And now it was clear day. The lime-washed walls of the town gleamed in sunshine, and the shadows of the men at war upon the sand stretched far back from their feet toward the white land. Birds twittered, and shook the snow from the shrubbery of the Duke's garden; the river cried below the arches, but not loud enough to drown the sound of stumbling steps, and Montaiglon threw a glance in the direction whence they came, even at the risk of being spitted on his opponent's weapon.
He parried a thrust in quarte and cried, “Stop! stop!Remettez-vous, monsieur!Here comes a woman.”
The Chamberlain looked at the dishevelled figure running awkwardly over the rough stones and slimy weeds, muttered an oath, and put his point up again.
“Come on,” said he; “we'll have the whole town about our lugs in ten minutes.”
“But the lady?” said Count Victor, guarding under protest.
“It's only Kate,” said the Chamberlain, and aimed a furious thrust in tierce. Montaiglon parried by a beat of the edge of his forte, and forced the blade upwards. He could have disarmed by the simplest trick of Girard, but missed the opportunity from an insane desire to save his opponent's feelings in the presence of a spectator. Yet the leniency cost them dear.
“Sim! Sim!” cried out the woman in a voice full of horror and entreaty, panting towards the combatants. Her call confused her lover: in a mingling of anger and impatience he lunged wildly, and Count Victor's weapon took him in the chest.
“Zut!” cried the Frenchman, withdrawing the sword and flicking the blood from the point with a ludicrous movement.
The Chamberlain writhed at his feet, muttered something fierce in Gaelic, and a great repugnance took possession of the other. He looked at his work; he quite forgot the hurrying woman until she ran past him and threw herself beside the wounded man.
“Oh, Sim! Sim!” she wailed, in an utterance the most distressing. Her lover turned upon his back and smiled sardonically at her out of a face of paper. “I wish ye had been a little later, Kate,” he said, “or that I had begun with a hale arm. Good God! I've swallowed a hot cinder. I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear. Oh, where the de'il's my flageolet?” And then his head fell back.
With frantic hands she unloosed his cravat, sought and staunched the wound with her handkerchief, and wept the while with no sound, though her bosom, white like the spray of seas, seemed bound to burst above her corsage.
Count Victor sheathed his weapon, and “Madame,” said he with preposterous inadequacy, “this—this—is distressing; this—this—” he desired to offer some assistance, but baulked at the fury of the eyes she turned on him.
“Oh, you!—you!—you!” she gasped, choking to say even so little. “It is enough, is it not, that you have murdered him, without staying to see me tortured?”
To this he could, of course, make no reply. His quandary was immense. Two hundred yards away was that white phantom town shining in the morning sun that rose enormous over the eastern hills beyond the little lapping silver waves. A phantom town, with phantom citizens doubtless prying through the staring eyes of those closed shutters. A phantom town—town of fairy tale, with grotesque roofs, oddcorbeau-stepped gables, smokeless chimneys, all white with snow, and wild birds on its terrace, preening in the blessed light of the sun. He stood with his back to the pair upon the sand. “My God! 'tis a dream,” said he. “I shall laugh in a moment.” He seemed to himself to stand thus an age, and yet in truth it was only a pause of minutes when the Chamberlain spoke with the tone of sleep and insensibility as from another world.
“I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear—Olivia.”
Mrs. Petullo gave a cry of pain and staggered to her feet. She turned upon Count Victor a face distraught and eyes that were wild with the wretchedness of the disillusioned. Her fingers were playing nervously at her lips; her shoulders were roughened and discoloured by the cold; her hair falling round her neck gave her the aspect of a slattern. She, too, looked at the façade of the town and saw her husband's windows shuttered and indifferent to her grief.
“I do not know whether you have killed him or not,” she said at last. “It does not matter—oh! it matters all—no, no, it does not matter—Oh! could you not—could you not kill me too?”
For his life he could not have answered: he but looked at her in mortal pity, and at that she ground her teeth and struck him on the lips.
“Awake, decidedly awake!” he said, and shrugged his shoulders; and then for the first time he saw that she was shivering.
“Madame,” he said, “you will die of cold: permit me,” and he stooped and picked up his coat from the sand and placed it without resistance on her shoulders, like a cloak. She drew it, indeed, about her with trembling fingers as if her senses craved the comfort though her detestation of the man who gave it was great. But in truth she was demented now, forgetting even the bleeding lover. She gave little paces on the sand, with one of her shoes gone from her feet, and wrung her hands and sobbed miserably.
Count Victor bent to the wounded man and found him regaining consciousness. He did what he could, though that of necessity was little, to hasten his restoration, and relinquished the office only when approaching footsteps on the shore made him look up to see a group of workmen hastening to the spot where the Chamberlain lay on the edge of the tide and the lady and the foreigner beside him.
“This man killed him,” cried Mrs. Petullo, pointing an accusing finger.
“I hope I have not killed him,” said he, “and in any case it was an honourable engagement; but that matters little at this moment when the first thing to do is to have him removed home. So far as I am concerned, I promise you I shall be quite ready to go with you and see him safely lodged.”
As the wounded man was borne through the lodge gate with Count Victor, coatless, in attendance, the latter looked back and saw Mrs. Petullo, again bare-shouldered, standing before her husband's door and gazing after them.
Her temper had come back; she had thrown his laced coat into the approaching sea!
