Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbed by the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meeting with the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with hints of rain on the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a storm not far distant. Children were in the wood of Dunderave—ruddy, shy children, gathering nuts and blackberries, with merriment haunting the landscape as it were in a picture by Watteau or a tale of the classics, where such figures happily move for ever and for ever in the right golden glamour. Little elves they seemed to Count Victor as he came upon them over an eminence, and saw them for the first time through the trees under tall oaks and pines, among whose pillars they moved as if in fairy cloisters, the sea behind them shining with a vivid and stinging blue.
He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to the hazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron of Doom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no more hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and played upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched the thickets with romance.
In other circumstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victor might have been a good man—a good man not in the common sense that means paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand, respecting the law, going to Mass, loyalty to the woman and to a friend, but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has its growth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animals ever found him soft-handed; as for children—thepetites—God bless them! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to see them playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood of Dunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouth language whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt an elevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the grass above them, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if it were an opera.
He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ignoble little emprise of revenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall ever have who sits a space with childish merriment and woodland innocence. In his case it was something more direct and tangible than the immaterial efflux of the soul, though that too was not wanting: he saw the signal kerchief being placed outside the window, that otherwise, reaching home too early, he had missed.
“It is my last chance, if I leave to-morrow,” he thought. “I shall satisfy myself as to the nocturnal visitor, the magic flautist, and the bewildering Annapla—and probably find the mystery as simple as the egg in the conjurer's bottle when all's ended!”
That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of his host's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who had promised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and the Baron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederunt and consent to an early retirement.
“I have something pressing to do before I go to bed myself,” he said, restoring by that simple confession some of Count Victor's first suspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.
He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's sordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself that there was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyons shopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the steps he proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debated the situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candles lasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stair suggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above. Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had before him a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a great plaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!
Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.
“Pardon!” said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he saw his host's abashed countenance. “I fear I intrude on a masquerade. Pray, do not mind me. It was that I thought the upper flat uninhabited, and no one awake but myself.”
“You have me somewhat at a disadvantage,” said Doom coldly, resenting the irony. “I'll explain afterwards.”
“Positively, there is no necessity,” replied Count Victor, with a profound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.
There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had seen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaid itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his candles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signal he expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and he awakened each time to find an hour was gone.
It was a night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window, a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair—the sound of a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels—decided him, and he waited to confound the master of Doom.
In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon his heart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword. A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, but left the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front of his door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was not the Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had any reason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered each other simultaneously,—she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put a rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this savage domicile.
In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her eyes had first given him the embarrassment that kept him dumb in her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes—the eyes of the woman born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet always inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise—that told him first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the average of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; instead there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely low.
“Madame; pardon! I—I—was awakened by music, and—”
Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature of the recontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to a bolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.
“I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame's permission, I shall return to earth.”
His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully understand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, not a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count Victor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt that there were lines upon his face betraying him.
“I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance,” she said at last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain melody but adding to the charm of her accent.
Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by thissang froidwhere he might naturally have looked for perturbation.
“Pardon! I demand your pardon!” was all that he could say, looking at the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze, instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so doing.
He had the woman there!
“Pardon!” he repeated. “It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know”—he smiled the smile of theflâneur—“I did not know it was, let me say, Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I hope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading.”
Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled—an indescribable thing, but a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in that haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue Beautreillis.
“I fear I have not intruded for the first time,” he went on, in a different tone. “It must have been your chamber I somewhat unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me—at least I had come to consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here.”
“It is easily explained,” said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.
“There is positively not the necessity,” protested Count Victor, realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.
“But you must understand that—” she went on.
Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. “The explanation is due from me, madame: I protest,” said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now. France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy waters—but this—but this was Paradise!
“The explanation must be mine,” said he. “I was prying upon no amour, but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions.”
“They were, perhaps, connected with my father,” she said, with a divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.
“Your father!” he exclaimed, astonished that one more of his misconceptions should be thus dispelled. “Then I have been guilty of the unpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess.”
“A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the black-affronted woman,” said she, “but through no fault of mine. I am in my own good father's house, and still, in a way, a stranger in it, and that is a hard thing. But you must not distrust my father: you will find, I think, before very long, that all the odd affairs in this house have less to do with him than with his daughter Olivia.”
