For some days Count Victor chafed at the dull and somewhat squalid
life of the inn. He found himself regarded coldly among strangers; the
flageolet sounded no longer in the private parlour; the Chamberlain
stayed away. And if Drimdarroch had seemed ill to find from Doom, he was
absolutely indiscoverable here. Perhaps there was less eagerness in the
search because other affairs would for ever intrude--not the Cause (that
now, to tell the truth, he somehow regarded moribund; little wonder
after eight years' inaction!) nor the poignant home-thoughts that made
his ride through Scotland melancholy, but affairs more recent, and
Olivia's eyes possessed him.
A morning had come of terrific snow, and made all the colder, too, his
sojourn in the country of MacCailen Mor. Now he looked upon mountains
white and far, phantom valleys gulping chilly winds, the sea alone with
some of its familiar aspect, yet it, too, leaden to eye and heart as it
lay in a perpetual haze between the headlands and lazily rose and fell
in the bays.
The night of the ball was to him like a reprieve. From the darkness of
those woody deeps below Dunchuach the castle gleamed with fires, and a
Highland welcome illumined the greater part of the avenue from the town
with flambeaux, in whose radiance the black pines, the huge beeches,
the waxen shrubbery round the lawns all shrouded, seemed to creep closer
round the edifice to hear the sounds of revelry and learn what charms
the human world when the melodious winds are still and the weather is
cold, and out of doors poor thickets must shiver in appalling darkness.
A gush of music met Count Victor at the threshold; dresses were
rustling, a caressing warmth sighed round him, and his host was very
genial.
“M. Montaiglon,” said his Grace in French, “you will pardon our
short notice; my good friend, M. Montaiglon, my dear; my wife, M.
Montaiglon--”
“But M. Montaiglon merely in the inns, my lord,” corrected the
Frenchman, smiling. “I should be the last to accept the honour of your
hospitality under a _nom de guerre_.”
The Duke bowed. “M. le Comte,” he said, “to be quite as candid as
yourself, I pierced your incognito even in the dark. My dear sir, a
Scots traveller named for the time being the Baron Hay once had the
privilege of sharing a glass coach with your uncle between Paris
and Dunkerque; 'tis a story that will keep. Meanwhile, as I say, M.
Montaiglon will pardon the shortness of our notice; in these wilds
one's dancing shoes are presumed to be ever airing at the fire. You must
consider these doors as open as the woods so long as your are in this
neighbourhood. I have some things I should like to show you that
you might not find wholly uninteresting--a Raphael, a Rembrandt (so
reputed), and several Venetians--not much, in faith, but regarding which
I should value your criticism--”
Some other guests arrived, his Grace's speech was broken, and Count
Victor passed on, skirting the dancers, who to his unaccustomed eyes
presented features strange yet picturesque as they moved in the puzzling
involutions of a country dance. It was a noble hall hung round with
tapestry and bossed with Highland targets, trophies of arms and the
mountain chase; from the gallery round it drooped little banners with
the devices of all those generations of great families that mingled in
the blood of MacCailen Mor.
The Frenchman looked round him for a familiar face, and saw the
Chamberlain in Highland dress in the midst of a little group of dames.
Mrs. Petullo was not one of them. She was dancing with her husband--a
pitiful spectacle, for the lawyer must be pushed through the dance as he
were a doll, with monstrous ungracefulness, and no sense of the time of
the music, his thin legs quarrelling with each other, his neighbours
all confused by his inexpert gyrations, and yet himself with a smirk of
satisfaction on his sweating countenance.
“Madame is not happy,” thought Count Victor, watching the lady who was
compelled to be a partner in these ungainly gambols.
And indeed Mrs. Petullo was far from happy, if her face betrayed her
real feelings, as she shared the ignominy of the false position into
which Petullo had compelled her. When the dance was ended she did not
take her husband's proffered arm, but walked before him to her seat,
utterly ignoring his pathetic courtesies.
This little domestic comedy only engaged Count Victor for a moment; he
felt vexed for a woman in a position for which there seemed no remedy,
and he sought distraction from his uneasy feeling by passing every man
in the room under review, and guessing which of them, if any, could
be the Drim-darroch who had brought him there from France. It was a
baffling task. For many were there with faces wholly inscrutable who
might very well have among them the secret he cherished, and yet nothing
about them to advertise the scamp who had figured so effectively
in other scenes than these. The Duke, their chief, moved now among
them--suave, graceful, affectionate, his lady on his arm, sometimes
squeezing her hand, a very boy in love!
“That's a grand picture of matrimonial felicity, Count,” said a voice at
Count Victor's ear, and he turned to find the Chamberlain beside him.
“Positively it makes me half envious, monsieur,” said Count Victor.
“A following influenced by the old feudal affections and wellnigh
worshipping; health and wealth, ambitions gratified, a name that has
sounded in camp and Court, yet a heart that has stayed at home; the
fever of youth abated, and wedded to a beautiful woman who does not
weary one, _pardieu!_ his Grace has nothing more in this world to wish
for.”
