Doom Castle Part 30

"At his age, my dear," said she, "you had the tact to put so obvious a thing differently or leave it alone."

"Not that I heed his impudence," said the Duke hastily; "that a man is no longer young at sixty is the most transparent of facts."

"Only he does not care to have it mentioned too unexpectedly. Oh, you goose!" And she laughed outright, then checked herself at the recollection of the ailing Chamberlain.

"If I would believe myself as young as ever I was, my dear la.s.s,"

said he, "credit me it is that it is more to seem so in the eyes of yourself," and he put his arm around her waist.

"But still," said she after a little--"still the unlucky Frenchman is in the fosse more for his want of tact, I fear, than for his crime against the law of the land. Who pinked--if that's the nasty word--who pinked the Dutchman in Utrecht?--that's what I should like to know, my dear Justice Shallow."

"This is different, though; he came here for the express purpose--"

"Of quarrelling with the Chamberlain!"

"Well, of quarrelling with somebody, as you know," said the n.o.bleman hesitatingly.

"I am sorry for MacTaggart," said the d.u.c.h.ess, "really sorry, but I cannot pretend to believe he has been very ill done by--I mean unjustly done by. I am sure my Frenchman must have had some provocation, and is really the victim."

"You--that is we--know nothing about that, my dear," said Argyll.

"I cannot be mistaken; you would be the first at any other time to admit that I could tell whether a man was good or evil on a very brief acquaintance. With every regard for your favour to the Chamberlain, I cannot stand the man. If my instinct did not tell me he was vicious, my ears would, for I hear many stories little to his credit."

"And yet a brave man, goodwife, a faithful servant and an interesting fellow. Come now! Jean, is it not so?"

She merely smiled, patting his ruffles with delicate fondling fingers.

It was never her habit to argue with her Duke.

"What!" he cried smilingly, "none of that, but contradict me if you dare."

"I never contradict his Grace the Duke of Argyll," said she, stepping back and sweeping the floor with her gown in a stately courtesy; "it is not right, and it is not good for him--at his age."

"Ah, you rogue!" he cried, laughing. "But soberly now, you are too hard on poor Sim. It is the worst--the only vice of good women that they have no charity left for the imperfect either of their own s.e.x or of mine.

Let us think what an atom of wind-blown dust is every human being at the best, bad or good in his blood as his ancestry may have been, kind or cruel, straight or crooked, pious or pagan, admirable or evil, as the accidents of his training or experience shall determine. As I grow older I grow more tolerant, for I have learned that my own scanty virtues and graces are no more my own creation than the dukedom I came into from my father--or my red hair."

"Not red, Archie," said the d.u.c.h.ess, "not red, but reddish fair; in fact, a golden;" and she gently pulled a curl upon his temple. "What about our Frenchman? Is he to lie in the fosse till the Sheriff sends for him or till the great MacCailen Mor has forgiven him for telling him he was a little over the age of thirty?"

"For once, my dear, you cannot have your way," said the Duke firmly. "Be reasonable! We could not tolerate so scandalous an affair without some show of law and--"

"Tolerate!" said the d.u.c.h.ess. "You are very hard on poor Montaiglon, Archie, and all because he fought a duel with a doubtful gentleman who will be little the worse for it in a week or two. Let us think," she went on banteringly--"let us think what an atom of wind-blown dust is every human being at the best, admirable or evil as his training--"

Her husband stopped her with a kiss.

"No more of that, Jean; the man must thole his trial, for I have gone too far to draw back even if I had the will to humour you."

There was one tone of her husband's his wife knew too decisive for her contending with, and now she heard it. Like a wise woman, she made up her mind to say no more, and she was saved an awkward pause by an uproar in the fosse. Up to the window where those two elderly lovers had their kindly disputation came the sound of cries. Out into the dusk of the evening Argyll thrust his head and asked an explanation.

"The Frenchman's gone!" cried somebody.

He drew in his head, with a smile struggling on his countenance.

"You witch!" said he, "you must have your own way with me, even if it takes a spell!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI -- FLIGHT

Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into great good fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bears his name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste to envy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to the south of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, with oddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner of his escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen. And always his acutest memory was of the whipping rigour of the evening air, his temporary sense of swooning helplessness upon the verge of the fantastic wood. "Figure you! Charles," would he say, "the thin-blooded wand of forty years ago in a brocaded waistcoat and a pair of dancing-shoes seeking his way through a labyrinth of demoniac trees, s.h.i.+vering half with cold and half with terror like a _forcat_ from the _bagne_ of Toulouse, only that he knew not particularly from what he fled nor whereto his unlucky footsteps should be turned. I have seen it often since--the same place--have we not, _mignonne?_--and I avow 'tis as sweet and friendly a spot as any in our own neighbourhood; but then in that pestilent night of black and grey I was like a child, tenanting every tiny thicket with the were-wolf and the sheeted spectre. There is a stupid feeling comes to people sometimes in the like circ.u.mstances, that they are dead, that they have turned the key in the lock of life, as we say, and gone in some abstraction into the territory of shades.

