"Ah! then you have found your needle in the haystack after all?" cried Doom, vastly interested.

"Found the devil!" cried Montaiglon, a shade of vexation in his countenance, for he had not once that day had a thought of all that had brought, him into Scotland. "The haystack must be stuck full of needles like the bran of a pin-cushion."

"And this one, who is not the particular needle named Drimdarroch?"

"I shall give you three guesses, M. le Baron."

Doom reflected, pulled out his nether lip with his fingers, looking hard at his guest.

"It is not the Chamberlain?"

"Peste!" thought the Count, "can the stern unbending parent have relented? You are quite right," he said; "no other. But it is not a matter of the most serious importance. I lost my coat and the gentleman lost a little blood. I have the best assurances that he will be on foot again in a week or two, by which time I hope—at all events I expect—to be out of all danger of being invited to resume the entertainment."

"In the meantime here's Doom, yours—so long as it is mine—while it's your pleasure to bide in it if you fancy yourself safe from molestation," said the Baron.

"As to that I think I may be tranquil. I have, there too, the best assurances that the business will be hushed up."

"So much the better, though in any case this seems to have marred your real engagements here in the matter of Drimdarroch."

Count Victor's turn it was to feel vexation now. He pulled his moustache and reddened. "As to that, Baron," said he, "I pray you not to despise me, for I have to confess that my warmth in the mission that brought me here has abated sadly. You need not ask me why. I cannot tell you. As for me and my affair, I have not forgotten, nor am I likely wholly to forget; but your haystack is as difficile as you promised it should be, and—there are divers other considerations. It necessitates that I go home. There shall be some raillery at my expense doubtless—Ciel! how Louis my cousin will laugh!—but no matter."

He spoke a little abstractedly, for he saw a delicate situation approaching. He was sure to be asked—once Annapla's service was over—what led to the encounter, and to give the whole story frankly involved Olivia's name unpleasantly in a vulgar squabble. He saw for the first time that he had been wholly unwarranted in taking the defence of the Baron's interests into his own hands. Could he boldly intimate that in his opinion jealousy of himself had been the spring of the Chamberlain's midnight attacks on the castle of Doom? That were preposterous! And yet that seemed the only grounds that would justify his challenging the Chamberlain.

When Annapla was gone then Doom got the baldest of histories. He was encouraged to believe that all this busy day of adventure had been due to a simple quarrel after a game of cards, and where he should have preferred a little more detail he had to content himself with a humorous narrative of the escape, the borrowing of the coat, and the interview with the Duchess.

"And now with your permission, Baron, I shall go to bed," at last said Count Victor. "I shall sleep to-night, like a sabot. I am, I know, the boldest of beggars for your grace and kindness. It seems I am fated in this country to make free, not only with my enemy's coat, but with my dear friend's domicile as if it were an inn. To-morrow, Baron, I shall make my dispositions. The coat can be returned to its owner none the worse for my use of it, but I shall not so easily be able to square accounts with you."



CHAPTER XXXIV — IN DAYS OF STORM

In a rigorous privacy of storm that lasted many days after his return, and cut Doom wholly off from the world at large, Count Victor spent what but for several considerations would have been—perhaps indeed they really were—among the happiest moments of his life. It was good in that tumultuous weather, when tempests snarled and frosts fettered the countryside, and the sea continually wrangled round the rock of Doom, to look out on the inclemency from windows where Olivia looked out too. She used to come and stand beside him, timidly perhaps at first, but by-and-by with no self-consciousness. Her sleeve would touch his, sometimes, indeed, her shoulder must press against his arm and little strands of her hair almost blow against his lips as in the narrow apertures of the tower they watched the wheeling birds from the outer ocean. For these birds she had what was little less than a passion. To her they represented the unlimited world of liberty and endeavour; at sight of them something stirred in her that was the gift of all the wandering years of that old Ulysses, her grandfather, to whom the beckoning lights of ships at sea were irresistible, and though she doted on the glens of her nativity, she had the spirit that invests every hint of distant places and far-off happenings with magic parts.

She seemed content, and yet not wholly happy: he could hear her sometimes sigh, as he thought, from a mere wistfulness that had the illimitable spaces of the sea, the peopled isles and all their mystery for background. To many of the birds that beat and cried about the place she gave names, investing them with histories, recounting humorously their careers. And it was odd that however far she sent them in her fancy—to the distant Ind, to the vexed Pole itself—with joy in their travelling, she assumed that their greatest joy was when they found themselves at Doom. The world was a place to fare forth in as far as you could, only to give you the better zest for Doom on your return.

