There was no drawing back; the circumstances positively forbade it, even if a certain smile following fast upon the momentary embarrassment of the Duchess had not prompted him to put himself at her mercy.
“A thousand pardons, Madame la Duchesse,” he said, standing in the doorway. “Je vous dérange.”
She rose from her chair composedly, a figure of matured grace and practised courtliness, and above all with an air of what he flattered himself was friendliness. She directed him to a seat.
“The pleasure is unexpected, monsieur,” she said; “but it is a moment for quick decision, I suppose. What is the cue? To be desperate?” here she laughed softly, “or to take a chair? Monsieur has called to see his Grace. I regret exceedingly that a pressing business has called my husband to the town, and he is unlikely to be back for another hour at least. If monsieur—assuming desperation is not the cue—will please to be seated—”
Count Victor was puzzled for a second or two, but came farther into the room, and, seeing the lady resume her seat, he availed himself of her invitation and took the chair she offered.
“Madame la Duchesse,” he went on to say with some evidence of confusion that prejudiced her the more in his favour, “I am, as you see, in the drollest circumstances, and—pardon thebêtise—time is at the moment the most valuable of my assets.”
“Oh!” she cried with a low laugh that gave evidence of the sunniest disposition in the world—“Oh! that is not a pretty speech, monsieur! But there! you cannot, of course, know my powers of entertainment. Positively there need be no hurry. On my honour, as the true friend of a gentleman who looked very like monsieur, and was, by the way, a compatriot, I repeat there is no occasion for haste. I presume monsieur found no servants—those stupid servants!—to let him into the house, and wisely found an entrance for himself? How droll! It is our way in these barbaric places; people just come and go as they please; we waive ceremony. By the way, monsieur has not done me the honour to confide to me his name.”
“Upon my word, Madame la Duchesse, I—I forget it myself at the moment,” said Count Victor, divining her strategy, but too much embarrassed to play up to her lead. “Perhaps madame may remember.”
She drew down her brows in a comical frown, and then rippled into low laughter. “Now, how in the world should I know if monsieur does not? I, that have never”—here she stared in his face with a solemnity in which her amusement struggled—“never, to my knowledge, seen him before. I have heard the Duke speak of a certain M. Soi-disant! perhaps monsieur is Monsieur Soi-disant?”
“Sans doute, Madame la Duchesse, and madame's very humble servant,” acquiesced Count Victor, relieved to have his first impression of strategy confirmed, and inclining his head.
She looked at him archly and laughed again. “I have a great admiration for your sex, M. Soi-disant,” she said; “my dear Duke compels it, but now and then—now and then—I think it a little stupid. Not to know your own name! I hope monsieur does not hope to go through life depending upon women all the time to set him at ease in his chair. You are obviously not at ease in your chair, Monsieur Soi-disant.”
“It is this coat, Madame la Duchesse,” Count Victor replied, looking down at the somewhat too ample sleeves and skirt; “I fell into it—”
“That is very obvious,” she interrupted, with no effort to conceal her amusement.
“I fell into it by sheer accident, and it fits me like an evil habit, and under the circumstances is as inconvenient to get rid of.”
“And still an excellent coat, monsieur. Let me see; has it not a familiar look? Oh! I remember; it is very like one I have seen with the Duke's Chamberlain—poor fellow! Monsieur has doubtless heard of his accident, and will be glad to learn that he is out of danger, and like to be abroad in a very short time.”
This was a humour touching him too closely; he replied in a monosyllable.
“Perhaps it was the coat gave me the impression that I had seen monsieur somewhere before. He reminds me, as I have said, of a compatriot who was the cause of the Chamberlain's injury.”
“And is now, doubtless, in prison,” added the Count, bent on giving evidence of some inventiveness of his own.
“Nay! by no means,” cried the Duchess. “He was in a cell, but escaped two or three hours ago, as our watchman discovered, and is now probably far away from here.”
“Ah, then,” said Count Victor with nonchalance, “I daresay they will speedily recapture him. If they only knew the way with any of my compatriots it is to put a woman in his path, only she must be a woman ofespritand charm, and she shall engage him, I'll warrant, till the pursuit come up, even if it takes a century and the axe is at the end of it.”
The Duchess coughed.
The Count hemmed.
They both broke into laughter.
“Luckily, then,” said she, “he need have no anxiety on that score, should he meet the lady, for the pursuit is neither hot nor hearty. Between ourselves, monsieur, it is non-existent. If I were to meet this person we speak of I should—but for the terror I know I should feel in his society—tell him that so long as he did not venture within a couple of miles of this castle he was perfectly safe from interference.”
