Petullo was from home. It was in such circumstances she found the bondage least intolerable. Now she was to find his absence more than a pleasant respite; it gave her an opportunity of warning Doom. She had scarce made up her mind how he should be informed of the jeopardies that menaced his guest, whose skaithless departure with Olivia was even, from her point of view, a thing wholly desirable, when the Baron appeared himself. It was not on the happiest of errands he came down on the first day of favouring weather; it was to surrender the last remnant of his right to the home of his ancestors. With the flourish of a quill he brought three centuries of notable history to a close.
“Here's a lesson in humility, Mr. Campbell,” said he to Petullo's clerk. “We builded with the sword, and fell upon the sheep-skin. Who would think that so foolish a bird as the grey goose would have Doom and its generations in its wing?”
He had about his shoulders a plaid that had once been of his tartan, but had undergone the degradation of the dye-pot for a foolish and tyrannical law; he threw it round him with a dignity that was half defiance, and cast his last glance round the scene of his sorriest experiences—the dusty writing-desks, the confusion of old letters; the taped and dog-eared, fouled, and forgotten records of pithy causes; and, finally, at the rampart of deed-chests, one of which had the name “Drimdarroch” blazoned on it for remembrance if he had been in danger of forgetting.
“And is it yourself, Baron?” cried a woman's voice as he turned to go. “I am so sorry my husband is from home.”
He turned again with his hat off for the lady who had an influence on his fate that he could never guess of.
“It is what is left of me, ma'am,” said he. “And it is more than is like to be seen of me in these parts for many a day to come,” but with no complaint in his expression.
“Ah,” said she, “I know; I know! and I am so sorry. You cannot leave to-day of any day without a glass of wine fordeoch-an-doruis.”
“I thank you, ma'am,” said Doom, “but my boat is at the quay, and Mungo waits for me.”
“But, indeed, you must come in, Baron,” she insisted. “There is something of the greatest importance I have to say to you, and it need not detain you ten minutes.”
He followed her upstairs to her parlour. It was still early in the day and there was something of the slattern in her dragging gown. As he walked behind her, the remembrance would intrude of that betraying letter, and he had the notion that perhaps she somehow knew he shared her shameful secret. Nor was the idea dispelled when she stopped and faced him in the privacy of her room with her eyes swollen and a trembling under-lip.
“And it has come to this of it, Baron?” said she.
“It has come to this,” said Doom simply.
“I cannot tell you how vexed I am. But you know my husband—”
“I have the honour, ma'am,” said he, bowing with an old-fashioned inclination.
“—You know my husband, a hard man, Baron, though I perhaps should be the last to say it, and I have no say in his business affairs.”
“Which is doubtless proper enough,” said Doom, and thought of an irony breeding forbade him to give utterance to.
“But I must tell you I think it is a scandal you should have to go from the place of your inheritance; and your sweet girl too! I hope and trust she is in good health and spirits?”
“My good girl is very well,” said he, “and with some reason for cheerfulness in spite of our misfortunes. As for them, ma'am, I am old enough to have seen and known a sufficiency of ups and downs, of flux and change, to wonder at none of them. I am not going to say that what has come to me is the most joco of happenings for a person like myself that has more than ordinary of the sentimentalist in me, and is bound to be wrapped up in the country-side hereabouts. But the tail may go with the hide, as the saying runs. Doom, that's no more than a heart-break of memories and an' empty shell, may very well join Duntorvil and Drimdarroch and the Islands of Lochow, that have dribbled through the courts of what they call the law and left me scarcely enough to bury myself in another country than my own.”
Mrs. Petullo was not, in truth, wholly unmoved, but it was the actress in her wrung her hands.
“I hear you are going abroad,” she cried. “That must be the hardest thing of all.”
“I am not complaining, ma'am,” said Doom.
“No, no; but oh! it is so sad, Baron—and your dear girl too, so sweet and nice—”
The Baron grew impatient; the “something of importance” was rather long of finding an expression, and he took the liberty of interrupting.
