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<h2> CHAPTER VIII — AN APPARITION </h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 shore, 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 shore 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What had been a cr�pe-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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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 passage. But the
darkness made identity 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 superstitious instinct, though not terrific in a material way. When it
passed 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 <i>sang froid</i> of Montaiglon.</p>
<p>At a bound he went up to his chamber and lit a candle, and stood a space
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 assuredly 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.</p>
<p>"My <i>sans culottes</i> 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."</p>
<p>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 passions, 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 identity 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 <i>salle</i> he constrained his
features to a calm reserve, showing none of his emotions.</p>
<p>He found the Baron seated by the fire, and ready to take a suspiciously
loud but abstracted interest in his ramble.</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>Montaiglon lounged to a chair, threw a careless glance at his
interrogator, pulled the ever upright moustache, and calmly confessed them
charming.</p>
<p>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 shores of that curving
coast. Bit by bit that ancient patrimony had sloughed off in successive
generations, lost to lust, to the gambler's folly, the spendthrift's
weakness.</p>
<p>"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 ship outbound—he would stand
for hours in his night-sark at the window gloating on it. As for me, no
ship-light gave me half the satisfaction of the evening star coming up
above the hill Ardno."</p>
<p>"To-morrow," said Montaiglon—"to-morrow is another day; that's my
consolation in every trial."</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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 associate 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.</p>
<p>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
documents of the law, was the evidence of how all this tragedy of a
downfallen house had come about.</p>
<p>Doom's eyes saw his fall upon the squalid pile.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>His host rose hurriedly from his chair.</p>
<p>"Trash! trash! 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He looked at Doom, and saw his face was hot with some confusion, and that
his tongue stammered upon an excuse his wits were not alert enough to
make.</p>
<p>He stooped and picked up the weapon—an elegant instrument well
adorned with silver on the hilt and sheath; caught it at the point, and,
leaning the hilt upon his left wrist in the manner of the courtier
slightly exaggerated, and true to the delicacies of the <i>salle-d'armes</i>,
proffered it to the owner.</p>
<p>Doom laughed in some confusion. "Ah!" said he, lamely, "Mungo's been at
his dusting again," and he tried to restore the easiness of the
conversation that the incident had so strangely marred.</p>
<p>But Montaiglon could not so speedily restore his equanimity. For the
unknown who had so unceremoniously brushed against him on the dark stair
had been attired in tartan clothes. It had been a bare knee that had
touched him on the leg; it had been a plaid-fringe that had brushed across
his face; and his knuckles had been rapped lightly by the protuberances
upon the sheath and hilt of a mountain dagger. M. le Baron's proscription
of arms seemed to have some strange exceptions, he told himself. They were
not only treated with contempt by the Macfarlanes, but even in Doom
Castle, whose owner affected to look upon the garb of his ancestors as
something well got rid of. For the life of him, Count Victor could not
disassociate the thought of that mysterious figure on the stair, full clad
in all Highland panoply against the law, and the men—the broken men—who
had shot his pony in the wood and attempted to rob him. All the
eccentricities of his host mustered before him—his narrow state here
with but one servant apparent, a mysterious room tenanted by an invisible
woman, and his coldness—surely far from the Highland temper—to
the Count's scheme of revenge upon the fictitious Drimdarroch.</p>
<p>There was an awkward pause even the diplomacy of the Frenchman could not
render less uncomfortable, and the Baron fumbled with the weapon ere he
laid it down again on the table.</p>
<p>"By the way," said Count Victor, now with his mind made up, "I see no
prospect of pushing my discoveries from here, and it is also unfair that I
should involve you in my adventure, that had much better be conducted from
the plain base of an inn, if such there happens to be in the town down
there."</p>
<p>A look of unmistakable relief, quelled as soon as it breathed across his
face, came to the Baron. "Your will is my pleasure," he said quickly; "but
there is at this moment no man in the world who could be more welcome to
share my humble domicile.".</p>
<p>"Yet I think I could work with more certainty of a quick success from a
common lodging in the town than from here. I have heard that now and then
French fish dealers and merchants sometimes come for barter to this coast
and——"</p>
<p>The ghost of a smile came over Doom's face. "They could scarcely take you
for a fish merchant, M. le Count," said he.</p>
<p>"At all events common fairness demands that I should adopt any means that
will obviate getting your name into the thing, and I think I shall try the
inn. Is there one?"</p>
<p>"There is the best in all the West Country there," said Doom, "kept by a
gentleman of family and attainments. But it will not do for you to go down
there without some introduction. I shall have to speak of your coming to
some folk and see if it is a good time."</p>
<p>"<i>Eh bien!</i> Remember at all events that I am in affairs," said
Montaiglon, and the thing was settled.</p>
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