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<h2> CHAPTER IV — WANTED, A SPY </h2>
<p>The wail of a mountain pipe, poorly played, as any one accustomed to its
strains would have admitted, even if the instrument was one he loved, and
altogether execrable in the ears of Montaiglon, called him to the <i>salle</i>,
where Doom joined him in a meal whereof good Mungo's jugged hare formed no
part. Mungo, who had upheld ancient ceremony by his crude performance on
the <i>piob mhor</i>, was the attendant upon the table,—an office he
undertook with his bonnet on his head, "in token," as his master
whisperingty explained to Count Victor, "of his sometimes ill-informed
purpose of conducting every formal task in Doom upon the strict letter of
military codes as pertained in camps, garrisons, and strongholds." It was
amusing to witness the poor fellow's pompous precision of movement as he
stood behind his master's chair or helped the guest to his humble meal;
the rigidity of his inactive moments, or the ridiculous jerkiness with
which he passed a platter as 'twere to the time of a drill-sergeant's
baton. More amusing still to one able, like Count Victor, to enter into
the humour of the experience, was it to have his garrulity get the better
of him in spite of the military punctilio.</p>
<p>"The Baron was telling me aboot your exploit wi' the Loch Sloy pairty.
Man! did I no' think ye had come by boat," he whispered over a tendered
ale-glass. "It was jist my luck to miss sic a grand ploy. I wad hae backed
ye to haud the water against Black Andy and all his clan, and they're no'
slack at a tulzie."</p>
<p>"Ye may be grand in a fight, Mungo, but only a middling man at forage,"
interrupted his master. "I think ye said jugged hare?"</p>
<p>"It wasna my faut," explained the domestic, "that ye havena what was
steepulated; the Baron wadna bide till the beast was cooked."</p>
<p>Doom laughed. "Come, come, Mungo," said he, "the Count could scarcely be
expected to wait for the cooking of an animal running wild in the bracken
twenty minutes ago."</p>
<p>"Oh, it disna tak' sae terrible lang to cook a hare," said the unabashed
retainer.</p>
<p>"But was it a hare after a', Mungo?" asked his master. "Are ye sure it
wasna a rabbit?"</p>
<p>"A rabbit!" cried he in astonishment; then more cautiously, "Weel, if it
was a rabbit, it was a gey big ane, that's a' I can say," and he covered
his perturbation by a retreat from the room to resume his office of
musician, which, it appeared, demanded a tune after dinner as well as
before it.</p>
<p>What had seemed to Montaiglon a harsh, discordant torturing of reeds when
heard on the stair outside his chamber, seemed somehow more mellowed and
appropriate—pleasing even—when it came from the garden outside
the castle, on whose grass-grown walk the little lowlander strutted as he
played the evening melody of the house of Doom—a pibroch all imbued
with passion and with melancholy. This distance lulled it into something
more than human music, into a harmony with the monotone of the wave that
thundered against the rock; it seemed the voice of choiring mermen; it had
the bitterness, the agonised remembrance, of the sea's profound; it was
full of hints of stormy nights and old wars. For a little Doom and his
visitor sat silent listening to it, the former, with a strain upon his
countenance, tapping nervously with his fingers upon the arm of his chair.</p>
<p>"An old custom in the Highlands," he explained. "I set, perhaps, too
little store by it myself, but Mungo likes to maintain it, though he plays
the pipe but indifferently, and at this distance you might think the
performance not altogether without merit.</p>
<p>"I love all music," replied Count Victor with polite ambiguity, and he
marvelled at the signs of some deep feeling in his host.</p>
<p>Till a late hour they sat together while Count Victor explained his
mission to the Highlands. He told much, but, to be sure, he did not at
first tell all. He recounted the evidences of the spy's guilt as a
correspondent with the British Government, whose pay he drew while sharing
the poor fortunes and the secrets of the exiled Jacobites. "Iscariot, my
dear Baron," he protested, "was a Bayard compared with this wretch. His
presence in your locality should pollute the air; have you not felt a
malaise?"</p>
<p>"It's dooms hard," admitted the Baron, throwing up distressed hands, "but,
man, I'm feared he's not the only one. Do you know, I could mention
well-kent names far ben in the Cause—men not of hereabouts at all,
but of Lochaber no less, though you may perhaps not guess all that means—and
they're in Paris up to the elbow now in the same trade. It's well known to
some of yourselves, or should be, and it puzzles me that you should come
to the shire of Argyll on account of one, as I take it, no worse than
three or four you might have found by stepping across the road to Roisin's
coffee-house in the Rue Vaugirard. The commoners in the late troubles have
been leal enough, I'll give them that credit, but some of the gentry wag
their tongues for Prince Tearlach and ply their pens for Geordie's pay."</p>
<p>The servant came in with two candles, placed them on the table, and
renewed the fire. He had on a great woollen night-cowl of gaudy hue with a
superb tassel that bobbed grotesquely over his beady eyes.</p>
<p>"I'll awa' to my bed, if it's your will, Baron," said he with the
customary salute. "I was thinkin' it might be needful for me to bide up a
while later in case ony o' the Coont's freends cam' the way; but the
tide'll keep them aff till mornin' anyway, and I'm sure we'll meet them a'
the baulder then if we hae a guid sleep." He got permission to retire, and
passed into the inky darkness of the corridor, and crept to that part of
the vacant dwelling in which he had his bed.</p>
<p>"There might be another reason for my coming here," said Montaiglon,
resuming the conversation where Mungo's entrance had broken it off. "In
this affair there was a lady. I knew her once." He paused with a manner
showing discomposure.</p>
<p>"And there was liking; I can comprehend," said Doom with sympathy.</p>
<p>"Liking is but love without wings," said Montaiglon. "My regard soared
above the clay; I loved her, and I think she was not indifferent to me
till this man came in her way. He had, they say, the devil's tongue; at
least he had the devil's heart, and she died six months ago with her head
on my arm. I could tell you the story, M. le Baron, but it is in all the
books, and you can fancy it easily. She died forgiving her betrayer, and
sending a message to that effect by me. I come to deliver it, and, by God!
