The light went out; he dropped at a boy's intuition upon a knee and lowered his head. Over him in the darkness poured his assailants, too close upon each other in their eagerness, and while they struggled at the stair-foot he drew softly back. Out in the night Mungo wailed lugubrious in the hands of some of his captors; within there was a wonderful silence for a little, the baffled visitors recovering themselves with no waste of words, and mounting the stair in pursuit of the gentleman they presumed to have preceded them. When they were well up, he went to the door and made it fast again, leaving Mungo to the fate his stupidity deserved.

Doom's sleeping-chamber lay behind; he passed along the corridor quickly, knocked at the door, got no answer, and entered.

It was as he had fancied—his host was gone, his couch had not been occupied. A storm of passion swept through him; he felt himself that contemptible thing, a man of the world betrayed by a wickedness that ought to be transparent. They were in the plot then, master and man, perhaps even—but no, that was a thought to quell on the moment of its waking; she at least was innocent of all these machinations, and upstairs now, she shared, without a doubt, the alarms of Annapla. That familiar of shades and witches, that student of the fates, was a noisy poltroon when it was the material world that threatened; she was shrieking again.

"Loch Sloy! Loch Sloy!" now rose the voices overhead, surely the maddest place in the world for a Gaelic slogan: it gave him a sense of unspeakable savagery and antique, for it was two hundred years since his own family had cried "Cammercy!" on stricken fields.

He paused a moment, irresolute.

A veritable farce! he thought. It would have been so much easier for his host to hand him over without these play-house preliminaries.

But Olivia! but Olivia!

He felt the good impulse of love and anger, the old ichor of his folk surged through his veins, and without a weapon he went upstairs, trusting to his wits to deal best with whatever he would there encounter.

It seemed an hour since they had entered; in truth it was but a minute or two, and they were still in the bewildering blackness of the stair, one behind another in its narrow coils, and seemingly wisely dubious of too precipitate an advance. He estimated that they numbered less than half a dozen when he came upon the rear-most of the queue.

"Loch Sloy!" cried the leader, somewhat too theatrically for illusion.

"Cammercy for me!" thought Montaiglon: he was upon the tail, and clutched to drag the last man down. Fate was kind, she gave the bare knees of the enemy to his hand, and behold! here was his instrument—in the customary knife stuck in the man's stocking. It was Count Victor's at a flash: he stood a step higher, threw his arm over the shoulder of the man, pulled him backward into the pit of the stair and stabbed at him as he fell.

"Un!" said he as the wretch collapsed upon himself, and the knife seemed now unnecessary. He clutched the second man, who could not guess the tragedy behind, for the night's business was all in front, and surely only friends were in the rear—he clutched the second lower, and threw him backward over his head.

"Deux!" said Count Victor, as the man fell limp behind him upon his unconscious confederate.

The third in front turned like a viper when Count Victor's clutch came on his waist, and drove out with his feet. The act was his own undoing. It met with no resistance, and the impetus of his kick carried him off the balance and threw him on the top of his confederates below.

"Trois!" said Montaiglon. "Pulling corks is the most excellent training for such a warfare," and he set himself almost cheerfully to number four.

But number four was not in the neck of the bottle: this ferment behind him propelled him out upon the stairhead, and Montaiglon, who had thrown himself upon him, fell with him on the floor. Both men recovered their feet at a spring. A moment's pause was noisy with the cries of the domestic in her room, then the Frenchman felt a hand pass rapidly over his habiliments and seek hurriedly for his throat, as on a sudden inspiration. What that precluded was too obvious: he fancied he could feel the poignard already plunging in his ribs, and he swiftly tried a fall with his opponent.

It was a wrestler's grip he sought, but a wrestler he found, for arms of a gigantic strength went round him, clasping his own to his side and rendering his knife futile; a Gaelic malediction hissed in his ear; he felt breath hot and panting; his own failed miserably, and his blood sang in his head with the pressure of those tremendous arms that caught him to a chest like a cuirass of steel. But if his hands were bound his feet were free: he placed one behind his enemy and flung his weight upon him, so that they fell together. This time Count Victor was uppermost. His hands were free of a sudden; he raised the knife to stab at the breast heaving under him, but he heard as from another world—as from a world of calm and angels—the voice of Olivia in her room crying for her father, and a revulsion seized him, so that he hesitated at his ugly task. It was less than a second's slackness, yet it was enough, for his enemy rolled free and plunged for the stair. Montaiglon seized him as he fled; the skirt of his coat dragged through his hands, and left him with a button. He dropped it with a cry, and turned in the darkness to find himself more frightfully menaced than before.

This time the plunge of the dirk was actual; he felt it sear his side like a hot iron, and caught the wrist that held it only in time to check a second blow. His fingers slipped, his head swam; a moment more, and a Montaiglon was dead very far from his pleasant land of France, in a phantom castle upon a shadowy sea among savage ghosts.

"Father! father!"

It was Olivia's voice; a light was thrown upon the scene, for she stood beside the combatants with a candle in her hand.

They drew back at a mutual spasm, and Montaiglon saw that his antagonist was the Baron of Doom!



CHAPTER XIX — REVELATION

Doom, astounded, threw the dagger from him with an exclamation. His eyes, large and burning yet with passion, were wholly for Count Victor, though his daughter Olivia stood there at his side holding the light that had revealed the furies to each other, her hair in dark brown cataracts on her shoulders, and eddying in bewitching curls upon her ears and temples, that gleamed below like the foam of mountain pools.

"Father! father! what does this mean?" she cried. "There is some fearful mistake here."

"That is not to exaggerate the position, at all events," thought Count Victor, breathing hard, putting the knife unobserved behind him. He smiled to this vision and shrugged his shoulders. He left the elucidation of the mystery to the other gentleman, this counsellor of forgiveness and peace, clad head to foot in the garb he contemned, and capable of some excellent practice with daggers in the darkness.

"I'll never be able to say how much I regret this, Count Victor," said Doom. "Good God! your hands were going, and in a second or two more—"

"For so hurried a farce," said Count Victor, "the lowered light was something of a mistake, n'est ce pas? I—I—I just missed the point of the joke," and he glanced at the dagger glittering sinister in the corner of the stair.

"I have known your mistake all along," cried Olivia. "Oh! it is a stupid thing this. I will tell you! It is my father should have told you before."

The clangour of the outer door closing recalled that there was danger still below. Olivia put a frightened hand on her father's arm. "A thousand pardons, Montaiglon," cried he; "but here's a task to finish." And without a word more of excuse or explanation he plunged downstairs.

Count Victor looked dubiously after him, and made no move to follow.

"Surely you will not be leaving him alone there," said Olivia. "Oh! you have not your sword. I will get your sword." And before he could reply she had flown to his room. She returned with the weapon. Her hand was all trembling as she held it out to him. He took it slowly; there seemed no need for haste below now, for all was silent except the voices of Doom and Mungo.

"It is very good of you, Mademoiselle Olivia," said he. "I thank you, but—but—you find me in a quandary. Am I to consider M. le Baron as ally or—or—or—" He hesitated to put the brutal alternative to the daughter.

Olivia stamped her foot impetuously, her visage disturbed by emotions of anxiety, vexation, and shame.

"Oh, go! go!" she cried. "You will not, surely, be taking my father for a traitor to his own house—for a murderer."

"I desire to make the least of a pleasantry I am incapable of comprehending, yet his dagger was uncomfortably close to my ribs a minute or two ago," sard Count Victor reflectively.

"Oh!" she cried. "Is not this a coil? I must even go myself," and she made to descend.

"Nay, nay," said Count Victor softly, holding her back. "Nay, nay; I will go if your whole ancestry were ranked at the foot."

"It is the most stupid thing," she cried, as he left her; "I will explain when you come up. My father is a Highland gentleman."

"So, by the way, was Drimdarroch," said Montaiglon, but that was to himself. He smiled back into the illumination of the lady's candle, then descended into the darkness with a brow tense and frowning, and his weapon prepared for anything.

The stair was vacant, so was the corridor. The outer door was open; the sound of the sea came in faint murmurs, the mingled odours of pine and wrack borne with it. Out in the heavens a moon swung among her stars most queenly and sedate, careless altogether of this mortal world of strife and terrors; the sea had a golden roadway. A lantern light bobbed on the outer edge of the rock, shining through Olivia's bower like a will-o'-the-wisp, and he could hear in low tones the voices of Doom and his servant. Out at sea, but invisible, for beyond the moon's influence, a boat was being rowed fast: the beat of the oars on the thole-pins came distinctly. And in the wood behind, now cut off from them by the riding waves, owls called incessantly.

It was like a night in a dream, like some vast wheeling chimera of fever—that plangent sea before, those terrors fleeing, and behind, a maiden left with her duenna in a castle demoniac.

Doom and Mungo came back from the rock edge, silently almost, brooding over a mystery, and the three looked at each other.

"Well, they are gone," said the Baron at last, showing the way to his guest.

"What, gone!" said Montaiglon, incapable of restraining his irony. "Not all of them?"

"O Lord! but this is the nicht!" cried the little servant who carried the lantern. "I micht hae bided a' my days in Fife and never kent what war was. The only thing that daunts me is that I should hae missed my chance o' a whup at them, for they had me trussed like a cock before I put my feet below me when they pu'd me oot."

He drew the bars with nervous fingers, and seemed to dread his master as much as he had done the enemy. Olivia had come down to the corridor; aloft Annapla had renewed her lamentations; the four of them stood clustered in the narrow passage at the stair-foot.

"What for did ye open the door, Mungo?" asked Doom,—not the Doom of doleful days, of melancholy evenings of study and of sour memories, not the done man, but one alert and eager, a soldier, in the poise of his body, the set of his limbs, the spirit of his eye.

"Here's a new man!" thought Montaiglon, silently regarding him. "Devilry appears to have a marvellous power of stimulation."

"I opened the door," said Mungo, much perturbed.

"For what?" said Doom shortly.

"There was a knock."

"I heard it. The knock was obvious; it dirled the very roof of the house. But it was not necessary to open at a knock at this time of morning; ye must have had a reason. Hospitality like that to half-a-dozen rogues from Arroquhar, who had already made a warm night for ye, was surely stretched a little too far. What did ye open for?"

Mungo seemed to range his mind for a reply. He looked to Montaiglon, but got no answer in the Frenchman's face; he looked over Montaiglon's shoulder at Olivia, standing yet in the tremour of her fears, and his eye lingered. It was no wonder, thought Count Victor, that it lingered there.

