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Doom Castle

<h2> CHAPTER XXXI — FLIGHT </h2> Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into great good fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bears his name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste to envy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to the south of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, with oddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner of his escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen. And always his acutest memory was of the whipping rigour of the evening air, his temporary sense of swooning helplessness upon the verge of the fantastic wood. "Figure you! Charles," would he say, "the thin-blooded wand of forty years ago in a brocaded waistcoat and a pair of dancing-shoes seeking his way through a labyrinth of demoniac trees, shivering half with cold and half with terror like a forcat from the bagne of Toulouse, only that he knew not particularly from what he fled nor whereto his unlucky footsteps should be turned. I have seen it often since—the same place—have we not, mignonne?—and I avow 'tis as sweet and friendly a spot as any in our own neighbourhood; but then in that pestilent night of black and grey I was like a child, tenanting every tiny thicket with the were-wolf and the sheeted spectre. There is a stupid feeling comes to people sometimes in the like circumstances, that they are dead, that they have turned the key in the lock of life, as we say, and gone in some abstraction into the territory of shades. 'Twas so I felt, messieurs, and if in truth the ultimate place of spirits is so mortal chilly, I shall ask P�re Antoine to let me have a greatcoat as well as the viaticum ere setting out upon the journey." It had been an insufferably cruel day, indeed, for Count Victor in his cell had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments—sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed in this same austere atmosphere under the same grey sky that hung low outside his cell; the same snowfall that he could catch a glimpse of through the tiny space above his door was seen by her that moment in Doom; she must be taking the flavour of the sea as he could sometimes do in blessed moments even in this musty oubliette. The day passed, a short day with the dusk coming on as suddenly as if some one had drawn a curtain hurriedly over the tiny aperture above the door. And all the world outside seemed wrapped in silence. Twice again his warder came dumbly serving a meal, otherwise the prisoner might have been immeasurably remote from any life and wholly forgotten. There was, besides his visions of Olivia, one other thing to comfort him; it was when he heard briefly from some distant part of the castle the ululation of a bagpipe playing an air so jocund that it assured him at all events the Chamberlain was not dead, and was more probably out of danger. And then the cold grew intense beyond his bearance, and he reflected upon some method of escape if it were to secure him no more than exercise for warmth. The window was out of the question, for in all probability the watch was still on the other side of the fosse—a tombstone for steadfastness and constancy. Count Victor could not see him now even by standing on his box and looking through the aperture, yet he gained something, he gained all, indeed, so pregnant a thing is accident—even the cosy charcoal-fires and the friends about him in the chateau near Saint Germain-en-Laye—by his effort to pierce the dusk and see across the ditch. For as he was standing on the box, widening softly the aperture in the drifted snow upon the little window-ledge, he became conscious of cold air in a current beating upon the back of his head. The draught, that should surely be entering, was blowing out! At once he thought of a chimney, but there was no fireplace in his cell. Yet the air must be finding entrance elsewhere more freely than from the window. Perplexity mastered him for a little, and then he concluded that the current could come from nowhere else than behind the array of marshalled empty bottles. "Tonnerre!" said he to himself, "I have begun my career as wine merchant rather late in life or I had taken more interest in these dead gentlemen. Avancez, donc, mes princes! your ancient spirit once made plain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us see if now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon's profit." One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrude a sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked. There was an airy space. "Tr�s bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres, perhaps I may forgive you even yet for being empty." Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away a passage—that ended in a dead wall! It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then, been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searched every inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold, clammy, substantial. "A delusion after all!" he said, bitterly disappointed. "A delusion, and not the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine." He had almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffing current of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him for the second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm with his exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere over the level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behind the bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing, to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, and was apparently an incompleted curtain partitioning his cell from some space farther in. Not with any vaulting hopes, for an egress from this inner space seemed less unlikely than from the one he occupied, he pulled himself on the top of the intervening wall and lowered himself over the other side. At the full stretch of his arms he failed to touch anything with his feet; an alarming thought came to him; he would have pulled himself back, but the top of the wall was crumbling to his fingers, a mass of rotten mortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realised with a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What—this was his thought—what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the ground within an inch of his straining toes. To die in a pit! To die in a pit! good God!—was this the appropriate conclusion to a life with so much of open-air adventure, sunshine, gaiety, and charm in it? The sweat streamed upon his face as he strove vainly to hang by one of his arms and search the cope of the crumbling wall for a surer hold with the other; he stretched his toes till his muscles cramped, his eyes in the darkness filled with a red cloud, his breath choked him, a vision of his body thrashing through space overcame him, and his slipping fingers would be loose from the mortar in another minute! To one last struggle for a decent mastery his natural manhood rose, and cleared his brain and made him loose his grip. He fell less than a yard! For a moment he stopped to laugh at his foolish terror, and then set busily to explore this new place in which he found himself. The air was fresher; the walls on either hand contracted into the space of a lobby; he felt his way along for twenty paces before he could be convinced that he was in a sort of tunnel. But figure a so-convenient tunnel in connection with a prison cell! It was too good to be true. With no great surrender to hope even yet, he boldly plunged into the darkness, reason assuring him that the cul-de-sac would come sooner or later. But for once reason was wrong; the passage opened ever before him, more airy than ever, always dank and odorous, but with never a barrier—a passage the builders of the castle had executed for an age of sudden sieges and alarms, but now archaic and useless, and finally forgotten altogether. He had walked, he knew not how long, when he was brought up by a curious sound—a prolonged, continuous, hollow roar as of wind in a wood or a sea that rolled on a distant beach. Vainly he sought to identify it, but finally shook aside his wonder and pushed on again till he came to the apparent end of the passage, where a wooden door barred his progress farther. He stopped as much in amazement as in dubiety about the door, for the noise that had baffled him farther back in the tunnel was now close at hand, and he might have been in a ship's hold and the ship all blown about by tempest, to judge from the inexplicable thunder that shook the darkness. A score of surmises came quickly, only to be dismissed as quickly as they came; that extraordinary tumult was beyond his understanding, and so he applied himself to his release. Still his lucky fortune remained with him; the door was merely on a latch. He plucked it open eagerly, keen to solve the puzzle of the noise, emerging on a night now glittering with stars, and clamant with the roar of tumbling waters. A simple explanation!—he had come out beside the river. The passage came to its conclusion under the dumb arch of a bridge whose concaves echoed back in infinite exaggeration every sound of the river as it gulped in rocky pools below. The landscape round about him in the starshine had a most bewitching influence. Steep banks rose from the riverside and lost themselves in a haze of frost, through which, more eminent, stood the boles and giant members of vast gaunt trees, their upper branches fretting the starry sky. No snow was on the spot where he emerged, for the wind, blowing huge wreaths against the buttresses of the bridge a little higher on the bank, had left some vacant spaces, but the rest of the world was blanched well-nigh to the complexion of linen. Where he was to turn to first puzzled Count Victor. He was free in a whimsical fashion, indeed, for he was scarcely more than half-clad, and he wore a pair of dancing-shoes, ludicrously inappropriate for walking in such weather through the country. He was free, but he could not be very far yet from his cell; the discovery of his escape might be made known at any moment; and even now while he lingered here he might have followers in the tunnel. Taking advantage of the uncovered grass he climbed the bank and sought the shelter of a thicket where the young trees grew too dense to permit the snow to enter. From here another hazard of flight was manifest, for he could see now that the face of the country outside on the level was spread as with a tablecloth, its white surface undisturbed, ready for the impress of so light an object as a hopping wren. To make his way across it would be to drag his bonds behind him, plainly asking the world to pull him back. Obviously there must be a more tactical retreat, and without more ado he followed the river's course, keeping ever, as he could, in the shelter of the younger woods, where the snow did