by Neil Munro
CHAPTER VIII -- AN APPARITION
The tide in his absence had come in around the rock of Doom, and he mustsignal for Mungo's ferry. Long and loud he piped, but there was at firstno answer; and when at last the little servitor appeared, it was tolook who called, and then run back with a haste no way restrained by anysense of garrison punctilio. He was not long gone, but when he camedown again to the boat his preparations for crossing took up anunconscionable time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and thena thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bowunaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo,though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality. Heseemed to be the family's friend resenting, as far as politeness might,some inconvenience to which it was being subjected without having thepower to prevent the same.
Before they had gained the rock, dusk was on the country, brought thesooner for a frost-fog that had been falling all afternoon. It wrappedthe woods upon the shore, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doomitself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a placeless hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peaceit seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drabsky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle givinglittle of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen,flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriadsensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the shore side no lightillumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in whathe fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless inthe chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance onwhich Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.
Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observationof anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenestinterest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as itreached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo hadleft open.
What had been a crepe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. Thecorridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was likea wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a doorsomewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment agleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately bya hurried step coming down the stair.
At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, butthe masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.
"M. le Baron," he concluded, "and home before me by another route," andhe stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give passage. Butthe darkness made identity impossible, and he waited the recognitionof himself. It never came. He was brushed past as by a somnambulist,without greeting or question, though to accomplish it the other inthe narrow stairway had to rub clothes with him. Something utterlyunexpected in the apparition smote him with surprise andapprehension. It was as if he had encountered something groping in amausoleum--something startling to the superstitious instinct, though notterrific in a material way. When it passed he stood speechless on thestair, looking down into the profound black, troubled with amazement,full of speculation. All the suspicions that he had felt last night,when the signal-calls rose below the turret and the door had openedand the flageolet had disturbed his slumbers, came back to him moresinister, more compelling than before. He listened to the decliningfootfall of that silent mystery; a whisper floated upwards, a doorcreaked, no more than that, and yet the effect was wildly disturbing,even to a person of the _sang froid_ of Montaiglon.
At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood aspace on the floor, lost in thought. When he looked at his face, halfunconscious that he did so, in a little mirror on a table, he sawrevealed there no coward terrors, but assuredly alarm. He smiled at hispallid image, tugged in Gascon manner at his moustache, and threw outhis chest; then his sense of humour came to him, and he laughed at thefolly of his perturbation. But he did not keep the mood long.
"My _sans culottes_ surely do not share the hospitality of Doom withme in its owner's absence," he reflected. "And yet, and yet--! I oweBethune something for the thrill of the experiences he has introduced meto. Now I comprehend the affection of those weeping exiles for thevery plain and commonplace life of France they profess to think soindifferent a country compared with this they have left behind. A weekof these ghosts would drive me to despair. To-morrow--to-morrow--M. deMontaiglon--to-morrow you make your reluctant adieux to Doom and itsinexplicable owner, whose surprise and innuendo are altogether tooexciting for your good health."
So he promised himself as he walked up and down the floor of hischamber, feeling himself in a cage, yet unable to think how he wasto better his condition without the aid of the host whose mysteriesdisturbed so much by the suspicions they aroused. Bethune had told himLamond, in spite of his politics and his comparative poverty, was onneighbourly terms with Argyll, and would thus be in a position to puthim in touch with the castle of the Duke and the retinue there withoutcreating any suspicion as to the nature of his mission. It was that hehad depended on, and to no other quarter could he turn with a hope ofbeing put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom wasapparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, atvariance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuitswith which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesomeold manner with the sword, indulged their contestful passions, andhe presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his mosthopeless moments had never allowed for--he did not know the identity ofthe man sought for, and he questioned if it could easily be established.All these considerations determined Count Victor upon an immediateremoval from this starven castle and this suspicious host. But whenhe joined Doom in the _salle_ he constrained his features to a calmreserve, showing none of his emotions.
He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciouslyloud but abstracted interest in his ramble.
"Well, Count," said he, "ye've seen the castle of the King o' theHielan's, as we call him, have you? And what think ye of MacCailen'squarters?"
Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at hisinterrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessedthem charming.
A bitter smile came on the face of his host. "They might well be that,"said he. "There's many a picking there." And then he became garrulousupon the tale of his house and family, that seemed to have been doggedby misfortune for a century and a half; that had owned once many ofthese lush glens, the shoulders of these steep bens, the shores of thatcurving coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed offin successive generations, lost to lust, to the gambler's folly, thespendthrift's weakness.
