By this time the morning was well gone; the town had wakened to the
day's affairs--a pleasant light grey reek with the acrid odour of
burning wood soaring from chimneys into a sky intensely blue; and the
roads that lay interlaced and spacious around the castle of Argyll
were--not thronged, but busy at least with labouring folk setting out
upon their duties. To them, meeting the wounded form of the Chamberlain,
the hour was tragic, and figured long at fireside stories after, acutely
memorable for years. They passed astounded or turned to follow him,
making their own affairs secondary to their interest in the state of one
who, it was obvious even to Montaiglon, was deep in their affections.
He realised that a few leagues farther away from the seat of a
Justiciary-General it might have gone ill with the man who had brought
Simon MacTaggart to this condition, for menacing looks were thrown at
him, and more than once there was a significant gesture that made plain
the animosity with which he was regarded. An attempt to escape--if such
had occurred to him--would doubtless have been attended by the most
serious consequences.
Argyll met his Chamberlain with the signs of genuine distress: it was
touching, indeed, to see his surrender to the most fraternal feeling,
and though for a while the Duke's interest in his Chamberlain left him
indifferent to him who was the cause of it, Count Victor could not
but perceive that he was himself in a position of exceeding peril. He
remembered the sinister comments of the Baron of Doom upon the hazards
of an outsider's entrance to the boar's cave, and realised for the first
time what that might mean in this country, where the unhappy wretch
from Appin, whose case had some resemblance to his own, had been
remorselessly made the victim (as the tale went) to world-old tribal
jealousies whose existence was incredible to all outside the Highland
line. In the chill morning air he stood, coatless and shivering, the
high embrasured walls lifting above him, the jabbering menials of the
castle grouped a little apart, much of the language heard savage and
incomprehensible in his ears, himself, as it were, of no significance to
any one except the law that was to manifest itself at any moment.
Last night it had been very gay in this castle, the Duke was the most
gracious of hosts; here, faith! was a vast difference.
“May I have a coat?” he asked a bystander, taking advantage of a bustle
in the midst of which the wounded man was taken into the castle. He got
the answer of a scullion.
“A coat!” exclaimed the man he addressed. “A rope's more like it.” And
so, Count Victor, shrugging his shoulders at this impertinence, was left
to suffer the air that bit him to the marrow.
The Chamberlain disposed of, and in the leech's hands, Argyll had the
Frenchman brought to his rooms, still in his shirt-sleeves. The weapon
of his offence was yet in his hand for evidence, had that been wanting,
of an act he was prepared to admit with frankness.
“Well, Monsieur Montaiglon,” said his Grace, pacing nervously up and
down the room before him, “this is a pretty matter. You have returned
to see my pictures somewhat sooner than I had looked for, and in no very
ceremonious circumstances.”
“Truly,” said the Count, with a difficult essay at meeting the man
in his own humour--“Truly, but your Grace's invitation was so
pressing--_ah! c'est grand dommage! mais--mais_--I am not, with every
consideration, in the key for badinage. M. le Duc, you behold me
exceedingly distressed at the discommoding of your household. At your
age this--”
He pulled himself up, confused a little, aware that his customary
politeness had somehow for once shamefully deserted him with no
intention on his part.
“That is to put the case with exceeding delicacy,” said the Duke. “At my
age, as you have said, my personal inconvenience is of little importance
in face of the fact that a dear friend of mine may be at death's door.
At all events there is a man, if signs mislead me not, monstrously near
death under this roof, a man well liked by all that know him, a strong
man and a brave man, and a man, in his way, of genius. He goes out, as I
say, hale and hearty, and comes back bloody in your company. You came
to this part of the world, monsieur, with the deliberate intention of
killing my Chamberlain!”
“That's as Heaven, which arranges these things without consulting us,
may have decided, my lord; on my honour, I had much preferred never to
have set eyes on your Chamberlain.”
“Come, come!” said the Duke with a high head and slapping with open hand
the table beside him--“Come, come! I am not a fool, Montaiglon--even at
my age. You deliberately sought this unfortunate man.”
“Monsieur the Duke of Argyll has my word that it was not so,” said the
Count softly.