“Quite so, ma'am,” said he, “but there was something in particular you had to tell me. Mungo, as I mentioned, is waiting me at the quay, and time presses, for we have much to do before we leave next week.”
A look of relief came to Mrs. Petullo's face.
“Next week!” she cried. “Oh, then, that goes far to set my mind at ease.” Some colour came to her cheeks; she trifled with a handkerchief. “What I wished to say, Baron, was that your daughter and—and—and the French gentleman, with whom we are glad to hear she is like to make a match of it, could not be away from this part of the country a day too soon. I overheard a curious thing the other day, it is only fair I should tell you, for it concerns your friend the French gentleman, and it was that Simon MacTaggart knew the Frenchman was back in your house and threatened trouble. There may be nothing in it, but I would not put it past the same person, who is capable of any wickedness.”
“It is not the general belief, ma'am,” said the Baron, “but I'll take your word for it, and, indeed, I have long had my own suspicions. Still, I think the same gentleman has had his wings so recently clipped that we need not be much put about at his threats.”
“I have it on the best authority that he broods mischief,” said she.
“The best authority,” repeated Doom, with never a doubt as to what that was. “Well, it may be, but I have no fear of him. Once, I'll confess, he troubled me, but the man is now no more than a rotten kail-stock so far as my household is concerned. I thank God Olivia is happy!”
“And so do I, I'm sure, with all my heart,” chimed in the lady. “And that is all the more reason why the Count—you see we know his station—should be speedily out of the way of molestation, either from the law or Simon MacTaggart.”
Doom made to bring the interview to a conclusion. “As to the Count,” said he, “you can take my word for it, he is very well able to look after himself, as Drimdarroch, or MacTaggart, or whatever is the Chamberlain's whim to call himself, knows very well by now. Drimdarroch, indeed! I could be kicking him myself for his fouling of an honest old name.”
“Kicking!” said she; “I wonder at your leniency. I cannot but think you are far from knowing the worst of Simon MacTaggart.”
“The worst!” said Doom. “That's between himself and Hell, but I know as much as most, and it's enough to make me sure the man's as boss as an empty barrel. He was once a sort of friend of mine, till twenty years ago my wife grew to hate the very mention of his name. Since then I've seen enough of him at a distance to read the plausible rogue in his very step. The man wears every bawbee virtue he has like a brooch in his bonnet; and now when I think of it, I would not dirty my boots with him.”
Mrs. Petullo's lips parted. She hovered a second or two on a disclosure that explained the wife's antipathy of twenty years ago, but it involved confession of too intimate a footing on her own part with the Chamberlain, and she said no more.
Some days passed and a rumour went about the town, in its origin as indiscoverable as the birthplace of the winds. It engaged the seamen on the tiny trading vessels at the quay, and excited the eagerest speculation in Ludovic's inn. Women put down their water-stoups at the wells and shook mysterious heads over hints of Sim MacTaggart's history. No one for a while had a definite story, but in all the innuendoes the Chamberlain figured vaguely as an evil influence. That he had slain a man in some parts abroad was the first and the least astonishing of the crimes laid to his charge, though the fact that he had never made a brag of it was counted sinister; but, by-and-by, surmise and sheer imagination gave place to a commonly accepted tale that Simon had figured in divers escapades in France with the name Drimdarroch; that he had betrayed men and women there, and that the Frenchman had come purposely to Scotland seeking for him. It is the most common of experiences that the world will look for years upon a man admiringly and still be able to recall a million things to his discredit when he is impeached with some authority. It was so in this case. The very folks who had loved best to hear the engaging flageolet, feeling the springs of some nobility bubble up in them at the bidding of its player, and drunk with him and laughed with him and ever esteemed his free gentility, were the readiest to recall features of his character and incidents of his life that—as they put it—ought to have set honest men upon their guard. The tale went seaward on the gabbards, and landward, even to Lorn itself, upon carriers' carts and as the richest part of the packman's budget. Furthermore, a song or two was made upon the thing, that even yet old women can recall in broken stanzas, and of one of these, by far the best informed, Petullo's clerk was the reputed author.
