pleasure become a nocturnal conspirator myself, and I have all the necessary qualities—romance, enterprise, and sympathy.”
“Mungo knows all,” said the lady; “Mungo will explain.”
“With infinite deference, mademoiselle, Mungo shall not be invited to do anything of the kind.”
“But he must,” said she firmly. “It is due to myself, as well as to you, and I shall tell him to do so.”
“Your good taste and judgment, mademoiselle, are your instructors. Permit me.”
He took the candlestick from her hands, gravely led the way to her chamber door, and at the threshold restored the light with an excess of polite posturing not without its whimsicality. As she took the candlestick she looked in his face with a twinkle of amusement in her eyes, giving her a vivacity not hitherto betrayed.
Guessing but half the occasion of her smiles, he cried abruptly, and not without confusion: “Ah! you were the amused observer of my farce in wading across from the shore. Peste!”
“Indeed and I was!” said she, smiling all the more brightly at the scene recalled. “Good night!”
And, more of a rogue than Count Victor had thought her, she disappeared into her chamber, leaving him to find his way back to his own.
CHAPTER XV — A RAY OF LIGHT
For the remainder of the night Count Victor's sleep was delicious or disturbed by dreams in which the gloomy habitation of that strange Highland country was lit with lamps—the brightest a woman's eyes. Sometimes she was Cecile, dancing—all abandoned, a child of dalliance, a nymph irresolute—to the music of a flageolet; sometimes another whose radiance fascinated, whose presence yet had terror, for (in the manner of dreams that at their maddest have some far-compassing and tremendous philosophy such as in the waking world is found in poems) she was more than herself, she was the other also, at least sharing the secrets of that great sisterhood of immaculate and despoiled, and, looking in his face, compelled to see his utter unworthiness.
He rose early and walked in the narrow garden, still sodden with rain, though a bold, warm sun shone high to the east. For ordinary he was not changeable, but an Olivia in Doom made a difference: those mouldering walls contained her; she looked out on the sea from those high peering windows; that bower would sometimes shelter her; those alien breezes flowing continually round Doom were privileged to kiss her hair. Positively there seems no great reason, after all, why he should be so precipitate in his removal to the town! Indeed (he told himself with the smile of his subconscious self at the subterfuge) there was a risk of miscarriage for his mission among tattling aubergistes, lawyers, and merchants. He was positively vexed when he encountered Mungo, and that functionary informed him that, though he was early afoot, the Baron was earlier still, and off to the burgh to arrange for his new lodgings. This precipitancy seemed unpleasantly like haste to be rid of him.
“Ah,” said he to the little servant, “your master is so good, so kind, so attentive. Yet I do not wonder, for your Highland hospitality is renowned. I have heard much of it from the dear exiles—Glengarry par exemple, when he desired to borrow the cost of a litre or the price of the diligence to Dun-querque in the season when new-come Scots were reaching there in a humour to be fleeced by a compatriot with three languages at command and the boast of connections with Versailles.”
Mungo quite comprehended.
“Sir,” said he, with some feeling, “there was never bed nor board grudged at Doom. It's like father like son a' through them. The Baron's great-gutcher, auld Alan, ance thought the place no' braw enough for the eye o' a grand pairty o' Irish nobeelity that had bidden themsel's to see him, and the day they were to come he burned the place hauf doon. It was grand summer weather, and he camped them i' the park behin' there, sparing time nor money nor device in their entertainment. Ye see what might hae been a kin' o' penury in a castle was the very extravagance o' luxury in a camp. A hole in the hose is an accident nae gentleman need be ashamed o', but the same darned is a disgrace, bein' poverty confessed, as Annapla says.”
It was a touchy servant this, Montaiglon told himself—somewhat sharper, too, than he had thought: he must hazard no unkind ironies upon the master.
“Charming, charming! good Mungo,” said he. “The expedient might have been devised by my own great-grandfather—a gentleman of—of—of commercial pursuits in Lyons city. I am less fastidious, perhaps, than the Irish, being very glad to take Doom Castle as I have the honour to find it.”
“But ye're thinkin' the Baron is in a hurry to billet ye elsewhere,” said the servant bluntly.
In an ordinary lackey this boldness would have been too much for Count Victor; in this grotesque, so much in love, it seemed, with his employer, and so much his familiar and friend in a ridiculous Scots fashion, the impertinence appeared pardonable. Besides, he blamed himself for the ill-breeding of his own irony.
“That, if I may be permitted to point it out, is not for us to consider, Monsieur Mungo,” said he. “I have placed myself unreservedly in the Baron's hands, and if he considers it good for my indifferent health that I should change the air and take up my residence a little farther along your delightful coast while my business as a wine merchant from Bordeaux is marching, I have no doubt he has reason.”
A smile he made no effort to conceal stole over Mungo's visage.
“Wine merchant frae Bordeaux!” he cried. “I've seen a hantle o' them hereaboots at the fish-curin' season, but they cam' in gabbarts to French Foreland, and it wasnae usual for them to hae Coont to their names nor whingers to their hips. It was mair ordinar the ink-horn at their belts and the sporran at their groins.”
“A malediction on the creature's shrewdness!” said Count Victor inwardly, while outwardly he simply smiled back.
“The red wine is my specialty,” said he, patting his side where the hilt of his sword should be. “My whinger, as you call it, is an auger: who the devil ever broached a pipe of Scots spirits with a penknife? But I see you are too much in the confidence of the Baron for there to be any necessity of concealment between us.”
“H'm!” exclaimed Mungo dryly, as one who has a sense of being flattered too obviously. “The Baron's a bairn, like a' true gentlemen I've seen, and he kens me lang enough and likes me weel enough to mak' nae secret o' what it were to a'body's advantage should be nae secret to Mungo Byde. In this place I'm sentinel, spy, and garrison; it wad ill become the officer in command to let me be doin' my wark withoot some clew to the maist important pairt o't. Ye're here on a search for ane Drimdarroch.”
“You are a wizard, Monsieur Mungo!” cried Montaiglon, not without chagrin at Doom's handing over so vast and vital a secret to a menial.
“Ay, and ye might think it droll that I should ken that; But I be't to ken it, for there's mony a plot against my maister, and nae foreigneer comes inside thae wa's whase pedigree I canna' hae an inklin' o'. Ye're here aifter Drimdarroch, and ye're no' very sure aboot your host, and that's the last thing I wad haggle wi' ye aboot, for your error'll come to ye by-and-by.”
Count Victor waved a deprecating hand.
“Oh, I ken a' aboot what mak's ye sae suspicious,” went on Mungo, undisturbed, “and it's a thing I could mak' clear to ye in a quarter-hour's crack if I had his leave. Tak' my word for't, there's no' a better man wi' his feet in brogues this day than the Baron o' Doom. He should be searchin' the warld wi' the sword o' his faithers (and the same he can use), but the damned thing is the warld for him doesna gang by the snout o' Cowal and the pass o' Glencroe. He had a wife ance; she's dead and buried in Kilmorich; noo he's doited on his hame and his dochter—”
“The charming Olivia!” cried Count Victor, thinking in one detail at all events to surprise this little custodian of all the secrets.
“Ye met her last night,” said Mungo, calmly, seeming to enjoy the rapidity with which his proofs of omniscience could be put forth. “That's half the secret. Ye were daunderin' aboot the lobby wi' thae fine French manners I hae heard o'—frae the French theirsels—and wha' wad blame ye in a hoose like this? And ye're early up the day, but the lass was up earlier to tell me o' your meeting. She had to come to me before Annapla was aboot, for Annapla's no' in this part o' the ploy at all.”
“I protest I have no head for charades,” said Count Victor, with a gesture of bewilderment. “I do not know what you mean.”
Mungo chuckled with huge satisfaction.
“Man, it's as plain's parridge! There's a gentleman in the toon down by that's a hot wooer, and daddy's for nane o' his kind roon' Doom; d'ye tak' me?”
“But still—but still—”
“But still the trystin' gaes on, ye were aboot to say. That's very true, Coont, but it's only the like o' you and me that has nae dochters to plague oorsel's wi' that can guess the like o' that. Ay, it gaes on as ye say, and that's where me and Miss Olivia maun put oor trust in you. In this affair I'll admit I'm a traitor in the camp—at least, to the camp commander, but I think it's in a guid cause. The lassie's fair aff her heid, and nae wonder, for he's a fine mak' o' a man.”
“And a good one, I hope?” interjected Count Victor.
“Humph!” said Mungo. “I thocht that wasna laid muckle stress on in France. He's a takin' deevil, and the kind's but middlin' morally, sae far as I had ony experience o' them. Guid or bad, Miss Olivia, nae further gane nor last Friday, refused to promise she wad gie up meetin' him—though she's the gem o' dochters, God bless her bonny een! His lordship got up in a tirravee and ordered her to her room, wi' Annapla for warder, till he should mak' arrangements for sending her to his guid-sister's in the low country. Your comin' found us in a kin' o' confusion, but ye might hac spared yersel' my trepannin' in the tolbooth upstairs, and met her in a mair becomin' way at her faither's table if it hadna been for Annapla.”
“For Annapla?” repeated Montaiglon.
“Oh, ah! Annapla has the Gift, ye ken. Dae ye think I wad hae been sae ceevil the ither nicht to her when she was yelping on the stair-heid if it hadna been her repute for the Evil E'e? Ye may lauch, but I could tell tales o' Annapla's capacity. The night afore ye cam' she yoked himsel' on his jyling the lassie, though she's the last that wad thraw him. 'Oh.' said he, 'ye're a' tarred wi' the ae stick: if ye connive at his comin' here without my kennin', I'll gie him death wi' his boots on!' It was in the Gaelic this, ye maun ken; Annapla gied me't efter. 'Boots here, boots there,' quo' she, 'love's the fine adventurer, and I see by the griosach' (that's the fire-embers, ye ken; between the ash o' a peat and the creesh o' a candle thae kin' o' witches can tell ye things frae noo to Hogmanay)—' I see by the griosach,' says she, 'that this ane'll come wi' his bare feet.' It staggered him; oh, ay! it staggered him a bit. 'Barefit or brogues,' said he, 'she'll see no man from this till the day she gaes!' And he's the man to keep his word; but it looks as though we might shuffle the pack noo and start a new game, for the plans o' flittin' her to Dunbarton hae fallen through, I hear, and he'll hae to produce her before ye leave.”