She blushed again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitiveness that Count Victor found perfectly entrancing.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said, wishing the while he had had afriseurat the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran his fingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curled above his brow,—“my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fool and a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to your annoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom of proffering an adequate apology.”
He expected her to leave him then, and he had a foot retired, preparing to re-enter his room, but there was a hesitancy in her manner that told him she had something more to say. She bit her nether lip—the orchards of Cammercy, he told himself, never bred a cherry a thousandth part so rich and so inviting, even to look at in candle-light; a shy dubiety hovered round her eyes. He waited her pleasure to speak.
“Perhaps,” said she softly, relinquishing her brave demeanour—“perhaps it might be well that—that my father knew nothing of this meeting, or—or—or of what led to it.”
“Mademoiselle Olivia,” said Count Victor, “I am—what do you call it?—a somnambulist. In that condition it has sometimes been my so good fortune to wander into the most odd and ravishing situations. But as it happens,helas!I can never recall a single incident of them when I waken in the morning.Ma foi!” (he remembered that even yet his suspicions of the Baron were unsatisfied), “I would with some pleasure become a nocturnal conspirator myself, and I have all the necessary qualities—romance, enterprise, and sympathy.”
“Mungo knows all,” said the lady; “Mungo will explain.”
“With infinite deference, mademoiselle, Mungo shall not be invited to do anything of the kind.”
“But he must,” said she firmly. “It is due to myself, as well as to you, and I shall tell him to do so.”
“Your good taste and judgment, mademoiselle, are your instructors. Permit me.”
He took the candlestick from her hands, gravely led the way to her chamber door, and at the threshold restored the light with an excess of polite posturing not without its whimsicality. As she took the candlestick she looked in his face with a twinkle of amusement in her eyes, giving her a vivacity not hitherto betrayed.
Guessing but half the occasion of her smiles, he cried abruptly, and not without confusion: “Ah! you were the amused observer of my farce in wading across from the shore.Peste!”
“Indeed and I was!” said she, smiling all the more brightly at the scene recalled. “Good night!”
And, more of a rogue than Count Victor had thought her, she disappeared into her chamber, leaving him to find his way back to his own.
For the remainder of the night Count Victor's sleep was delicious or disturbed by dreams in which the gloomy habitation of that strange Highland country was lit with lamps—the brightest a woman's eyes. Sometimes she was Cecile, dancing—all abandoned, a child of dalliance, a nymph irresolute—to the music of a flageolet; sometimes another whose radiance fascinated, whose presence yet had terror, for (in the manner of dreams that at their maddest have some far-compassing and tremendous philosophy such as in the waking world is found in poems) she was more than herself, she was the other also, at least sharing the secrets of that great sisterhood of immaculate and despoiled, and, looking in his face, compelled to see his utter unworthiness.
He rose early and walked in the narrow garden, still sodden with rain, though a bold, warm sun shone high to the east. For ordinary he was not changeable, but an Olivia in Doom made a difference: those mouldering walls contained her; she looked out on the sea from those high peering windows; that bower would sometimes shelter her; those alien breezes flowing continually round Doom were privileged to kiss her hair. Positively there seems no great reason, after all, why he should be so precipitate in his removal to the town! Indeed (he told himself with the smile of his subconscious self at the subterfuge) there was a risk of miscarriage for his mission among tattlingaubergistes, lawyers, and merchants. He was positively vexed when he encountered Mungo, and that functionary informed him that, though he was early afoot, the Baron was earlier still, and off to the burgh to arrange for his new lodgings. This precipitancy seemed unpleasantly like haste to be rid of him.
“Ah,” said he to the little servant, “your master is so good, so kind, so attentive. Yet I do not wonder, for your Highland hospitality is renowned. I have heard much of it from the dear exiles—Glengarrypar exemple, when he desired to borrow the cost of a litre or the price of the diligence to Dun-querque in the season when new-come Scots were reaching there in a humour to be fleeced by a compatriot with three languages at command and the boast of connections with Versailles.”
Mungo quite comprehended.