By this time the morning was well gone; the town had wakened to the day's affairs—a pleasant light grey reek with the acrid odour of burning wood soaring from chimneys into a sky intensely blue; and the roads that lay interlaced and spacious around the castle of Argyll were—not thronged, but busy at least with labouring folk setting out upon their duties. To them, meeting the wounded form of the Chamberlain, the hour was tragic, and figured long at fireside stories after, acutely memorable for years. They passed astounded or turned to follow him, making their own affairs secondary to their interest in the state of one who, it was obvious even to Montaiglon, was deep in their affections. He realised that a few leagues farther away from the seat of a Justiciary-General it might have gone ill with the man who had brought Simon MacTaggart to this condition, for menacing looks were thrown at him, and more than once there was a significant gesture that made plain the animosity with which he was regarded. An attempt to escape—if such had occurred to him—would doubtless have been attended by the most serious consequences.
Argyll met his Chamberlain with the signs of genuine distress: it was touching, indeed, to see his surrender to the most fraternal feeling, and though for a while the Duke's interest in his Chamberlain left him indifferent to him who was the cause of it, Count Victor could not but perceive that he was himself in a position of exceeding peril. He remembered the sinister comments of the Baron of Doom upon the hazards of an outsider's entrance to the boar's cave, and realised for the first time what that might mean in this country, where the unhappy wretch from Appin, whose case had some resemblance to his own, had been remorselessly made the victim (as the tale went) to world-old tribal jealousies whose existence was incredible to all outside the Highland line. In the chill morning air he stood, coatless and shivering, the high embrasured walls lifting above him, the jabbering menials of the castle grouped a little apart, much of the language heard savage and incomprehensible in his ears, himself, as it were, of no significance to any one except the law that was to manifest itself at any moment. Last night it had been very gay in this castle, the Duke was the most gracious of hosts; here, faith! was a vast difference.
“May I have a coat?” he asked a bystander, taking advantage of a bustle in the midst of which the wounded man was taken into the castle. He got the answer of a scullion.
“A coat!” exclaimed the man he addressed. “A rope's more like it.” And so, Count Victor, shrugging his shoulders at this impertinence, was left to suffer the air that bit him to the marrow.
The Chamberlain disposed of, and in the leech's hands, Argyll had the Frenchman brought to his rooms, still in his shirt-sleeves. The weapon of his offence was yet in his hand for evidence, had that been wanting, of an act he was prepared to admit with frankness.
“Well, Monsieur Montaiglon,” said his Grace, pacing nervously up and down the room before him, “this is a pretty matter. You have returned to see my pictures somewhat sooner than I had looked for, and in no very ceremonious circumstances.”
“Truly,” said the Count, with a difficult essay at meeting the man in his own humour—“Truly, but your Grace's invitation was so pressing—ah! c'est grand dommage! mais—mais—I am not, with every consideration, in the key for badinage. M. le Duc, you behold me exceedingly distressed at the discommoding of your household. At your age this—”
He pulled himself up, confused a little, aware that his customary politeness had somehow for once shamefully deserted him with no intention on his part.
“That is to put the case with exceeding delicacy,” said the Duke. “At my age, as you have said, my personal inconvenience is of little importance in face of the fact that a dear friend of mine may be at death's door. At all events there is a man, if signs mislead me not, monstrously near death under this roof, a man well liked by all that know him, a strong man and a brave man, and a man, in his way, of genius. He goes out, as I say, hale and hearty, and comes back bloody in your company. You came to this part of the world, monsieur, with the deliberate intention of killing my Chamberlain!”
“That's as Heaven, which arranges these things without consulting us, may have decided, my lord; on my honour, I had much preferred never to have set eyes on your Chamberlain.”
“Come, come!” said the Duke with a high head and slapping with open hand the table beside him—“Come, come! I am not a fool, Montaiglon—even at my age. You deliberately sought this unfortunate man.”
“Monsieur the Duke of Argyll has my word that it was not so,” said the Count softly.
“I fancy in that case, then, you had found him easy to avoid,” said the Duke, who was in an ir-restrainable heat. “From the first—oh, come! sir, let us not be beating about the bush, and let us sink all these evasions—from the first you have designed a meeting with MacTaggart, and your every act since you came to this country has led up to this damned business that is likely to rob me of the bravest of servants. It was not the winds of heaven that blew you against your will into this part of Scotland, and brought you in contact with my friend on the very first night of your coming here.”
“And still, M. le Duc, with infinite deference, and a coolness that is partly due to the unpleasant fact (as you may perceive) that I have no coat on, 'twas quite the other way, and your bravest of servants thrust himself upon my attention that had otherwise been directed to the real object of my being in Scotland at all.”
The Duke gave a gesture of impatience. “I am not at the heart of these mysteries,” said he, “but—even at my age—I know a great deal more about this than you give me credit for. If it is your whim to affect that this wretched business was no more than a passage between gentlemen, the result of a quarrel over cards or the like in my house—”
“Ah!” cried the Count, “there I am all to blame. Our affair ought more properly to have opened elsewhere. In that detail your Grace has every ground for complaint.”
“That is a mere side affair,” said the Duke, “and something else more closely affects me. I am expected to accept it, then, that the Comte de Mont-aiglon, travelling incognito in the unassumingrôleof a wine merchant, came here at this season simply from a passion for our Highland scenery. I had not thought the taste for dreary mountains and black glens had extended to the Continent.”