As usual, the object of the scandal was for a while unconscious. He went about experiencing a new aloofness in his umquhile friends, and finally concluded that it was due to his poor performance in front of the foreigner on the morning of the ball, and that but made him the more venomously ruminant upon revenge. In these days he haunted the avenues like a spirit, brooding on his injuries, pondering the means of a retaliation; there were no hours of manumission in the inn; the reed was still. And yet, to do him justice, there was even then the frank and suave exterior; no boorish awkward silence in his ancient gossips made him lose his jocularity; he continued to embellish his conversation with morals based on universal kindness and goodwill.
At last the thunder broke, for the scandal reached the castle, and was there overheard by the Duchess in a verse of the ballad sung under her window by a gardener's boy. She made some inquiries, and thereafter went straight to her husband.
“What is this I hear about your Chamberlain?” she asked.
Argyll drew down his brows and sighed. “My Chamberlain?” said he. “It must be something dreadful by the look of her grace the Duchess. What is it this time? High treason, or marriage, or the need of it? Or has old Knapdale died by a blessed disposition and left him a fortune? That would save me the performance of a very unpleasant duty.”
“It has gone the length of scurrilous songs about our worthy gentleman. The town has been ringing with scandals about him for a week, and I never heard a word about it till half-an-hour ago.”
“And so you feel defrauded, my dear, which is natural enough, being a woman as well as a duchess. I am glad to know that so squalid a story should be so long of reaching your ears; had it been anything to anybody's credit you would have been the first to learn of it. To tell the truth, I've heard the song myself, and if I have seemed unnaturally engaged for a day or two it is because I have been in a quandary as to what I should do. Now that you know the story, what do you advise, my dear?”
“A mere woman must leave that to the Lord Justice-General,” she replied. “And now that your Chamberlain turns out a greater scamp than I thought him, I'm foolish enough to be sorry for him.”
“And so am I,” said the Duke, and looked about the shelves of books lining the room. “Here's a multitude of counsellors, a great deal of the world's wisdom so far as it has been reduced to print, and I'll swear I could go through it from end to end without learning how I should judge a problem like Sim MacTaggart.”
She would have left him then, but he stopped her with a smiling interrogation. “Well?” he said.
She waited.
“What about the customary privilege?” he went on.
“What is that?”
“Why, you have not said 'I told you so.'”
She smiled at that. “How stupid of me!” said she. “Oh! but you forgave my Frenchman, and for that I owe you some consideration.”
“Did I, faith?” said he. “'Twas mighty near the compounding of a felony, a shocking lapse in a Justice-General. To tell the truth, I was only too glad, in MacTaggart's interest, while he was ill, to postpone disclosures so unpleasant as are now the talk of the country; and like you, I find him infinitely worse in these disclosures than I guessed.”
The Duchess went away, the Duke grew grave, reflecting on his duty. What it clearly was he had not decided until it was late in the evening, and then he sent for his Chamberlain.
Simon went to the library and saw plainly that the storm was come.
“Sit down, Simon, sit down,” said his Grace and carefully sharped a pen.
The Chamberlain subsided in a chair; crossed his legs; made a mouth as if to whistle. There was a vexatious silence in the room till the Duke got up and stood against the chimney-piece and spoke.
“Well,” said he, “I could be taking a liberty with the old song and singing 'Roguery Parts Good Company' if I were not, so far as music goes, as timber as the table there and in anything but a key for music even if I had the faculty. Talking about music, you have doubtless not heard the ingenious ballant connected with your name and your exploits. It has been the means of informing her Grace upon matters I had preferred she knew nothing about, because I liked to have the women I regard believe the world much better than it is. And it follows that you and I must bring our long connection to an end. When will it be most convenient for my Chamberlain to send me his resignation after 'twelve years of painstaking and intelligent service to the Estate,' as we might be saying, on the customary silver salver?”
