The tide in his absence had come in around the rock of Doom, and he must
signal for Mungo's ferry. Long and loud he piped, but there was at first
no answer; and when at last the little servitor appeared, it was to
look who called, and then run back with a haste no way restrained by any
sense of garrison punctilio. He was not long gone, but when he came
down again to the boat his preparations for crossing took up an
unconscionable time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and then
a thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bow
unaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo,
though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality. He
seemed to be the family's friend resenting, as far as politeness might,
some inconvenience to which it was being subjected without having the
power to prevent the same.
Before they had gained the rock, dusk was on the country, brought the
sooner for a frost-fog that had been falling all afternoon. It wrapped
the woods upon the shore, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doom
itself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a place
less hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peace
it seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drab
sky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving
little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen,
flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad
sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the shore side no light
illumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in what
he fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless in
the chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance on
which Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.
Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observation
of anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenest
interest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as it
reached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo had
left open.
What had been a crêpe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. The
corridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was like
a wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a door
somewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment a
gleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately by
a hurried step coming down the stair.
At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, but
the masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.
“M. le Baron,” he concluded, “and home before me by another route,” and
he stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give passage. But
the darkness made identity impossible, and he waited the recognition
of himself. It never came. He was brushed past as by a somnambulist,
without greeting or question, though to accomplish it the other in
the narrow stairway had to rub clothes with him. Something utterly
unexpected in the apparition smote him with surprise and
apprehension. It was as if he had encountered something groping in a
mausoleum--something startling to the superstitious instinct, though not
terrific in a material way. When it passed he stood speechless on the
stair, looking down into the profound black, troubled with amazement,
full of speculation. All the suspicions that he had felt last night,
when the signal-calls rose below the turret and the door had opened
and the flageolet had disturbed his slumbers, came back to him more
sinister, more compelling than before. He listened to the declining
footfall of that silent mystery; a whisper floated upwards, a door
creaked, no more than that, and yet the effect was wildly disturbing,
even to a person of the _sang froid_ of Montaiglon.
At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood a
space on the floor, lost in thought. When he looked at his face, half
unconscious that he did so, in a little mirror on a table, he saw
revealed there no coward terrors, but assuredly alarm. He smiled at his
pallid image, tugged in Gascon manner at his moustache, and threw out
his chest; then his sense of humour came to him, and he laughed at the
folly of his perturbation. But he did not keep the mood long.
“My _sans culottes_ surely do not share the hospitality of Doom with
me in its owner's absence,” he reflected. “And yet, and yet--! I owe
Bethune something for the thrill of the experiences he has introduced me
to. Now I comprehend the affection of those weeping exiles for the
very plain and commonplace life of France they profess to think so
indifferent a country compared with this they have left behind. A week
of these ghosts would drive me to despair. To-morrow--to-morrow--M. de
Montaiglon--to-morrow you make your reluctant adieux to Doom and its
inexplicable owner, whose surprise and innuendo are altogether too
exciting for your good health.”
So he promised himself as he walked up and down the floor of his
chamber, feeling himself in a cage, yet unable to think how he was
to better his condition without the aid of the host whose mysteries
disturbed so much by the suspicions they aroused. Bethune had told him
Lamond, in spite of his politics and his comparative poverty, was on
neighbourly terms with Argyll, and would thus be in a position to put
him in touch with the castle of the Duke and the retinue there without
creating any suspicion as to the nature of his mission. It was that he
had depended on, and to no other quarter could he turn with a hope of
being put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom was
apparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, at
variance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuits
with which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesome
old manner with the sword, indulged their contestful passions, and
he presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his most
hopeless moments had never allowed for--he did not know the identity of
the man sought for, and he questioned if it could easily be established.
All these considerations determined Count Victor upon an immediate
removal from this starven castle and this suspicious host. But when
he joined Doom in the _salle_ he constrained his features to a calm
reserve, showing none of his emotions.
He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciously
loud but abstracted interest in his ramble.
“Well, Count,” said he, “ye've seen the castle of the King o' the
Hielan's, as we call him, have you? And what think ye of MacCailen's
quarters?”
Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at his
interrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessed
them charming.
A bitter smile came on the face of his host. “They might well be that,”
said he. “There's many a picking there.” And then he became garrulous
upon the tale of his house and family, that seemed to have been dogged
by misfortune for a century and a half; that had owned once many of
these lush glens, the shoulders of these steep bens, the shores of that
curving coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed off
in successive generations, lost to lust, to the gambler's folly, the
spendthrift's weakness.
“Hard, is it not?” questioned his host. “I'm the man that should have
Doom at its very best, for I could bide among my people here, and like
them, and make them like me, without a thought of rambling about the
world. 'Mildewing with a ditch between you and life' my grandfather used
to call it, when old age took him back from his gaieties abroad. Faith!
