A solemn game indeed, for the Baron was a man of a sobriety
unaccountable to Montaiglon, who, from what he knew of Macdonnel of
Barisdel, Mac-leod, Balhaldie, and the others of the Gaelic gang in
Paris, had looked for a roysterer in Doom. It was a man with strange
melancholies he found there, with a ludicrous decorum for a person of
his condition, rising regularly on the hour, it seemed, and retiring
early to his chamber like a peasant, keeping no company with the
neighbouring lairds because he could not even pretend to emulate their
state, passing his days among a score of books in English, some (as the
Sieur de Guille) in French, and a Bedel Bible in the Irish letter,
and as often walking aimlessly about the shore looking ardently at the
hills, and rehearsing to himself native rhymes that ever account
native women the dearest and the same hills the most beautiful in God's
creation. He was the last man to look to for aid in an enterprise like
Montaiglon's: if he had an interest in the exploit it seemed it was only
to discourage the same, and an hour or two of his company taught the
Count he must hunt his spy unaided.
But the hunting of the spy, in the odd irrelevance or inconsistency of
nature, was that day at least an enterprise altogether absent from
his thoughts. He had been diverted from the object of his journey to
Scotland by just such a hint at romance as never failed to fascinate a
Montaiglon, and he must be puzzling himself about the dulcet singer and
her share in the clandestine midnight meeting. When he had finished his
game with his host, and the latter had pleaded business in the burgh as
an excuse for his absence in the afternoon, Count Victor went round Doom
on every side trying to read its mystery. While it was a house whose
very mortar must be drenched with tradition, whose every window had
looked upon histories innumerable worth retelling, nothing was revealed
of the matter in hand.
Many rooms of it were obviously unoccupied, for in the domestic routine
of the Baron and of Mungo and the lady of song there were two storeys
utterly unoccupied, and even in the flats habited there were seemingly
chambers vacant, at least ever unopened and forlorn. Count Victor
realised, as he looked at the frowning and taciturn walls, that he
might be in Doom a twelvemonth and have no chance to learn from that
abstracted scholar, its owner, one-half of its interior economy.
From the ground he could get no clear view of the woman's window: that
he discovered early, for it was in the woman he sought the key to all
Doom's little mystery. He must, to command the window, climb to his own
chamber in the tower, and even then it was not a full front view he had,
but a foreshortened glance at the side of it and the signal, if any more
signalling there might be. He never entered that room without a glance
along the sun-lit walls; he never passed the mouth of that corridor on
the half landing where his candle had blown out without as curious a
scrutiny as good-breeding might permit. And nothing was disclosed.
Mungo pervaded the place--Mungo toiling in the outhouses at tasks the
most menial, feeding the half-dozen moulting poultry, digging potatoes
in the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairs
with backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; and
in the _salle_ the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholy
by rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking with
pensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon his
knee--that was Doom as Count Victor was permitted to know it.
He began at last to doubt his senses, and half believe that what he had
heard on the night of his arrival had been some chimera, a dream of a
wearied and imperilled man in unaccustomed surroundings.
Mungo saw him walk with poorly concealed curiosity about the outside of
the stronghold, and smiled to himself as one who knows the reason for
a gentleman's prying. Montaiglon caught that smile once: his chagrin at
its irony was blended with a pleasing delusion that the frank and genial
domestic might proffer a solution without indelicate questioning. But he
was soon undeceived: the discreet retainer knew but three things in this
world--the grandeur of war, the ancient splendour of the house of Doom,
and the excellent art of absent-mindedness. When it came to the contents
of Doom, Mungo Boyd was an oyster.
“It must have been a place of some importance in its day,” said Count
Victor, gazing up at the towering walls and the broken embrasures.
“And what is't yet?” demanded Mungo, jealously, with no recollection
that a moment ago he had been mourning its decline.
“_Eh bien!_ It is quite charming, such of it as I have had the honour to
see; still, when the upper stages were habitable------” and Count
Victor mentally cursed his luck that he must fence with a blunt-witted
scullion.
“Oh, ay! I'll alio' I've seen it no' sae empty, if that's what ye mean;
but if it's no' jist Dumbarton or Dunedin, it's still auld bauld Doom,
and an ill deevil to crack, as the laddie said that found the nutmeg.”
“But surely,” conceded Montaiglon, “and yet, and yet--have you ever
heard of Jericho, M. Boyd? Its capitulation was due to so simple a thing
as the playing of a trumpet or two.”
“I ken naething aboot trumpets,” said Mungo curtly, distinguishing some
_arrière pensée_ in the interrogator.
“_Fi donc!_ and you so much the old _sabreur!_ Perhaps your people
marched to the flageolet--a seductive instrument, I assure you.”
The little man betrayed confusion. “Annapla thrieps there's a ghaistly
flageolet aboot Doom,” said he, “but it'll hae to toil away lang or the
wa's o' oor Jericho fa',--they're seeven feet thick.”
“He plays divinely, this ghostly flageoleteer, and knows his Handel to a
demi-semi-quaver,” said Count Victor coolly.
“O Lord! lugs! I told them that!” muttered Mungo.
“Pardon!”
“Naething; we're a' idiots noo and then, and--and I maun awa' in.”
So incontinently he parted from Count Victor, who, to pass the
afternoon, went walking on the mainland highway. He walked to the south
through the little hamlet he and Doom had visited earlier in the day;
and as the beauty of the scenery allured him increasingly the farther
he went, he found himself at last on a horn of the great bay where the
Duke's seat lay sheltered below its hilly ramparts. As he had walked to
this place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea was
now a fleet of fishing-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting out
upon their evening travail--a heartening spectacle; and that on either
side of him--once the squalid huts of Doom were behind--was a more
dainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was not
wholly unprepared for the noble view revealed when he turned the point
of land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.
But yet the sight somewhat stunned. In all his notions of Drimdarroch's
habitation, since he had seen the poverty of Doom, he had taken his idea
from the baron's faded splendour, and had ludicrously underestimated
the importance of Argyll's court and the difficulty of finding his man.
Instead of a bleak bare country-side, with the ducal seat a mean
tower in the midst of it, he saw a wide expanse of thickly-wooded and
inhabitable country speckled for miles with comfortable dwellings, the
castle itself a high embattled structure, clustered round by a town of
some dimensions, and at its foot a harbour, where masts were numerous
and smoke rose up in clouds.
Here was, plainly, a different society from Doom; here was something
of what the exiled chiefs had bragged of in their cups. The Baron had
suggested no more than a dozen of cadets about the place. _Grand Dieu!_
there must be a regiment in and about this haughty palace, with its
black and yellow banner streaming in the wind, and to seek Drimdarroch
there and round that busy neighbourhood seemed a task quite hopeless.
For long he stood on the nose of land, gazing with a thousand
speculations at where probably lay his prey; and when he returned to
the castle of Doom it looked all the more savage and inhospitable in
contrast with the lordly domicile he had seen. What befell him there on
his return was so odd and unexpected that it clean swept his mind again
of every interest in the spy.