Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in
the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.
Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered
front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at
a single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other
evidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom.
“M. Bethune's bowl,” he said to himself, “is not likely to be brimming
over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much
of the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry
again for a louis!--Glengarry _sans feu ni lieu_, but always the most
punctilious when most nearly penniless.”
Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; then
reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously bare
the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, and
sheathed the steel.
A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently
just inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain
clanked. But something informed the Count Victor that he was being
observed, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss
was missing about the height of his head and that through the hole an
eye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with
a hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eye
apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count
Victor saw its owner fully revealed.
A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well
as humour. A domestic--a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count
Victor could not resist smiling back to it.
And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold,
with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or
thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at
the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He
put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a
military salute.
“Doom?” inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.
“Jist that,” answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile
puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled
brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked
of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port
of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again
for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to
each other on the quays.
“Is your master at home?” he asked.
“At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken,” said
the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural
geniality and burlesque importance, “It's the auld styles aboot Doom,
sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the
Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously
before the like o' me could say.”
“My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I--”
“Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon,” cried the little man with a
salute more profound than before. “We're prood to see you, and hoo are
they a' in France?”
“Tolerably well, I thank you,” said Count Victor, amused at this
grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.
Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing
to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag.
With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time
of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared his
shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.
“This way, your honour,” said he. “Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for
it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and
ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's
droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot
the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi'
a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a
wasp's byke.”
The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut
of itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it
borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odour
of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was to
be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shell
that is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasant
anticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterly
erroneous, mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behind
the little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner.
The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance was
held half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein were
surprise and curiosity.
“The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France,” announced Mungo, stepping aside
still with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing by the door
to give dignity to the introduction and the entrance.
The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servant
when he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller cocked
hat in one hand and fondling the upturned moustache with the other;
something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly dismissed
the man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he turned a
questioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing him one of the
few chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms.
“You are welcome, sir,” he said simply in a literal rendering of his
native Gaelic phrase; “take your breath. And you will have refreshment?”
Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. “It is the custom
of the country,” said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling among
glasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunity
of settling down to his new surroundings--a room ill-furnished as a
monk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and
one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in
massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor
took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the
colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who
had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games
of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typical
Highland stronghold.
The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire
of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it
was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and
Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his
head slightly to see what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds.
And the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folio
of arms, “_Les Arts de l'Homme d'Epée; ou, Le Dictionnaire du
Gentilhomme_,” by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place,
but apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described its
master as “ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his
déjeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug.” A poor Baron
(of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken
too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though
droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still
being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the
right side, a reader of the _beau langage_, and a student of the lore of
_arme blanche_--come, here was luck!
And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle of
quaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners and
two glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams upon
the table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the book
of arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the native
tartan of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat and
breeches of some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more of
the look of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a man
at least twenty years the senior of his visitor--a handsome man of his
kind, dark, deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, but
seemingly, to the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of one
unpardonable weakness in a gentleman--a shame of his obvious penury.
“I have permitted myself, M. le Baron, to interrupt you on the counsel
of a common friend,” said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to a
situation somewhat droll.
“After the goblet, after the goblet,” said Lamond softly, himself but
sipping at the rim of his glass. “It is the custom of the country--one
of the few that's like to be left to us before long.”
“_À la santé de la bonne cause!_” said the Count politely, choking upon
the fiery liquor and putting down the glass with an apology.
“I am come from France--from Saint Germains,” he said. “You may have
heard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon.”
The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion.
“Do you tell me, now?” said he. “Then you are the more welcome. I wish
I could say so in your own language--that is, so far as ease goes, known
to me only in letters. From Saint Germains--” making a step or two up
and down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing.
“H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of the
Highland gentry about the place.”
“There is one Bethune--Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron,” replied
Count Victor meaningly. “Knowing that I was coming to this part of the
world, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardly
circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me
your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came
across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast
with but one name of a friend, _pardieu_, to make the strange cliffs
cheerful.”
“You are very good,” said the Baron simply, with half a bow. “And Hugh
Bethune, now--well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old
friend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!”--a strange wistfulness came
to the Baron's utterance--“Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has
the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very
far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail.”
“I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it
at a _bal masque._”
“So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit.”
Count Victor smiled.
“It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with less
dignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit,
M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates.”
“Ay, man!” said the Baron, heedless of the irony, “and Hugh wears the
tartan?”