“And yet a dangerous man, Madame la Duchesse,” said Count Victor; “and I have heard the Duke is determined on his punishment, which is of course proper—from his Grace's point of view.”
“Yes, yes! I am told he is a dangerous man, a very monster. The Duke assured me of that, though if I were to tell the truth, Monsieur Soi-disant, I saw no evidence of it in the young gentleman when I met him last night. A most harmless fellow, I assure you. Are monsieur's feet not cold?”
She was staring at his red-heeled dancing-shoes.
“Pas du tout!” he replied promptly, tucking them under his chair. “These experiments in costume are a foible with me.”
There was a step along the corridor outside, which made him snap off his sentence hurriedly and turn listening and apprehensive. Again the Duchess was amused.
“No, monsieur, it is not his Grace yet; you are all impatience to meet him, I see, and my poor company makes little amends for his absence; but it is as I say, he will not be back for another hour. You are interested, doubtless, in the oddities of human nature; for me I am continually laughing at the transparency of the stratagems whereby men like my husband try to lock their hearts up like a garden and throw away the key before they come into the company of their wives. I'msureyour poor feet must be cold. You did not drive? Such a night of snow too! I cannot approve of your foible for dancing-shoes to wade through snow in such weather. As I was saying, you are not only the stupid sex sometimes, but a most transparent one. I will let you into a little secret that may convince you that what I say of our Count What's-his-name not being hunted is true. I see quite clearly that the Duke is delighted to have this scandal of a duel—oh! the shocking things, duels, Monsieur Soi-disant!—shut up. In the forenoon he was mightily vexed with that poor Count What-do-you-call-him for a purely personal reason that I may tell you of later, but mainly because his duty compelled him to secure the other party to the—let us say, outrage. You follow, Monsieur Soi-disant?”
“Parfaitement, Madame la Duchesse,” said Count Victor, wondering where all this led to.
“I am a foolish sentimentalist, I daresay you may think—for a person of my age (are you quite comfortable, monsieur? I fear that chair does not suit you)—I am a foolish sentimentalist, as I have said, and I may tell you I pleaded very hard for the release of this luckless compatriot of yours who was then in the fosse. But, oh dear! his Grace was adamant, as is the way with dukes, at least in this country, and I pleaded in vain.”
“Naturally, madame; his Grace had his duty as a good subject.”
“Doubtless,” said the Duchess; “but there have been occasions in history, they assure me, when good subjects have been none the less nice husbands. Monsieur can still follow me?”
Count Victor smiled and bowed again, and wished to heaven her Grace the Duchess had a little more of the gift of expedition. He had come looking for a sword and found a sermon.
“I know I weary you,” she went on complacently. “I was about to say that while the Duke desires to do his duty, even at the risk of breaking his wife's heart, it was obvious to me he was all the time sorry to have to do it, and when we heard that our Frenchman had escaped I, take my word for it, was not the only one relieved.”
“I do not wonder, madame,” said Montaiglon, “that the subject in this case should capitulate to—to—to the—”
“To the loving husband, you were about to say. La! you are too gallant, monsieur, I declare. And as a matter of fact the true explanation is less to my husband's credit and less flattering to me, for he had his own reasons.”
“One generally has,” reflected the Count aloud.
“Quite! and in his case they are very often mine. Dear Archie! Though he did not think I knew it, I saw clearly that he had his own reasons, as I say, to wish the Frenchman well out of the country. Now could you guess what these reasons were?”
Count Victor confessed with shame that it was beyond him.
“I will tell you. They were not his own interests, and they were not mine, that influenced him; I had not to think very hard to discover that they were the interests of the Chamberlain. I fancy his Grace knows that the less inquiry there is into this encounter the better for all concerned.”
“I daresay, Madame la Duchesse,” agreed Count Victor, “and yet the world speaks well of the Chamberlain, one hears.”
“Woe unto you when all men speak well of you!” quoted the Duchess sententiously.
“It only happens when the turf is in our teeth,” said the Count, “and thenDe mortuisis a motto our dear friends use more as an excuse than as a moral.”
“I do not like our Chamberlain, monsieur; I may frankly tell you so. I should not be surprised to learn that my husband knows a little more about him than I do, and I give you my word I know enough to consider him hateful.”
“These are most delicate considerations, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Count, vastly charmed by her manner but naturally desirous of the open air. Every step he heard in neighbouring lobbies, every slammed door, spoiled his attention to the lady's confidences, and he had an uneasy sense that she was not wholly unamused at his predicament, however much his friend.
“Delicate considerations, true, but I fear they do not interest Monsieur Soi-disant. How should they indeed? Gossip, monsieur, gossip! At our age, as you might say, we must be chattering. Iknowyou are uncomfortable on that chair. Do, monsieur, please take another.”
