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Doom Castle

<h2> CHAPTER III — BARON OF DOOM </h2> Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came. Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at a single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other evidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom. "M. Bethune's bowl," he said to himself, "is not likely to be brimming over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much of the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry again for a louis!—Glengarry sans feu ni lieu, but always the most punctilious when most nearly penniless." Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet; then reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously bare the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped again, and sheathed the steel. A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently just inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain clanked. But something informed the Count Victor that he was being observed, and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss was missing about the height of his head and that through the hole an eye was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with a hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eye apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count Victor saw its owner fully revealed. A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well as humour. A domestic—a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count Victor could not resist smiling back to it. And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold, with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a military salute. "Doom?" inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door. "Jist that," answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to each other on the quays. "Is your master at home?" he asked. "At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken," said the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural geniality and burlesque importance, "It's the auld styles aboot Doom, sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously before the like o' me could say." "My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I—" "Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon," cried the little man with a salute more profound than before. "We're prood to see you, and hoo are they a' in France?" "Tolerably well, I thank you," said Count Victor, amused at this grotesque combination of military form and familiarity. Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag. With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared his shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior. "This way, your honour," said he. "Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi' a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a wasp's byke." The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut of itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading into a room. An odour of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers was to be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a shell that is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasant anticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterly erroneous, mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behind the little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner. The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance was held half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein were surprise and curiosity. "The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France," announced Mungo, stepping aside still with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing by the door to give dignity to the introduction and the entrance. The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servant when he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller cocked hat in one hand and fondling the upturned moustache with the other; something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly dismissed the man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he turned a questioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing him one of the few chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms. "You are welcome, sir," he said simply in a literal rendering of his native Gaelic phrase; "take your breath. And you will have refreshment?" Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. "It is the custom of the country," said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling among glasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunity of settling down to his new surroundings—a room ill-furnished as a monk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who had implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typical Highland stronghold. The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head slightly to see what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds. And the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folio of arms, "Les Arts de l'Homme d'Ep�e; ou, Le Dictionnaire du Gentilhomme," by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place, but apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described its master as "ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his d�jeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron (of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a reader of the beau langage, and a student of the lore of arme blanche—come, here was luck! And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle of quaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners and two glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams upon the table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the book of arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the native tartan of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat and breeches of some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more of the look of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a man at least twenty years the senior of his visitor—a handsome man of his kind, dark, deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, but seemingly, to the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of one unpardonable weakness in a gentleman—a shame of his obvious penury. "I have permitted myself, M. le Baron, to interrupt you on the counsel of a common friend," said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to a situation somewhat droll. "After the goblet, after the goblet," said Lamond softly, himself but sipping at the rim of his glass. "It is the custom of the country—one of the few that's like to be left to us before long." "� la sant� de la bonne cause!" said the Count politely, choking upon the fiery liquor and putting down the glass with an apology. "I am come from France—from Saint Germains," he said. "You may have heard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon." The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion. "Do you tell me, now?" said he. "Then you are the more welcome. I wish I could say so in your own language—that is, so far as ease goes, known to me only in letters. From Saint Germains—" making a step or two up and down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing. "H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of the Highland gentry about the place." "There is one Bethune—Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron," replied Count Victor meaningly. "Knowing that I was coming to this part of the world, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardly circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast with but one name of a friend, pardieu, to make the strange cliffs cheerful." "You are very good," said the Baron simply, with half a bow. "And Hugh Bethune, now—well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old friend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!"