Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbed
by the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meeting
with the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with hints of rain
on the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a storm
not far distant. Children were in the wood of Dunderave--ruddy, shy
children, gathering nuts and blackberries, with merriment haunting the
landscape as it were in a picture by Watteau or a tale of the classics,
where such figures happily move for ever and for ever in the right
golden glamour. Little elves they seemed to Count Victor as he came upon
them over an eminence, and saw them for the first time through the trees
under tall oaks and pines, among whose pillars they moved as if in fairy
cloisters, the sea behind them shining with a vivid and stinging blue.
He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to the
hazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron of
Doom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no more
hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their
innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as
he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and
played upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their
pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and
chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched
the thickets with romance.
In other circumstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victor
might have been a good man--a good man not in the common sense that
means paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand,
respecting the law, going to Mass, loyalty to the woman and to a friend,
but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has its
growth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animals
ever found him soft-handed; as for children--the _petites_--God bless
them! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to see
them playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood of
Dunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouth
language whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt an
elevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the grass above
them, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if it
were an opera.
He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ignoble little emprise of
revenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall ever
have who sits a space with childish merriment and woodland innocence. In
his case it was something more direct and tangible than the immaterial
efflux of the soul, though that too was not wanting: he saw the signal
kerchief being placed outside the window, that otherwise, reaching home
too early, he had missed.
“It is my last chance, if I leave to-morrow,” he thought. “I shall
satisfy myself as to the nocturnal visitor, the magic flautist, and the
bewildering Annapla--and probably find the mystery as simple as the egg
in the conjurer's bottle when all's ended!”
That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of his
host's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who had
promised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and the
Baron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederunt
and consent to an early retirement.
“I have something pressing to do before I go to bed myself,” he said,
restoring by that simple confession some of Count Victor's first
suspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.
He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some
unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a
house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than
for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable
dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of
things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a
reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's
sordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself that
there was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyons
shopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the steps
he proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debated
the situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candles
lasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stair
suggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above.
Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had before
him a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a great
plaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!
Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.
“Pardon!” said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he saw
his host's abashed countenance. “I fear I intrude on a masquerade. Pray,
do not mind me. It was that I thought the upper flat uninhabited, and no
one awake but myself.”
“You have me somewhat at a disadvantage,” said Doom coldly, resenting
the irony. “I'll explain afterwards.”
“Positively, there is no necessity,” replied Count Victor, with a
profound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.
There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had
seen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaid
itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly
the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score
of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all
of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host
conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for
their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his
candles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signal
he expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and he
awakened each time to find an hour was gone.
It was a night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window,
a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the
land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and
ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight
voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he
expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar
and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about
the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked
into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and
upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should
carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a
forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a
coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair--the sound
of a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels--decided him, and
he waited to confound the master of Doom.
In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon his
heart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword.
A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, but
left the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front of
his door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was not
the Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had any
reason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered each
other simultaneously,--she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put a
rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman
no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this
savage domicile.
In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her
eyes had first given him the embarrassment that kept him dumb in
her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely
ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes--the eyes of the woman
born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet
always inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise--that told him
first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm
grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet
quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the
flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter
her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the
average of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; instead
there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely
low.
“Madame; pardon! I--I--was awakened by music, and--”
Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature of
the recontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to a
bolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.
“I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame's
permission, I shall return to earth.”
His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied
noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to
gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully
understand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, not
a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count
Victor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt
that there were lines upon his face betraying him.
“I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance,” she said at
last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running
on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English
was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain
melody but adding to the charm of her accent.
Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by this
_sang froid_ where he might naturally have looked for perturbation.
“Pardon! I demand your pardon!” was all that he could say, looking at
the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the
silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze,
instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so
doing.
He had the woman there!
“Pardon!” he repeated. “It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the
signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know”--he
smiled the smile of the _flâneur_--“I did not know it was, let me say,
Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the
constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I
hope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading.”
Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled--an indescribable thing, but
a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in that
haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the
place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue
Beautreillis.
“I fear I have not intruded for the first time,” he went on, in
a different tone. “It must have been your chamber I somewhat
unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence
of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me--at least I had come to
consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here.”
“It is easily explained,” said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and
showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.
“There is positively not the necessity,” protested Count Victor,
realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.
“But you must understand that--” she went on.
Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. “The explanation is due
from me, madame: I protest,” said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look
so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that
he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but
respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through
her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now.
France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its
thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little
account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the
same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the
dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the
crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the
tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy
waters--but this--but this was Paradise!
“The explanation must be mine,” said he. “I was prying upon no amour,
but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions.”
“They were, perhaps, connected with my father,” she said, with a
divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.
“Your father!” he exclaimed, astonished that one more of his
misconceptions should be thus dispelled. “Then I have been guilty of the
unpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess.”
“A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the black-affronted woman,” said
she, “but through no fault of mine. I am in my own good father's house,
and still, in a way, a stranger in it, and that is a hard thing. But you
must not distrust my father: you will find, I think, before very long,
that all the odd affairs in this house have less to do with him than
with his daughter Olivia.”
She blushed again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitiveness
that Count Victor found perfectly entrancing.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said, wishing the while he had had a
_friseur_ at the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran his
fingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curled
above his brow,--“my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fool
and a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to your
annoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom of
proffering an adequate apology.”
He expected her to leave him then, and he had a foot retired, preparing
to re-enter his room, but there was a hesitancy in her manner that told
him she had something more to say. She bit her nether lip--the orchards
of Cammercy, he told himself, never bred a cherry a thousandth part so
rich and so inviting, even to look at in candle-light; a shy dubiety
hovered round her eyes. He waited her pleasure to speak.
“Perhaps,” said she softly, relinquishing her brave demeanour--“perhaps
it might be well that--that my father knew nothing of this meeting,
or--or--or of what led to it.”
“Mademoiselle Olivia,” said Count Victor, “I am--what do you call it?--a
somnambulist. In that condition it has sometimes been my so good fortune
to wander into the most odd and ravishing situations. But as it happens,
_helas!_ I can never recall a single incident of them when I waken in
the morning. _Ma foi!_” (he remembered that even yet his suspicions
of the Baron were unsatisfied), “I would with some pleasure become
a nocturnal conspirator myself, and I have all the necessary
qualities--romance, enterprise, and sympathy.”
“Mungo knows all,” said the lady; “Mungo will explain.”
“With infinite deference, mademoiselle, Mungo shall not be invited to do
anything of the kind.”
“But he must,” said she firmly. “It is due to myself, as well as to you,
and I shall tell him to do so.”
“Your good taste and judgment, mademoiselle, are your instructors.
Permit me.”
He took the candlestick from her hands, gravely led the way to her
chamber door, and at the threshold restored the light with an excess
of polite posturing not without its whimsicality. As she took the
candlestick she looked in his face with a twinkle of amusement in her
eyes, giving her a vivacity not hitherto betrayed.
Guessing but half the occasion of her smiles, he cried abruptly, and
not without confusion: “Ah! you were the amused observer of my farce in
wading across from the shore. _Peste!_”
“Indeed and I was!” said she, smiling all the more brightly at the scene
recalled. “Good night!”
And, more of a rogue than Count Victor had thought her, she disappeared
into her chamber, leaving him to find his way back to his own.