“I'm in no hurry,” said Count Victor, coolly twisting his moustache.
“What! To hae her produced?” said the little man, slyly.
“Farceur! No, to leave.”
“Indeed is that sae?” asked Mungo, in a quite new tone, and reddening. “H'm! Ye may hae come barefit, but the ither ane has the preference.”
“He has my sincere felicitations, I assure you,” said Count Victor, “and I can only hope he is worthy of the honour of Master Mungo's connivance and the lady's devotion.”
“Oh! he's a' richt! It's only a whim o' Doom's that mak's him discoontenance the fellow. I'll allow the gentleman has a name for gallantry and debt, and a wheen mair genteel vices that's neither here nor there, but he's a pretty lad. He's the man for my fancy—six feet tall, a back like a board, and an e'e like lightning. And he's nane the waur o' ha'in' a great interest in Mungo Byde's storie.”
“Decidedly a diplomatist!” said Count Victor, laughing. “I always loved an enthusiast; go on—go on, good Mungo. And so he is my nocturnal owl, my flautist of the bower, my Orpheus of the mountains. Does the gifted Annapla also connive, and are hers the window signals?”
“Annapla kens naething o' that—”
“The—what do you call it?—the Second Sight appears to have its limitations.”
“At least if it does she's nane the less willin' to be an unconscious aid, and put a flag at the window at the biddin' o' Olivia to keep the witches awa'. The same flag that keeps aff a witch may easily fetch a bogle. There's but ae time noo and then when it's safe for the lad to venture frae the mainland, and for that there maun be a signal o' some kind, otherwise, if I ken his spirit, he wad never be aff this rock. I'm tellin' ye a' that by Mistress Olivia's command, and noo ye're in the plot like the lave of us.”
Mungo heaved a deep breath as if relieved of a burden.
“Still—still,” said Count Victor, “one hesitates to mention it to so excellent a custodian of the family reputation—still there are other things to me somewhat—somewhat crepuscular.”
His deprecatory smile and the gesture of his hands and shoulders conveyed his meaning.
“Ye're thinkin' o' the Baron in tartan,” said Mungo, bluntly. He smiled oddly. “That's the funniest bit of all. If ye're here a while langer that'll be plain to ye too. Between the darkest secrets and oor understanding o' them there's whiles but a rag, and that minds me that Mistress Olivia was behin' the arras tapestry chitterin' wi' fright when ye broke in by her window. Sirs! sirs! what times we're ha'in; there's ploy in the warld yet, and me unable—tuts! I'm no' that auld either. And faith here's himsel'.”
Mungo punctiliously saluted his master as that gentleman emerged beneath the frowning doorway and joined Count Victor in the dejected garden, lifted the faggot of firewood he had laid at his feet during his talk with the visitor, and sought his kitchen.
In Doom's aspect there was restraint: Count Victor shared the feeling, for now he realised that, in some respects, at all events, he had been doing an injustice to his host.
“I find, M. le Count,” said Doom, after some trivial introductories, “that you cannot be accommodated in the inn down by for some days yet—possibly another week. The Circuit Court has left a pack of the legal gentlemen and jurymen there, who will not be persuaded to return to Edinburgh so long as the cellar at the inn holds out, and my doer, Mr. Petullo, expresses a difficulty in getting any other lodging.”
“I regret exceedingly—”
“No regret at all, M. le Count,” said Doom, “no regret at all, unless it be that you must put up with a while longer of a house that must be very dull to you. It is my privilege and pleasure to have you here—without prejudice to your mission—and the only difficulty there might be about it has been removed through—through—through your meeting with my daughter Olivia. I learn you met her on the stair last night. Well—it would look droll, I dare say, to have encountered that way, and no word of her existence from me, but—but—but there has been a little disagreement between us. I hope I am a decently indulgent father, M. le Count, but—”
“You see before you one with great shame of his awkwardness, Baron,” said Montaiglon. “Ordinarily, I should respect a host's privacy to the extent that I should walk a hundred miles round rather than stumble upon it, but this time I do not know whether to blame myself for my gaucherie or feel pleased that for once it brought me into good company. Mungo has just hinted with his customary discretion at the cause of the mystery. I sympathise with the father; I am, with the daughter, très charmé and—”
This hint of the gallant slightly ruffled Doom.
“Chut!” he cried. “The man with an only daughter had need be a man of patience. I have done my best with this Olivia of mine. She lost her mother when a child”—an accent of infinite tenderness here came to his voice. “These woods and this shore and this lonely barn of ours, all robbed of what once made it a palace to me and mine, were, I fancied, uncongenial to her spirit, and I sent her to the Lowlands. She came back, educated, as they call it—I think she brought back as good a heart as she took away, but singularly little tolerance sometimes for the life in the castle of Doom. It has been always the town for her these six months, always the town, for there she fell in with a fellow who is no fancy of mine.”
Count Victor listened sympathetically, somewhat envying the lover, reviving in his mental vision the figure he had seen first twelve hours ago or less. He was brought to a more vivid interest in the story by the altered tone of Doom, who seemed to sour at the very mention of the unwelcome cavalier.
“Count,” said he, “it's the failing of the sex—the very best of them, because the simplest and the sweetest—that they will prefer a fool to a wise man and a rogue to a gentleman. They're blind, because the rogue is for ever showing off his sham good qualities till they shine better than an ordinary decent man's may. To my eyes, if not quite to my knowledge, this man is as great a scoundrel as was ever left unhung. It's in his look—well, scarcely so, to tell the truth, but something of it is in his mouth as well as in his history, and sooner than see my daughter take up for life with a creature of his stamp I would have her in her grave beside her mother. Unluckily, as I say, the man's a plausible rogue: that's the most dangerous rogue of all, and the girl's blind to all but the virtues and graces he makes a display of. I'll forgive Petullo his cheatry in the common way of his craft sooner than his introduction of such a man to my girl.”
To all this Count Victor could no more than murmur his sympathy, but he had enough of the young gallant in him to make some mental reservations in favour of the persistent wooer. It was an alluring type, this haunter of the midnight bower, and melancholy sweet breather in the classic reed. All the wooers of only daughters, he reminded himself, as well as all the sweethearts of only sons, were unworthy in the eyes of parents, and probably Mungo's unprejudiced attitude towards the conspiring lovers was quite justified by the wooer's real character in spite of the ill repute of his history. He reflected that this confidence of Doom's left unexplained his own masquerade of the previous night, but he gave no whisper to the thought, and had, indeed, forgotten it by evening, when for the first time Olivia joined them at her father's table.
CHAPTER XVI — OLIVIA
It was a trying position in which Olivia found herself when first she sat at the same table with the stranger whose sense of humour, as she must always think, was bound to be vastly entertained by her ridiculous story. Yet she carried off the situation with that triumph that ever awaits on a frank eye, a good honest heart, and an unfailing trust in the ultimate sympathy of one's fellow-creatures. There was no mauvaise honte there, Count Victor saw, and more than ever he admired, if that were possible. It was the cruel father of the piece who was uneasy. He it was who must busy himself with the feeding of an appetite whose like he had not manifested before, either silent altogether or joining in the conversation with the briefest sentences.
There was never a Montaiglon who would lose such a good occasion, and Count Victor made the most of it. He was gentle, but not too gentle—for this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaningless blague that no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and shining influence Olivia soon forgot the ignominy of these recent days, and it was something gained in that direction that already she looked upon him as a confederate.
“I am so glad you like our country, Count Victor,” she said, no way dubious about his praise of her home hills, those loud impetuous cataracts, and that alluring coast. “It rains—oh! it rains—”
“Parfaitement, mademoiselle, but when it shines!” and up went his hands in an admiration wherefor words were too little eloquent: at that moment he was convinced truly that the sun shone nowhere else than in the Scottish hills.
“Yes, yes, when it shines, as you say, it is the dear land! Then the woods—the woods gleam and tremble, I always think, like a girl who has tears in her eyes, the tears of gladness. The hills—let my father tell you of the hills, Count Victor; I think he must love them more than he loves his own Olivia—is that not cruel of a man with an only child? He would die, I am sure, if he could not be seeing them when he liked. But I cannot be considering the hills so beautiful as my own glens, my own little glens, that no one, I'll be fancying, is acquainted with to the heart but me and the red deer, and maybe a hunter or two. Of course, we have the big glens, too, and I would like it if I could show you Shira Glen—”
“The best of it was once our own,” said Doom, black at brow.
“—That once was ours, as father says, and is mine yet so long as I can walk there and be thinking my own thoughts in it when the wood is green, and the wild ducks are plashing in the lake.”
Doom gave a significant exclamation: he was recalling that rumour had Shira Glen for his daughter's favourite trysting-place.
“Rain or shine,” said Count Victor, delighting in such whole-souled rapture, delighting in that bright, unwearied eye, that curious turn of phrase that made her in English half a foreigner like himself—“Rain or shine, it is a country of many charms.”
“But now you are too large in your praise,” she said, not quite so warmly. “I do not expect you to think it is a perfect country-side at any time and all times; and it is but natural that you should love the country of France, that I have been told is a brave and beautiful country, and a country I am sometimes loving myself because of its hospitality to folk that we know. I know it is a country of brave men, and sometimes I am wondering if it is the same for beautiful women. Tell me!” and she leaned on an arm that shone warm, soft, and thrilling from the short sleeve of her gown, and put the sweetest of chins upon a hand for the wringing of hearts.
