The Chamberlain's quarters were in the eastern turret, and there he went so soon as he could leave his Grace, who quickly forgot the Frenchman and his story, practising upon Simon the speech he had prepared in his evening walk, alternated with praise extravagant—youthfully rapturous almost—of his duchess, who might, from all his chafing at her absence, have been that night at the other end of the world, instead of merely in the next county on a few days' visit.
“Ah! you are smiling, Sim!” said he. “Old whinstone! You fancy Argyll an imbecile of uxoriousness. Well, well, my friend, you are at liberty; Lord knows, it's not a common disease among dukes! Eh, Sim? But then women like my Jean are not common either or marriages were less fashions. Upon my word, I could saddle Jock and ride this very night to Luss, just to have the fun of throwing pebbles at her window in the morning, and see her wonder and pleasure at finding me there. Do you know what, cousin? I am going to give a ball when she comes home. We'll have just the neighbours, and I'll ask M. Soi-disant, who'll give us the very latest step. I like the fellow's voice, it rings the sterling metal.... And now, my lords, this action on the part of the Government.... Oh, the devil fly away with politics! I must go to a lonely bed!” And off set Mac-Cailen Mor, the noble, the august, the man of silk and steel, whom 'twas Simon MacTaggart's one steadfast ambition in life to resemble even in a remote degree.
And then we have the Chamberlain in his turret room, envious of that blissful married man, and warmed to a sympathetic glow with Olivia floating through the images that rose before him.
He drew the curtains of his window and looked in that direction where Doom, of course, was not for material eyes, finding a vague pleasure in building up the picture of the recluse tower, dark upon its promontory. It was ten o'clock. It had been arranged at their last meeting that without the usual signal he should go to her to-night before twelve. Already his heart beat quickly; his face was warm and tingling with pleasant excitation, he felt a good man.
“By God!” he cried. “If it was not for the old glaur! What for does heaven—or hell—send the worst of its temptations to the young and ignorant? If I had met her twenty years ago! Twenty years ago! H'm! 'Clack!' goes the weaver's shuttle! Twenty years ago it was her mother, and Sim MacTaggart without a hair on his face trying to kiss the good lady of Doom, and her, perhaps na' half unwilling. I'm glad—I'm glad.”
He put on a pair of spurs, his fingers trembling as those of a lad dressing for his first ball, and the girl a fairy in white, with her neck pink and soft and her eyes shy like little fawns in the wood.
“And how near I was to missing it!” he thought. “But for the scheming of a fool I would never have seen her. It's not too late, thank the Lord for that! No more of yon for Sim MacTaggart. I've cut with the last of it, and now my face is to the stars.”
His hands were spotless white, but he poured some water in a basin and washed them carefully, shrugging his shoulders with a momentary comprehension of how laughable must that sacrament be in the eyes of the worldly Sim MacTaggart. He splashed the water on his lips, drew on a cloak, blew out the light, and went softly downstairs and out at a side door for which he had a pass-key. The night was still, except for the melancholy sound of the river running over its cascades and echoing under the two bridges; odours of decaying leaves surrounded him, and the air of the night touched him on his hot face like a benediction. A heavy dew clogged the grass of Cairnbaan as he made for the stables, where a man stood out in the yard waiting with a black horse saddled. Without a word he mounted and rode, the hoofs thudding dull on the grass. He left behind him the castle, quite dark and looming in its nest below the sentinel hill; he turned the bay; the town revealed a light or two; a bird screamed on the ebb shore. Something of all he saw and heard touched a fine man in his cloak, touched a decent love in him; his heart was full with wholesome joyous ichor; and he sang softly to the creaking saddle, sang an air of good and clean old Gaelic sentiment that haunted his lips until he came opposite the very walls of Doom.
He fastened his horse to a young hazel and crossed the sandy interval between the mainland and the rock, sea-wrack bladders bursting under his feet, and the smells of seaweed dominant over the odours of the winter wood. The tower was pitch dark. He went into the bower, sat on the rotten seat among the damp bedraggled strands of climbing flowers, and took his flageolet from his pocket.