“At least 'twas not to quarrel with a servant I came here,” retorted Count Victor.
“That is ill said, sir,” said his Grace. “My kinsman has ten generations of ancestry of the best blood of Scotland and the Isles underground.”
“To that, M. le Duc, there is an obvious and ancient retort—that therein he is like a potato plant; the best of him is buried.”
Argyll stood before the Frenchman dubious and embarrassed; vexed at the tone of the encounter, and convinced, for reasons of his own, that in one particular at least the foreigner prevaricated, yet impressed by the manly front of the gentleman whose affair had brought a morning's tragedy so close upon the heels of an evening's mirth. Here was the sort of quandary in which he would naturally have consulted with his Duchess, but it was no matter to wake a woman to, and she was still in her bed-chamber.
“I assume you look for this unhappy business to be treated as an affair of honour?” he asked at last.
“So to call it,” replied Count Victor, “though in truth, the honour, on my word, was all on one side.”
“You are in doubtful taste to put it quite in these terms,” said the Duke more sternly, “particularly as you are the one to come out of it so far scathless.”
“Would M. le Duc know how his servant compelled my—my attentions?”
“Compelled your attentions! I do not like the tone of your speeches, monsieur. Dignity—”
“Pardieu!M. le Duc, would you expect a surfeit of dignity from a man without a jacket?” said the Count, looking pathetically at his arms.
“Dignity—I mean the sense of it—would dictate a more sober carriage in face of the terrible act you have committed. I am doing my best to find the slightest excuse for you, because you are a stranger here, a man of good family though engaged upon a stupendous folly, and I have before now been in the reverence of your people. You ask me if I know what compelled your attention (as you say) to my Chamberlain, and I will answer you frankly that I know all that is necessary.”
At that the Count was visibly amazed. This was, indeed, to put a new face on matters and make more regrettable his complacent surrender after his affair on the sands.
“In that case, M. le Duc,” said he, “there is no more to be said. I protest I am unable to comprehend your Grace's complacence towards a rogue—even of your own household.”
Argyll rang a bell and concluded the interview.
“There has been enough of this,” he said. “I fear you do not clearly realise all the perils of your situation. You came here—you will pardon a man at my age insisting upon it, for I know the facts—with the set design of challenging one who properly or improperly has aroused your passion; you have accomplished your task, and must not consider yourself harshly treated if you have to pay the possible penalty.”
“Pardon, M. le Duc, it is not so, always with infinite deference, and without a coat as I have had the boldness to remark before: my task had gone on gaily enough had your Monsieur MacTaggart not been the victim of some inexplicable fever—unless as I sometimes suspect it were a preposterous jealousy that made me the victim of his somewhat stupid folly play.”
“You have accomplished your task, as I say,” proceeded Argyll, heedless of the interruption, “and to tell the truth, the thing has been done with an unpardonably primitive absence of form. I am perhaps an indifferent judge of such ceremonies; at my age—as you did me the honour to put it—that is only to be expected, but we used, when I was younger, to follow a certain formula in inviting our friend the enemy out to be killed. What is this hasty and clandestine encounter before the law of the land but a deliberate attempt at murder? It would be so even in your own country under the circumstances. M. le Comte, where were your seconds? Your wine-selling has opened in villainously bad circumstances, and you are in error to assume that the details of the code may be waived even among the Highland hills.”
A servant entered.
“Take this gentleman to the fosse,” said the Duke, with the ring of steel in his voice and his eyes snapping.
“At least there is as little form about my incarceration as about my poor duel,” said Count Victor.
“My father would have been somewhat more summary in circumstances like these,”, said the Duke, “and, by Heaven! the old style had its merits too; but these are different days, though, if I were you, I fancy I'd prefer the short shrift of Long David the dempster to the felon's cell. Be good enough to leave your sword.”
Count Victor said never a word, but placed the weapon in a corner of the room, made a deepcongé, and went forth a prisoner.
In the last few minutes of the interview he had forgotten the cold, but now when he was led into the open air he felt it in his coatless condition more poignant than his apprehension at his position otherwise. He shivered as he walked along the fosse, through which blew a shrewd north wind, driving the first flakes of an approaching snowstorm. The fosse was wide and deep, girding the four-square castle, mantled on its outer walls by dense ivy, where a few birds twittered. The wall was broken at intervals by the doors of what might very well serve as cells if cells were wanted, and it was to one of these that Count Victor found himself consigned.
“My faith, Victor, thou art a fool of the first water!” he said to himself as he realised the ignominy of his situation. For he was in the most dismal of dungeons, furnished as scantily as a cellar, fireless, damp, and almost in sepulchral darkness, for what light might have entered by a little window over the door was obscured by drifted snow.
By-and-by his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, and he concluded that he was in what had at one time been a wine-cellar, as bottles were racked against the back wall of his arched apartment. They were empty—he confirmed his instinct on that point quickly enough, for the events of the morning left him in the mood for refreshment. It was uncomfortable all this; there was always the possibility of justice miscarried; but at no time had he any fear of savage reprisals such as had alarmed him when Mungo Boyd locked him up in Doom and the fictitious broken clan cried “Loch Sloy!” in darkness. For this was not wholly the wilds, and Argyll's manner, though stern, was that of one who desired in all circumstances to be just.
