Doom Castle Part 6

Many rooms of it were obviously unoccupied, for in the domestic routine of the Baron and of Mungo and the lady of song there were two storeys utterly unoccupied, and even in the flats habited there were seemingly chambers vacant, at least ever unopened and forlorn. Count Victor realised, as he looked at the frowning and taciturn walls, that he might be in Doom a twelvemonth and have no chance to learn from that abstracted scholar, its owner, one-half of its interior economy.

From the ground he could get no clear view of the woman's window: that he discovered early, for it was in the woman he sought the key to all Doom's little mystery. He must, to command the window, climb to his own chamber in the tower, and even then it was not a full front view he had, but a foreshortened glance at the side of it and the signal, if any more signalling there might be. He never entered that room without a glance along the sun-lit walls; he never pa.s.sed the mouth of that corridor on the half landing where his candle had blown out without as curious a scrutiny as good-breeding might permit. And nothing was disclosed.

Mungo pervaded the place--Mungo toiling in the outhouses at tasks the most menial, feeding the half-dozen moulting poultry, digging potatoes in the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairs with backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; and in the _salle_ the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholy by rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking with pensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon his knee--that was Doom as Count Victor was permitted to know it.

He began at last to doubt his senses, and half believe that what he had heard on the night of his arrival had been some chimera, a dream of a wearied and imperilled man in unaccustomed surroundings.

Mungo saw him walk with poorly concealed curiosity about the outside of the stronghold, and smiled to himself as one who knows the reason for a gentleman's prying. Montaiglon caught that smile once: his chagrin at its irony was blended with a pleasing delusion that the frank and genial domestic might proffer a solution without indelicate questioning. But he was soon undeceived: the discreet retainer knew but three things in this world--the grandeur of war, the ancient splendour of the house of Doom, and the excellent art of absent-mindedness. When it came to the contents of Doom, Mungo Boyd was an oyster.

"It must have been a place of some importance in its day," said Count Victor, gazing up at the towering walls and the broken embrasures.

"And what is't yet?" demanded Mungo, jealously, with no recollection that a moment ago he had been mourning its decline.

"_Eh bien!_ It is quite charming, such of it as I have had the honour to see; still, when the upper stages were habitable------" and Count Victor mentally cursed his luck that he must fence with a blunt-witted scullion.

"Oh, ay! I'll alio' I've seen it no' sae empty, if that's what ye mean; but if it's no' jist Dumbarton or Dunedin, it's still auld bauld Doom, and an ill deevil to crack, as the laddie said that found the nutmeg."

"But surely," conceded Montaiglon, "and yet, and yet--have you ever heard of Jericho, M. Boyd? Its capitulation was due to so simple a thing as the playing of a trumpet or two."

"I ken naething aboot trumpets," said Mungo curtly, distinguis.h.i.+ng some _arriere pensee_ in the interrogator.

"_Fi donc!_ and you so much the old _sabreur!_ Perhaps your people marched to the flageolet--a seductive instrument, I a.s.sure you."

The little man betrayed confusion. "Annapla thrieps there's a ghaistly flageolet aboot Doom," said he, "but it'll hae to toil away lang or the wa's o' oor Jericho fa',--they're seeven feet thick."

"He plays divinely, this ghostly flageoleteer, and knows his Handel to a demi-semi-quaver," said Count Victor coolly.

"O Lord! lugs! I told them that!" muttered Mungo.

"Pardon!"

"Naething; we're a' idiots noo and then, and--and I maun awa' in."

So incontinently he parted from Count Victor, who, to pa.s.s the afternoon, went walking on the mainland highway. He walked to the south through the little hamlet he and Doom had visited earlier in the day; and as the beauty of the scenery allured him increasingly the farther he went, he found himself at last on a horn of the great bay where the Duke's seat lay sheltered below its hilly ramparts. As he had walked to this place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea was now a fleet of fis.h.i.+ng-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting out upon their evening travail--a heartening spectacle; and that on either side of him--once the squalid huts of Doom were behind--was a more dainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was not wholly unprepared for the n.o.ble view revealed when he turned the point of land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.

But yet the sight somewhat stunned. In all his notions of Drimdarroch's habitation, since he had seen the poverty of Doom, he had taken his idea from the baron's faded splendour, and had ludicrously underestimated the importance of Argyll's court and the difficulty of finding his man.