This time he was convinced of his first suspicion that she was having her revenge for his tactless remark to her husband, for he had not stirred at all in his chair, but had only reddened, and she had a smile at the corners of her mouth.
“At my age, Madame la Duchesse, we are quite often impertinent fools. There is, however, but one age—the truly golden. We reach it when we fall first in love, and there love keeps us. His Grace, Madame la Duchesse, is, I am sure, the happiest of men.”
She was seated opposite him. Leaning forward a little, she put forth her hand in a motherly, unembarrassed way, and placed it for a moment on his knee, looking into his face, smiling.
“Good boy! good boy!” she said.
And then she rose as if to hint that it was time for him to go.
“I see you are impatient; perhaps you may meet the Duke on his way back.”
“Charmed, Madame la Duchesse, I assure you,” said the Count with a grimace, and they both fell into laughing.
She recovered herself first to scan the shoes and coat again. “How droll!” said she. “Ah, monsieur, you are delightful in your foibles, but I wish it had looked like any other coat than Simon Mac-Taggart's. I have never seen his without wondering how many dark secrets were underneath the velvet. Had this coat of yours been a perfect fit, believe me I had not expected much from you of honour or of decency. Oh! there I go on chattering again, and you have said scarcely twenty words.”
“Believe me, Madame la Duchesse, it is because I can find none good enough to express my gratitude,” said Count Victor, making for the door.
“Pooh! Monsieur Soi-disant, a fig for your gratitude! Would you have me inhospitable to a guest who would save me even the trouble of opening my door? And that, by the way, reminds me, monsieur, that you have not even hinted at what you might be seeking his Grace for? Could it be—could it be for a better fit in coats?”
“For a mere trifle, madame, no more than my sword.”
“Your sword, monsieur? I know nothing of Monsieur Soi-disant's sword, but I think I know where is one might serve his purpose.”
With these words she went out of the room, hurried along the corridor, and returned in a moment or two with Count Victor's weapon, which she dragged back by its belt as if she loathed an actual contact with the thing itself.
“There!” she said, affecting a shudder. “A mouse and a rapier, they are my bitterest horrors. If you could only guess what a coward I am! Good night, monsieur, and I hope—I hope”—she laughed as she hung on the wish a moment—“I hope you will meet his Grace on the way. If so, you may tell him 'tis rather inclement weather for the night air—at his age,” and she laughed again. “If you do not see him—as is possible—come back soon; look! my door bids you in your own language—Revenez bientôt. I am sure he will be charmed to see you, and to make his delight the more I shall never mention you were here tonight.”
She went along the lobby and looked down the stair to see that the way was clear; came back and offered her hand.
“Madame la Duchesse, you are very magnanimous,” he said, exceedingly grateful.
“Imprudent, rather,” she corrected him.
“Magnanimity and Prudence are cousins who, praisele bon Dieu!never speak to each other, and the world is very much better for it.” He pointed to the motto on the panel. “I may never come back, madame,” said he, “but at least I shall never forget.”
“Au plaisir de vous revoir, Monsieur Soi-disant,” she said in conclusion, and went into her room and closed the door.
“Now there's a darling!” said the Duchess as she heard his footsteps softly departing. “Archie was just such another—at his age.”
The night brooded on the Highlands when Count Victor reached the shore. Snow and darkness clotted in the clefts of the valleys opening innumerably on the sea, but the hills held up their heads and thought among the stars—unbending and august and pure, knowing nothing at all of the glens and shadows. It was like a convocation of spirits. The peaks rose everywhere white to the brows and vastly ruminating. An ebbing tide too, so that the strand was bare. Upon the sands where there had been that folly of the morning the waves rolled in an ascending lisp, spilled upon at times with gold when the decaying moon—a halbert-head thrown angrily among Ossian's flying ghosts, the warrior clouds—cut through them sometimes and was so reflected in the sea. The sea was good; good to hear and smell; the flying clouds were grateful to the eye; the stars—he praised God for the delicious stars not in words but in an exultation of gratitude and affection, yet the mountain-peaks were most of all his comforters.
He had run from the castle as if the devil had been at his red heels, with that ridiculous coat flapping its heavily braided skirts about his calves; passed through snow-smothered gardens, bordered boding dark plantations of firs, leaped opposing fell-dykes whence sheltering animals ran terrified at the apparition, and he came out upon the seaside at the bay as one who has overcome a nightmare and wakens to see the familiar friendly glimmer of the bedroom fire.