“Sir,” said he, with some feeling, “there was never bed nor board grudged at Doom. It's like father like son a' through them. The Baron's great-gutcher, auld Alan, ance thought the place no' braw enough for the eye o' a grand pairty o' Irish nobeelity that had bidden themsel's to see him, and the day they were to come he burned the place hauf doon. It was grand summer weather, and he camped them i' the park behin' there, sparing time nor money nor device in their entertainment. Ye see what might hae been a kin' o' penury in a castle was the very extravagance o' luxury in a camp. A hole in the hose is an accident nae gentleman need be ashamed o', but the same darned is a disgrace, bein' poverty confessed, as Annapla says.”
It was a touchy servant this, Montaiglon told himself—somewhat sharper, too, than he had thought: he must hazard no unkind ironies upon the master.
“Charming, charming! good Mungo,” said he. “The expedient might have been devised by my own great-grandfather—a gentleman of—of—of commercial pursuits in Lyons city. I am less fastidious, perhaps, than the Irish, being very glad to take Doom Castle as I have the honour to find it.”
“But ye're thinkin' the Baron is in a hurry to billet ye elsewhere,” said the servant bluntly.
In an ordinary lackey this boldness would have been too much for Count Victor; in this grotesque, so much in love, it seemed, with his employer, and so much his familiar and friend in a ridiculous Scots fashion, the impertinence appeared pardonable. Besides, he blamed himself for the ill-breeding of his own irony.
“That, if I may be permitted to point it out, is not for us to consider, Monsieur Mungo,” said he. “I have placed myself unreservedly in the Baron's hands, and if he considers it good for my indifferent health that I should change the air and take up my residence a little farther along your delightful coast while my business as a wine merchant from Bordeaux is marching, I have no doubt he has reason.”
A smile he made no effort to conceal stole over Mungo's visage.
“Wine merchant frae Bordeaux!” he cried. “I've seen a hantle o' them hereaboots at the fish-curin' season, but they cam' in gabbarts to French Foreland, and it wasnae usual for them to hae Coont to their names nor whingers to their hips. It was mair ordinar the ink-horn at their belts and the sporran at their groins.”
“A malediction on the creature's shrewdness!” said Count Victor inwardly, while outwardly he simply smiled back.
“The red wine is my specialty,” said he, patting his side where the hilt of his sword should be. “My whinger, as you call it, is an auger: who the devil ever broached a pipe of Scots spirits with a penknife? But I see you are too much in the confidence of the Baron for there to be any necessity of concealment between us.”
“H'm!” exclaimed Mungo dryly, as one who has a sense of being flattered too obviously. “The Baron's a bairn, like a' true gentlemen I've seen, and he kens me lang enough and likes me weel enough to mak' nae secret o' what it were to a'body's advantage should be nae secret to Mungo Byde. In this place I'm sentinel, spy, and garrison; it wad ill become the officer in command to let me be doin' my wark withoot some clew to the maist important pairt o't. Ye're here on a search for ane Drimdarroch.”
“You are a wizard, Monsieur Mungo!” cried Montaiglon, not without chagrin at Doom's handing over so vast and vital a secret to a menial.
“Ay, and ye might think it droll that I should ken that; But I be't to ken it, for there's mony a plot against my maister, and nae foreigneer comes inside thae wa's whase pedigree I canna' hae an inklin' o'. Ye're here aifter Drimdarroch, and ye're no' very sure aboot your host, and that's the last thing I wad haggle wi' ye aboot, for your error'll come to ye by-and-by.”
Count Victor waved a deprecating hand.
“Oh, I ken a' aboot what mak's ye sae suspicious,” went on Mungo, undisturbed, “and it's a thing I could mak' clear to ye in a quarter-hour's crack if I had his leave. Tak' my word for't, there's no' a better man wi' his feet in brogues this day than the Baron o' Doom. He should be searchin' the warld wi' the sword o' his faithers (and the same he can use), but the damned thing is the warld for him doesna gang by the snout o' Cowal and the pass o' Glencroe. He had a wife ance; she's dead and buried in Kilmorich; noo he's doited on his hame and his dochter—”
“The charming Olivia!” cried Count Victor, thinking in one detail at all events to surprise this little custodian of all the secrets.