“Only in the waistcoat,” repeated Count Victor, complacently looking at
his own scallops.
“Even that!” said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. And
then he added hurriedly, “Not that the tartan's anything wonderful.
It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another.
There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks,
says I--the douce, honest breeks----”
“Unless it be the petticoats,” murmured the Count, smiling, and his
fingers went to the pointing of his moustache.
“Nothing like the breeks. The philabeg was aye telling your parentage in
every line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there but
any drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family of
caterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should be
proscribed, but what does it matter?”
“The tartan is forbidden?” guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled.
Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes. He turned to fumble
noisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard.
“I thought that was widely enough known,” said he. “Put down by the law,
and perhaps a good business too. _Diaouil!_” He came back to the table
with this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film of
the peat-fire. “There was a story in every line,” said he, “a history in
every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could
never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's
in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but _crotal_-colour--the old
stuff stained with lichen from the rock.”
“Ah, what damage!” said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. “But there
are some who wear it yet?”
The Baron started slightly. “Sir?” he questioned, without taking his
eyes from the embers.
“The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must
have something of an air of impertinence,” said Count Victor briskly,
unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; “but the
cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently
not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and _sans
culottes_ too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain
of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel
to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said
about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings.
I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an
oyster-man with my bag on my back.”
“Good God!” cried the Baron. “I forgot the tide. Could you not have
whistled?”
“Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me
would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to be
ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. _Mon Dieu!_ but
I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first
introduction to your tartan among its own mountains.”
“It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some
of the king's soldiers,” suggested the Baron.
Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. “I think I know a red-coat when I
see one,” said he. “These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's
call for signal too.”
“Are you sure?” cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an
unbelieving tone.
“My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the
feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner
of introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to be
circumspect; is it not so?”
As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had tried
to cloak--by a scarcely perceptible tremour of the hand that drummed the
table, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. He
saw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to a
careless laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points,
drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically saluted
and lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease.
The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told
as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only
some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome
tastes and talents.
“Still I'm a little in the dark,” he said when the point dropped and
Count Victor recovered.
“Pardon,” said his guest. “I am vexed at what you may perhaps look on as
a trifle. The ruffians attacked me a mile or two farther up the coast,
shot my horse below me, and chased me to the very edge of your moat. I
made a feint to shoot one with my pistol, and came closer on the gold
than I had intended.”
“The Macfarlanes!” cried Doom, with every sign of uneasiness. “It's a
pity, it's a pity; not that a man more or less of that crew makes any
difference, but the affair might call for more attention to this place
and your presence here than might be altogether wholesome for you or
me.”
He heard the story in more detail, and when Count Victor had finished,
ran into an adjoining room to survey the coast from a window there. He
came back with a less troubled vision.
“At least they're gone now,” said he in a voice that still had some
perplexity. “I wish I knew who it was you struck. Would it be Black Andy
of Arroquhar now? If it's Andy, the gang will be crying 'Loch Sloy!'
about the house in a couple of nights; if it was a common man of the
tribe, there might be no more about it, for we're too close on the
Duke's gallows to be meddled with noisily; that's the first advantage I
ever found in my neighbourhood.”
“He was a man of a long habit of body,” said Count Victor, “and he fell
with a grunt.”
“Then it was not Andy. Andy is like a hogshead--a blob of creesh with a
turnip on the top--and he would fall with a curse.”
“Name of a pipe! I know him; he debated the last few yards of the way
with me, and I gave him De Chenier's mace in the jaw.”
“Sir?”
“I put him slightly out of countenance with the butt and trigger-guard
of my pistol. Again I must apologise, dear Baron, for so unceremonious
and ill-tempered an approach to your hospitality. You will confess it is
a sort of country the foibles of whose people one has to grow accustomed
to, and Bethune gave me no guidance for such an emergency as banditti on
the fringe of Argyll's notoriously humdrum Court.”
“Odd!” repeated Doom. “Will you step this way?” He led Count Victor to
the window that commanded the coast, and their heads together filled the
narrow space as they looked out. It was a wondrous afternoon. The sun
swung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed to
the gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood and
heather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him,
the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land,
the abode of seraphim and the sun's eternal smile.
“God is good!” said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion.
“I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradise
with open doors.” Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the
wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that
glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch
upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm.
“Ah!” he said airily, “there is civilisation in the land after all.”