"Come, come, I'm waiting my answer!" cried Doom, in a voice that might have stirred a corps in the battlefield.

"I thought there wasna mair than ane," said Mungo.

"But even one! At this time of morning! And is it your custom to open to a summons of that kind without finding out who calls?"

"I thought I kent the voice," said Mungo, furtively looking again at Olivia.

"And whose was it, this voice that could command so ready and foolish an acquiescence on the part of my honest sentinel Mungo Boyd?" asked Doom incredulously.

"Ye can ask that!" replied the servant desperately; "it's mair than I can tell. All I ken is that I thought the voice fair-spoken, and I alloo it was a daft-like thing to do, but I pu'ed the bar, I had nae sooner dune't nor I was gripped by the thrapple and kep' doon by a couple o' the blackguards that held me a' the time the ither three or four were—"

Doom caught him by the collar and shook him angrily.

"Ye lie, ye Fife cat; I see't in your face!"

"I can speak as to the single voice and its humility, and to the sudden plucking forth of this gentleman," said Count Victor quietly, at sea over this examination. But for the presence of the woman he would have cried out at the mockery of the thing.

"You must hear my explanation, Montaiglon," said Doom. "If you will come to the hall, I will give it. Olivia, you will come too. I should have taken your hints of yesterday morning, and the explanation of this might have been unnecessary."

Doom and his guest went to the salle; Olivia lingered a moment behind.

"Who was it, Mungo?" said she, whisperingly to the servant. "I know by the face of you that you are keeping something from my father."

"Am I?" said he. "Humph! It's Fife very soon for Mungo Boyd, I'm tellin' ye."

"But who was it?" she persisted.

"The Arroquhar men," said he curtly; "and that's all I ken aboot it," and he turned to leave her.

"And that is not the truth, Mungo," said Olivia, with great dignity. "I think with my father that you are telling what is not the true word," and she said no more, but followed to the salle.

On the stairway Count Victor had trod upon the button he had drawn from the skirts of his assailant; he picked it up without a word, to keep it as a souvenir. Doom preceded him into the room, lit some candles hurriedly at the smouldering fire, and turned to offer him a chair.

"Our—our friends are gone," said he. "You seem to have badly wounded one of them, for the others carried him bleeding to the water-side, as we have seen from his blood-marks on the rock: they have gone, as they apparently must have come, by boat. Sit down, Olivia."

His daughter had entered. She had hurriedly coiled her hair up, and the happy carelessness of it pleased Montaiglon's eye like a picture.

Still he said nothing; he could not trust himself to speak, facing, as he fancied yet he did, a traitor.

"I see from your face you must still be dubious of me," said Doom. He waited for no reply, but paced up and down the room excitedly, the pleats of his kilt and the thongs of his purse swinging to his movements: a handsome figure, as Mont-aiglon could not but confess. "I am still shattered at the nerve to think that I had almost taken your life there in a fool's blunder. You must wonder to see me in this—in this costume."

He could not even yet come to his explanation, and Olivia must help him.

"What my father would tell you, if he was not in such a trouble, Count Victor, is what I did my best to let you know last night. It is just that he breaks the laws of George the king in this small affair of our Highland tartan. It is a fancy of his to be wearing it in an evening, and the bats in the chapel upstairs are too blind to know what a rebel it is that must be play-acting old days and old styles among them."

A faint light came suddenly to Count Victor.

"Ah!" said he, "it is not, mademoiselle, that the bats alone are blind; here is a very blind Montaiglon. I implore your pardon, M. le Baron. It is good to be frank, though it is sometimes unpleasant, and I must plead guilty to an imbecile misapprehension."

Doom flushed, and took the proffered hand.

"My good Montaiglon," said he, "I'm the most shamefaced man this day in the shire of Argyll. Need I be telling you that I have all Olivia's sentiment and none of her honest courage?"

"My dear father!" cried Olivia fondly, looking with melting eyes at her parent; and Count Victor, too, thought this mummer no inadmirable figure.

"It is nothing more than my indulgence in the tartan that makes your host look sometimes scarcely trustworthy; and my secret got its right punishment this night. I will not be able to wear a kilt with an easy conscience for some time to come."

"My faith! Baron, that were a penance out of all proportion!" said Count Victor, laughing. "If you nearly gave me the key of the Olympian meadows there, 'tis I that have brought these outlaws about your ears."

"What beats me is that they should make so much ado about a trifle."

"A trifle!" said Count Victor. "True, in a sense. The wretch but died. We must all die; we all know it, though none of us believe it."

"I am glad to say that after all you only wounded yon Macfarlane; so Petullo learned but yesterday, and I clean forgot to tell you sooner."

Montaiglon looked mightily relieved.

"So!" said he; "I shall give a score of the best candles to St. Denys—if I remember when I get home again. You could not have told me such good tidings a moment too soon, dear M. le Baron, though of course a small affair like that would naturally escape one's memory."

"He was as good as dead, by all rumour; but being a thief and an Arroquhar man, he naturally recovered: and now it's the oddest thing in the world that an accident of the nature, that is all, as Black Andy well must know, in the ordinary way of business, should bring about so much fracas."

"It was part of my delusion," said Count Victor, "to fancy Mungo not entirely innocent. As you observed, he opened the door with an excess of hospitality."

"Yes, that was droll," confessed Doom, reflectively. "That was droll, indeed; but Mungo hates the very name of Arroquhar, and all that comes from it."

"Except our Annapla," suggested Olivia, smiling.

"Oh, except Annapla, of course!" said her father. "He's to marry her to avert her Evil Eye."

"And is she a Macfarlane?" asked Montaiglon, surprised.

"No less," replied Doom. "She's a cousin of Andy's; but there's little love lost between them."

"Speaking of bats!" thought Count Victor, but he did not hint at his new conclusions. "Well, I am glad," said he; "they left me but remorse last time; this time here's a souvenir," and he showed the button.

It was a silver chamfered lozenge, conspicuous and unforgettable.

"Stolen gear, doubtless," guessed the Baron, looking at it with indifference. "Silver buttons are not rife between here and the pass of Balmaha."

"Let me see it, please?" said Olivia.

She took it in her hand but for a moment, turned slightly aside to look more closely at it in the sconce-light, paled with some emotion, and gave it back with slightly trembling fingers.

"I have a headache," she said suddenly. "I am not so brave as I thought I was; you will let me say good night?"

She smiled to Count Victor with a face most wan.

"My dear, you are like a ghost," said her father, and as she left the room he looked after her affectionately.



CHAPTER XX — AN EVENING'S MELODY IN THE BOAR'S HEAD INN

The Boar's Head Inn, for all its fine cognomen, was little better than any of the numerous taverns that kept discreet half-open doors to the wynds and closes of the Duke's burgh town, but custom made it a preserve of the upper class in the community. There it was the writers met their clients and cozened them into costly law pleas over the genial jug or chopine; the through-going stranger took his pack there and dwelt cheaply in the attics that looked upon the bay and upon the little harbour where traffic dozed upon the swinging tide, waiting the goodwill of mariners in no hurry to leave a port so alluring; in its smoke-grimed public-room skippers frequented, full of loud tales of roving, and even the retinue of MacCailen was not averse from an evening's merriment in a company where no restraint of the castle was expected, and his Grace was mentioned but vaguely as a personal pronoun.

There was in the inn a sanctum sanctorum where only were allowed the bailies of the burgh, a tacksman of position, perhaps, from the landward part, or the like of the Duke's Chamberlain, who was no bacchanal, but loved the company of honest men in their hours of manumission. Here the bottle was of the best, and the conversation most genteel—otherwise there had been no Sim MacTaggart in the company where he reigned the king. It was a state that called for shrewd deportment. One must not be too free, for an excess of freedom cheapened the affability, and yet one must be hail fellow with magistrate—and even an odd master mariner—with no touch of condescension for the Highland among them who could scent the same like aqua vito and resent it like a push of the hand.

He came not often, but ever was he welcome, those nights the more glorious for his qualities of humour and generosity, his tales that stirred like the brassy cry of trumpets, his tolerance of the fool and his folly, his fatalist excuse for any sin except the scurviest. And there was the flageolet! You will hear the echo of it yet in that burgh town where he performed; its charm lingers in melodies hummed or piped by old folks of winter nights, its magic has been made the stuff of myth, so that as children we have heard the sound of Simon's instrument in the spring woods when we went there white-hay-gathering, or for fagots for the schoolhouse fire.

A few nights after that thundering canter from the spider's den where Kate Petullo sat amid her coils, the Chamberlain went to wander care among easy hearts. It was a season of mild weather though on the eve of winter; even yet the perfume of the stubble-field and of fruitage in forest and plantation breathed all about the country of Mac-Cailen Mor. Before the windows of the inn the bay lay warm and placid, and Dunchuach, wood-mantled, and the hills beyond it vague, remote, and haunted all by story, seemed to swim in a benign air, and the outer world drew the souls of these men in a tavern into a brief acquaintanceship. The window of the large room they sat in looked out upon this world new lit by the tender moon that hung on Strome. A magistrate made to shutter it and bring the hour of Bacchus all the faster.

"Hold there, Bailie!" cried the Chamberlain. "Good God! let us have so long as we can of a night so clean and wholesome."

It needed but a hint of that nature from this creature of romance and curious destiny to silence their unprofitable discourse over herds and session discipline, and for a space they sat about the window, surrendered to the beauty of the night. So still that outer world, so vacant of living creature, that it might have been a picture! In the midst of their half circle the Chamberlain lay back in his chair and drank the vision in by gloating eyes.

"Upon my word," said he at last in a voice that had the rich profound of passion—"upon my word, we are the undeserving dogs!" and at an impulse he took his flageolet and played a Highland air. It had the proper spirit of the hour—the rapturous evening pipe of birds in dewy thickets, serene yet someway touched by melancholy; there was no man there among them who did not in his breast repeat its words that have been heard for generations in hillside milking-folds where women put their ruddy cheeks against the kine and look along the valleys, singing softly to the accompaniment of the gushing pail.

He held his audience by a chain of gold: perhaps he knew it, perhaps he joyed in it, but his half-shut eyes revealed no more than that he still saw the beauty and peace of the night and thus rendered an oblation.