Montaiglon looked into those eyes, so frank and yet profound, and straight became a rebel. “Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he, indifferently (oh, Cecile! oh, Cecile!), “they are considered not unpleasing; but for myself, perhaps acquaintance has spoiled the illusion.”
She did not like that at all; her eyes grew proud and unbelieving.
“When I was speaking of the brave men of France,” said she, “I fancied perhaps they would tell what they really thought—even to a woman.” And he felt very much ashamed of himself.
“Ah! well, to tell the truth, mademoiselle,” he confessed, “I have known very beautiful ones among them, and many that I liked, and still must think of with affection. Mort de ma vie! am I not the very slave of your sex, that for all the charms, the goodness, the kindnesses and purities, is a continual reproach to mine? In the least perfect of them I have never failed to find something to remind me of my little mother.”
“And now I think that is much better,” said Olivia, heartily, her eyes sparkling at that concluding filial note. “I would not care at all for a man to come from his own land and pretend to me that he had no mind for the beautiful women and the good women he had seen there. No; it would not deceive me, that; it would not give me any pleasure. We have a proverb in the Highlands, that Annapla will often be saying, that the rook thinks the pigeon hen would be bonny if her wings were black; and that is a seanfhacal—that is an old-word that is true.”
“If I seemed to forget France and what I have seen there of Youth and Beauty,” said Count Victor, “it is, I swear it is—it is—”
“It is because you would be pleasant to a simple Highland girl,” said Olivia, with just a hint of laughter in her eyes.
“No, no, par ma foi! not wholly that. But yes, I love my country—ah! the happy days I have known there, the sunny weather, the friends so good, the comradeship so true. Your land is beautiful—it is even more beautiful than the exiles in Paris told me; but I was not born here, and there are times when your mountains seem to crush my heart.”
“Is it so, indeed?” said Doom. “As for me, I would not change the bleakest of them for the province of Champagne.” And he beat an impulsive hand upon the table.
“Yes, yes, I understand that,” cried Olivia. “I understand it very well. It is the sorrow of the hills and woods you mean; ah! do I not know it, too? It is only in my own little wee glens among the rowans that I can feel careless like the birds, and sing; when I walk the woods or stand upon the shore and see the hills without a tree or tenant, when the land is white with the snow and the mist is trailing, Olivia Lamond is not very cheery. What it is I do not know—that influence of my country; it is sad, but it is good and wholesome, I can tell you; it is then I think that the bards make songs, and those who are not bards, like poor myself, must just be feeling the songs there are no words for.”
At this did Doom sit mighty pleased and humming to himself a bar of minstrelsy.
“Look at my father there!” said Olivia; “he would like you to be thinking that he does not care a great deal for the Highlands of Scotland.”
“Indeed, and that is not fair, Olivia; I never made pretence of that,” said Doom. “Never to such as understand; Montaiglon knows the Highlands are at my heart, and that the look of the hills is my evening prayer.”
“Isn't that a father, Count Victor?” cried Olivia, quite proud of the confession. “But he is the strange father, too, that will be pretending that he has forgotten the old times and the old customs of our dear people. We are the children of the hills and of the mists; the hills make no change, the mists are always coming back, and the deer is in the corrie yet, and when you will hear one that is of the Highland blood say he does not care any more for the old times, and preferring the English tongue to his own, and making a boast of his patience when the Government of England robs him of his plaid, you must be watchful of that man, Count Victor. For there is something wrong. Is it not true, that I am saying, father?” She turned a questioning gaze to Doom, who had no answer but a sigh.
“You will have perhaps heard my father miscall the breacan, miscall the tartan, and—”
“Not at all,” cried the Baron. “There is a great difference between condemning and showing an indifference.”
“I think, father,” said Olivia, “we are among friends. Count Victor, as you say, could understand about our fancies for the hills, and it would be droll indeed if he smiled at us for making a treasure of the tartan. Whatever my father, the stupid man, the darling, may be telling you of the tartan and the sword, Count Victor, do not believe that we are such poor souls as to forget them. Though we must be wearing the Saxon in our clothes and in our speech, there are many like me—and my dear father there—who will not forget.”
It was a curious speech all that, not without a problem, as well as the charm of the unexpected and the novel, to Count Victor. For, somehow or other, there seemed to be an under meaning in the words; Olivia was engaged upon the womanly task—he thought—of lecturing some one. If he had any doubt about that, there was Mungo behind the Baron's chair, his face just showing over his shoulder, seamed with smiles that spoke of some common understanding between him and the daughter of his master; and once, when she thrust more directly at her father, the little servitor deliberately winked to the back of his master's head—a very gnome of slyness.
“But you have not told me about the ladies of France,” said she. “Stay! you will be telling me that again; it is not likely my father would be caring to hear about them so much as about the folk we know that have gone there from Scotland. They are telling me that many good, brave men are there wearing their hearts out, and that is the sore enough trial.”
Count Victor thought of Barisdale and his cousin-german, young Glengarry, gambling in that frowsiest boozing-ken in the Rue Tarane—the Café de la Paix—without credit for a louis d'or; he thought of James Mor Drummond and the day he came to him behind the Tuileries stable clad in rags of tartan to beg a loan; none of these was the picturesque figure of loyalty in exile that he should care to paint for this young woman.
But he remembered also Cameron, Macleod, Traquair, a score of gallant hearts, of handsome gentlemen, and Lochiel, true chevalier—perhaps a better than his king!
It was of these Count Victor spoke—of their faith, their valiancies, their shifts of penury and pride. He had used often to consort with them at Cammercy, and later on in Paris. If the truth were to be told, they had made a man of him, and now he was generous enough to confess it.
“I owe them much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “When first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young, that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in an ennui and the nights below the lamps? Well, I met your Scots after Dettingen, renewed the old acquaintance I had made at Cam-mercy, and found the later exiles better than the first—than the Balhaldies, the Glengarries, Mur-rays, and Sullivans. They were different, ces gens-là. Ordinarily they rendezvoused in the Taverne Tourtel of St. Germains, and that gloomy palace shared their devotions with Scotland, whence they came and of which they were eternally talking, like men in a nostalgia. James and his Jacquette were within these walls, often indifferent enough, I fear, about the cause our friends were exiled there for; and Charles, between Luneville and Liege or Poland and London, was not at the time an inspiring object of veneration, if you will permit me to says so, M. le Baron. But what does it matter? the cause was there, an image to keep the good hearts strong, unselfish, and expectant. Ah! the songs they sang, so full of that hopeful melancholy of the glens you speak of, mademoiselle; the stories they told of Tearlach's Year; the hopes that bound them in a brotherhood—and binds them yet, praise le bon Dieu! That was good for me. Yes; I like your exiled compatriots very much, Mademoiselle Olivia. And yet there was a maraud or two among them; no fate could be too hard for the spies who would betray them.”
For the first time in many hours Count Victor remembered that he had an object in Scotland, but with it somehow Cecile was not associated.
“Mungo has been telling me about the spy, Count Victor. Oh, the wickedness of it! I feel black, burning shame that one with a Highland name and a Highland mother would take a part like yon. I would not think there could be men in the world so bad. They must have wicked mothers to make such sons; the ghost of a good mother would cry from her grave to check her child in such a villany.” Olivia spoke with intense feeling, her eyes lambent and her lips quivering.
“Drimdarroch's mother must have been a rock,” said Count Victor.
“And to take what was my father's name!” cried Olivia; “Mungo has been telling me that. Though I am a woman, I could be killing him myself.”
“And here we're in our flights, sure enough!” broke in the father, as he left them with a humorousous pretence at terror.
“Now you must tell me about the women of France,” said Olivia. “I have a friend who was there once, and tells me, like you, he was indifferent; but I am doubting that he must have seen some there that were worth his fancy.”
“Is it there sits the wind?” thought Montaiglon. “Our serene angel is not immune against the customary passions.” An unreasonable envy of the diplomatist who had been indifferent to the ladies of France took possession of him; still, he might have gratified her curiosity about his fair compatriots had not Doom returned, and then Olivia's interest in the subject oddly ceased.
CHAPTER XVII — A SENTIMENTAL SECRET
“Good night,” said Olivia, at last, and straightway Count Victor felt the glory of the evening eclipse. He opened the door to let her pass through.
“I go back to my cell quiet enough,” she said, in low tones, and with a smiling frown upon her countenance.
“Happy prisoner!” said he, “to be condemned to no worse than your own company.”
“Ah! it is often a very dull and pitiful company that, Count Victor,” said Olivia, with a sigh.
It was not long till he, too, sought his couch, and the Baron of Doom was left alone.
Doom sat long looking at his crumbling walls, and the flaming fortunes, the blush, the heat-white and the dead grey ash of the peat-fire. He sighed now and then with infinite despondency. Once or twice he pshawed his melancholy vapours, gave a pace back and forward on the oaken floor, with a bent head, a bereaved countenance, and sat down again, indulging in the passionate void that comes to a bosom reft of its joys, its hopes and loves, and only mournful recollection left. A done man! Not an old man; not even an elderly, but a done man none the less, with the heart out of him, and all the inspiration clean gone!
Count Victor's advent in the castle had brought its own bitterness, for it was not often now that Doom had the chance to see anything of the big, brave outer world of heat and enterprise. This gallant revived ungovernably the remembrances he for ever sought to stifle—all he had been and all he had seen, now past and gone for ever, as Annapla did not scruple to tell him when the demands of her Gift or a short temper compelled her. His boyhood in the dear woods, by the weedy river-banks, in the hill-clefts where stags harboured, on a shore for ever sounding with the enchanting sea—oh, sorrow! how these things came before him. The gentle mother, with the wan, beautiful face; the eager father looking ardent out to sea—they were plain to view. And then St. Andrews, when he was a bejant of St. Leonard's, roystering with his fellows, living the life of youth with gusto, but failing lamentably at the end; then the despondency of those scanty acres and decayed walls; his marriage with the dearest woman in the world, Death at the fireside, the bairn crying at night in the arms of her fosterer; his journeys abroad, the short hour of glory and forgetfulness with Saxe at Fontenoy and Laffeldt, to be followed only by these weary years of spoliation by law, of oppression by the usurping Hanoverian.