This pleased her father hugely, but it scarcely tallied with the views of one who had fond memories of a land where sang the nightingale in its season, and roads were traversable in the wildest winter weather; still Count Victor was in no mood to question it.

He was, save in rare moments of unpleasant reflection, supremely happy, thrilling to that accidental contact, paling at the narrow margins whereby her hair escaped conferring on him a delirium. He could stand at a window all day pretending interest in the monotonous hills and empty sea, only that he might keep her there too and indulge himself upon her eyes. They—so eager, deep, or busied with the matters of her thoughts—were enough for a common happiness; a debauch of it was in the contact of her arm.

And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been before. Several times he was on the point of speaking on the subject. Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.

A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his gun was to be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly for "her ladyship" Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant conversation—otherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia alone. For the father relapsed anew into his old strange melancholies, dozing over his books, indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily along the imprisoned coast.

That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were clandestine; now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways in the breacan as of old. But that was not his only distress, Count Victor was sure.

"What accounts for your father's melancholy?" he had the boldness one day to ask Olivia.

They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden, bent upon its slaughter.

"And do you not know the reason for that?" she asked, with her humour promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at the figure bent beside the fire. "What is the dearest thing to you?"

She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it was no wonder he stammered in his reply.

"The dearest," he repeated. "Ah! well—well—the dearest, Mademoiselle Olivia; ma foi! there are so many things."

"Yes, yes," she said impatiently, "but only one or two are at the heart's core." She saw him smile at this, and reddened. "Oh, how stupid I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a lady—if there is a lady."

"There is a lady," said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.

A silence followed; not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had thought to look for it.

"I am the one," said she at length, "who will wish you well in that; but after her—after this—this lady—what is it that comes closest?"

"What but my country!" cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.

"To be sure!" she acquiesced, "your country! I am not wondering at that. And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most cruel. We are like the folks I have read of—they were the Greeks who travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy. 'Tha-latta!'—was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in school in Edinburgh, I cried, myself, 'Lochfinne!' and thought I heard the tide rumbling upon this same rock. It is for that; it is because we must be leaving here my father is sad."

Here indeed was news

"Leaving!" said Count Victor in astonishment.

"It is so. My father has been robbed; his people have been foolish; it is not a new thing in the Highlands of Scotland, Count Victor. You must not be thinking him a churl to be moping and leaving you to my poor entertainment, for it is ill to keep the pipes in tune when one is drying tears."

"Where will you go?" asked Count Victor, disturbed at the tidings and the distress she so bravely struggled to conceal.

"Where? indeed!" said Olivia. "That I cannot tell you yet. But the world is wide, and it is strange if there is any spot of it where we cannot find some of our own Gaelic people who have been flitting for a generation, taking the world for their pillow. What is it that shall not come to an end? My sorrow! the story on our door down there has been preparing me for this since ever I was a bairn. My great-great-grandfather was the wise man and the far-seeing when he carved it there—'Man, Behauld the End of All, Be nocht Wiser than the Hiest. Hope in God!'" She struggled courageously with her tears that could not wholly be restrained, and there and then he could have gathered her into his arms. But he must keep himself in bounds and twist the fringes of her shawl.

"Ah, Olivia," said he, "you will die for the sight of home."

At that she dashed her hand across her eyes and boldly faced him, smiling.

"That would be a shameful thing in a Baron's daughter," said she. "No, indeed! when we must rise and go away, here is the woman who will go bravely! We live not in glens, in this house nor in that, but in the hearts that love us, and where my father is and friends are to be made, I think I can be happy yet. Look at the waves there, and the snow and the sea-birds! All these are in other places as well as here."

"But not the same, but not the same! 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."

"And you," said he, all aglow in passion but with a face of flint, "you are leaving those behind that love you too."

This time he watched her narrowly; she gave no sign.

"There are the poor people in the clachan there," said she; "some of them will not forget me I am hoping, but that is all. We go. It is good for us, perhaps. Something has been long troubling my father more than the degradation of the clans and all these law pleas that Petullo has now brought to the bitter end. He is proud, and he is what is common in the Highlands when the heart is sore—he is silent. You must not think it is for myself I am vexing to leave Doom Castle; it is for him. Look! do you see the dark spot on the side of the hill yonder up at Ardno? That is the yew-tree in the churchyard where my mother, his wife, lies; it is no wonder that at night sometimes he goes out to look at the hills, for the hills are over her there and over the generations of his people in the same place. I never knew my mother, mothruaigh! but he remembers, and it is the hundred dolours (as we say) for him to part. For me I have something of the grandfather in me, and would take the seven bens for it, and the seven glens, and the seven mountain moors, if it was only for the sake of the adventure, though I should always like to think that I would come again to these places of hered-ity."