His melody ceased as abruptly as it began. Up he got hastily and stamped his foot and turned to the table where the bottle lay and cried loud out for lights, as one might do ashamed of a womanly weakness, and it is the Highland heart that his friends should like him all the more for that display of sentiment and shyness to confess it.

"By the Lord, Factor, and it's you have the skill of it!" said the Provost, in tones of lofty admiration.

"Is't the bit reed?" said the Chamberlain, indifferently. "Your boy Davie could learn to play better than I in a month's lessons."

"It's no' altogether the playing though," said the Provost slowly, ruminating as on a problem; "it's that too, but it's more than that; it's the seizing of the time and tune to play. I'm no great musicianer myself, though I have tried the trump; but there the now—with the night like that, and us like this, and all the rest of it—that lilt of yours—oh, damn! pass the bottle; what for should a man be melancholy?" He poured some wine and gulped it hurriedly.

"Never heard the beat of it!" said the others. "Give us a rant, Factor," and round the table they gathered: the candles were being lit, the ambrosial night was to begin.

Simon MacTaggart looked round his company—at some with the maudlin tear of sentiment still on their cheeks, at others eager to escape this soft moment and make the beaker clink.

"My sorrow!" thought he, "what a corps to entertain! Is it the same stuff as myself? Is this the best that Sim MacTaggart that knows and feels things can be doing? And still they're worthy fellows, still I must be liking them."

"Rants!" he cried, and stood among them tall and straight and handsome, with lowering dark brows, and his face more pale than they had known it customarily,—"a little less rant would be the better for us. Take my word for it, the canty quiet lilt in the evening, and the lights low, and calm and honest thoughts with us, is better than all the rant and chorus, and I've tried them both. But heaven forbid that Sim MacTaggart should turn to preaching in his middle age."

"Faith! and it's very true what you say, Factor," acquiesced some sycophant.

The Chamberlain looked at him half in pity, half in amusement. "How do you ken, Bailie?" said he; "what are yearlings at Fa'kirk Tryst?" And then, waiting no answer to what demanded none, he put the flageolet to his lips again and began to play a strathspey to which the company in the true bucolic style beat time with feet below the table. He changed to the tune of a minuet, then essayed at a melody more sweet and haunting than them all, but broken ere its finish.

"A hole in the ballant," commented the Provost. "Have another skelp at it, Factor."

"Later on perhaps," said Sim MacTaggart. "The end of it aye escapes my memory. Rather a taking tune, I think—don't you? Just a little—just a little too much of the psalm in it for common everyday use, but man! it grips me curiously;" and then on a hint from one at his shoulder he played "The Devil in the Kitchen," a dance that might have charmed the imps of Hallowe'en.

He was in the midst of it when the door of the room opened and a beggar looked in—a starven character of the neighbourhood parish, all bedecked with cheap brooches and babs of ribbon, leading by the hand the little child of his daughter wronged and dead. He said never a word but stood just within the door expectant—a reproach to cleanliness, content, good clothes, the well fed, and all who make believe to love their fellows.

"Go away, Baldy!" cried the Bailies sharply, vexed by this intrusion on their moments of carouse; no one of them had a friendly eye for the old wanderer, in his blue coat, and dumb but for his beggar's badge and the child that clung to his hand.

It was the child that Sim MacTaggart saw. He thought of many things as he looked at the little one, white-haired, bare-footed, and large-eyed.

"Come here, my dear!" said he, quite tenderly, smiling upon her.

She would have been afraid but for the manifest kindness of that dark commanding stranger; it was only shyness that kept her from obeying.

The Chamberlain rose and went over to the door and cried upon the landlord. "You will have a chopine of ale, Baldy," said he to the old wreck; "sometimes it's all the difference between hell-fire and content, and—for God's sake buy the bairn a pair of boots!" As he spoke he slipped, by a motion studiously concealed from the company, some silver into the beggar's poke.

The ale came in, the beggar drank for a moment, the Chamberlain took the child upon his knee, his face made fine and noble by some sweet human sentiment, and he kissed her, ere she went, upon the brow.

For a space the sanctum sanctorum of the Boar's Head Inn was ill at ease. This sort of thing—so common in Sim MacTaggart,who made friends with every gangrel he met—was like a week-day sermon, and they considered the Sunday homilies of Dr. Macivor quite enough. They much preferred their Simon in his more common mood of wild devilry, and nobody knew it better than the gentleman himself.

"Oh, damn the lousy tribe of them!" cried he, beating his palm upon the table; "what's Long Davie the dempster thinking of to be letting such folk come scorning here?"

"I'll warrant they get more encouragement here than they do in Lorn," said the Provost, shrewdly, for he had seen the glint of coin and knew his man. "You beat all, Factor! If I lived a hundred years, you would be more than I could fathom. Well, well, pass the bottle, and ye might have another skelp at yon tune if it's your pleasure."

The Chamberlain most willingly complied: it was the easiest retort to the Provost's vague allusion.

He played the tune again; once more its conclusion baffled him, and as he tried a futile repetition Count Victor stood listening in the lobby of the Boar's Head Inn.



CHAPTER XXI — COUNT VICTOR CHANGES HIS QUARTERS

Count Victor said Au revoir to Doom Castle that afternoon.

Mungo had rowed him down by boat to the harbour and left him with his valise at the inn, pleased mightily that his cares as garrison were to be relieved by the departure of one who so much attracted the unpleasant attention of nocturnal foes, and returned home with the easiest mind he had enjoyed since the fateful day the Frenchman waded to the rock. As for Count Victor, his feelings were mingled. He had left Doom from a double sense of duty, and yet had he been another man he would have bided for love. After last evening's uproar, plain decency demanded that Jonah should obviate a repetition by removing himself elsewhere. There was also another consideration as pregnant, yet more delicate: the traditions of his class and family as well as his natural sense of honour compelled his separation from the fascinating influence of the ingenuous woman whose affections were pledged in another quarter. In a couple of days he had fallen desperately in love with Olivia—a precipitation that might seem ridiculous in any man of the world who was not a Montaiglon satiated by acquaintance with scores of Dame Stratagems, fair intrigueuses and puppets without hearts below their modish bodices. Olivia charmed by her freshness, and the simple frankness of her nature, with its deep emotions, gave him infinitely more surprise and thrill than any woman he had met before. "Wisdom wanting absolute honesty," he told himself, "is only craft: I discover that a monstrous deal of cleverness I have seen in her sex is only another kind of cosmetic daubed on with a sponge."

And then, too, Olivia that morning seemed to have become all of a sudden very cold to him. He was piqued at her silence, he was more than piqued to discover that she too, like Mungo, obviously considered his removal a relief.

Behold him, then, with his quarters taken in the Boar's Head Inn, whence by good luck the legal gang of Edinburgh had some hours before departed, standing in the entrance feeling himself more the foreigner than ever, with the vexing reflection that he had not made any progress in the object of his embassy, but, on the contrary, had lost no little degree of his zest therein.

The sound of the flageolet was at once a blow and a salute. That unaccomplished air had helped to woo Olivia in her bower, but yet it gave a link with her, the solace of the thought that here was one she knew. Was it not something of good fortune that it should lead him to identify and meet one whose very name was still unknown to him, but with whom he was, in a faint measure, on slight terms of confederacy through the confession of Olivia and the confidence of Mungo Boyd?

"Toujours l'audace!" thought he, and he asked for the innkeeper's introduction to the performer. "If it may be permitted, and the gentleman is not too pressingly engaged."

"Indeed," said the innkeeper—a jovial rosy gentleman, typical of his kind—"indeed, and it may very well be permitted, and it would not be altogether to my disadvantage that his lordship should be out of there, for the Bailies cannot very well be drinking deep and listening to Mr. Simon MacTag-gart's songs, as I have experienced afore. The name?"

"He never heard it," said Count Victor, "but it happens to be Montaiglon, and I was till this moment in the odd position of not knowing his, though we have a common friend."

A few minutes later the Chamberlain stood before him with the end of the flageolet protruding from the breast of his coat.

As they met in the narrow confine of the lobby—on either hand of them closed rooms noisy with clink of drinking-ware, with laugh and jest and all that rumour of carouse—Montaiglon's first impression was exceeding favourable. This Chamberlain pleased his eye to start with; his manner was fine-bred in spite of a second's confusion; his accent was cordial, and the flageolet displayed with no attempt at concealment, captured the heart of the Frenchman, who had been long enough in these isles to weary of a national character that dare not surrender itself to any unbusiness-like frisking in the meadows. And one thing more there was revealed—here was the kilted gallant of the miniature in Olivia's chamber, and here was the unfriendly horseman of the wood, here in fine was the lover of the story, and the jealousy (if it was a jealousy) he had felt in the wood, forgotten, for he smiled.

But now he was face to face with Olivia's lover, Count Victor discovered that he had not the slightest excuse for referring to her who was the only association between them! The lady herself and Mungo Boyd had conveyed a sense of very close conspiracy between all four, but from neither the lady nor any one else in Doom had he any passport to the friendship of this gentleman. It was only for a moment the difficulties of the situation mastered him.

"I have permitted myself, monsieur, to intrude upon you upon an excuse that must seem scandalously inadequate," said he. "My name is Montaiglon—"

"With the particle, I think?" said Sim MacTaggart.

Count Victor started slightly.

"But yes," said he, "it is so, though I never march with much baggage, and a De to a traveller is like a second hat. It is, then, that it is perhaps unnecessary to say more of myself?"

The Chamberlain with much bonhomie grasped his hand.

"M. Montaiglon," said he, "I am very proud to meet you. I fancy a certain lady and I owe something to your consideration, and Simon MacTaggart stands upon no ceremony."

Count Victor winced slightly at the conjunction, but otherwise he was delighted.

"I am ravished, monsieur!" said he. "Ceremony is like some people's assumption of dignity—the false bottoms they put in their boots to conceal the fact that they are under the average height, is it not?"

Arm in arm they went out in front of the inn and walked along the bay, and the Provost and the Bailies were left mourning for their king.

"You must not fancy the name and the reputation of the gentlemen of Cammercy unknown in these parts," said the Chamberlain. "When the lady—who need not be more specifically mentioned—told me you had come to Doom, it was like the over-come of a song at first that I had heard of you before. And now that I see you, I mind the story went, when I was at Dunkerque some years ago, that Count Victor Jean, if all his other natural gifts had failed him, might have made a noble fortune as a maitre d'escrime. Sir, I am an indifferent hand with the rapier myself, but I aye liked to see a man that was its master."

