Count Victor heard the woman's lamentation die away in the pit of the stair before he ceased to wonder at the sound and had fully realised the unpleasantness of his own incarceration. It was the cries of the outer assault that roused him from mere amazement to a comprehension of the dangers involved in his being thus penned in a cell and his enemies kept at bay by some wooden bars and a wooden-head. He felt with questioning fingers along the walls, finding no crevice to suggest outer air till he reached the window, and, alas! an escape from a window at that height seemed out of the question without some machinery at hand.
“I suspected the little clown's laughter,” said he to himself. “The key of the mystery lies between him and this absurd Baron, and I begin to guess at something of complicity on the part of M. Bethune. A malediction on the whole tribe of mountaineers! The thing's like a play; I've seen far more improbable circumstances in a book. I am shot at in a country reputed to be well-governed even to monotony; a sombre host puzzles, a far too frank domestic perplexes; magic flutes and midnight voices haunt this infernal hold; the conventional lady of the drama is kept in the background with great care, and just when I am on the point of meeting her, the perplexing servitor becomes my jailer. But yes, it is a play; surely it is a play; or else I am in bed in Cammercy suffering from one of old Jeanne's heavy late suppers. It is then that I must waken myself into the little room with the pink hangings.”
He raised the point of the sword to prick his finger, more in a humorous mood than with any real belief that it was all a dream, and dropped it fast as he felt a gummy liquor clotting on the blade.
“Grand Dieu!” said he softly, “I have perhaps pricked some one else to-night into his eternal nightmare, and I cannot prick myself out of one.”
The noise of the men outside rose louder; a gleam of light waved upon the wall of the chamber, something wan and elusive, bewildering for a moment as if it were a ghost; from the clamour he could distinguish sentences in a guttural tongue. He turned to the window—the counterpart of the one in his own bedroom, but without a pane of glass in its narrow space. Again the wan flag waved across the wall, more plainly the cries of the robbers came up to him. They had set a torch flaring on the scene. It revealed the gloomy gable-end of Doom with a wild, a menacing illumination, deepening the blackness of the night beyond its influence, giving life to shadows that danced upon rock and grass. The light, held high by the man Count Victor had wounded, now wrapped to his eyes in a plaid, rose and fell, touched sometimes on the mainland showing the bracken and the tree, sometimes upon the sea to show the wave, frothy from its quarrel with the fissured rock, making it plain that Doom was a ship indeed, cast upon troubled waters, cut off from the gentle world.
But little for the sea or for the shore had Count Victor any interest; his eyes were all for the wild band who clamoured about the flambeau. They wore such a costume as he had quarrelled with on his arrival; they cried “Loch Sloy!” with something of theatrical effect, and “Out with the gentleman! out with Black Andy's murderer!” they demanded in English.
He craned his head out at the Window and watched the scene. The tall man who had personally assailed him seemed to lead the band in all except their clamour, working eagerly, directing in undertones. They had brought a ladder from the shore, apparently provided for such an emergency, and placed it against the wall, with a view to an escalade. A stream of steaming water shot down upon the first who ventured upon the rounds, and he fell back with ludicrous whimperings. Compelled by the leader, another ventured on the ladder, and the better to watch his performance Count Victor leaned farther out at his window, secure from observation in the darkness. As he did so, he saw for the first time that on his right there was a lighted window he could almost touch with his hand as he leaned over. It flashed upon him that here was the woman's room, and that on the deep moulding running underneath the windows he could at some little risk gain it, probably to find its door open, and thus gain the freedom Mungo had so unexpectedly taken from him. He crept out upon the ledge, only then to realise the hazards of such a narrow footing. It seemed as he stood with his hands yet grasping the sides of the window he sought to escape by, that he could never retain his balance sufficiently to reach the other in safety. The greatest of his physical fears—greater even than that of drowning which sometimes whelmed him in dreams and on ships—was the dread of empty space; a touch of vertigo seized him; the enemy gathered round the torch beneath suddenly seemed elves, puny impossible things far off, and he almost slipped into their midst. But he dragged back his senses. “We must all die,” he gasped, “but we need not be precipitate about the business,” and shut his eyes as he stood up, and with feet upon the moulding stretched to gain grip of the other window. Something fell away below his right foot and almost plunged him into space. With a terrific effort he saved himself from that fate, and his senses, grown of a sudden to miraculous acuteness, heard the crumbled masonry he had released thud upon the patch of grass at the foot of the tower, apprising the enemy of his attempt. A wild commingling of commands and threats came up to him; the night seemed something vast beyond all former estimates, a swinging and giddy horror; the single star that peered through the cloud took to airy dancing, a phantom of the evening heavens; again he might have fallen, but the material, more deadly, world he was accustomed to manifested itself for his relief and his salvation. Through the night rang a pistol shot, and the ball struck against the wall but an inch or two from his head.
“Merci beaucoup!” he said aloud. “There is nothing like a pill,” and his grasp upon the sides of the illuminated window was quite strong and confident as he drew himself towards it. He threw himself in upon the floor just in time to escape death from half a dozen bullets that rattled behind him.