A miracle! and mainly worked by a glimpse of these blanched hills. For he knew now they were an inseparable part of his memory of Olivia,herhills,hersheltering sentinels, the mere sight of them Doom's orison. Though he had thought of her so much when he shivered in the fosse, it had too often been as something unattainable, never to be seen again perhaps, a part of his life past and done with. An incubus rode his chest, though he never knew till now, when it fled at the sight of Olivia's constant friends the mountains. Why, the girl lived! her home was round the corner there dark-jutting in the sea! He could, with some activity, be rapping at her father's door in a couple of hours!
“Grace de Dieu!” said he, “let us leave trifles and go home.”
It was a curious sign of his preoccupation, ever since he had escaped from his imprisonment, that he should not once have thought on where he was to fly to till this moment when the hills inspired. “Silence, thought, calm, and purity, here they are!” they seemed to tell him, and by no means unattainable. Where (now that he had time to think of it) could he possibly go to-night but to the shelter of Doom? Let the morrow decide for itself.À demain les affaires sérieuses!Doom and—Olivia. What eyes she had, that girl! They might look upon the assailant of her wretched lover with anything but favour; yet even in anger they were more to him than those of all the world else in love.
Be sure Count Victor was not standing all the time of these reflections shivering in the snow. He had not indulged a moment's hesitation since ever he had come out upon the bay, and he walked through the night as fast as his miserable shoes would let him.
The miles passed, he crossed the rivers that mourned through hollow arches and spread out in brackish pools along the shore. Curlews piped dolorously the very psalm of solitude, and when he passed among the hazel-woods of Strone and Achnatra, their dark recesses belled continually with owls. It was the very pick of a lover's road: no outward vision but the sombre masses of the night, the valleys of snow, and the serene majestic hills to accompany that inner sight of the woman; no sounds but that of solemn waters and the forest creatures to make the memory of her words the sweeter. A road for lovers, and he was the second of the week, though he did not know it. Only, Simon MacTaggart had come up hot-foot on his horse, a trampling conqueror (as he fancied), the Count trudged shamefully undignified through snow that came high upon the silken stockings, and long ago had made his dancing-shoes shapeless and sodden. But he did not mind that; he had a goal to make for, an ideal to cherish timidly; once or twice he found himself with some surprise humming Gringoire's song, that surely should never go but with a light heart.
And in the fulness of time he approached the point of land from which he knew he could first see Doom's dark promontory if it were day. There his steps slowed. Somehow it seemed as if all his future fortune depended upon whether or not a light shone through the dark to greet him. Between him and the sea rolling in upon a spit of the land there was—of all things!—a herd of deer dimly to be witnessed running back and forward on the sand as in some confusion at his approach; at another time the thing should have struck him with amazement, but now he was too busy with his speculation whether Doom should gleam on him or not to study this phenomenon of the frosty winds. He made a bargain with himself: if the isle was black, that must mean his future fortune; if a light was there, however tiny, it was the star of happy omen, it was—it was—it was several things he dared not let himself think upon for fear of immediate disappointment.
For a minute he paused as if to gather his courage and then make a dash round the point.
Ventre Dieu!Blackness! His heart ached.
And then, as most men do in similar circumstances, he decided that the test was a preposterous one. Why, faith! should he relinquish hope of everything because—
What! the light was there. Like a fool he had misjudged the distance in the darkness and had been searching for it in the wrong place. It was so bright that it might be a star estrayed, a tiny star and venturesome, gone from the keeping of the maternal moon and wandered into the wood behind Doom to tangle in the hazel-boughs. A dear star! a very gem of stars! a star more precious than all the others in that clustered sky, because it was the light of Olivia's window. A plague on all the others with their twinkling search among the clouds for the little one lost! he wished it had been a darker night that he might have only this one visible.
By rights he should be weary and cold, and the day's events should trouble him; but to tell the truth, he was in a happy exaltation all the rest of the way. Sometimes the star of hope evaded him as he followed the bending path, trees interposing; he only ran the faster to get it into his vision again, and it was his beacon up to the very walls of Doom.
The castle took possession of the night.
How odd that he should have fancied that brave tower arrogant; it was tranced in the very air of friendliness and love—the fairy residence, the moated keep of all the sweet old tales his nurse was used to tell him when he was a child in Cam-mercy.
And there he had a grateful memory of the ringleted middle-aged lady who had alternately whipped and kissed him, and in his night's terrors soothed him with tales. “My faith!” said he, “thou didst not think thy Perrault's 'Contes des Fées' might, twenty years after, have so close an application to a woman and a tower in misty Albion.”
He walked deliberately across to the rock, went round the tower, stood a moment in the draggled arbour—the poor arbour of dead ideals. Doom, that once was child of the noisy wars, was dead as the Château d'Arques save for the light in its mistress's window. Poor old shell! and yet somehow he would not have had it otherwise.
