Doom Castle Part 13

He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to the hazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron of Doom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no more hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and played upon the gra.s.s, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched the thickets with romance.

In other circ.u.mstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victor might have been a good man--a good man not in the common sense that means paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand, respecting the law, going to Ma.s.s, loyalty to the woman and to a friend, but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has its growth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animals ever found him soft-handed; as for children--the _pet.i.tes_--G.o.d bless them! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to see them playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood of Dunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouth language whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt an elevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the gra.s.s above them, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if it were an opera.

He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ign.o.ble little emprise of revenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall ever have who sits a s.p.a.ce with childish merriment and woodland innocence. In his case it was something more direct and tangible than the immaterial efflux of the soul, though that too was not wanting: he saw the signal kerchief being placed outside the window, that otherwise, reaching home too early, he had missed.

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

That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of his host's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who had promised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and the Baron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederunt and 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 first suspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.

He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's sordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself that there was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyons shopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the steps he proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debated the situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candles lasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stair suggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above.

Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had before him a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a great plaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!

Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.

"Pardon!" said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he saw his 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 no one awake but myself."

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

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

There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had seen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaid itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his candles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signal he expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and he awakened 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 the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repet.i.tion. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the bas.e.m.e.nt and upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair--the sound of a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels--decided him, and he waited to confound the master of Doom.

In the darkness the stern walls about him seemed to weigh upon his heart, and so imbued with vague terrors that he unsheathed his sword.

A light revealed itself upon the stair; he drew back into his room, but left the door open, and when the bearer of the light came in front of his door he could have cried out loudly in astonishment, for it was not the Baron but a woman, and no woman that he had seen before, or had any reason to suspect the presence of in Doom Castle. They discovered each other simultaneously,--she, a handsome foreigner, fumbling to put a rapier behind him in discreet concealment, much astounded; he, a woman no more than twenty, in her dress and manner all incongruous with this savage domicile.

In his after years it was Count Victor's most vivid impression that her eyes had first given him the embarra.s.sment that kept him dumb in her presence for a minute after she had come upon him thus strangely ensconced in the dark corridor. It was those eyes--the eyes of the woman born and bred by seas unchanging yet never the same; unfathomable, yet always inviting to the guess, the pa.s.sionate surmise--that told him first here was a maiden made for love. A figure tremulous with a warm grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. Had she been the average of her s.e.x he would have met her with a front of bra.s.s; instead there was confusion in his utterance and his mien. He bowed extremely low.

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

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

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

His foolish words perhaps did not quite reach her: the wind eddied noisily in the stair, that seemed, in the light from his open door, to gulp the blackness. Perhaps she did not hear, perhaps she did not fully understand, for she hesitated more than a moment, as if pondering, not a whit astonished or abashed, with her eyes upon his countenance. Count Victor wished to G.o.d that he had lived a cleaner life: somehow he felt that there were lines upon his face betraying him.

"I am sorry to have been the cause of your disturbance," she said at last, calmly, in a voice with the music of lulled little waves running on fairy isles in summer weather, almost without a trace that English was not her natural tongue, and that faint innuendo of the mountain melody 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 at the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze, instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so doing.

He had the woman there!

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

Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled--an indescribable thing, but a plain lesson for a man who knew her s.e.x, and Count Victor, in that haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue Beautreillis.

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

"It is easily explained," said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and showing 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 due from me, madame: I protest," said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now.

France, far off in suns.h.i.+ne, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy a.s.sociations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy waters--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 a divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.

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

"A droll hostess, I must say, and I am the black-affronted woman," said she, "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 you must 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 than with his daughter Olivia."

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

"My dear mademoiselle," he said, wis.h.i.+ng the while he had had a _friseur_ at the making of his toilet that morning, as he ran his fingers over his beard and the thick brown hair that slightly curled above his brow,--"my dear mademoiselle, I feel pestilently like a fool and a knave to have placed myself in this position in any way to your annoyance. I hope I may have the opportunity before I leave Doom of proffering an adequate apology."

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

"Perhaps," said she softly, relinquis.h.i.+ng her brave demeanour--"perhaps it 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?--a somnambulist. In that condition it has sometimes been my so good fortune to wander into the most odd and ravis.h.i.+ng situations. But as it happens, _helas!_ I can never recall a single incident of them when I waken in the morning. _Ma foi!_" (he remembered that even yet his suspicions of the Baron were unsatisfied), "I would with some pleasure become a nocturnal conspirator myself, and I have all the necessary qualities--romance, enterprise, and sympathy."

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

"With infinite deference, mademoiselle, Mungo shall not be invited to do anything 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 her chamber door, and at the threshold restored the light with an excess of polite posturing not without its whimsicality. As she took the candlestick she looked in his face with a twinkle of amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes, giving her a vivacity not hitherto betrayed.

Guessing but half the occasion of her smiles, he cried abruptly, and not without confusion: "Ah! you were the amused observer of my farce in wading across from the sh.o.r.e. _Peste!_"

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

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