He played softly, breathing in the instrument the very pang of love. It might have been a psalm and this forsaken dew-drenched bower a great cathedral, so rapt, so devoted, his spirit as he sought to utter the very deepest ecstasy. Into the reed he poured remembrance and regret; the gathered nights of riot and folly lived and sorrowed for; the ideals cherished and surrendered; the remorseful sinner, the awakened soul.
No one paid any heed in Castle Doom.
That struck him suddenly with wonder, as he ceased his playing for a moment and looked through the broken trellis to see the building black below the starry sky. There ought, at least, to be a light in the window of Olivia's room. She had made the tryst herself, and never before had she failed to keep it. Perhaps she had not heard him. And so to his flageolet again, finding a consolation in the sweetness of his own performance.
“Ah!” said he to himself, pausing to admire—“Ah! there's no doubt I finger it decently well—better than most—better than any I've heard, and what's the wonder at that? for it's all in what you feel, and the most of people are made of green wood. There's no green timber here; I'm cursed if I'm not the very ancient stuff of fiddles!”
He had never felt happier in all his life. The past?—he wiped that off his recollection as with a sponge; now he was a new man with his feet out of the mire and a clean road all the rest of the way, with a clean sweet soul for his companion. He loved her to his very heart of hearts; he had, honestly, for her but the rendered passion of passion—why! what kept her?
He rammed the flageolet impatiently into his waistcoat, threw back his cloak, and stepped out into the garden. Doom Castle rose over him black, high and low, without a glimmer. A terrific apprehension took possession of him. He raised his head and gave the signal call, so natural that it drew an answer almost like an echo from an actual bird far off in some thicket at Achnatra. And oh! felicity; here she was at last!
The bolts of the door slid back softly; the door opened; a little figure came out. Forward swept the lover, all impatient fires—to find himself before Mungo Boyd!
He caught him by the collar of his coat as if he would shake him.
“What game is this? what game is this?” he furiously demanded. “Where is she?”
“Canny, man, canny!” said the little servitor, releasing himself with difficulty from the grasp of this impetuous lover. “Faith! it's anither warnin' this no' to parley at nicht wi' onything less than twa or three inch o' oak dale atween ye and herm.”
“Cut clavers and tell me what ails your mistress!”
“Oh, weel; she hisna come oot the nicht,” said Mungo, waving his arms to bring the whole neighbourhood as witness of the obvious fact.
The Chamberlain thrust at his chest and nearly threw him over.
“Ye dull-witted Lowland brock!” said he; “have I no' the use of my own eyes? Give me another word but what I want and I'll slash ye smaller than ye are already with my Ferrara.”
“Oh, I'm no' that wee!” said Mungo. “If ye wad jist bide cool—”
“'Cool' quo' he! Man! I'm up to the neck in fire. Where is she?”
“Whaur ony decent lass should be at this 'oor o' the nicht—in her naked bed.”
“Say that again, you foul-mouthed dog o' Fife, and I'll gralloch you like a deer!” cried the Chamberlain, his face tingling.
“Losh! the body's cracked,” said Mungo Boyd, astounded at this nicety.
“I was to meet her to-night; does she know I'm here?”
“I rapped at her door mysel' to mak' sure she did.”
“And what said she?”
“She tauld me to gae awa'. I said it was you, and she said it didna maitter.”
“Didna maitter!” repeated the Chamberlain, viciously, mimicking the eastland accent. “What ails her?”
“Ye ought to ken that best yoursel'. It was the last thing I daur ask her,” said Mungo Boyd, preparing to retreat, but his precaution was not called for, he had stunned his man.
The Chamberlain drew his cloak about him, cold with a contemptuous rebuff. His mouth parched; violent emotions wrought in him, but he recovered in a moment, and did his best to hide his sense of ignominy.
“Oh, well!” said he, “it's a woman's way, Mungo.”
“You'll likely ken,” said Mungo; “I've had sma' troke wi' them mysel'.”
“Lucky man! And now that I mind right, I think it was not to-night I was to come, after all; I must have made a mistake. If you have a chance in the morn's morning you can tell her I wasted a tune or two o' the flageolet on a wheen stars. It is a pleasant thing in stars, Mungo, that ye aye ken where to find them when ye want them!”