He advanced and rapped at the door. The sound rang in the interior, and presently Mungo's shuffling steps were heard and his voice behind the door inquiring who was there.
“A friend,” answered Count Victor, humouring the little old man's fancy for affairs of arms.
“A friend!” repeated Mungo with contempt. “A man on a horse has aye hunders o' frien's in the gutter, as Annapla says, and it wad need to be somethin' rarer to get into Doom i' the mirk o' nicht. I opened the door to a frien' the ither nicht and he gripped me by the craig and fair choked me afore I could cry a barley.”
“Peste!Do not flatter my English so much as to tell me you do not recognise Count Victor's accent through a door.”
“Lord keep 's!” cried Mungo, hastily drawing his bolts. “Hae ye changed ye'r mind already and left the inns? It's a guid thing for your wife ye're no marrit, or she wad be the sorry woman wi' sic a shiftin' man.”
His astonishment was even greater when Count Victor stood before him a ludicrous figure with his too ample coat.
“Dinna tell me ye hae come through the snaw this nicht like that!” he cried incredulous, holding up his candle the better to examine the figure.
Count Victor laughed, and for an answer simply thrust forth a sopping foot to his examination.
“Man, ye must hae been hot on't!” said the servant, shaking his cowled head till the tassel danced above his temple. “Ye'r shoon's fair steeped wi' water. Water's an awfu' thing to rot ye'r boots; I aye said if it rotted ane's boots that way, whit wad it no' dae to ane's stamach? Oh, sirs! sirs! this is becomin' the throng hoose, wi' comin's and goin's and raps and roars and collie-shangies o' a' kin's. If it wasna me was the canny gaird o't it's Himsel' wad hae to flit for the sake o' his nicht's sleep.”
“You behold, Mungo, the daw in borrowed plumes,” said Count Victor as the door was being barred again. “I hope the daw felt more comfortable than I do in mine,” and he ruefully surveyed his apparel. “Does Master Mungo recognise these peacock feathers?”
Mungo scanned the garment curiously.
“It's gey like ane I've seen on a bigger man,” he answered.
“And a better, perhaps, thought my worthy Mungo. I remember me that our peacock was a diplomatist and had huge interest in your delightful stories.”
A movement of Mungo's made him turn to see the Baron standing behind him a little bewildered at this apparition.
“Failte!” said the Baron, “and I fancy you would be none the waur, as we say, of the fireside.”
He went before him into thesalle, taking Mungo's candle. Mungo was despatched for Annapla, and speedily the silent abigail of visions was engaged upon that truly Gaelic courtesy, the bathing of the traveller's feet. The Baron considerately made no inquiries; if it was a caprice of Count Victor's to venture in dancing shoes and a borrowed jacket through dark snow-swept roads, it was his own affair. And the Count was so much interested in the new cheerfulness of his host (once so saturnine and melancholy) that he left his own affairs unmentioned for a while as the woman worked. It was quite a light-hearted recluse this, compared with that he had left a week ago.
“I am not surprised you found yon place dull,” at the last hazarded the Baron.
“Comment?”
“Down-by, I mean. I'm glad myself always to get home out of it at this season. When the fishers are there it's all my fancy, but when it does not smell of herring, the stench of lawyers' sheepskins gets on the top and is mighty offensive to any man that has had muckle to do with them.”
“Dull!” repeated Count Victor, now comprehending; “I have crowded more experience into the past four-and-twenty hours than I might meet in a month anywhere east of Calais. I have danced with a duchess, fought a stupid duel, with a town looking on for all the world as if it were a performance in a circus with lathen weapons, moped in a dungeon, broken through the same, stolen a coat, tramped through miles of snow in a pair of pantoufles, forgotten to pay the bill at the inn, and lost my baggage and my reputation—which latter I swear no one in these parts will be glad to pick up for his own use. Baron, I'll be shot if your country is not bewitched. My faith! what happenings since I came here expecting to be killed withennui!I protest I shall buy a Scots estate and ask all my friends over here to see real life. Only they must have good constitutions; I shall insist on them having good constitutions. And there's another thing—it necessitates that they must have so kind a friend as Monsieur le Baron and so hospitable a house as Doom to fall back on when their sport comes to a laughable termination, as mine has done to-night.”
“Ah! then you have found your needle in the haystack after all?” cried Doom, vastly interested.
“Found the devil!” cried Montaiglon, a shade of vexation in his countenance, for he had not once that day had a thought of all that had brought, him into Scotland. “The haystack must be stuck full of needles like the bran of a pin-cushion.”
“And this one, who is not the particular needle named Drimdarroch?”
