by Neil Munro
CHAPTER III -- BARON OF DOOM
Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose inthe Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.
Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-batteredfront, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but ata single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and otherevidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom.
"M. Bethune's bowl," he said to himself, "is not likely to be brimmingover if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too muchof the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarryagain for a louis!--Glengarry _sans feu ni lieu_, but always the mostpunctilious when most nearly penniless."
Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; thenreddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously barethe weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, andsheathed the steel.
A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparentlyjust inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chainclanked. But something informed the Count Victor that he was beingobserved, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-bosswas missing about the height of his head and that through the hole aneye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment witha hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eyeapparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, CountVictor saw its owner fully revealed.
A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as wellas humour. A domestic--a menial eye too, but for the life of him CountVictor could not resist smiling back to it.
And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold,with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years orthereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy atthe cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. Heput his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave amilitary salute.
"Doom?" inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.
"Jist that," answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smilepuckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckledbrogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smackedof Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the portof Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing againfor the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying toeach other on the quays.
"Is your master at home?" he asked.
"At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken," saidthe servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of naturalgeniality and burlesque importance, "It's the auld styles aboot Doom,sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether theBaron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulouslybefore the like o' me could say."
"My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I--"
"Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon," cried the little man with asalute more profound than before. "We're prood to see you, and hoo arethey a' in France?"
"Tolerably well, I thank you," said Count Victor, amused at thisgrotesque combination of military form and familiarity.
Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standingto look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag.With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical timeof a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared hisshoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.
"This way, your honour," said he. "Ye'll paurdon my discretion, forit's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms andceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it'sdroll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withootthe kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi'a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in awasp's byke."
The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shutof itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what itborrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odourof burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was tobe heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shellthat is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasantanticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterlyerroneous, mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behindthe little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner.
The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance washeld half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein weresurprise and curiosity.
"The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France," announced Mungo, stepping asidestill with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing by the doorto give dignity to the introduction and the entrance.
The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servantwhen he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller cockedhat in one hand and fondling the upturned moustache with the other;something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly dismissedthe man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he turned aquestioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing him one of thefew chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms.
"You are welcome, sir," he said simply in a literal rendering of hisnative Gaelic phrase; "take your breath. And you will have refreshment?"
Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. "It is the customof the country," said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling amongglasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunityof settling down to his new surroundings--a room ill-furnished as amonk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea andone along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep inmassive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victortook all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash thecolossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds whohad implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many gamesof piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typicalHighland stronghold.
The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fireof peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and itwas characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, andVillon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt hishead slightly to see what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds.And the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folioof arms, "_Les Arts de l'Homme d'Epee; ou, Le Dictionnaire duGentilhomme_," by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place,but apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described itsmaster as "ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to hisdejeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron(of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spokentoo, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance thoughdroll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass stillbeing fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on theright side, a reader of the _beau langage_, and a student of the lore of_arme blanche_--come, here was luck!
And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle ofquaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners andtwo glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams uponthe table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the bookof arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the nativetartan of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat andbreeches of some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more ofthe look of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a manat least twenty years the senior of his visitor--a handsome man of hiskind, dark, deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, butseemingly, to the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of oneunpardonable weakness in a gentleman--a shame of his obvious penury.
"I have permitted myself, M. le B
aron, to interrupt you on the counselof a common friend," said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to asituation somewhat droll.
"After the goblet, after the goblet," said Lamond softly, himself butsipping at the rim of his glass. "It is the custom of the country--oneof the few that's like to be left to us before long."
"_A la sante de la bonne cause!_" said the Count politely, choking uponthe fiery liquor and putting down the glass with an apology.
"I am come from France--from Saint Germains," he said. "You may haveheard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon."
The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion.
"Do you tell me, now?" said he. "Then you are the more welcome. I wishI could say so in your own language--that is, so far as ease goes, knownto me only in letters. From Saint Germains--" making a step or two upand down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing."H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of theHighland gentry about the place."
"There is one Bethune--Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron," repliedCount Victor meaningly. "Knowing that I was coming to this part of theworld, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardlycircumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give meyour direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I cameacross the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coastwith but one name of a friend, _pardieu_, to make the strange cliffscheerful."
"You are very good," said the Baron simply, with half a bow. "And HughBethune, now--well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his oldfriend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!"--a strange wistfulness cameto the Baron's utterance--"Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he hasthe notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a veryfar-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail."