He left the rock, and took to horse again, and home. All through the dark ride he fervently cursed Count Victor, a prey of an idiotic jealousy.
Mungo stood in the dark till the last beat of the horse-hoofs could be heard, and then went in disconsolate and perplexed. He drew the bars as it were upon a dear friend out in the night, and felt as there had gone the final hope for Doom and its inhabitants.
“An auld done rickle o' a place!” he soliloquised, lifting a candle high that it might show the shame of the denuded and crumbling walls. “An auld done rickle: I've seen a better barn i' the Lothians, and fancy me tryin' to let on that it's a kind o' Edinbro'! Sirs! sirs! 'If ye canna hae the puddin' be contented wi' the bree,' Annapla's aye sayin', but here there's neither bree nor puddin'. To think that a' my traison against the master i' the interest o' his dochter and himsel' should come to naethin', and that Sim MacTaggart should be sent awa' wi' a flea in his lug, a' for the tirravee o' a lassie that canna' value a guid chance when it offers! I wonder what ails her, if it's no' that mon-sher's ta'en her fancy! Women are a' like weans; they never see the crack in an auld toy till some ane shows them a new ane. Weel! as sure as death I wash my haun's o' the hale affair. She's daft; clean daft, puir dear! If she kent whit I ken, she micht hae some excuse, but I took guid care o' that. I doot yon's the end o' a very promisin' match, and the man, though he mayna' think it, has his merchin' orders.”
The brief bow-legged figure rolled along the lobby, pshawing with vexation, and in a little, Doom, to all appearance, was a castle dark and desolate.
Yet not wholly asleep, however dark and silent; for Olivia, too, had heard the last of the thundering hoofs, had suffered the agony that comes from the wrench of a false ideal from the place of its long cherishing.
She came down in the morning a mere wraith of beauty, as it seemed to the little servitor, shutting her lips hard, but ready to burst into a shower.
“Guid Lord!” thought Mungo, setting the scanty table. “It's clear she hasna steeked an e'e a' nicht, and me sleepin' like a peerie. That's ane o' the advantages o' being ower the uneasy age o' love—and still I'm no' that auld. I wonder if she's rued it the day already.”
She smiled upon him bravely, but woe-begone, and could not check a quivering lip, and then she essayed at a song hummed with no bad pretence as she cast from the window a glance along the wintry coast, that never changed its aspect though hearts broke. But, as ill-luck had it, the air was the unfinished melody of Sim's bewitching flageolet. She stopped it ere she had gone farther than a bar or two, and turned to find Mungo irresolute and disturbed.
“He ga'ed awa'—” began the little man, with the whisper of the conspirator.
“Mungo!” she cried, “you will not say a word of it. It is all bye with me, and what for not with you? I command you to say no more about it, do you hear?” And her foot beat with an imperiousness almost comical from one with such a broken countenance.
“It's a gey droll thing—”
“It's a gey hard thing, that is what it is,” she interrupted him, “that you will not do what I tell you, and say nothing of what I have no relish to hear, and must have black shame to think of. Must I go over all that I have said to you already? It is finished, Mungo; are you listening? Did he—did he—looked vexed? But it does not matter, it is finished, and I have been a very foolish girl.”
“But that needna' prevent me tellin' ye that the puir man's awa' clean gyte.”
She smiled just the ghost of a smile at that, then put her hands upon her ears.
“Oh!” she cried despairingly, “have I not a friend left?”
Mungo sighed and said no more then, but went to Annapla and sought relief for his feelings in bilingual wrangling with that dark abigail. At low tide beggars from Glen Croe came to his door with yawning pokes and all their old effrontery: he astounded them by the fiercest of receptions, condemned them all eternally for limmers and sorners, lusty rogues and vagabonds.
“Awa'! awa'!” he cried, an implacable face against their whining protestations—“Awa', or I'll gie ye the gairde! If I was my uncle Erchie, I wad pit an end to your argy-bargying wi' hail frae a gun!” But to Annapla it was, “Puir deevils, it's gey hard to gie them the back o' the haun' and them sae used to rougher times in Doom. What'll they think o' us? It's sic a doon-come, but we maun be hainin' seein' Leevie's lost her jo, and no ither way clear oot o' the bit. I'm seein' a toom girnel and done beef here lang afore next Martinmas.”
