In a rigorous privacy of storm that lasted many days after his return,
and cut Doom wholly off from the world at large, Count Victor spent
what but for several considerations would have been--perhaps indeed they
really were--among the happiest moments of his life. It was good in
that tumultuous weather, when tempests snarled and frosts fettered the
countryside, and the sea continually wrangled round the rock of Doom, to
look out on the inclemency from windows where Olivia looked out too.
She used to come and stand beside him, timidly perhaps at first, but
by-and-by with no self-consciousness. Her sleeve would touch his,
sometimes, indeed, her shoulder must press against his arm and little
strands of her hair almost blow against his lips as in the narrow
apertures of the tower they watched the wheeling birds from the outer
ocean. For these birds she had what was little less than a passion. To
her they represented the unlimited world of liberty and endeavour; at
sight of them something stirred in her that was the gift of all the
wandering years of that old Ulysses, her grandfather, to whom the
beckoning lights of ships at sea were irresistible, and though she doted
on the glens of her nativity, she had the spirit that invests every hint
of distant places and far-off happenings with magic parts.
She seemed content, and yet not wholly happy: he could hear her
sometimes sigh, as he thought, from a mere wistfulness that had the
illimitable spaces of the sea, the peopled isles and all their mystery
for background. To many of the birds that beat and cried about the place
she gave names, investing them with histories, recounting humorously
their careers. And it was odd that however far she sent them in her
fancy--to the distant Ind, to the vexed Pole itself--with joy in their
travelling, she assumed that their greatest joy was when they found
themselves at Doom. The world was a place to fare forth in as far as you
could, only to give you the better zest for Doom on your return.
This pleased her father hugely, but it scarcely tallied with the views
of one who had fond memories of a land where sang the nightingale in its
season, and roads were traversable in the wildest winter weather; still
Count Victor was in no mood to question it.
He was, save in rare moments of unpleasant reflection, supremely happy,
thrilling to that accidental contact, paling at the narrow margins
whereby her hair escaped conferring on him a delirium. He could stand at
a window all day pretending interest in the monotonous hills and empty
sea, only that he might keep her there too and indulge himself upon
her eyes. They--so eager, deep, or busied with the matters of her
thoughts--were enough for a common happiness; a debauch of it was in the
contact of her arm.
And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if
you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding
clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that
extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this
foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her
affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been
before. Several times he was on the point of speaking on the subject.
Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower
that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude
of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not
even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the
topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.
A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone
could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his
gun was to be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island
inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly
wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly
for “her ladyship” Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla
were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant
conversation--otherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was
left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia alone. For the father
relapsed anew into his old strange melancholies, dozing over his books,
indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily
along the imprisoned coast.
That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan
entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former
recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were
clandestine; now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that
he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways
in the _breacan_ as of old. But that was not his only distress, Count
Victor was sure.
“What accounts for your father's melancholy?” he had the boldness one
day to ask Olivia.
They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented
as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he
fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden, bent
upon its slaughter.
“And do you not know the reason for that?” she asked, with her humour
promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at
the figure bent beside the fire. “What is the dearest thing to you?”
She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it
was no wonder he stammered in his reply.
“The dearest,” he repeated. “Ah! well--well--the dearest, Mademoiselle
Olivia; _ma foi!_ there are so many things.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “but only one or two are at the
heart's core.” She saw him smile at this, and reddened. “Oh, how stupid
I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a lady--if there is a
lady.”
“There _is_ a lady,” said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl
that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.
A silence followed; not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love
or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had
thought to look for it.
“I am the one,” said she at length, “who will wish you well in that; but
after her--after this--this lady--what is it that comes closest?”
“What but my country!” cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.
“To be sure!” she acquiesced, “your country! I am not wondering at that.
And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps
so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most
cruel. We are like the folks I have read of--they were the Greeks who
travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to
burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the
sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy.
'Tha-latta!'--was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in
school in Edinburgh, I cried, myself, 'Lochfinne!' and thought I heard
the tide rumbling upon this same rock. It is for that; it is because we
must be leaving here my father is sad.”
