Doom Castle Part 11

"I should have fancied it might have been a permanency in that case,"

suggested Count Victor, "unless, indeed, your Highland ghosts have a special preference for Mondays and Wednesdays."

"Permanency!" repeated the Baron, thoughtfully. "H'm!" The suggestion had obviously struck him as reasonable, but he baulked at any debate on it.

"There was also the matter of the horseman," went on Count Victor blandly, pointing his moustache.

"Horseman?" queried the Baron.

"A horseman _sans doute_. I noticed most of your people here ride with a preposterously short stirrup; this one rode like a gentleman cavalier.

He stopped opposite the castle this forenoon and waved his compliments to the responsive maid."

The effect upon the Baron was amazing. He grew livid with some feeling repressed. It was only for a moment; the next he was for changing the conversation, but Count Victor had still his quiver to empty.

"Touching flageolets?" said he, but there his arrow missed.

Doom only laughed.

"For that," said he, "you must trouble Annapla or Mungo. They have a story that the same's to be heard every night of storm, but my bed's at the other side of the house and I never heard it;" and he brought the conversation back to the Macfarlanes, so that Count Victor had to relinquish his inquisition.

"The doings of to-night," said he, "make it clear I must rid you of my presence _tout a l'heure_. I think I shall transfer me to the town to-morrow."

"You can't, man," protested Doom, though, it almost seemed, with some reluctance. "There could be no worse time for venturing there. In the first place, the Macfarlanes' affair is causing a stir; then I've had no chance of speaking to Petullo about you. He was to meet me after the court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin', as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle, though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will have to be put off a day or two longer."

CHAPTER XIII -- A LAWYER'S GOOD LADY

The remainder of the night pa.s.sed without further alarm, but Count Victor lay only on the frontiers of forgetfulness till morning, his senses all on sentry, and the salt, wind-blown dawn found him abroad before the rest of Doom was well awake. He met the calesh of the Lords going back the way it had come with an outrider in a red jacket from the stable of Argyll: it pa.s.sed him on the highway so close that he saw Elchies and Kilkerran half sleeping within as they drove away from the scene of their dreadful duties. In a cloak of rough watchet blue he had borrowed from his host and a hat less conspicuous than that he had come in from Stirling, he pa.s.sed, to such strangers in the locality, for some tacksman of the countryside, or a traveller like themselves. To have ventured into the town, however, where every one would see he was a stranger and speedily inquire into his business there, was, as he had been carefully apprised by Doom the night before, a risk too great to be run without good reason. Stewart's trial had created in the country a state of mind that made a stranger's presence there somewhat hazardous for himself, and all the more so in the case of a foreigner, for, rightly or wrongly, there was a.s.sociated with the name of the condemned man as art and part in the murder that of a Highland officer in the service of the French. There had been rumours, too, of an attempted rescue on the part of the Stewarts of Ards.h.i.+el, Achnacoin, and Fasnacloich--all that l.u.s.ty breed of the ancient train: the very numbers of them said to be on the drove-roads with weapons from the thatch were given in the town, and so fervently believed in that the appearance of a stranger without any plausible account to give of himself would have stirred up tumult.

Count Victor eluded the more obvious danger of the town, but in his forenoon ramble stumbled into one almost as great as that he had been instructed to avoid. He had gone through the wood of Strongara and come suddenly upon the cavalcade that bore the doomed man to the scene of his execution thirty or forty miles away.

The wretch had been bound upon a horse--a tall, middle-aged man in coa.r.s.e home-spun clothing, his eye defiant, but his countenance white with the anxieties of his situation. He was surrounded by a troop of sabres; the horses' hoofs made a great clatter upon the hard road, and Count Victor, walking abstractedly along the river-bank, came on them before he was aware of their proximity. As he stood to let them pa.s.s he was touched inexpressibly by the glance the convict gave him, so charged was it with question, hope, dread, and the appet.i.te for some human sympathy. He had seen that look before in men condemned--once in front of his own rapier,--and with the utmost feeling for the unhappy wretch he stood, when the cavalcade had gone, looking after it and conjuring in his fancy the last terrible scene whereof that creature would be the central figure. Thus was he standing when another horseman came upon him suddenly, following wide in the rear of the troops--a civilian who shared the surprise of the unexpected meeting. He had no sooner gazed upon Count Victor than he drew up his horse confusedly and seemed to hesitate between proceeding or retreat. Count Victor pa.s.sed with a courteous salute no less formally returned. He was struck singularly by some sense of familiarity. He did not know the horseman who so strangely scrutinised him as he pa.s.sed, but yet the face was one not altogether new to him. It was a face scarce friendly, too, and for his life the Frenchman could not think of any reason for aversion.

