by Neil Munro
CHAPTER II -- THE PURSUIT
Nobody who had acquaintance with Victor de Montaiglon would callhim coward. He had fought with De Grammont, and brought a wound fromDettingen under circumstances to set him up for life in a repute forvalour, and half a score of duels were at his credit or discredit in thechronicles of Paris society.
And yet, somehow, standing there in an unknown country beside a brutecompanion wantonly struck down by a robber's shot, and the wood sostill around, and the thundering sea so unfamiliar, he felt vastlyuncomfortable, with a touch of more than physical apprehension. If theenemy would only manifest themselves to the eye and ear as well as tothe unclassed senses that inform the instinct, it would be much morecomfortable. Why did they not appear? Why did they not follow up theirassault upon his horse? Why were they lurking in the silence of thethicket, so many of them, and he alone and so obviously at their mercy?The pistols he held provided the answer.
"What a rare delicacy!" said Count Victor, applying himself to therelease of his mail from the saddle whereto it was strapped. "They wouldnot interrupt my regretful tears. But for the true elan of the trade ofrobbery, give me old Cartouche picking pockets on the Pont Neuf."
While he loosened the bag with one hand, with the other he directed atthe thicket one of the pistols that seemed of such wholesome influence.Then he slung the bag upon his shoulder and encouraged the animal to getupon its legs, but vainly, for the shot was fatal.
"Ah!" said he regretfully, "I must sacrifice my bridge and my goodcomrade. This is an affair!"
Twice--three times, he placed the pistol at the horse's head and asoften withdrew it, reluctant, a man, as all who knew him wondered at,gentle to womanliness with a brute, though in a cause against men themost bitter and sometimes cruel of opponents.
A rustle in the brake at last compelled him. "Allons!" said heimpatiently with himself, "I do no more than I should have done with mein the like case," and he pulled the trigger.
Then having deliberately charged the weapon anew, he moved off in thedirection he had been taking when the attack was made.
It was still, he knew, some distance to the castle. Half an hour beforehis rencontre with those broken gentry, now stealing in his rear withthe cunning and the bloodthirstiness of their once native wolves (andalways, remember, with the possibility of the blunderbuss for aught thathe could tell), he had, for the twentieth time since he left the port ofDysart, taken out the rude itinerary, written in ludicrous Scoto-Englishby Hugh Bethune, one time secretary to the Lord Marischal in exile, andread:--
... and so on to the Water of Leven (the brewster-wife at the howff nearLoch Lomond mouth keeps a good glass of _aqua_) then by Luss (with aneye on the Gregarach), there after a bittock to Glencroe and down uponthe House of Ardkinglas, a Hanoverian rat whom 'ware. Round the lochhead and three miles further the Castle o' the Baron. Give him mydevoirs and hopes to challenge him to a Bowl when Yon comes off whichGod kens there seems no hurry.
By that showing the castle of Baron Lamond must be within half an hour'swalk of where he now moved without show of eagerness, yet quickly nonethe less, from a danger the more alarming because the extent of it couldnot be computed.
In a little the rough path he followed bent parallel with the sea. Atide at the making licked ardently upon sand-spits strewn with ware,and at the forelands, overhung by harsh and stunted seaside shrubs, thebreakers rose tumultuous. On the sea there was utter vacancy; only afew screaming birds slanted above the wave, and the coast, curving farbefore him, gave his eye no sign at first of the castle to which he hadgot the route from M. Hugh Bethune.
Then his vision, that had been set for something more imposing, for thetowers and embrasures of a stately domicile, if not for a Chantilly, atleast for the equal of the paternal chateau in the Meuse valley, withmultitudinous chimneys and the incense of kind luxuriant hearths,suave parks, gardens, and gravelled walks, contracted with dubiety andamazement upon a dismal tower perched upon a promontory.
Revealed against the brown hills and the sombre woods of the farthercoast, it was scarcely a wonder that his eye had failed at first to findit. Here were no pomps of lord or baron; little luxuriance could prevailbehind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance aboutthose walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp, nopleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying man'soldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends and one crenelated bastionor turret betraying its sinister relation to its age, its whole aspectarrogant and unfriendly, essential of war. Caught suddenly by thevision that swept the fretted curve of the coast, it seemed blacklyto perpetuate the spirit of the land, its silence, its solitude andterrors.
