Doom Castle

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER XXIX -- THE CELL IN THE FOSSE

  By this time the morning was well gone; the town had wakened to theday's affairs--a pleasant light grey reek with the acrid odour ofburning wood soaring from chimneys into a sky intensely blue; and theroads that lay interlaced and spacious around the castle of Argyllwere--not thronged, but busy at least with labouring folk setting outupon their duties. To them, meeting the wounded form of the Chamberlain,the hour was tragic, and figured long at fireside stories after, acutelymemorable for years. They passed astounded or turned to follow him,making their own affairs secondary to their interest in the state of onewho, it was obvious even to Montaiglon, was deep in their affections.He realised that a few leagues farther away from the seat of aJusticiary-General it might have gone ill with the man who had broughtSimon MacTaggart to this condition, for menacing looks were thrown athim, and more than once there was a significant gesture that made plainthe animosity with which he was regarded. An attempt to escape--if suchhad occurred to him--would doubtless have been attended by the mostserious consequences.

  Argyll met his Chamberlain with the signs of genuine distress: it wastouching, indeed, to see his surrender to the most fraternal feeling,and though for a while the Duke's interest in his Chamberlain left himindifferent to him who was the cause of it, Count Victor could notbut perceive that he was himself in a position of exceeding peril. Heremembered the sinister comments of the Baron of Doom upon the hazardsof an outsider's entrance to the boar's cave, and realised for the firsttime what that might mean in this country, where the unhappy wretchfrom Appin, whose case had some resemblance to his own, had beenremorselessly made the victim (as the tale went) to world-old tribaljealousies whose existence was incredible to all outside the Highlandline. In the chill morning air he stood, coatless and shivering, thehigh embrasured walls lifting above him, the jabbering menials of thecastle grouped a little apart, much of the language heard savage andincomprehensible in his ears, himself, as it were, of no significance toany one except the law that was to manifest itself at any moment.Last night it had been very gay in this castle, the Duke was the mostgracious of hosts; here, faith! was a vast difference.

  "May I have a coat?" he asked a bystander, taking advantage of a bustlein the midst of which the wounded man was taken into the castle. He gotthe answer of a scullion.

  "A coat!" exclaimed the man he addressed. "A rope's more like it." Andso, Count Victor, shrugging his shoulders at this impertinence, was leftto suffer the air that bit him to the marrow.

  The Chamberlain disposed of, and in the leech's hands, Argyll had theFrenchman brought to his rooms, still in his shirt-sleeves. The weaponof his offence was yet in his hand for evidence, had that been wanting,of an act he was prepared to admit with frankness.

  "Well, Monsieur Montaiglon," said his Grace, pacing nervously up anddown the room before him, "this is a pretty matter. You have returnedto see my pictures somewhat sooner than I had looked for, and in no veryceremonious circumstances."

  "Truly," said the Count, with a difficult essay at meeting the manin his own humour--"Truly, but your Grace's invitation was sopressing--_ah! c'est grand dommage! mais--mais_--I am not, with everyconsideration, in the key for badinage. M. le Duc, you behold meexceedingly distressed at the discommoding of your household. At yourage this--"

  He pulled himself up, confused a little, aware that his customarypoliteness had somehow for once shamefully deserted him with nointention on his part.

  "That is to put the case with exceeding delicacy," said the Duke. "At myage, as you have said, my personal inconvenience is of little importancein face of the fact that a dear friend of mine may be at death's door.At all events there is a man, if signs mislead me not, monstrously neardeath under this roof, a man well liked by all that know him, a strongman and a brave man, and a man, in his way, of genius. He goes out, as Isay, hale and hearty, and comes back bloody in your company. You cameto this part of the world, monsieur, with the deliberate intention ofkilling my Chamberlain!"

  "That's as Heaven, which arranges these things without consulting us,may have decided, my lord; on my honour, I had much preferred never tohave set eyes on your Chamberlain."

  "Come, come!" said the Duke with a high head and slapping with open handthe table beside him--"Come, come! I am not a fool, Montaiglon--even atmy age. You deliberately sought this unfortunate man."

  "Monsieur the Duke of Argyll has my word that it was not so," said theCount softly.