—a strange wistfulness came to the Baron's utterance—"Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail." "I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it at a bal masque." "So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit." Count Victor smiled. "It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with less dignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit, M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates." "Ay, man!" said the Baron, heedless of the irony, "and Hugh wears the tartan?" "Only in the waistcoat," repeated Count Victor, complacently looking at his own scallops. "Even that!" said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. And then he added hurriedly, "Not that the tartan's anything wonderful. It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another. There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks, says I—the douce, honest breeks——" "Unless it be the petticoats," murmured the Count, smiling, and his fingers went to the pointing of his moustache. "Nothing like the breeks. The philabeg was aye telling your parentage in every line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there but any drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family of caterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should be proscribed, but what does it matter?" "The tartan is forbidden?" guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled. Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes. He turned to fumble noisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard. "I thought that was widely enough known," said he. "Put down by the law, and perhaps a good business too. Diaouil!" He came back to the table with this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film of the peat-fire. "There was a story in every line," said he, "a history in every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but crotal-colour—the old stuff stained with lichen from the rock." "Ah, what damage!" said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. "But there are some who wear it yet?" The Baron started slightly. "Sir?" he questioned, without taking his eyes from the embers. "The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must have something of an air of impertinence," said Count Victor briskly, unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; "but the cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and sans culottes too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings. I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an oyster-man with my bag on my back." "Good God!" cried the Baron. "I forgot the tide. Could you not have whistled?" "Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to be ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. Mon Dieu! but I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first introduction to your tartan among its own mountains." "It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some of the king's soldiers," suggested the Baron. Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. "I think I know a red-coat when I see one," said he. "These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's call for signal too." "Are you sure?" cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an unbelieving tone. "My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner of introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to be circumspect; is it not so?" As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had tried to cloak—by a scarcely perceptible tremour of the hand that drummed the table, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. He saw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to a careless laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points, drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically saluted and lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease. The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes and talents. "Still I'm a little in the dark," he said when the point dropped and Count Victor recovered. "Pardon," said his guest. "I am vexed at what you may perhaps look on as a trifle. The ruffians attacked me a mile or two farther up the coast, shot my horse below me, and chased me to the very edge of your moat. I made a feint to shoot one with my pistol, and came closer on the gold than I had intended." "The Macfarlanes!" cried Doom, with every sign of uneasiness. "It's a pity, it's a pity; not that a man more or less of that crew makes any difference, but the affair might call for more attention to this place and your presence here than might be altogether wholesome for you or me." He heard the story in more detail, and when Count Victor had finished, ran into an adjoining room to survey the coast from a window there. He came back with a less troubled vision. "At least they're gone now," said he in a voice that still had some perplexity. "I wish I knew who it was you struck. Would it be Black Andy of Arroquhar now? If it's Andy, the gang will be crying 'Loch Sloy!' about the house in a couple of nights; if it was a common man of the tribe, there might be no more about it, for we're too close on the Duke's gallows to be meddled with noisily; that's the first advantage I ever found in my neighbourhood." "He was a man of a long habit of body," said Count Victor, "and he fell with a grunt." "Then it was not Andy. Andy is like a hogshead—a blob of creesh with a turnip on the top—and he would fall with a curse." "Name of a pipe! I know him; he debated the last few yards of the way with me, and I gave him De Chenier's mace in the jaw." "Sir?" "I put him slightly out of countenance with the butt and trigger-guard of my pistol. Again I must apologise, dear Baron, for so unceremonious and ill-tempered an approach to your hospitality. You will confess it is a sort of country the foibles of whose people one has to grow accustomed to, and Bethune gave me no guidance for such an emergency as banditti on the fringe of Argyll's notoriously humdrum Court." "Odd!" repeated Doom. "Will you step this way?" He led Count Victor to the window that commanded the coast, and their heads together filled the narrow