Instead of a bleak bare country-side, with the ducal seat a mean tower in the midst of it, he saw a wide expanse of thickly-wooded and inhabitable country speckled for miles with comfortable dwellings, the castle itself a high embattled structure, cl.u.s.tered round by a town of some dimensions, and at its foot a harbour, where masts were numerous and smoke rose up in clouds.

Here was, plainly, a different society from Doom; here was something of what the exiled chiefs had bragged of in their cups. The Baron had suggested no more than a dozen of cadets about the place. _Grand Dieu!_ there must be a regiment in and about this haughty palace, with its black and yellow banner streaming in the wind, and to seek Drimdarroch there and round that busy neighbourhood seemed a task quite hopeless.

For long he stood on the nose of land, gazing with a thousand speculations at where probably lay his prey; and when he returned to the castle of Doom it looked all the more savage and inhospitable in contrast with the lordly domicile he had seen. What befell him there on his return was so odd and unexpected that it clean swept his mind again of every interest in the spy.

CHAPTER VIII -- AN APPARITION

The tide in his absence had come in around the rock of Doom, and he must signal for Mungo's ferry. Long and loud he piped, but there was at first no answer; and when at last the little servitor appeared, it was to look who called, and then run back with a haste no way restrained by any sense of garrison punctilio. He was not long gone, but when he came down again to the boat his preparations for crossing took up an unconscionable time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and then a thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bow unaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo, though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality. He seemed to be the family's friend resenting, as far as politeness might, some inconvenience to which it was being subjected without having the power to prevent the same.

Before they had gained the rock, dusk was on the country, brought the sooner for a frost-fog that had been falling all afternoon. It wrapped the woods upon the sh.o.r.e, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doom itself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a place less hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peace it seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drab sky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen, flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. From the sh.o.r.e side no light illumined the sombre masonry; but to the south there was a glow in what he fancied now must be the woman's window, and higher up, doubtless in the chapel above the flat he occupied himself, there was a radiance on which Mungo at the oars turned round now and then to look.

Whistling a careless melody, and with no particularly acute observation of anything beyond the woman's window, which now monopolised his keenest interest in Doom, Count Victor leaped out of the boat as soon as it reached the rock, and entered the castle by the door which Mungo had left open.

What had been a crepe-like fog outside was utter gloom within. The corridor was pitch-black, the stair, as he climbed to his room, was like a wolf's throat, as the saying goes; but as he felt his way up, a door somewhere above him suddenly opened and shut, lending for a moment a gleam of reflected light to his progress. It was followed immediately by a hurried step coming down the stair.

At first he thought he was at length to see the mysterious Annapla, but the masculine nature of the footfall told him he was in error.

"M. le Baron," he concluded, "and home before me by another route," and he stepped closely into the right side of the wall to give pa.s.sage. But the darkness made ident.i.ty impossible, and he waited the recognition of himself. It never came. He was brushed past as by a somnambulist, without greeting or question, though to accomplish it the other in the narrow stairway had to rub clothes with him. Something utterly unexpected in the apparition smote him with surprise and apprehension. It was as if he had encountered something groping in a mausoleum--something startling to the superst.i.tious instinct, though not terrific in a material way. When it pa.s.sed he stood speechless on the stair, looking down into the profound black, troubled with amazement, full of speculation. All the suspicions that he had felt last night, when the signal-calls rose below the turret and the door had opened and the flageolet had disturbed his slumbers, came back to him more sinister, more compelling than before. He listened to the declining footfall of that silent mystery; a whisper floated upwards, a door creaked, no more than that, and yet the effect was wildly disturbing, even to a person of the _sang froid_ of Montaiglon.

At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood a s.p.a.ce on the floor, lost in thought. When he looked at his face, half unconscious that he did so, in a little mirror on a table, he saw revealed there no coward terrors, but a.s.suredly alarm. He smiled at his pallid image, tugged in Gascon manner at his moustache, and threw out his chest; then his sense of humour came to him, and he laughed at the folly of his perturbation. But he did not keep the mood long.

"My _sans culottes_ surely do not share the hospitality of Doom with me in its owner's absence," he reflected. "And yet, and yet--! I owe Bethune something for the thrill of the experiences he has introduced me to. Now I comprehend the affection of those weeping exiles for the very plain and commonplace life of France they profess to think so indifferent a country compared with this they have left behind. A week of these ghosts would drive me to despair. To-morrow--to-morrow--M. de Montaiglon--to-morrow you make your reluctant adieux to Doom and its inexplicable owner, whose surprise and innuendo are altogether too exciting for your good health."