“Plenty of law at least,” said the Baron. “Law of its kind--MacCailen
law. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-General
of the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pit
and gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but his
Grace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up his
dule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It's
a fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as the
saying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France,
that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,'
though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grand
country out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that tree
there and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'm
at my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat.”
He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondness
that surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo.
In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in his
military manner.
“Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?” asked the master indulgently.
“Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided for
voluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane's
on the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry.
There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oors
syne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-to
wdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies.”
They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor.
“I regret the what-do-you-call-it?--the stoved howtowdy,” said he,
laughing, “more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveys
to me.”
“There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate the
bagpipes,” said Mungo.
“There's waur nor howtowdy. And oh! I forgot the het victual, there's
jugged hare.”
“Is the hare ready?” asked the Baron suspiciously.
“It's no jist a'thegether what ye micht ca' ready,” answered Mungo
without hesitation; “but it can be here het in nae time, and micht agree
wi' the Count better nor the cauld fowl.”
“Tell Annapla to do the best she can,” broke in the Baron on his
servant's cheerful garrulity; and Mungo with another salute disappeared.
“How do your women-folk like the seclusion of Doom?” asked Count Victor,
to make conversation while the refection was in preparation. “With the
sea about you so, and the gang of my marauding obese friend in the wood
behind, I should think you had little difficulty in keeping them under
your eye.”
The Baron was obviously confused. “Mungo's quite enough to keep his eye
on Annapla,” said he. “He has the heart and fancy to command a garrison;
there's a drum forever beating in his head, a whistle aye fifing in his
lug, and he will amuse you with his conceits of soldiering ancient and
modern, a trade he thinks the more of because Heaven made him so unfit
to become 'prentice to it. Good Mungo! There have been worse men; indeed
what need I grudge admitting there have been few better? He has seen
this place more bien than it is to-day in my father's time, and in
my own too before the law-pleas ate us up; you will excuse his Scots
freedom of speech, Count, he--”
A shot rang outside in some shrubbery upon the mainland, suddenly
putting an end to Doom's conversation. Count Victor, sure that the
Macfarlanes were there again, ran to the window and looked out, while
his host in the rear bit his lip with every sign of annoyance. As
Montaiglon looked he saw Mungo emerge from the shrubbery with a rabbit
in his hand and push off hurriedly in a little boat, which apparently
was in use for communication with the shore under such circumstances.
“And now,” said the Count, without comment upon what he had seen, “I
think, with your kind permission, I shall change my boots before eating.
“There's plenty of time for that, I jalouse,” said Doom, smiling
somewhat guiltily, and he showed his guest to a room in the turret. It
was up a flight of corkscrew stairs, and lit with singular poverty by an
orifice more of the nature of a porthole for a piece than a window, and
this port or window, well out in the angle of the turret, commanded a
view of the southward wall or curtain of the castle.
Montaiglon, left to himself, opened the bag that Mungo had placed in
readiness for him in what was evidently the guest-room of the castle,
transformed the travelling half of himself into something that was more
in conformity with the gay nature of his upper costume, complacently
surveyed the result when finished, and hummed a _chanson_ of Pierre
Gringoire's, altogether unremembering the encounter in the wood, the
dead robber, and the stern nature of his embassy here so far from
France.
He bent to close the valise, and with a start abruptly concluded his
song at the sight of a miniature with the portrait of a woman looking at
him from the bottom of the bag.
“_Mort de ma vie!_ what a fool I am; what a forgetful _vengeur_, to be
chanting Gringoire in the house of Doom and my quarry still to hunt!”
His voice had of a sudden gained a sterner accent; the pleasantness
of his aspect became clouded by a frown. Looking round the constricted
room, and realising how like a prison-cell it was compared with what
he had expected, he felt oppressed as with the want of air. He sought
vainly about the window for latch or hinge to open it, and as he did so
glanced along the castle wall painted yellow by the declining sun. He
noticed idly that some one was putting out upon the sill of a window on
a lower stage what might have been a green kerchief had not the richness
of its fabric and design suggested more a pennon or banneret. It was
carefully placed by a woman's hands--the woman herself unseen. The
incident recalled an old exploit of his own in Marney, and a flood of
humorous memories of amorous intrigue.
“Mademoiselle Annapla,” said he whimsically, “has a lover, and here's
his signal. The Baron's daughter? The Baron's niece? The Baron's ward?
Or merely the Baron's domestic? M. Bethune's document suffers infernally
from the fault of being too curt. He might at least have indicated the
fair recluse.”