The remainder of the night passed without further alarm, but Count
Victor lay only on the frontiers of forgetfulness till morning, his
senses all on sentry, and the salt, wind-blown dawn found him abroad
before the rest of Doom was well awake. He met the calesh of the Lords
going back the way it had come with an outrider in a red jacket from
the stable of Argyll: it passed him on the highway so close that he saw
Elchies and Kilkerran half sleeping within as they drove away from the
scene of their dreadful duties. In a cloak of rough watchet blue he had
borrowed from his host and a hat less conspicuous than that he had come
in from Stirling, he passed, to such strangers in the locality, for some
tacksman of the countryside, or a traveller like themselves. To have
ventured into the town, however, where every one would see he was a
stranger and speedily inquire into his business there, was, as he had
been carefully apprised by Doom the night before, a risk too great to
be run without good reason. Stewart's trial had created in the country
a state of mind that made a stranger's presence there somewhat hazardous
for himself, and all the more so in the case of a foreigner, for,
rightly or wrongly, there was associated with the name of the condemned
man as art and part in the murder that of a Highland officer in the
service of the French. There had been rumours, too, of an attempted
rescue on the part of the Stewarts of Ardshiel, Achnacoin, and
Fasnacloich--all that lusty breed of the ancient train: the very numbers
of them said to be on the drove-roads with weapons from the thatch were
given in the town, and so fervently believed in that the appearance of
a stranger without any plausible account to give of himself would have
stirred up tumult.
Count Victor eluded the more obvious danger of the town, but in his
forenoon ramble stumbled into one almost as great as that he had been
instructed to avoid. He had gone through the wood of Strongara and come
suddenly upon the cavalcade that bore the doomed man to the scene of his
execution thirty or forty miles away.
The wretch had been bound upon a horse--a tall, middle-aged man in
coarse home-spun clothing, his eye defiant, but his countenance white
with the anxieties of his situation. He was surrounded by a troop of
sabres; the horses' hoofs made a great clatter upon the hard road, and
Count Victor, walking abstractedly along the river-bank, came on them
before he was aware of their proximity. As he stood to let them pass he
was touched inexpressibly by the glance the convict gave him, so charged
was it with question, hope, dread, and the appetite for some human
sympathy. He had seen that look before in men condemned--once in front
of his own rapier,--and with the utmost feeling for the unhappy wretch
he stood, when the cavalcade had gone, looking after it and conjuring
in his fancy the last terrible scene whereof that creature would be the
central figure. Thus was he standing when another horseman came upon
him suddenly, following wide in the rear of the troops--a civilian who
shared the surprise of the unexpected meeting. He had no sooner gazed
upon Count Victor than he drew up his horse confusedly and seemed to
hesitate between proceeding or retreat. Count Victor passed with a
courteous salute no less formally returned. He was struck singularly by
some sense of familiarity. He did not know the horseman who so strangely
scrutinised him as he passed, but yet the face was one not altogether
new to him. It was a face scarce friendly, too, and for his life the
Frenchman could not think of any reason for aversion.
He could no more readily have accounted for the action of the horseman
had he known that he had ridden behind the soldiers but a few hundred
yards after meeting with Count Victor when he turned off at one of
the hunting-roads with which the ducal grounds abounded, and galloped
furiously back towards the castle of Argyll. Nothing checked him till he
reached the entrance, where he flung the reins to a servant and dashed
into the turret-room where the Duke sat writing.
“Ah, Sim!” said his Grace, airily, yet with an accent of apprehension,
“you have come back sooner than I looked for: nothing wrong with the
little excursion, I hope?”
MacTaggart leaned with both hands upon the table where his master wrote.
“They're all right, so far as I went with them,” said he; “but if your
Grace in my position came upon a foreigner in the wood of Strongara--a
gentleman by the looks of him and a Frenchman by his moustachio, all
alone and looking after Sergeant Donald's company, what would your
Grace's inference be?”