These reflections darted through the mind of Count Victor as he sped,monstrously uncomfortable with the burden of the bag that bobbed on hisback, not to speak of the indignity of the office. It was not the kindof castle he had looked for, but a castle, in the narrow and squalidmeaning of a penniless refugee like Bethune, it doubtless was, the onlyone apparent on the landscape, and therefore too obviously the one hesought.
"Very well, God is good!" said Count Victor, who, to tell all andleave no shred of misunderstanding, was in some regards the frankest ofpagans, and he must be jogging on for its security.
But as he hurried, the ten broken men who had been fascinated by his tooostentatious fob and the extravagance of his embroidery, and inspiredfurthermore by a natural detestation of any foreign _duine uasail_apparently bound for the seat of MacCailen Mor, gathered boldness, andsoon he heard the thicket break again behind him.
He paused, turned sharply with the pistols in his hands. Instantlythe wood enveloped his phantom foes; a bracken or two nodded, a hazelsapling swung back and forward more freely than the wind accounted for.And at the same time there rose on the afternoon the wail of a wild fowlhigh up on the hill, answered in a sharp and querulous too-responsivenote of the same character in the wood before.
The gentleman who had twice fought _a la barriere_ felt a nameless newthrill, a shudder of the being, born of antique terrors generationsbefore his arms were quartered with those of Rochefoucauld and Modene.
It was becoming all too awkward, this affair. He broke into a more rapidwalk, then into a run, with his eyes intent upon the rude dark keep thatheld the promontory, now the one object in all the landscape that had tohis senses some aspect of human fellowship and sympathy.
The caterans were assured; _Dieu du ciel_, how they ran too! Those inadvance broke into an appalling halloo, the shout of hunters on theheels of quarry. High above the voice of the breakers it sounded savageand alarming in the ears of Count Victor, and he fairly took to flight,the valise bobbing more ludicrously than ever on his back.
It was like the man that, in spite of dreads not to be concealed fromhimself, he should be seized as he sped with a notion of the grotesquefigure he must present, carrying that improper burden. He must evenlaugh when he thought of his, austere punctilious maternal aunt, theBaronne de Chenier, and fancied her horror and disgust could she beholdher nephew disgracing the De Chenier blood by carrying his ownbaggage and outraging several centuries of devilishly fine history byrunning--positively running--from ill-armed footpads who had never wornbreeches. She would frown, her bosom would swell till her bodice wouldappear to crackle at the armpits, the seven hairs on her upper lip wouldbristle all the worse against her purpling face as she cried it wasthe little Lyons shopkeeper in his mother's grandfather that was inhis craven legs. Doubt it who will, an imminent danger will not whollydispel the sense of humour, and Montaiglon, as he ran before thefootpads, laughed softly at the Baronne.
But a short knife with a black hilt hissed past his right ear and buriedthree-fourths of its length in the grass, and so abruptly spoiled thecomedy. This was ridiculous. He stopped suddenly, turned him round aboutin a passion, and fired one of the pistols at an unfortunate robber toolate to duck among the bracken. And the marvel was that the bullet foundits home, for the aim was uncertain, and the shot meant more
for anemphatic protest than for attack.
The gled's cry rose once more, rose higher on the hill, echoed far off,and was twice repeated nearer head with a drooping melancholy cadence.Gaunt forms grew up straight among the undergrowth of trees, indifferentto the other pistol, and ran back or over to where the wounded comradelay.
"Heaven's thunder!" cried Count Victor, "I wish I had aimed morecarefully." He was appalled at the apparent tragedy of his act. Asuicidal regret and curiosity kept him standing where he fired, with thepistol still smoking in his hand, till there came from the men clusteredround the body in the brake a loud simultaneous wail unfamiliar to hisear, but unmistakable in its import. He turned and ran wildly for thetower that had no aspect of sanctuary in it; his heart drummed noisilyat his breast; his mouth parched and gaped. Upon his lips in a littledropped water; he tasted the salt of his sweating body. And then he knewweariness, great weariness, that plucked at the sinews behind his knees,and felt sore along the hips and back, the result of his days of hardriding come suddenly to the surface. Truly he was not happy.