Safe within, he looked around in wonder. What he had come upon was not what he had expected,—was, indeed, so incongruous with the cell next door and the general poverty of the castle as a whole that it seemed unreal; for here was a trim and tasteful boudoir lit by a silver lamp, warmed by a charcoal fire, and giving some suggestion of dainty womanhood by a palpable though delicate odour of rose-leaves conserved in pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste.
“Annapla becomes more interesting,” he reflected, but he spent no time in her boudoir; he made to try the door. It was locked; nor did he wonder at it, though in a cooler moment he might have done so. Hurriedly he glanced about the room for something to aid him to open the door, but there was nothing to suit his purpose. In his search his eye fell upon a miniature upon the mantelshelf—the work, as he could tell by its technique and its frame, of a French artist. It was the presentment of a gentleman in the Highland dress, adorned, as was the manner of some years back before the costume itself had become discredited, with fripperies of the mode elsewhere—a long scalloped waistcoat, a deep ruffled collar, the shoes buckled, and the hairen queue,—the portrait of a man of dark complexion, distinguished and someways pleasant.
“The essential lover of the story,” said Count Victor, putting it down. “Now I know my Annapla is young and lovely. We shall see—we shall see!”
He turned to the door to try its fastenings with his sword, found the task of no great difficulty, for the woodwork round the lock shared the common decay of Doom, and with the silver lamp to light his steps, he made his way along the corridor and down the stair. It was a strange and romantic spectacle he made moving thus through the darkness, the lamp swaying his shadow on the stairway as he descended, and he could have asked for no more astonishment in the face of his jailer than he found in Mungo's when that domestic met him at the stair-foot.
Mungo was carrying hot water in a huge kettle. He put down the vessel with a startled jolt that betrayed his fright.
“God be aboot us! Coont, ye near gied me a stroke there.”
“Oh, I demand pardon!” said Count Victor ironically. “I forgot that a man of your age should not be taken by surprise.”
“My age!” repeated Mungo, with a tone of annoyance. “No' sae awfu' auld either. At my age my grandfaither was a sergeant i' the airmy, and married for the fourth time.”
“Only half his valour seems to run in the blood,” said Count Victor. Then, more sternly, “What did you mean by locking me up there?”
Mungo took up the kettle and placed it to the front of him, with some intuition that a shield must be extemporised against the sword that the Frenchman had menacing in his hand. The action was so droll and futile that, in spite of his indignation, Count Victor had to smile; and this assured the little domestic, though he felt chagrin at the ridicule implied.
“Jist a bit plan o' my ain, Coont, to keep ye oot o' trouble, and I'm shair ye'll excuse the leeberty. A bonny-like thing it wad be if the maister cam' hame and foun' the Macfarlanes wer oot on the ran-dan and had picked ye oot o' Doom like a wulk oot o' its shell. It wisna like as if ye were ane o' the ordinar garrison, ye ken; ye were jist a kin' o' veesitor—”
“And it was I they were after,” said Count Victor, “which surely gave me some natural interest in the defence.”
“Ye were safer to bide whaur ye were; and hoo ye got oot o't 's mair than I can jalouse. We hae scalded aff the rogues wi' het water, and if they're to be keepit aff, I'll hae to be unco gleg wi' the kettle.”
As he said these words he saw, apparently for the first time, with a full understanding of its significance, the lamp in Count Victor's hands. His jaw fell; he put down the kettle again helplessly, and, in trembling tones, “Whaur did ye get the lamp?” said he.
“Ah, mon vieux!” cried Count Victor, enjoying his bewilderment. “You should have locked the lady's door as well as mine. 'Art a poor warder not to think of the possibilities in two cells so close to each other.”
“Cells!” cried Mungo, very much disturbed. “Cells! quo' he,” looking chapfallen up the stairway, as if for something there behind his escaped prisoner.
“And now you will give me the opportunity of paying my respects to your no doubt adorable lady.”
“Eh!” cried Mungo, incredulous. A glow came to his face. He showed the ghost of a mischievous smile. “Is't that way the lan' lies? Man, ye're a dour birkie!” said he; “but a wilf u' man maun hae his way, and, if naething less'll dae ye, jist gang up to yer ain chaumer, and ye'll find her giein' the Macfarlanes het punch wi' nae sugar till't.”
The statement was largely an enigma to Count Victor, but he understood enough to send him up the stairs with an alacrity that drove Mungo, in his rear, into silent laughter. Yet the nearer he came to his door the slower grew his ascent. At first he had thought but of the charming lady, the vocalist, and the recluse. The Baron's share in the dangerous mystery of Doom made him less scrupulous than he might otherwise have been as to the punctilio of a domestic's introduction to one apparently kept out of his way for reasons best known to his host; and he advanced to the encounter in the mood of the adventurer, Mungo in his rear beholding it in his jaunty step, in the fingers that pulled and peaked the moustachio, and drew forth a somewhat pleasing curl that looked well across a temple. But a more sober mood overcame him before he had got to the top of the stair. The shouts of the besieging party outside had declined and finally died away; the immediate excitement of the adventure, which with Mungo and the unknown lady he was prepared to share, was gone. He began to realise that there was something ludicrous in the incident that had kept him from making her acquaintance half an hour ago, and reflected that she might well have some doubt of his courage and his chivalry. Even more perturbing was the sudden recollection of the amused laughter that had greeted his barefooted approach to Doom through two or three inches of water, and at the open door he hung back dubious.