Argyll, obviously, did not share much of his Chamberlain's excitement.
“There was no more than one there?” he asked, sprinkling sand upon his
finished letter. “No! Then there seems no great excuse for your extreme
perturbation, my good Sim. I'm lord of Argyll, but I'm not lord of the
king's highway, and if an honest stranger cares to take a freeman's
privilege and stand between the wind and Simon MacTaggart's
dignity--Simon MacTaggart's very touchy dignity, it would appear--who
am I that I should blame the liberty? You did not ride _ventre à terre_
from Strongara (I see a foam-fleck on your breeches) to tell me we had
a traveller come to admire our scenery? Come, come, Sim! I'll begin to
think these late eccentricities of yours, these glooms, abstractions,
errors, and anxieties and indispositions, and above all that pallid
face of yours, are due to some affair of the heart.” As he spoke Argyll
pinched his kinsman playfully on the ear, quite the good companion,
with none of the condescension that a duke might naturally display in so
doing.
MacTaggart reddened and Argyll laughed, “Ah!” he cried. “Can I have hit
it?” he went on, quizzing the Chamberlain. “See that you give me fair
warning, and I'll practise the accustomed and essential reel. Upon my
soul, I haven't danced since Lady Mary left, unless you call it so
that foolish minuet. You should have seen her Grace at St. James's last
month. Gad! she footed it like an angel; there's not a better dancer in
London town. See that your wife's a dancer, whoever she may be, Sim; let
her dance and sing and play the harpsichord or the clarsach--they are
charms that will last longer than her good looks, and will not weary you
so soon as that intellect that's so much in fashion nowadays, when every
woman listens to every clever thing you say, that she may say something
cleverer, or perhaps retail it later as her own.”
MacTaggart turned about impatiently, poked with his riding crop at the
fire, and plainly indicated that he was not in the mood for badinage.
“All that has nothing to do with my Frenchman, your Grace,” said he
bluntly.
“Oh, confound your Frenchman!” retorted the Duke, coming over, turning
up the skirts of his coat, and warming himself at the fire. “Don't
say Frenchman to me, and don't suggest any more abominable crime and
intrigue till the memory of that miserable Appin affair is off my mind.
I know what they'll say about that: I have a good notion what they're
saying already--as if I personally had a scrap of animosity to this poor
creature sent to the gibbet on Leven-side.”
“I think you should have this Frenchman arrested for inquiry: I do not
like the look of him.”
Argyll laughed. “Heavens!” he cried, “is the man gane wud? Have you
any charge against this unfortunate foreigner who has dared to shelter
himself in my woods? And if you have, do you fancy it is the old feudal
times with us still, and that I can clap him in my dungeon--if I had
such a thing--without any consultation with the common law-officers
of the land? Wake up, Sim! wake up! this is '55, and there are sundry
written laws of the State that unfortunately prevent even the Mac-Cailen
Mor snatching a man from the footpath and hanging him because he has
not the Gaelic accent and wears his hair in a different fashion from the
rest of us. Don't be a fool, cousin, don't be a fool!”
“It's as your Grace likes,” said MacTaggart. “But if this man's not in
any way concerned in the Appin affair, he may very well be one of the
French agents who are bargaining for men for the French service, and the
one thing's as unlawful as the other by the act of 'thirty-six.”
“H'm!” said Argyll, turning more grave, and shrewdly eyeing his
Chamberlain--“H'm! have you any particularly good reason to think that?”
He waited for no answer, but went on. “I give it up, MacTaggart,” said
he, with a gesture of impatience. “Gad! I cannot pretend to know half
the plots you are either in yourself or listening on the outside of,
though I get credit, I know, for planning them. All I want to know is,
have you any reason to think this part of Scotland--and incidentally
the government of this and every well-governed realm, as the libels
say--would be bettered by the examination of this man? Eh?”
MacTaggart protested the need was clamant. “On the look of the man I
would give him the jougs,” said he. “It's spy--”
“H'm!” said Argyll, then coughed discreetly over a pinch of snuff.
