by Neil Munro
CHAPTER VII -- THE BAY OF THE BOAR'S HEAD
A solemn game indeed, for the Baron was a man of a sobrietyunaccountable to Montaiglon, who, from what he knew of Macdonnel ofBarisdel, Mac-leod, Balhaldie, and the others of the Gaelic gang inParis, had looked for a roysterer in Doom. It was a man with strangemelancholies he found there, with a ludicrous decorum for a person ofhis condition, rising regularly on the hour, it seemed, and retiringearly to his chamber like a peasant, keeping no company with theneighbouring lairds because he could not even pretend to emulate theirstate, passing his days among a score of books in English, some (as theSieur de Guille) in French, and a Bedel Bible in the Irish letter,and as often walking aimlessly about the shore looking ardently at thehills, and rehearsing to himself native rhymes that ever accountnative women the dearest and the same hills the most beautiful in God'screation. He was the last man to look to for aid in an enterprise likeMontaiglon's: if he had an interest in the exploit it seemed it was onlyto discourage the same, and an hour or two of his company taught theCount he must hunt his spy unaided.
But the hunting of the spy, in the odd irrelevance or inconsistency ofnature, was that day at least an enterprise altogether absent fromhis thoughts. He had been diverted from the object of his journey toScotland by just such a hint at romance as never failed to fascinate aMontaiglon, and he must be puzzling himself about the dulcet singer andher share in the clandestine midnight meeting. When he had finished hisgame with his host, and the latter had pleaded business in the burgh asan excuse for his absence in the afternoon, Count Victor went round Doomon every side trying to read its mystery. While it was a house whosevery mortar must be drenched with tradition, whose every window hadlooked upon histories innumerable worth retelling, nothing was revealedof the matter in hand.
Many rooms of it were obviously unoccupied, for in the domestic routineof the Baron and of Mungo and the lady of song there were two storeysutterly unoccupied, and even in the flats habited there were seeminglychambers vacant, at least ever unopened and forlorn. Count Victorrealised, as he looked at the frowning and taciturn walls, that hemight be in Doom a twelvemonth and have no chance to learn from thatabstracted scholar, its owner, one-half of its interior economy.
From the ground he could get no clear view of the woman's window: thathe discovered early, for it was in the woman he sought the key to allDoom's little mystery. He must, to command the window, climb to his ownchamber in the tower, and even then it was not a full front view he had,but a foreshortened glance at the side of it and the signal, if any moresignalling there might be. He never entered that room without a glancealong the sun-lit walls; he never passed the mouth of that corridor onthe half landing where his candle had blown out without as curious ascrutiny as good-breeding might permit. And nothing was disclosed.
Mungo pervaded the place--Mungo toiling in the outhouses at tasks themost menial, feeding the half-dozen moulting poultry, digging potatoesin the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairswith backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; andin the _salle_ the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholyby rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking withpensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon hisknee--that was Doom as Count Victor was permitted to know it.
He began at last to doubt his senses, and half believe that what he hadheard on the night of his arrival had been some chimera, a dream of awearied and imperilled man in unaccustomed surroundings.
Mungo saw him walk with poorly concealed curiosity about the outside ofthe stronghold, and smiled to himself as one who knows the reason fora gentleman's prying. Montaiglon caught that smile once: his chagrin atits irony was blended with a pleasing delusion that the frank and genialdomestic might proffer a solution without indelicate questioning. But hewas soon undeceived: the discreet retainer knew but three things in thisworld--the grandeur of war, the ancient splendour of the house of Doom,and the excellent art of absent-mindedness. When it came to the contentsof Doom, Mungo Boyd was an oyster.
"It must have been a place of some importance in its day," said CountVictor, gazing up at the towering walls and the broken embrasures.
"And what is't yet?" demanded Mungo, jealously, with no recollectionthat a moment ago he had been mourning its decline.
"_Eh bien!_ It is quite charming, such of it as I have had the honour tosee; still, when the upper stages were habitable------" and CountVictor mentally cursed his luck that he must fence with a blunt-wittedscullion.
"Oh, ay! I'll alio' I've seen it no' sae empty, if that's what ye mean;but if it's no' jist Dumbarton or Dunedin, it's still auld bauld Doom,and an ill deevil to crack, as the laddie said that found the nutmeg."
"But surely," conceded Montaiglon, "and yet, and yet--have you everheard of Jericho, M. Boyd? Its capitulation was due to so simple a thingas the playing of a trumpet or two."
"I ken naething aboot trumpets," said Mungo curtly, distinguishing some_arriere pensee_ in the interrogator.
"_Fi donc!_ and you so much the old _sabreur!_ Perhaps your peoplemarched to the flageolet--a seductive instrument, I assure you."
The little man betrayed confusion. "Annapla thrieps there's a ghaistlyflageolet aboot Doom," said he, "but it'll hae to toil away lang or thewa's o' oor Jericho fa',--they're seeven feet thick."
"He plays divinely, this ghostly flageoleteer, and knows his Handel to ademi-semi-quaver," said Count Victor coolly.
"O Lord! lugs! I told them that!" muttered Mungo.
"Pardon!"
"Naething; we're a' idiots noo and then, and--and I maun awa' in."
So incontinently he parted from Count Victor, who, to pass theafternoon, went walking on the mainland highway. He walked to the souththrough the little hamlet he and Doom had visited earlier in the day;and as the beauty of the scenery allured him increasingly the fartherhe went, he found himself at last on a horn of the great bay where theDuke's seat lay sheltered below its hilly ramparts. As he had walked tothis place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea wasnow a fleet of fishing-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting outupon their evening travail--a heartening spectacle; and that on eitherside of him--once the squalid huts of Doom were behind--was a moredainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was notwholly unprepared for the noble view revealed when he turned the pointof land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.
But yet the sight somewhat stunned. In all his notions of Drimdarroch'shabitation, since he had seen the poverty of Doom, he had taken his ideafrom the baron's faded splendour, and had ludicrously underestimatedthe importance of Argyll's court and the difficulty of finding his man.Instead of a bleak bare country-side, with the ducal seat a meantower in the midst of it, he saw a wide expanse of thickly-wooded andinhabitable country speckled for miles with comfortable dwellings, thecastle itself a high embattled structure, clustered round by a town ofsome dimensions, and at its foot a harbour, where masts were numerousand smoke rose up in clouds.
Here was, plainly, a different society from Doom; here was somethingof what the exiled chiefs had bragged of in their cups. The Baron hadsuggested no more than a dozen of cadets about the place. _Grand Dieu!_there must be a regiment in and about this haughty palace, with itsblack and yellow banner streaming in the wind, and to seek Drimdarrochthere and round that busy neighbourhood seemed a task quite hopeless.
For long he stood on the nose of land, gazing with a thousandspeculations at where probably lay his prey; and when he returned tothe castle of Doom it looked all the more savage and inhospitable incontrast with the lordly domicile he had seen. What befell him there onhis return was so odd and unexpected that it clean swept his mind againof every interest in the spy.