“Ye met her last night,” said Mungo, calmly, seeming to enjoy the rapidity with which his proofs of omniscience could be put forth. “That's half the secret. Ye were daunderin' aboot the lobby wi' thae fine French manners I hae heard o'—frae the French theirsels—and wha' wad blame ye in a hoose like this? And ye're early up the day, but the lass was up earlier to tell me o' your meeting. She had to come to me before Annapla was aboot, for Annapla's no' in this part o' the ploy at all.”
“I protest I have no head for charades,” said Count Victor, with a gesture of bewilderment. “I do not know what you mean.”
Mungo chuckled with huge satisfaction.
“Man, it's as plain's parridge! There's a gentleman in the toon down by that's a hot wooer, and daddy's for nane o' his kind roon' Doom; d'ye tak' me?”
“But still—but still—”
“But still the trystin' gaes on, ye were aboot to say. That's very true, Coont, but it's only the like o' you and me that has nae dochters to plague oorsel's wi' that can guess the like o' that. Ay, it gaes on as ye say, and that's where me and Miss Olivia maun put oor trust in you. In this affair I'll admit I'm a traitor in the camp—at least, to the camp commander, but I think it's in a guid cause. The lassie's fair aff her heid, and nae wonder, for he's a fine mak' o' a man.”
“And a good one, I hope?” interjected Count Victor.
“Humph!” said Mungo. “I thocht that wasna laid muckle stress on in France. He's a takin' deevil, and the kind's but middlin' morally, sae far as I had ony experience o' them. Guid or bad, Miss Olivia, nae further gane nor last Friday, refused to promise she wad gie up meetin' him—though she's the gem o' dochters, God bless her bonny een! His lordship got up in a tirravee and ordered her to her room, wi' Annapla for warder, till he should mak' arrangements for sending her to his guid-sister's in the low country. Your comin' found us in a kin' o' confusion, but ye might hac spared yersel' my trepannin' in the tolbooth upstairs, and met her in a mair becomin' way at her faither's table if it hadna been for Annapla.”
“For Annapla?” repeated Montaiglon.
“Oh, ah! Annapla has the Gift, ye ken. Dae ye think I wad hae been sae ceevil the ither nicht to her when she was yelping on the stair-heid if it hadna been her repute for the Evil E'e? Ye may lauch, but I could tell tales o' Annapla's capacity. The night afore ye cam' she yoked himsel' on his jyling the lassie, though she's the last that wad thraw him. 'Oh.' said he, 'ye're a' tarred wi' the ae stick: if ye connive at his comin' here without my kennin', I'll gie him death wi' his boots on!' It was in the Gaelic this, ye maun ken; Annapla gied me't efter. 'Boots here, boots there,' quo' she, 'love's the fine adventurer, and I see by thegriosach' (that's the fire-embers, ye ken; between the ash o' a peat and the creesh o' a candle thae kin' o' witches can tell ye things frae noo to Hogmanay)—' I see by thegriosach,' says she, 'that this ane'll come wi' his bare feet.' It staggered him; oh, ay! it staggered him a bit. 'Barefit or brogues,' said he, 'she'll see no man from this till the day she gaes!' And he's the man to keep his word; but it looks as though we might shuffle the pack noo and start a new game, for the plans o' flittin' her to Dunbarton hae fallen through, I hear, and he'll hae to produce her before ye leave.”
“I'm in no hurry,” said Count Victor, coolly twisting his moustache.
“What! To hae her produced?” said the little man, slyly.
“Farceur!No, to leave.”
“Indeed is that sae?” asked Mungo, in a quite new tone, and reddening. “H'm! Ye may hae come barefit, but the ither ane has the preference.”
“He has my sincere felicitations, I assure you,” said Count Victor, “and I can only hope he is worthy of the honour of Master Mungo's connivance and the lady's devotion.”
“Oh!he'sa' richt! It's only a whim o' Doom's that mak's him discoontenance the fellow. I'll allow the gentleman has a name for gallantry and debt, and a wheen mair genteel vices that's neither here nor there, but he's a pretty lad. He's the man for my fancy—six feet tall, a back like a board, and an e'e like lightning. And he's nane the waur o' ha'in' a great interest in Mungo Byde's storie.”