“Spy or agent,” said the Chamberlain, little abashed at the
interjection.
“And yet a gentleman by the look of him, said Sim MacTaggart, five
minutes syne.”
“And what's to prevent that?” asked the Chamberlain almost sharply.
“Your Grace will admit it's nothing to the point,” said he, boldly, and
smilingly, standing up, a fine figure of a man, with his head high and
his chest out. “It was the toss of a bawbee whether or not I should
apprehend him myself when I saw him, and if I had him here your Grace
would be the first to admit my discretion.”
“My Grace is a little more judicious than to treat the casual pedestrian
like a notour thief,” said Argyll; “and yet, after all, I dare say the
matter may be left to your good judgment--that is, after you have had
a word or two on the matter with Petullo, who will better be able to
advise upon the rights to the persons of suspicious characters in our
neighbourhood.”
With never a word more said MacTaggart clapped on his hat, withdrew in
an elation studiously concealed from his master, and fared at a canter
to Petullo's office in the town. He fastened the reins to the ring at
the door and entered.
The lawyer sat in a den that smelt most wickedly of mildewed vellum,
sealing-wax, tape, and all that trash that smothers the soul of man--the
appurtenances of his craft. He sat like a sallow mummy among them,
like a half-man made of tailor's patches, flanked by piles of docketed
letters and Records closed, bastioned by deed-boxes blazoned with
the indication of their offices--MacGibbon's Mortification, Dunderave
Estate, Coil's Trust, and so on; he sat with a shrieking quill among
these things, and MacTaggart entering to him felt like thanking God that
he had never been compelled to a life like this in a stinking mortuary,
with the sun outside on the windows and the clean sea and the singing
wood calling in vain. Perhaps some sense of contrast seized the writer,
too, as he looked up to see the Chamberlain entering with a pleasant,
lively air of wind behind him, and health and vigour in his step,
despite the unwonted wanness of his face. At least, in the glance
Petullo gave below his shaggy eyebrows, there was a little envy as well
as much cunning. He made a ludicrous attempt at smiling.
“Ha!” he cried, “Mr. MacTaggart! Glad to see you, Mr. MacTaggart. Sit ye
down, Mr. MacTaggart. I was just thinking about you.”
“No ill, I hope,” said the Chamberlain, refusing a seat proffered;
for anything of the law to him seemed gritty in the touch, and a
three-legged stool would, he always felt, be as unpleasant to sit upon
as a red-hot griddle.
“Te-he!” squeaked Petullo with an irritating falsetto. “You must have
your bit joke, Mr. MacTaggart. Did his Grace--did his Grace--I was
just wondering if his Grace said anything to-day about my unfortunate
accident with the compote yestreen.” He looked more cunningly than ever
at the Chamberlain.
“In his Grace's class, Mr. Petullo, and incidentally in my own,
nothing's said of a guest's gawkiness, though you might hardly believe
it for a reason that I never could make plain to you, though I know it
by instinct.”
“Oh! as to gawkiness, an accident of the like might happen to any one,”
said Petullo, irritably.
“And that's true,” confessed the Chamberlain. “But, tut! tut! Mr.
Petullo, a compote's neither here nor there to the Duke. If you had
spilt two of them it would have made no difference; there was plenty
left. Never mind the dinner, Mr. Petullo, just now, I'm in a haste.
There's a Frenchman--”
“There's a wheen of Frenchmen, seemingly,” said the writer, oracularly,
taking to the trimming of his nails with a piece of pumice-stone he kept
for the purpose, and used so constantly that they looked like talons.
“Now, what the devil do you mean?” cried Mac-Taggart.
“Go on, go on with your business,” squeaked Petullo, with an eye upon an
inner door that led to his household.
“I have his Grace's instructions to ask you about the advisability
of arresting a stranger, seemingly a Frenchman, who is at this moment
suspiciously prowling about the policies.”