These plaints were to a woman blissfully beyond comprehending the full import of them, for so much was Annapla taken up with her Gift, so misty and remote the realms of Gaelic dream wherein she moved, that the little Lowland oddity's perturbation was beneath her serious attention.
Olivia had that day perhaps the bitterest of her life. With love outside—calling in the evening and fluting in the bower, and ever (as she thought) occupied with her image even when farther apart—she had little fault to find with the shabby interior of her home. Now that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared to him that she had the look of a mountain birch stricken by the first of wintry weather.
“My dear,” he said, with a tenderness that had been some time absent from their relations, “you must be taking a change of air. I'm a poor parent not to have seen before how much you need it.” He hastened to correct what he fancied from her face was a misapprehension. “I am speaking for your red cheeks, my dear, believe me; I'm wae to see you like that.”
“I will do whatever you wish, father,” said Olivia in much agitation. Coerced she was iron, coaxed she was clay. “I have not been a very good daughter to you, father; after this I will be trying to be better.”
His face reddened; his heart beat at this capitulation of his rebel: he rose from his chair and took her into his arms—an odd display for a man so long stone-cold but to his dreams.
“My dear, my dear!” said he, “but in one detail that need never again be named between us two, you have been the best of girls, and, God knows, I am not the pattern parent!”
Her arm went round his neck, and she wept on his breast.
“Sour and dour—” said he.
“No, no!” she cried.
“And poor to penury.”
“All the more need for a loving child. There are only the two of us.”
He held her at arm's-length and looked at her wistfully in the wet wan face and saw his wife Christina there. “By heaven!” he thought, “it is no wonder that this man should hunt her.”
“You have made me happy this day, Olivia,” said he; “at least half happy. I dare not mention what more was needed to make me quite content.”
“You need not,” said she. “I know, and that—and that—is over too. I am just your own Olivia.”
“What!” he cried elate; “no more?”
“No more at all.”
“Now praise God!” said he. “I have been robbed of Credit and estate, and even of my name; I have seen king and country foully done by, and black affront brought on our people, and still there's something left to live for.”
For some days Count Victor chafed at the dull and somewhat squalid life of the inn. He found himself regarded coldly among strangers; the flageolet sounded no longer in the private parlour; the Chamberlain stayed away. And if Drimdarroch had seemed ill to find from Doom, he was absolutely indiscoverable here. Perhaps there was less eagerness in the search because other affairs would for ever intrude—not the Cause (that now, to tell the truth, he somehow regarded moribund; little wonder after eight years' inaction!) nor the poignant home-thoughts that made his ride through Scotland melancholy, but affairs more recent, and Olivia's eyes possessed him.
A morning had come of terrific snow, and made all the colder, too, his sojourn in the country of MacCailen Mor. Now he looked upon mountains white and far, phantom valleys gulping chilly winds, the sea alone with some of its familiar aspect, yet it, too, leaden to eye and heart as it lay in a perpetual haze between the headlands and lazily rose and fell in the bays.
The night of the ball was to him like a reprieve. From the darkness of those woody deeps below Dunchuach the castle gleamed with fires, and a Highland welcome illumined the greater part of the avenue from the town with flambeaux, in whose radiance the black pines, the huge beeches, the waxen shrubbery round the lawns all shrouded, seemed to creep closer round the edifice to hear the sounds of revelry and learn what charms the human world when the melodious winds are still and the weather is cold, and out of doors poor thickets must shiver in appalling darkness.
A gush of music met Count Victor at the threshold; dresses were rustling, a caressing warmth sighed round him, and his host was very genial.
“M. Montaiglon,” said his Grace in French, “you will pardon our short notice; my good friend, M. Montaiglon, my dear; my wife, M. Montaiglon—”
“But M. Montaiglon merely in the inns, my lord,” corrected the Frenchman, smiling. “I should be the last to accept the honour of your hospitality under anom de guerre.”
