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Doom Castle

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<h2> CHAPTER V — THE FLAGEOLET </h2> He woke from a dream of pressing danger and impotent flight to marvel where he was in darkness; fancied himself at first in some wayside inn mid-way over Scotland, and sat up suddenly with an exclamation of assurance that he was awake to the suppositious landlord who had called, for the sense of some sound but stilled on the second of his waking was strong within him. He fastened upon the vague starlit space of the little window to give him a clew to his situation. Then he remembered Doom, and, with the window for his key, built up the puzzle of his room, wondering at the cause of his alarm. The wind had risen and sent a loud murmur through the trees along the coast; the sea, in breakers again, beat on the rock till Doom throbbed. But there was nothing in that to waken a man who had ridden two days on coarse roads and encountered and fought with banditti. Decidedly there was some menace in the night; danger on hard fields had given him blood alert and unsleeping; the alarum was drumming at his breast. Stealthily he put out his hand, and it fell as by a fiddler's instinct upon the spot desired—the hilt of his sword. There he kept it with his breath subdued, and the alarum severely quelled. An owl's call sounded on the shore, extremely pensive in its note, and natural, but unusual in the rhythm of its repetition. It might have passed for the veritable call of the woods to an unsuspicious ear, but Montaiglon knew it for a human signal. As if to prove it so, it was followed by the grating of the outer door upon its hinge, and the sound of a foot stumbling among stones. He reflected that the tide was out in all probability, and at once the notion followed that here were his searchers, the Macfarlanes, back in force to revenge his impetuous injury to their comrades. But then—a second thought almost as promptly told him in that case there should be no door opened. A sound of subdued voices came from the foot of the tower and died in the garden behind or was swept elsewhere by the wind; then, through the voice of the wave, the moan of the wind, and its whistle in vent and cranny, came a strain of music—not the harsh uncultured pipe of Mungo the servitor, but a more dulcet air of flute or flageolet. In those dark savage surroundings it seemed a sound inhuman, something unreal, something of remembrance in delirium or dream, charged for this Parisian with a thousand recollections of fond times, gay times, passionate times elsewhere. Doom throbbed to the waves, but the flageolet stirred in him not so much surprise at this incongruous experience as a wave of emotion where all his past of gaillard was crystalled in a second—many nights of dance and song anew experienced in a mellow note or two; an old love reincarnated in a phrase (and the woman in the dust); the evenings of Provence lived again, and Louis's darling flute piping from the chateau over the field and river; moons of harvest vocal with some peasant cheer; in the south the nightingale searching to express his kinship with the mind of man and the creatures of the copse, his rapture at the star. Somehow the elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in passionate crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon—and yet it was too short—the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains. Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with tears at his father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance gave quickness to the execution. But more haunting than all was one simple strain and brief, indeed never wholly accomplished, as if the player sought to recollect a song forgot, that was repeated over and over again, as though it were the motive of the others or refrain. Sometimes Montaiglon thought the player had despaired of concluding this bewitching melody when he changed suddenly to another, and he had a very sorrow at his loss; again, when its progress to him was checked by a veering current of the wind and the flageolet rose once more with a different tune upon it, he dreaded that the conclusion had been found in the lacuna. He rose at last and went to the window, and tried in the wan illumination of the heavens to detect the mysterious musician in the garden, but that was quite impossible: too dark the night, too huge and profound the shadows over Doom. He went to his door and opened it and looked down the yawning stairway; only the sigh of the wind in the gun-slits occupied the stairway, and the dark was the dark of Genesis. And so again to bed, to lie with his weariness for long forgotten. He found that tantalising fragment return again and again, but fated never to be complete. It seemed, he fancied, something like a symbol of a life—with all the qualities there, the sweetness, the affection, the passion, the divine despair, the longing, even the valours and the faiths to make a great accomplishment, but yet lacking the round accomplishment. And as he waited once again for its recurrence he fell asleep. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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