So Count Victor sat on a box and shivered in his shirt-sleeves and fervently wished for breakfast. The snow fell heavily now, and drifted in the fosse and whitened the world; outside, therefore, all was silent; there must be bustle and footsteps, but here they were unheard: it seemed in a while that he was buried in catacombs, an illusion so vexatious that he felt he must dispel it at all hazards.
There was but one way to do so. He stood on his box and tried to reach the window over his door. To break the glass was easy, but when that was done and the snow was cleared away by his hand, he could see out only by pulling himself up with an awkward and exhausting grasp on the narrow ledge. Thus he secured but the briefest of visions of what was outside, and that was not a reassuring one.
Had he meditated escape from the window, he must now abandon it; for on the other side of the ditch, cowering in the shelter of one of the castle doors, was standing one of the two men who had placed him in the cell, there apparently for no other purpose than to keep an eye on the only possible means of exit from the discarded wine-cellar.
The breaking glass was unheard by the watcher; at all events he made no movement to suggest that he had observed it, and he said nothing about it when some time later in the forenoon he came with Count Victor's breakfast, which was generous enough to confirm his belief that in Argyll's hands he was at least assured of the forms of justice, though that, in truth, was not the most consoling of prospects.
His warder was a dumb dog, a squint-eyed Cerberus with what Count Victor for once condemned as a tribal gibberish for his language, so that he was incapable of understanding what was said to him even if he had been willing to converse.
“It is little good to play the guitar to an ass,” said the Frenchman, and fell to his viands.
If Count Victor, buried among cobwebs in the fosse, stung by cold till he shivered as in a quartan ague, suffering alternately the chagrin of the bungler self-discovered and the apprehension of a looming fate whose nature could only be guessed at, was in a state unenviable, Argyll himself was scarcely less unhappy. It was not only that his Chamberlain's condition grieved him, but that the whole affair put him in a quandary where the good citizen quarrelled in him with another old Highland gentleman whose code of morals was not in strict accord with written statutes. He had studied the Pandects at Utrecht, but also he had been young there, and there was a place (if all tales be true) on the banks of the Yssel River where among silent polders a young Scot had twice at least fought with the sword upon some trivial matter of debate with Netherlanders of his college. And then he knew his Chamberlain. About Simon MacTaggart Argyll had few illusions, though they perhaps made all the difference in his conduct to the gentleman in question. That MacTaggart should have brought upon himself a tardy retribution for acts more bold than scrupulous was not to be wondered at; that the meeting with Count Victor was honourably conducted, although defective in its form, was almost certain; but here the assailant was in his custody, and whether he liked it or not he must hand him over to the law.
His first impulse had been to wash his hands of all complicity in the Frenchman's fate by sending him straightway to the common town tolbooth, pending his trial in the ordinary course; but he hesitated from an intuition that the step would find no favour in the eyes of his Duchess, who had her own odd prejudices regarding Sim MacTaggart, and an interest in Count Victor none the less ardent because it was but a day or two old.
“A man! Archie, every bit of him!” she had said at the conclusion of last evening's entertainment; and though without depreciating his visitor he had attempted to convince her that her estimate ran the risk of being prejudiced by her knowledge of the quixotic mission the foreigner was embarked on, she had refused to see in Count Victor's accent, face, and carriage anything but the most adorable character. She ever claimed a child's attribute of attraction or repulsion on mere instinct to and from men's mere exteriors, and her husband knew it was useless to expect any approval from her for any action that might savour of the slightest harshness to the foreigner.
But above all he feared—he dreaded—something else. Simon MacTaggart was to him more than a servant; he knew many of his failings, but seemed to tolerate them because he also, like Count Victor, had learned not to expect too much from human nature. But it was ever his fear that his lenience for the sins and follies of his Chamberlain would some day suffer too hard a strain, and lead to that severance that in the case of old friends and familiars was his Grace's singular terror in life.
The day passed heavily for Argyll. Many a time he looked out of his window into the fosse slow drifting full of snow; and though he could not from that point see the cell-door of his prisoner, his fancy did enough to feed his unhappiness. Vainly he paced his library, vainly sought the old anodyne—the blessed anodyne of books; he was consumed with impatience to consult with his wife, and she, fragile always, and fatigued by last evening's gaieties, was still asleep.
He went for the twentieth time into the room where the Chamberlain was lying. The doctor, a lank, pock-pitted embodiment of mad chirurgy from books and antique herbal delusions inherited from generations of simple healers, mixed noxious stuff in a gallipot and plumed himself upon some ounces of gore drawn from his victim. Clysters he prated on; electuaries; troches; the weed that the Gael of him calledslanlusor “heal-all;” of unguents loathsomely compounded, but at greatest length and with fullest rapture of his vile phlebotomy.
“Six ounces, your Grace!” he cried gleefully, in a laughable high falsetto, holding up the bowl with trembling fingers as if he proffered for the ducal cheer the very flagon of Hebe.
Argyll shuddered.
“I wish to God, Dr. Madver,” said he, “your practice in this matter of blood-letting may not be so much infernal folly. Why! the man lost all he could spare before he reached you.”