  "I fancy in that case, then, you had found him easy to avoid," said theDuke, who was in an ir-restrainable heat. "From the first--oh, come!sir, let us not be beating about the bush, and let us sink all theseevasions--from the first you have designed a meeting with MacTaggart,and your every act since you came to this country has led up to thisdamned business that is likely to rob me of the bravest of servants. Itwas not the winds of heaven that blew you against your will into thispart of Scotland, and brought you in contact with my friend on the veryfirst night of your coming here."

  "And still, M. le Duc, with infinite deference, and a coolness that ispartly due to the unpleasant fact (as you may perceive) that I have nocoat on, 'twas quite the other way, and your bravest of servants thrusthimself upon my attention that had otherwise been directed to the realobject of my being in Scotland at all."

  The Duke gave a gesture of impatience. "I am not at the heart of thesemysteries," said he, "but--even at my age--I know a great deal moreabout this than you give me credit for. If it is your whim to affectthat this wretched business was no more than a passage betweengentlemen, the result of a quarrel over cards or the like in my house--"

  "Ah!" cried the Count, "there I am all to blame. Our affair ought moreproperly to have opened elsewhere. In that detail your Grace has everyground for complaint."

  "That is a mere side affair," said the Duke, "and something else moreclosely affects me. I am expected to accept it, then, that the Comtede Mont-aiglon, travelling incognito in the unassuming _role_ of awine merchant, came here at this season simply from a passion for ourHighland scenery. I had not thought the taste for dreary mountains andblack glens had extended to the Continent."

  "At least 'twas not to quarrel with a servant I came here," retortedCount Victor.

  "That is ill said, sir," said his Grace. "My kinsman has ten generationsof ancestry of the best blood of Scotland and the Isles underground."

  "To that, M. le Duc, there is an obvious and ancient retort--thattherein he is like a potato plant; the best of him is buried."

  Argyll stood before the Frenchman dubious and embarrassed; vexed at thetone of the encounter, and convinced, for reasons of his own, that inone particular at least the foreigner prevaricated, yet impressed bythe manly front of the gentleman whose affair had brought a morning'stragedy so close upon the heels of an evening's mirth. Here was the sortof quandary in which he would naturally have consulted with his Duchess,but it was no matter to wake a woman to, and she was still in herbed-chamber.

  "I assume you look for this unhappy business to be treated as an affairof honour?" he asked at last.

  "So to call it," replied Count Victor, "though in truth, the honour, onmy word, was all on one side."

  "You are in doubtful taste to put it quite in these terms," said theDuke more sternly, "particularly as you are the one to come out of it sofar scathless."

  "Would M. le Duc know how his servant compelled my--my attentions?"

  "Compelled your attentions! I do not like the tone of your speeches,monsieur. Dignity--"

  "_Pardieu!_ M. le Duc, would you expect a surfeit of dignity from a manwithout a jacket?" said the Count, looking pathetically at his arms.

  "Dignity--I mean the sense of it--would dictate a more sober carriage inface of the terrible act you have committed. I am doing my best to findthe slightest excuse for you, because you are a stranger here, a man ofgood family though engaged upon a stupendous folly, and I have beforenow been in the reverence of your people. You ask me if I know whatcompelled your attenti
on (as you say) to my Chamberlain, and I willanswer you frankly that I know all that is necessary."

  At that the Count was visibly amazed. This was, indeed, to put a newface on matters and make more regrettable his complacent surrender afterhis affair on the sands.

  "In that case, M. le Duc," said he, "there is no more to be said. Iprotest I am unable to comprehend your Grace's complacence towards arogue--even of your own household."

  Argyll rang a bell and concluded the interview.

  "There has been enough of this," he said. "I fear you do not clearlyrealise all the perils of your situation. You came here--you will pardona man at my age insisting upon it, for I know the facts--with the setdesign of challenging one who properly or improperly has aroused yourpassion; you have accomplished your task, and must not consider yourselfharshly treated if you have to pay the possible penalty."

  "Pardon, M. le Duc, it is not so, always with infinite deference, andwithout a coat as I have had the boldness to remark before: my task hadgone on gaily enough had your Monsieur MacTaggart not been the victimof some inexplicable fever--unless as I sometimes suspect it were apreposterous jealousy that made me the victim of his somewhat stupidfolly play."