A done man! Only a poor done man of middle age, and the fact made all the plainer to himself by contrast with his guest, alert and even gay upon a fiery embassy of retribution.
It was exactly the hour of midnight by a clock upon the mantel; a single candle, by which he had made a show of reading, was guttering all to a side and an ungracious end in a draught that came from some cranny in the ill-seamed ingle-walls, for all that the night seemed windless. A profound stillness wrapped all; the night was huge outside, with the sea dead-flat to moon and pulsing star.
He shook off his vapours vexatiously, and, as he had done on the first night of Count Victor's coming, he went to his curious orisons at the door—the orisons of the sentimentalist, the home-lover. Back he drew the bars softly, and looked at the world that ever filled him with yearning and apprehension, at the draggled garden, at the sea, with its roadway strewn with golden sand all shimmering, at the mounts—Ben Ime, Ardno, and Ben Artair, haughty in the night.
Then he shut the doors reluctantly, stood hesitating—more the done man than ever—in the darkness of the entrance, finally hurried to save the guttering candle. He lit a new one at its expiring flame and left the salle. He went, not to his bedchamber, but to the foot of the stair that led to the upper flats, to his daughter's room, to the room of his guest, and to the ancient chapel. With infinite caution, he crept round and round on the narrow corkscrew stair; at any step it might have been a catacomb cell.
He listened at the narrow corridor leading to Olivia's room and that adjoining of her umquhile warder, Annapla; he paused, too, for a second, at Montaiglon's door. None gave sign of life. He went up higher.
A storey over the stage on which Count Victor slumbered the stair ended abruptly at an oaken door, which he opened with a key. As he entered, a wild flurry of wings disturbed the interior, and by the light of the candle and some venturesome rays of the moon a flock of bats or birds were to be seen in precipitous flight through unglazed windows and a broken roof.
Doom placed his candle in a niche of the wall and went over to an ancient armoire, or chest, which seemed to be the only furniture of what had apparently once been the chapel of the castle, to judge from its size and the situation of an altar-like structure at the east end-.
He unlocked the heavy lid, threw it open, looked down with a sigh at its contents, which seemed, in the light of he candle, nothing wonderful. But a suit of Highland clothes, and some of the more martial appurtenances of the lost Highland state, including the dirk that had roused Montaiglon's suspicion!
He drew them out hurriedly upon the floor, but yet with an affectionate tenderness, as if they were the relics of a sacristy, and with eagerness substituted the gay tartan for his dull mulberry Saxon habiliments. It was like the creation of a man from a lay figure. The jerk at the kilt-belt buckle somehow seemed to brace the sluggish spirit; his shoulders found their old square set above a well-curved back; his feet—his knees—by an instinct took a graceful poise they had never learned in the mean immersement of breeches and Linlithgow boots. As he fastened his buckled brogues, he hummed the words of MacMhaister Allister's songs:
“Oh! the black-cloth of the Saxon,
Dearer far's the Gaelic tartan!”
“Hugh Bethune's content with the waistcoat, is he?” he said to himself. “He's no Gael to be so easily pleased, and him with a freeman's liberty! And yet—and yet—I would be content myself to have the old stuff only about my heart.”
He assumed the doublet and plaid, drew down upon his brow a bonnet with an eagle plume; turned him to the weapons. The knife—the pistols—the dirk, went to their places, and last he put his hand upon the hilt of a sword—not a claymore, but the weapon he had worn in the foreign field. As foolish a piece of masquerade as ever a child had found entertainment in, and yet, if one could see it, with some great element of pathos and of dignity. For with every item of the discarded and degraded costume of his race he seemed to put on a grace not there before, a manliness, a spirit that had lain in abeyance with the clothes in that mothy chest. It was no done man who eagerly trod the floor of that ruined chapel, no lack-lustre failure of life, but one complete, commingling action with his sentiment. He felt the world spacious about him again; a summons to ample fields beyond the rotting woods and the sonorous shore of Doom. The blood of his folk, that had somehow seemed to stay about his heart in indolent clots, began to course to every extremity, and gave his brain a tingling clarity, a wholesome intoxication of the perfect man.
He drew the sword from its scabbard, joying hugely in the lisp of the steel, at its gleam in the candle-light, and he felt anew the wonder of one who had drunk the wine of life and venture to its lees.
He made with the weapon an airy academic salute à la Gerard and the new school of fence, thrust swift in tierce like a sun-flash in forest after rain, followed with a parade, and felt an expert's ecstasy. The blood tingled to his veins; his eyes grew large and flashing; a flush came to that cheek, for ordinary so wan. Over and over again he sheathed the sword, and as often withdrew it from its scabbard. Then he handled the dirk with the pleasure of a child. But always back to the sword, handled with beauty and aplomb, always back to the sword, and he had it before him, a beam of fatal light, when something startled him, as one struck unexpectedly by a whip.
There was a furious rapping at the outer door!
CHAPTER XVIII — “Loch Sloy!”
The rap that startled Doom in the midst of his masquerade in the chapel of his house, came like the morning beat of drums to his guest a storey lower. Count Victor sprang up with a certainty that trouble brew, dressed with all speed, and yet with the coolness of one who has heard alarums on menaced frontiers; took his sword in hand, hesitated, remembered Olivia, and laid it down again; then descended the dark stair that seemed the very pit of hazards.
A perturbing silence had succeeded the noisy summons on the oak, and Mungo, with a bold aspect well essayed, but in no accord with the tremour of his knees and the pallor of his countenance, stood, in dragging pantaloons and the gaudy Kilmarnock cap cocked upon his bald head, at the stair-foot with a flambeau in his hand. He seemed hugely relieved to have the company of Count Victor.
“Noo, wha the deevil can we hae here at sic an unearthly oor o' nicht?” said he, trying a querulous tone befitting an irate sentinel; but the sentence trailed off unconvincingly, because his answer came too promptly in another peremptory summons from without.
“Lord keep 's!” whispered the little man, no longer studying to sustain his martial rôle. He looked nervously at Count Victor standing silently by, with some amusement at the perturbation of the garrison and a natural curiosity as to what so untimely a visit might portend. It was apparent that Mungo was for once willing to delegate his duty as keeper of the bartizan to the first substitute who offered, but here was no move to help him out of his quandary.
“It's gey gash this!” whispered the little man. “And the tide in, too! And the oor sae late!”
These sinister circumstances seemed to pile upon his brain till his knees bent below the weight of accumulated terror, and Montaiglon must smile at fears not all unreasonable, as he felt himself.
“Oh! better late than never—is not that the proverb, Master Mungo?” said he. “Though, indeed, it is not particularly consoling to a widow's husband.”
“I'd gie a pound Scots to ken wha chaps,” said Mungo, deaf to every humour.
“Might I suggest your asking? It is, I have heard, the customary proceeding,” said Count Victor.
“Wha's there?” cried Mungo, with an ear to the wood, that appeared to have nothing human outside, for now for a little there was absolute stillness. Then an answer as from a wraith—the humble request of some one for admission.
“Noo, that's michty droll,” said Mungo, his face losing its alarm and taking on a look of some astonishment. “Haud that,” and he thrust the torch in the Frenchman's hand. Without another word he drew back the bars, opened the door, and put out his head. He was caught by the throat and plucked forth into the darkness.
Count Victor could not have drawn a weapon had he had one ere the door fell in thundering on the walls. He got one glimpse of the sans culottes, appealed again to the De Chenier macer in his ancestry, and flung the flambeau at the first who entered.
The light went out; he dropped at a boy's intuition upon a knee and lowered his head. Over him in the darkness poured his assailants, too close upon each other in their eagerness, and while they struggled at the stair-foot he drew softly back. Out in the night Mungo wailed lugubrious in the hands of some of his captors; within there was a wonderful silence for a little, the baffled visitors recovering themselves with no waste of words, and mounting the stair in pursuit of the gentleman they presumed to have preceded them. When they were well up, he went to the door and made it fast again, leaving Mungo to the fate his stupidity deserved.
Doom's sleeping-chamber lay behind; he passed along the corridor quickly, knocked at the door, got no answer, and entered.
It was as he had fancied—his host was gone, his couch had not been occupied. A storm of passion swept through him; he felt himself that contemptible thing, a man of the world betrayed by a wickedness that ought to be transparent. They were in the plot then, master and man, perhaps even—but no, that was a thought to quell on the moment of its waking; she at least was innocent of all these machinations, and upstairs now, she shared, without a doubt, the alarms of Annapla. That familiar of shades and witches, that student of the fates, was a noisy poltroon when it was the material world that threatened; she was shrieking again.
“Loch Sloy! Loch Sloy!” now rose the voices overhead, surely the maddest place in the world for a Gaelic slogan: it gave him a sense of unspeakable savagery and antique, for it was two hundred years since his own family had cried “Cammercy!” on stricken fields.
He paused a moment, irresolute.
A veritable farce! he thought. It would have been so much easier for his host to hand him over without these play-house preliminaries.
But Olivia! but Olivia!
He felt the good impulse of love and anger, the old ichor of his folk surged through his veins, and without a weapon he went upstairs, trusting to his wits to deal best with whatever he would there encounter.
It seemed an hour since they had entered; in truth it was but a minute or two, and they were still in the bewildering blackness of the stair, one behind another in its narrow coils, and seemingly wisely dubious of too precipitate an advance. He estimated that they numbered less than half a dozen when he came upon the rear-most of the queue.
“Loch Sloy!” cried the leader, somewhat too theatrically for illusion.