"Hard, is it not?" questioned his host. "I'm the man that should haveDoom at its very best, for I could bide among my people here, and likethem, and make them like me, without a thought of rambling about theworld. 'Mildewing with a ditch between you and life' my grandfather usedto call it, when old age took him back from his gaieties abroad. Faith!I wish I had the chance to do it better than I may. All's here I everwanted of life, and I have tasted it elsewhere, too. Give me my ownacres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeedfrom the rise of the sun till bedtime--a short day and a happy. Myfather used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point ofStrome where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in theport down-by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood ofhim. If he saw a light out there at sea--the lamp of a ship outbound--hewould stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. Asfor me, no ship-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening starcoming up above the hill Ardno."
"To-morrow," said Montaiglon--"to-morrow is another day; that's myconsolation in every trial."
"At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that," admittedDoom; "at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it."
Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that somet
imesswept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back andback at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him,he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plottingsomething? And with whom? What was the secret of that wind-blown castle,its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of thedomestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could hepossibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of whatsignalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearningthere, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrillingmoment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway;but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doomhimself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless ofreading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room forsome clue to what he found nowhere else.
A chamber plain to meanness--there seemed nothing here to help him toa solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangey anddusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a windowonly sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentiousinterior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dog-eareddocuments of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of adownfallen house had come about.
Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.
"Ay!" he said, "that's the ashes of Doom, all that's left of what weburned in fiery living and hot law-pleas. We have the ash and the othershave warm hands."
Count Victor, who had been warming his chilled fingers at the fire,moved to the curtain and drew it back, the better again to see thatdoleful cinerary urn.
His host rose hurriedly from his chair.
"Trash! trash! Only trash, and dear bought at that," said he, seeing hisguest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness.
But the deed was done before the implied protest was attended. TheCount's movements revealed a Highland dagger concealed beneath oneof the parchments! It was a discovery of no importance in a Highlandcastle, where, in spite of the proscription of weapons, there mightinnocently be something so common as a dagger left; but a half-checkedcry from the Baron stirred up again all Count Victor's worst suspicions.
He looked at Doom, and saw his face was hot with some confusion, andthat his tongue stammered upon an excuse his wits were not alert enoughto make.
He stooped and picked up the weapon--an elegant instrument well adornedwith silver on the hilt and sheath; caught it at the point, and, leaningthe hilt upon his left wrist in the manner of the courtier slightlyexaggerated, and true to the delicacies of the _salle-d'armes_,proffered it to the owner.
Doom laughed in some confusion. "Ah!" said he, lamely, "Mungo's beenat his dusting again," and he tried to restore the easiness of theconversation that the incident had so strangely marred.
But Montaiglon could not so speedily restore his equanimity. For theunknown who had so unceremoniously brushed against him on the dark stairhad been attired in tartan clothes. It had been a bare knee that hadtouched him on the leg; it had been a plaid-fringe that had brushedacross his face; and his knuckles had been rapped lightly by theprotuberances upon the sheath and hilt of a mountain dagger. M. leBaron's proscription of arms seemed to have some strange exceptions,he told himself. They were not only treated with contempt by theMacfarlanes, but even in Doom Castle, whose owner affected to look uponthe garb of his ancestors as something well got rid of. For the life ofhim, Count Victor could not disassociate the thought of that mysteriousfigure on the stair, full clad in all Highland panoply against thelaw, and the men--the broken men--who had shot his pony in the wood andattempted to rob him. All the eccentricities of his host mustered beforehim--his narrow state here with but one servant apparent, a mysteriousroom tenanted by an invisible woman, and his coldness--surely farfrom the Highland temper--to the Count's scheme of revenge upon thefictitious Drimdarroch.
There was an awkward pause even the diplomacy of the Frenchman could notrender less uncomfortable, and the Baron fumbled with the weapon ere helaid it down again on the table.
"By the way," said Count Victor, now with his mind made up, "I see noprospect of pushing my discoveries from here, and it is also unfair thatI should involve you in my adventure, that had much better be conductedfrom the plain base of an inn, if such there happens to be in the towndown there."
A look of unmistakable relief, quelled as soon as it breathed across hisface, came to the Baron. "Your will is my pleasure," he said quickly;"but there is at this moment no man in the world who could be morewelcome to share my humble domicile.".
"Yet I think I could work with more certainty of a quick success froma common lodging in the town than from here. I have heard that now andthen French fish dealers and merchants sometimes come for barter to thiscoast and----"
The ghost of a smile came over Doom's face. "They could scarcely takeyou for a fish merchant, M. le Count," said he.
"At all events common fairness demands that I should adopt any meansthat will obviate getting your name into the thing, and I think I shalltry the inn. Is there one?"
"There is the best in all the West Country there," said Doom, "kept bya gentleman of family and attainments. But it will not do for you togo down there without some introduction. I shall have to speak of yourcoming to some folk and see if it is a good time."
"_Eh bien!_ Remember at all events that I am in affairs," saidMontaiglon, and the thing was settled.