“Step in; it's your ain room,” cried Mungo, struggling with his kettle; “and for the Lord's sake mind your mainners and gie her a guid impression.”
It was the very counsel to make a Montaiglon bold.
He entered; a woman was busy at the open window; he stared in amazement and chagrin.
Beaten back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound silence on the shore and all along the coast—a silence the more sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle, his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads; it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor scrutinised the ground beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead.
He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere else the desolation was pitiful—the hips glowing crimson on their stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green with damp and the base growths of old and mouldering situations, the seat decayed and broken, but propped at its feet as if for recent use. All seemed to express some poignant anguish for lost summers, happy days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the rain and sea saddened the moment—the rain dripping through the ragged foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw.
He held high the lantern, and to a woman at her darkened window her bower seemed to glow like a shell lit in the depths of troubled ocean. He swung the light; a footstep, that he did not hear, was checked in wonder. He came out, and instinct told him some one watched him in the dark beyond the radiance of his lantern.
“Qui est la?” he cried, forgetting again the foreign country, thinking himself sentinel in homely camps, and when he spoke a footstep sounded in the darkness.
Some one had crossed from the mainland while he ruminated within. He listened, with the lantern high above his head but to the right of him for fear of a pistol-shot.
One footstep.
He advanced slowly to meet it, his fingers tremulous on his sword, and the Baron came out of the darkness, his hands behind his back, his shoulders bent, his visage a mingling of sadness and wonder.
“M. le Baron?” said Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer. Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that showed him for the moment incapable of calm utterance.
“You—you—are late,” stammered Count Victor, putting the sword behind him and feeling his words grotesque.
“I took—I took you for a wraith—I took you for a vision,” said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. “Oh, man!” said he, “if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from things new and thriving, and above all the castle of his Grace flaring from foundation to finial like a torch, though murder was done this day in the guise of justice: I came through the rain and the wet full of bitterness to my poor black home, and find no light there where once my father and my father's father and all the race of us knew pleasant hours in the wildest weather. Not a light, not a lowe—” he went on, gazing upward to the frowning walls dark glistening in the rain—“and then the bower must out and shine to mind me—to mind me—ah, Mont-aiglon, my pardons, my regrets! you must be finding me a melancholy host.”
“Do not mention it,” said Count Victor carelessly, though the conduct of this marvel fairly bewildered him, and his distress seemed poorly accounted for by his explanation. “Ah, vieux blagueur!” he thought, “can it be Balhaldie again—a humbug with no heart in his breast but an onion in his handkerchief?” And then he was ashamed of suspicions of which a day or two ago he would have been incapable.
“My dear friends of Monday did me the honour to call in your absence,” he said. “They have not gone more than twenty minutes.”
“What! the Macfarlanes,” cried Doom, every trace of his softer emotion gone, but more disturbed than ever as he saw the sword for the first time. “Well—well—well?” he inquired eagerly.
“Well, well, well?” and he gripped Count Victor by the arm and looked him in the eyes.
“Nothing serious happened,” replied Count Victor, “except that your domestics suffered some natural alarms.”
Doom seemed wonderously relieved. “The did not force an entrance?” said he.
“They did their best, but failed. I pricked one slightly before I fell back on Mungo's barricades; that and some discomfiture from Mistress Annapla's punch-bowl completed the casualties.”
“Well? well? well?” cried Lamond, still waking something. Count Victor only looked at him in wonder, and led the way to the door where Mungo drew back the bars and met his master with a trembling front. A glance of mute inquiry and intelligence passed between the servant and his master: the Frenchman saw it and came to his own conclusions, but nothing was said till the Baron had made a tour of investigation through the house and come at last to join his guest in thesalle, where the embers of the fire were raked together on the hearth and fed with new peat. The Count and his host sat down together, and when Mungo had gone to prepare some food for his master, Count Victor narrated the night's adventure. He had an excited listener—one more excited, perhaps, than the narrative of itself might account for.
“And there is much that is beyond my poor comprehension,” continued Count Victor, looking at him as steadfastly as good breeding would permit.
“Eh?” said Doom, stretching fingers that trembled to the peat-flame that stained his face like wine.
“Your servant Mungo was quite unnecessarily solicitous for my safety, and took the trouble to put me under lock and key.”
Doom fingered the bristles of his chin in a manifest perturbation. “He—he did that, did he?” said he, like one seeking to gain time for further reflection. And when Count Victor waited some more sympathetic comment, “It was—it was very stupid, very stupid of Mungo,” said he.