“Decidedly a diplomatist!” said Count Victor, laughing. “I always loved an enthusiast; go on—go on, good Mungo. And so he is my nocturnal owl, my flautist of the bower, my Orpheus of the mountains. Does the gifted Annapla also connive, and are hers the window signals?”
“Annapla kens naething o' that—”
“The—what do you call it?—the Second Sight appears to have its limitations.”
“At least if it does she's nane the less willin' to be an unconscious aid, and put a flag at the window at the biddin' o' Olivia to keep the witches awa'. The same flag that keeps aff a witch may easily fetch a bogle. There's but ae time noo and then when it's safe for the lad to venture frae the mainland, and for that there maun be a signal o' some kind, otherwise, if I ken his spirit, he wad never be aff this rock. I'm tellin' ye a' that by Mistress Olivia's command, and noo ye're in the plot like the lave of us.”
Mungo heaved a deep breath as if relieved of a burden.
“Still—still,” said Count Victor, “one hesitates to mention it to so excellent a custodian of the family reputation—still there are other things to me somewhat—somewhat crepuscular.”
His deprecatory smile and the gesture of his hands and shoulders conveyed his meaning.
“Ye're thinkin' o' the Baron in tartan,” said Mungo, bluntly. He smiled oddly. “That's the funniest bit of all. If ye're here a while langer that'll be plain to ye too. Between the darkest secrets and oor understanding o' them there's whiles but a rag, and that minds me that Mistress Olivia was behin' the arras tapestry chitterin' wi' fright when ye broke in by her window. Sirs! sirs! what times we're ha'in; there's ploy in the warld yet, and me unable—tuts! I'm no' that auld either. And faith here's himsel'.”
Mungo punctiliously saluted his master as that gentleman emerged beneath the frowning doorway and joined Count Victor in the dejected garden, lifted the faggot of firewood he had laid at his feet during his talk with the visitor, and sought his kitchen.
In Doom's aspect there was restraint: Count Victor shared the feeling, for now he realised that, in some respects, at all events, he had been doing an injustice to his host.
“I find, M. le Count,” said Doom, after some trivial introductories, “that you cannot be accommodated in the inn down by for some days yet—possibly another week. The Circuit Court has left a pack of the legal gentlemen and jurymen there, who will not be persuaded to return to Edinburgh so long as the cellar at the inn holds out, and my doer, Mr. Petullo, expresses a difficulty in getting any other lodging.”
“I regret exceedingly—”
“No regret at all, M. le Count,” said Doom, “no regret at all, unless it be that you must put up with a while longer of a house that must be very dull to you. It is my privilege and pleasure to have you here—without prejudice to your mission—and the only difficulty there might be about it has been removed through—through—through your meeting with my daughter Olivia. I learn you met her on the stair last night. Well—it would look droll, I dare say, to have encountered that way, and no word of her existence from me, but—but—but there has been a little disagreement between us. I hope I am a decently indulgent father, M. le Count, but—”
“You see before you one with great shame of his awkwardness, Baron,” said Montaiglon. “Ordinarily, I should respect a host's privacy to the extent that I should walk a hundred miles round rather than stumble upon it, but this time I do not know whether to blame myself for my gaucherie or feel pleased that for once it brought me into good company. Mungo has just hinted with his customary discretion at the cause of the mystery. I sympathise with the father; I am, with the daughter,très charméand—”
This hint of the gallant slightly ruffled Doom.
“Chut!” he cried. “The man with an only daughter had need be a man of patience. I have done my best with this Olivia of mine. She lost her mother when a child”—an accent of infinite tenderness here came to his voice. “These woods and this shore and this lonely barn of ours, all robbed of what once made it a palace to me and mine, were, I fancied, uncongenial to her spirit, and I sent her to the Lowlands. She came back, educated, as they call it—I think she brought back as good a heart as she took away, but singularly little tolerance sometimes for the life in the castle of Doom. It has been always the town for her these six months, always the town, for there she fell in with a fellow who is no fancy of mine.”
Count Victor listened sympathetically, somewhat envying the lover, reviving in his mental vision the figure he had seen first twelve hours ago or less. He was brought to a more vivid interest in the story by the altered tone of Doom, who seemed to sour at the very mention of the unwelcome cavalier.