not lie or was gathered by the wind in alleys and walls. Forgotten was the cold in his hurried flight through the trees; but by-and-by it compelled his attention, and he fell to beating his arms in the shelter of a plantation of yews. "Mort de ma vie!" he thought while in this occupation, "why should I not have a roquelaire? If his very ungracious Grace refuses to see when a man is dying of cold for want of a coat, shall the man not help himself to a loan? M. le Duc owes Cammercy something for that ride in a glass coach, and for a night of a greatcoat I shall be pleased to discharge the family obligation." Count Victor there and then came to a bold decision. He would, perhaps, not only borrow a coat and cover his nakedness, but furthermore cover his flight by the same strategy. The only place in the neighbourhood where he could obscure his footsteps in that white night of stars was in the castle itself—perhaps in the very fosse whence he had made his escape. There the traffic of the day was bound to have left a myriad tracks, amongst which the imprint of a red-heeled Rouen shoe would never advertise itself. But it was too soon yet to risk so bold a venture, for his absence might be at this moment the cause of search round all the castle, and ordinary prudence suggested that he should permit some time to pass before venturing near the dwelling that now was in his view, its lights blurred by haze, no sign apparent that they missed or searched for him. For an hour or more, therefore, he kept his blood from congelation by walking back and forward in the thicket into which the softly breathing but shrewish night wind penetrated less cruelly than elsewhere, and at last judged the interval enough to warrant his advance upon the enterprise. Behold then Count Victor running hard across the white level waste of the park into the very boar's den—a comic spectacle, had there been any one to see it, in a dancer's shoes and hose, coatless and excited. He looked over the railing of the fosse to find the old silence undisturbed. Was his flight discovered yet? If not it was something of a madness, after all, to come back to the jaws of the trap. "Here's a pretty problem!" he told himself, hesitating upon the brink of the ditch into which dipped a massive stair—"Here's a pretty problem! to have the roquelaire or to fly without it and perish of cold, because there is one chance in twenty that monsieur the warder opposite my chamber may not be wholly a fool and may have looked into his mousetrap. I do not think he has; at all events here are the alternatives, and the wiser is invariably the more unpleasant. Allons! Victor, advienne que pourra, and Heaven help us!" He ran quickly down the stair into the fosse, crept along in the shelter of the ivy for a little, saw that no one was visible, and darted across and up to a postern in the eastern turret. The door creaked noisily as he entered, and a flight of stairs, dimly lit by candles, presented itself, up which he ventured with his heart in his mouth. On the first landing were two doors, one of them ajar; for a second or two he hesitated with every nerve in his flesh pulsating and his heart tumultuous in his breast; then hearing nothing, took his courage in his hands and blandly entered, with his feet at a fencer's balance for the security of his retreat if that were necessary. There was a fire glowing in the apartment—a tempting spectacle for the shivering refugee, a dim light burned within a glass shade upon the mantel, and a table laden with drug-vials was drawn up to the side of a heavily-curtained bed. Count Victor compassed the whole at a glance, and not the least pleasant part of the spectacle was the sight of a coat—not a greatcoat, but still a coat—upon the back of a chair that stood between the bed and the fire. "With a thousand apologies to his Grace," he whispered to himself, and tiptoed in his soaking shoes across the floor without reflecting for a second that the bed might have an occupant. He examined the coat; it had a familiar look that might have indicated its owner even if there had not been the flageolet lying beside it. Instinctively Count Victor turned about and went up to the bed, where, silently peeping between the curtains, he saw his enemy of the morning so much in a natural slumber as it seemed that he was heartened exceedingly. Only for a moment he looked; there was the certainty of some one returning soon to the room, and accordingly he rapidly thrust himself into the coat and stepped back upon the stair. There was but one thing wanting—a sword! Why should he not have his own back again? As he remembered the interview of the morning, the chamber in which he had left his weapon at the bidding of the Duke was close at hand, and probably it was still there. Each successive hazard audaciously faced emboldened him the more; and so he ventured along, searching amid a multitude of doors in dim rushlight till he came upon one that was different from its neighbours only inasmuch as it had a French motto painted across the panels. The motto read "Revenez bient�t," and smiling at the omen, Count Victor once more took his valour in his fingers and turned the handle. "Revenez bient�t" he was whispering softly to himself as he noiselessly pushed in the door. The sentence froze on his lips when he saw the Duchess seated in a chair, and turned half round to look at him. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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