He could no more readily have accounted for the action of the horseman had he known that he had ridden behind the soldiers but a few hundred yards after meeting with Count Victor when he turned off at one of the hunting-roads with which the ducal grounds abounded, and galloped furiously back towards the castle of Argyll. Nothing checked him till he reached the entrance, where he flung the reins to a servant and dashed into the turret-room where the Duke sat writing.

"Ah, Sim!" said his Grace, airily, yet with an accent of apprehension, "you have come back sooner than I looked for: nothing wrong with the little excursion, I hope?"

MacTaggart leaned with both hands upon the table where his master wrote.

"They're all right, so far as I went with them," said he; "but if your Grace in my position came upon a foreigner in the wood of Strongara--a gentleman by the looks of him and a Frenchman by his moustachio, all alone and looking after Sergeant Donald's company, what would your Grace's inference be?"

Argyll, obviously, did not share much of his Chamberlain's excitement.

"There was no more than one there?" he asked, sprinkling sand upon his finished letter. "No! Then there seems no great excuse for your extreme perturbation, my good Sim. I'm lord of Argyll, but I'm not lord of the king's highway, and if an honest stranger cares to take a freeman's privilege and stand between the wind and Simon MacTaggart's dignity--Simon MacTaggart's very touchy dignity, it would appear--who am I that I should blame the liberty? You did not ride _ventre a terre_ from Strongara (I see a foam-fleck on your breeches) to tell me we had a traveller come to admire our scenery? Come, come, Sim! I'll begin to think these late eccentricities of yours, these glooms, abstractions, errors, and anxieties and indispositions, and above all that pallid face of yours, are due to some affair of the heart." As he spoke Argyll pinched his kinsman playfully on the ear, quite the good companion, with none of the condescension that a duke might naturally display in so doing.

MacTaggart reddened and Argyll laughed, "Ah!" he cried. "Can I have hit it?" he went on, quizzing the Chamberlain. "See that you give me fair warning, and I'll practise the accustomed and essential reel. Upon my soul, I haven't danced since Lady Mary left, unless you call it so that foolish minuet. You should have seen her Grace at St. James's last month. Gad! she footed it like an angel; there's not a better dancer in London town. See that your wife's a dancer, whoever she may be, Sim; let her dance and sing and play the harpsichord or the clarsach--they are charms that will last longer than her good looks, and will not weary you so soon as that intellect that's so much in fas.h.i.+on nowadays, when every woman listens to every clever thing you say, that she may say something cleverer, or perhaps retail it later as her own."

MacTaggart turned about impatiently, poked with his riding crop at the fire, and plainly indicated that he was not in the mood for badinage.

"All that has nothing to do with my Frenchman, your Grace," said he bluntly.

"Oh, confound your Frenchman!" retorted the Duke, coming over, turning up the skirts of his coat, and warming himself at the fire. "Don't say Frenchman to me, and don't suggest any more abominable crime and intrigue till the memory of that miserable Appin affair is off my mind.

I know what they'll say about that: I have a good notion what they're saying already--as if I personally had a sc.r.a.p of animosity to this poor creature sent to the gibbet on Leven-side."

"I think you should have this Frenchman arrested for inquiry: I do not like the look of him."

Argyll laughed. "Heavens!" he cried, "is the man gane wud? Have you any charge against this unfortunate foreigner who has dared to shelter himself in my woods? And if you have, do you fancy it is the old feudal times with us still, and that I can clap him in my dungeon--if I had such a thing--without any consultation with the common law-officers of the land? Wake up, Sim! wake up! this is '55, and there are sundry written laws of the State that unfortunately prevent even the Mac-Cailen Mor s.n.a.t.c.hing a man from the footpath and hanging him because he has not the Gaelic accent and wears his hair in a different fas.h.i.+on from the rest of us. Don't be a fool, cousin, don't be a fool!"

"It's as your Grace likes," said MacTaggart. "But if this man's not in any way concerned in the Appin affair, he may very well be one of the French agents who are bargaining for men for the French service, and the one thing's as unlawful as the other by the act of 'thirty-six."