And through all this never a hint of Simon Mac-Taggart! Could there be any other conclusion than the joyous one—it made his heart bound!—that that affair was at an end? And yet how should he ascertain the truth about a matter so close upon his heart? He put his pride in his pocket and went down that afternoon with the Chamberlain's coat in his hands. There was a lull in the wind, and the servitor was out of doors caulking the little boat, the argosy of poor fortunes, which had been drawn up from the menacing tides so that its prow obtruded on the half-hearted privacy of the lady's bower. Deer were on the shore, one sail was on the blue of the sea, a long way off, a triumphant flash of sun lit up the innumerable glens. A pleasant interlude of weather, and yet Mungo was in what he called, himself, a tirravee. He was honestly becoming impatient with this undeparting foreigner, mainly because Annapla was day by day the more insistent that he had not come wading into Doom without boots entirely in vain, and that her prediction was to be fulfilled.

"See! Mungo," said the Count, "the daw, if my memory fails me not, had his plumes pecked off him, but I seem fated to retain my borrowed feathers until I pluck myself. Is it that you can have them at the first opportunity restored to our connoisseur in contes—your friend the Chamberlain? It comes to occur to me that the gentleman's wardrobe may be as scanty as my own, and the absence of his coat may be the reason, more than my unfortunate pricking with a bodkin, for his inexplicable absence from—from—the lady's side."

Mungo had heard of the duel, of course; it was the understanding in Doom that all news was common property inasmuch as it was sometimes almost the only thing to pass round.

"Humph!" said he. "It wasna' sae ill to jag a man that had a wound already."

"Expiscate, good Master Mungo," said Count Victor, wondering. "What wound already? You speak of the gentleman's susceptible heart perhaps?"

"I speak o' naethin' o' the kind, but o' the man's airm. Ye ken fine ye gied him a push wi' your whinger that first night he cam' here wi' his fenci-ble gang frae the Maltland and play-acted Black Andy o' Arroquhar."

"The devil!" cried Count Victor. "I wounded somebody, certainly, but till now I had no notion it might be the gentleman himself. Well, let me do him the justice to say he made rather pretty play with his weapon on the sands, considering he was wounded. And so, honest Mungo, the garrison was not really taken by surprise that night you found yourself plucked out like a periwinkle from your wicket? As frankness is in fashion, I may say that for a while I gave you credit for treason to the house, and treason now it seems to have been, though not so black as I thought. It was MacTaggart who asked you to open the door?"

"Wha else? A bonny like cantrip! Nae doot it was because I tauld him Annapla's prophecy aboot a man with the bare feet. The deil's buckie! Ye kent yersel' brawly wha it was."

"I, Master Mungo! Faith, not I!"

Mungo looked incredulous.

"And what ails the ladyship, for she kent? I'll swear she kent the next day, though I took guid care no' to say cheep."

"I daresay you are mistaken there, my good Mungo."

"Mistaken! No me! It wasna a' thegither in a tantrum o' an ordinar' kind she broke her tryst wi' him the very nicht efter ye left for the inns doon by. At onyrate, if she didna' ken then she kens noo, I'll warrant."

"Not so far as I am concerned, certainly."

Mungo looked incredulous. That any one should let go the chance of conveying so rare a piece of gossip to persons so immediately concerned was impossible of belief. "Na, na," said he, shaking his head; "she has every word o't, or her faither at least, and that's the same thing. But shoon or nae shoon, yon's the man for my money!"

"Again he has my felicitations," said Count Victor, with a good humour unfailing. Indeed he could afford to be good-humoured if this were true. 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.

He thrust the coat into Mungo's hands and went hurriedly up to his room to be alone with his thoughts, that he feared might show themselves plainly in his face if he met either the lady or her father, and there for the first time had a memory of Cecile—some odd irrelevance of a memory—in which she figured in a masque in a Paris garden. Good God! that he should have failed to see it before; this Cecile had been an actress, as, he told himself, were most of her sex he had hitherto encountered, and 'twas doubtful if he once had touched her soul. Olivia had shown him now, in silences, in sighs, in some unusual aura of sincerity that was round her like the innocence of infancy, that what he thought was love a year ago was but its drossy elements. Seeking the first woman in the eyes of the second, he had found the perfect lover there!



