He woke from a dream of pressing danger and impotent flight to marvel
where he was in darkness; fancied himself at first in some wayside
inn mid-way over Scotland, and sat up suddenly with an exclamation of
assurance that he was awake to the suppositious landlord who had called,
for the sense of some sound but stilled on the second of his waking
was strong within him. He fastened upon the vague starlit space of the
little window to give him a clew to his situation. Then he remembered
Doom, and, with the window for his key, built up the puzzle of his room,
wondering at the cause of his alarm.
The wind had risen and sent a loud murmur through the trees along the
coast; the sea, in breakers again, beat on the rock till Doom throbbed.
But there was nothing in that to waken a man who had ridden two days on
coarse roads and encountered and fought with banditti. Decidedly there
was some menace in the night; danger on hard fields had given him blood
alert and unsleeping; the alarum was drumming at his breast. Stealthily
he put out his hand, and it fell as by a fiddler's instinct upon the
spot desired--the hilt of his sword. There he kept it with his breath
subdued, and the alarum severely quelled.
An owl's call sounded on the shore, extremely pensive in its note, and
natural, but unusual in the rhythm of its repetition. It might have
passed for the veritable call of the woods to an unsuspicious ear, but
Montaiglon knew it for a human signal. As if to prove it so, it was
followed by the grating of the outer door upon its hinge, and the sound
of a foot stumbling among stones.
He reflected that the tide was out in all probability, and at once the
notion followed that here were his searchers, the Macfarlanes, back in
force to revenge his impetuous injury to their comrades. But then--a
second thought almost as promptly told him in that case there should be
no door opened.
A sound of subdued voices came from the foot of the tower and died in
the garden behind or was swept elsewhere by the wind; then, through the
voice of the wave, the moan of the wind, and its whistle in vent and
cranny, came a strain of music--not the harsh uncultured pipe of Mungo
the servitor, but a more dulcet air of flute or flageolet. In those
dark savage surroundings it seemed a sound inhuman, something unreal,
something of remembrance in delirium or dream, charged for this Parisian
with a thousand recollections of fond times, gay times, passionate times
elsewhere. Doom throbbed to the waves, but the flageolet stirred in him
not so much surprise at this incongruous experience as a wave of emotion
where all his past of gaillard was crystalled in a second--many nights
of dance and song anew experienced in a mellow note or two; an old love
reincarnated in a phrase (and the woman in the dust); the evenings of
Provence lived again, and Louis's darling flute piping from the chateau
over the field and river; moons of harvest vocal with some peasant
cheer; in the south the nightingale searching to express his kinship
with the mind of man and the creatures of the copse, his rapture at the
star.
Somehow the elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its
magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in passionate
crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon--and yet it was too
short--the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains.
Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the
manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with
tears at his father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the
dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made
special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an
Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance
gave quickness to the execution.
But more haunting than all was one simple strain and brief, indeed never
wholly accomplished, as if the player sought to recollect a song forgot,
that was repeated over and over again, as though it were the motive
of the others or refrain. Sometimes Montaiglon thought the player had
despaired of concluding this bewitching melody when he changed suddenly
to another, and he had a very sorrow at his loss; again, when its
progress to him was checked by a veering current of the wind and the
flageolet rose once more with a different tune upon it, he dreaded that
the conclusion had been found in the lacuna.
He rose at last and went to the window, and tried in the wan
illumination of the heavens to detect the mysterious musician in the
garden, but that was quite impossible: too dark the night, too huge and
profound the shadows over Doom. He went to his door and opened it and
looked down the yawning stairway; only the sigh of the wind in the
gun-slits occupied the stairway, and the dark was the dark of Genesis.
And so again to bed, to lie with his weariness for long forgotten. He
found that tantalising fragment return again and again, but fated never
to be complete. It seemed, he fancied, something like a symbol of a
life--with all the qualities there, the sweetness, the affection, the
passion, the divine despair, the longing, even the valours and the
faiths to make a great accomplishment, but yet lacking the round
accomplishment. And as he waited once again for its recurrence he fell
asleep.