“Cammercy for me!” thought Montaiglon: he was upon the tail, and clutched to drag the last man down. Fate was kind, she gave the bare knees of the enemy to his hand, and behold! here was his instrument—in the customary knife stuck in the man's stocking. It was Count Victor's at a flash: he stood a step higher, threw his arm over the shoulder of the man, pulled him backward into the pit of the stair and stabbed at him as he fell.
“Un!” said he as the wretch collapsed upon himself, and the knife seemed now unnecessary. He clutched the second man, who could not guess the tragedy behind, for the night's business was all in front, and surely only friends were in the rear—he clutched the second lower, and threw him backward over his head.
“Deux!” said Count Victor, as the man fell limp behind him upon his unconscious confederate.
The third in front turned like a viper when Count Victor's clutch came on his waist, and drove out with his feet. The act was his own undoing. It met with no resistance, and the impetus of his kick carried him off the balance and threw him on the top of his confederates below.
“Trois!” said Montaiglon. “Pulling corks is the most excellent training for such a warfare,” and he set himself almost cheerfully to number four.
But number four was not in the neck of the bottle: this ferment behind him propelled him out upon the stairhead, and Montaiglon, who had thrown himself upon him, fell with him on the floor. Both men recovered their feet at a spring. A moment's pause was noisy with the cries of the domestic in her room, then the Frenchman felt a hand pass rapidly over his habiliments and seek hurriedly for his throat, as on a sudden inspiration. What that precluded was too obvious: he fancied he could feel the poignard already plunging in his ribs, and he swiftly tried a fall with his opponent.
It was a wrestler's grip he sought, but a wrestler he found, for arms of a gigantic strength went round him, clasping his own to his side and rendering his knife futile; a Gaelic malediction hissed in his ear; he felt breath hot and panting; his own failed miserably, and his blood sang in his head with the pressure of those tremendous arms that caught him to a chest like a cuirass of steel. But if his hands were bound his feet were free: he placed one behind his enemy and flung his weight upon him, so that they fell together. This time Count Victor was uppermost. His hands were free of a sudden; he raised the knife to stab at the breast heaving under him, but he heard as from another world—as from a world of calm and angels—the voice of Olivia in her room crying for her father, and a revulsion seized him, so that he hesitated at his ugly task. It was less than a second's slackness, yet it was enough, for his enemy rolled free and plunged for the stair. Montaiglon seized him as he fled; the skirt of his coat dragged through his hands, and left him with a button. He dropped it with a cry, and turned in the darkness to find himself more frightfully menaced than before.
This time the plunge of the dirk was actual; he felt it sear his side like a hot iron, and caught the wrist that held it only in time to check a second blow. His fingers slipped, his head swam; a moment more, and a Montaiglon was dead very far from his pleasant land of France, in a phantom castle upon a shadowy sea among savage ghosts.
“Father! father!”
It was Olivia's voice; a light was thrown upon the scene, for she stood beside the combatants with a candle in her hand.
They drew back at a mutual spasm, and Montaiglon saw that his antagonist was the Baron of Doom!
CHAPTER XIX — REVELATION
Doom, astounded, threw the dagger from him with an exclamation. His eyes, large and burning yet with passion, were wholly for Count Victor, though his daughter Olivia stood there at his side holding the light that had revealed the furies to each other, her hair in dark brown cataracts on her shoulders, and eddying in bewitching curls upon her ears and temples, that gleamed below like the foam of mountain pools.
“Father! father! what does this mean?” she cried. “There is some fearful mistake here.”
“That is not to exaggerate the position, at all events,” thought Count Victor, breathing hard, putting the knife unobserved behind him. He smiled to this vision and shrugged his shoulders. He left the elucidation of the mystery to the other gentleman, this counsellor of forgiveness and peace, clad head to foot in the garb he contemned, and capable of some excellent practice with daggers in the darkness.
“I'll never be able to say how much I regret this, Count Victor,” said Doom. “Good God! your hands were going, and in a second or two more—”
“For so hurried a farce,” said Count Victor, “the lowered light was something of a mistake, n'est ce pas? I—I—I just missed the point of the joke,” and he glanced at the dagger glittering sinister in the corner of the stair.
“I have known your mistake all along,” cried Olivia. “Oh! it is a stupid thing this. I will tell you! It is my father should have told you before.”
The clangour of the outer door closing recalled that there was danger still below. Olivia put a frightened hand on her father's arm. “A thousand pardons, Montaiglon,” cried he; “but here's a task to finish.” And without a word more of excuse or explanation he plunged downstairs.
Count Victor looked dubiously after him, and made no move to follow.
“Surely you will not be leaving him alone there,” said Olivia. “Oh! you have not your sword. I will get your sword.” And before he could reply she had flown to his room. She returned with the weapon. Her hand was all trembling as she held it out to him. He took it slowly; there seemed no need for haste below now, for all was silent except the voices of Doom and Mungo.
“It is very good of you, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “I thank you, but—but—you find me in a quandary. Am I to consider M. le Baron as ally or—or—or—” He hesitated to put the brutal alternative to the daughter.
Olivia stamped her foot impetuously, her visage disturbed by emotions of anxiety, vexation, and shame.
“Oh, go! go!” she cried. “You will not, surely, be taking my father for a traitor to his own house—for a murderer.”
“I desire to make the least of a pleasantry I am incapable of comprehending, yet his dagger was uncomfortably close to my ribs a minute or two ago,” sard Count Victor reflectively.
“Oh!” she cried. “Is not this a coil? I must even go myself,” and she made to descend.
“Nay, nay,” said Count Victor softly, holding her back. “Nay, nay; I will go if your whole ancestry were ranked at the foot.”
“It is the most stupid thing,” she cried, as he left her; “I will explain when you come up. My father is a Highland gentleman.”
“So, by the way, was Drimdarroch,” said Montaiglon, but that was to himself. He smiled back into the illumination of the lady's candle, then descended into the darkness with a brow tense and frowning, and his weapon prepared for anything.
The stair was vacant, so was the corridor. The outer door was open; the sound of the sea came in faint murmurs, the mingled odours of pine and wrack borne with it. Out in the heavens a moon swung among her stars most queenly and sedate, careless altogether of this mortal world of strife and terrors; the sea had a golden roadway. A lantern light bobbed on the outer edge of the rock, shining through Olivia's bower like a will-o'-the-wisp, and he could hear in low tones the voices of Doom and his servant. Out at sea, but invisible, for beyond the moon's influence, a boat was being rowed fast: the beat of the oars on the thole-pins came distinctly. And in the wood behind, now cut off from them by the riding waves, owls called incessantly.
It was like a night in a dream, like some vast wheeling chimera of fever—that plangent sea before, those terrors fleeing, and behind, a maiden left with her duenna in a castle demoniac.
Doom and Mungo came back from the rock edge, silently almost, brooding over a mystery, and the three looked at each other.
“Well, they are gone,” said the Baron at last, showing the way to his guest.
“What, gone!” said Montaiglon, incapable of restraining his irony. “Not all of them?”
“O Lord! but this is the nicht!” cried the little servant who carried the lantern. “I micht hae bided a' my days in Fife and never kent what war was. The only thing that daunts me is that I should hae missed my chance o' a whup at them, for they had me trussed like a cock before I put my feet below me when they pu'd me oot.”
He drew the bars with nervous fingers, and seemed to dread his master as much as he had done the enemy. Olivia had come down to the corridor; aloft Annapla had renewed her lamentations; the four of them stood clustered in the narrow passage at the stair-foot.
“What for did ye open the door, Mungo?” asked Doom,—not the Doom of doleful days, of melancholy evenings of study and of sour memories, not the done man, but one alert and eager, a soldier, in the poise of his body, the set of his limbs, the spirit of his eye.
“Here's a new man!” thought Montaiglon, silently regarding him. “Devilry appears to have a marvellous power of stimulation.”
“I opened the door,” said Mungo, much perturbed.
“For what?” said Doom shortly.
“There was a knock.”
“I heard it. The knock was obvious; it dirled the very roof of the house. But it was not necessary to open at a knock at this time of morning; ye must have had a reason. Hospitality like that to half-a-dozen rogues from Arroquhar, who had already made a warm night for ye, was surely stretched a little too far. What did ye open for?”
Mungo seemed to range his mind for a reply. He looked to Montaiglon, but got no answer in the Frenchman's face; he looked over Montaiglon's shoulder at Olivia, standing yet in the tremour of her fears, and his eye lingered. It was no wonder, thought Count Victor, that it lingered there.
“Come, come, I'm waiting my answer!” cried Doom, in a voice that might have stirred a corps in the battlefield.
“I thought there wasna mair than ane,” said Mungo.
“But even one! At this time of morning! And is it your custom to open to a summons of that kind without finding out who calls?”
“I thought I kent the voice,” said Mungo, furtively looking again at Olivia.
“And whose was it, this voice that could command so ready and foolish an acquiescence on the part of my honest sentinel Mungo Boyd?” asked Doom incredulously.
“Ye can ask that!” replied the servant desperately; “it's mair than I can tell. All I ken is that I thought the voice fair-spoken, and I alloo it was a daft-like thing to do, but I pu'ed the bar, I had nae sooner dune't nor I was gripped by the thrapple and kep' doon by a couple o' the blackguards that held me a' the time the ither three or four were—”
Doom caught him by the collar and shook him angrily.
“Ye lie, ye Fife cat; I see't in your face!”
“I can speak as to the single voice and its humility, and to the sudden plucking forth of this gentleman,” said Count Victor quietly, at sea over this examination. But for the presence of the woman he would have cried out at the mockery of the thing.
“You must hear my explanation, Montaiglon,” said Doom. “If you will come to the hall, I will give it. Olivia, you will come too. I should have taken your hints of yesterday morning, and the explanation of this might have been unnecessary.”
Doom and his guest went to the salle; Olivia lingered a moment behind.
“Who was it, Mungo?” said she, whisperingly to the servant. “I know by the face of you that you are keeping something from my father.”