I wish I had the chance to do it better than I may. All's here I ever
wanted of life, and I have tasted it elsewhere, too. Give me my own
acres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeed
from the rise of the sun till bedtime--a short day and a happy. My
father used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point of
Strome where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in the
port down-by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood of
him. If he saw a light out there at sea--the lamp of a ship outbound--he
would stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As
for me, no ship-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star
coming up above the hill Ardno.”
“To-morrow,” said Montaiglon--“to-morrow is another day; that's my
consolation in every trial.”
“At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that,” admitted
Doom; “at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it.”
Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that sometimes
swept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back and
back at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him,
he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plotting
something? And with whom? What was the secret of that wind-blown castle,
its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the
domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he
possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what
signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning
there, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrilling
moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway;
but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom
himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless of
reading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room for
some clue to what he found nowhere else.
A chamber plain to meanness--there seemed nothing here to help him to
a solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangey and
dusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a window
only sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentious
interior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dog-eared
documents of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a
downfallen house had come about.
Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.
“Ay!” he said, “that's the ashes of Doom, all that's left of what we
burned in fiery living and hot law-pleas. We have the ash and the others
have warm hands.”
Count Victor, who had been warming his chilled fingers at the fire,
moved to the curtain and drew it back, the better again to see that
doleful cinerary urn.
His host rose hurriedly from his chair.
“Trash! trash! Only trash, and dear bought at that,” said he, seeing his
guest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness.
But the deed was done before the implied protest was attended. The
Count's movements revealed a Highland dagger concealed beneath one
of the parchments! It was a discovery of no importance in a Highland
castle, where, in spite of the proscription of weapons, there might
innocently be something so common as a dagger left; but a half-checked
cry from the Baron stirred up again all Count Victor's worst suspicions.
He looked at Doom, and saw his face was hot with some confusion, and
that his tongue stammered upon an excuse his wits were not alert enough
to make.
He stooped and picked up the weapon--an elegant instrument well adorned
with silver on the hilt and sheath; caught it at the point, and, leaning
the hilt upon his left wrist in the manner of the courtier slightly
exaggerated, and true to the delicacies of the _salle-d'armes_,
proffered it to the owner.
Doom laughed in some confusion. “Ah!” said he, lamely, “Mungo's been
at his dusting again,” and he tried to restore the easiness of the
conversation that the incident had so strangely marred.
But Montaiglon could not so speedily restore his equanimity. For the
unknown who had so unceremoniously brushed against him on the dark stair
had been attired in tartan clothes. It had been a bare knee that had
touched him on the leg; it had been a plaid-fringe that had brushed
across his face; and his knuckles had been rapped lightly by the
protuberances upon the sheath and hilt of a mountain dagger. M. le
Baron's proscription of arms seemed to have some strange exceptions,
he told himself. They were not only treated with contempt by the
Macfarlanes, but even in Doom Castle, whose owner affected to look upon
the garb of his ancestors as something well got rid of. For the life of
him, Count Victor could not disassociate the thought of that mysterious
figure on the stair, full clad in all Highland panoply against the
law, and the men--the broken men--who had shot his pony in the wood and
attempted to rob him. All the eccentricities of his host mustered before
him--his narrow state here with but one servant apparent, a mysterious
room tenanted by an invisible woman, and his coldness--surely far
from the Highland temper--to the Count's scheme of revenge upon the
fictitious Drimdarroch.
There was an awkward pause even the diplomacy of the Frenchman could not
render less uncomfortable, and the Baron fumbled with the weapon ere he
laid it down again on the table.
“By the way,” said Count Victor, now with his mind made up, “I see no
prospect of pushing my discoveries from here, and it is also unfair that
I should involve you in my adventure, that had much better be conducted
from the plain base of an inn, if such there happens to be in the town
down there.”
A look of unmistakable relief, quelled as soon as it breathed across his
face, came to the Baron. “Your will is my pleasure,” he said quickly;
“but there is at this moment no man in the world who could be more
welcome to share my humble domicile.”.
“Yet I think I could work with more certainty of a quick success from
a common lodging in the town than from here. I have heard that now and
then French fish dealers and merchants sometimes come for barter to this
coast and----”
The ghost of a smile came over Doom's face. “They could scarcely take
you for a fish merchant, M. le Count,” said he.
“At all events common fairness demands that I should adopt any means
that will obviate getting your name into the thing, and I think I shall
try the inn. Is there one?”
“There is the best in all the West Country there,” said Doom, “kept by
a gentleman of family and attainments. But it will not do for you to
go down there without some introduction. I shall have to speak of your
coming to some folk and see if it is a good time.”
“_Eh bien!_ Remember at all events that I am in affairs,” said
Montaiglon, and the thing was settled.