“On whatna charge, Mr. MacTaggart, on whatna charge?” asked the writer,
taking a confident, even an insolent, tone, now that he was on his own
familiar ground. “Rape, arson, forgery, robbery, thigging, sorning,
pickery, murder, or high treason?”
“Clap them all together, Mr. Petullo, and just call it local
inconduciveness,” cried MacTaggart. “Simply the Duke may not care for
his society. That should be enough for the Fiscal and Long Davie the
dempster, shouldn't it?”
“H'm!” said Petullo. “It's a bit vague, Mr. MacTaggart, and I don't
think it's mentioned in Forbes's 'Institutes.' Fifteen Campbell
assessors and the baron bailie might have sent a man to the Plantations
on that dittay ten years ago, but we live in different times, Mr.
MacTaggart--different times, Mr. MacTaggart,” repeated the writer,
tee-heeing till his bent shoulders heaved under his seedy, ink-stained
surtout coat.
“Do we?” cried the Chamberlain, with a laugh. “I'm thinking ye forget
a small case we had no further gone than yesterday, when a man with
the unlucky name of Stewart--” He stopped, meaningly smiled, and made a
gesture with his fingers across his neck, at the same time giving an odd
sound with his throat.
“Oh! You're an awfu' man,” cried Petullo, with the accent of a lout. “I
wonder if you're on the same track as myself, for I'm like the Hielan'
soldier--I have a Frenchman of my own. There's one, I mean, up by there
in Doom, and coming down here to-morrow or the day after, or as soon as
I can order a lodging for him in the town.”
“Oh, hell!” cried the secretary, amazingly dumfoundered.
“There's nothing underhand about him, so far as I know, to give even his
Grace an excuse for confining him, for it seems he's a wine merchant out
of Bordeaux, one Montaiglon, come here on business, and stopped at
Doom through an attack on his horse by the same Macfarlanes who are of
interest to us for another reason, as was spoken of at his Grace's table
last night.”
“And he's coming here?” asked MacTaggart, incredulous.
“I had a call from the Baron himself to-day to tell me that.”
“Ah, well, there's no more to be said of our suspicions,” said
MacTaggart. “Not in this form, at least.” And he was preparing to go.
A skirt rustled within the inner door, and Mrs. Petullo, flushed a
little to her great becoming in spite of a curl-paper or two, and clad
in a lilac-coloured negligee of the charmingest, came into the office
with a well-acted start of surprise to find a client there.
“Oh, good morning! Mr. MacTaggart,” she exclaimed, radiantly, while her
husband scowled to himself, as he relapsed into the chair at his
desk and fumbled with his papers. “Good morning; I hope I have not
interrupted business?”
“Mr. MacTaggart was just going, my dear,” said Mr. Petullo.
A cracked bell rang within, and the Chamberlain perceived an odour of
cooking celery. Inwardly he cursed his forgetfulness, because it was
plain that the hour for his call upon the writer was ill-chosen.
“My twelve-hours is unusual sharp to-day,” said Petullo, consulting a
dumpy horologe out of his fob. “Would ye--would ye do me the honour
of joining me?” with a tone that left, but not too rudely, immediate
departure as the Chamberlain's only alternative.
“Thank you, thank you,” said MacTaggart. “I rose late to-day, and my
breakfast's little more than done with.” He made for the door, Mrs.
Petullo close in his cry and holding his eye, defying so hurried a
departure, while she kept up a chattering about the last night's party.
Her husband hesitated, but his hunger (he had the voracious appetite
of such shrivelled atomies) and a wholesome fear of being accused of
jealousy made him withdraw, leaving the office to the pair.
All MacTaggart's anger rose against madame for her machination. “You saw
me from the window,” said he; “it's a half-cooked dinner for the goodman
to-day, I'll warrant!”
She laughed a most intoxicating laugh, all charged with some sweet
velvety charm, put out her hands, and caught his. “Oh, Lord! I wish it
would choke him, Sim,” said she, fervently, then lifted up her mouth and
dropped a swooning eyelash over her passionate orbs.