“Stupid!” echoed Count Victor ironically. “Ah! so it was. I should not have said stupid myself, but it so hard, is it not, for a foreigner to find the just word in his poor vocabulary? For abêtisemuch less unpleasant I have scored a lackey's back with a scabbard. Master Mungo had an explanation, however, though I doubted the truth of it.”
“And what was that?”
“That you would be angry if he permitted me to get into danger while I was your guest,—an excuse more courteous than convincing.”
“He was right,” said Doom, “though I can scarcely defend the manner of executing his trust: I was not to see that he would make a trepanning affair of it. I'm—I'm very much grieved, Count, much grieved, I assure you: I shall have a word or two on the matter the morn's morning with Mungo. A stupid action! a stupid action! but you know the man by this time—an oddity out and out.”
“A little too much so, if I may take the liberty, M. le Baron,—a little too much so for a foreigner's peace of mind,” said Count Victor softly. “Are you sure, M. le Baron, there are no traitors in Doom?” and he leaned forward with his gaze on the Baron's face.
The Baron started, flushed more crimson than before, and turned an alarmed countenance to his interrogator. “Good God!” he cried, “are you bringing your doubts of the breed of us to my hearthstone?”
“It is absurd, perhaps,” said Count Victor, still very softly, and watching his host as closely as he might, “but Mungo—”
“Pshaw! a good lowland heart! For all his clowning, Count, you might trust him with your life.”
“The other servant then—the woman?”
Doom looked a trifle uneasy. “Hush!” said he, with half a glance behind him to the door. “Not so loud. If she should hear!” he stammered: he stopped, then smiled awkwardly. “Have ye any dread of an Evil Eye?” said he.
“I have no dread of the devil himself, who is something more tangible,” replied Count Victor. “You do not suggest that malevolent influence in Mistress Annapla, do you?”
“We are very civil to her in these parts,” said Doom, “and I'm not keen to put her powers to the test. I have seen and heard some droll things of her.”
“That has been my own experience,” said Count Victor. “Are you sure her honesty is on more substantial grounds than her reputation for witchcraft? I demand your pardon for expressing these suspicions, but I have reasons. I cannot imagine that the attack of the Macfarlanes was connived at by your servants, though that was my notion for a little when Mungo locked me up, for they suffered more alarm at the attack than I did, and the reason for the attack seems obvious enough. But are you aware that this woman who commands your confidence is in the practice of signalling to the shore when she wishes to communicate with some one there?”
“I think you must be mistaken,” said Doom, uneasily.
“I could swear I saw something of the kind,” said Count Victor. He described the signal he had seen twice at her window. “Not having met her at the time, I laid it down to some gay gillian's affair with a lover on the mainland, but since I have seen her that idea seem—seems—”
“Just so, I should think it did,” said the Baron: but though his words were light, his aspect was disturbed. He paced once or twice up and down the floor, muttered something to himself in Gaelic, and finally went to the door, which he opened. “Mungo, Mungo!” he cried into the darkness, and the servant appeared with the gaudy nightcap of his slumber already on.
“Tell Annapla to come here,” said the Baron.
The servant hesitated, his lip trembled upon some objection that he did not, however, express, and he went on his errand.
In a little the woman entered. It was not surprising that when Count Victor, prepared by all that had gone before to meet a bright young creature when he had gone into his chamber where she was repelling the escalade of the enemy, had been astounded to find what he found there, for Mistress Annapla was in truth not the stuff for amorous intrigues. She had doubtless been handsome enough in her day, but that was long distant; now there were but the relics of her good looks, with only her eyes, dark, lambent, piercing, to tell of passions unconsumed. She had eyes only for her master; Count Victor had no existence for her, and he was all the freer to watch how she received the Baron's examination.
“Do you dry your clothes at the windows in Doom?” asked her master quietly, with none of a master's bluntness, asking the question in English from politeness to his guest.
She replied rapidly in Gaelic.
“For luck,” said the Baron dubiously when he had listened to a long guttural explanation that was of course unintelligible to the Frenchman. “That's a new freit. To keep away the witches. Now, who gave ye a notion like that?” he went on, maintaining his English.
Another rapid explanation followed, one that seemed to satisfy the Baron, for when it was finished he gave her permission to go.
“It's as I thought,” he explained to Count Victor. “The old body has been troubled with moths and birds beating themselves against her window at night when the light was in it: what must she be doing but taking it for some more sinister visitation, and the green kerchief is supposed to keep them away.”
“I should have fancied it might have been a permanency in that case,” suggested Count Victor, “unless, indeed, your Highland ghosts have a special preference for Mondays and Wednesdays.”
“Permanency!” repeated the Baron, thoughtfully. “H'm!” The suggestion had obviously struck him as reasonable, but he baulked at any debate on it.
“There was also the matter of the horseman,” went on Count Victor blandly, pointing his moustache.
“Horseman?” queried the Baron.