to push it to his heart."</p>
<p>"It is a dangerous errand in this country and at this time," said Doom,
looking into the fire.</p>
<p>"Ah! but you did not know Cecile," replied Montaiglon, simply.</p>
<p>"But I know the human heart. I know it in any man under the sober age of
thirty. Better to let it rest thus. Excuse my interference. It does not
matter much to me that it should be out of my house you should go seeking
for your vengeance, but I'm an older man than you, and have learned how
quickly the worst misfortunes and wrongs may be forgotten. In your place I
would leave this man to the punishment of his own conscience."</p>
<p>Montaiglon laughed bitterly. "That," said he, "is to assume a mechanism
that in his case never existed. Pardon me, I pray you, but I prefer the
old reckoning, which will be all the fairer because he has the reputation
of being a good swordsman, and I am not without some practice."</p>
<p>"And the man's name? you have not mentioned it."</p>
<p>"But there you puzzle me. He was eight months in France, six of these in a
lodging beside the Baigneurs on the Estrapade, Rue Dauphine. He came with
no credentials but from Glengarry, and now Glengarry can give no account
of him except that he had spoken familiarly to him of common friends in
the Highlands."</p>
<p>"Oh, Glengarry—Alasdair Rhuadh!" exclaimed the Baron, dryly.</p>
<p>"And presumed to be burdened with a dangerous name, he passed with the
name of Drimdarroch."</p>
<p>"Drimdarroch!" repeated the Baron with some apparent astonishment.</p>
<p>"I have never seen the man, so far as I know, for I was at Cammercy when
he hung about the lady."</p>
<p>"Drimdarroch!" repeated Doom reflectively, "a mere land title."</p>
<p>"And some words he dropped in the ear of the lady made me fancy he might
be found about the Court of Argyll."</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>Doom pushed back his chair a little from the fire, but without taking his
eyes from the peats, and made a curious suggestion.</p>
<p>"You would not take it to be me, would you?" he asked.</p>
<p>Count Victor laughed, with a gesture of his hands that made denial all
unnecessary.</p>
<p>"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 shire 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 accumulation of
dusty documents 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.</p>
<p>"That's Drimdarroch!" said he, intensely bitter; "that's Drimdarroch, and
Duntorvil, that's the Isles, the bonny Isles of Lochow; that's damn 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—God! I have the cackle of the law
in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that wi' all my
practice?"</p>
<p>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
passage 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 bestial!"</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>"<i>Tenez!</i> M. Bethune was scarcely like to send me to Doom in that
case," said the Count laughing.</p>
<p>"But Bethune, like yourself, may never have seen the man."</p>
<p>"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 <i>bavard</i>, his great
friends, Glengarry and another Scot, Balhaldie—"</p>
<p>"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 identity. 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."</p>
<p>"<i>Eh bien!</i> Monsieur; <i>this</i> 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."</p>
<p>"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—"</p>
<p>"Sir!" cried Montaiglon, half rising in his chair.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"<i>Mille pardons!</i>" 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."</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>"And ye would send this man to hell that he may find his punishment in
remembering her? If I thought so much of vengeance I would leave him on
the earth forgetting."</p>
<p>"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 nobihty <i>de cour</i> 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 <i>par les deux
bouts</i> 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 marksmanship."</p>
<p>Doom sighed, took up a candle, and led the way into the passage. 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, shivering in the evening
air.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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 passionately to his heart. The
Frenchman bowed his sympathy and understanding.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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 shell, and the bats have the old chapel above you. <i>Oidhche mhath!</i>
Good night!" He turned upon his heel and was gone into the farther end of
the passage.</p>
<p>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 passage, that seemed to have several doors on either hand. In a
castle so sparsely 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. "<i>Dieu!</i>" 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.</p>
<p>"These might be her quarters," he reflected, finding a solace in the
thought. The chill was at once less apparent, a pleasant glow of
companionship came over him. Higher up he held the light to see the
farther into the long passage, 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
companionship confirmed by sight of a thin line of light below a door
mid-way up the curious passage.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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