And there, unconscious, Simon MacTaggart slept, pale as parchment, fallen in at the jaw, twitching a little now and then at the corners of the mouth, otherwise inert and dead. Never before had his master seen him off his guard—never, that is to say, without the knowledge that he was being looked at—and if his Grace had expected that he should find any grosser man than he knew revealed, he was mistaken. 'Twas a child that slept—a child not unhappy, at most only indifferent to everything with that tremendous naïveté of the dead and of the soundly sleeping—that great carelessness that comes upon the carcass when the soul's from home. If he had sinned a million times,—let the physiognomists say what they will!—not a line upon his face betrayed him, for there the ideals only leave their mark, and his were forever impeccable.
His coat hung upon the back of a chair, and his darling flageolet had fallen out of the pocket and lay upon the floor. Argyll picked it up and held it in his hand a while, looking upon it with a little Contempt, and yet with some kindness.
“Fancy that!” he said more to himself than to the apothecary; “the poor fellow must have his flageloet with him even upon an affair of this kind. It beats all! My dear man of moods! my good vagabond! my windlestraw of circumstance! constant only to one ideal—the unattainable perfection in a kind of roguish art. To play a perfect tune in the right spirit he would sacrifice everything, and yet drift carelessly into innumerable disgraces for mere lack of will to lift a hand. I daresay sometimes Jean is in the rights of it after all—his gifts have been his curse; wanting his skill of this simple instrument that was for ever to himself and others an intoxication, and wanting his outward pleasing form, he had been a good man to the very marrow. A good man! H'm! Ay! and doubtless an uninteresting one. Doctor! doctor! have you any herb for the eyesight?”
“Does your Grace have a dimness? I know a lotion—”
“Dimness! faith! it is the common disease, and I suffer it with the rest. Sometimes I cannot see the length of my nose.”
“The stomach, your Grace; just the stomach,” cried the poor leech. “My own secret preparation—”
“Your own secret preparation, doctor, will not, I am sure, touch the root of this complaint or the devil himself is in it. I can still see—even at my age—the deer on Tom-a-chrochair, and read the scurviest letters my enemies send me, but my trouble is that I cannot understand the flageolet.”
“The flageolet, your Grace,” said MacIver bewildered. “I thought you spoke of your eyesight.”
“And so I did. I cannot see through the mysteries of things; I cannot understand why man should come into the world with fingers so apt to fankle that he cannot play the finest tunes all the time and in the best of manners. These, however, are but idle speculations, beyond the noble jurisdiction of the chymist. And so you think our patient will make a good recovery?”
“With care, your Grace; and the constant use of my styptic, a most elegant nostrum, your Grace, that has done wonders in the case of a widow up the glen.”
“This folly of a thing they call one's honour,” said the Duke, “has made a great deal of profitable trade for your profession?”
“I have no cause of complaint, your Grace,” said the doctor complacently, “except that nowadays honour nor nothing else rarely sends so nice a case of hemorrhage my way. An inch or two to the left and Mr. MacTaggart would have lifted his last rents.”
Argyll grimaced with distaste at the idea.
“Poor Sim!” said he. “And my tenants would have lost a tolerable agent, though I might easily find one to get more money out of them. Condemn that Frenchman! I wish the whole race of them were at the devil.”
“It could never have been a fair fight this,” said the doctor, spreading a plaster.
“There neverwasa fair fight,” said Argyll, “or but rarely, and then neither of the men was left to tell the tale. The man with most advantages must ever win.”
“The other had them all here,” said the doctor, “for the Chamberlain was fighting with an unhealed wound in his right arm.”
“A wounded arm!” cried Argyll. “I never heard of that.”
It was a wound so recent, the doctor pointed out, that it made the duel madness. He turned over the neck of his patient's shirt and showed the cicatrice, angry and ugly. “A stab, too!” said he.
“A stab?” said the Duke.
“A stab with a knife or a thrust with a sword,” said the doctor. “It has gone clean through the arm and come out at the back.”
“Gad! this is news indeed! What does it mean? It's the reason for the pallour and the abstraction of some days back, for which I put the blame upon some love-affair of his. He never breathed a word of it to me, nor I suppose to you?”
“It has had no attention from me or any one else,” said the doctor; “but the wound seems to have healed of itself so far without anything being done for it.”
“So that a styptic—even the famous styptic—can do no more wonders than a good constitution after all. Poor Sim, I wonder what folly this came of. And yet—to look at him there—his face so gentle, his brow so calm, his mouth—ah, poor Sim!”
From a distant part of the house a woman's voice arose, crying, “Archie, Archi-e-e!” in a lingering crescendo: it was the Duchess, and as yet she had not heard of the day's untoward happenings. He went out and told her gently. “And now,” he went on when her agitation had abated, “what of our Chevalier?”
“Well!” said she, “what of him? I hope he is not to suffer for this, seeing MacTaggart is going to get better, for I should dearly like to have him get some return for his quest.”
“Would you, indeed?” said the Duke. “H'm,” and stared at her. “The Count is at this moment cooling his heels in the fosse cell.”
“That is hard!” said she, reddening.
“But what would you, my dear? I am still as much the representative of the law as ever, and am I to connive at such outrages under my own windows because the chief offender is something of a handsome young gentleman who has the tact to apologise for a disturbance in my domestic affairs that must, as he puts it, be disconcerting to a man at my age? A man of my age—there's France!—toujours la politesse, if you please! At my age! Confound his impudence!”
The Duchess could not suppress a smile.
“At his age, my dear,” said she, “you had the tact to put so obvious a thing differently or leave it alone.”