“A horsemansans doute. I noticed most of your people here ride with a preposterously short stirrup; this one rode like a gentleman cavalier. He stopped opposite the castle this forenoon and waved his compliments to the responsive maid.”
The effect upon the Baron was amazing. He grew livid with some feeling repressed. It was only for a moment; the next he was for changing the conversation, but Count Victor had still his quiver to empty.
“Touching flageolets?” said he, but there his arrow missed.
Doom only laughed.
“For that,” said he, “you must trouble Annapla or Mungo. They have a story that the same's to be heard every night of storm, but my bed's at the other side of the house and I never heard it;” and he brought the conversation back to the Macfarlanes, so that Count Victor had to relinquish his inquisition.
“The doings of to-night,” said he, “make it clear I must rid you of my presencetout à l'heure. I think I shall transfer me to the town to-morrow.”
“You can't, man,” protested Doom, though, it almost seemed, with some reluctance. “There could be no worse time for venturing there. In the first place, the Macfarlanes' affair is causing a stir; then I've had no chance of speaking to Petullo about you. He was to meet me after the court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin', as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle, though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will have to be put off a day or two longer.”
The remainder of the night passed without further alarm, but Count Victor lay only on the frontiers of forgetfulness till morning, his senses all on sentry, and the salt, wind-blown dawn found him abroad before the rest of Doom was well awake. He met the calesh of the Lords going back the way it had come with an outrider in a red jacket from the stable of Argyll: it passed him on the highway so close that he saw Elchies and Kilkerran half sleeping within as they drove away from the scene of their dreadful duties. In a cloak of rough watchet blue he had borrowed from his host and a hat less conspicuous than that he had come in from Stirling, he passed, to such strangers in the locality, for some tacksman of the countryside, or a traveller like themselves. To have ventured into the town, however, where every one would see he was a stranger and speedily inquire into his business there, was, as he had been carefully apprised by Doom the night before, a risk too great to be run without good reason. Stewart's trial had created in the country a state of mind that made a stranger's presence there somewhat hazardous for himself, and all the more so in the case of a foreigner, for, rightly or wrongly, there was associated with the name of the condemned man as art and part in the murder that of a Highland officer in the service of the French. There had been rumours, too, of an attempted rescue on the part of the Stewarts of Ardshiel, Achnacoin, and Fasnacloich—all that lusty breed of the ancient train: the very numbers of them said to be on the drove-roads with weapons from the thatch were given in the town, and so fervently believed in that the appearance of a stranger without any plausible account to give of himself would have stirred up tumult.
Count Victor eluded the more obvious danger of the town, but in his forenoon ramble stumbled into one almost as great as that he had been instructed to avoid. He had gone through the wood of Strongara and come suddenly upon the cavalcade that bore the doomed man to the scene of his execution thirty or forty miles away.
The wretch had been bound upon a horse—a tall, middle-aged man in coarse home-spun clothing, his eye defiant, but his countenance white with the anxieties of his situation. He was surrounded by a troop of sabres; the horses' hoofs made a great clatter upon the hard road, and Count Victor, walking abstractedly along the river-bank, came on them before he was aware of their proximity. As he stood to let them pass he was touched inexpressibly by the glance the convict gave him, so charged was it with question, hope, dread, and the appetite for some human sympathy. He had seen that look before in men condemned—once in front of his own rapier,—and with the utmost feeling for the unhappy wretch he stood, when the cavalcade had gone, looking after it and conjuring in his fancy the last terrible scene whereof that creature would be the central figure. Thus was he standing when another horseman came upon him suddenly, following wide in the rear of the troops—a civilian who shared the surprise of the unexpected meeting. He had no sooner gazed upon Count Victor than he drew up his horse confusedly and seemed to hesitate between proceeding or retreat. Count Victor passed with a courteous salute no less formally returned. He was struck singularly by some sense of familiarity. He did not know the horseman who so strangely scrutinised him as he passed, but yet the face was one not altogether new to him. It was a face scarce friendly, too, and for his life the Frenchman could not think of any reason for aversion.
He could no more readily have accounted for the action of the horseman had he known that he had ridden behind the soldiers but a few hundred yards after meeting with Count Victor when he turned off at one of the hunting-roads with which the ducal grounds abounded, and galloped furiously back towards the castle of Argyll. Nothing checked him till he reached the entrance, where he flung the reins to a servant and dashed into the turret-room where the Duke sat writing.
“Ah, Sim!” said his Grace, airily, yet with an accent of apprehension, “you have come back sooner than I looked for: nothing wrong with the little excursion, I hope?”
MacTaggart leaned with both hands upon the table where his master wrote. “They're all right, so far as I went with them,” said he; “but if your Grace in my position came upon a foreigner in the wood of Strongara—a gentleman by the looks of him and a Frenchman by his moustachio, all alone and looking after Sergeant Donald's company, what would your Grace's inference be?”