“Am I?” said he. “Humph! It's Fife very soon for Mungo Boyd, I'm tellin' ye.”
“But who was it?” she persisted.
“The Arroquhar men,” said he curtly; “and that's all I ken aboot it,” and he turned to leave her.
“And that is not the truth, Mungo,” said Olivia, with great dignity. “I think with my father that you are telling what is not the true word,” and she said no more, but followed to the salle.
On the stairway Count Victor had trod upon the button he had drawn from the skirts of his assailant; he picked it up without a word, to keep it as a souvenir. Doom preceded him into the room, lit some candles hurriedly at the smouldering fire, and turned to offer him a chair.
“Our—our friends are gone,” said he. “You seem to have badly wounded one of them, for the others carried him bleeding to the water-side, as we have seen from his blood-marks on the rock: they have gone, as they apparently must have come, by boat. Sit down, Olivia.”
His daughter had entered. She had hurriedly coiled her hair up, and the happy carelessness of it pleased Montaiglon's eye like a picture.
Still he said nothing; he could not trust himself to speak, facing, as he fancied yet he did, a traitor.
“I see from your face you must still be dubious of me,” said Doom. He waited for no reply, but paced up and down the room excitedly, the pleats of his kilt and the thongs of his purse swinging to his movements: a handsome figure, as Mont-aiglon could not but confess. “I am still shattered at the nerve to think that I had almost taken your life there in a fool's blunder. You must wonder to see me in this—in this costume.”
He could not even yet come to his explanation, and Olivia must help him.
“What my father would tell you, if he was not in such a trouble, Count Victor, is what I did my best to let you know last night. It is just that he breaks the laws of George the king in this small affair of our Highland tartan. It is a fancy of his to be wearing it in an evening, and the bats in the chapel upstairs are too blind to know what a rebel it is that must be play-acting old days and old styles among them.”
A faint light came suddenly to Count Victor.
“Ah!” said he, “it is not, mademoiselle, that the bats alone are blind; here is a very blind Montaiglon. I implore your pardon, M. le Baron. It is good to be frank, though it is sometimes unpleasant, and I must plead guilty to an imbecile misapprehension.”
Doom flushed, and took the proffered hand.
“My good Montaiglon,” said he, “I'm the most shamefaced man this day in the shire of Argyll. Need I be telling you that I have all Olivia's sentiment and none of her honest courage?”
“My dear father!” cried Olivia fondly, looking with melting eyes at her parent; and Count Victor, too, thought this mummer no inadmirable figure.
“It is nothing more than my indulgence in the tartan that makes your host look sometimes scarcely trustworthy; and my secret got its right punishment this night. I will not be able to wear a kilt with an easy conscience for some time to come.”
“My faith! Baron, that were a penance out of all proportion!” said Count Victor, laughing. “If you nearly gave me the key of the Olympian meadows there, 'tis I that have brought these outlaws about your ears.”
“What beats me is that they should make so much ado about a trifle.”
“A trifle!” said Count Victor. “True, in a sense. The wretch but died. We must all die; we all know it, though none of us believe it.”
“I am glad to say that after all you only wounded yon Macfarlane; so Petullo learned but yesterday, and I clean forgot to tell you sooner.”
Montaiglon looked mightily relieved.
“So!” said he; “I shall give a score of the best candles to St. Denys—if I remember when I get home again. You could not have told me such good tidings a moment too soon, dear M. le Baron, though of course a small affair like that would naturally escape one's memory.”
“He was as good as dead, by all rumour; but being a thief and an Arroquhar man, he naturally recovered: and now it's the oddest thing in the world that an accident of the nature, that is all, as Black Andy well must know, in the ordinary way of business, should bring about so much fracas.”
“It was part of my delusion,” said Count Victor, “to fancy Mungo not entirely innocent. As you observed, he opened the door with an excess of hospitality.”
“Yes, that was droll,” confessed Doom, reflectively. “That was droll, indeed; but Mungo hates the very name of Arroquhar, and all that comes from it.”
“Except our Annapla,” suggested Olivia, smiling.
“Oh, except Annapla, of course!” said her father. “He's to marry her to avert her Evil Eye.”
“And is she a Macfarlane?” asked Montaiglon, surprised.
“No less,” replied Doom. “She's a cousin of Andy's; but there's little love lost between them.”
“Speaking of bats!” thought Count Victor, but he did not hint at his new conclusions. “Well, I am glad,” said he; “they left me but remorse last time; this time here's a souvenir,” and he showed the button.
It was a silver chamfered lozenge, conspicuous and unforgettable.
“Stolen gear, doubtless,” guessed the Baron, looking at it with indifference. “Silver buttons are not rife between here and the pass of Balmaha.”
“Let me see it, please?” said Olivia.
She took it in her hand but for a moment, turned slightly aside to look more closely at it in the sconce-light, paled with some emotion, and gave it back with slightly trembling fingers.
“I have a headache,” she said suddenly. “I am not so brave as I thought I was; you will let me say good night?”
She smiled to Count Victor with a face most wan.
“My dear, you are like a ghost,” said her father, and as she left the room he looked after her affectionately.
CHAPTER XX — AN EVENING'S MELODY IN THE BOAR'S HEAD INN
The Boar's Head Inn, for all its fine cognomen, was little better than any of the numerous taverns that kept discreet half-open doors to the wynds and closes of the Duke's burgh town, but custom made it a preserve of the upper class in the community. There it was the writers met their clients and cozened them into costly law pleas over the genial jug or chopine; the through-going stranger took his pack there and dwelt cheaply in the attics that looked upon the bay and upon the little harbour where traffic dozed upon the swinging tide, waiting the goodwill of mariners in no hurry to leave a port so alluring; in its smoke-grimed public-room skippers frequented, full of loud tales of roving, and even the retinue of MacCailen was not averse from an evening's merriment in a company where no restraint of the castle was expected, and his Grace was mentioned but vaguely as a personal pronoun.
There was in the inn a sanctum sanctorum where only were allowed the bailies of the burgh, a tacksman of position, perhaps, from the landward part, or the like of the Duke's Chamberlain, who was no bacchanal, but loved the company of honest men in their hours of manumission. Here the bottle was of the best, and the conversation most genteel—otherwise there had been no Sim MacTaggart in the company where he reigned the king. It was a state that called for shrewd deportment. One must not be too free, for an excess of freedom cheapened the affability, and yet one must be hail fellow with magistrate—and even an odd master mariner—with no touch of condescension for the Highland among them who could scent the same like aqua vito and resent it like a push of the hand.
He came not often, but ever was he welcome, those nights the more glorious for his qualities of humour and generosity, his tales that stirred like the brassy cry of trumpets, his tolerance of the fool and his folly, his fatalist excuse for any sin except the scurviest. And there was the flageolet! You will hear the echo of it yet in that burgh town where he performed; its charm lingers in melodies hummed or piped by old folks of winter nights, its magic has been made the stuff of myth, so that as children we have heard the sound of Simon's instrument in the spring woods when we went there white-hay-gathering, or for fagots for the schoolhouse fire.
A few nights after that thundering canter from the spider's den where Kate Petullo sat amid her coils, the Chamberlain went to wander care among easy hearts. It was a season of mild weather though on the eve of winter; even yet the perfume of the stubble-field and of fruitage in forest and plantation breathed all about the country of Mac-Cailen Mor. Before the windows of the inn the bay lay warm and placid, and Dunchuach, wood-mantled, and the hills beyond it vague, remote, and haunted all by story, seemed to swim in a benign air, and the outer world drew the souls of these men in a tavern into a brief acquaintanceship. The window of the large room they sat in looked out upon this world new lit by the tender moon that hung on Strome. A magistrate made to shutter it and bring the hour of Bacchus all the faster.
“Hold there, Bailie!” cried the Chamberlain. “Good God! let us have so long as we can of a night so clean and wholesome.”
It needed but a hint of that nature from this creature of romance and curious destiny to silence their unprofitable discourse over herds and session discipline, and for a space they sat about the window, surrendered to the beauty of the night. So still that outer world, so vacant of living creature, that it might have been a picture! In the midst of their half circle the Chamberlain lay back in his chair and drank the vision in by gloating eyes.
“Upon my word,” said he at last in a voice that had the rich profound of passion—“upon my word, we are the undeserving dogs!” and at an impulse he took his flageolet and played a Highland air. It had the proper spirit of the hour—the rapturous evening pipe of birds in dewy thickets, serene yet someway touched by melancholy; there was no man there among them who did not in his breast repeat its words that have been heard for generations in hillside milking-folds where women put their ruddy cheeks against the kine and look along the valleys, singing softly to the accompaniment of the gushing pail.
He held his audience by a chain of gold: perhaps he knew it, perhaps he joyed in it, but his half-shut eyes revealed no more than that he still saw the beauty and peace of the night and thus rendered an oblation.
His melody ceased as abruptly as it began. Up he got hastily and stamped his foot and turned to the table where the bottle lay and cried loud out for lights, as one might do ashamed of a womanly weakness, and it is the Highland heart that his friends should like him all the more for that display of sentiment and shyness to confess it.
“By the Lord, Factor, and it's you have the skill of it!” said the Provost, in tones of lofty admiration.
“Is't the bit reed?” said the Chamberlain, indifferently. “Your boy Davie could learn to play better than I in a month's lessons.”
“It's no' altogether the playing though,” said the Provost slowly, ruminating as on a problem; “it's that too, but it's more than that; it's the seizing of the time and tune to play. I'm no great musicianer myself, though I have tried the trump; but there the now—with the night like that, and us like this, and all the rest of it—that lilt of yours—oh, damn! pass the bottle; what for should a man be melancholy?” He poured some wine and gulped it hurriedly.
“Never heard the beat of it!” said the others. “Give us a rant, Factor,” and round the table they gathered: the candles were being lit, the ambrosial night was to begin.