The Duke bowed. “M. le Comte,” he said, “to be quite as candid as yourself, I pierced your incognito even in the dark. My dear sir, a Scots traveller named for the time being the Baron Hay once had the privilege of sharing a glass coach with your uncle between Paris and Dunkerque; 'tis a story that will keep. Meanwhile, as I say, M. Montaiglon will pardon the shortness of our notice; in these wilds one's dancing shoes are presumed to be ever airing at the fire. You must consider these doors as open as the woods so long as your are in this neighbourhood. I have some things I should like to show you that you might not find wholly uninteresting—a Raphael, a Rembrandt (so reputed), and several Venetians—not much, in faith, but regarding which I should value your criticism—”
Some other guests arrived, his Grace's speech was broken, and Count Victor passed on, skirting the dancers, who to his unaccustomed eyes presented features strange yet picturesque as they moved in the puzzling involutions of a country dance. It was a noble hall hung round with tapestry and bossed with Highland targets, trophies of arms and the mountain chase; from the gallery round it drooped little banners with the devices of all those generations of great families that mingled in the blood of MacCailen Mor.
The Frenchman looked round him for a familiar face, and saw the Chamberlain in Highland dress in the midst of a little group of dames.
Mrs. Petullo was not one of them. She was dancing with her husband—a pitiful spectacle, for the lawyer must be pushed through the dance as he were a doll, with monstrous ungracefulness, and no sense of the time of the music, his thin legs quarrelling with each other, his neighbours all confused by his inexpert gyrations, and yet himself with a smirk of satisfaction on his sweating countenance.
“Madame is not happy,” thought Count Victor, watching the lady who was compelled to be a partner in these ungainly gambols.
And indeed Mrs. Petullo was far from happy, if her face betrayed her real feelings, as she shared the ignominy of the false position into which Petullo had compelled her. When the dance was ended she did not take her husband's proffered arm, but walked before him to her seat, utterly ignoring his pathetic courtesies.
This little domestic comedy only engaged Count Victor for a moment; he felt vexed for a woman in a position for which there seemed no remedy, and he sought distraction from his uneasy feeling by passing every man in the room under review, and guessing which of them, if any, could be the Drim-darroch who had brought him there from France. It was a baffling task. For many were there with faces wholly inscrutable who might very well have among them the secret he cherished, and yet nothing about them to advertise the scamp who had figured so effectively in other scenes than these. The Duke, their chief, moved now among them—suave, graceful, affectionate, his lady on his arm, sometimes squeezing her hand, a very boy in love!
“That's a grand picture of matrimonial felicity, Count,” said a voice at Count Victor's ear, and he turned to find the Chamberlain beside him.
“Positively it makes me half envious, monsieur,” said Count Victor. “A following influenced by the old feudal affections and wellnigh worshipping; health and wealth, ambitions gratified, a name that has sounded in camp and Court, yet a heart that has stayed at home; the fever of youth abated, and wedded to a beautiful woman who does not weary one,pardieu!his Grace has nothing more in this world to wish for.”
“Ay! he has most that's needed to make it a very comfortable world. Providence is good—”
“But sometimes grudging—”
“But sometimes grudging, as you say; yet MacCailen has got everything. When I see him and her there so content I'm wondering at my own wasted years of bachelordom. As sure as you're there, I think the sooner I draw in at a fire and play my flageolet to the guidwife the better for me.”
“It is a gift, this domesticity,” said Count Victor, not without an inward twinge at the picture. “Some of us have it, some of us have not, and no trying hard for content with one's own wife and early suppers will avail unless one is born to it like the trick of the Sonnet. I have been watching our good friend, your lawyer's wife, distracted over the—over the—balourdiseof her husband as a dancer: he dances like a bootmaker's sign, if you can imagine that, and I dare not approach them till her very natural indignation has simmered down.”
The Chamberlain looked across, the hall distastefully and found Mrs. Petullo's eyes on him. She shrugged, for his perception alone, a white shoulder in a manner that was eloquent of many things.
“To the devil!” he muttered, yet essayed at the smile of good friendship which was now to be their currency, and a poor exchange for the old gold.
“Surely Monsieur MacTaggart dances?” said the Count; “I see a score of ladies here who would give their garters for the privilege.”