“I shall give you three guesses, M. le Baron.”
Doom reflected, pulled out his nether lip with his fingers, looking hard at his guest.
“It is not the Chamberlain?”
“Peste!” thought the Count, “can the stern unbending parent have relented? You are quite right,” he said; “no other. But it is not a matter of the most serious importance. I lost my coat and the gentleman lost a little blood. I have the best assurances that he will be on foot again in a week or two, by which time I hope—at all events I expect—to be out of all danger of being invited to resume the entertainment.”
“In the meantime here's Doom, yours—so long as it is mine—while it's your pleasure to bide in it if you fancy yourself safe from molestation,” said the Baron.
“As to that I think I may be tranquil. I have, there too, the best assurances that the business will be hushed up.”
“So much the better, though in any case this seems to have marred your real engagements here in the matter of Drimdarroch.”
Count Victor's turn it was to feel vexation now. He pulled his moustache and reddened. “As to that, Baron,” said he, “I pray you not to despise me, for I have to confess that my warmth in the mission that brought me here has abated sadly. You need not ask me why. I cannot tell you. As for me and my affair, I have not forgotten, nor am I likely wholly to forget; but your haystack is asdifficileas you promised it should be, and—there are divers other considerations. It necessitates that I go home. There shall be some raillery at my expense doubtless—Ciel!how Louis my cousin will laugh!—but no matter.”
He spoke a little abstractedly, for he saw a delicate situation approaching. He was sure to be asked—once Annapla's service was over—what led to the encounter, and to give the whole story frankly involved Olivia's name unpleasantly in a vulgar squabble. He saw for the first time that he had been wholly unwarranted in taking the defence of the Baron's interests into his own hands. Could he boldly intimate that in his opinion jealousy of himself had been the spring of the Chamberlain's midnight attacks on the castle of Doom? That were preposterous! And yet that seemed the only grounds that would justify his challenging the Chamberlain.
When Annapla was gone then Doom got the baldest of histories. He was encouraged to believe that all this busy day of adventure had been due to a simple quarrel after a game of cards, and where he should have preferred a little more detail he had to content himself with a humorous narrative of the escape, the borrowing of the coat, and the interview with the Duchess.
“And now with your permission, Baron, I shall go to bed,” at last said Count Victor. “I shall sleep to-night, like asabot. I am, I know, the boldest of beggars for your grace and kindness. It seems I am fated in this country to make free, not only with my enemy's coat, but with my dear friend's domicile as if it were an inn. To-morrow, Baron, I shall make my dispositions. The coat can be returned to its owner none the worse for my use of it, but I shall not so easily be able to square accounts with you.”
In a rigorous privacy of storm that lasted many days after his return, and cut Doom wholly off from the world at large, Count Victor spent what but for several considerations would have been—perhaps indeed they really were—among the happiest moments of his life. It was good in that tumultuous weather, when tempests snarled and frosts fettered the countryside, and the sea continually wrangled round the rock of Doom, to look out on the inclemency from windows where Olivia looked out too. She used to come and stand beside him, timidly perhaps at first, but by-and-by with no self-consciousness. Her sleeve would touch his, sometimes, indeed, her shoulder must press against his arm and little strands of her hair almost blow against his lips as in the narrow apertures of the tower they watched the wheeling birds from the outer ocean. For these birds she had what was little less than a passion. To her they represented the unlimited world of liberty and endeavour; at sight of them something stirred in her that was the gift of all the wandering years of that old Ulysses, her grandfather, to whom the beckoning lights of ships at sea were irresistible, and though she doted on the glens of her nativity, she had the spirit that invests every hint of distant places and far-off happenings with magic parts.
She seemed content, and yet not wholly happy: he could hear her sometimes sigh, as he thought, from a mere wistfulness that had the illimitable spaces of the sea, the peopled isles and all their mystery for background. To many of the birds that beat and cried about the place she gave names, investing them with histories, recounting humorously their careers. And it was odd that however far she sent them in her fancy—to the distant Ind, to the vexed Pole itself—with joy in their travelling, she assumed that their greatest joy was when they found themselves at Doom. The world was a place to fare forth in as far as you could, only to give you the better zest for Doom on your return.
This pleased her father hugely, but it scarcely tallied with the views of one who had fond memories of a land where sang the nightingale in its season, and roads were traversable in the wildest winter weather; still Count Victor was in no mood to question it.
He was, save in rare moments of unpleasant reflection, supremely happy, thrilling to that accidental contact, paling at the narrow margins whereby her hair escaped conferring on him a delirium. He could stand at a window all day pretending interest in the monotonous hills and empty sea, only that he might keep her there too and indulge himself upon her eyes. They—so eager, deep, or busied with the matters of her thoughts—were enough for a common happiness; a debauch of it was in the contact of her arm.