CHAPTER XXXV — A DAMNATORY DOCUMENT

Mungo took the coat into the castle kitchen, the true arcanum of Doom, where he and Annapla solved the domestic problems that in later years had not been permitted to disturb the mind of the master or his daughter. An enormous fireplace, arched like a bridge, and poorly enough fed nowadays compared with its gluttony in those happier years of his continual bemoaning, when plenty kept the spit perpetually at work, if it were only for the good of the beggars who blackened the road from the Lowlands, had a handful of peat in its centre to make the yawning orifice the more pathetic to eyes that had seen the flames leap there. Everywhere the evidence of the old abundant days—the rusting spit itself, the idle battery of cuisine, long rows of shining covers. Annapla, who was assumed to be true tutelary genius of these things, but in fact was beholden to the martial mannikin of Fife for inspiration and aid with the simplest of ragouts, though he would have died sooner than be suspected of the unsoldierly art of cookery,—Annapla was in one of her trances. Her head was swathed mountainously in shawls; her wild, black, lambent eyes had the look of distant contemplation.

"Lord keep 's!" said Mungo, entering, "what are ye doverin' on noo? Wauken up, ye auld bitch, and gie this coat a dight. D'ye ken wha's ocht it? It belangs to a gentleman that's no' like noo to get but this same, and the back-o'-my-haun'-to-ye oot o' Doom Castle."

She took the coat and brushed it in a lethargy, with odd, unintelligible chanting.

"Nane o' your warlock canticles!" cried Mungo. "Ye gied the lassie to the man that cam' withouten boots—sorrow be on the bargain! And if it's cast-in' a spell on the coat ye are, I'll raither clean't mysel'."

With that he seized the garment from her and lustily applied himself.

"A bonny-like hostler-wife ye'll mak'," said he. "And few'll come to Mungo Byde's hostelry if his wife's to be eternally in a deevilish dwaam, concocting Hielan' spells when she should be stirring at the broth. No' that I can blame ye muckle for a want o' the up-tak in what pertains to culinairy airts; for what hae ye seen here since ye cam' awa frae the rest o' the drove in Arroquhar but lang kail, and oaten brose, and mashlum bannocks? Oh! sirs, sirs!—I've seen the day!"

Annapla emerged from her trance, and ogled him with an amusing admiration.

"And noo it's a' by wi't; it's the end o' the auld ballant," went on the little man. "I've kept auld Doom in times o' rowth and splendour, and noo I'm spared to see't rouped, the laird a dyvour and a nameless wanderer ower the face o' the earth. He's gaun abroad, he tells me, and settles to sit doon aboot Dunkerque in France. It's but fair, maybe, that whaur his forbears squandered he should gang wi' the little that's to the fore. I mind o' his faither gaun awa at the last hoved up, a fair Jeshurun, his een like to loup oot o' his heid wi' fat, and comin' back a pooked craw frae the dicing and the drink, nae doot amoung the scatter-brained white cockades. Whatna shilpit man's this that Leevie's gotten for her new jo? As if I dinna see through them! The tawpie's taen the gee at the Factor because he played yon ploy wi' his lads frae the Maltland barracks, and this Frenchy's ower the lugs in love wi' her, I can see as plain as Cowal, though it's a shameless thing to say't. He's gotten gey far ben in a michty short time. Ye're aye saying them that come unsent for should sit unserved; but wha sent for this billy oot o' France? and wha has been sae coothered up as he has since he cam' here? The Baron doesnae ken the shifts that you and me's been put to for to save his repitation. Mony a lee I tauld doon there i' the clachan to soother them oot o' butter and milk and eggs, and a bit hen at times; mony a time I hae gie'n my ain dinner to thae gangrel bodies frae Glencro sooner nor hae them think there was nae rowth o' vivers whaur they never wer sent awa empty-haunded afore. I aye keepit my he'rt up wi' the notion that him doon-bye the coat belangs to wad hae made a match o't, and saved us a' frae beggary. But there's an end o' that, sorry am I. And sorry may you be; ye auld runt, to hear't, for he's been the guid enough friend to me; and there wad never hae been the Red Sodger Tavern for us if it wasnae for his interest in a man that has aye kep' up the airmy."

Annapla seemed to find the dialect of Fife most pleasing and melodious. She listened to his monologue with approving smiles, and sitting on a stool, cowered within the arch, warming her hands at the apology for a flame.