But if he ran wearily he ran well, better at least than his pursuers,who had their own reasons for taking it more leisurely, and in a whilethere was neither sight nor sound of the enemy.
He was beginning to get some satisfaction from this, when, turninga bend of the path within two hundred yards of the castle, behold anunmistakable enemy barred his way!--an ugly, hoggish, obese man, withbare legs most grotesquely like pillars of granite, and a protuberantpaunch; but the devil must have been in his legs to carry him moreswiftly than thoroughbred limbs had borne Count Victor. He stoodsneering in the path, turning up the right sleeve of a soiled and raggedsaffron shirt with his left hand, the right being engaged most ominouslywith a sword of a fashion that might well convince the Frenchman he hadsome new methods of fence to encounter in a few minutes.
High and low looked Count Victor as he slacked his pace, seeking forsome way out of this sack, releasing as he did so the small sword fromthe tanglement of his skirts, feeling the Mechlin deucedly in his way.As he approached closer to the man barring his path he relapsed intoa walk and opened a parley in English that except for the slightest ofaccents had nothing in it of France, where he had long been the comradeof compatriots to this preposterous savage with the manners of medievalProvence when footpads lived upon Damoiselle Picoree.
"My good fellow," said he airily, as one might open with a lackey,"I protest I am in a hurry, for my presence makes itself much desiredelsewhere. I cannot comprehend why in Heaven's name so large a regimentof you should turn out to one unfortunate traveller."
The fat man fondled the brawn of his sword-arm and seemed to gloat uponthe situation.
"Come, come!" said Count Victor, affecting a cheerfulness, "my waistcoatwould scarcely adorn a man of your inches, and as for my pantaloons"--helooked at the ragged kilt--"as for my pantaloons, now on one's honour,would you care for them? They are so essentially a matter of custom."
He would have bantered on in this strain up to the very nose of theenemy, but the man in his path was utterly unresponsive to his humour.In truth he did not understand a word of the nobleman's pleasantry. Heuttered something like a war-cry, threw his bonnet off a head as bald asan egg, and smote out vigorously with his broadsword.
Count Victor fired the pistol _a bout portant_ with deliberation; theflint, in the familiar irony of fate, missed fire, and there was nothingmore to do with the treacherous weapon but to throw it in the face ofthe Highlander. It struck full; the trigger-guard gashed the jaw and themetalled butt spoiled the sight of an eye.
"This accounts for the mace in the De Chenier quartering," thought theCount whimsically. "It is obviously the weapon of the family." And hedrew the rapier forth.
A favourite, a familiar arm, as the carriage of his head made clear atany time, he knew to use it with the instinct of the eyelash, butit seemed absurdly inadequate against the broad long weapon of hisopponent, who had augmented his attack with a dirk drawn in the lefthand, and sought lustily to bring death to his opponent by point as wellas edge. A light dress rapier obviously must do its business quicklyif it was not to suffer from the flailing blow of the claymore, and yetCount Victor did not wish to increase the evil impression of his firstvisit to this country by a second homicide, even in self-defence. Hemeasured the paunched rascal with a rapid eye, and with a flick at theleft wrist disarmed him of his poignard. Furiously the Gael thrashedwith the sword, closing up too far on his opponent. Count Victor brokeground, beat an appeal that confused his adversary, lunged, and skeweredhim through the thick of the active arm.
The Highlander dropped his weapon and bawled lamentably as he tried tostaunch the copious blood; and safe from his further interference, CountVictor took to his heels again.
Where the encounter with the obese and now discomfited Gael took placewas within a hundred yards of the castle, whose basement and approachwere concealed by a growth of stunted whin. Towards the castle CountVictor rushed, still hearing the shouts in the wood behind, and as heseemed, in spite of his burden, to be gaining ground upon his pursuers,he was elate at the prospect of escape. In his gladness he threw ataunting cry behind, a hunter's greenwood challenge.