'Twas so I felt, messieurs, and if in truth the ultimate place of spirits is so mortal chilly, I shall ask Pere Antoine to let me have a greatcoat as well as the viatic.u.m ere setting out upon the journey."

It had been an insufferably cruel day, indeed, for Count Victor in his cell had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments--sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed in this same austere atmosphere under the same grey sky that hung low outside his cell; the same snowfall that he could catch a glimpse of through the tiny s.p.a.ce above his door was seen by her that moment in Doom; she must be taking the flavour of the sea as he could sometimes do in blessed moments even in this musty _oubliette_.

The day pa.s.sed, a short day with the dusk coming on as suddenly as if some one had drawn a curtain hurriedly over the tiny aperture above the door. And all the world outside seemed wrapped in silence. Twice again his warder came dumbly serving a meal, otherwise the prisoner might have been immeasurably remote from any life and wholly forgotten. There was, besides his visions of Olivia, one other thing to comfort him; it was when he heard briefly from some distant part of the castle the ululation of a bagpipe playing an air so jocund that it a.s.sured him at all events the Chamberlain was not dead, and was more probably out of danger. And then the cold grew intense beyond his bearance, and he reflected upon some method of escape if it were to secure him no more than exercise for warmth.

The window was out of the question, for in all probability the watch was still on the other side of the fosse--a tombstone for steadfastness and constancy. Count Victor could not see him now even by standing on his box and looking through the aperture, yet he gained something, he gained all, indeed, so pregnant a thing is accident--even the cosy charcoal-fires and the friends about him in the chateau near Saint Germain-en-Laye--by his effort to pierce the dusk and see across the ditch.

For as he was standing on the box, widening softly the aperture in the drifted snow upon the little window-ledge, he became conscious of cold air in a current beating upon the back of his head. The draught, that should surely be entering, was blowing out!

At once he thought of a chimney, but there was no fireplace in his cell.

Yet the air must be finding entrance elsewhere more freely than from the window. Perplexity mastered him for a little, and then he concluded that the current could come from nowhere else than behind the array of marshalled empty bottles.

"_Tonnerre!_" said he to himself, "I have begun my career as wine merchant rather late in life or I had taken more interest in these dead gentlemen. _Avancez, donc, mes princes!_ your ancient spirit once made plain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us see if now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon's profit."

One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrude a sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked.

There was an airy s.p.a.ce.

"_Tres bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres_, perhaps I may forgive you even yet for being empty."

Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away a pa.s.sage--that ended in a dead wall!

It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then, been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searched every inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold, clammy, substantial.

"A delusion after all!" he said, bitterly disappointed. "A delusion, and not the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine." He had almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffing current of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him for the second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm with his exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere over the level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behind the bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing, to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, and was apparently an incompleted curtain part.i.tioning his cell from some s.p.a.ce farther in.

Not with any vaulting hopes, for an egress from this inner s.p.a.ce seemed less unlikely than from the one he occupied, he pulled himself on the top of the intervening wall and lowered himself over the other side. At the full stretch of his arms he failed to touch anything with his feet; an alarming thought came to him; he would have pulled himself back, but the top of the wall was crumbling to his fingers, a ma.s.s of rotten mortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realised with a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What--this was his thought--what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the ground within an inch of his straining toes.

To die in a pit!

To die in a pit! good G.o.d!--was this the appropriate conclusion to a life with so much of open-air adventure, suns.h.i.+ne, gaiety, and charm in it? The sweat streamed upon his face as he strove vainly to hang by one of his arms and search the cope of the crumbling wall for a surer hold with the other; he stretched his toes till his muscles cramped, his eyes in the darkness filled with a red cloud, his breath choked him, a vision of his body thras.h.i.+ng through s.p.a.ce overcame him, and his slipping fingers would be loose from the mortar in another minute!

To one last struggle for a decent mastery his natural manhood rose, and cleared his brain and made him loose his grip.

He fell less than a yard!

For a moment he stopped to laugh at his foolish terror, and then set busily to explore this new place in which he found himself. The air was fresher; the walls on either hand contracted into the s.p.a.ce of a lobby; he felt his way along for twenty paces before he could be convinced that he was in a sort of tunnel. But figure a so-convenient tunnel in connection with a prison cell! It was too good to be true.

With no great surrender to hope even yet, he boldly plunged into the darkness, reason a.s.suring him that the _cul-de-sac_ would come sooner or later. But for once reason was wrong; the pa.s.sage opened ever before him, more airy than ever, always dank and odorous, but with never a barrier--a pa.s.sage the builders of the castle had executed for an age of sudden sieges and alarms, but now archaic and useless, and finally forgotten altogether.