Argyll, obviously, did not share much of his Chamberlain's excitement. “There was no more than one there?” he asked, sprinkling sand upon his finished letter. “No! Then there seems no great excuse for your extreme perturbation, my good Sim. I'm lord of Argyll, but I'm not lord of the king's highway, and if an honest stranger cares to take a freeman's privilege and stand between the wind and Simon MacTaggart's dignity—Simon MacTaggart's very touchy dignity, it would appear—who am I that I should blame the liberty? You did not rideventre à terrefrom Strongara (I see a foam-fleck on your breeches) to tell me we had a traveller come to admire our scenery? Come, come, Sim! I'll begin to think these late eccentricities of yours, these glooms, abstractions, errors, and anxieties and indispositions, and above all that pallid face of yours, are due to some affair of the heart.” As he spoke Argyll pinched his kinsman playfully on the ear, quite the good companion, with none of the condescension that a duke might naturally display in so doing.
MacTaggart reddened and Argyll laughed, “Ah!” he cried. “Can I have hit it?” he went on, quizzing the Chamberlain. “See that you give me fair warning, and I'll practise the accustomed and essential reel. Upon my soul, I haven't danced since Lady Mary left, unless you call it so that foolish minuet. You should have seen her Grace at St. James's last month. Gad! she footed it like an angel; there's not a better dancer in London town. See that your wife's a dancer, whoever she may be, Sim; let her dance and sing and play the harpsichord or the clarsach—they are charms that will last longer than her good looks, and will not weary you so soon as that intellect that's so much in fashion nowadays, when every woman listens to every clever thing you say, that she may say something cleverer, or perhaps retail it later as her own.”
MacTaggart turned about impatiently, poked with his riding crop at the fire, and plainly indicated that he was not in the mood for badinage.
“All that has nothing to do with my Frenchman, your Grace,” said he bluntly.
“Oh, confound your Frenchman!” retorted the Duke, coming over, turning up the skirts of his coat, and warming himself at the fire. “Don't say Frenchman to me, and don't suggest any more abominable crime and intrigue till the memory of that miserable Appin affair is off my mind. I know what they'll say about that: I have a good notion what they're saying already—as if I personally had a scrap of animosity to this poor creature sent to the gibbet on Leven-side.”
“I think you should have this Frenchman arrested for inquiry: I do not like the look of him.”
Argyll laughed. “Heavens!” he cried, “is the man gane wud? Have you any charge against this unfortunate foreigner who has dared to shelter himself in my woods? And if you have, do you fancy it is the old feudal times with us still, and that I can clap him in my dungeon—if I had such a thing—without any consultation with the common law-officers of the land? Wake up, Sim! wake up! this is '55, and there are sundry written laws of the State that unfortunately prevent even the Mac-Cailen Mor snatching a man from the footpath and hanging him because he has not the Gaelic accent and wears his hair in a different fashion from the rest of us. Don't be a fool, cousin, don't be a fool!”
“It's as your Grace likes,” said MacTaggart. “But if this man's not in any way concerned in the Appin affair, he may very well be one of the French agents who are bargaining for men for the French service, and the one thing's as unlawful as the other by the act of 'thirty-six.”
“H'm!” said Argyll, turning more grave, and shrewdly eyeing his Chamberlain—“H'm! have you any particularly good reason to think that?” He waited for no answer, but went on. “I give it up, MacTaggart,” said he, with a gesture of impatience. “Gad! I cannot pretend to know half the plots you are either in yourself or listening on the outside of, though I get credit, I know, for planning them. All I want to know is, have you any reason to think this part of Scotland—and incidentally the government of this and every well-governed realm, as the libels say—would be bettered by the examination of this man? Eh?”
MacTaggart protested the need was clamant. “On the look of the man I would give him the jougs,” said he. “It's spy—”
“H'm!” said Argyll, then coughed discreetly over a pinch of snuff.
“Spy or agent,” said the Chamberlain, little abashed at the interjection.
“And yet a gentleman by the look of him, said Sim MacTaggart, five minutes syne.”
“And what's to prevent that?” asked the Chamberlain almost sharply. “Your Grace will admit it's nothing to the point,” said he, boldly, and smilingly, standing up, a fine figure of a man, with his head high and his chest out. “It was the toss of a bawbee whether or not I should apprehend him myself when I saw him, and if I had him here your Grace would be the first to admit my discretion.”
“My Grace is a little more judicious than to treat the casual pedestrian like a notour thief,” said Argyll; “and yet, after all, I dare say the matter may be left to your good judgment—that is, after you have had a word or two on the matter with Petullo, who will better be able to advise upon the rights to the persons of suspicious characters in our neighbourhood.”
With never a word more said MacTaggart clapped on his hat, withdrew in an elation studiously concealed from his master, and fared at a canter to Petullo's office in the town. He fastened the reins to the ring at the door and entered.