"Wha the deevil could hae tauld her it was the lad himsel' was here that nicht wi' his desperate chiels frae the barracks? It couldna' be you, for I didna' tell ye mysel' for fear ye wad bluitter it oot and spoil his chances. She kent onyway, and it was for no ither reason she gie'd him the route, unless—unless she had a notion o' the Frenchman frae the first glisk o' him. There's no accoontin' for tastes; clap a bunnet on a tawtie-bogle, wi' a cock to the ae side that's kin' o' knowin', and ony woman'll jump at his neck, though ye micht pap peas through the place whaur his wame should be. The Frenchy's no' my taste onyway; and noo, there's Sim! Just think o' Sim gettin' the dirty gae-bye frae a glaikit lassie hauf his age; and no' his equal in the three parishes, wi' a leg to tak' the ee o' a hal dancin'-school, and auld Knapdale's money comin' till him whenever Knapdale's gane, and I'm hearin' he's in the deid-thraws already. Ill fa' the day fotch the Frenchy! The race o' them never brocht ocht in my generation to puir Scotland worth a bodle, unless it micht be a new fricassee to fyle a stamach wi'. I'm fair bate to ken what this Coont wants here. 'Drimdarroch,' says he, but that's fair rideeculous, unless it was the real auld bauld Drimdarroch, and that's nae ither than Doom. I winna wonder if he heard o' Leevie ere ever he left the France."

Annapla began to drowse at the fire. He saw her head nod, and came round with the coat in his hand to confirm his suspicion that she was about to fall asleep. Her eyes were shut.

"Wauken up, Luckie!" he cried, disgusted at this absence of appreciation. "What ails the body? Ye're into your damnable dwaam again. There's them that's gowks enough to think ye're seein' Sichts, when it's neither mair nor less than he'rt-sick laziness, and I was ance ane o' them mysel'. Ye hinnae as muckle o' the Sicht as wad let ye see when Leevie was makin' a gowk o' ye to gar ye hang oot signals for her auld jo. A bonny-like brewster-wife ye'll mak', I warrant!" He tapped her, not unkindly, on the head with the back of his brush, and brought her to earth again.

"Are ye listenin', ye auld runt?" said he. "I'm goin' doon to the toon i' the aifternoon wi' this braw coat and money for Monsher's inn accoont, and if ye're no' mair wide-awake by that time, there's deil the cries'll gae in wi' auld MacNair."

The woman laughed, not at all displeased with herself nor with her rough admirer, and set to some trivial office. Mungo was finished with the coat; he held it out at arm's length, admiring its plenitude of lace, and finally put off his own hodden garment that he might try on the Chamberlain's.

"God!" said he, "it fits me like an empty ale-cask. I thocht the Coont looked gey like a galo-shan in't, but I maun be the bonny doo mysel'. And I'm no that wee neither, for it's ticht aboot the back."

Annapla thought her diminutive admirer adorable; she stood raptly gazing on him, with her dish-clout dripping on the floor.

"I wonder if there's no' a note or twa o' the New Bank i' the pouches," said Mungo, and began to search. Something in one of the pockets rustled to the touch, and with a face of great expectancy he drew forth what proved to be a letter. The seal was broken, there was neither an address nor the superscription of the writer; the handwriting was a faint Italian, betokening a lady—there was no delicate scrupulosity about the domestic, and the good Mungo unhesitatingly indulged himself.

"It's no' exactly a note," said he, contracting his brows above the document. Not for the first time Annapla regretted her inability to read, as she craned over his shoulder to see what evidently created much astonishment in her future lord.

"Weel, that bates a'!" he cried when he had finished, and he turned, visibly flushing, even through his apple-red complexion, to see Annapla at his shoulder.

"It's a guid thing the Sicht's nae use for English write," said he, replacing the letter carefully in the pocket whence it had come. "This'll gae back to himsel', and naebody be nane the wiser o't for Mungo Byde."

For half an hour he busied himself with aiding Annapla at the preparation of dinner, suddenly become silent as a consequence of what the letter had revealed to him, and then he went out to prepare his boat for his trip to town.

Annapla did not hesitate a moment; she fished out the letter and hurried with it to her master, less, it must be owned, from a desire to inform him, than from a womanly wish to share a secret that had apparently been of the greatest interest to Mungo.

Doom took it from her hands in an abstraction, for he was whelmed with the bitter prospect of imminent farewells; he carelessly scanned the sheet with half-closed eyes, and was well through perusing it before he realised that it had any interest. He began at the beginning again, caught the meaning of a sentence, sat bolt upright in the chair where Annapla had found him lolling, and finished with eagerness and astonishment.