“Count,” said he, “it's the failing of the sex—the very best of them, because the simplest and the sweetest—that they will prefer a fool to a wise man and a rogue to a gentleman. They're blind, because the rogue is for ever showing off his sham good qualities till they shine better than an ordinary decent man's may. To my eyes, if not quite to my knowledge, this man is as great a scoundrel as was ever left unhung. It's in his look—well, scarcely so, to tell the truth, but something of it is in his mouth as well as in his history, and sooner than see my daughter take up for life with a creature of his stamp I would have her in her grave beside her mother. Unluckily, as I say, the man's a plausible rogue: that's the most dangerous rogue of all, and the girl's blind to all but the virtues and graces he makes a display of. I'll forgive Petullo his cheatry in the common way of his craft sooner than his introduction of such a man to my girl.”
To all this Count Victor could no more than murmur his sympathy, but he had enough of the young gallant in him to make some mental reservations in favour of the persistent wooer. It was an alluring type, this haunter of the midnight bower, and melancholy sweet breather in the classic reed. All the wooers of only daughters, he reminded himself, as well as all the sweethearts of only sons, were unworthy in the eyes of parents, and probably Mungo's unprejudiced attitude towards the conspiring lovers was quite justified by the wooer's real character in spite of the ill repute of his history. He reflected that this confidence of Doom's left unexplained his own masquerade of the previous night, but he gave no whisper to the thought, and had, indeed, forgotten it by evening, when for the first time Olivia joined them at her father's table.
It was a trying position in which Olivia found herself when first she sat at the same table with the stranger whose sense of humour, as she must always think, was bound to be vastly entertained by her ridiculous story. Yet she carried off the situation with that triumph that ever awaits on a frank eye, a good honest heart, and an unfailing trust in the ultimate sympathy of one's fellow-creatures. There was nomauvaise hontethere, Count Victor saw, and more than ever he admired, if that were possible. It was the cruel father of the piece who was uneasy. He it was who must busy himself with the feeding of an appetite whose like he had not manifested before, either silent altogether or joining in the conversation with the briefest sentences.
There was never a Montaiglon who would lose such a good occasion, and Count Victor made the most of it. He was gentle, but not too gentle—for this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaninglessblaguethat no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and shining influence Olivia soon forgot the ignominy of these recent days, and it was something gained in that direction that already she looked upon him as a confederate.
“I am so glad you like our country, Count Victor,” she said, no way dubious about his praise of her home hills, those loud impetuous cataracts, and that alluring coast. “It rains—oh! it rains—”
“Parfaitement, mademoiselle, but when it shines!” and up went his hands in an admiration wherefor words were too little eloquent: at that moment he was convinced truly that the sun shone nowhere else than in the Scottish hills.
“Yes, yes, when it shines, as you say, it is the dear land! Then the woods—the woods gleam and tremble, I always think, like a girl who has tears in her eyes, the tears of gladness. The hills—let my father tell you of the hills, Count Victor; I think he must love them more than he loves his own Olivia—is that not cruel of a man with an only child? He would die, I am sure, if he could not be seeing them when he liked. But I cannot be considering the hills so beautiful as my own glens, my own little glens, that no one, I'll be fancying, is acquainted with to the heart but me and the red deer, and maybe a hunter or two. Of course, we have the big glens, too, and I would like it if I could show you Shira Glen—”
“The best of it was once our own,” said Doom, black at brow.
“—That once was ours, as father says, and is mine yet so long as I can walk there and be thinking my own thoughts in it when the wood is green, and the wild ducks are plashing in the lake.”
Doom gave a significant exclamation: he was recalling that rumour had Shira Glen for his daughter's favourite trysting-place.
“Rain or shine,” said Count Victor, delighting in such whole-souled rapture, delighting in that bright, unwearied eye, that curious turn of phrase that made her in English half a foreigner like himself—“Rain or shine, it is a country of many charms.”
“But now you are too large in your praise,” she said, not quite so warmly. “I do not expect you to think it is a perfect country-side at any time and all times; and it is but natural that you should love the country of France, that I have been told is a brave and beautiful country, and a country I am sometimes loving myself because of its hospitality to folk that we know. I know it is a country of brave men, and sometimes I am wondering if it is the same for beautiful women. Tell me!” and she leaned on an arm that shone warm, soft, and thrilling from the short sleeve of her gown, and put the sweetest of chins upon a hand for the wringing of hearts.