“My dancing days are over,” said Sim MacTaggart, but merely as one who repeats a formula; his eyes were roving among the women. The dark green-and-blue tartan of the house well became him: he wore diced hose of silk and a knife on the calf of his leg; his plaid swung from a stud at the shoulder, and fell in voluminous and graceful folds behind him. His eyes roved among the women, and now and then he lifted the whitest of hands and rubbed his shaven chin.
Count Victor was a little amused at the vanity of this village hero. And then there happened what more deeply impressed him with wonder at the contrarieties of character here represented, for the hero brimmed with sentimental tears!
They were caused by so simple a thing as a savage strain of music from the Duke's piper, who strutted in the gallery fingering a melody in an interval of the dance—a melody full of wearisome iterations in the ears of the foreigner, who could gain nothing of fancy from the same save that the low notes sobbed. When the piece was calling in the hall, ringing stormily to the roof, shaking the banners, silencing the guests, the Duke's Chamberlain laughed with some confusion in a pretence that he was undisturbed.
“An air with a story, perhaps?” asked Count Victor.
“They are all stories,” answered this odd person, so responsive to the yell of guttural reeds. “In that they are like our old friend Balhaldie, whose tales, as you may remember—the old rogue!—would fill many pages.”
“Many leaves, indeed,” said Count Victor—“preferably fig-leaves.”
“The bagpipe moves me like a weeping woman, and here, for all that, is the most indifferent of musicians.”
“Tenez!monsieur; I present my homages to the best of flageolet-players,” said Count Victor, smiling.
“The flageolet! a poor instrument, and still—and still not without its qualities. Here's one at least who finds it the very salve for weariness. Playing it, I often feel in the trance of rapture. I wish to God I could live my life upon the flute, for there I'm on the best and cleanest terms with myself, and no backwash of penitence. Eh! listen to me preaching!”
“There is one air I have heard of yours—so!—that somehow haunts me,” said Count Victor; “its conclusion seemed to baffle you.”
“So it does, man, so it does! If I found the end of that, I fancy I would find a new MacTaggart. It's—it's—it's not a run of notes I want—indeed the air's my own, and I might make it what I chose—but an experience or something of that sort outside my opportunities, or my recollection.”
Count Victor's glance fell on Mrs. Petullo, but hers was not on him; she sought the eyes of the Chamberlain.
“Madame looks your way,” he indicated, and at once the Chamberlain's visage changed.
“She'd be better to look to her man,” he said, so roughly that the Count once more had all his misgivings revived.
“We may not guess how bitter a prospect that may be,” said he with pity for the creature, and he moved towards her, with the Chamberlain, of necessity, but with some reluctance, at his heel.
Mrs. Petullo saw the lagging nature of her old love's advance; it was all that was needed now to make her evening horrible.
“Oh!” said she, smiling, but still with other emotions than amusement or goodwill struggling in her countenance, “I was just fancying you would be none the waur o' a wife to look to your buttons.”
“Buttons!” repeated the Chamberlain.
“See,” she said, and lightly turned him round so that his back was shown, with his plaid no longer concealing the absence of a button from a skirt of his Highland jacket.
Count Victor looked, and a rush of emotions fairly overwhelmed him, for he knew he had the missing button in his pocket.
Here was the nocturnal marauder of Doom, or the very devil was in it!
The Chamberlain laughed, but still betrayed a little confusion: Mrs. Petullo wondered at the anger of his eyes, and a moment later launched upon an abstracted minuet with Montaiglon.
The Chamberlain stood near the door with his hand in the bosom of his coat, fingering the flageolet that was his constant companion even in the oddest circumstances, and Count Victor went up to him, the button concealed in his palm.
“Well, you are for going?” said Simon, more like one who puts a question than states a position, for some hours of Count Victor's studied contempt created misgivings.
“Il y a terme à tout!And possibly monsieur will do me the honour to accompany me so far as the avenue?”
“Sir!” said the Chamberlain.
“I have known men whose reputations were mainly a matter of clothes. Monsieur is the first I have met whose character hung upon a single button. Permit me to return your button with a million regards.”