And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been before. Several times he was on the point of speaking on the subject. Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.
A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his gun was to be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly for “her ladyship” Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant conversation—otherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia alone. For the father relapsed anew into his old strange melancholies, dozing over his books, indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily along the imprisoned coast.
That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were clandestine; now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways in thebreacanas of old. But that was not his only distress, Count Victor was sure.
“What accounts for your father's melancholy?” he had the boldness one day to ask Olivia.
They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden, bent upon its slaughter.
“And do you not know the reason for that?” she asked, with her humour promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at the figure bent beside the fire. “What is the dearest thing to you?”
She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it was no wonder he stammered in his reply.
“The dearest,” he repeated. “Ah! well—well—the dearest, Mademoiselle Olivia;ma foi!there are so many things.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “but only one or two are at the heart's core.” She saw him smile at this, and reddened. “Oh, how stupid I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a lady—if there is a lady.”
“Thereisa lady,” said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.
A silence followed; not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had thought to look for it.
“I am the one,” said she at length, “who will wish you well in that; but after her—after this—this lady—what is it that comes closest?”
“What but my country!” cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.
“To be sure!” she acquiesced, “your country! I am not wondering at that. And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most cruel. We are like the folks I have read of—they were the Greeks who travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy. 'Tha-latta!'—was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in school in Edinburgh, I cried, myself, 'Lochfinne!' and thought I heard the tide rumbling upon this same rock. It is for that; it is because we must be leaving here my father is sad.”
Here indeed was news
“Leaving!” said Count Victor in astonishment.
“It is so. My father has been robbed; his people have been foolish; it is not a new thing in the Highlands of Scotland, Count Victor. You must not be thinking him a churl to be moping and leaving you to my poor entertainment, for it is ill to keep the pipes in tune when one is drying tears.”
“Where will you go?” asked Count Victor, disturbed at the tidings and the distress she so bravely struggled to conceal.
“Where? indeed!” said Olivia. “That I cannot tell you yet. But the world is wide, and it is strange if there is any spot of it where we cannot find some of our own Gaelic people who have been flitting for a generation, taking the world for their pillow. What is it that shall not come to an end? My sorrow! the story on our door down there has been preparing me for this since ever I was a bairn. My great-great-grandfather was the wise man and the far-seeing when he carved it there—'Man, Behauld the End of All, Be nocht Wiser than the Hiest. Hope in God!'” She struggled courageously with her tears that could not wholly be restrained, and there and then he could have gathered her into his arms. But he must keep himself in bounds and twist the fringes of her shawl.
“Ah, Olivia,” said he, “you will die for the sight of home.”
At that she dashed her hand across her eyes and boldly faced him, smiling.
“That would be a shameful thing in a Baron's daughter,” said she. “No, indeed! when we must rise and go away, here is the woman who will go bravely! We live not in glens, in this house nor in that, but in the hearts that love us, and where my father is and friends are to be made, I think I can be happy yet. Look at the waves there, and the snow and the sea-birds! All these are in other places as well as here.”
“But not the same, but not the same! Here I swear I could live content myself.”
“What!” said she, smiling, and the rogue a moment dancing in her eyes. “No, no, Count Victor, to this you must be born like the stag in the corrie and the seal on the rock. We are a simple people, and a poor people—worse fortune!—poor and proud. Your world is different from ours, and there you will have friends that think of you.”
“And you,” said he, all aglow in passion but with a face of flint, “you are leaving those behind that love you too.”
This time he watched her narrowly; she gave no sign.
“There are the poor people in the clachan there,” said she; “some of them will not forget me I am hoping, but that is all. We go. It is good for us, perhaps. Something has been long troubling my father more than the degradation of the clans and all these law pleas that Petullo has now brought to the bitter end. He is proud, and he is what is common in the Highlands when the heart is sore—he is silent. You must not think it is for myself I am vexing to leave Doom Castle; it is for him. Look! do you see the dark spot on the side of the hill yonder up at Ardno? That is the yew-tree in the churchyard where my mother, his wife, lies; it is no wonder that at night sometimes he goes out to look at the hills, for the hills are over her there and over the generations of his people in the same place. I never knew my mother,mothruaigh!but he remembers, and it is the hundred dolours (as we say) for him to part. For me I have something of the grandfather in me, and would take the seven bens for it, and the seven glens, and the seven mountain moors, if it was only for the sake of the adventure, though I should always like to think that I would come again to these places of hered-ity.”