Where had she got this? She hesitated to tell him that it had been pilfered from the owner's pocket, and intimated that she had picked it up outside.

"Good woman," said he in Gaelic, "you have picked up a fortune. It would have saved me much tribulation, and yourself some extra work, if you had happened to pick it up a month ago!"

He hurried to Olivia.

"My dear," he said, "I have come upon the oddest secret."

His daughter reddened to the roots of her hair, and fell to trembling with inexplicable shame. He did not observe it.

"It is that you have got out of the grip of the gled. Yon person was an even blacker villain than I guessed."

"Oh!" she said, apparently much relieved, "and is that your secret? I have no wonder left in me for any new display of wickedness from Simon MacTaggart."

"Listen," he said, and read her the damnatory document. She flushed, she trembled, she well-nigh wept with shame; but "Oh!" she cried at the end, "is he not the noble man?"

"The noble man!" cried Doom at such an irrelevant conclusion. "Are you out of your wits, Olivia?"

She stammered an explanation. "I do not mean—I do not mean—this—wretch that is exposed here, but Count Victor. He has known it all along."

"H'm," said Doom. "I fancy he has. That was, like enough, the cause of the duel. But I do not think it was noble at all that he should keep silent upon a matter so closely affecting the happiness of your whole life."

Olivia saw this too, when helped to it, and bit her lip. It was, assuredly, not right that Count Victor, in the possession of such secrets as this letter revealed, should allow her to throw herself away on the villain there portrayed.

"He may have some reason we cannot guess," she said, and thought of one that made her heart beat wildly.

"No reason but a Frenchman's would let me lose my daughter to a scamp out of a pure punctilio. I can scarcely believe that he knew all that is in this letter. And you, my dear, you never guessed any more than I that these attacks under cover of night were the work of Simon MacTaggart."

"I must tell you the truth, father," said Olivia. "I have known it since the second, and that it was that turned me. I learned from the button that Count Victor picked up on the stair, for I recognised it as his. I knew—I knew—and yet I wished to keep a doubt of it, I felt it so, and still would not confess it to myself that the man I loved—the man I thought I loved—was no better than a robber." "A robber indeed! I thought the man bad; I never liked his eye and less his tongue, that was ever too plausible. Praise God, my dear, that he's found out!"



CHAPTER XXXVI — LOVE

It was hours before Count Victor could trust himself and his tell-tale countenance before Olivia, and as he remained in an unaccustomed seclusion for the remainder of the day, she naturally believed him cold, though a woman with a fuller experience of his sex might have come to a different conclusion. Her misconception, so far from being dispelled when he joined her and her father in the evening, was confirmed, for his natural gaiety was gone, and an emotional constraint, made up of love, dubiety, and hope, kept him silent even in the precious moments when Doom retired to his reflections and his book, leaving them at the other end of the room alone. Nothing had been said about the letter; the Baron kept his counsel on it for a more fitting occasion, and though Olivia, who had taken its possession, turned it over many times in her pocket, its presentation involved too much boldness on her part to be undertaken in an impulse. The evening passed with inconceivable dulness; the gentleman was taciturn to clownishness; Mungo, who had come in once or twice to replenish fires and snuff candles, could not but look at them with wonder, for he plainly saw two foolish folks in a common misunderstanding.

He went back to the kitchen crying out his contempt for them.

"If yon's coortin'," he said, "it's the drollest I ever clapt een on! The man micht be a carven image, and Leevie no better nor a shifty in the pook. I hope she disnae rue her change o' mind alreadys, for I'll warrant there was nane o' yon blateness aboot Sim MacTaggart, and it's no' what the puir lassie's been used to."

But these were speculations beyond the sibyl of his odd adoration; Annapla was too intent upon her own elderly love-affairs to be interested in those upstairs.

And upstairs, by now, a topic had at last come on between the silent pair that did not make for love or cheerfulness. The Baron had retired to his own room in the rear of the castle, and they had begun to talk of the departure that was now fixed for a date made imminent through the pressure of Petullo. Where were they bound for but France? Doom had decided upon Dunkerque because he had a half-brother there in a retirement compelled partly for political reasons Count Victor could appreciate.

"France!" he cried, delighted. "This is ravishing news indeed, Mademoiselle Olivia!"

"Yes?" she answered dubiously, reddening a little, and wondering why he should particularly think it so.