Montaiglon looked into those eyes, so frank and yet profound, and straight became a rebel. “Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he, indifferently (oh, Cecile! oh, Cecile!), “they are considered not unpleasing; but for myself, perhaps acquaintance has spoiled the illusion.”
She did not like that at all; her eyes grew proud and unbelieving.
“When I was speaking of the brave men of France,” said she, “I fancied perhaps they would tell what they really thought—even to a woman.” And he felt very much ashamed of himself.
“Ah! well, to tell the truth, mademoiselle,” he confessed, “I have known very beautiful ones among them, and many that I liked, and still must think of with affection.Mort de ma vie!am I not the very slave of your sex, that for all the charms, the goodness, the kindnesses and purities, is a continual reproach to mine? In the least perfect of them I have never failed to find something to remind me of my little mother.”
“And now I think that is much better,” said Olivia, heartily, her eyes sparkling at that concluding filial note. “I would not care at all for a man to come from his own land and pretend to me that he had no mind for the beautiful women and the good women he had seen there. No; it would not deceive me, that; it would not give me any pleasure. We have a proverb in the Highlands, that Annapla will often be saying, that the rook thinks the pigeon hen would be bonny if her wings were black; and that is aseanfhacal—that is an old-word that is true.”
“If I seemed to forget France and what I have seen there of Youth and Beauty,” said Count Victor, “it is, I swear it is—it is—”
“It is because you would be pleasant to a simple Highland girl,” said Olivia, with just a hint of laughter in her eyes.
“No, no,par ma foi!not wholly that. But yes, I love my country—ah! the happy days I have known there, the sunny weather, the friends so good, the comradeship so true. Your land is beautiful—it is even more beautiful than the exiles in Paris told me; but I was not born here, and there are times when your mountains seem to crush my heart.”
“Is it so, indeed?” said Doom. “As for me, I would not change the bleakest of them for the province of Champagne.” And he beat an impulsive hand upon the table.
“Yes, yes, I understand that,” cried Olivia. “I understand it very well. It is the sorrow of the hills and woods you mean; ah! do I not know it, too? It is only in my own little wee glens among the rowans that I can feel careless like the birds, and sing; when I walk the woods or stand upon the shore and see the hills without a tree or tenant, when the land is white with the snow and the mist is trailing, Olivia Lamond is not very cheery. What it is I do not know—that influence of my country; it is sad, but it is good and wholesome, I can tell you; it is then I think that the bards make songs, and those who are not bards, like poor myself, must just be feeling the songs there are no words for.”
At this did Doom sit mighty pleased and humming to himself a bar of minstrelsy.
“Look at my father there!” said Olivia; “he would like you to be thinking that he does not care a great deal for the Highlands of Scotland.”
“Indeed, and that is not fair, Olivia; I never made pretence of that,” said Doom. “Never to such as understand; Montaiglon knows the Highlands are at my heart, and that the look of the hills is my evening prayer.”
“Isn't that a father, Count Victor?” cried Olivia, quite proud of the confession. “But he is the strange father, too, that will be pretending that he has forgotten the old times and the old customs of our dear people. We are the children of the hills and of the mists; the hills make no change, the mists are always coming back, and the deer is in the corrie yet, and when you will hear one that is of the Highland blood say he does not care any more for the old times, and preferring the English tongue to his own, and making a boast of his patience when the Government of England robs him of his plaid, you must be watchful of that man, Count Victor. For there is something wrong. Is it not true, that I am saying, father?” She turned a questioning gaze to Doom, who had no answer but a sigh.
“You will have perhaps heard my father miscall thebreacan, miscall the tartan, and—”
“Not at all,” cried the Baron. “There is a great difference between condemning and showing an indifference.”
“I think, father,” said Olivia, “we are among friends. Count Victor, as you say, could understand about our fancies for the hills, and it would be droll indeed if he smiled at us for making a treasure of the tartan. Whatever my father, the stupid man, the darling, may be telling you of the tartan and the sword, Count Victor, do not believe that we are such poor souls as to forget them. Though we must be wearing the Saxon in our clothes and in our speech, there are many like me—and my dear father there—who will not forget.”