“Not that I heed his impudence,” said the Duke hastily; “that a man is no longer young at sixty is the most transparent of facts.”
“Only he does not care to have it mentioned too unexpectedly. Oh, you goose!” And she laughed outright, then checked herself at the recollection of the ailing Chamberlain.
“If I would believe myself as young as ever I was, my dear lass,” said he, “credit me it is that it is more to seem so in the eyes of yourself,” and he put his arm around her waist.
“But still,” said she after a little—“still the unlucky Frenchman is in the fosse more for his want of tact, I fear, than for his crime against the law of the land. Who pinked—if that's the nasty word—who pinked the Dutchman in Utrecht?—that's what I should like to know, my dear Justice Shallow.”
“This is different, though; he came here for the express purpose—”
“Of quarrelling with the Chamberlain!”
“Well, of quarrelling with somebody, as you know,” said the nobleman hesitatingly.
“I am sorry for MacTaggart,” said the Duchess, “really sorry, but I cannot pretend to believe he has been very ill done by—I mean unjustly done by. I am sure my Frenchman must have had some provocation, and is really the victim.”
“You—that is we—know nothing about that, my dear,” said Argyll.
“I cannot be mistaken; you would be the first at any other time to admit that I could tell whether a man was good or evil on a very brief acquaintance. With every regard for your favour to the Chamberlain, I cannot stand the man. If my instinct did not tell me he was vicious, my ears would, for I hear many stories little to his credit.”
“And yet a brave man, goodwife, a faithful servant and an interesting fellow. Come now! Jean, is it not so?”
She merely smiled, patting his ruffles with delicate fondling fingers. It was never her habit to argue with her Duke.
“What!” he cried smilingly, “none of that, but contradict me if you dare.”
“I never contradict his Grace the Duke of Argyll,” said she, stepping back and sweeping the floor with her gown in a stately courtesy; “it is not right, and it is not good for him—at his age.”
“Ah, you rogue!” he cried, laughing. “But soberly now, you are too hard on poor Sim. It is the worst—the only vice of good women that they have no charity left for the imperfect either of their own sex or of mine. Let us think what an atom of wind-blown dust is every human being at the best, bad or good in his blood as his ancestry may have been, kind or cruel, straight or crooked, pious or pagan, admirable or evil, as the accidents of his training or experience shall determine. As I grow older I grow more tolerant, for I have learned that my own scanty virtues and graces are no more my own creation than the dukedom I came into from my father—or my red hair.”
“Not red, Archie,” said the Duchess, “not red, but reddish fair; in fact, a golden;” and she gently pulled a curl upon his temple. “What about our Frenchman? Is he to lie in the fosse till the Sheriff sends for him or till the great MacCailen Mor has forgiven him for telling him he was a little over the age of thirty?”
“For once, my dear, you cannot have your way,” said the Duke firmly. “Be reasonable! We could not tolerate so scandalous an affair without some show of law and—”
“Tolerate!” said the Duchess. “You are very hard on poor Montaiglon, Archie, and all because he fought a duel with a doubtful gentleman who will be little the worse for it in a week or two. Let us think,” she went on banteringly—“let us think what an atom of wind-blown dust is every human being at the best, admirable or evil as his training—”
Her husband stopped her with a kiss.
“No more of that, Jean; the man must thole his trial, for I have gone too far to draw back even if I had the will to humour you.”
There was one tone of her husband's his wife knew too decisive for her contending with, and now she heard it. Like a wise woman, she made up her mind to say no more, and she was saved an awkward pause by an uproar in the fosse. Up to the window where those two elderly lovers had their kindly disputation came the sound of cries. Out into the dusk of the evening Argyll thrust his head and asked an explanation.
“The Frenchman's gone!” cried somebody.
He drew in his head, with a smile struggling on his countenance.
“You witch!” said he, “you must have your own way with me, even if it takes a spell!”
Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into great good fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bears his name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste to envy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to the south of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, with oddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner of his escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen. And always his acutest memory was of the whipping rigour of the evening air, his temporary sense of swooning helplessness upon the verge of the fantastic wood. “Figure you! Charles,” would he say, “the thin-blooded wand of forty years ago in a brocaded waistcoat and a pair of dancing-shoes seeking his way through a labyrinth of demoniac trees, shivering half with cold and half with terror like aforcatfrom thebagneof Toulouse, only that he knew not particularly from what he fled nor whereto his unlucky footsteps should be turned. I have seen it often since—the same place—have we not,mignonne?—and I avow 'tis as sweet and friendly a spot as any in our own neighbourhood; but then in that pestilent night of black and grey I was like a child, tenanting every tiny thicket with the were-wolf and the sheeted spectre. There is a stupid feeling comes to people sometimes in the like circumstances, that they are dead, that they have turned the key in the lock of life, as we say, and gone in some abstraction into the territory of shades. 'Twas so I felt, messieurs, and if in truth the ultimate place of spirits is so mortal chilly, I shall ask Père Antoine to let me have a greatcoat as well as the viaticum ere setting out upon the journey.”
It had been an insufferably cruel day, indeed, for Count Victor in his cell had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments—sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed in this same austere atmosphere under the same grey sky that hung low outside his cell; the same snowfall that he could catch a glimpse of through the tiny space above his door was seen by her that moment in Doom; she must be taking the flavour of the sea as he could sometimes do in blessed moments even in this mustyoubliette.