“I fancy in that case, then, you had found him easy to avoid,” said the
Duke, who was in an ir-restrainable heat. “From the first--oh, come!
sir, let us not be beating about the bush, and let us sink all these
evasions--from the first you have designed a meeting with MacTaggart,
and your every act since you came to this country has led up to this
damned business that is likely to rob me of the bravest of servants. It
was not the winds of heaven that blew you against your will into this
part of Scotland, and brought you in contact with my friend on the very
first night of your coming here.”
“And still, M. le Duc, with infinite deference, and a coolness that is
partly due to the unpleasant fact (as you may perceive) that I have no
coat on, 'twas quite the other way, and your bravest of servants thrust
himself upon my attention that had otherwise been directed to the real
object of my being in Scotland at all.”
The Duke gave a gesture of impatience. “I am not at the heart of these
mysteries,” said he, “but--even at my age--I know a great deal more
about this than you give me credit for. If it is your whim to affect
that this wretched business was no more than a passage between
gentlemen, the result of a quarrel over cards or the like in my house--”
“Ah!” cried the Count, “there I am all to blame. Our affair ought more
properly to have opened elsewhere. In that detail your Grace has every
ground for complaint.”
“That is a mere side affair,” said the Duke, “and something else more
closely affects me. I am expected to accept it, then, that the Comte
de Mont-aiglon, travelling incognito in the unassuming _rôle_ of a
wine merchant, came here at this season simply from a passion for our
Highland scenery. I had not thought the taste for dreary mountains and
black glens had extended to the Continent.”
“At least 'twas not to quarrel with a servant I came here,” retorted
Count Victor.
“That is ill said, sir,” said his Grace. “My kinsman has ten generations
of ancestry of the best blood of Scotland and the Isles underground.”
“To that, M. le Duc, there is an obvious and ancient retort--that
therein he is like a potato plant; the best of him is buried.”
Argyll stood before the Frenchman dubious and embarrassed; vexed at the
tone of the encounter, and convinced, for reasons of his own, that in
one particular at least the foreigner prevaricated, yet impressed by
the manly front of the gentleman whose affair had brought a morning's
tragedy so close upon the heels of an evening's mirth. Here was the sort
of quandary in which he would naturally have consulted with his Duchess,
but it was no matter to wake a woman to, and she was still in her
bed-chamber.
“I assume you look for this unhappy business to be treated as an affair
of honour?” he asked at last.
“So to call it,” replied Count Victor, “though in truth, the honour, on
my word, was all on one side.”
“You are in doubtful taste to put it quite in these terms,” said the
Duke more sternly, “particularly as you are the one to come out of it so
far scathless.”
“Would M. le Duc know how his servant compelled my--my attentions?”
“Compelled your attentions! I do not like the tone of your speeches,
monsieur. Dignity--”
“_Pardieu!_ M. le Duc, would you expect a surfeit of dignity from a man
without a jacket?” said the Count, looking pathetically at his arms.
“Dignity--I mean the sense of it--would dictate a more sober carriage in
face of the terrible act you have committed. I am doing my best to find
the slightest excuse for you, because you are a stranger here, a man of
good family though engaged upon a stupendous folly, and I have before
now been in the reverence of your people. You ask me if I know what
compelled your attention (as you say) to my Chamberlain, and I will
answer you frankly that I know all that is necessary.”
At that the Count was visibly amazed. This was, indeed, to put a new
face on matters and make more regrettable his complacent surrender after
his affair on the sands.
“In that case, M. le Duc,” said he, “there is no more to be said. I
protest I am unable to comprehend your Grace's complacence towards a
rogue--even of your own household.”
Argyll rang a bell and concluded the interview.
“There has been enough of this,” he said. “I fear you do not clearly
realise all the perils of your situation. You came here--you will pardon
a man at my age insisting upon it, for I know the facts--with the set
design of challenging one who properly or improperly has aroused your
passion; you have accomplished your task, and must not consider yourself
harshly treated if you have to pay the possible penalty.”
“Pardon, M. le Duc, it is not so, always with infinite deference, and
without a coat as I have had the boldness to remark before: my task had
gone on gaily enough had your Monsieur MacTaggart not been the victim
of some inexplicable fever--unless as I sometimes suspect it were a
preposterous jealousy that made me the victim of his somewhat stupid
folly play.”