space as they looked out. It was a wondrous afternoon. The sun swung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed to the gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood and heather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him, the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land, the abode of seraphim and the sun's eternal smile. "God is good!" said he again, no way reverently, but with some emotion. "I thought I had left for ever the place of hope, and here's Paradise with open doors." Then he looked upon the nearer country, upon the wooded hills, the strenuous shoulders of the bens upholding all that glory of sinking sunshine, and on one he saw upstanding, a vulgar blotch upon the landscape, a gaunt long spar with an overhanging arm. "Ah!" he said airily, "there is civilisation in the land after all." "Plenty of law at least," said the Baron. "Law of its kind—MacCailen law. His Grace, till the other day, as it might be, was Justice-General of the shire, Sheriff of the same, Regality Lord, with rights of pit and gallows. My place goes up to the knowe beside his gallows; but his Grace's regality comes beyond this, and what does he do but put up his dule-tree there that I may see it from my window and mind the fact. It's a fine country this; man, I love it! I'm bound to be loving it, as the saying goes, waking and sleeping, and it brought me back from France, that I had no illwill to, and kept me indoors in the 'Forty-five,' though my heart was in the rising, as Be-thune would tell you. A grand country out and in, wet and dry, winter and summer, and only that tree there and what it meant to mar the look and comfort of it. But here I'm at my sentiments and you starving, I am sure, for something to eat." He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondness that surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo. In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in his military manner. "Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?" asked the master indulgently. "Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided for voluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane's on the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry. There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oors syne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-to wdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies." They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor. "I regret the what-do-you-call-it?—the stoved howtowdy," said he, laughing, "more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveys to me." "There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate the bagpipes," said Mungo. "There's waur nor howtowdy. And oh! I forgot the het victual, there's jugged hare." "Is the hare ready?" asked the Baron suspiciously. "It's no jist a'thegether what ye micht ca' ready," answered Mungo without hesitation; "but it can be here het in nae time, and micht agree wi' the Count better nor the cauld fowl." "Tell Annapla to do the best she can," broke in the Baron on his servant's cheerful garrulity; and Mungo with another salute disappeared. "How do your women-folk like the seclusion of Doom?" asked Count Victor, to make conversation while the refection was in preparation. "With the sea about you so, and the gang of my marauding obese friend in the wood behind, I should think you had little difficulty in keeping them under your eye." The Baron was obviously confused. "Mungo's quite enough to keep his eye on Annapla," said he. "He has the heart and fancy to command a garrison; there's a drum forever beating in his head, a whistle aye fifing in his lug, and he will amuse you with his conceits of soldiering ancient and modern, a trade he thinks the more of because Heaven made him so unfit to become 'prentice to it. Good Mungo! There have been worse men; indeed what need I grudge admitting there have been few better? He has seen this place more bien than it is to-day in my father's time, and in my own too before the law-pleas ate us up; you will excuse his Scots freedom of speech, Count, he—" A shot rang outside in some shrubbery upon the mainland, suddenly putting an end to Doom's conversation. Count Victor, sure that the Macfarlanes were there again, ran to the window and looked out, while his host in the rear bit his lip with every sign of annoyance. As Montaiglon looked he saw Mungo emerge from the shrubbery with a rabbit in his hand and push off hurriedly in a little boat, which apparently was in use for communication with the shore under such circumstances. "And now," said the Count, without comment upon what he had seen, "I think, with your kind permission, I shall change my boots before eating. "There's plenty of time for that, I jalouse," said Doom, smiling somewhat guiltily, and he showed his guest to a room in the turret. It was up a flight of corkscrew stairs, and lit with singular poverty by an orifice more of the nature of a porthole for a piece than a window, and this port or window, well out in the angle of the turret, commanded a view of the southward wall or curtain of the castle. Montaiglon, left to himself, opened the bag that Mungo had placed in readiness for him in what was evidently the guest-room of the castle, transformed the travelling half of himself into something that was more in conformity with the gay nature of his upper costume, complacently surveyed the result when finished, and hummed a chanson of Pierre Gringoire's, altogether unremembering the encounter in the wood, the dead robber, and the stern nature of his embassy here so far from France. He bent to close the valise, and with a start abruptly concluded his song at the sight of a miniature with the portrait of a woman looking at him from the bottom of the bag. "Mort de ma vie! what a fool I am; what a forgetful vengeur, to be chanting Gringoire in the house of Doom and my quarry still to hunt!" His voice had of a sudden gained a sterner accent; the pleasantness of his aspect became clouded by a frown. Looking round the constricted room, and realising how like a prison-cell it was compared with what he had expected, he felt oppressed as with the want of air. He sought vainly about the window for latch or hinge to open it, and as he did so glanced along the castle wall painted yellow by the declining sun. He noticed idly that some one was putting out upon the sill of a window on a lower stage what might have been a green kerchief had not the richness of its fabric and design suggested more a pennon or banneret. It was carefully placed by a woman's hands—the woman herself unseen. The incident recalled an old exploit of his own in Marney, and a flood of humorous memories of amorous intrigue. "Mademoiselle Annapla," said he whimsically, "has a lover, and here's his signal. The Baron's daughter? The Baron's niece? The Baron's ward? Or merely the Baron's domestic? M. Bethune's document suffers infernally from the fault of being too curt. He might at least have indicated the fair recluse." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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