Simon cursed within but outwardly never quailed.
“I know nothing about a ballant,” said he coolly, “but as for the rest of it, I thank God I can be taking a hint as ready as the quickest. Your Grace no doubt has reasons. And I'll make bold to say the inscription it is your humour to suggest would not be anyway extravagant, for the twelve years have been painstaking enough, whatever about their intelligence, of which I must not be the judge myself.”
“So far as that goes, sir,” said the Duke, “you have been a pattern. And it is your gifts that make your sins the more heinous; a man of a more sluggish intelligence might have had the ghost of an excuse for failing to appreciate the utmost loathsomeness of his sins.”
“Oh! by the Lord Harry, if it is to be a sermon—!” cried Simon, jumping to his feet.
“Keep your chair, sir! keep your chair like a man!” said the Duke. “I am thinking you know me well enough to believe there is none of the common moralist about me. I leave the preaching to those with a better conceit of themselves than I could afford to have of my indifferent self. No preaching, cousin, no preaching, but just a word among friends, even if it were only to explain the reason for our separation.”
The Chamberlain resumed his chair defiantly and folded his arms.
“I'll be cursed if I see the need for all this preamble,” said he; “but your Grace can fire away. It need never be said that Simon MacTaggart was feared to account for himself when the need happened.”
“Within certain limitations, I daresay that is true,” said the Duke.
“I aye liked a tale to come to a brisk conclusion,” said the Chamberlain, with no effort to conceal his impatience.
“This one will be as brisk as I can make it,” said his Grace. “Up till the other day I gave you credit for the virtue you claim—the readiness to answer for yourself when the need happened. I was under the delusion that your duel with the Frenchman was the proof of it.”
“Oh, damn the Frenchman!” cried the Chamberlain with contempt and irritation. “I am ready to meet the man again with any arm he chooses.”
“With any arm!” said the Duke dryly. “'Tis always well to have a whole one, and not one with a festering sore, as on the last occasion. Oh yes,” he went on, seeing Simon change colour, “you observe I have learned about the old wound, and what is more, I know exactly where you got it.”
“Your Grace seems to have trustworthy informants,” said the Chamberlain less boldly, but in no measure abashed. “I got that wound through your own hand as surely as if you had held the foil that gave it, for the whole of this has risen, as you ought to know, from your sending me to France.”
“And that is true, in a sense, my good sophist. But I was, in that, the unconscious and blameless link in your accursed destiny. I had you sent to France on a plain mission. It was not, I make bold to say, a mission on which the Government would have sent any man but a shrewd one and a gentleman, and I was mad enough to think Simon Mac-Taggart was both. When you were in Paris as our agent—”
“Fah!” cried Simon, snapping his fingers and drawing his face in a grimace. “Agent, quo' he! for God's sake take your share of it and say spy and be done with it!”
The Duke shrugged his shoulders, listening patiently to the interruption. “As you like,” said he. “Let us say spy, then. You were to learn what you could of the Pretender's movements, and incidentally you were to intromit with certain of our settled agents at Versailles. Doubtless a sort of espionage was necessary to the same. But I make bold to say the duty was no ignoble one so long as it was done with some sincerity and courage, for I count the spy in an enemy's country is engaged upon the gallantest enterprise of war, using the shrewdness that alone differs the quarrel of the man from the fury of the beast, and himself the more admirable, because his task is a thousand times more dangerous than if he fought with the claymore in the field.”
“Doubtless! doubtless!” said the Chamberlain. “That's an old tale between the two of us, but you should hear the other side upon it.”
“No matter; we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart—and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. Countersap with a vengeance! We know now where Bertin got his information. You betrayed us and the woman Cecile Favart in the one filthy transaction.”