“Adorable creature,” he thought: “she'll have rat-bane in his broth some
day.” He kissed her with no more fervour than if she had been a wooden
figurehead, but she was not thus to be accepted: she put an arm quickly
round his neck and pressed her passionate lips to his. Back he drew
wincing. “Oh, damnation!” he cried.
“What's the matter?” she exclaimed in wonder, and turned to assure
herself that it was not that some one spied from the inner door, for
Mac-Taggart's face had become exceeding pale.
“Nothing, nothing,” he replied; “you are--you are so ferocious.”
“Am I, Sim?” said she. “Who taught me? Oh, Sim,” she went on,
pleadingly, “be good to me. I'm sick, I'm _sick_ of life, and you don't
show you care for me a little bit. Do you love me, Sim?”
“Heavens!” he cried, “you would ask the question fifty times a-day if
you had the opportunity.”
“It would need a hundred times a-day to keep up with your changing
moods. Do you love me, Sim?” She was smiling, with the most pathetic
appeal in her face.
“You look beautiful in that gown, Kate,” said he, irrelevantly, not
looking at it at all, but out at the window, where showed the gabbarts
tossing in the bay, and the sides of the hill of Dunchuach all splashed
with gold and crimson leafage.
“Never mind my gown, Sim,” said she, stamping her foot, and pulling at
the buttons of his coat. “Once--oh, Sim, do you love me? Tell me,
tell me, tell me! Whether you do or not, say it, you used to be such a
splendid liar.”
“It was no lie,” said he curtly; then to himself: “Oh, Lord, give me
patience with this! and I have brought it on myself.”
“It _was_ no lie. Oh, Sim!” (And still she was turning wary eyes upon
the door that led to her husband's retirement.) “It _was_ no lie; you're
left neither love nor courtesy. Oh, never mind! say you love me, Sim,
whether it's true or not: that's what it's come to with me.”
“Of course I do,” said he.
“Of course what?”
“Of course I love you.” He smiled, but at heart he grimaced.
“I don't believe you,” said she, from custom waiting his protestation.
But the Duke's Chamberlain was in no mood for protestations. He looked
at her high temples, made bald by the twisted papilottes, and wondered
how he could have thought that bold shoulder beautiful.
“I'm in a great hurry, Kate,” said he. “Sorry to go, but there's my
horse at the ring to prove the hurry I'm in!”
“I know, I know; you're always in a hurry now with me: it wasn't always
so. Do you hear the brute?” Her husband's squeaky voice querulously
shouting on a servant came to them from behind.
The servant immediately after came to the door with an intimation that
Mr. Petullo desired to know where the spirit-bottle was.
“He knows very well,” said Mrs. Petullo. “Here is the key--no, I'll take
it to him myself.”
“It's not the drink he wants, but me, the pig,” said she as the servant
withdrew. “Kiss me good afternoon, Sim.”
“I wish to God it was good-bye!” thought he, as he smacked her vulgarly,
like a clown at a country fair.
She drew her hand across her mouth, and her eyes flashed indignation.
“There's something between us, Simon,” said she, in an altered tone; “it
used not to be like that.”
“Indeed it did not,” he thought bitterly, and not for the first time
he missed something in her--some spirit of simplicity, freshness,
flower-bloom, and purity that he had sought for, seen in many women, and
found elusive, as the frost finds the bloom of flowers he would begem.
Her husband shrieked again, and with mute gestures they parted.
The Chamberlain threw himself upon his horse as 'twere a mortal enemy,
dug rowel-deep in the shuddering flesh, and the hoof-beats thundered on
the causey-stones. The beast whinnied in its pain, reared, and backed to
the breast wall of the bay. He lashed it wildly over the eyes with his
whip, and they galloped up the roadway. A storm of fury possessed him;
he saw nothing, heard nothing.