"Ma foi! it is," he insisted heartily. "I had the most disturbing visions of your wandering elsewhere. I declare I saw my dear Baron and his daughter immured in some pestilent Lowland burgh town, moping mountain creatures among narrow streets, in dreary tenements, with glimpse of neither sea nor tree to compensate them for pleasures lost. But France!—Mademoiselle has given me an exquisite delight. For, figure you! 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! Je suis ravi! I little thought when I heard of this end to the old home of you that you were to make the new one in my country; how could I guess when anticipating my farewell to the Highlands of Scotland that I should have such good company to the shore of France?"

"Then you are returning now?" asked Olivia, her affectation of indifference just a little overdone.

In very truth he had not, as yet, so determined; but he boldly lied like a lover.

"'Twas my intention to return at once. I cannot forgive myself for being so long away from my friends there."

Olivia had a bodice of paduasoy that came low upon her shoulders and showed a spray of jasmine in the cleft of her rounded breasts, which heaved with what Count Victor could not but perceive was some emotion. Her eyes were like a stag's, and they evaded him; she trifled with the pocket of her gown.

"Ah," she said, "it is natural that you should weary here in this sorry place and wish to get back to the people you know. There will be many that have missed you."

He laughed at that.

"A few—a few, perhaps," he said. "Clancarty has doubtless often sought me vainly for the trivial coin: some butterflies in the coulisse of the playhouse will have missed my pouncet-box; but I swear there are few in Paris who would be inconsolable if Victor de Montaiglon never set foot on the trottoir again. It is my misfortune, mademoiselle, to have a multitude of friends so busy with content and pleasure—who will blame them?—that an absentee makes little difference, and as for relatives, not a single one except the Baroness de Chenier, who is large enough to count as double."

"And there will be—there will be the lady," said Olivia, with a poor attempt at raillery.

For a moment he failed to grasp her allusion.

"Of course, of course," said he hastily; "I hope, indeed, to see her there." He felt an exaltation simply at the prospect. To see her there! To have a host's right to bid welcome to his land this fair wild-flower that had blossomed on rocks of the sea, unspoiled and unsophisticated!

The jasmine stirred more obviously: it was fastened with a topaz brooch that had been her mother's, and had known of old a similar commotion; she became diligent with a book.

It was then there happened the thing that momentarily seemed a blow of fate to both of them. But for Mungo's voice at intervals in the kitchen, the house was wholly still, and through the calm winter night there came the opening bars of a melody, played very softly by Sim MacTaggart's flageolet. At first it seemed incredible—a caprice of imagination, and they listened for some moments speechless. Count Victor was naturally the least disturbed; this unlooked-for entertainment meant the pleasant fact that the Duchess had been nowise over-sanguine in her estimate of the Chamberlain's condition. Here was another possible homicide off his mind; the Gaelic frame was capable, obviously, of miraculous recuperation. That was but his first and momentary thought; the next was less pleasing, for it seemed not wholly unlikely now that after all Olivia and this man were still on an unchanged footing, and Mungo's sowing of false hopes was like to bring a bitter reaping of regretful disillusions. As for Olivia, she was first a flame and then an icicle. Her face scorched; her whole being seemed to take a sudden wild alarm. Count Victor dared scarcely look at her, fearing to learn his doom or spy on her embarrassment until her first alarm was over, when she drew her lips together tightly and assumed a frigid resolution. She made no other movement.

A most bewitching flageolet! It languished on the night with an o'ermastering appeal, sweet inexpressibly and melting, the air unknown to one listener at least, but by him enviously confessed a very siren spell. He looked at Olivia, and saw that she intended to ignore it.

"Orpheus has recovered," he ventured with a smile.

She stared in front of her with no response; but the jasmine rose and fell, and her nostrils were abnormally dilated. Her face had turned from the red of her first surprise to the white of suppressed indignation. The situation was inconceivably embarrassing for both; now his bolt was shot, and unless she cared to express herself, he could not venture to allude to it again, though a whole orchestra augmented the efforts of the artist in the bower.

By-and-by there came a pause in the music, and she spoke.

"It is the blackest of affronts this," was her comment, that seemed at once singular and sweet to her hearer.

"D'accord," said Count Victor, but that was to himself. He was quite agreed that the Chamberlain's attentions, though well meant, were not for a good woman to plume herself on.

The flageolet spoke again—that curious unfinished air. Never before had it seemed so haunting and mysterious; a mingling of reproaches and command. It barely reached them where they sat together listening, a fairy thing and fascinating, yet it left the woman cold. And soon the serenade entirely ceased. Olivia recovered herself; Count Victor was greatly pleased.

"I hope that is the end of it," she said, with a sigh of relief.