Simon MacTaggart looked round his company—at some with the maudlin tear of sentiment still on their cheeks, at others eager to escape this soft moment and make the beaker clink.
“My sorrow!” thought he, “what a corps to entertain! Is it the same stuff as myself? Is this the best that Sim MacTaggart that knows and feels things can be doing? And still they're worthy fellows, still I must be liking them.”
“Rants!” he cried, and stood among them tall and straight and handsome, with lowering dark brows, and his face more pale than they had known it customarily,—“a little less rant would be the better for us. Take my word for it, the canty quiet lilt in the evening, and the lights low, and calm and honest thoughts with us, is better than all the rant and chorus, and I've tried them both. But heaven forbid that Sim MacTaggart should turn to preaching in his middle age.”
“Faith! and it's very true what you say, Factor,” acquiesced some sycophant.
The Chamberlain looked at him half in pity, half in amusement. “How do you ken, Bailie?” said he; “what are yearlings at Fa'kirk Tryst?” And then, waiting no answer to what demanded none, he put the flageolet to his lips again and began to play a strathspey to which the company in the true bucolic style beat time with feet below the table. He changed to the tune of a minuet, then essayed at a melody more sweet and haunting than them all, but broken ere its finish.
“A hole in the ballant,” commented the Provost. “Have another skelp at it, Factor.”
“Later on perhaps,” said Sim MacTaggart. “The end of it aye escapes my memory. Rather a taking tune, I think—don't you? Just a little—just a little too much of the psalm in it for common everyday use, but man! it grips me curiously;” and then on a hint from one at his shoulder he played “The Devil in the Kitchen,” a dance that might have charmed the imps of Hallowe'en.
He was in the midst of it when the door of the room opened and a beggar looked in—a starven character of the neighbourhood parish, all bedecked with cheap brooches and babs of ribbon, leading by the hand the little child of his daughter wronged and dead. He said never a word but stood just within the door expectant—a reproach to cleanliness, content, good clothes, the well fed, and all who make believe to love their fellows.
“Go away, Baldy!” cried the Bailies sharply, vexed by this intrusion on their moments of carouse; no one of them had a friendly eye for the old wanderer, in his blue coat, and dumb but for his beggar's badge and the child that clung to his hand.
It was the child that Sim MacTaggart saw. He thought of many things as he looked at the little one, white-haired, bare-footed, and large-eyed.
“Come here, my dear!” said he, quite tenderly, smiling upon her.
She would have been afraid but for the manifest kindness of that dark commanding stranger; it was only shyness that kept her from obeying.
The Chamberlain rose and went over to the door and cried upon the landlord. “You will have a chopine of ale, Baldy,” said he to the old wreck; “sometimes it's all the difference between hell-fire and content, and—for God's sake buy the bairn a pair of boots!” As he spoke he slipped, by a motion studiously concealed from the company, some silver into the beggar's poke.
The ale came in, the beggar drank for a moment, the Chamberlain took the child upon his knee, his face made fine and noble by some sweet human sentiment, and he kissed her, ere she went, upon the brow.
For a space the sanctum sanctorum of the Boar's Head Inn was ill at ease. This sort of thing—so common in Sim MacTaggart,who made friends with every gangrel he met—was like a week-day sermon, and they considered the Sunday homilies of Dr. Macivor quite enough. They much preferred their Simon in his more common mood of wild devilry, and nobody knew it better than the gentleman himself.
“Oh, damn the lousy tribe of them!” cried he, beating his palm upon the table; “what's Long Davie the dempster thinking of to be letting such folk come scorning here?”
“I'll warrant they get more encouragement here than they do in Lorn,” said the Provost, shrewdly, for he had seen the glint of coin and knew his man. “You beat all, Factor! If I lived a hundred years, you would be more than I could fathom. Well, well, pass the bottle, and ye might have another skelp at yon tune if it's your pleasure.”
The Chamberlain most willingly complied: it was the easiest retort to the Provost's vague allusion.
He played the tune again; once more its conclusion baffled him, and as he tried a futile repetition Count Victor stood listening in the lobby of the Boar's Head Inn.
CHAPTER XXI — COUNT VICTOR CHANGES HIS QUARTERS
Count Victor said Au revoir to Doom Castle that afternoon. Mungo had rowed him down by boat to the harbour and left him with his valise at the inn, pleased mightily that his cares as garrison were to be relieved by the departure of one who so much attracted the unpleasant attention of nocturnal foes, and returned home with the easiest mind he had enjoyed since the fateful day the Frenchman waded to the rock. As for Count Victor, his feelings were mingled. He had left Doom from a double sense of duty, and yet had he been another man he would have bided for love. After last evening's uproar, plain decency demanded that Jonah should obviate a repetition by removing himself elsewhere. There was also another consideration as pregnant, yet more delicate: the traditions of his class and family as well as his natural sense of honour compelled his separation from the fascinating influence of the ingenuous woman whose affections were pledged in another quarter. In a couple of days he had fallen desperately in love with Olivia—a precipitation that might seem ridiculous in any man of the world who was not a Montaiglon satiated by acquaintance with scores of Dame Stratagems, fair intrigueuses and puppets without hearts below their modish bodices. Olivia charmed by her freshness, and the simple frankness of her nature, with its deep emotions, gave him infinitely more surprise and thrill than any woman he had met before. “Wisdom wanting absolute honesty,” he told himself, “is only craft: I discover that a monstrous deal of cleverness I have seen in her sex is only another kind of cosmetic daubed on with a sponge.”
And then, too, Olivia that morning seemed to have become all of a sudden very cold to him. He was piqued at her silence, he was more than piqued to discover that she too, like Mungo, obviously considered his removal a relief.
Behold him, then, with his quarters taken in the Boar's Head Inn, whence by good luck the legal gang of Edinburgh had some hours before departed, standing in the entrance feeling himself more the foreigner than ever, with the vexing reflection that he had not made any progress in the object of his embassy, but, on the contrary, had lost no little degree of his zest therein.
The sound of the flageolet was at once a blow and a salute. That unaccomplished air had helped to woo Olivia in her bower, but yet it gave a link with her, the solace of the thought that here was one she knew. Was it not something of good fortune that it should lead him to identify and meet one whose very name was still unknown to him, but with whom he was, in a faint measure, on slight terms of confederacy through the confession of Olivia and the confidence of Mungo Boyd?
“Toujours l'audace!” thought he, and he asked for the innkeeper's introduction to the performer. “If it may be permitted, and the gentleman is not too pressingly engaged.”
“Indeed,” said the innkeeper—a jovial rosy gentleman, typical of his kind—“indeed, and it may very well be permitted, and it would not be altogether to my disadvantage that his lordship should be out of there, for the Bailies cannot very well be drinking deep and listening to Mr. Simon MacTag-gart's songs, as I have experienced afore. The name?”
“He never heard it,” said Count Victor, “but it happens to be Montaiglon, and I was till this moment in the odd position of not knowing his, though we have a common friend.”
A few minutes later the Chamberlain stood before him with the end of the flageolet protruding from the breast of his coat.
As they met in the narrow confine of the lobby—on either hand of them closed rooms noisy with clink of drinking-ware, with laugh and jest and all that rumour of carouse—Montaiglon's first impression was exceeding favourable. This Chamberlain pleased his eye to start with; his manner was fine-bred in spite of a second's confusion; his accent was cordial, and the flageolet displayed with no attempt at concealment, captured the heart of the Frenchman, who had been long enough in these isles to weary of a national character that dare not surrender itself to any unbusiness-like frisking in the meadows. And one thing more there was revealed—here was the kilted gallant of the miniature in Olivia's chamber, and here was the unfriendly horseman of the wood, here in fine was the lover of the story, and the jealousy (if it was a jealousy) he had felt in the wood, forgotten, for he smiled.
But now he was face to face with Olivia's lover, Count Victor discovered that he had not the slightest excuse for referring to her who was the only association between them! The lady herself and Mungo Boyd had conveyed a sense of very close conspiracy between all four, but from neither the lady nor any one else in Doom had he any passport to the friendship of this gentleman. It was only for a moment the difficulties of the situation mastered him.
“I have permitted myself, monsieur, to intrude upon you upon an excuse that must seem scandalously inadequate,” said he. “My name is Montaiglon—”
“With the particle, I think?” said Sim MacTaggart.
Count Victor started slightly.
“But yes,” said he, “it is so, though I never march with much baggage, and a De to a traveller is like a second hat. It is, then, that it is perhaps unnecessary to say more of myself?”
The Chamberlain with much bonhomie grasped his hand.
“M. Montaiglon,” said he, “I am very proud to meet you. I fancy a certain lady and I owe something to your consideration, and Simon MacTaggart stands upon no ceremony.”
Count Victor winced slightly at the conjunction, but otherwise he was delighted.
“I am ravished, monsieur!” said he. “Ceremony is like some people's assumption of dignity—the false bottoms they put in their boots to conceal the fact that they are under the average height, is it not?”
Arm in arm they went out in front of the inn and walked along the bay, and the Provost and the Bailies were left mourning for their king.
“You must not fancy the name and the reputation of the gentlemen of Cammercy unknown in these parts,” said the Chamberlain. “When the lady—who need not be more specifically mentioned—told me you had come to Doom, it was like the over-come of a song at first that I had heard of you before. And now that I see you, I mind the story went, when I was at Dunkerque some years ago, that Count Victor Jean, if all his other natural gifts had failed him, might have made a noble fortune as a maître d'escrime. Sir, I am an indifferent hand with the rapier myself, but I aye liked to see a man that was its master.”
“You are very good,” said Montaiglon, “and yet such a reputation, exaggerated as I fear it may be, is not, by my faith! the one I should desire under the circumstances that, as you have doubtless further heard, bring me here.”