"You are very good," said Montaiglon, "and yet such a reputation, exaggerated as I fear it may be, is not, by my faith! the one I should desire under the circumstances that, as you have doubtless further heard, bring me here."

"About that, M. Montaiglon, it is perhaps as well that the Duke of Argyll's Chamberlain should know nothing at all. You are a wild lot, my gallant Jacobites"—he laughed softly as he spoke. "Between ourselves I have been more than bottle friends with some lovable persons on your side of the house, and you will be good enough to consider Simon MacTaggart no politician, though the Duke's Chamberlain ex officio is bound to be enemy to every man who will not swear King George the best of monarchs."

"From what I know of affairs in Europe now, and for all our heroics of invasion," said Count Victor, "his Majesty is like to remain in undisputed possession, and you may take my word for it, no affair of high politics is responsible for my being here. Monsieur himself has doubtless had affairs. I am seeking but for one man—"

"Drimdarroch," said the Chamberlain. "So the lady told me. Our Drimdarroch will not provide very much interest for a maitre d'escrime," and he laughed as he pictured Petullo the writer shivering before a flash of steel.

"Ah! you speak of the lawyer: Doom told me of him, and as he was good enough to interest himself in my lodging in this place, I must make him my compliments at the earliest and tell him I have settled down for myself in the auberge."

"To that much at least I can help you, though in the other affair I'm neutral in spite of my interest in any ploy of the kind. There's Petullo's house across the way; I'm on certain terms with him; if you care, we could see him now."

"Le plus tot sera le mieux!" said Count Victor.

The Chamberlain led the way.



CHAPTER XXII — THE LONELY LADY

When Petullo's work was done of an evening it was his practice to sit with his wife in their huge and draughty parlour, practising the good husband and the domestic virtues in an upright zealous manner, such as one may read of in the books. A noble thing to do, but what's the good of it when hearts are miles apart and the practitioner is a man of rags? Yet there he sat, strewing himself with snuff to keep himself awake, blinking with dim eyes at her, wondering for ever at her inscrutable nature, conversing improvingly upon his cases in the courts, or upon his growing fortune that he computed nightly like a miser. Sometimes, in spite of his drenchings of macabaw, sleep compelled him, and, humped in his lug-chair, he would forget his duty, yet waken at her every yawn. And she—she just looked at him as he slept! She looked—and loathed herself, that she—so clean, so graceful, so sweet in spite of all her sin—should be allied with a dead man. The evenings passed for her on fettered hours; but for the window she had died from her incubus, or at least stood up and shrieked and ran into the street.

But for the window! From there she saw the hill Dunchuach, so tranquil, and the bosky deeps of Shira Glen that she knew so well in dusky evenings and in moonlight, and must ever tenant, in her fancy, with the man she used to meet there. Often she would turn her back upon that wizened atomy of quirks and false ideals, and let her bosom pant to think to-night!—to-night!—to-night!

When the Chamberlain and Montaiglon were announced she could have cried aloud with joy. It was not hard in that moment of her elation to understand why once the Chamberlain had loved her; beside the man to whom her own mad young ambition manacled her she seemed a vision of beauty none the worse for being just a little ripened.

"Come awa' in!" cried the lawyer with effusion. "You'll find the mistress and me our lones, and nearly tiring o' each other's company."

The Chamberlain was disappointed. It was one of those evenings when Mrs. Petullo was used to seek him in the woods, and he had thought to find her husband by himself.

"A perfect picture of a happy hearth, eh?" said he. "I'm sweared to spoil it, but I'm bound to lose no time in bringing to you my good friend M. Montaiglon, who has taken up his quarters at the Boar's Head. Madam, may I have the pleasure of introducing to you M. Montaiglon?" and Sim Mac-Taggart looked in her eyes with some impatience, for she hung just a second too long upon his fingers, and pinched ere she released them.

She was delighted to make monsieur's acquaintance. Her husband had told her that monsieur was staying farther up the coast and intended to come to town.. Monsieur was in business; she feared times were not what they were for business in Argyll, but the air was bracing—and much to the same effect, which sent the pseudo wine merchant gladly into the hands of her less ceremonious husband.

As for Petullo, he was lukewarm. He saw no prospects of profit from this dubious foreigner thrust upon his attention by his well-squeezed client the Baron of Doom. Yet something of style, some sign of race in the stranger, thawed him out of his suspicious reserve, and he was kind enough to be condescending to his visitor while cursing the man who sent him there and the man who guided him. They sat together at the window, and meanwhile in the inner end of the room a lonely lady made shameful love.

"Oh, Sim!" she whispered, sitting beside him on the couch and placing the candlestick on a table behind them; "this is just like old times—the dear darling old times, isn't it?"

She referred to the first of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband.

The Chamberlain toyed with his silver box and found it easiest to get out of a response by a sigh that might mean anything.

"You have the loveliest hand," she went on, looking at his fingers, that certainly were shapely enough, as no one knew better than Simon Mac-Taggart. "I don't say you are in any way handsome,"—her eyes betrayed her real thought,—"but I'll admit to the hands,—they're dear pets, Sim."

He thrust them in his pockets.

"Heavens! Kate!" he protested in a low tone, and assuming a quite unnecessary look of vacuity for the benefit of the husband, who gazed across the dim-lit room at them, "don't behave like an idiot; faithful wives never let their husbands see them looking like that at another man's fingers. What do you think of our monsher? He's a pretty enough fellow, if you'll not give me the credit."

"Oh, he's good enough, I daresay," she answered without looking aside a moment. "I would think him much better if he was an inch or two taller, a shade blacker, and Hielan' to boot. But tell me this, and tell me no more, Sim; where has your lordship been for three whole days? Three whole days, Simon MacTaggart, and not a word of explanation. Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir? Do you know that I was along the riverside every night this week? Can you fancy what I felt to hear your flageolet playing for tipsy fools in Ludovic's room? Very well, I said: let him! I have pride of my own, and I was so angry to-night that I said I would never go again to meet you. You cannot blame me if I was not there to-night, Sim. But there!—seeing you have rued your cruelty to me and made an excuse to see me even before him, there, I'll forgive you."

"Oh! well!" drawled the Chamberlain, ambiguously.

"But I can't make another excuse this week. He sits in here every night, and has a new daft notion for late suppers. Blame yourself for it, Sim, but there can be no trysts this week."

"I'm a most singularly unlucky person," said the Chamberlain, in a tone that deaf love alone could fail to take alarm at.

"I heard a story to-day that frightened me, Sim," she went on, taking up some fine knitting and bending over it while she spoke rapidly, always in tones too low to carry across the room. "It was that you have been hanging about that girl of Doom's you met here."

The Chamberlain damned internally.

"Don't believe all you hear, Kate," said he. "And even if it was the case,"—he broke off in a faint laugh.

"Even if what?" she repeated, looking up.

"Even if—even if there was anything in the story, who's to blame? Your goodman's not the ass he sometimes looks."

"You mean that he was the first to put her in your way, and that he had his own reasons?"

The Chamberlain nodded.

Mrs. Petullo's fingers rushed the life out of her knitting. "If I thought—if I thought!" she said, leaving the sentence unfinished. No more was necessary; Sim MacTaggart thanked heaven he was not mated irrevocably.

"Is it true?" she asked. "Is it true of you, Sim, who did your best to make me push Petullo to Doom's ruin?"

"Now, my dear, you talk the damnedest nonsense!" said Simon MacTaggart firmly. "I pushed in no way; the fool dropped into your husband's hands like a ripe plum. I have plenty of shortcomings of my own to answer for without getting the blame of others."

"Don't lie like that, Sim, dear," said Mrs. Petullo, decidedly. "My memory is not gone yet, though you seem to think me getting old. Oh yes! I have all my faculties about me still."

"I wish to the Lord you had prudence; old Vellum's cocking his lugs."

"Oh, I don't care if he is; you make me desperate, Sim." Her needles thrust like poignards, her bosom heaved. "You may deny it if you like, but who pressed me to urge him on to take Drim-darroch? Who said it might be so happy a home for us when—when—my goodman there—when I was free?"

"Heavens! what a hangman's notion!" thought the Chamberlain to himself, with a swift side glance at this termagant, and a single thought of calm Olivia.

"You have nothing to say to that, Sim, I see. It's just too late in the day for you to be virtuous, laddie; your Kate knows you and she likes you better as you are than as you think you would like to be. We were so happy, Sim, we were so happy!" A tear dropped on her lap.

"Now heaven forgive me for my infernal folly!" cried out the soul of Sim MacTaggart; but never a word did he say aloud.

Count Victor, at the other end of the room, listening to Petullo upon wines he was supposed to sell and whereof Petullo was supposed to be a connoisseur, though as a fact his honest taste was buttermilk—Count Victor became interested in the other pair. He saw what it took younger eyes, and a different experience from those of the husband, to observe.

"Cognac,"—this to M. le Connoisseur with the rheumy eye—"but yes, it is good; your taste in that must be a national affair, is it not? Our best, the La Rochelle, has the name of a Scot—I think of Fife—upon the cask;" but to himself, with a glance again at the tragic comedy in the corner of the couch, "Fi donc! Mungo had reason; my gentleman of the dark eye is suspiciously like cavaliere servante."

The Chamberlain began to speak fast upon topics of no moment, dreading the consequence of this surrender on the woman's part: she heard nothing as she thrust furiously and blindly with her needles, her eyes suffused with tears courageously restrained. At last she checked him.

"All that means, Sim, that it's true about the girl," said she. "I tried to think it was a lie when I heard it, but now you compel me to believe you are a brute. You are a brute, Sim, do you hear that? Oh God! oh God! that ever I saw you! That ever I believed you! What is wrong with me, Sim? tell me, Sim! What is wrong with me? Am I different in any way from what I was last spring? Surely I'm not so old as all that; not a grey hair in my head, not a wrinkle on my face. I could keep like that for twenty years yet, just for love of Sim MacTaggart. Sim, say something, for the love of Heaven! Say it's a lie. Laugh at the story, Sim! Oh, Sim! Sim!"

The knitting needles clicked upon each other in her trembling hands, like fairy castanets.

"Who will say that man's fate is in his own fingers?" the Chamberlain asked himself, at the very end of patience. "From the day I breathed I got no chance. A clean and decent road's before me and a comrade for it, and I'm in the mood to take it, and here's the glaur about my feet! I wonder what monsieur there would do in a plight like mine. Lord! I envy him to be sitting there, and never a skeleton tugging at his sleeve."