The Chamberlain showed in his face that the blow was home. His mouth broke and he grew as grey as a rag.
“And that's the way of it?” he said, after a moment's silence.
“That's the way of it,” said the Duke. “She was as much the agent—let us say the spy, then—as you were yourself, and seems to have brought more cunning to the trade than did our simple Simon himself. If her friend Montaiglon had not come here to look for you, and thereby put us on an old trail we had abandoned, we would never have guessed the source of her information.”
“I'll be cursed if I have a dog's luck!” cried Simon.
Argyll looked pityingly at him. “So!” said he. “You mind our old country saying,Ni droch dhuine dàn da féin—a bad man makes his own fate?”
“Do you say so?” cried MacTaggart, with his first sign of actual insolence, and the Duke sighed.
“My good Simon,” said he, “I do not require to tell you so, for you know it very well. What I would add is that all I have said is, so far as I am concerned, between ourselves; that's my only tribute to our old acquaintanceship. Only I can afford to have no more night escapades at Doom or anywhere else with my fencibles, and so, Simon, the resignation cannot be a day too soon.”
“Heaven forbid that I should delay it a second longer than is desirable, and your Grace has it here and now! A finefracasall this about a puddock-eating Frenchman! I do not value him nor his race to the extent of a pin. And as for your Grace's Chamberlain—well, Simon MacTaggart has done very well hitherto on his own works and merits.”
“You may find, for all that,” says his Grace, “that they were all summed up in a few words—'he was a far-out cousin to the Duke.'Sic itur ad astra.”
At that Simon put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as he descended.
“The man is fey,” said the Duke to himself, listening with a startled gravity.
Simon MacTaggart went out possessed by the devils of hatred and chagrin. He saw himself plainly for what he was in truth—a pricked bladder, his career come to an ignoble conclusion, the single honest scheme he had ever set his heart on brought to nought, and his vanity already wounded sorely at the prospect of a contemptuous world to be faced for the remainder of his days. All this from the romantics of a Frenchman who walked through life in the step of a polonaise, and a short season ago was utterly unaware that such a man as Simon MacTaggart existed, or that a woman named Olivia bloomed, a very flower, among the wilds! At whatever angle he viewed the congregated disasters of the past few weeks, he saw Count Victor in their background—a sardonic, smiling, light-hearted Nemesis; and if he detested him previously as a merely possible danger, he hated him now with every fibre of his being as the cause of his upheaval.
And then, in this way that is not uncommon with the sinner, he must pity himself because circumstances had so consistently conspired against him.
He had come into the garden after the interview with Argyll had made it plain that the darkest passages in his servant's history were known to him, and had taken off his hat to get the night breeze on his brow which was wet with perspiration. The snow was still on the ground; among the laden bushes, the silent soaring trees of fir and ash, it seemed as if this was no other than the land of outer darkness whereto the lost are driven at the end. It maddened him to think of what he had been brought to; he shook his fist in a childish and impotent petulance at the spacious unregarding east where Doom lay—the scene of all his passions.
“God's curse on the breed of meddlers!” he said. “Another month and I was out of these gutters and hell no more to tempt me. To be the douce good-man, and all the tales of storm forgotten by the neighbours that may have kent them; to sit perhaps with bairns—her bairns and mine—about my knee, and never a twinge of the old damnable inclinations, and the flageolet going to the honestest tunes. All lost! All lost for a rat that takes to the hold of an infernal ship, and comes here to chew at the ropes that dragged me to salvation. This is where it ends! It's the judgment come a day ower soon for Sim MacTaggart. But Sim MacTaggart will make the rat rue his meddling.”