The day passed, a short day with the dusk coming on as suddenly as if some one had drawn a curtain hurriedly over the tiny aperture above the door. And all the world outside seemed wrapped in silence. Twice again his warder came dumbly serving a meal, otherwise the prisoner might have been immeasurably remote from any life and wholly forgotten. There was, besides his visions of Olivia, one other thing to comfort him; it was when he heard briefly from some distant part of the castle the ululation of a bagpipe playing an air so jocund that it assured him at all events the Chamberlain was not dead, and was more probably out of danger. And then the cold grew intense beyond his bearance, and he reflected upon some method of escape if it were to secure him no more than exercise for warmth.
The window was out of the question, for in all probability the watch was still on the other side of the fosse—a tombstone for steadfastness and constancy. Count Victor could not see him now even by standing on his box and looking through the aperture, yet he gained something, he gained all, indeed, so pregnant a thing is accident—even the cosy charcoal-fires and the friends about him in the chateau near Saint Germain-en-Laye—by his effort to pierce the dusk and see across the ditch.
For as he was standing on the box, widening softly the aperture in the drifted snow upon the little window-ledge, he became conscious of cold air in a current beating upon the back of his head. The draught, that should surely be entering, was blowing out!
At once he thought of a chimney, but there was no fireplace in his cell. Yet the air must be finding entrance elsewhere more freely than from the window. Perplexity mastered him for a little, and then he concluded that the current could come from nowhere else than behind the array of marshalled empty bottles.
“Tonnerre!” said he to himself, “I have begun my career as wine merchant rather late in life or I had taken more interest in these dead gentlemen.Avancez, donc, mes princes!your ancient spirit once made plain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us see if now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon's profit.”
One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrude a sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked.
There was an airy space.
“Très bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres, perhaps I may forgive you even yet for being empty.”
Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away a passage—that ended in a dead wall!
It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then, been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searched every inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold, clammy, substantial.
“A delusion after all!” he said, bitterly disappointed. “A delusion, and not the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine.” He had almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffing current of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him for the second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm with his exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere over the level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behind the bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing, to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, and was apparently an incompleted curtain partitioning his cell from some space farther in.
Not with any vaulting hopes, for an egress from this inner space seemed less unlikely than from the one he occupied, he pulled himself on the top of the intervening wall and lowered himself over the other side. At the full stretch of his arms he failed to touch anything with his feet; an alarming thought came to him; he would have pulled himself back, but the top of the wall was crumbling to his fingers, a mass of rotten mortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realised with a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What—this was his thought—what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the ground within an inch of his straining toes.
To die in a pit!
To die in a pit! good God!—was this the appropriate conclusion to a life with so much of open-air adventure, sunshine, gaiety, and charm in it? The sweat streamed upon his face as he strove vainly to hang by one of his arms and search the cope of the crumbling wall for a surer hold with the other; he stretched his toes till his muscles cramped, his eyes in the darkness filled with a red cloud, his breath choked him, a vision of his body thrashing through space overcame him, and his slipping fingers would be loose from the mortar in another minute!
To one last struggle for a decent mastery his natural manhood rose, and cleared his brain and made him loose his grip.
He fell less than a yard!
For a moment he stopped to laugh at his foolish terror, and then set busily to explore this new place in which he found himself. The air was fresher; the walls on either hand contracted into the space of a lobby; he felt his way along for twenty paces before he could be convinced that he was in a sort of tunnel. But figure a so-convenient tunnel in connection with a prison cell! It was too good to be true.
With no great surrender to hope even yet, he boldly plunged into the darkness, reason assuring him that thecul-de-sacwould come sooner or later. But for once reason was wrong; the passage opened ever before him, more airy than ever, always dank and odorous, but with never a barrier—a passage the builders of the castle had executed for an age of sudden sieges and alarms, but now archaic and useless, and finally forgotten altogether.
He had walked, he knew not how long, when he was brought up by a curious sound—a prolonged, continuous, hollow roar as of wind in a wood or a sea that rolled on a distant beach. Vainly he sought to identify it, but finally shook aside his wonder and pushed on again till he came to the apparent end of the passage, where a wooden door barred his progress farther. He stopped as much in amazement as in dubiety about the door, for the noise that had baffled him farther back in the tunnel was now close at hand, and he might have been in a ship's hold and the ship all blown about by tempest, to judge from the inexplicable thunder that shook the darkness. A score of surmises came quickly, only to be dismissed as quickly as they came; that extraordinary tumult was beyond his understanding, and so he applied himself to his release. Still his lucky fortune remained with him; the door was merely on a latch. He plucked it open eagerly, keen to solve the puzzle of the noise, emerging on a night now glittering with stars, and clamant with the roar of tumbling waters.
A simple explanation!—he had come out beside the river. The passage came to its conclusion under the dumb arch of a bridge whose concaves echoed back in infinite exaggeration every sound of the river as it gulped in rocky pools below.
The landscape round about him in the starshine had a most bewitching influence. Steep banks rose from the riverside and lost themselves in a haze of frost, through which, more eminent, stood the boles and giant members of vast gaunt trees, their upper branches fretting the starry sky. No snow was on the spot where he emerged, for the wind, blowing huge wreaths against the buttresses of the bridge a little higher on the bank, had left some vacant spaces, but the rest of the world was blanched well-nigh to the complexion of linen. Where he was to turn to first puzzled Count Victor. He was free in a whimsical fashion, indeed, for he was scarcely more than half-clad, and he wore a pair of dancing-shoes, ludicrously inappropriate for walking in such weather through the country. He was free, but he could not be very far yet from his cell; the discovery of his escape might be made known at any moment; and even now while he lingered here he might have followers in the tunnel.