Mrs. Petullo gulped a sob, and gave a single glance into his face as he stared across the room.

"Why do you hate that man?" she asked, suddenly.

"Who?" said he smiling, and glad that the wild rush of reproach was checked. "Is it monsher? I hate nobody, my dear Kate, except sometimes myself for sin and folly."

"And still and on you hate that man," said she convinced. "Oh no! not with that face, with the face you had a second ago. I think—oh! I can guess the reason; he has been up in Doom Castle; has he been getting round Miss Milk-and-Water? If he has, he's far more like her than you are. You made me pauperise her father, Sim; I'm sorry it was not worse. I'll see that Petullo has them rouped from the door."

"Adorable Kate!" said the Chamberlain, ironically.

Her face flamed, she pressed her hand on her side.

"I'll not forget that, Sim," said she with a voice of marvellous calm, bracing herself to look indifferently across the room at her husband. "I'll not forget many things, Sim. I thought the man I was to raise from the lackey that you were ten years ago would have some gratitude. No, no, no, Sim; I do not mean that, forgive me. Don't look at me like that! Where are you to be to-morrow night, Sim? I could meet you at the bridge; I'll make some excuse, and I want you to see my new gown—such a gown, Sim! I know what you're thinking, it would be too dark to see it; but you could strike a light, sweetheart, and look. Do you mind when you did that over and over again the first time, to see my eyes? I'm not going to say another word about—about Miss Milk-and-Water, if that's what angers you. She could never understand my Sim, or love the very worm he tramps on as I do. Now look at me smiling; ain't I brave? Would any one know to see me that my heart was sore? Be kind to me, Sim, oh! be kind to me; you should be kind to me, with all you promised!"

"Madame is smiling into a mist; alas! poor M. Petullo!" thought Count Victor, seeing the lady standing up and looking across the room.

"Kate," said the Chamberlain in a whisper, pulling unobserved at her gown, "I have something to say to you."

She sat down again in a transport, her cheeks reddening, her eyes dancing; poor soul! she was glad nowadays of the very crumbs of affection from Sim MacTaggart's table.

"I know you are going to say 'Yes' for to-morrow night, Sim," said she triumphant. "Oh, you are my own darling! For that I'll forgive you everything."

"There's to be no more nonsense of this kind, Kate," said the Chamberlain. "We have been fools—I see that quite plainly—and I'm not going to carry it on any longer."

"That is very kind of you," said Mrs. Petullo, with the ring of metal in her accent and her eyes on fire. "Do you feel a great deal of remorse about it?"

"I do," said he, wondering what she was to be at next.

"Poor man! I was aye sure your conscience would be the death of you some day. And it's to be the pretext for throwing over unhappy Kate Cameron, is it?"

"Not Kate Cameron—her I loved—but Mrs. Petullo."

"Whom you only made-believe to? That is spoken like a true Highland gentleman, Sim. I'm to be dismissed with just that amount of politeness that will save my feelings. I thought you knew me better, Sim. I thought you could make a more plausible excuse than that for the dirty transaction when it had to be done, as they say it must be done some time with all who are in our position. As sure as death I prefer the old country style that's in the songs, where he laughs and rides away. But I'm no fool, Sim; what about Miss Milk-and-Water? Has she been hearing about me, I wonder, and finding fault with her new jo? The Lord help her if she trusts him as I did!"

"I want you to give me a chance, Kate," said the Chamberlain desperately. Petullo and the Count were still intently talking; the tragedy was in the poor light of a guttering candle.

"A chance?" she repeated vaguely, her eyes in vacancy, a broken heart shown in the corners of her mouth, the sudden aging of her countenance.

"That's it, Kate; you understand, don't you? A chance. I'm a boy no longer. I want to be a better man—" The sentence trailed off, for the Chamberlain could not but see himself in the most contemptible of lights.

"A better man!" said she, her knitting and her hands drowned in her lap, her countenance hollow and wan. "Lord keep me, a better man! And am I to be any the better woman when my old lover is turned righteous? Have you no' a thought at all for me when I'm to be left with him that's not my actual husband, left without love, hope, or self-respect? God help poor women! It's Milk-and-Water then; that's settled, and I'm to see you at the kirk with her for a lifetime of Sundays after this, an honest woman, and me what I am for you that have forgotten me—forgotten me! I was as good as she when you knew me first, Sim; I was not bad, and oh, my God! but I loved you, Sim Mac-Taggart!"

"Of all that's damnable," said the Chamberlain to himself, "there's nothing beats a whining woman!" He was in a mortal terror that her transports could be heard across the room, and that would be to spoil all with a vengeance.

"God pity women!" she went on. "It's a lesson. I was so happy sometimes that it frightened me, and now I know I was right."

"What do you say, my dear?" cried out Petullo across the room, suspiciously. He fancied he had heard an over-eager accent in her last words, that were louder spoken than all that had gone before. Fortunately he could not make out her face as he looked, otherwise he would have seen, as Montaiglon did with some surprise, a mask of Tragedy.

"I'm giving Mr. MacTaggart my congratulations on his coming marriage," said she quickly, with a miraculous effort at a little laugh, and the Chamberlain cursed internally.

"Oh! it's that length, is it?" said Petullo with a tone of gratification. "Did I no' tell you, Kate? You would deny't, and now you have the best authority. Well, well, it's the way we a' maun gang, as the auld blin' woman said, and here's wishing you the best o' luck!"

He came across to shake hands, but the Chamberlain checked him hurriedly.

"Psha!" said he. "Madame's just a little premature, Mr. Petullo; there must be no word o' this just now."

"Is it that way?" said Petullo. "Likely the Baron's thrawn. Man, he hasna a roost, and he should be glad—" He stopped on reflection that the Frenchman was an intimate of the family he spoke of, and hastily returned to his side without seeing the pallor of his wife.

"And so it was old Vellum who clyped to you," said the Chamberlain to the lady.

"I see it all plainly now," said she. "He brought her here just to put her in your way and punish me. Oh, heavens, I'll make him rue for that! And do you fancy I'm going to let you go so easily as all that, Sim? Will Miss Mim-mou' not be shocked if I tell her the truth about her sweetheart?"

"You would not dare!" said the Chamberlain.

"Oh! would I not?" Mrs. Petullo smiled in a fashion that showed she appreciated the triumph of her argument. "What would I not do for my Sim?"

"Well, it's all by, anyway," said he shortly.

"What, with her?" said Mrs. Petullo, but with no note of hope.

"No, with you," said he brutally. "Let us be friends, good friends, Kate," he went on, fearing this should too seriously arouse her. "I'll be the best friend you have in the world, my dear, if you'll let me, only—"

"Only you will never kiss me again," said she with a sob. "There can be no friendship after you, Sim, and you know it. You are but lying again. Oh, God! oh, God! I wish I were dead! You have done your worst, Simon MacTaggart; and if all tales be true—"

"I'm not saying a word of what I might say in my own defence," he protested.

"What could you say in your own defence? There is not the ghost of an excuse for you. What could you say?"

"Oh, I could be pushed to an obvious enough retort," he said, losing patience, for now it was plain that they were outraging every etiquette by so long talking together while others were in the room. "I was to blame, Heaven knows! I'm not denying that, but you—but you—" And his fingers nervously sought in his coat for the flageolet.

Mrs. Petullo's face flamed. "Oh, you hound!" she hissed, "you hound!" and then she laughed softly, hysterically. "That is the gentleman for you! The seed of kings, no less! What a brag it was! That is the gentleman for you!—to put the blame on me. No, Sim; no, Sim; I will not betray you to Miss Mim-mou', you need not be feared of that; I'll let her find you out for herself and then it will be too late. And, oh! I hate her! hate her! hate her!"

"Thank God for that!" said the Chamberlain with a sudden memory of the purity she envied, and at these words Mrs. Petullo fell in a swoon upon the floor.

"Lord, what's the matter?" cried her husband, running to her side, then crying for the maid.

"I haven't the slightest idea," said Sim MacTag-gart. "But she looked ill from the first," and once more he inwardly cursed his fate that constantly embroiled him in such affairs.

Ten minutes later he and the Count were told the lady had come round, and with expressions of deep sympathy they left Petullo's dwelling.



CHAPTER XXIII — A MAN OF NOBLE SENTIMENT

There was a silence between the two for a little after they came out from Petullo's distracted household. With a chilling sentiment towards his new acquaintance, whom he judged the cause of the unhappy woman's state, Count Victor waited for the excuse he knew inevitable. He could not see the Chamberlain's face, for the night was dark now; the tide, unseen, was running up on the beach of the bay, lights were burning in the dwellings of the little town.

"M. Montaiglon," at last said the Chamberlain in a curious voice where feelings the most deep appeared to strive together, "yon's a tragedy, if you like."

"Comment?" said the Count. He was not prepared for an opening quite like this.

"Well," said the Chamberlain, "you saw it for yourself; you are not a mole like Petullo the husband. By God! I would be that brute's death if he were thirty years younger, and made of anything else than sawdust. It's a tragedy in there, and look at this burgh!—like the grave but for the lights of it; rural, plodding, unambitious, ignorant—and the last place on earth you might seek in for a story so peetiful as that in there. My heart's wae, wae for that woman; I saw her face was like a corp when we went in first, though she put a fair front on to us. A woman in a hundred; a brave woman, few like her, let me tell you, M. Montaiglon, and heartbroken by that rat she's married on. I could greet to think on all her trials. You saw she was raised somewhat; you saw I have some influence in that quarter?"

For his life Count Victor could make no reply, so troubled was his mind with warring thoughts of Olivia betrayed, perhaps, to a debauchee sans heart and common pot-house decency; of whether in truth this was the debauchee to such depths as he suggested, or a man in a false position through the stress of things around him.

The Chamberlain went on as in a meditation. "Poor Kate! poor Kate! We were bairns together, M. Montaiglon, innocent bairns, and happy, twenty years syne, and I will not say but what in her maidenhood there was some warmth between us, so that I know her well. She was compelled by her relatives to marriage with our parchment friend yonder, and there you have the start of what has been hell on earth for her. The man has not the soul of a louse, and as for her, she's the finest gold! You would see that I was the cause of her swoon?"

"Unhappy creature!" said Montaiglon, beginning to fear he had wronged this good gentleman.