Here indeed was news
“Leaving!” said Count Victor in astonishment.
“It is so. My father has been robbed; his people have been foolish; it
is not a new thing in the Highlands of Scotland, Count Victor. You must
not be thinking him a churl to be moping and leaving you to my poor
entertainment, for it is ill to keep the pipes in tune when one is
drying tears.”
“Where will you go?” asked Count Victor, disturbed at the tidings and
the distress she so bravely struggled to conceal.
“Where? indeed!” said Olivia. “That I cannot tell you yet. But the world
is wide, and it is strange if there is any spot of it where we cannot
find some of our own Gaelic people who have been flitting for a
generation, taking the world for their pillow. What is it that shall
not come to an end? My sorrow! the story on our door down there has
been preparing me for this since ever I was a bairn. My
great-great-grandfather was the wise man and the far-seeing when he
carved it there--'Man, Behauld the End of All, Be nocht Wiser than the
Hiest. Hope in God!'” She struggled courageously with her tears that
could not wholly be restrained, and there and then he could have
gathered her into his arms. But he must keep himself in bounds and twist
the fringes of her shawl.
“Ah, Olivia,” said he, “you will die for the sight of home.”
At that she dashed her hand across her eyes and boldly faced him,
smiling.
“That would be a shameful thing in a Baron's daughter,” said she. “No,
indeed! when we must rise and go away, here is the woman who will go
bravely! We live not in glens, in this house nor in that, but in the
hearts that love us, and where my father is and friends are to be made,
I think I can be happy yet. Look at the waves there, and the snow and
the sea-birds! All these are in other places as well as here.”
“But not the same, but not the same! Here I swear I could live content
myself.”
“What!” said she, smiling, and the rogue a moment dancing in her eyes.
“No, no, Count Victor, to this you must be born like the stag in the
corrie and the seal on the rock. We are a simple people, and a poor
people--worse fortune!--poor and proud. Your world is different from
ours, and there you will have friends that think of you.”
“And you,” said he, all aglow in passion but with a face of flint, “you
are leaving those behind that love you too.”
This time he watched her narrowly; she gave no sign.
“There are the poor people in the clachan there,” said she; “some of
them will not forget me I am hoping, but that is all. We go. It is good
for us, perhaps. Something has been long troubling my father more than
the degradation of the clans and all these law pleas that Petullo has
now brought to the bitter end. He is proud, and he is what is common in
the Highlands when the heart is sore--he is silent. You must not think
it is for myself I am vexing to leave Doom Castle; it is for him. Look!
do you see the dark spot on the side of the hill yonder up at Ardno?
That is the yew-tree in the churchyard where my mother, his wife, lies;
it is no wonder that at night sometimes he goes out to look at the
hills, for the hills are over her there and over the generations of his
people in the same place. I never knew my mother, _mothruaigh!_ but he
remembers, and it is the hundred dolours (as we say) for him to part.
For me I have something of the grandfather in me, and would take the
seven bens for it, and the seven glens, and the seven mountain moors, if
it was only for the sake of the adventure, though I should always like
to think that I would come again to these places of hered-ity.”
And through all this never a hint of Simon Mac-Taggart! Could there be
any other conclusion than the joyous one--it made his heart bound!--that
that affair was at an end? And yet how should he ascertain the truth
about a matter so close upon his heart? He put his pride in his pocket
and went down that afternoon with the Chamberlain's coat in his hands.
There was a lull in the wind, and the servitor was out of doors caulking
the little boat, the argosy of poor fortunes, which had been drawn up
from the menacing tides so that its prow obtruded on the half-hearted
privacy of the lady's bower. Deer were on the shore, one sail was on the
blue of the sea, a long way off, a triumphant flash of sun lit up the
innumerable glens. A pleasant interlude of weather, and yet Mungo was in
what he called, himself, a tirravee. He was honestly becoming impatient
with this undeparting foreigner, mainly because Annapla was day by day
the more insistent that he had not come wading into Doom without boots
entirely in vain, and that her prediction was to be fulfilled.