So he promised himself as he walked up and down the floor of his chamber, feeling himself in a cage, yet unable to think how he was to better his condition without the aid of the host whose mysteries disturbed so much by the suspicions they aroused. Bethune had told him Lamond, in spite of his politics and his comparative poverty, was on neighbourly terms with Argyll, and would thus be in a position to put him in touch with the castle of the Duke and the retinue there without creating any suspicion as to the nature of his mission. It was that he had depended on, and to no other quarter could he turn with a hope of being put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom was apparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, at variance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuits with which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesome old manner with the sword, indulged their contestful pa.s.sions, and he presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his most hopeless moments had never allowed for--he did not know the ident.i.ty of the man sought for, and he questioned if it could easily be established.

All these considerations determined Count Victor upon an immediate removal from this starven castle and this suspicious host. But when he joined Doom in the _salle_ he constrained his features to a calm reserve, showing none of his emotions.

He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciously loud but abstracted interest in his ramble.

"Well, Count," said he, "ye've seen the castle of the King o' the Hielan's, as we call him, have you? And what think ye of MacCailen's quarters?"

Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at his interrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessed them charming.

A bitter smile came on the face of his host. "They might well be that,"

said he. "There's many a picking there." And then he became garrulous upon the tale of his house and family, that seemed to have been dogged by misfortune for a century and a half; that had owned once many of these lush glens, the shoulders of these steep bens, the sh.o.r.es of that curving coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed off in successive generations, lost to l.u.s.t, to the gambler's folly, the spendthrift's weakness.

"Hard, is it not?" questioned his host. "I'm the man that should have Doom at its very best, for I could bide among my people here, and like them, and make them like me, without a thought of rambling about the world. 'Mildewing with a ditch between you and life' my grandfather used to call it, when old age took him back from his gaieties abroad. Faith!

I wish I had the chance to do it better than I may. All's here I ever wanted of life, and I have tasted it elsewhere, too. Give me my own acres and my own people about me, and it would be a short day indeed from the rise of the sun till bedtime--a short day and a happy. My father used, after a week or two at home, to walk round the point of Strome where you were to-day and look at the skiffs and gabberts in the port down-by, and the sight never failed to put frolic in the blood of him. If he saw a light out there at sea--the lamp of a s.h.i.+p outbound--he would stand for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As for me, no s.h.i.+p-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star coming up above the hill Ardno."

"To-morrow," said Montaiglon--"to-morrow is another day; that's my consolation in every trial."

"At something on the happy side of thirty it may be that," admitted Doom; "at forty-five there's not so muckle satisfaction in it."

Through all this Count Victor, in spite of the sympathy that sometimes swept him away into his host's narrative, felt his doubts come back and back at intervals. With an eye intent upon the marvel before him, he asked often what this gentleman was concealing. Was he plotting something? And with whom? What was the secret of that wind-blown castle, its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning there, he was the last man in the world to a.s.sociate with the thrilling moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway; but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, made him hopeless of reading that inscrutable face, and he turned to look about the room for some clue to what he found nowhere else.

A chamber plain to meanness--there seemed nothing here to help him to a solution. The few antlered stag-heads upon the walls were mangey and dusty; the strip of arras that swayed softly in the draught of a window only sufficed to accentuate the sordid nature of that once pretentious interior. And the half-curtained recess, with the soiled and dog-eared doc.u.ments of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a downfallen house had come about.

Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.

"Ay!" he said, "that's the ashes of Doom, all that's left of what we burned in fiery living and hot law-pleas. We have the ash and the others have warm hands."

Count Victor, who had been warming his chilled fingers at the fire, moved to the curtain and drew it back, the better again to see that doleful cinerary urn.

His host rose hurriedly from his chair.

"Tras.h.!.+ tras.h.!.+ Only trash, and dear bought at that," said he, seeing his guest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness.

But the deed was done before the implied protest was attended. The Count's movements revealed a Highland dagger concealed beneath one of the parchments! It was a discovery of no importance in a Highland castle, where, in spite of the proscription of weapons, there might innocently be something so common as a dagger left; but a half-checked cry from the Baron stirred up again all Count Victor's worst suspicions.