"You may well say it, M. Montaiglon. It is improper, perhaps, that I should expose to a stranger the skeleton of that house, but I'm feeling what happened just now too much to heed a convention." He sighed profoundly. "I have had influence with the good woman, as you would see; for years I've had it, because I was her only link with the gay world she was born to be an ornament in, and the only one free to be trusted with the tale of her misery. Well, you know—you are a man of the world, M. Montaiglon—you know the dangers of such a correspondence between a person of my reputation, that is none of the best, because I have been less a hypocrite than most, and a lady in her position. It's a gossiping community this, long-lugged and scandal-loving like all communities of its size; it is not the Faubourg St. Honore, where intrigues go on behind fans and never an eye cocked or a word said about it; and I'll not deny but there have been scandalous and cruel things said about the lady and myself. Now, as God's my judge—"

"Pardon, monsieur," said the Count, eager to save this protesting gentleman another betise; "I quite understand, I think,—the lady finds you a discreet friend. Naturally her illness has unmanned you. The scandal of the world need never trouble a good man."

"But a merely middling-good man, M. Montaiglon," cried the Chamberlain; "you'll allow that's a difference. Lord knows I lay no claim to a crystal virtue! In this matter I have no regard for my own reputation, but just for that very reason I'm anxious about the lady's. What happened in that room there was that I've had to do an ill thing and make an end of an auld sang. I'm rarely discreet in my own interest, M. Montaiglon, but it had to be shown this time, and as sure as death I feel like a murderer at the havoc I have wrought with that good woman's mind!"

He stopped suddenly; a lump was in his throat. In the beam of light that came through the hole in a shutter of a house they passed, Montaiglon saw that his companion's face was all wrought with wretchedness, and a tear was on his cheek.

The discovery took him aback. He had ungenerously deemed the strained voice in the darkness beside him a mere piece of play-acting, but here was proof of genuine feeling, all the more convincing because the Chamberlain suddenly brisked up and coughed and assumed a new tone, as if ashamed of his surrender to a sentiment.

"I have been compelled to be cruel to-night to a woman, M. Montaiglon," said he, "and that is not my nature. And—to come to another consideration that weighed as much with me as any—this unpleasant duty of mine that still sticks in my throat like funeral-cake was partly forced by consideration for another lady—the sweetest and the best—who would be the last I should care to have hear any ill of me, even in a libel."

A protest rose to Montaiglon's throat; a fury stirred him at the gaucherie that should bring Olivia's name upon the top of such a subject. He could not trust himself to speak with calmness, and it was to his great relief the Chamberlain changed the topic—broadened it, at least, and spoke of women in the general, almost cheerfully, as if he delighted to put an unpleasant topic behind him. It was done so adroitly, too, that Count Victor was compelled to believe it prompted by a courteous desire on the part of the Chamberlain not too vividly to illuminate his happiness in the affection of Olivia.

"I'm an older man than you, M. Montaiglon," said the Chamberlain, "and I may be allowed to give some of my own conclusions upon the fair. I have known good, ill, and merely middling among them, the cunning and the simple, the learned and the utterly ignorant, and by the Holy Iron! honesty and faith are the best virtues in the lot of them. They all like flattery, I know—"

"A dead man and a stupid woman are the only ones who do not. Jamais beau parler riecorcha le langue!" said Montaiglon.

"Faith, and that's very true," consented the Chamberlain, laughing softly. "I take it not amiss myself if it's proffered in the right way—which is to say, for the qualities I know I have, and not for the imaginary ones. As I was saying, give me the simple heart and honesty; they're not very rife in our own sex, and—"

"Even there, monsieur, I can be generous enough," said Montaiglon. "I can always retain my regard for human nature, because I have learned never to expect too much from it."

"Well said!" cried the Chamberlain. "Do you know that in your manner of rejoinder you recall one Dumont I met once at the Jesuits' College when I was in France years ago?"

"Ah, you have passed some time in my country, then?" said the Count with awakened interest, a little glad of a topic scarce so abstruse as sex.

"I have been in every part of Europe," said the Chamberlain; "and it must have been by the oddest of mischances I have not been at Cammercy itself, for well I knew your uncle's friends, though, as it happened, we were of a different complexion of politics. I lived for months one time in the Hotel de Transylvania, Rue Conde, and kept my carosse de remise, and gambled like every other ass of my kind in Paris till I had not a louis to my credit. Lord! the old days, the old days! I should be penitent, I daresay, M. Montaiglon, but I'm putting that off till I find that a sober life has compensations for the entertainment of a life of liberty."

"Did you know Balhaldie?"

"Do I know the inside of my own pocket! I've played piquet wi' the old rogue a score of times in the Sun tavern of Rotterdam. Pardon me speaking that way of one that may be an intimate of your own, but to be quite honest, the Scots gentlemen living on the Scots Fund in France in these days were what I call the scourings of the Hielan's. There were good and bad among them, of course, but I was there in the entourage of one who was no politician, which was just my own case, and I saw but the convivial of my exiled countrymen in their convivial hours. Politics! In these days I would scunner at the very word, if you know what that means, M. Montaiglon. I was too throng with gaiety to trouble my head about such trifles; my time was too much taken up with buckling my hair, in admiring the cut of my laced jabot, and the Mechlin of my wrist-bands."

They were walking close upon the sea-wall with leisurely steps, preoccupied, the head of the little town, it seemed, wholly surrendered to themselves alone. Into the Chamberlain's voice had come an accent of the utmost friendliness and flattering ir-restraint; he seemed to be leaving his heart bare to the Frenchman. Count Victor was by these last words transported to his native city, and his own far-off days of galliard. Why, in the name of Heaven! was he here listening to hackneyed tales of domestic tragedy and a stranger's reminiscences? Why did his mind continually linger round the rock of Doom, so noisy on its promontory, so sad, so stern, so like an ancient saga in its spirit? Cecile—he was amazed at it, but Cecile, and the Jacobite cause he had come here to avenge with a youth's ardour, had both fallen, as it were, into a dusk of memory!

"By the way, monsieur, you did not happen to have come upon any one remotely suggesting my Drimdarroch in the course of your travels?"

"Oh, come!" cried Sim MacTaggart; "if I did, was I like to mention it here and now?" He laughed at the idea. "You have not grasped the clannishness of us yet if you fancy—"

"But in an affair of strict honour, monsieur," broke in Count Victor eagerly. "Figure you a woman basely betrayed; your admirable sentiments regarding the sex must compel you to admit there is here something more than clannishness can condone. It is true there is the political element—but not much of it—in my quest, still—"

"Not a word of that, M. Montaiglon!" cried the Chamberlain: "there you address yourself to his Grace's faithful servant; but I cannot be denying some sympathy with the other half of your object. If I had known this by-named Drimdarroch you look for, I might have swithered to confess it, but as it is, I have never had the honour. I've seen scores of dubious cattle round the walls of Ludo-vico Rex, but which might be Drimdarroch and which might be decent honest men, I could not at this time guess. We have here among us others who had a closer touch with affairs in France than I."

"So?" said Count Victor. "Our friend the Baron of Doom suggested that for that very reason my search was for the proverbial needle in the haystack. I find myself in pressing need of a judicious friend at court, I see. Have you ever found your resolution quit you—not an oozing courage, I mean, but an indifference that comes purely by the lapse of time and the distractions on the way to its execution? It is my case at the moment. My thirst for the blood of this inconnu has modified considerably in the past few days. I begin to wish myself home again, and might set out incontinent if the object of my coming here at all had not been so well known to those I left behind. You would be doing a brilliant service—and perhaps but little harm to Drimdarroch after all—if you could arrange a meeting at the earliest."

He laughed as he said so.

"Man! I'm touched by the issue," said the Chamberlain; "I must cast an eye about. Drimdarroch, of course, is Doom, or was, if a lawyer's sheep-skins had not been more powerful nowadays than the sword; but"—he paused a moment as if reluctant to give words to the innuendo—"though Doom himself has been in France to some good purpose in nis time, and though, for God knows what, he is no friend of mine, I would be the first to proclaim him free of any suspicion."

"That, monsieur, goes without saying! I was stupid enough to misunderstand some of his eccentricities myself, but have learned in our brief acquaintanceship to respect in him the man of genuine heart."

"Just so, just so!" cried the Chamberlain, and cleared his throat. "I but mentioned his name to make it plain that his claim to the old title in no way implicated him. A man of great heart, as you say, though with a reputation for oddity. If I were not the well-wisher of his house, I could make some trouble about his devotion to the dress and arms forbidden here to all but those in the king's service, as I am myself, being major of the local Fencibles. And—by the Lord! here's MacCailen!"

They had by this time entered the policies of the Duke. A figure walked alone in the obscurity, with arms in a characteristic fashion behind its back, going in the direction they themselves were taking. For a second or two the Chamberlain hesitated, then formed his resolution.

"I shall introduce you," he said to Count Victor. "It may be of some service afterwards."

The Duke turned his face in the darkness, and, as they came alongside, recognised his Chamberlain.

"Good evening, good evening!" he cried cheerfully. "'Art a late bird, as usual, and I am at that pestilent task the rehearsal of a speech."

"Your Grace's industry is a reproach to your Grace's Chamberlain," said the latter. "I have been at the speech-making myself, partly to a lady."

"Ah, Mr. MacTaggart!" cried the Duke in a comical expostulation.

"And partly to this unfortunate friend of mine, who must fancy us a singularly garrulous race this side of the German Ocean. May I introduce M. Montaiglon, who is at the inn below, and whom it has been my good fortune to meet for the first time to-night?"

Argyll was most cordial to the stranger, who, however, took the earliest opportunity to plead fatigue and return to his inn. He had no sooner retired than the Duke expressed some natural curiosity.

"It cannot be the person you desired for the furnishing of our tolbooth the other day, Sim?" said he.

"No less," frankly responded the Chamberlain. "Your Grace saved me a faux pas there, for Montaiglon is not what I fancied at all."

"You were ever the dubious gentleman, Sim," laughed his Grace. "And what—if I may take the liberty—seeks our excellent and impeccable Gaul so far west?"

"He's a wine merchant," said the Chamberlain, and at that the Duke laughed.