“See! Mungo,” said the Count, “the daw, if my memory fails me not,
had his plumes pecked off him, but I seem fated to retain my borrowed
feathers until I pluck myself. Is it that you can have them at the first
opportunity restored to our connoisseur in _contes_--your friend the
Chamberlain? It comes to occur to me that the gentleman's wardrobe may
be as scanty as my own, and the absence of his coat may be the reason,
more than my unfortunate pricking with a bodkin, for his inexplicable
absence from--from--the lady's side.”
Mungo had heard of the duel, of course; it was the understanding in Doom
that all news was common property inasmuch as it was sometimes almost
the only thing to pass round.
“Humph!” said he. “It wasna' sae ill to jag a man that had a wound
already.”
“Expiscate, good Master Mungo,” said Count Victor, wondering. “What
wound already? You speak of the gentleman's susceptible heart perhaps?”
“I speak o' naethin' o' the kind, but o' the man's airm. Ye ken fine ye
gied him a push wi' your whinger that first night he cam' here wi'
his fenci-ble gang frae the Maltland and play-acted Black Andy o'
Arroquhar.”
“The devil!” cried Count Victor. “I wounded somebody, certainly, but
till now I had no notion it might be the gentleman himself. Well, let me
do him the justice to say he made rather pretty play with his weapon
on the sands, considering he was wounded. And so, honest Mungo, the
garrison was not really taken by surprise that night you found yourself
plucked out like a periwinkle from your wicket? As frankness is in
fashion, I may say that for a while I gave you credit for treason to the
house, and treason now it seems to have been, though not so black as I
thought. It was MacTaggart who asked you to open the door?”
“Wha else? A bonny like cantrip! Nae doot it was because I tauld him
Annapla's prophecy aboot a man with the bare feet. The deil's buckie! Ye
kent yersel' brawly wha it was.”
“I, Master Mungo! Faith, not I!”
Mungo looked incredulous.
“And what ails the ladyship, for she kent? I'll swear she kent the next
day, though I took guid care no' to say cheep.”
“I daresay you are mistaken there, my good Mungo.”
“Mistaken! No me! It wasna a' thegither in a tantrum o' an ordinar' kind
she broke her tryst wi' him the very nicht efter ye left for the inns
doon by. At onyrate, if she didna' ken then she kens noo, I'll warrant.”
“Not so far as I am concerned, certainly.”
Mungo looked incredulous. That any one should let go the chance of
conveying so rare a piece of gossip to persons so immediately concerned
was impossible of belief. “Na, na,” said he, shaking his head; “she has
every word o't, or her faither at least, and that's the same thing. But
shoon or nae shoon, yon's the man for my money!”
“Again he has my felicitations,” said Count Victor, with a good humour
unfailing. Indeed he could afford to be good-humoured if this were true.
So here was the explanation of Olivia's condescension, her indifference
to her lover's injury, of which her father could not fail to have
apprised her even if Mungo had been capable of a miracle and held his
tongue. The Chamberlain, then, was no longer in favour! Here was joy!
Count Victor could scarce contain himself. How many women would have
been flattered at the fierceness of devotion implied in a lover's
readiness to commit assassination out of sheer jealousy of a
supposititious rival in her affections? But Olivia--praise _le bon
Dieu!_--was not like that.
He thrust the coat into Mungo's hands and went hurriedly up to his room
to be alone with his thoughts, that he feared might show themselves
plainly in his face if he met either the lady or her father, and there
for the first time had a memory of Cecile--some odd irrelevance of a
memory--in which she figured in a masque in a Paris garden. Good God!
that he should have failed to see it before; this Cecile had been an
actress, as, he told himself, were most of her sex he had hitherto
encountered, and 'twas doubtful if he once had touched her soul. Olivia
had shown him now, in silences, in sighs, in some unusual _aura_ of
sincerity that was round her like the innocence of infancy, that what
he thought was love a year ago was but its drossy elements. Seeking the
first woman in the eyes of the second, he had found the perfect lover
there!