"H'm!" said Argyll, turning more grave, and shrewdly eyeing his Chamberlain--"H'm! have you any particularly good reason to think that?"

He waited for no answer, but went on. "I give it up, MacTaggart," said he, with a gesture of impatience. "Gad! I cannot pretend to know half the plots you are either in yourself or listening on the outside of, though I get credit, I know, for planning them. All I want to know is, have you any reason to think this part of Scotland--and incidentally the government of this and every well-governed realm, as the libels say--would be bettered by the examination of this man? Eh?"

MacTaggart protested the need was clamant. "On the look of the man I would give him the jougs," said he. "It's spy--"

"H'm!" said Argyll, then coughed discreetly over a pinch of snuff.

"Spy or agent," said the Chamberlain, little abashed at the interjection.

"And yet a gentleman by the look of him, said Sim MacTaggart, five minutes syne."

"And what's to prevent that?" asked the Chamberlain almost sharply.

"Your Grace will admit it's nothing to the point," said he, boldly, and smilingly, standing up, a fine figure of a man, with his head high and his chest out. "It was the toss of a bawbee whether or not I should apprehend him myself when I saw him, and if I had him here your Grace would be the first to admit my discretion."

"My Grace is a little more judicious than to treat the casual pedestrian like a notour thief," said Argyll; "and yet, after all, I dare say the matter may be left to your good judgment--that is, after you have had a word or two on the matter with Petullo, who will better be able to advise upon the rights to the persons of suspicious characters in our neighbourhood."

With never a word more said MacTaggart clapped on his hat, withdrew in an elation studiously concealed from his master, and fared at a canter to Petullo's office in the town. He fastened the reins to the ring at the door and entered.

The lawyer sat in a den that smelt most wickedly of mildewed vellum, sealing-wax, tape, and all that trash that smothers the soul of man--the appurtenances of his craft. He sat like a sallow mummy among them, like a half-man made of tailor's patches, flanked by piles of docketed letters and Records closed, bastioned by deed-boxes blazoned with the indication of their offices--MacGibbon's Mortification, Dunderave Estate, Coil's Trust, and so on; he sat with a shrieking quill among these things, and MacTaggart entering to him felt like thanking G.o.d that he had never been compelled to a life like this in a stinking mortuary, with the sun outside on the windows and the clean sea and the singing wood calling in vain. Perhaps some sense of contrast seized the writer, too, as he looked up to see the Chamberlain entering with a pleasant, lively air of wind behind him, and health and vigour in his step, despite the unwonted wanness of his face. At least, in the glance Petullo gave below his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, there was a little envy as well as much cunning. He made a ludicrous attempt at smiling.

"Ha!" he cried, "Mr. MacTaggart! Glad to see you, Mr. MacTaggart. Sit ye down, Mr. MacTaggart. I was just thinking about you."

"No ill, I hope," said the Chamberlain, refusing a seat proffered; for anything of the law to him seemed gritty in the touch, and a three-legged stool would, he always felt, be as unpleasant to sit upon as a red-hot griddle.

"Te-he!" squeaked Petullo with an irritating falsetto. "You must have your bit joke, Mr. MacTaggart. Did his Grace--did his Grace--I was just wondering if his Grace said anything to-day about my unfortunate accident with the compote yestreen." He looked more cunningly than ever at the Chamberlain.

"In his Grace's cla.s.s, Mr. Petullo, and incidentally in my own, nothing's said of a guest's gawkiness, though you might hardly believe it for a reason that I never could make plain to you, though I know it by instinct."

"Oh! as to gawkiness, an accident of the like might happen to any one,"

said Petullo, irritably.

"And that's true," confessed the Chamberlain. "But, tut! tut! Mr.

Petullo, a compote's neither here nor there to the Duke. If you had spilt two of them it would have made no difference; there was plenty left. Never mind the dinner, Mr. Petullo, just now, I'm in a haste.

There's a Frenchman--"

"There's a wheen of Frenchmen, seemingly," said the writer, oracularly, taking to the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of his nails with a piece of pumice-stone he kept for the purpose, and used so constantly that they looked like talons.

"Now, what the devil do you mean?" cried Mac-Taggart.

"Go on, go on with your business," squeaked Petullo, with an eye upon an inner door that led to his household.