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 thesalle, 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 thepiob 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, abavard, 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;thisis 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 nobihtyde courthat 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 candlepar les deux boutsis 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.
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.
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.
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 thesallethe 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 somearrière penséein the interrogator.
“Fi donc!and you so much the oldsabreur!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.