Doom Castle Part 4

"Drimdarroch! Drimdarroch! I ken no one of the name, though the name itself, for very good reasons, is well known to me. Have you any description of the man?"

"Not much. A man older than myself, dark, well-bred. I should say a man something like yourself, if you will pardon the comparison, with a less easy mind, if he remembers his friends and his past."

Doom pushed back his chair a little from the fire, but without taking his eyes from the peats, and made a curious suggestion.

"You would not take it to be me, would you?" he asked.

Count Victor laughed, with a gesture of his hands that made denial all unnecessary.

"Oh, but you do not know," went on the Baron. "Some months of caballing with our friends--even our Hielan' friends--in the France, left me with an unwholesome heart that would almost doubt my father in his grave. You mentioned the name Drimdarroch--is it not the odd thing that you should speak it to the only man in the s.h.i.+re that ever had the right to use it?

Do you see this?" and rising he stepped to a recess in the wall, only half curtained, so that its contents overflowed into the chamber, and by a jerk of the hand revealed a strange acc.u.mulation of dusty doc.u.ments in paper and in parchment. He looked at them with an aspect of disgust, and stirred them with a contemptuous toe as if he meddled with the litter of a stye.

"That's Drimdarroch!" said he, intensely bitter; "that's Drimdarroch, and Duntorvil, that's the Isles, the bonny Isles of Lochow; that's d.a.m.n like to be Doom too! That and this ruckle of stones we sit in are all that's left of what was my father's and my grandfather's and their forebears back till the dark of time. And how is it, ye may ask? Let us pretermit the question till another occasion; anyway here's Drimdarroch wi' the lave, at any rate the weight of it in processes, records, caveats, multiple poindings, actions of suspension and declator, interim decrees, fugie warrants, compts, and reckonings--G.o.d! I have the cackle of the law in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that wi'

all my practice?"

He stooped and picked up from the confused heap of legal scrivenings by finger-tips that seemed to fear infection a parchment fouled with its pa.s.sage through the courts and law offices. "You're in luck indeed,"

said he; "for there's Drimdarroch--all that's left of it to me: the land itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and scab seize his b.e.s.t.i.a.l!"

Back he threw the relic of his patrimony; he dropped the curtain; he turned on his guest a face that tried to smile. "Come, let us sit down again," he said, "and never heed my havers. Am I not thankful to have Doom itself left me, and the company of the hills and sea? After all, there are more Drimdarrochs than one in the Highlands, for the name means just 'the place at the back of the oak-wood or the oaken shaw,'

and oaks are as plentiful hereabout as the lawyers are in the burgh down-by. I but mentioned it to show you the delicacy of your search, for you do not know but what I'm the very man you want, though I'm sitting here looking as if acting trusty for the Hanoverian cause did not fill my pouches."

"_Tenez!_ M. Bethune was scarcely like to send me to Doom in that case,"

said the Count laughing.

"But Bethune, like yourself, may never have seen the man."

"But yes, it is true, he did not see him any more than I did.

Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a _bavard_, his great friends, Glengarry and another Scot, Balhaldie--"

"Oh, Balhaldie! blethering Balhaldie!" cried Doom, contempt upon his countenance. "And Balhaldie would sell him, I'll warrant. He seems, this Drimdarroch, to have been dooms unlucky in his friends. I say all I've said to you, Count, because you're bound to find it out for yourself some day if you prosecute your search here, and you might be coming round to me at last with your ower-ready pistol when I was ill-prepared to argue out my ident.i.ty. Furthermore, I do not know the man you want.

About the castle down-by his Grace has a corps of all kinds that you might pick from nine times out of ten without striking an honest man.

Some of them are cadets of his own family, always blunt opponents of mine and of our cause here and elsewhere; some are incomers, as we call them; a few of them from clans apparently friendly to us when in other quarters, but traitors and renegades at the heart; some are spies by habit and repute. There's not a friend of mine among them, not in all the fat and prosperous rabble of them; but I wish you were here on another errand, though to Doom, my poor place, you are welcome. I am a widower, a lonely man, with my own flesh and blood rebel against me"--he checked his untimeous confidence--"and yet I have been chastened by years and some unco experiences from a truculent man to one preferring peace except at the last ditch."

"_Eh bien!_ Monsieur; _this_ is the last ditch!" said Montaiglon. "Spy and murderer, M. le Baron, and remember I propose to give him more than the murderer's chance when I agree to meet him on a fair field with a sword in his hand."

"I have seen you lunge, sir," said Doom meaningly; "I ken the carriage of a fencer's head; your eye's fast, your step's light; with the sword I take it Drimdarroch is condemned, and your practice with the pistol, judging from the affair with the Macfarlanes, seems pretty enough. You propose, or I'm mistaken, to make yourself the executioner. It is a step for great deliberation, and for the sake of a wanton woman--"

"Sir!" cried Montaiglon, half rising in his chair.

