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Doom Castle

<h2> CHAPTER XII — OMENS AND ALARMS </h2> Beaten back by Annapla's punch-bowl from their escalade, the assailants rallied to a call from their commander, and abandoned, for the time at least, their lawless enterprise. They tossed high their arms, stamped out their torch to blackness, shouted a ribald threat, and were swallowed up by the black mainland. A gentle rain began to fall, and the sea lapsed from a long roll to an oily calm. With no heed for the warnings and protests of Mungo, whose intrepidity was too obviously a merely mental attitude and incapable of facing unknown dangers, Count Victor lit a lantern and went out again into the night that now held no rumour of the band who had so noisily menaced. There was profound silence on the shore and all along the coast—a silence the more sinister because peopled by his enemies. He went round the castle, his lantern making a beam of yellow light before him, showing the rain falling in silvery threads, gathering in silver beads upon his coat and trickling down the channels of his weapon. A wonderful fondness for that shaft of steel possessed him at the moment: it seemed a comrade faithful, his only familiar in that country of marvels and dreads; it was a comfort to have it hand in hand; he spoke to it once in affectionate accents as if it had been a thing of life. The point of it suggested the dark commander, and Count Victor scrutinised the ground beside the dyke-side where he had made the thrust: to his comfort only a single gout of blood revealed itself, for he had begun to fear something too close on a second homicide, which would make his presence in the country the more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his feet to the impenetrable blackness overhead. He went into the garden, he stood in the bower. There more than anywhere else the desolation was pitiful—the hips glowing crimson on their stems, the eglantine in withering strands, the rustic woodwork green with damp and the base growths of old and mouldering situations, the seat decayed and broken, but propped at its feet as if for recent use. All seemed to express some poignant anguish for lost summers, happy days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the rain and sea saddened the moment—the rain dripping through the ragged foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw. He held high the lantern, and to a woman at her darkened window her bower seemed to glow like a shell lit in the depths of troubled ocean. He swung the light; a footstep, that he did not hear, was checked in wonder. He came out, and instinct told him some one watched him in the dark beyond the radiance of his lantern. "Qui est la?" he cried, forgetting again the foreign country, thinking himself sentinel in homely camps, and when he spoke a footstep sounded in the darkness. Some one had crossed from the mainland while he ruminated within. He listened, with the lantern high above his head but to the right of him for fear of a pistol-shot. One footstep. He advanced slowly to meet it, his fingers tremulous on his sword, and the Baron came out of the darkness, his hands behind his back, his shoulders bent, his visage a mingling of sadness and wonder. "M. le Baron?" said Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer. Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that showed him for the moment incapable of calm utterance. "You—you—are late," stammered Count Victor, putting the sword behind him and feeling his words grotesque. "I took—I took you for a wraith—I took you for a vision," said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. "Oh, man!" said he, "if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from things new and thriving, and above all the castle of his Grace flaring from foundation to finial like a torch, though murder was done this day in the guise of justice: I came through the rain and the wet full of bitterness to my poor black home, and find no light there where once my father and my father's father and all the race of us knew pleasant hours in the wildest weather. Not a light, not a lowe—" he went on, gazing upward to the frowning walls dark glistening in the rain—"and then the bower must out and shine to mind me—to mind me—ah, Mont-aiglon, my pardons, my regrets! you must be finding me a melancholy host." "Do not mention it," said Count Victor carelessly, though the conduct of this marvel fairly bewildered him, and his distress seemed poorly accounted for by his explanation. "Ah, vieux blagueur!" he thought, "can it be Balhaldie again—a humbug with no heart in his breast but an onion in his handkerchief?" And then he was ashamed of suspicions of which a day or two ago he would have been incapable. "My dear friends of Monday did me the honour to call in your absence," he