“You have accomplished your task, as I say,” proceeded Argyll, heedless
of the interruption, “and to tell the truth, the thing has been
done with an unpardonably primitive absence of form. I am perhaps an
indifferent judge of such ceremonies; at my age--as you did me the
honour to put it--that is only to be expected, but we used, when I was
younger, to follow a certain formula in inviting our friend the enemy
out to be killed. What is this hasty and clandestine encounter before
the law of the land but a deliberate attempt at murder? It would be so
even in your own country under the circumstances. M. le Comte, where
were your seconds? Your wine-selling has opened in villainously bad
circumstances, and you are in error to assume that the details of the
code may be waived even among the Highland hills.”
A servant entered.
“Take this gentleman to the fosse,” said the Duke, with the ring of
steel in his voice and his eyes snapping.
“At least there is as little form about my incarceration as about my
poor duel,” said Count Victor.
“My father would have been somewhat more summary in circumstances like
these,”, said the Duke, “and, by Heaven! the old style had its merits
too; but these are different days, though, if I were you, I fancy I'd
prefer the short shrift of Long David the dempster to the felon's cell.
Be good enough to leave your sword.”
Count Victor said never a word, but placed the weapon in a corner of the
room, made a deep _congé_, and went forth a prisoner.
In the last few minutes of the interview he had forgotten the cold,
but now when he was led into the open air he felt it in his coatless
condition more poignant than his apprehension at his position otherwise.
He shivered as he walked along the fosse, through which blew a shrewd
north wind, driving the first flakes of an approaching snowstorm. The
fosse was wide and deep, girding the four-square castle, mantled on
its outer walls by dense ivy, where a few birds twittered. The wall was
broken at intervals by the doors of what might very well serve as cells
if cells were wanted, and it was to one of these that Count Victor found
himself consigned.
“My faith, Victor, thou art a fool of the first water!” he said to
himself as he realised the ignominy of his situation. For he was in the
most dismal of dungeons, furnished as scantily as a cellar, fireless,
damp, and almost in sepulchral darkness, for what light might have
entered by a little window over the door was obscured by drifted snow.
By-and-by his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, and he concluded
that he was in what had at one time been a wine-cellar, as bottles
were racked against the back wall of his arched apartment. They were
empty--he confirmed his instinct on that point quickly enough, for
the events of the morning left him in the mood for refreshment. It was
uncomfortable all this; there was always the possibility of justice
miscarried; but at no time had he any fear of savage reprisals such as
had alarmed him when Mungo Boyd locked him up in Doom and the fictitious
broken clan cried “Loch Sloy!” in darkness. For this was not wholly the
wilds, and Argyll's manner, though stern, was that of one who desired in
all circumstances to be just.
So Count Victor sat on a box and shivered in his shirt-sleeves and
fervently wished for breakfast. The snow fell heavily now, and drifted
in the fosse and whitened the world; outside, therefore, all was silent;
there must be bustle and footsteps, but here they were unheard: it
seemed in a while that he was buried in catacombs, an illusion so
vexatious that he felt he must dispel it at all hazards.
There was but one way to do so. He stood on his box and tried to reach
the window over his door. To break the glass was easy, but when that was
done and the snow was cleared away by his hand, he could see out only
by pulling himself up with an awkward and exhausting grasp on the narrow
ledge. Thus he secured but the briefest of visions of what was outside,
and that was not a reassuring one.
Had he meditated escape from the window, he must now abandon it; for
on the other side of the ditch, cowering in the shelter of one of the
castle doors, was standing one of the two men who had placed him in the
cell, there apparently for no other purpose than to keep an eye on the
only possible means of exit from the discarded wine-cellar.
The breaking glass was unheard by the watcher; at all events he made no
movement to suggest that he had observed it, and he said nothing about
it when some time later in the forenoon he came with Count Victor's
breakfast, which was generous enough to confirm his belief that in
Argyll's hands he was at least assured of the forms of justice, though
that, in truth, was not the most consoling of prospects.
His warder was a dumb dog, a squint-eyed Cerberus with what Count Victor
for once condemned as a tribal gibberish for his language, so that he
was incapable of understanding what was said to him even if he had been
willing to converse.
“It is little good to play the guitar to an ass,” said the Frenchman,
and fell to his viands.