Taking advantage of the uncovered grass he climbed the bank and sought the shelter of a thicket where the young trees grew too dense to permit the snow to enter. From here another hazard of flight was manifest, for he could see now that the face of the country outside on the level was spread as with a tablecloth, its white surface undisturbed, ready for the impress of so light an object as a hopping wren. To make his way across it would be to drag his bonds behind him, plainly asking the world to pull him back. Obviously there must be a more tactical retreat, and without more ado he followed the river's course, keeping ever, as he could, in the shelter of the younger woods, where the snow did not lie or was gathered by the wind in alleys and walls. Forgotten was the cold in his hurried flight through the trees; but by-and-by it compelled his attention, and he fell to beating his arms in the shelter of a plantation of yews.
“Mort de ma vie!” he thought while in this occupation, “why should I not have a roquelaire? If his very ungracious Grace refuses to see when a man is dying of cold for want of a coat, shall the man not help himself to a loan? M. le Duc owes Cammercy something for that ride in a glass coach, and for a night of a greatcoat I shall be pleased to discharge the family obligation.”
Count Victor there and then came to a bold decision. He would, perhaps, not only borrow a coat and cover his nakedness, but furthermore cover his flight by the same strategy. The only place in the neighbourhood where he could obscure his footsteps in that white night of stars was in the castle itself—perhaps in the very fosse whence he had made his escape. There the traffic of the day was bound to have left a myriad tracks, amongst which the imprint of a red-heeled Rouen shoe would never advertise itself. But it was too soon yet to risk so bold a venture, for his absence might be at this moment the cause of search round all the castle, and ordinary prudence suggested that he should permit some time to pass before venturing near the dwelling that now was in his view, its lights blurred by haze, no sign apparent that they missed or searched for him.
For an hour or more, therefore, he kept his blood from congelation by walking back and forward in the thicket into which the softly breathing but shrewish night wind penetrated less cruelly than elsewhere, and at last judged the interval enough to warrant his advance upon the enterprise.
Behold then Count Victor running hard across the white level waste of the park into the very boar's den—a comic spectacle, had there been any one to see it, in a dancer's shoes and hose, coatless and excited. He looked over the railing of the fosse to find the old silence undisturbed.
Was his flight discovered yet? If not it was something of a madness, after all, to come back to the jaws of the trap.
“Here's a pretty problem!” he told himself, hesitating upon the brink of the ditch into which dipped a massive stair—“Here's a pretty problem! to have the roquelaire or to fly without it and perish of cold, because there is one chance in twenty that monsieur the warder opposite my chamber may not be wholly a fool and may have looked into his mousetrap. I do not think he has; at all events here are the alternatives, and the wiser is invariably the more unpleasant.Allons!Victor,advienne que pourra, and Heaven help us!”
He ran quickly down the stair into the fosse, crept along in the shelter of the ivy for a little, saw that no one was visible, and darted across and up to a postern in the eastern turret. The door creaked noisily as he entered, and a flight of stairs, dimly lit by candles, presented itself, up which he ventured with his heart in his mouth. On the first landing were two doors, one of them ajar; for a second or two he hesitated with every nerve in his flesh pulsating and his heart tumultuous in his breast; then hearing nothing, took his courage in his hands and blandly entered, with his feet at a fencer's balance for the security of his retreat if that were necessary. There was a fire glowing in the apartment—a tempting spectacle for the shivering refugee, a dim light burned within a glass shade upon the mantel, and a table laden with drug-vials was drawn up to the side of a heavily-curtained bed.
Count Victor compassed the whole at a glance, and not the least pleasant part of the spectacle was the sight of a coat—not a greatcoat, but still a coat—upon the back of a chair that stood between the bed and the fire.
“With a thousand apologies to his Grace,” he whispered to himself, and tiptoed in his soaking shoes across the floor without reflecting for a second that the bed might have an occupant. He examined the coat; it had a familiar look that might have indicated its owner even if there had not been the flageolet lying beside it. Instinctively Count Victor turned about and went up to the bed, where, silently peeping between the curtains, he saw his enemy of the morning so much in a natural slumber as it seemed that he was heartened exceedingly. Only for a moment he looked; there was the certainty of some one returning soon to the room, and accordingly he rapidly thrust himself into the coat and stepped back upon the stair.
There was but one thing wanting—a sword! Why should he not have his own back again? As he remembered the interview of the morning, the chamber in which he had left his weapon at the bidding of the Duke was close at hand, and probably it was still there. Each successive hazard audaciously faced emboldened him the more; and so he ventured along, searching amid a multitude of doors in dim rushlight till he came upon one that was different from its neighbours only inasmuch as it had a French motto painted across the panels. The motto read “Revenez bientôt,” and smiling at the omen, Count Victor once more took his valour in his fingers and turned the handle. “Revenez bientôt” he was whispering softly to himself as he noiselessly pushed in the door. The sentence froze on his lips when he saw the Duchess seated in a chair, and turned half round to look at him.