said. "They have not gone more than twenty minutes." "What! the Macfarlanes," cried Doom, every trace of his softer emotion gone, but more disturbed than ever as he saw the sword for the first time. "Well—well—well?" he inquired eagerly. "Well, well, well?" and he gripped Count Victor by the arm and looked him in the eyes. "Nothing serious happened," replied Count Victor, "except that your domestics suffered some natural alarms." Doom seemed wonderously relieved. "The did not force an entrance?" said he. "They did their best, but failed. I pricked one slightly before I fell back on Mungo's barricades; that and some discomfiture from Mistress Annapla's punch-bowl completed the casualties." "Well? well? well?" cried Lamond, still waking something. Count Victor only looked at him in wonder, and led the way to the door where Mungo drew back the bars and met his master with a trembling front. A glance of mute inquiry and intelligence passed between the servant and his master: the Frenchman saw it and came to his own conclusions, but nothing was said till the Baron had made a tour of investigation through the house and come at last to join his guest in the salle, where the embers of the fire were raked together on the hearth and fed with new peat. The Count and his host sat down together, and when Mungo had gone to prepare some food for his master, Count Victor narrated the night's adventure. He had an excited listener—one more excited, perhaps, than the narrative of itself might account for. "And there is much that is beyond my poor comprehension," continued Count Victor, looking at him as steadfastly as good breeding would permit. "Eh?" said Doom, stretching fingers that trembled to the peat-flame that stained his face like wine. "Your servant Mungo was quite unnecessarily solicitous for my safety, and took the trouble to put me under lock and key." Doom fingered the bristles of his chin in a manifest perturbation. "He—he did that, did he?" said he, like one seeking to gain time for further reflection. And when Count Victor waited some more sympathetic comment, "It was—it was very stupid, very stupid of Mungo," said he. "Stupid!" echoed Count Victor ironically. "Ah! so it was. I should not have said stupid myself, but it so hard, is it not, for a foreigner to find the just word in his poor vocabulary? For a b�tise much less unpleasant I have scored a lackey's back with a scabbard. Master Mungo had an explanation, however, though I doubted the truth of it." "And what was that?" "That you would be angry if he permitted me to get into danger while I was your guest,—an excuse more courteous than convincing." "He was right," said Doom, "though I can scarcely defend the manner of executing his trust: I was not to see that he would make a trepanning affair of it. I'm—I'm very much grieved, Count, much grieved, I assure you: I shall have a word or two on the matter the morn's morning with Mungo. A stupid action! a stupid action! but you know the man by this time—an oddity out and out." "A little too much so, if I may take the liberty, M. le Baron,—a little too much so for a foreigner's peace of mind," said Count Victor softly. "Are you sure, M. le Baron, there are no traitors in Doom?" and he leaned forward with his gaze on the Baron's face. The Baron started, flushed more crimson than before, and turned an alarmed countenance to his interrogator. "Good God!" he cried, "are you bringing your doubts of the breed of us to my hearthstone?" "It is absurd, perhaps," said Count Victor, still very softly, and watching his host as closely as he might, "but Mungo—" "Pshaw! a good lowland heart! For all his clowning, Count, you might trust him with your life." "The other servant then—the woman?" Doom looked a trifle uneasy. "Hush!" said he, with half a glance behind him to the door. "Not so loud. If she should hear!" he stammered: he stopped, then smiled awkwardly. "Have ye any dread of an Evil Eye?" said he. "I have no dread of the devil himself, who is something more tangible," replied Count Victor. "You do not suggest that malevolent influence in Mistress Annapla, do you?" "We are very civil to her in these parts," said Doom, "and I'm not keen to put her powers to the test. I have seen and heard some droll things of her." "That has been my own experience," said Count Victor. "Are you sure her honesty is on more substantial grounds than her reputation for witchcraft? I demand your pardon for expressing these suspicions, but I have reasons. I cannot imagine that the attack of the Macfarlanes was connived at by your servants, though that was my notion for a little when Mungo locked me up, for they suffered more alarm at the attack than I did, and the reason for the attack seems obvious enough. But are you aware that this woman who commands your confidence is in the practice of signalling to the