The lawyer sat in a den that smelt most wickedly of mildewed vellum, sealing-wax, tape, and all that trash that smothers the soul of man—the appurtenances of his craft. He sat like a sallow mummy among them, like a half-man made of tailor's patches, flanked by piles of docketed letters and Records closed, bastioned by deed-boxes blazoned with the indication of their offices—MacGibbon's Mortification, Dunderave Estate, Coil's Trust, and so on; he sat with a shrieking quill among these things, and MacTaggart entering to him felt like thanking God that he had never been compelled to a life like this in a stinking mortuary, with the sun outside on the windows and the clean sea and the singing wood calling in vain. Perhaps some sense of contrast seized the writer, too, as he looked up to see the Chamberlain entering with a pleasant, lively air of wind behind him, and health and vigour in his step, despite the unwonted wanness of his face. At least, in the glance Petullo gave below his shaggy eyebrows, there was a little envy as well as much cunning. He made a ludicrous attempt at smiling.
“Ha!” he cried, “Mr. MacTaggart! Glad to see you, Mr. MacTaggart. Sit ye down, Mr. MacTaggart. I was just thinking about you.”
“No ill, I hope,” said the Chamberlain, refusing a seat proffered; for anything of the law to him seemed gritty in the touch, and a three-legged stool would, he always felt, be as unpleasant to sit upon as a red-hot griddle.
“Te-he!” squeaked Petullo with an irritating falsetto. “You must have your bit joke, Mr. MacTaggart. Did his Grace—did his Grace—I was just wondering if his Grace said anything to-day about my unfortunate accident with the compote yestreen.” He looked more cunningly than ever at the Chamberlain.
“In his Grace's class, Mr. Petullo, and incidentally in my own, nothing's said of a guest's gawkiness, though you might hardly believe it for a reason that I never could make plain to you, though I know it by instinct.”
“Oh! as to gawkiness, an accident of the like might happen to any one,” said Petullo, irritably.
“And that's true,” confessed the Chamberlain. “But, tut! tut! Mr. Petullo, a compote's neither here nor there to the Duke. If you had spilt two of them it would have made no difference; there was plenty left. Never mind the dinner, Mr. Petullo, just now, I'm in a haste. There's a Frenchman—”
“There's a wheen of Frenchmen, seemingly,” said the writer, oracularly, taking to the trimming of his nails with a piece of pumice-stone he kept for the purpose, and used so constantly that they looked like talons.
“Now, what the devil do you mean?” cried Mac-Taggart.
“Go on, go on with your business,” squeaked Petullo, with an eye upon an inner door that led to his household.
“I have his Grace's instructions to ask you about the advisability of arresting a stranger, seemingly a Frenchman, who is at this moment suspiciously prowling about the policies.”
“On whatna charge, Mr. MacTaggart, on whatna charge?” asked the writer, taking a confident, even an insolent, tone, now that he was on his own familiar ground. “Rape, arson, forgery, robbery, thigging, sorning, pickery, murder, or high treason?”
“Clap them all together, Mr. Petullo, and just call it local inconduciveness,” cried MacTaggart. “Simply the Duke may not care for his society. That should be enough for the Fiscal and Long Davie the dempster, shouldn't it?”
“H'm!” said Petullo. “It's a bit vague, Mr. MacTaggart, and I don't think it's mentioned in Forbes's 'Institutes.' Fifteen Campbell assessors and the baron bailie might have sent a man to the Plantations on that dittay ten years ago, but we live in different times, Mr. MacTaggart—different times, Mr. MacTaggart,” repeated the writer, tee-heeing till his bent shoulders heaved under his seedy, ink-stained surtout coat.
“Do we?” cried the Chamberlain, with a laugh. “I'm thinking ye forget a small case we had no further gone than yesterday, when a man with the unlucky name of Stewart—” He stopped, meaningly smiled, and made a gesture with his fingers across his neck, at the same time giving an odd sound with his throat.
“Oh! You're an awfu' man,” cried Petullo, with the accent of a lout. “I wonder if you're on the same track as myself, for I'm like the Hielan' soldier—I have a Frenchman of my own. There's one, I mean, up by there in Doom, and coming down here to-morrow or the day after, or as soon as I can order a lodging for him in the town.”
“Oh, hell!” cried the secretary, amazingly dumfoundered.
“There's nothing underhand about him, so far as I know, to give even his Grace an excuse for confining him, for it seems he's a wine merchant out of Bordeaux, one Montaiglon, come here on business, and stopped at Doom through an attack on his horse by the same Macfarlanes who are of interest to us for another reason, as was spoken of at his Grace's table last night.”
“And he's coming here?” asked MacTaggart, incredulous.
“I had a call from the Baron himself to-day to tell me that.”
“Ah, well, there's no more to be said of our suspicions,” said MacTaggart. “Not in this form, at least.” And he was preparing to go.
A skirt rustled within the inner door, and Mrs. Petullo, flushed a little to her great becoming in spite of a curl-paper or two, and clad in a lilac-coloured negligee of the charmingest, came into the office with a well-acted start of surprise to find a client there.
“Oh, good morning! Mr. MacTaggart,” she exclaimed, radiantly, while her husband scowled to himself, as he relapsed into the chair at his desk and fumbled with his papers. “Good morning; I hope I have not interrupted business?”