He held the silver lozenge out upon his open hand.
“There are many buttons alike,” said the Chamberlain. Then he checked himself abruptly and—“Well, damn it! I'll allow it's mine,” said he.
“I should expect just this charming degree of manly frankness from monsieur. A button is a button, too, and a devilish serious thing when, say, off a foil.”
He still held out the accusation on his open hand, and bowed with his eyes on those of the other man.
At that MacTaggart lightly struck up the hand, and the button rolled twinkling along the floor.
Count Victor glanced quickly round him to see that no one noticed. The hall, but for some domestics, was left wholly to themselves. The ball was over, the company had long gone, and he had managed to stay his own departure by an interest feigned in the old armour that hung, with all its gallant use accomplished, on the walls, followed by a game at cards with three of the ducalentourage, two of whom had just departed. The melancholy of early morning in a banquet-room had settled down, and all the candles guttered in the draught of doors.
“I fancy monsieur will agree that this is a business calling for the open air,” said Count Victor, no way disturbed by the rudeness. “I abhor the stench of hot grease.”
“To-morrow—” began the Chamberlain, and Count Victor interrupted.
“To-morrow,” said he, “is for reflection; to-day is for deeds. Look! it will be totally clear in a little.”
“I'm the last man who would spoil the prospect of a ploy,” said the Chamberlain, changing his Highland sword for one of the rapiers on the wall that was more in conformity with the Frenchman's weapon; “and yet this is scarcely the way to find your Drimdarroch.”
“Mais oui!Our Drimdarroch can afford to wait his turn. Drimdarroch is wholly my affair; this is partly Doom's, though I, it seems, was made the poor excuse for your inexplicable insolence.”
The Chamberlain slightly started, turned away, and smiled. “I was right,” thought he. “Here's a fellow credits himself with being the cause of jealousy.”
“Very well!” he said aloud at last, “this way,” and with the sword tucked under his arm he led, by a side-door in the turret-angle, into the garden.
Count Victor followed, stepping gingerly, for the snow was ankle-deep upon the lawn, and his red-heeled dancing-shoes were thin.
“We know we must all die,” said he in a little, pausing with a shiver of cold, and a glance about that bleak grey garden—“We know we must all die, but I have a preference for dying in dry hose, if die I must. Cannot monsieur suggest a more comfortable quarter for our little affair?”
“Monsieur is not so dirty particular,” said the Chamberlain. “If I sink my own rheumatism, it is not too much for you to risk your hose.”
“The main avenue—” suggested Count Victor.
“Is seen from every window of the ball-room, and the servants are still there. Here is a great to-do about nothing!”
“But still, monsieur, I must protest on behalf of my poor hose,” said Count Victor, always smiling.
“By God! I could fight on my bare feet,” cried the Chamberlain.
“Doubtless, monsieur; but there is so much in custom,n'est ce pas?and my ancestors have always been used with boots.”
The Chamberlain overlooked the irony and glanced perplexed about him. There was, obviously, no place near that was not open to the objection urged. Everywhere the snow lay deep on grass and pathway; the trees were sheeted ghosts, the chill struck through his own Highland brogues.
“Come!” said he at last, with a sudden thought; “the sand's the place, though it's a bit to go,” and he led the way hurriedly towards the riverside.
“One of us may go farther to-day and possibly fare worse,” said Montaiglon with unwearied good-humour, stepping in his rear.
It was the beginning of the dawn. Already there was enough of it to show the world of hill and wood in vast, vague, silent masses, to render wan the flaming windows of the castle towers behind them. In the east a sullen sky was all blotched with crimson, some pine-trees on the heights were struck against it, intensely black, intensely melancholy, perhaps because they led the mind to dwell on wild, remote, and solitary places, the savagery of old forests, the cruel destiny of man, who has come after and must go before the dead things of the wood. There was no wind; the landscape swooned in frost.
“My faith! 'tis an odd and dolorous world at six o'clock in the morning,” thought Count Victor; “I wish I were asleep in Cammercy and all well.”