shore when she wishes to communicate with some one there?" "I think you must be mistaken," said Doom, uneasily. "I could swear I saw something of the kind," said Count Victor. He described the signal he had seen twice at her window. "Not having met her at the time, I laid it down to some gay gillian's affair with a lover on the mainland, but since I have seen her that idea seem—seems—" "Just so, I should think it did," said the Baron: but though his words were light, his aspect was disturbed. He paced once or twice up and down the floor, muttered something to himself in Gaelic, and finally went to the door, which he opened. "Mungo, Mungo!" he cried into the darkness, and the servant appeared with the gaudy nightcap of his slumber already on. "Tell Annapla to come here," said the Baron. The servant hesitated, his lip trembled upon some objection that he did not, however, express, and he went on his errand. In a little the woman entered. It was not surprising that when Count Victor, prepared by all that had gone before to meet a bright young creature when he had gone into his chamber where she was repelling the escalade of the enemy, had been astounded to find what he found there, for Mistress Annapla was in truth not the stuff for amorous intrigues. She had doubtless been handsome enough in her day, but that was long distant; now there were but the relics of her good looks, with only her eyes, dark, lambent, piercing, to tell of passions unconsumed. She had eyes only for her master; Count Victor had no existence for her, and he was all the freer to watch how she received the Baron's examination. "Do you dry your clothes at the windows in Doom?" asked her master quietly, with none of a master's bluntness, asking the question in English from politeness to his guest. She replied rapidly in Gaelic. "For luck," said the Baron dubiously when he had listened to a long guttural explanation that was of course unintelligible to the Frenchman. "That's a new freit. To keep away the witches. Now, who gave ye a notion like that?" he went on, maintaining his English. Another rapid explanation followed, one that seemed to satisfy the Baron, for when it was finished he gave her permission to go. "It's as I thought," he explained to Count Victor. "The old body has been troubled with moths and birds beating themselves against her window at night when the light was in it: what must she be doing but taking it for some more sinister visitation, and the green kerchief is supposed to keep them away." "I should have fancied it might have been a permanency in that case," suggested Count Victor, "unless, indeed, your Highland ghosts have a special preference for Mondays and Wednesdays." "Permanency!" repeated the Baron, thoughtfully. "H'm!" The suggestion had obviously struck him as reasonable, but he baulked at any debate on it. "There was also the matter of the horseman," went on Count Victor blandly, pointing his moustache. "Horseman?" queried the Baron. "A horseman sans doute. I noticed most of your people here ride with a preposterously short stirrup; this one rode like a gentleman cavalier. He stopped opposite the castle this forenoon and waved his compliments to the responsive maid." The effect upon the Baron was amazing. He grew livid with some feeling repressed. It was only for a moment; the next he was for changing the conversation, but Count Victor had still his quiver to empty. "Touching flageolets?" said he, but there his arrow missed. Doom only laughed. "For that," said he, "you must trouble Annapla or Mungo. They have a story that the same's to be heard every night of storm, but my bed's at the other side of the house and I never heard it;" and he brought the conversation back to the Macfarlanes, so that Count Victor had to relinquish his inquisition. "The doings of to-night," said he, "make it clear I must rid you of my presence tout � l'heure. I think I shall transfer me to the town to-morrow." "You can't, man," protested Doom, though, it almost seemed, with some reluctance. "There could be no worse time for venturing there. In the first place, the Macfarlanes' affair is causing a stir; then I've had no chance of speaking to Petullo about you. He was to meet me after the court was over, but his wife dragged him up with her to dinner in the castle. Lord! yon's a wife who would be nane the waur o' a leatherin', as they say in the south. Well, she took the goodman to the castle, though a dumb dog he is among gentrice, and the trip must have been little to his taste. I waited and better waited, and I might have been waiting for his home-coming yet, for it's candle-light to the top flat of MacCailen's tower and the harp in the hall. Your going, Count, will have to be put off a day or two longer." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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