"What, man!" he cried at last, shaking with his merriment, "is our ancient Jules from Oporto to be ousted with the aid of Sim MacTaggart from the ducal cellars in favour of one Montaiglon?" He stopped, caught his Chamberlain by the arm, and stood close in an endeavour to perceive his countenance. "Sim," said he, "I wonder what Modene would say to find his cousin hawking vile claret round Argyll. Your friend's incognito is scarcely complete enough even in the dark. Why, the man's Born! I could tell it in his first sentence, and it's a swordsman's hand, not a cellarer's fingers, he gave me a moment ago. That itself would betray him even if I did not happen to know that the Montaiglons have the particule."

"It is quite as you say," confessed the Chamberlain with some chagrin at his position, "but I'm giving the man's tale as he desires to have it known here. He's no less than the Count de Montaiglon, and a rather decent specimen of the kind, so far as I can judge."

"But why the alias, good Sim?" asked the Duke. "I like not your aliases, though they have been, now and then—ahem!—useful."

"Your Grace has travelled before now as Baron Hay," said the Chamberlain.

"True! true! and saved very little either in inn charges or in the pother of State by the device. And if I remember correctly, I made no pretence at wine-selling on these occasions. Honestly now, what the devil does the Comte de Montaiglon do here—and with Sim MacTaggart?"

"The matter is capable of the easiest explanation. He's here on what he is pleased to call an affair of honour, in which there is implicated the usual girl and another gentleman, who, it appears, is some ope, still unknown, about your Grace's castle." And the story in its entirety was speedily his Grace's.

"H'm," ejaculated Argyll at last when he had heard all. "And you fancy the quest as hopeless as it is quixotic? Now mark me! Simon; I read our French friend, even in the dark, quite differently. He had little to say there, but little as it was 'twas enough to show by its manner that he's just the one who will find his man even in my crowded corridors."



CHAPTER XXIV — A BROKEN TRYST

The Chamberlain's quarters were in the eastern turret, and there he went so soon as he could leave his Grace, who quickly forgot the Frenchman and his story, practising upon Simon the speech he had prepared in his evening walk, alternated with praise extravagant—youthfully rapturous almost—of his duchess, who might, from all his chafing at her absence, have been that night at the other end of the world, instead of merely in the next county on a few days' visit.

"Ah! you are smiling, Sim!" said he. "Old whinstone! You fancy Argyll an imbecile of uxoriousness. Well, well, my friend, you are at liberty; Lord knows, it's not a common disease among dukes! Eh, Sim? But then women like my Jean are not common either or marriages were less fashions. Upon my word, I could saddle Jock and ride this very night to Luss, just to have the fun of throwing pebbles at her window in the morning, and see her wonder and pleasure at finding me there. Do you know what, cousin? I am going to give a ball when she comes home. We'll have just the neighbours, and I'll ask M. Soi-disant, who'll give us the very latest step. I like the fellow's voice, it rings the sterling metal.... And now, my lords, this action on the part of the Government.... Oh, the devil fly away with politics! I must go to a lonely bed!" And off set Mac-Cailen Mor, the noble, the august, the man of silk and steel, whom 'twas Simon MacTaggart's one steadfast ambition in life to resemble even in a remote degree.

And then we have the Chamberlain in his turret room, envious of that blissful married man, and warmed to a sympathetic glow with Olivia floating through the images that rose before him.

He drew the curtains of his window and looked in that direction where Doom, of course, was not for material eyes, finding a vague pleasure in building up the picture of the recluse tower, dark upon its promontory. It was ten o'clock. It had been arranged at their last meeting that without the usual signal he should go to her to-night before twelve. Already his heart beat quickly; his face was warm and tingling with pleasant excitation, he felt a good man.

"By God!" he cried. "If it was not for the old glaur! What for does heaven—or hell—send the worst of its temptations to the young and ignorant? If I had met her twenty years ago! Twenty years ago! H'm! 'Clack!' goes the weaver's shuttle! Twenty years ago it was her mother, and Sim MacTaggart without a hair on his face trying to kiss the good lady of Doom, and her, perhaps na' half unwilling. I'm glad—I'm glad."

He put on a pair of spurs, his fingers trembling as those of a lad dressing for his first ball, and the girl a fairy in white, with her neck pink and soft and her eyes shy like little fawns in the wood.

"And how near I was to missing it!" he thought. "But for the scheming of a fool I would never have seen her. It's not too late, thank the Lord for that! No more of yon for Sim MacTaggart. I've cut with the last of it, and now my face is to the stars."

His hands were spotless white, but he poured some water in a basin and washed them carefully, shrugging his shoulders with a momentary comprehension of how laughable must that sacrament be in the eyes of the worldly Sim MacTaggart. He splashed the water on his lips, drew on a cloak, blew out the light, and went softly downstairs and out at a side door for which he had a pass-key. The night was still, except for the melancholy sound of the river running over its cascades and echoing under the two bridges; odours of decaying leaves surrounded him, and the air of the night touched him on his hot face like a benediction. A heavy dew clogged the grass of Cairnbaan as he made for the stables, where a man stood out in the yard waiting with a black horse saddled. Without a word he mounted and rode, the hoofs thudding dull on the grass. He left behind him the castle, quite dark and looming in its nest below the sentinel hill; he turned the bay; the town revealed a light or two; a bird screamed on the ebb shore. Something of all he saw and heard touched a fine man in his cloak, touched a decent love in him; his heart was full with wholesome joyous ichor; and he sang softly to the creaking saddle, sang an air of good and clean old Gaelic sentiment that haunted his lips until he came opposite the very walls of Doom.

He fastened his horse to a young hazel and crossed the sandy interval between the mainland and the rock, sea-wrack bladders bursting under his feet, and the smells of seaweed dominant over the odours of the winter wood. The tower was pitch dark. He went into the bower, sat on the rotten seat among the damp bedraggled strands of climbing flowers, and took his flageolet from his pocket.

He played softly, breathing in the instrument the very pang of love. It might have been a psalm and this forsaken dew-drenched bower a great cathedral, so rapt, so devoted, his spirit as he sought to utter the very deepest ecstasy. Into the reed he poured remembrance and regret; the gathered nights of riot and folly lived and sorrowed for; the ideals cherished and surrendered; the remorseful sinner, the awakened soul.

No one paid any heed in Castle Doom.

That struck him suddenly with wonder, as he ceased his playing for a moment and looked through the broken trellis to see the building black below the starry sky. There ought, at least, to be a light in the window of Olivia's room. She had made the tryst herself, and never before had she failed to keep it. Perhaps she had not heard him. And so to his flageolet again, finding a consolation in the sweetness of his own performance.

"Ah!" said he to himself, pausing to admire—"Ah! there's no doubt I finger it decently well—better than most—better than any I've heard, and what's the wonder at that? for it's all in what you feel, and the most of people are made of green wood. There's no green timber here; I'm cursed if I'm not the very ancient stuff of fiddles!"

He had never felt happier in all his life. The past?—he wiped that off his recollection as with a sponge; now he was a new man with his feet out of the mire and a clean road all the rest of the way, with a clean sweet soul for his companion. He loved her to his very heart of hearts; he had, honestly, for her but the rendered passion of passion—why! what kept her?

He rammed the flageolet impatiently into his waistcoat, threw back his cloak, and stepped out into the garden. Doom Castle rose over him black, high and low, without a glimmer. A terrific apprehension took possession of him. He raised his head and gave the signal call, so natural that it drew an answer almost like an echo from an actual bird far off in some thicket at Achnatra. And oh! felicity; here she was at last!

The bolts of the door slid back softly; the door opened; a little figure came out. Forward swept the lover, all impatient fires—to find himself before Mungo Boyd!

He caught him by the collar of his coat as if he would shake him.

"What game is this? what game is this?" he furiously demanded. "Where is she?"

"Canny, man, canny!" said the little servitor, releasing himself with difficulty from the grasp of this impetuous lover. "Faith! it's anither warnin' this no' to parley at nicht wi' onything less than twa or three inch o' oak dale atween ye and herm."

"Cut clavers and tell me what ails your mistress!"

"Oh, weel; she hisna come oot the nicht," said Mungo, waving his arms to bring the whole neighbourhood as witness of the obvious fact.

The Chamberlain thrust at his chest and nearly threw him over.

"Ye dull-witted Lowland brock!" said he; "have I no' the use of my own eyes? Give me another word but what I want and I'll slash ye smaller than ye are already with my Ferrara."

"Oh, I'm no' that wee!" said Mungo. "If ye wad jist bide cool—"

"'Cool' quo' he! Man! I'm up to the neck in fire. Where is she?"

"Whaur ony decent lass should be at this 'oor o' the nicht—in her naked bed."

"Say that again, you foul-mouthed dog o' Fife, and I'll gralloch you like a deer!" cried the Chamberlain, his face tingling.

"Losh! the body's cracked," said Mungo Boyd, astounded at this nicety.

"I was to meet her to-night; does she know I'm here?"

"I rapped at her door mysel' to mak' sure she did."

"And what said she?"

"She tauld me to gae awa'. I said it was you, and she said it didna maitter."

"Didna maitter!" repeated the Chamberlain, viciously, mimicking the eastland accent. "What ails her?"

"Ye ought to ken that best yoursel'. It was the last thing I daur ask her," said Mungo Boyd, preparing to retreat, but his precaution was not called for, he had stunned his man.

The Chamberlain drew his cloak about him, cold with a contemptuous rebuff. His mouth parched; violent emotions wrought in him, but he recovered in a moment, and did his best to hide his sense of ignominy.

"Oh, well!" said he, "it's a woman's way, Mungo."

"You'll likely ken," said Mungo; "I've had sma' troke wi' them mysel'."

"Lucky man! And now that I mind right, I think it was not to-night I was to come, after all; I must have made a mistake. If you have a chance in the morn's morning you can tell her I wasted a tune or two o' the flageolet on a wheen stars. It is a pleasant thing in stars, Mungo, that ye aye ken where to find them when ye want them!"

He left the rock, and took to horse again, and home. All through the dark ride he fervently cursed Count Victor, a prey of an idiotic jealousy.



CHAPTER XXV — RECONCILIATION

Mungo stood in the dark till the last beat of the horse-hoofs could be heard, and then went in disconsolate and perplexed. He drew the bars as it were upon a dear friend out in the night, and felt as there had gone the final hope for Doom and its inhabitants.