A young fallow-deer stood under an oak-tree, lifting its head to gaze without dismay, almost a phantom; every moment the dawn spread wider; at last the sea showed, leaden in the bay, mists revealed themselves upon Ben Ime. Of sound there was only the wearying plunge of the cascades and the roll of the shallows like tumbril-wheels on causeway as the river ran below the arches.
“Far yet, monsieur?” cried Count Victor to the figure striding ahead, and his answer came in curt accents.
“We'll be there in ten minutes. You want a little patience.”
“We shall be there,par dieu!in time enough,” cried out Count Victor. “'Tis all one to me, but the march is pestilent dull.”
“What! would ye have fiddlin' at a funeral?” asked the Chamberlain, still without turning or slowing his step; and then, as though he had been inspired, he drew out the flageolet that was ever his bosom friend, and the astounded Frenchman heard the strains of a bagpipe march. It was so incongruous in the circumstances that he must laugh.
“It were a thousand pities to kill so rare a personage,” thought he, “and yet—and yet—'tis a villainous early morning.”
They passed along the river-bank; they came upon the sea-beach; the Chamberlain put his instrument into his pocket and still led the way upon the sand that lay exposed far out by the low tide. He stopped at a spot clear of weed, flat and dry and firm almost as a table. It was the ideal floor for an engagement, but from the uncomfortable sense of espionage from the neighbourhood of a town that looked with all its windows upon the place as it were upon a scene in a play-house. The whole front of the town was not two hundred yards away.
“We shall be disturbed here, monsieur,” said Count Victor, hesitating as the other put off his plaid and coat.
“No!” said Sim MacTaggart shortly, tugging at a belt, and yet Count Victor had his doubts. He made his preparations, it is true, but always with an apprehensive look at that long line of sleeping houses, whose shutters—with a hole in the centre of each—seemed to stare down upon the sand. No smoke, no flames, no sign of human occupance was there: the sea-gull and the pigeon pecked together upon the door-steps or the window-sills, or perched upon the ridges of the high-pitched roofs, and a heron stalked at the outlet of a gutter that ran down the street. The sea, quiet and dull, the east turned from crimson to grey; the mountains streaming with mist——
“Cammercy after all!” said Count Victor to himself; “I shall wake in a moment, but yet for a nightmare 'tis the most extraordinary I have ever experienced.”
“I hope you are a good Christian,” said the Chamberlain, ready first and waiting, bending his borrowed weapon in malignant arcs above his head.
“Three-fourths of one at least,” said Montaiglon; “for I try my best to be a decent man,” and he daintily and deliberately turned up his sleeve upon an arm as white as milk.
“I'm waiting,” said the Chamberlain.
“So!en garde!” said his antagonist, throwing off his hat and putting up his weapon.
There was a tinkle of steel like the sound of ice afloat in a glass.
The town but seemed to sleep wholly; as it happened, there was one awake in it who had, of all its inhabitants, the most vital interest in this stern business out upon the sands. She had gone home from the ball rent with vexation and disappointment; her husband snored, a mannikin of parchment, jaundice-cheeked, scorched at the nose with snuff; and, shuddering with distaste of her cage and her companion, she sat long at the window, all her finery on, chasing dream with dream, and every dream, as she knew, alas! with the inevitable poignancy of waking to the truth. For her the flaming east was hell's own vestibule, for her the greying dawn was a pallor of the heart, the death of hope. She sat turning and turning the marriage-ring upon her finger, sometimes all unconsciously essaying to slip it off, and tugging viciously at the knuckle-joint that prevented its removal, and her eyes, heavy for sleep and moist with sorrow, still could pierce the woods of Shira Glen to their deep-most recesses and see her lover there. They roamed so eagerly, so hungrily into that far distance, that for a while she failed to see the figures on the nearer sand. They swam into her recognition like wraiths upsprung, as it were, from the sand itself or exhaled upon a breath from the sea: at first she could not credit her vision.
It was not with her eyes—those tear-blurred eyes—she knew him; it was by the inner sense, the nameless one that lovers know; she felt the tale in a thud of the heart and ran out with “Sim!” shrieked on her dumb lips. Her gown trailed in the pools and flicked up the ooze of weed and sand; a shoulder bared itself; some of her hair took shame and covered it with a veil of dull gold.