Beaten back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants
rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at
least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped
out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were
swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and
the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the
warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a
merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count
Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held
no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound
silence on the shore and all along the coast--a silence the more
sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle,
his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain
falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and
trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for
that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade
faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads;
it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in
affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it
suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor scrutinised the ground
beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a
single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something
too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the
country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where
Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the
alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the
south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its
chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the
shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more
sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his
feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead.
He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere
else the desolation was pitiful--the hips glowing crimson on their
stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green
with damp and the base growths of old and mouldering situations, the
seat decayed and broken, but propped at its feet as if for recent use.
All seemed to express some poignant anguish for lost summers, happy
days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the
rain and sea saddened the moment--the rain dripping through the ragged
foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on
the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw.
He held high the lantern, and to a woman at her darkened window her
bower seemed to glow like a shell lit in the depths of troubled ocean.
He swung the light; a footstep, that he did not hear, was checked in
wonder. He came out, and instinct told him some one watched him in the
dark beyond the radiance of his lantern.
“_Qui est la?_” he cried, forgetting again the foreign country, thinking
himself sentinel in homely camps, and when he spoke a footstep sounded
in the darkness.
Some one had crossed from the mainland while he ruminated within. He
listened, with the lantern high above his head but to the right of him
for fear of a pistol-shot.
One footstep.
He advanced slowly to meet it, his fingers tremulous on his sword,
and the Baron came out of the darkness, his hands behind his back, his
shoulders bent, his visage a mingling of sadness and wonder.
“M. le Baron?” said Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer.
Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear
upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that
showed him for the moment incapable of calm utterance.
“You--you--are late,” stammered Count Victor, putting the sword behind
him and feeling his words grotesque.
“I took--I took you for a wraith--I took you for a vision,” said the
Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. “Oh, man!” said
he, “if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I
came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from
things new and thriving, and above all the castle of his Grace flaring
from foundation to finial like a torch, though murder was done this day
in the guise of justice: I came through the rain and the wet full of
bitterness to my poor black home, and find no light there where once my
father and my father's father and all the race of us knew pleasant hours
in the wildest weather. Not a light, not a lowe--” he went on, gazing
upward to the frowning walls dark glistening in the rain--“and then
the bower must out and shine to mind me--to mind me--ah, Mont-aiglon, my
pardons, my regrets! you must be finding me a melancholy host.”
“Do not mention it,” said Count Victor carelessly, though the conduct
of this marvel fairly bewildered him, and his distress seemed poorly
accounted for by his explanation. “_Ah, vieux blagueur!_” he thought,
“can it be Balhaldie again--a humbug with no heart in his breast but
an onion in his handkerchief?” And then he was ashamed of suspicions of
which a day or two ago he would have been incapable.
“My dear friends of Monday did me the honour to call in your absence,”
he said. “They have not gone more than twenty minutes.”
“What! the Macfarlanes,” cried Doom, every trace of his softer emotion
gone, but more disturbed than ever as he saw the sword for the first
time. “Well--well--well?” he inquired eagerly.
“Well, well, well?” and he gripped Count Victor by the arm and looked
him in the eyes.
“Nothing serious happened,” replied Count Victor, “except that your
domestics suffered some natural alarms.”
Doom seemed wonderously relieved. “The did not force an entrance?” said
he.
“They did their best, but failed. I pricked one slightly before I fell
back on Mungo's barricades; that and some discomfiture from Mistress
Annapla's punch-bowl completed the casualties.”
“Well? well? well?” cried Lamond, still waking something. Count Victor
only looked at him in wonder, and led the way to the door where Mungo
drew back the bars and met his master with a trembling front. A glance
of mute inquiry and intelligence passed between the servant and his
master: the Frenchman saw it and came to his own conclusions, but
nothing was said till the Baron had made a tour of investigation through
the house and come at last to join his guest in the _salle_, where the
embers of the fire were raked together on the hearth and fed with new
peat. The Count and his host sat down together, and when Mungo had gone
to prepare some food for his master, Count Victor narrated the night's
adventure. He had an excited listener--one more excited, perhaps, than
the narrative of itself might account for.
“And there is much that is beyond my poor comprehension,” continued
Count Victor, looking at him as steadfastly as good breeding would
permit.
“Eh?” said Doom, stretching fingers that trembled to the peat-flame that
stained his face like wine.
“Your servant Mungo was quite unnecessarily solicitous for my safety,
and took the trouble to put me under lock and key.”
Doom fingered the bristles of his chin in a manifest perturbation.
“He--he did that, did he?” said he, like one seeking to gain time for
further reflection. And when Count Victor waited some more sympathetic
comment, “It was--it was very stupid, very stupid of Mungo,” said he.
“Stupid!” echoed Count Victor ironically. “Ah! so it was. I should not
have said stupid myself, but it so hard, is it not, for a foreigner
to find the just word in his poor vocabulary? For a _bêtise_ much less
unpleasant I have scored a lackey's back with a scabbard. Master Mungo
had an explanation, however, though I doubted the truth of it.”
“And what was that?”
“That you would be angry if he permitted me to get into danger while I
was your guest,--an excuse more courteous than convincing.”
“He was right,” said Doom, “though I can scarcely defend the manner of
executing his trust: I was not to see that he would make a trepanning
affair of it. I'm--I'm very much grieved, Count, much grieved, I assure
you: I shall have a word or two on the matter the morn's morning with
Mungo. A stupid action! a stupid action! but you know the man by this
time--an oddity out and out.”
