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 thesang froidof 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.
“Mysans culottessurely 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 thesallehe 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 thesalle-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.
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.
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 kingn liberam baroniamHe 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. Theres gestoshow, 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.