  "You have accomplished your task, as I say," proceeded Argyll, heedlessof the interruption, "and to tell the truth, the thing has beendone with an unpardonably primitive absence of form. I am perhaps anindifferent judge of such ceremonies; at my age--as you did me thehonour to put it--that is only to be expected, but we used, when I wasyounger, to follow a certain formula in inviting our friend the enemyout to be killed. What is this hasty and clandestine encounter beforethe law of the land but a deliberate attempt at murder? It would be soeven in your own country under the circumstances. M. le Comte, wherewere your seconds? Your wine-selling has opened in villainously badcircumstances, and you are in error to assume that the details of thecode may be waived even among the Highland hills."

  A servant entered.

  "Take this gentleman to the fosse," said the Duke, with the ring ofsteel in his voice and his eyes snapping.

  "At least there is as little form about my incarceration as about mypoor duel," said Count Victor.

  "My father would have been somewhat more summary in circumstances likethese,", said the Duke, "and, by Heaven! the old style had its meritstoo; but these are different days, though, if I were you, I fancy I'dprefer the short shrift of Long David the dempster to the felon's cell.Be good enough to leave your sword."

  Count Victor said never a word, but placed the weapon in a corner of theroom, made a deep _conge_, and went forth a prisoner.

  In the last few minutes of the interview he had forgotten the cold,but now when he was led into the open air he felt it in his coatlesscondition more poignant than his apprehension at his position otherwise.He shivered as he walked along the fosse, through which blew a shrewdnorth wind, driving the first flakes of an approaching snowstorm. Thefosse was wide and deep, girding the four-square castle, mantled onits outer walls by dense ivy, where a few birds twittered. The wall wasbroken at intervals by the doors of what might very well serve as cellsif cells were wanted, and it was to one of these that Count Victor foundhimself consigned.

  "My faith, Victor, thou art a fool of the first water!" he said tohimself as he realised the ignominy of his situation. For he was in themost dismal of dungeons, furnished as scantily as a cellar, fireless,damp, and almost in sepulchral darkness, for what light might haveentered by a little window over the door was obscured by drifted snow.

  By-and-by his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, and he concludedthat he was in what had at one time been a wine-cellar, as bottleswere racked against the back wall of his arched apartment. They wereempty--he confirmed his instinct on that point quickly enough, forthe events of the morning left him in the mood for refreshment. It wasuncomfortable all this; there was always the possibility of justicemiscarried; but at no time had he any fear of savage reprisals such ashad alarmed him when Mungo Boyd locked him up in Doom and the fictitiousbroken clan cried "Loch Sloy!" in darkness. For this was not wholly thewilds, and Argyll's manner, though stern, was that of one who desired inall circumstances to be just.

  So Count Victor sat on a box and shivered in his shirt-sleeves andfervently wished for breakfast. The snow fell heavily now, and driftedin the fosse and whitened the world; outside, therefore, all was silent;there must be bustle and footsteps, but here they were unheard: itseemed in a while that he was buried in catacombs, an illusion sovexatious that he felt he must dispel it at all hazards.

  There was but one way to do so. He stood on his box and tried to reachthe window over his door. To break the glass was easy, but when that wasdone and the snow was cleared away by his hand, he could see out onlyby pulling himself up with an awkward and exhausting grasp on the narrowledge. Thus he secured but the briefest of visions of what was outside,and that was not a reassuring one.

  Had he meditated escape from the window, he must now abandon it; foron the other side of the ditch, cowering in the shelter of one of thecastle doors, was standing one of the two men who had placed him in thecell, there apparently for no other purpose than to keep an eye on theonly possible means of exit from the discarded wine-cellar.

  The breaking glass was unheard by the watcher; at all events he made nomovement to suggest that he had observed it, and he said nothing aboutit when some time later in the forenoon he came with Count Victor'sbreakfast, which was generous enough to confirm his belief that inArgyll's hands he was at least assured of the forms of justice, thoughthat, in truth, was not the most consoling of prospects.

  His warder was a dumb dog, a squint-eyed Cerberus with what Count Victorfor once condemned as a tribal gibberish for his language, so that hewas incapable of understanding what was said to him even if he had beenwilling to converse.

  "It is little good to play the guitar to an ass," said the Frenchman,and fell to his viands.