“A little too much so, if I may take the liberty, M. le Baron,--a little
too much so for a foreigner's peace of mind,” said Count Victor softly.
“Are you sure, M. le Baron, there are no traitors in Doom?” and he
leaned forward with his gaze on the Baron's face.
The Baron started, flushed more crimson than before, and turned an
alarmed countenance to his interrogator. “Good God!” he cried, “are you
bringing your doubts of the breed of us to my hearthstone?”
“It is absurd, perhaps,” said Count Victor, still very softly, and
watching his host as closely as he might, “but Mungo--”
“Pshaw! a good lowland heart! For all his clowning, Count, you might
trust him with your life.”
“The other servant then--the woman?”
Doom looked a trifle uneasy. “Hush!” said he, with half a glance behind
him to the door. “Not so loud. If she should hear!” he stammered: he
stopped, then smiled awkwardly. “Have ye any dread of an Evil Eye?” said
he.
“I have no dread of the devil himself, who is something more tangible,”
replied Count Victor. “You do not suggest that malevolent influence in
Mistress Annapla, do you?”
“We are very civil to her in these parts,” said Doom, “and I'm not keen
to put her powers to the test. I have seen and heard some droll things
of her.”
“That has been my own experience,” said Count Victor. “Are you sure
her honesty is on more substantial grounds than her reputation for
witchcraft? I demand your pardon for expressing these suspicions, but
I have reasons. I cannot imagine that the attack of the Macfarlanes was
connived at by your servants, though that was my notion for a little
when Mungo locked me up, for they suffered more alarm at the attack than
I did, and the reason for the attack seems obvious enough. But are you
aware that this woman who commands your confidence is in the practice
of signalling to the shore when she wishes to communicate with some one
there?”
“I think you must be mistaken,” said Doom, uneasily.
“I could swear I saw something of the kind,” said Count Victor. He
described the signal he had seen twice at her window. “Not having met
her at the time, I laid it down to some gay gillian's affair with
a lover on the mainland, but since I have seen her that idea
seem--seems--”
“Just so, I should think it did,” said the Baron: but though his words
were light, his aspect was disturbed. He paced once or twice up and down
the floor, muttered something to himself in Gaelic, and finally went to
the door, which he opened. “Mungo, Mungo!” he cried into the darkness,
and the servant appeared with the gaudy nightcap of his slumber already
on.
“Tell Annapla to come here,” said the Baron.
The servant hesitated, his lip trembled upon some objection that he did
not, however, express, and he went on his errand.
In a little the woman entered. It was not surprising that when Count
Victor, prepared by all that had gone before to meet a bright young
creature when he had gone into his chamber where she was repelling the
escalade of the enemy, had been astounded to find what he found there,
for Mistress Annapla was in truth not the stuff for amorous intrigues.
She had doubtless been handsome enough in her day, but that was long
distant; now there were but the relics of her good looks, with only her
eyes, dark, lambent, piercing, to tell of passions unconsumed. She had
eyes only for her master; Count Victor had no existence for her, and he
was all the freer to watch how she received the Baron's examination.
“Do you dry your clothes at the windows in Doom?” asked her master
quietly, with none of a master's bluntness, asking the question in
English from politeness to his guest.
She replied rapidly in Gaelic.
“For luck,” said the Baron dubiously when he had listened to a long
guttural explanation that was of course unintelligible to the Frenchman.
“That's a new freit. To keep away the witches. Now, who gave ye a notion
like that?” he went on, maintaining his English.
Another rapid explanation followed, one that seemed to satisfy the
Baron, for when it was finished he gave her permission to go.
“It's as I thought,” he explained to Count Victor. “The old body has
been troubled with moths and birds beating themselves against her window
at night when the light was in it: what must she be doing but taking it
for some more sinister visitation, and the green kerchief is supposed to
keep them away.”
“I should have fancied it might have been a permanency in that case,”
suggested Count Victor, “unless, indeed, your Highland ghosts have a
special preference for Mondays and Wednesdays.”
“Permanency!” repeated the Baron, thoughtfully. “H'm!” The suggestion
had obviously struck him as reasonable, but he baulked at any debate on
it.
“There was also the matter of the horseman,” went on Count Victor
blandly, pointing his moustache.
“Horseman?” queried the Baron.
“A horseman _sans doute_. I noticed most of your people here ride with
a preposterously short stirrup; this one rode like a gentleman cavalier.
He stopped opposite the castle this forenoon and waved his compliments
to the responsive maid.”
The effect upon the Baron was amazing. He grew livid with some feeling
repressed. It was only for a moment; the next he was for changing the
conversation, but Count Victor had still his quiver to empty.
“Touching flageolets?” said he, but there his arrow missed.
Doom only laughed.
“For that,” said he, “you must trouble Annapla or Mungo. They have a
story that the same's to be heard every night of storm, but my bed's at
the other side of the house and I never heard it;” and he brought
the conversation back to the Macfarlanes, so that Count Victor had to
relinquish his inquisition.
“The doings of to-night,” said he, “make it clear I must rid you of
my presence _tout à l'heure_. I think I shall transfer me to the town
to-morrow.”
“You can't, man,” protested Doom, though, it almost seemed, with some
reluctance. “There could be no worse time for venturing there. In the
first place, the Macfarlanes' affair is causing a stir; then I've had
no chance of speaking to Petullo about you. He was to meet me after the
court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the
castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin',
as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle,
though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been
little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been
waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat
of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will
have to be put off a day or two longer.”