"I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of itat a _bal masque._"
"So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit."
Count Victor smiled.
"It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with lessdignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit,M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates."
"Ay, man!" said the Baron, heedless of the irony, "and Hugh wears thetartan?"
"Only in the waistcoat," repeated Count Victor, complacently looking athis own scallops.
"Even that!" said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. Andthen he added hurriedly, "Not that the tartan's anything wonderful.It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another.There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks,says I--the douce, honest breeks----"
"Unless it be the petticoats," murmured the Count, smiling, and hisfingers went to the pointing of his moustache.
"Nothing like the breeks. The philabeg was aye telling your parentage inevery line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there butany drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family ofcaterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should beproscribed, but what does it matter?"
"The tartan is forbidden?" guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled.
Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes. He turned to fumblenoisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard.
"I thought that was widely enough known," said he. "Put down by the law,and perhaps a good business too. _Diaouil!_" He came back to the tablewith this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film ofthe peat-fire. "There was a story in every line," said he, "a history inevery check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we couldnever see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan'sin the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but _crotal_-colour--the oldstuff stained with lichen from the rock."
"Ah, what damage!" said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. "But thereare some who wear it yet?"
The Baron started slightly. "Sir?" he questioned, without taking hiseyes from the embers.
"The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality musthave something of an air of impertinence," said Count Victor briskly,unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; "but thecause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparentlynot affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and _sansculottes_ too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certainof either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidelto take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is saidabout stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings.I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like anoyster-man with my bag on my back."
"Good God!" cried the Baron. "I forgot the tide. Could you not havewhistled?"
"Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind mewould have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to beineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. _Mon Dieu!_ butI believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my firstintroduction to your tartan among its own mountains."
"It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been someof the king's soldiers," suggested the Baron.
Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. "I think I know a red-coat when Isee one," said he. "These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk'scall for signal too."
"Are you sure?" cried the Baron, standing up, and still with anunbelieving tone.
"My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at thefeathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a mannerof introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to becircumspect; is it not so?"
As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had triedto cloak--by a scarcely perceptible tremour of the hand that drummed thetable, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. Hesaw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to acareless laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points,drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically salutedand lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease.
The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been toldas he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not onlysome eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesometastes and talents.
"Still I'm a little in the dark," he said when the point dropped andCount Victor recovered.
"Pardon," said his guest. "I am vexed at what you may perhaps look on asa trifle. The ruffians attacked me a mile or two farther up the coast,shot my horse below me, and chased me to the very edge of your moat. Imade a feint to shoot one with my pistol, and came closer on the goldthan I had intended."
"The Macfarlanes!" cried Doom, with every sign of uneasiness. "It's apity, it's a pity; not that a man more or less of that crew makes anydifference, but the affair might call for more attention to this placeand your presence here than might be altogether wholesome for you orme."
He heard the story in more detail, and when Count Victor had finished,ran into an adjoining room to survey the coast from a window there. Hecame back with a less troubled vision.
"At least they're gone now," said he in a voice that still had someperplexity. "I wish I knew who it was you struck. Would it be Black Andyof Arroquhar now? If it's Andy, the gang will be crying 'Loch Sloy!'about the house in a couple of nights; if it was a common man of thetribe, there might be no more about it, for we're too close on theDuke's gallows to be meddled with noisily; that's the first advantage Iever found in my neighbourhood."
"He was a man of a long habit of body," said Count Victor, "and he fellwith a grunt."
"Then it was not Andy. Andy is like a hogshead--a blob of creesh with aturnip on the top--and he would fall with a curse."
"Name of a pipe! I know him; he debated the last few yards of the waywith me, and I gave him De Chenier's mace in the jaw."
"Sir?"
"I put him slightly out of countenance with the butt and trigger-guar
dof my pistol. Again I must apologise, dear Baron, for so unceremoniousand ill-tempered an approach to your hospitality. You will confess it isa sort of country the foibles of whose people one has to grow accustomedto, and Bethune gave me no guidance for such an emergency as banditti onthe fringe of Argyll's notoriously humdrum Court."
"Odd!" repeated Doom. "Will you step this way?" He led Count Victor tothe window that commanded the coast, and their heads together filled thenarrow space as they looked out. It was a wondrous afternoon. The sunswung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed tothe gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood andheather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him,the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land,the abode of seraphim and the sun's eternal smile.
"God is good!" said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion."I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradisewith open doors." Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon thewooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all thatglory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotchupon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm.