It was a curious speech all that, not without a problem, as well as the charm of the unexpected and the novel, to Count Victor. For, somehow or other, there seemed to be an under meaning in the words; Olivia was engaged upon the womanly task—he thought—of lecturing some one. If he had any doubt about that, there was Mungo behind the Baron's chair, his face just showing over his shoulder, seamed with smiles that spoke of some common understanding between him and the daughter of his master; and once, when she thrust more directly at her father, the little servitor deliberately winked to the back of his master's head—a very gnome of slyness.
“But you have not told me about the ladies of France,” said she. “Stay! you will be telling me that again; it is not likely my father would be caring to hear about them so much as about the folk we know that have gone there from Scotland. They are telling me that many good, brave men are there wearing their hearts out, and that is the sore enough trial.”
Count Victor thought of Barisdale and his cousin-german, young Glengarry, gambling in that frowsiest boozing-ken in the Rue Tarane—the Café de la Paix—without credit for alouis d'or; he thought of James Mor Drummond and the day he came to him behind the Tuileries stable clad in rags of tartan to beg a loan; none of these was the picturesque figure of loyalty in exile that he should care to paint for this young woman.
But he remembered also Cameron, Macleod, Traquair, a score of gallant hearts, of handsome gentlemen, and Lochiel, true chevalier—perhaps a better than his king!
It was of these Count Victor spoke—of their faith, their valiancies, their shifts of penury and pride. He had used often to consort with them at Cammercy, and later on in Paris. If the truth were to be told, they had made a man of him, and now he was generous enough to confess it.
“I owe them much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “When first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young, that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in anennuiand the nights below the lamps? Well, I met your Scots after Dettingen, renewed the old acquaintance I had made at Cam-mercy, and found the later exiles better than the first—than the Balhaldies, the Glengarries, Mur-rays, and Sullivans. They were different,ces gens-là. Ordinarily they rendezvoused in the Taverne Tourtel of St. Germains, and that gloomy palace shared their devotions with Scotland, whence they came and of which they were eternally talking, like men in a nostalgia. James and his Jacquette were within these walls, often indifferent enough, I fear, about the cause our friends were exiled there for; and Charles, between Luneville and Liege or Poland and London, was not at the time an inspiring object of veneration, if you will permit me to says so, M. le Baron. But what does it matter? the cause was there, an image to keep the good hearts strong, unselfish, and expectant. Ah! the songs they sang, so full of that hopeful melancholy of the glens you speak of, mademoiselle; the stories they told of Tearlach's Year; the hopes that bound them in a brotherhood—and binds them yet, praisele bon Dieu!That was good for me. Yes; I like your exiled compatriots very much, Mademoiselle Olivia. And yet there was amaraudor two among them; no fate could be too hard for the spies who would betray them.”
For the first time in many hours Count Victor remembered that he had an object in Scotland, but with it somehow Cecile was not associated.
“Mungo has been telling me about the spy, Count Victor. Oh, the wickedness of it! I feel black, burning shame that one with a Highland name and a Highland mother would take a part like yon. I would not think there could be men in the world so bad. They must have wicked mothers to make such sons; the ghost of a good mother would cry from her grave to check her child in such a villany.” Olivia spoke with intense feeling, her eyes lambent and her lips quivering.
“Drimdarroch's mother must have been a rock,” said Count Victor.
“And to take what was my father's name!” cried Olivia; “Mungo has been telling me that. Though I am a woman, I could be killing him myself.”
“And here we're in our flights, sure enough!” broke in the father, as he left them with a humorousous pretence at terror.
“Now you must tell me about the women of France,” said Olivia. “I have a friend who was there once, and tells me, like you, he was indifferent; but I am doubting that he must have seen some there that were worth his fancy.”
“Is it there sits the wind?” thought Montaiglon. “Our serene angel is not immune against the customary passions.” An unreasonable envy of the diplomatist who had been indifferent to the ladies of France took possession of him; still, he might have gratified her curiosity about his fair compatriots had not Doom returned, and then Olivia's interest in the subject oddly ceased.