He had come out with no fixed idea of what he next should do, but one step seemed now imperative—he must go to Doom, otherwise his blood would burst every vein in his body. He set forth with the stimulus of fury for the barracks where his men lay, of whom half-a-dozen at least were his to the gate of the Pit itself, less scrupulous even than himself because more ignorant, possessed of but one or two impulses—a foolish affection for him and an inherited regard for rapine too rarely to be indulged in these tame latter days. To call them out, to find them armed and ready for any enterprise of his was a matter of brief time. They set out knowing nothing at all of his object, and indifferent so long as this adorable gentleman was to lead them.
When they came to Doom the tide was full and round about it, so they retired upon the hillside, sheltering in a little plantation of fir through which they could see the stars, and Doom dense black against them without a sign of habitation.
And yet Doom, upon the side that faced the sea, was not asleep. Mungo was busy upon the preparations for departure, performing them in a funereal spirit, whimpering about the vacant rooms with a grief that was trivial compared with that of Doom itself, who waited for the dawn as if it were to bring him to the block, or of Olivia, whose pillow was wet with unavailing tears. It was their last night in Doom. At daybreak Mungo was to convey them to the harbour, where they should embark upon the vessel that was to bear them to the lowlands. It seemed as if the sea-gulls came earlier than usual to wheel and cry about the rock, half-guessing that it was so soon to be untenanted, and finally, as it is to-day, the grass-grown mound of memories. Olivia rose and went to her window to look out at them, and saw them as yet but vague grey floating shapes slanting against the paling stars.
And then the household rose; the boat nodded to the leeward of the rock, with its mast stepped, its sail billowing with a rustle in the faint air, and Mungo at the sheet. The dawn came slowly, but fast enough for the departing, and the landward portion of the rock was still in shadow when Olivia stepped forth with a tear-stained face and a trembling hand on Victor's arm. He shared her sorrow, but was proud and happy too that her trials, as he hoped, were over. They took their seat in the boat and waited for the Baron. Now the tide was down, the last of it running in tiny rivulets upon the sand between the mainland and the rock, and Simon and his gang came over silently. Simon led, and turned the corner of the tower hastily with his sword in his hand to find the Baron emerging. He had not seen the boat and its occupants, but the situation seemed to flash upon him, and he uttered a cry of rage.
Doom drew back under the frowning eyebrow of what had been his home, tugged the weapon from his scabbard, and threw himself on guard.
“This is kind, indeed,” he said in a pause of his assailant's confusion at finding this was not the man he sought. “You have come to say 'Goodbye.' On guard, black dog, on guard!”
“So dhuit maat!—here then is for you,” cried Sim, and waving back his followers, engaged with a rasp of steel. It lasted but a moment: Doom crouched a little upon bending knees, with a straight arm, parrying the assault of a point that flew in wild disorder. He broke ground for a few yards with feints in quarte. He followed on a riposte with a lunge—short, sharp, conclusive, for it took his victim in the chest and passed through at the other side with a thud of the hilt against his body. Sim fell with a groan, his company clustering round him, not wholly forgetful of retaliation, but influenced by his hand that forbade their interference with his enemy.
“Clean up your filth!” said Doom in the Gaelic, sheathing his sword and turning to join his daughter. “He took Drimdarroch from me, and now, by God! he's welcome to Doom.”
“Not our old friends, surely?” said Count Victor, looking backward at the cluster of men.
“The same,” said Doom, and kept his counsel further.
Count Victor put his arm round Olivia's waist. The boat's prow fell off; the sail filled; she ran with a pleasant ripple through the waves, and there followed her a cry that only Doom of all the company knew was a coronach, followed by the music of Sim MacTaggart's flageolet.
It rose above the ripple of the waves, above the screaming of the birds, finally stilling the coronach, and the air it gave an utterance to was the same that had often charmed the midnight bower, failing at the last abruptly as it had always done before.
“By heavens! it is my Mary's favourite air, and that was all she knew of it,” said Doom, and his face grew white with memory and a speculation.
“Had he found the end of that air,” said Count Victor, “he had found, as he said himself, another man. But I, perhaps, had never found Olivia!”