“About that, M. Montaiglon, it is perhaps as well that the Duke of Argyll's Chamberlain should know nothing at all. You are a wild lot, my gallant Jacobites”—he laughed softly as he spoke. “Between ourselves I have been more than bottle friends with some lovable persons on your side of the house, and you will be good enough to consider Simon MacTaggart no politician, though the Duke's Chamberlain ex officio is bound to be enemy to every man who will not swear King George the best of monarchs.”
“From what I know of affairs in Europe now, and for all our heroics of invasion,” said Count Victor, “his Majesty is like to remain in undisputed possession, and you may take my word for it, no affair of high politics is responsible for my being here. Monsieur himself has doubtless had affairs. I am seeking but for one man—”
“Drimdarroch,” said the Chamberlain. “So the lady told me. Our Drimdarroch will not provide very much interest for a maître d'escrime,” and he laughed as he pictured Petullo the writer shivering before a flash of steel.
“Ah! you speak of the lawyer: Doom told me of him, and as he was good enough to interest himself in my lodging in this place, I must make him my compliments at the earliest and tell him I have settled down for myself in the auberge.”
“To that much at least I can help you, though in the other affair I'm neutral in spite of my interest in any ploy of the kind. There's Petullo's house across the way; I'm on certain terms with him; if you care, we could see him now.”
“Le plus tôt sera le mieux!” said Count Victor.
The Chamberlain led the way.
CHAPTER XXII — THE LONELY LADY
When Petullo's work was done of an evening it was his practice to sit with his wife in their huge and draughty parlour, practising the good husband and the domestic virtues in an upright zealous manner, such as one may read of in the books. A noble thing to do, but what's the good of it when hearts are miles apart and the practitioner is a man of rags? Yet there he sat, strewing himself with snuff to keep himself awake, blinking with dim eyes at her, wondering for ever at her inscrutable nature, conversing improvingly upon his cases in the courts, or upon his growing fortune that he computed nightly like a miser. Sometimes, in spite of his drenchings of macabaw, sleep compelled him, and, humped in his lug-chair, he would forget his duty, yet waken at her every yawn. And she—she just looked at him as he slept! She looked—and loathed herself, that she—so clean, so graceful, so sweet in spite of all her sin—should be allied with a dead man. The evenings passed for her on fettered hours; but for the window she had died from her incubus, or at least stood up and shrieked and ran into the street.
But for the window! From there she saw the hill Dunchuach, so tranquil, and the bosky deeps of Shira Glen that she knew so well in dusky evenings and in moonlight, and must ever tenant, in her fancy, with the man she used to meet there. Often she would turn her back upon that wizened atomy of quirks and false ideals, and let her bosom pant to think to-night!—to-night!—to-night!
When the Chamberlain and Montaiglon were announced she could have cried aloud with joy. It was not hard in that moment of her elation to understand why once the Chamberlain had loved her; beside the man to whom her own mad young ambition manacled her she seemed a vision of beauty none the worse for being just a little ripened.
“Come awa' in!” cried the lawyer with effusion. “You'll find the mistress and me our lones, and nearly tiring o' each other's company.”
The Chamberlain was disappointed. It was one of those evenings when Mrs. Petullo was used to seek him in the woods, and he had thought to find her husband by himself.
“A perfect picture of a happy hearth, eh?” said he. “I'm sweared to spoil it, but I'm bound to lose no time in bringing to you my good friend M. Montaiglon, who has taken up his quarters at the Boar's Head. Madam, may I have the pleasure of introducing to you M. Montaiglon?” and Sim Mac-Taggart looked in her eyes with some impatience, for she hung just a second too long upon his fingers, and pinched ere she released them.
She was delighted to make monsieur's acquaintance. Her husband had told her that monsieur was staying farther up the coast and intended to come to town.. Monsieur was in business; she feared times were not what they were for business in Argyll, but the air was bracing—and much to the same effect, which sent the pseudo wine merchant gladly into the hands of her less ceremonious husband.
As for Petullo, he was lukewarm. He saw no prospects of profit from this dubious foreigner thrust upon his attention by his well-squeezed client the Baron of Doom. Yet something of style, some sign of race in the stranger, thawed him out of his suspicious reserve, and he was kind enough to be condescending to his visitor while cursing the man who sent him there and the man who guided him. They sat together at the window, and meanwhile in the inner end of the room a lonely lady made shameful love.
“Oh, Sim!” she whispered, sitting beside him on the couch and placing the candlestick on a table behind them; “this is just like old times—the dear darling old times, isn't it?”
She referred to the first of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband.
The Chamberlain toyed with his silver box and found it easiest to get out of a response by a sigh that might mean anything.
“You have the loveliest hand,” she went on, looking at his fingers, that certainly were shapely enough, as no one knew better than Simon Mac-Taggart. “I don't say you are in any way handsome,”—her eyes betrayed her real thought,—“but I'll admit to the hands,—they're dear pets, Sim.”
He thrust them in his pockets.
“Heavens! Kate!” he protested in a low tone, and assuming a quite unnecessary look of vacuity for the benefit of the husband, who gazed across the dim-lit room at them, “don't behave like an idiot; faithful wives never let their husbands see them looking like that at another man's fingers. What do you think of our monsher? He's a pretty enough fellow, if you'll not give me the credit.”
“Oh, he's good enough, I daresay,” she answered without looking aside a moment. “I would think him much better if he was an inch or two taller, a shade blacker, and Hielan' to boot. But tell me this, and tell me no more, Sim; where has your lordship been for three whole days? Three whole days, Simon MacTaggart, and not a word of explanation. Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir? Do you know that I was along the riverside every night this week? Can you fancy what I felt to hear your flageolet playing for tipsy fools in Ludovic's room? Very well, I said: let him! I have pride of my own, and I was so angry to-night that I said I would never go again to meet you. You cannot blame me if I was not there to-night, Sim. But there!—seeing you have rued your cruelty to me and made an excuse to see me even before him, there, I'll forgive you.”
“Oh! well!” drawled the Chamberlain, ambiguously.
“But I can't make another excuse this week. He sits in here every night, and has a new daft notion for late suppers. Blame yourself for it, Sim, but there can be no trysts this week.”
“I'm a most singularly unlucky person,” said the Chamberlain, in a tone that deaf love alone could fail to take alarm at.
“I heard a story to-day that frightened me, Sim,” she went on, taking up some fine knitting and bending over it while she spoke rapidly, always in tones too low to carry across the room. “It was that you have been hanging about that girl of Doom's you met here.”
The Chamberlain damned internally.
“Don't believe all you hear, Kate,” said he. “And even if it was the case,”—he broke off in a faint laugh.
“Even if what?” she repeated, looking up.
“Even if—even if there was anything in the story, who's to blame? Your goodman's not the ass he sometimes looks.”
“You mean that he was the first to put her in your way, and that he had his own reasons?”
The Chamberlain nodded.
Mrs. Petullo's fingers rushed the life out of her knitting. “If I thought—if I thought!” she said, leaving the sentence unfinished. No more was necessary; Sim MacTaggart thanked heaven he was not mated irrevocably.
“Is it true?” she asked. “Is it true of you, Sim, who did your best to make me push Petullo to Doom's ruin?”
“Now, my dear, you talk the damnedest nonsense!” said Simon MacTaggart firmly. “I pushed in no way; the fool dropped into your husband's hands like a ripe plum. I have plenty of shortcomings of my own to answer for without getting the blame of others.”
“Don't lie like that, Sim, dear,” said Mrs. Petullo, decidedly. “My memory is not gone yet, though you seem to think me getting old. Oh yes! I have all my faculties about me still.”
“I wish to the Lord you had prudence; old Vellum's cocking his lugs.”
“Oh, I don't care if he is; you make me desperate, Sim.” Her needles thrust like poignards, her bosom heaved. “You may deny it if you like, but who pressed me to urge him on to take Drim-darroch? Who said it might be so happy a home for us when—when—my goodman there—when I was free?”
“Heavens! what a hangman's notion!” thought the Chamberlain to himself, with a swift side glance at this termagant, and a single thought of calm Olivia.
“You have nothing to say to that, Sim, I see. It's just too late in the day for you to be virtuous, laddie; your Kate knows you and she likes you better as you are than as you think you would like to be. We were so happy, Sim, we were so happy!” A tear dropped on her lap.
“Now heaven forgive me for my infernal folly!” cried out the soul of Sim MacTaggart; but never a word did he say aloud.
Count Victor, at the other end of the room, listening to Petullo upon wines he was supposed to sell and whereof Petullo was supposed to be a connoisseur, though as a fact his honest taste was buttermilk—Count Victor became interested in the other pair. He saw what it took younger eyes, and a different experience from those of the husband, to observe.
“Cognac,”—this to M. le Connoisseur with the rheumy eye—“but yes, it is good; your taste in that must be a national affair, is it not? Our best, the La Rochelle, has the name of a Scot—I think of Fife—upon the cask;” but to himself, with a glance again at the tragic comedy in the corner of the couch, “Fi donc! Mungo had reason; my gentleman of the dark eye is suspiciously like cavalière servante.”
The Chamberlain began to speak fast upon topics of no moment, dreading the consequence of this surrender on the woman's part: she heard nothing as she thrust furiously and blindly with her needles, her eyes suffused with tears courageously restrained. At last she checked him.
“All that means, Sim, that it's true about the girl,” said she. “I tried to think it was a lie when I heard it, but now you compel me to believe you are a brute. You are a brute, Sim, do you hear that? Oh God! oh God! that ever I saw you! That ever I believed you! What is wrong with me, Sim? tell me, Sim! What is wrong with me? Am I different in any way from what I was last spring? Surely I'm not so old as all that; not a grey hair in my head, not a wrinkle on my face. I could keep like that for twenty years yet, just for love of Sim MacTaggart. Sim, say something, for the love of Heaven! Say it's a lie. Laugh at the story, Sim! Oh, Sim! Sim!”
The knitting needles clicked upon each other in her trembling hands, like fairy castanets.