"An auld done rickle o' a place!" he soliloquised, lifting a candle high that it might show the shame of the denuded and crumbling walls. "An auld done rickle: I've seen a better barn i' the Lothians, and fancy me tryin' to let on that it's a kind o' Edinbro'! Sirs! sirs! 'If ye canna hae the puddin' be contented wi' the bree,' Annapla's aye sayin', but here there's neither bree nor puddin'. To think that a' my traison against the master i' the interest o' his dochter and himsel' should come to naethin', and that Sim MacTaggart should be sent awa' wi' a flea in his lug, a' for the tirravee o' a lassie that canna' value a guid chance when it offers! I wonder what ails her, if it's no' that mon-sher's ta'en her fancy! Women are a' like weans; they never see the crack in an auld toy till some ane shows them a new ane. Weel! as sure as death I wash my haun's o' the hale affair. She's daft; clean daft, puir dear! If she kent whit I ken, she micht hae some excuse, but I took guid care o' that. I doot yon's the end o' a very promisin' match, and the man, though he mayna' think it, has his merchin' orders."

The brief bow-legged figure rolled along the lobby, pshawing with vexation, and in a little, Doom, to all appearance, was a castle dark and desolate.

Yet not wholly asleep, however dark and silent; for Olivia, too, had heard the last of the thundering hoofs, had suffered the agony that comes from the wrench of a false ideal from the place of its long cherishing.

She came down in the morning a mere wraith of beauty, as it seemed to the little servitor, shutting her lips hard, but ready to burst into a shower.

"Guid Lord!" thought Mungo, setting the scanty table. "It's clear she hasna steeked an e'e a' nicht, and me sleepin' like a peerie. That's ane o' the advantages o' being ower the uneasy age o' love—and still I'm no' that auld. I wonder if she's rued it the day already."

She smiled upon him bravely, but woe-begone, and could not check a quivering lip, and then she essayed at a song hummed with no bad pretence as she cast from the window a glance along the wintry coast, that never changed its aspect though hearts broke. But, as ill-luck had it, the air was the unfinished melody of Sim's bewitching flageolet. She stopped it ere she had gone farther than a bar or two, and turned to find Mungo irresolute and disturbed.

"He ga'ed awa'—" began the little man, with the whisper of the conspirator.

"Mungo!" she cried, "you will not say a word of it. It is all bye with me, and what for not with you? I command you to say no more about it, do you hear?" And her foot beat with an imperiousness almost comical from one with such a broken countenance.

"It's a gey droll thing—"

"It's a gey hard thing, that is what it is," she interrupted him, "that you will not do what I tell you, and say nothing of what I have no relish to hear, and must have black shame to think of. Must I go over all that I have said to you already? It is finished, Mungo; are you listening? Did he—did he—looked vexed? But it does not matter, it is finished, and I have been a very foolish girl."

"But that needna' prevent me tellin' ye that the puir man's awa' clean gyte."

She smiled just the ghost of a smile at that, then put her hands upon her ears.

"Oh!" she cried despairingly, "have I not a friend left?"

Mungo sighed and said no more then, but went to Annapla and sought relief for his feelings in bilingual wrangling with that dark abigail. At low tide beggars from Glen Croe came to his door with yawning pokes and all their old effrontery: he astounded them by the fiercest of receptions, condemned them all eternally for limmers and sorners, lusty rogues and vagabonds.

"Awa'! awa'!" he cried, an implacable face against their whining protestations—"Awa', or I'll gie ye the gairde! If I was my uncle Erchie, I wad pit an end to your argy-bargying wi' hail frae a gun!" But to Annapla it was, "Puir deevils, it's gey hard to gie them the back o' the haun' and them sae used to rougher times in Doom. What'll they think o' us? It's sic a doon-come, but we maun be hainin' seein' Leevie's lost her jo, and no ither way clear oot o' the bit. I'm seein' a toom girnel and done beef here lang afore next Martinmas."

These plaints were to a woman blissfully beyond comprehending the full import of them, for so much was Annapla taken up with her Gift, so misty and remote the realms of Gaelic dream wherein she moved, that the little Lowland oddity's perturbation was beneath her serious attention.

Olivia had that day perhaps the bitterest of her life. With love outside—calling in the evening and fluting in the bower, and ever (as she thought) occupied with her image even when farther apart—she had little fault to find with the shabby interior of her home. Now that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared to him that she had the look of a mountain birch stricken by the first of wintry weather.

"My dear," he said, with a tenderness that had been some time absent from their relations, "you must be taking a change of air. I'm a poor parent not to have seen before how much you need it." He hastened to correct what he fancied from her face was a misapprehension. "I am speaking for your red cheeks, my dear, believe me; I'm wae to see you like that."

"I will do whatever you wish, father," said Olivia in much agitation. Coerced she was iron, coaxed she was clay. "I have not been a very good daughter to you, father; after this I will be trying to be better."

His face reddened; his heart beat at this capitulation of his rebel: he rose from his chair and took her into his arms—an odd display for a man so long stone-cold but to his dreams.

"My dear, my dear!" said he, "but in one detail that need never again be named between us two, you have been the best of girls, and, God knows, I am not the pattern parent!"

Her arm went round his neck, and she wept on his breast.

"Sour and dour—" said he.

"No, no!" she cried.

"And poor to penury."

"All the more need for a loving child. There are only the two of us."

He held her at arm's-length and looked at her wistfully in the wet wan face and saw his wife Christina there. "By heaven!" he thought, "it is no wonder that this man should hunt her."

"You have made me happy this day, Olivia," said he; "at least half happy. I dare not mention what more was needed to make me quite content."

"You need not," said she. "I know, and that—and that—is over too. I am just your own Olivia."

"What!" he cried elate; "no more?"

"No more at all."

"Now praise God!" said he. "I have been robbed of Credit and estate, and even of my name; I have seen king and country foully done by, and black affront brought on our people, and still there's something left to live for."



CHAPTER XXVI — THE DUKE'S BALL

For some days Count Victor chafed at the dull and somewhat squalid life of the inn. He found himself regarded coldly among strangers; the flageolet sounded no longer in the private parlour; the Chamberlain stayed away. And if Drimdarroch had seemed ill to find from Doom, he was absolutely indiscoverable here. Perhaps there was less eagerness in the search because other affairs would for ever intrude—not the Cause (that now, to tell the truth, he somehow regarded moribund; little wonder after eight years' inaction!) nor the poignant home-thoughts that made his ride through Scotland melancholy, but affairs more recent, and Olivia's eyes possessed him.

A morning had come of terrific snow, and made all the colder, too, his sojourn in the country of MacCailen Mor. Now he looked upon mountains white and far, phantom valleys gulping chilly winds, the sea alone with some of its familiar aspect, yet it, too, leaden to eye and heart as it lay in a perpetual haze between the headlands and lazily rose and fell in the bays.

The night of the ball was to him like a reprieve. From the darkness of those woody deeps below Dunchuach the castle gleamed with fires, and a Highland welcome illumined the greater part of the avenue from the town with flambeaux, in whose radiance the black pines, the huge beeches, the waxen shrubbery round the lawns all shrouded, seemed to creep closer round the edifice to hear the sounds of revelry and learn what charms the human world when the melodious winds are still and the weather is cold, and out of doors poor thickets must shiver in appalling darkness.

A gush of music met Count Victor at the threshold; dresses were rustling, a caressing warmth sighed round him, and his host was very genial.

"M. Montaiglon," said his Grace in French, "you will pardon our short notice; my good friend, M. Montaiglon, my dear; my wife, M. Montaiglon—"

"But M. Montaiglon merely in the inns, my lord," corrected the Frenchman, smiling. "I should be the last to accept the honour of your hospitality under a nom de guerre."

The Duke bowed. "M. le Comte," he said, "to be quite as candid as yourself, I pierced your incognito even in the dark. My dear sir, a Scots traveller named for the time being the Baron Hay once had the privilege of sharing a glass coach with your uncle between Paris and Dunkerque; 'tis a story that will keep. Meanwhile, as I say, M. Montaiglon will pardon the shortness of our notice; in these wilds one's dancing shoes are presumed to be ever airing at the fire. You must consider these doors as open as the woods so long as your are in this neighbourhood. I have some things I should like to show you that you might not find wholly uninteresting—a Raphael, a Rembrandt (so reputed), and several Venetians—not much, in faith, but regarding which I should value your criticism—"

Some other guests arrived, his Grace's speech was broken, and Count Victor passed on, skirting the dancers, who to his unaccustomed eyes presented features strange yet picturesque as they moved in the puzzling involutions of a country dance. It was a noble hall hung round with tapestry and bossed with Highland targets, trophies of arms and the mountain chase; from the gallery round it drooped little banners with the devices of all those generations of great families that mingled in the blood of MacCailen Mor.

The Frenchman looked round him for a familiar face, and saw the Chamberlain in Highland dress in the midst of a little group of dames.

Mrs. Petullo was not one of them. She was dancing with her husband—a pitiful spectacle, for the lawyer must be pushed through the dance as he were a doll, with monstrous ungracefulness, and no sense of the time of the music, his thin legs quarrelling with each other, his neighbours all confused by his inexpert gyrations, and yet himself with a smirk of satisfaction on his sweating countenance.

"Madame is not happy," thought Count Victor, watching the lady who was compelled to be a partner in these ungainly gambols.

And indeed Mrs. Petullo was far from happy, if her face betrayed her real feelings, as she shared the ignominy of the false position into which Petullo had compelled her. When the dance was ended she did not take her husband's proffered arm, but walked before him to her seat, utterly ignoring his pathetic courtesies.

This little domestic comedy only engaged Count Victor for a moment; he felt vexed for a woman in a position for which there seemed no remedy, and he sought distraction from his uneasy feeling by passing every man in the room under review, and guessing which of them, if any, could be the Drim-darroch who had brought him there from France. It was a baffling task. For many were there with faces wholly inscrutable who might very well have among them the secret he cherished, and yet nothing about them to advertise the scamp who had figured so effectively in other scenes than these. The Duke, their chief, moved now among them—suave, graceful, affectionate, his lady on his arm, sometimes squeezing her hand, a very boy in love!

"That's a grand picture of matrimonial felicity, Count," said a voice at Count Victor's ear, and he turned to find the Chamberlain beside him.

"Positively it makes me half envious, monsieur," said Count Victor. "A following influenced by the old feudal affections and wellnigh worshipping; health and wealth, ambitions gratified, a name that has sounded in camp and Court, yet a heart that has stayed at home; the fever of youth abated, and wedded to a beautiful woman who does not weary one, pardieu! his Grace has nothing more in this world to wish for."