“Ay! he has most that's needed to make it a very comfortable world.
Providence is good--”
“But sometimes grudging--”
“But sometimes grudging, as you say; yet MacCailen has got everything.
When I see him and her there so content I'm wondering at my own wasted
years of bachelordom. As sure as you're there, I think the sooner I draw
in at a fire and play my flageolet to the guidwife the better for me.”
“It is a gift, this domesticity,” said Count Victor, not without an
inward twinge at the picture. “Some of us have it, some of us have not,
and no trying hard for content with one's own wife and early suppers
will avail unless one is born to it like the trick of the Sonnet. I
have been watching our good friend, your lawyer's wife, distracted over
the--over the--_balourdise_ of her husband as a dancer: he dances like a
bootmaker's sign, if you can imagine that, and I dare not approach them
till her very natural indignation has simmered down.”
The Chamberlain looked across, the hall distastefully and found Mrs.
Petullo's eyes on him. She shrugged, for his perception alone, a white
shoulder in a manner that was eloquent of many things.
“To the devil!” he muttered, yet essayed at the smile of good friendship
which was now to be their currency, and a poor exchange for the old
gold.
“Surely Monsieur MacTaggart dances?” said the Count; “I see a score of
ladies here who would give their garters for the privilege.”
“My dancing days are over,” said Sim MacTaggart, but merely as one
who repeats a formula; his eyes were roving among the women. The dark
green-and-blue tartan of the house well became him: he wore diced hose
of silk and a knife on the calf of his leg; his plaid swung from a stud
at the shoulder, and fell in voluminous and graceful folds behind him.
His eyes roved among the women, and now and then he lifted the whitest
of hands and rubbed his shaven chin.
Count Victor was a little amused at the vanity of this village hero. And
then there happened what more deeply impressed him with wonder at the
contrarieties of character here represented, for the hero brimmed with
sentimental tears!
They were caused by so simple a thing as a savage strain of music from
the Duke's piper, who strutted in the gallery fingering a melody in an
interval of the dance--a melody full of wearisome iterations in the ears
of the foreigner, who could gain nothing of fancy from the same save
that the low notes sobbed. When the piece was calling in the hall,
ringing stormily to the roof, shaking the banners, silencing the guests,
the Duke's Chamberlain laughed with some confusion in a pretence that he
was undisturbed.
“An air with a story, perhaps?” asked Count Victor.
“They are all stories,” answered this odd person, so responsive to the
yell of guttural reeds. “In that they are like our old friend Balhaldie,
whose tales, as you may remember--the old rogue!--would fill many
pages.”
“Many leaves, indeed,” said Count Victor--“preferably fig-leaves.”
“The bagpipe moves me like a weeping woman, and here, for all that, is
the most indifferent of musicians.”
“_Tenez!_ monsieur; I present my homages to the best of
flageolet-players,” said Count Victor, smiling.
“The flageolet! a poor instrument, and still--and still not without
its qualities. Here's one at least who finds it the very salve for
weariness. Playing it, I often feel in the trance of rapture. I wish to
God I could live my life upon the flute, for there I'm on the best and
cleanest terms with myself, and no backwash of penitence. Eh! listen to
me preaching!”
“There is one air I have heard of yours--so!--that somehow haunts me,”
said Count Victor; “its conclusion seemed to baffle you.”
“So it does, man, so it does! If I found the end of that, I fancy I
would find a new MacTaggart. It's--it's--it's not a run of notes I
want--indeed the air's my own, and I might make it what I chose--but
an experience or something of that sort outside my opportunities, or my
recollection.”
Count Victor's glance fell on Mrs. Petullo, but hers was not on him; she
sought the eyes of the Chamberlain.
“Madame looks your way,” he indicated, and at once the Chamberlain's
visage changed.
“She'd be better to look to her man,” he said, so roughly that the Count
once more had all his misgivings revived.
“We may not guess how bitter a prospect that may be,” said he with pity
for the creature, and he moved towards her, with the Chamberlain, of
necessity, but with some reluctance, at his heel.
Mrs. Petullo saw the lagging nature of her old love's advance; it was
all that was needed now to make her evening horrible.
“Oh!” said she, smiling, but still with other emotions than amusement or
goodwill struggling in her countenance, “I was just fancying you would
be none the waur o' a wife to look to your buttons.”
“Buttons!” repeated the Chamberlain.
“See,” she said, and lightly turned him round so that his back was
shown, with his plaid no longer concealing the absence of a button from
a skirt of his Highland jacket.
Count Victor looked, and a rush of emotions fairly overwhelmed him, for
he knew he had the missing button in his pocket.
Here was the nocturnal marauder of Doom, or the very devil was in it!
The Chamberlain laughed, but still betrayed a little confusion: Mrs.
Petullo wondered at the anger of his eyes, and a moment later launched
upon an abstracted minuet with Montaiglon.