And then he came upon the edge of the sea. The sea! _Peste!_ That heshould never have thought of that! There was the castle, truly,beetling against the breakers, very cold, very arrogant upon its barrenpromontory. He was not twenty paces from its walls, and yet it might aswell have been a league away, for he was cut off from it by a naturalmoat of sea-water that swept about it in yeasty little waves. It rodelike a ship, oddly independent of aspect, self-contained, inviolable,eternally apart, for ever by nature indifferent to the mainland, where aMontaiglon was vulgarly quarrelling with _sans culottes_.
For a moment or two he stood bewildered. There was no drawbridge to thiseccentric moat; there was, on this side of the rock at least, not solittle as a boat; if Lamond ever held intercourse with the adjacent isleof Scotland he must seemingly swim. Very well; the Count de Montaiglon,guilty of many outrages against his ancestry to-day, must swim tooif that were called for. And it looked as if that were the onlyalternative. Vainly he called and whistled; no answer came from thecastle, that he might have thought a deserted ruin if a column of smokedid not rise from some of its chimneys.
It was his one stroke of good fortune that for some reason the pursuitwas no longer apparent. The dim woods behind seemed to have swallowedup sight and sound of the broken men, who, at fault, were following uptheir quarry to the castle of Mac-Cailen Mor instead of to that of BaronLamond. He had therefore time to prepare himself for his next step. Hesat on the shore and took off his elegant long boots, the quite charmingsilk stockings so unlike travel in the wilds; then looked dubiously athis limbs and at the castle. No! manifestly, an approach so frank wasnot to be thought of, and he compromised by unbuttoning the foot of hispantaloons and turning them over his knees. In any case, if one had toswim over that yeasty and alarming barrier, his clothing must get wet._A porte basse, passant courbe_. He would wade as far as he could, andif he must, swim the rest.
With the boots and the valise and the stockings and the skirts ofhis coat tucked high in his arms, the Count waded into the tide, thatchilled deliciously after the heat of his flight.
But it was ridiculous! It was the most condemnable folly! His faceburned with shame as he found himself half-way over the channel and thewaves no higher than his ankles. It was to walk through a few inches ofwater that he had nearly stripped to nature!
And a woman was laughing at him, _morbleu!_ Decidedly a woman waslaughing--a young woman, he could wager, with a monstrously musicallaugh, by St. Denys! and witnessing (though he could not see her evenhad he wished) this farce from an upper window of the tower. He stoodfor a moment irresolute, half inclined to retreat from the ridicule thatnever failed to affect him more unpleasantly than danger the most dire;his face and neck flamed; he forgot all about the full-bosomed Baronneor remembered her only to agree that nobility
demanded some dignity evenin fleeing from an enemy. But the shouts of the pursuers that had diedaway in the distance grew again in the neighbourhood, and he pocketedhis diffidence and resumed his boots, then sought the entrance to adwelling that had no hospitable portal to the shore.
Close at hand the edifice gained in austerity and dignity while it lostthe last of its scanty air of hospitality. Its walls were of a roughrubble of granite and whinstone, grown upon at the upper storeyswith grasses and weeds wafted upon the ledges by the winds that blowindifferent, bringing the green messages of peace from God. A fortalicedark and square-built, flanked to the southern corner by a round turret,lit by few windows, and these but tiny and suspicious, it was as Scotsand arrogant as the thistle that had pricked Count Victor's feet whenfirst he set foot upon the islet.
A low wall surrounded a patch of garden-ground to the rear, one cornerof it grotesquely adorned with a bower all bedraggled with rains, yetwith the red berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage likegrapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door.Its arch, ponderous, deep-moulded, hung a scowling eyebrow over theblack and studded oak, and over all was an escutcheon with a blazon ofhands fess-wise and castles embattled and the legend--
"Doom
Man behauld the end of All. Be nocht Wiser than the Priest. Hope in God"
He stood on tiptoe to read the more easily the time-blurred characters,his baggage at his feet, his fingers pressed against the door. Some ofthe words he could not decipher nor comprehend, but the first was plainto his understanding.
"Doom!" said he airily and half aloud. "Doom! _Quelle felicite!_ It isan omen."
Then he rapped lightly on the oak with the pommel of his sword.