Doom Castle

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER XIV -- CLAMOUR

  Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbedby the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meetingwith the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with hints of rainon the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a stormnot far distant. Children were in the wood of Dunderave--ruddy, shychildren, gathering nuts and blackberries, with merriment haunting thelandscape as it were in a picture by Watteau or a tale of the classics,where such figures happily move for ever and for ever in the rightgolden glamour. Little elves they seemed to Count Victor as he came uponthem over an eminence, and saw them for the first time through the treesunder tall oaks and pines, among whose pillars they moved as if in fairycloisters, the sea behind them shining with a vivid and stinging blue.

  He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to thehazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron ofDoom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no morehopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of theirinnocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral ashe stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran andplayed upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, theirpillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, andchanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touchedthe thickets with romance.

  In other circumstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victormight have been a good man--a good man not in the common sense thatmeans paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand,respecting the law, going to Mass, loyalty to the woman and to a friend,but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has itsgrowth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animalsever found him soft-handed; as for children--the _petites_--God blessthem! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to seethem playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood ofDunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouthlanguage whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt anelevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the grass abovethem, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if itwere an opera.

  He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ignoble little emprise ofrevenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall everhave who sits a space with childish merriment and woodland innocence. Inhis case it was something more direct and tangible than the immaterialefflux of the soul, though that too was not wanting: he saw the signalkerchief being placed outside the window, that otherwise, reaching hometoo early, he had missed.

  "It is my last chance, if I leave to-morrow," he thought. "I shallsatisfy myself as to the nocturnal visitor, the magic flautist, and thebewildering Annapla--and probably find the mystery as simple as the eggin the conjurer's bottle when all's ended!"

  That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of hishost's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who hadpromised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and theBaron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederuntand consent to an early retirement.

  "I have something pressing to do before I go to bed myself," he said,restoring by that simple confession some of Count Victor's firstsuspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.

  He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to someunshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from ahouse more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, thanfor commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkabledwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences ofthings sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make areconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant'ssordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself thatthere was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyonsshopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the stepshe proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debatedthe situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candleslasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stairsuggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above.Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had beforehim a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a greatplaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!

  Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.

  "Pardon!" said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he sawhis host's abashed countenance. "I fear I intrude on a masquerade. Pray,do not mind me. It was that I thought the upper flat uninhabited, and noone awake but myself."

  "You have me somewhat at a disadvantage," said Doom coldly, resentingthe irony. "I'll explain afterwards."

  "Positively, there is no necessity," replied Count Victor, with aprofound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.

  There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He hadseen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaiditself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal whollythe unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A scoreof reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but allof them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his hostconspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge fortheir injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out hiscandles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signalhe expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and heawakened each time to find an hour was gone.

  It was a night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window,a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off theland and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea andominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnightvoices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as heexpected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiarand baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped aboutthe castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, lookedinto the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement andupwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he shouldcarry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with aforced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of acoin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair--the soundof a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels--decided him, andhe waited to confound the master of Doom.

  In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon hisheart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword.A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, butleft the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front ofhis door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was notthe Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had anyreason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered eachother simultaneously,--she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put arapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a womanno more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with thissavage domicile.

  In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that hereyes had first given him the embarrassment that kept him dumb inher presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangelyensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes--the eyes of the womanborn and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yetalways inviting to the guess, the passionate surmise--that told himfirst here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warmgrace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yetquick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to theflush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelterher, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been theaverage of her sex he would have met her with a front of brass; insteadthere was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremelylow.

  "Madame; pardon! I--I--was awakened by mu
sic, and--"

  Her silence, unaccompanied even by a smile at the ridiculous nature ofthe recontre, and the proud sobriety of her visage, quickened him to abolder sentiment than he had at first meditated.

  "I was awakened by music, and it seems appropriate. With madame'spermission, I shall return to earth."

  His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddiednoisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, togulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fullyunderstand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, nota whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. CountVictor wished to God that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he feltthat there were lines upon his face betraying him.