And through all this never a hint of Simon Mac-Taggart! Could there be any other conclusion than the joyous one—it made his heart bound!—that that affair was at an end? And yet how should he ascertain the truth about a matter so close upon his heart? He put his pride in his pocket and went down that afternoon with the Chamberlain's coat in his hands. There was a lull in the wind, and the servitor was out of doors caulking the little boat, the argosy of poor fortunes, which had been drawn up from the menacing tides so that its prow obtruded on the half-hearted privacy of the lady's bower. Deer were on the shore, one sail was on the blue of the sea, a long way off, a triumphant flash of sun lit up the innumerable glens. A pleasant interlude of weather, and yet Mungo was in what he called, himself, a tirravee. He was honestly becoming impatient with this undeparting foreigner, mainly because Annapla was day by day the more insistent that he had not come wading into Doom without boots entirely in vain, and that her prediction was to be fulfilled.
“See! Mungo,” said the Count, “the daw, if my memory fails me not, had his plumes pecked off him, but I seem fated to retain my borrowed feathers until I pluck myself. Is it that you can have them at the first opportunity restored to our connoisseur incontes—your friend the Chamberlain? It comes to occur to me that the gentleman's wardrobe may be as scanty as my own, and the absence of his coat may be the reason, more than my unfortunate pricking with a bodkin, for his inexplicable absence from—from—the lady's side.”
Mungo had heard of the duel, of course; it was the understanding in Doom that all news was common property inasmuch as it was sometimes almost the only thing to pass round.
“Humph!” said he. “It wasna' sae ill to jag a man that had a wound already.”
“Expiscate, good Master Mungo,” said Count Victor, wondering. “What wound already? You speak of the gentleman's susceptible heart perhaps?”
“I speak o' naethin' o' the kind, but o' the man's airm. Ye ken fine ye gied him a push wi' your whinger that first night he cam' here wi' his fenci-ble gang frae the Maltland and play-acted Black Andy o' Arroquhar.”
“The devil!” cried Count Victor. “I wounded somebody, certainly, but till now I had no notion it might be the gentleman himself. Well, let me do him the justice to say he made rather pretty play with his weapon on the sands, considering he was wounded. And so, honest Mungo, the garrison was not really taken by surprise that night you found yourself plucked out like a periwinkle from your wicket? As frankness is in fashion, I may say that for a while I gave you credit for treason to the house, and treason now it seems to have been, though not so black as I thought. It was MacTaggart who asked you to open the door?”
“Wha else? A bonny like cantrip! Nae doot it was because I tauld him Annapla's prophecy aboot a man with the bare feet. The deil's buckie! Ye kent yersel' brawly wha it was.”
“I, Master Mungo! Faith, not I!”
Mungo looked incredulous.
“And what ails the ladyship, for she kent? I'll swear she kent the next day, though I took guid care no' to say cheep.”
“I daresay you are mistaken there, my good Mungo.”
“Mistaken! No me! It wasna a' thegither in a tantrum o' an ordinar' kind she broke her tryst wi' him the very nicht efter ye left for the inns doon by. At onyrate, if she didna' ken then she kens noo, I'll warrant.”
“Not so far as I am concerned, certainly.”
Mungo looked incredulous. That any one should let go the chance of conveying so rare a piece of gossip to persons so immediately concerned was impossible of belief. “Na, na,” said he, shaking his head; “she has every word o't, or her faither at least, and that's the same thing. But shoon or nae shoon, yon's the man for my money!”
“Again he has my felicitations,” said Count Victor, with a good humour unfailing. Indeed he could afford to be good-humoured if this were true. So here was the explanation of Olivia's condescension, her indifference to her lover's injury, of which her father could not fail to have apprised her even if Mungo had been capable of a miracle and held his tongue. The Chamberlain, then, was no longer in favour! Here was joy! Count Victor could scarce contain himself. How many women would have been flattered at the fierceness of devotion implied in a lover's readiness to commit assassination out of sheer jealousy of a supposititious rival in her affections? But Olivia—praisele bon Dieu!—was not like that.
He thrust the coat into Mungo's hands and went hurriedly up to his room to be alone with his thoughts, that he feared might show themselves plainly in his face if he met either the lady or her father, and there for the first time had a memory of Cecile—some odd irrelevance of a memory—in which she figured in a masque in a Paris garden. Good God! that he should have failed to see it before; this Cecile had been an actress, as, he told himself, were most of her sex he had hitherto encountered, and 'twas doubtful if he once had touched her soul. Olivia had shown him now, in silences, in sighs, in some unusualauraof sincerity that was round her like the innocence of infancy, that what he thought was love a year ago was but its drossy elements. Seeking the first woman in the eyes of the second, he had found the perfect lover there!