Doom's eyes gleamed, a quiver ran over his brow, and a furrow came to the jaw; his hand went to his side, where in other days there might have been a dagger. It was the flash of a moment, and died again almost before Montaiglon had seen and understood.

"_Mille pardons!_" said Doom with uncouth French. "I used the word in its most innocent sense, with its kindliest meaning; but I was a fool to use it at all, and I withdraw it."

Count Victor bowed his head. "So," said he. "Perhaps I am too much Quixote, for I saw her but a few times, and that briefly. She was like a--like a fine air once heard, not all to be remembered, never wholly to be forgot. She had a failing, perhaps--the error of undue affection to qualify her for a sinful world. As it was, she seemed among other women some rarity out of place--Venus at a lantern feast."

"And ye would send this man to h.e.l.l that he may find his punishment in remembering her? If I thought so much of vengeance I would leave him on the earth forgetting."

"M. le Baron, I make you my compliments of your complacence," said Count Victor, rising to his feet and desirous to end the discussion. "I am only Victor de Montaiglon, poorly educated in the forgiveness of treachery, and lamentably incapable of the n.o.bihty _de cour_ that you profess. But I can be grateful; and if you give me the hospitality of your house for a day or two, I shall take care that neither it nor its owner will be implicated in my little affair. Touching retirement "--he went on with a smile--"I regret exceedingly an overpowering weariness.

I have travelled since long before dawn, and burning the candle _par les deux bouts_ is not, as Master Mungo hints, conducive to a vigorous reception of the Macfarlanes if they feel like retaliating to-morrow, and making your domicile the victim of my impetuosity and poor marksmans.h.i.+p."

Doom sighed, took up a candle, and led the way into the pa.s.sage. A chill air was in the corridor, that smelled like a cellar underground, and as their footsteps sounded reverberant upon the flags uncar-peted, Doom Castle gave the stranger the impression of a vault. Fantastic shadows danced macabre in the light of the candles; they were the only furniture of that part of the rough dwelling that the owner shuffled through as quickly as he could to save his guest from spying too closely the barrenness of the land. He went first to the outer door with the candle before he said good night, drew back great bars, and opened the oak. The sky was studded with pale golden stars; the open air was dense with the perfume of the wood, the saline indication of the sea-ware. On the rocky edge of the islet at one part showed the white fringe of the waves now more peaceful; to the north brooded enormous hills, seen dimly by the stars, couchant terrors, vague, vast shapes of dolours and alarms. Doom stood long looking at them with the flame of the candle blowing inward and held above his head--a mysterious man beyond Montaiglon's comprehension. He stood behind him a pace or two, s.h.i.+vering in the evening air.

"You'll be seeing little there, I'll warrant, Count, but a cold night and inhospitable vacancy, hard hills and the robber haunting them. For me, that prospect is my evening prayer. I cannot go to sleep without it, for fear I wake in Paradise and find it's all by with Doom and the native hills for me."

And by that he seemed to Montaiglon more explicable: it was the lover he was; the sentimentalist, the poet, knowing the ancient secret of the animate earth, taking his hills and valleys pa.s.sionately to his heart.

The Frenchman bowed his sympathy and understanding.

"It's a wonder Mungo kept his word and went to bed," said the Baron, recovering his ordinary manner, "for it would just suit his whim to bide up and act sentry here, very well pleased at the chance your coming gave him of play-acting the man of war."

He bolted the door again with its great bars, then gravely preceded his guest to the foot of the turret stair, where he handed him the candle.

"You're in a dreary airt of the house," he said apologetically, "but I hope you may find it not uncomfortable. Doom is more than two-thirds but empty sh.e.l.l, and the bats have the old chapel above you. _Oidhche mhath!_ Good night!" He turned upon his heel and was gone into the farther end of the pa.s.sage.

As Montaiglon went up to his room, the guttering candle flame, puffed at by hidden and mischievous enemies from broken ports and gun-slits, showed upon the landing lower than his own a long corridor he had not observed upon his first ascent. With the candle held high above his head he glanced into the pa.s.sage, that seemed to have several doors on either hand. In a castle so spa.r.s.ely occupied the very knowledge of this long and empty corridor in the neighbourhood of his sleeping apartment conferred a sense of chill and mystery. He thought he could perceive the odour of damp, decayed wood, crumbled lime, hanging rotten in stagnant airs and covered with the dust of years. "_Dieu!_" he exclaimed involuntarily, "this is no Cammercy." He longed for some relief from the air of mystery and dread that hung about the place. A laugh would have been a revelation, a strain of song a miracle of healing. And all at once he reflected upon the Annapla as yet unseen.