  "I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance," she said atlast, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves runningon fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that Englishwas not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountainmelody but adding to the charm of her accent.

  Count Victor ridiculously pulled at his moustache, troubled by this_sang froid_ where he might naturally have looked for perturbation.

  "Pardon! I demand your pardon!" was all that he could say, looking atthe curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against thesilk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze,instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in sodoing.

  He had the woman there!

  "Pardon!" he repeated. "It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard thesignals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know"--hesmiled the smile of the _flaneur_--"I did not know it was, let me say,Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among theconstellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, Ihope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading."

  Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled--an indescribable thing, buta plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in thathaughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not theplace for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the RueBeautreillis.

  "I fear I have not intruded for the first time," he went on, ina different tone. "It must have been your chamber I somewhatunceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presenceof a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me--at least I had come toconsider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here."

  "It is easily explained," said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, andshowing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.

  "There is positively not the necessity," protested Count Victor,realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.

  "But you must understand that--" she went on.

  Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. "The explanation is duefrom me, madame: I protest," said he, and she pouted. It gave her a lookso bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, thathe was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not butrespond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile throughher clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now.France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, itsthousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of littleaccount to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under thesame roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed thedusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, thecrumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of thetempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisywaters--but this--but this was Paradise!

  "The explanation must be mine," said he. "I was prying upon no amour,but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions."

  "They were, perhaps, connected with my father," she said, with adivination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.

  "Your father!" he exclaimed, astonished that one more of hismisconceptions should be thus dispelled. "Then I have been guilty of theunpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess."

  "A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the black-affronted woman," saidshe, "but through no fault of mine. I am in my own good father's house,and still, in a way, a stranger in it, and that is a hard thing. But youmust not distrust my father: you will find, I think, before very long,that all the odd affairs in this house have less to do with him thanwith his daughter Olivia."

  She blushed again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitivenessthat Count Victor found perfectly entrancing.

  "My dear mademoiselle," he said, wishing the while he had had a_friseur_ at the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran hisfingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curledabove his brow,--"my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fooland a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to yourannoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom ofproffering an adequate apology."

  He expected her to leave him then, and he had a foot retired, preparingto re-enter his room, but there was a hesitancy in her manner that toldhim she had something more to say. She bit her nether lip--the orchardsof Cammercy, he told himself, never bred a cherry a thousandth part sorich and so inviting, even to look at in candle-light; a shy dubietyhovered round her eyes. He waited her pleasure to speak.

  "Perhaps," said she softly, relinquishing her brave demeanour--"perhapsit might be well that--that my father knew nothing of this meeting,or--or--or of what led to it."

  "Mademoiselle Olivia," said Count Victor, "I am--what do you call it?--asomnambulist. In that condition it has sometimes been my so good fortuneto wander into the most odd and ravishing situations. But as it happens,_helas!_ I can never recall a single incident of them when I waken inthe morning. _Ma foi!_" (he remembered that even yet his suspicionsof the Baron were unsatisfied), "I would with some pleasure becomea nocturnal conspirator myself, and I have all the necessaryqualities--romance, enterprise, and sympathy."

  "Mungo knows all," said the lady; "Mungo will explain."

  "With infinite deference, mademoiselle, Mungo shall not be invited to doanything of the kind."

  "But he must," said she firmly. "It is due to myself, as well as to you,and I shall tell him to do so."

  "Your good taste and judgment, mademoiselle, are your instructors.Permit me."

  He took the candlestick from her hands, gravely led the way to herchamber door, and at the threshold restored the light with an excessof polite posturing not without its whimsicality. As she took thecandlestick she looked in his face with a twinkle of amusement in hereyes, giving her a vivacity not hitherto betrayed.

  Guessing but half the occasion of her smiles, he cried abruptly, andnot without confusion: "Ah! you were the amused observer of my farce inwading across from the shore. _Peste!_"

  "Indeed and I was!" said she, smiling all the more brightly at the scenerecalled. "Good night!"

  And, more of a rogue than Count Victor had thought her, she disappearedinto her chamber, leaving him to find his way back to his own.