"Ah!" he said airily, "there is civilisation in the land after all."
"Plenty of law at least," said the Baron. "Law of its kind--MacCailenlaw. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-Generalof the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pitand gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but hisGrace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up hisdule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It'sa fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as thesaying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France,that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,'though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grandcountry out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that treethere and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'mat my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat."
He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondnessthat surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo.
In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in hismilitary manner.
"Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?" asked the master indulgently.
"Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided forvoluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane'son the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry.There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oorssyne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-towdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies."
They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor.
"I regret the what-do-you-call-it?--the stoved howtowdy," said he,laughing, "more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveysto me."
"There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate thebagpipes," said Mungo.
"There's waur nor howtowdy. And oh! I forgot the het victual, there'sjugged hare."
"Is the hare ready?" asked the Baron suspiciously.
"It's no jist a'thegether what ye micht ca' ready," answered Mungowithout hesitation; "but it can be here het in nae time, and micht agreewi' the Count better nor the cauld fowl."
"Tell Annapla to do the best she can," broke in the Baron on hisservant's cheerful garrulity; and Mungo with another salute disappeared.
"How do your women-folk like the seclusion of Doom?" asked Count Victor,to make conversation while the refection was in preparation. "With thesea about you so, and the gang of my marauding obese friend in the woodbehind, I should think you had little difficulty in keeping them underyour eye."
The Baron was obviously confused. "Mungo's quite enough to keep his eyeon Annapla," said he. "He has the heart and fancy to command a garrison;there's a drum forever beating in his head, a whistle aye fifing in hislug, and he will amuse you with his conceits of soldiering ancient andmodern, a trade he thinks the more of because Heaven made him so unfitto become 'prentice to it. Good Mungo! There have been worse men; indeedwhat need I grudge admitting there have been few better? He has seenthis place more bien than it is to-day in my father's time, and inmy own too before the law-pleas ate us up; you will excuse his Scotsfreedom of speech, Count, he--"
A shot rang outside in some shrubbery upon the mainland, suddenlyputting an end to Doom's conversation. Count Victor, sure that theMacfarlanes were there again, ran to the window and looked out, whilehis host in the rear bit his lip with every sign of annoyance. AsMontaiglon looked he saw Mungo emerge from the shrubbery with a rabbitin his hand and push off hurriedly in a little boat, which apparentlywas in use for communication with the shore under such circumstances.
"And now," said the Count, without comment upon what he had seen, "Ithink, with your kind permission, I shall change my boots before eating.
"There's plenty of time for that, I jalouse," said Doom, smilingsomewhat guiltily, and he showed his guest to a room in the turret. Itwas up a flight of corkscrew stairs, and lit with singular poverty by anorifice more of the nature of a porthole for a piece than a window, andthis port or window, well out in the angle of the turret, commanded aview of the southward wall or curtain of the castle.
Montaiglon, left to himself, opened the bag that Mungo had placed inreadiness for him in what was evidently the guest-room of the castle,transformed the travelling half of himself into something that was morein conformity with the gay nature of his upper costume, complacentlysurveyed the result when finished, and hummed a _chanson_ of PierreGringoire's, altogether unremembering the encounter in the wood, thedead robber, and the stern nature of his embassy here so far fromFrance.
He bent to close the valise, and with a start abruptly concluded hissong at the sight of a miniature with the portrait of a woman looking athim from the bottom of the bag.
"_Mort de ma vie!_ what a fool I am; what a forgetful _vengeur_, to bechanting Gringoire in the house of Doom and my quarry still to hunt!"His voice had of a sudden gained a sterner accent; the pleasantnessof his aspect became clouded by a frown. Looking round the constrictedroom, and realising how like a prison-cell it was compared with whathe had expected, he felt oppressed as with the want of air. He soughtvainly about the window for latch or hinge to open it, and as he did soglanced along the castle wall painted yellow by the declining sun. Henoticed idly that some one was putting out upon the sill of a window ona lower stage what might have been a green kerchief had not the richnessof its fabric and design suggested more a pennon or banneret. It wascarefully placed by a woman's hands--the woman herself unseen. Theincident recalled an old exploit of his own in Marney, and a flood ofhumorous memories of amorous intrigue.
"Mademoiselle Annapla," said he whimsically, "has a lover, and here'shis signal. The Baron's daughter? The Baron's niece? The Baron's ward?Or merely the Baron's domestic? M. Bethune's document suffers infernallyfrom the fault of being too curt. He might at least have indicated thefair recluse."