“Mr. MacTaggart was just going, my dear,” said Mr. Petullo.
A cracked bell rang within, and the Chamberlain perceived an odour of cooking celery. Inwardly he cursed his forgetfulness, because it was plain that the hour for his call upon the writer was ill-chosen.
“My twelve-hours is unusual sharp to-day,” said Petullo, consulting a dumpy horologe out of his fob. “Would ye—would ye do me the honour of joining me?” with a tone that left, but not too rudely, immediate departure as the Chamberlain's only alternative.
“Thank you, thank you,” said MacTaggart. “I rose late to-day, and my breakfast's little more than done with.” He made for the door, Mrs. Petullo close in his cry and holding his eye, defying so hurried a departure, while she kept up a chattering about the last night's party. Her husband hesitated, but his hunger (he had the voracious appetite of such shrivelled atomies) and a wholesome fear of being accused of jealousy made him withdraw, leaving the office to the pair.
All MacTaggart's anger rose against madame for her machination. “You saw me from the window,” said he; “it's a half-cooked dinner for the goodman to-day, I'll warrant!”
She laughed a most intoxicating laugh, all charged with some sweet velvety charm, put out her hands, and caught his. “Oh, Lord! I wish it would choke him, Sim,” said she, fervently, then lifted up her mouth and dropped a swooning eyelash over her passionate orbs.
“Adorable creature,” he thought: “she'll have rat-bane in his broth some day.” He kissed her with no more fervour than if she had been a wooden figurehead, but she was not thus to be accepted: she put an arm quickly round his neck and pressed her passionate lips to his. Back he drew wincing. “Oh, damnation!” he cried.
“What's the matter?” she exclaimed in wonder, and turned to assure herself that it was not that some one spied from the inner door, for Mac-Taggart's face had become exceeding pale.
“Nothing, nothing,” he replied; “you are—you are so ferocious.”
“Am I, Sim?” said she. “Who taught me? Oh, Sim,” she went on, pleadingly, “be good to me. I'm sick, I'msickof life, and you don't show you care for me a little bit. Do you love me, Sim?”
“Heavens!” he cried, “you would ask the question fifty times a-day if you had the opportunity.”
“It would need a hundred times a-day to keep up with your changing moods. Do you love me, Sim?” She was smiling, with the most pathetic appeal in her face.
“You look beautiful in that gown, Kate,” said he, irrelevantly, not looking at it at all, but out at the window, where showed the gabbarts tossing in the bay, and the sides of the hill of Dunchuach all splashed with gold and crimson leafage.
“Never mind my gown, Sim,” said she, stamping her foot, and pulling at the buttons of his coat. “Once—oh, Sim, do you love me? Tell me, tell me, tell me! Whether you do or not, say it, you used to be such a splendid liar.”
“It was no lie,” said he curtly; then to himself: “Oh, Lord, give me patience with this! and I have brought it on myself.”
“Itwasno lie. Oh, Sim!” (And still she was turning wary eyes upon the door that led to her husband's retirement.) “Itwasno lie; you're left neither love nor courtesy. Oh, never mind! say you love me, Sim, whether it's true or not: that's what it's come to with me.”
“Of course I do,” said he.
“Of course what?”
“Of course I love you.” He smiled, but at heart he grimaced.
“I don't believe you,” said she, from custom waiting his protestation. But the Duke's Chamberlain was in no mood for protestations. He looked at her high temples, made bald by the twisted papilottes, and wondered how he could have thought that bold shoulder beautiful.
“I'm in a great hurry, Kate,” said he. “Sorry to go, but there's my horse at the ring to prove the hurry I'm in!”
“I know, I know; you're always in a hurry now with me: it wasn't always so. Do you hear the brute?” Her husband's squeaky voice querulously shouting on a servant came to them from behind.
The servant immediately after came to the door with an intimation that Mr. Petullo desired to know where the spirit-bottle was.
“He knows very well,” said Mrs. Petullo. “Here is the key—no, I'll take it to him myself.”
“It's not the drink he wants, but me, the pig,” said she as the servant withdrew. “Kiss me good afternoon, Sim.”
“I wish to God it was good-bye!” thought he, as he smacked her vulgarly, like a clown at a country fair.
She drew her hand across her mouth, and her eyes flashed indignation.
“There's something between us, Simon,” said she, in an altered tone; “it used not to be like that.”
“Indeed it did not,” he thought bitterly, and not for the first time he missed something in her—some spirit of simplicity, freshness, flower-bloom, and purity that he had sought for, seen in many women, and found elusive, as the frost finds the bloom of flowers he would begem.
Her husband shrieked again, and with mute gestures they parted.
The Chamberlain threw himself upon his horse as 'twere a mortal enemy, dug rowel-deep in the shuddering flesh, and the hoof-beats thundered on the causey-stones. The beast whinnied in its pain, reared, and backed to the breast wall of the bay. He lashed it wildly over the eyes with his whip, and they galloped up the roadway. A storm of fury possessed him; he saw nothing, heard nothing.