"These might be her quarters," he reflected, finding a solace in the thought. The chill was at once less apparent, a pleasant glow of companions.h.i.+p came over him. Higher up he held the light to see the farther into the long pa.s.sage, and as he did so the flame was puffed out. It seemed so human a caprice that he drew himself sharply against the wall, ready by instinct to evade any rush or thrust that was to follow. And then he smiled at his own alarm at a trick of the wind through some of La-mond's ill-patched walls, and found his consolation in the sense of companions.h.i.+p confirmed by sight of a thin line of light below a door mid-way up the curious pa.s.sage.

"Annapla, for a louis!" he thought cheerfully. "Thank heaven for one petticoat in Doom--though that, in truth, is to concede the lady but a scanty wardrobe." And he hummed softly as he entered his own room.

Wearied exceedingly by the toils of the day, he had no sooner thrown himself upon the bed than he slept with no need for the lullaby aid of the sea that rumoured light and soothingly round the rock of Doom.

CHAPTER V -- THE FLAGEOLET

He woke from a dream of pressing danger and impotent flight to marvel where he was in darkness; fancied himself at first in some wayside inn mid-way over Scotland, and sat up suddenly with an exclamation of a.s.surance that he was awake to the suppositious landlord who had called, for the sense of some sound but stilled on the second of his waking was strong within him. He fastened upon the vague starlit s.p.a.ce of the little window to give him a clew to his situation. Then he remembered Doom, and, with the window for his key, built up the puzzle of his room, wondering at the cause of his alarm.

The wind had risen and sent a loud murmur through the trees along the coast; the sea, in breakers again, beat on the rock till Doom throbbed.

But there was nothing in that to waken a man who had ridden two days on coa.r.s.e roads and encountered and fought with banditti. Decidedly there was some menace in the night; danger on hard fields had given him blood alert and unsleeping; the alarum was drumming at his breast. Stealthily he put out his hand, and it fell as by a fiddler's instinct upon the spot desired--the hilt of his sword. There he kept it with his breath subdued, and the alarum severely quelled.

An owl's call sounded on the sh.o.r.e, extremely pensive in its note, and natural, but unusual in the rhythm of its repet.i.tion. It might have pa.s.sed for the veritable call of the woods to an unsuspicious ear, but Montaiglon knew it for a human signal. As if to prove it so, it was followed by the grating of the outer door upon its hinge, and the sound of a foot stumbling among stones.

He reflected that the tide was out in all probability, and at once the notion followed that here were his searchers, the Macfarlanes, back in force to revenge his impetuous injury to their comrades. But then--a second thought almost as promptly told him in that case there should be no door opened.

A sound of subdued voices came from the foot of the tower and died in the garden behind or was swept elsewhere by the wind; then, through the voice of the wave, the moan of the wind, and its whistle in vent and cranny, came a strain of music--not the harsh uncultured pipe of Mungo the servitor, but a more dulcet air of flute or flageolet. In those dark savage surroundings it seemed a sound inhuman, something unreal, something of remembrance in delirium or dream, charged for this Parisian with a thousand recollections of fond times, gay times, pa.s.sionate times elsewhere. Doom throbbed to the waves, but the flageolet stirred in him not so much surprise at this incongruous experience as a wave of emotion where all his past of gaillard was crystalled in a second--many nights of dance and song anew experienced in a mellow note or two; an old love reincarnated in a phrase (and the woman in the dust); the evenings of Provence lived again, and Louis's darling flute piping from the chateau over the field and river; moons of harvest vocal with some peasant cheer; in the south the nightingale searching to express his kins.h.i.+p with the mind of man and the creatures of the copse, his rapture at the star.

Somehow the elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in pa.s.sionate crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon--and yet it was too short--the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains.

Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with tears at his father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance gave quickness to the execution.

But more haunting than all was one simple strain and brief, indeed never wholly accomplished, as if the player sought to recollect a song forgot, that was repeated over and over again, as though it were the motive of the others or refrain. Sometimes Montaiglon thought the player had despaired of concluding this bewitching melody when he changed suddenly to another, and he had a very sorrow at his loss; again, when its progress to him was checked by a veering current of the wind and the flageolet rose once more with a different tune upon it, he dreaded that the conclusion had been found in the lacuna.

He rose at last and went to the window, and tried in the wan illumination of the heavens to detect the mysterious musician in the garden, but that was quite impossible: too dark the night, too huge and profound the shadows over Doom. He went to his door and opened it and looked down the yawning stairway; only the sigh of the wind in the gun-slits occupied the stairway, and the dark was the dark of Genesis.

And so again to bed, to lie with his weariness for long forgotten. He found that tantalising fragment return again and again, but fated never to be complete. It seemed, he fancied, something like a symbol of a life--with all the qualities there, the sweetness, the affection, the pa.s.sion, the divine despair, the longing, even the valours and the faiths to make a great accomplishment, but yet lacking the round accomplishment. And as he waited once again for its recurrence he fell asleep.