Neil Munro

“ France is not so vast that friends may not meet there often—if one were so greatly privileged—and every roadway in it leads to Dunkerque—and—I should dearly love to think of you as, so to speak, in my neighbourhood, among the people I esteem. It is not your devoted Highlands, this France, Mademoiselle Olivia, but believe me, it has its charms. You shall not have the mountains—there I am distressed for you—nor yet the rivulets; and you must dispense with the mists; but there is ever the consolation of an air that is like wine in the head, and a frequent sun. France, indeed! ”

“ 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. ”

“ He opened the door to let her pass through.
“I go back to my cell quiet enough,” she said, in low tones, and with a smiling frown upon her countenance.
“Happy prisoner!” said he, “to be condemned to no worse than your own company.”
“Ah! it is often a very dull and pitiful company that, Count Victor,” said Olivia, with a sigh.
It was not long till he, too, sought his couch, and the Baron of Doom was left alone.
Doom sat long looking at his crumbling walls, and the flaming fortunes, the blush, the heat-white and the dead grey ash of the peat-fire. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The sea, quiet and dull, the east turned from crimson to grey; the mountains streaming with mist——
“Cammercy after all!” said Count Victor to himself; “I shall wake in a moment, but yet for a nightmare 'tis the most extraordinary I have ever experienced.”
“I hope you are a good Christian,” said the Chamberlain, ready first and waiting, bending his borrowed weapon in malignant arcs above his head.
“Three-fourths of one at least,” said Montaiglon; “for I try my best to be a decent man,” and he daintily and deliberately turned up his sleeve upon an arm as white as milk. ”

“ Not an old man; not even an elderly, but a done man none the less, with the heart out of him, and all the inspiration clean gone!
Count Victor's advent in the castle had brought its own bitterness, for it was not often now that Doom had the chance to see anything of the big, brave outer world of heat and enterprise. This gallant revived ungovernably the remembrances he for ever sought to stifle—all he had been and all he had seen, now past and gone for ever, as Annapla did not scruple to tell him when the demands of her Gift or a short temper compelled her. ”

“ What had seemed to Montaiglon a harsh, discordant torturing of reeds when heard on the stair outside his chamber, seemed somehow more mellowed and appropriate—pleasing even—when it came from the garden outside the castle, on whose grass-grown walk the little lowlander strutted as he played the evening melody of the house of Doom—a pibroch all imbued with passion and with melancholy. This distance lulled it into something more than human music, into a harmony with the monotone of the wave that thundered against the rock ”

“ 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.” ”

“ A man of my age—there's France!—toujours la politesse, if you please! At my age! Confound his impudence!”
The Duchess could not suppress a smile.
“At his age, my dear,” said she, “you had the tact to put so obvious a thing differently or leave it alone.”
“Not that I heed his impudence,” said the Duke hastily; “that a man is no longer young at sixty is the most transparent of facts.”
“Only he does not care to have it mentioned too unexpectedly. Oh, you goose!” And she laughed outright, then checked herself at the recollection of the ailing Chamberlain. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ It was of these Count Victor spoke—of their faith, their valiancies, their shifts of penury and pride. He had used often to consort with them at Cammercy, and later on in Paris. If the truth were to be told, they had made a man of him, and now he was generous enough to confess it.
“I owe them much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “When first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young, that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in an ennui and the nights below the lamps? ”

“ It was like the creation of a man from a lay figure. The jerk at the kilt-belt buckle somehow seemed to brace the sluggish spirit; his shoulders found their old square set above a well-curved back; his feet—his knees—by an instinct took a graceful poise they had never learned in the mean immersement of breeches and Linlithgow boots. As he fastened his buckled brogues, he hummed the words of MacMhaister Allister's songs:
“Oh! the black-cloth of the Saxon, Dearer far's the Gaelic tartan!”
“Hugh Bethune's content with the waistcoat, is he?” he said to himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It revealed the gloomy gable-end of Doom with a wild, a menacing illumination, deepening the blackness of the night beyond its influence, giving life to shadows that danced upon rock and grass. The light, held high by the man Count Victor had wounded, now wrapped to his eyes in a plaid, rose and fell, touched sometimes on the mainland showing the bracken and the tree, sometimes upon the sea to show the wave, frothy from its quarrel with the fissured rock, making it plain that Doom was a ship indeed, cast upon troubled waters, cut off from the gentle world. ”

“ There was never a Montaiglon who would lose such a good occasion, and Count Victor made the most of it. He was gentle, but not too gentle—for this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaningless blague that no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If Count Victor, buried among cobwebs in the fosse, stung by cold till he shivered as in a quartan ague, suffering alternately the chagrin of the bungler self-discovered and the apprehension of a looming fate whose nature could only be guessed at, was in a state unenviable, Argyll himself was scarcely less unhappy. It was not only that his Chamberlain's condition grieved him, but that the whole affair put him in a quandary where the good citizen quarrelled in him with another old Highland gentleman whose code of morals was not in strict accord with written statutes. ”

“ Montaiglon caught that smile once: his chagrin at its irony was blended with a pleasing delusion that the frank and genial domestic might proffer a solution without indelicate questioning. But he was soon undeceived: the discreet retainer knew but three things in this world—the grandeur of war, the ancient splendour of the house of Doom, and the excellent art of absent-mindedness. When it came to the contents of Doom, Mungo Boyd was an oyster.
“It must have been a place of some importance in its day,” said Count Victor, gazing up at the towering walls and the broken embrasures. ”

“ Count Victor followed, stepping gingerly, for the snow was ankle-deep upon the lawn, and his red-heeled dancing-shoes were thin.
“We know we must all die,” said he in a little, pausing with a shiver of cold, and a glance about that bleak grey garden—“We know we must all die, but I have a preference for dying in dry hose, if die I must. Cannot monsieur suggest a more comfortable quarter for our little affair?”
“Monsieur is not so dirty particular,” said the Chamberlain. “If I sink my own rheumatism, it is not too much for you to risk your hose.” ”

“ And then an odd thing happened to relieve Mungo's embarrassment and end incontinent his garrulity. Floating on the air round the bulge of the turret came a strain of song in a woman's voice, not powerful, but rich and sweet, young in its accent, the words inaudible but the air startling to Count Victor, who heard no more than half a bar before he had realised that it was the unfinished melody of the nocturnal flageolet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It wrapped the woods upon the shore, made dim the yeasty waterway, and gave Doom itself the look of a phantom edifice. It would be ill to find a place less hospitable and cheerful in its outer aspect; not for domestic peace it seemed, but for dark exploits. The gloomy silhouette against the drab sky rose inconceivably tall, a flat plane like a cardboard castle giving little of an impression of actuality, but as a picture dimly seen, flooding an impressionable mind like Count Victor's with a myriad sensations, tragic and unaccustomed. ”

“ So here was the explanation of Olivia's condescension, her indifference to her lover's injury, of which her father could not fail to have apprised her even if Mungo had been capable of a miracle and held his tongue. The Chamberlain, then, was no longer in favour! Here was joy! Count Victor could scarce contain himself. How many women would have been flattered at the fierceness of devotion implied in a lover's readiness to commit assassination out of sheer jealousy of a supposititious rival in her affections? But Olivia—praise le bon Dieu!—was not like that. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here I swear I could live content myself.”
“What!” said she, smiling, and the rogue a moment dancing in her eyes. “No, no, Count Victor, to this you must be born like the stag in the corrie and the seal on the rock. We are a simple people, and a poor people—worse fortune!—poor and proud. Your world is different from ours, and there you will have friends that think of you.” ”