"Alas, poor Orpheus! he returns to Thrace, where perhaps Madame Petullo may lead the ladies in tearing him to pieces!"

"Once that hollow reed bewitched me, I fancy," said she with a shy air of confession; "now I cannot but wonder and think shame at my blindness, for yon Orpheus has little beyond his music that is in any way admirable."

"And that the gift of nature, a thing without his own deserving, like his—like his regard for you, which was inevitable, Mademoiselle Olivia."

"And that the hollowest of all," she said, turning the evidence of it in her pocket again. "He will as readily get over that as over his injury from you."

"Perhaps 'tis so. The most sensitive man, they say, does not place all his existence on love; 'tis woman alone who can live and die in the heart."

"There I daresay you speak from experience," said Olivia, smiling, but impatient that he should find a single plea in favour of a wretch he must know so well.

"Consider me the exception," he hurried to explain. "I never loved but once, and then would die for it." The jasmine trembled in its chaste white nunnery, and her lips were temptingly apart. He bent forward boldly, searching her provoking eyes.

"She is the lucky lady!" said Olivia in a low voice, and then a pause. She trifled with her book.

"What I wonder is that you could have a word to say of plea for this that surely is the blackest of his kind."

"Not admirable, by my faith! no; not admirable," he confessed, "but I would be the last to blame him for intemperately loving you. There, I think his honesty was beyond dispute; there he might have found salvation. That he should have done me the honour to desire my removal from your presence was flattering to my vanity, and a savage tribute to your power, Mademoiselle Olivia."

"Oh!" cried Olivia, "you cannot deceive me, Count Victor. It is odd that all your sex must stick up for each other in the greatest villanies."

"Not the greatest, Mademoiselle Olivia," said Count Victor with an inclination; "he might have been indifferent to your charms, and that were the one thing unforgivable. But soberly, I consider his folly scarce bad enough for the punishment of your eternal condemnation."

"This man thinks lightly indeed of me," thought Olivia. "Drimdarroch has a good advocate," said she shortly, "and the last I would have looked for in his defence was just yourself."

"Drimdarroch?" he repeated, in a puzzled tone.

"Will you be telling me that you do not know?" she said. "For what did Simon MacTaggart harass our household?"

"I have been bold enough to flatter myself; I had dared to think—"

She stopped him quickly, blushing. "You know he was Drimdarroch, Count Victor," said she, with some conviction.

He jumped to his feet and bent to stare at her, his face all wrought with astonishment.

"Mon Dieu! Mademoiselle, you do not say the two were one? And yet—and yet—yes, par dieu! how blind I have been; there is every possibility."

"I thought you knew it," said Olivia, much relieved, "and felt anything but pleased at your seeming readiness in the circumstances to let me be the victim of my ignorance. I had too much trust in the wretch."

"Women distrust men too much in the general and too little in particular. And you knew?" asked Count Victor. .

"I learned to-day," said Olivia, "and this was my bitter schooling."

She passed him the letter. He took it and read aloud:

"I have learned now," said the writer, "the reason for your black looks at Monsher the wine merchant that has a Nobleman's Crest upon his belongings. It is because he has come to look for Drimdarroch. And the stupid body cannot find him! We know who Drimdarroch is, do we not, Sim? Monsher may have sharp eyes, but they do not see much further than a woman's face if the same comes in his way. And Simon MacTaggart (they're telling me) has been paying late visits to Doom Castle that were not for the love of Miss Milk-and-Water. Sim! Sim! I gave you credit for being less o' a Gomeral. To fetch the Frenchman to my house of all places! You might be sure he would not be long among our Indwellers here without his true business being discovered. Drimdarroch, indeed! Now I will hate the name, though I looked with a difference on it when I wrote it scores of times to your direction in the Rue Dauphine of Paris, and loved to dwell upon a picture of the place there that I had never seen, because my Sim (just fancy it!) was there. You were just a Wee Soon with the title, my dear Traitour, my bonny Spy. It might have been yours indeed, and more if you had patience, yes perhaps and Doom forby, as that is like to be my good-man's very speedily. What if I make trouble, Sim, and open the eyes of Monsher and the mim-mou'ed Madame at the same moment by telling them who is really Drimdarroch? Will it no' gar them Grue, think ye?"

Count Victor stood amazed when he had read this. A confusion of feelings were in his breast. He had blundered blindly into his long-studied reprisals whose inadequate execution he was now scarce willing to regret, and Olivia had thought him capable of throwing her to this colossal rogue! The document shook in his hand.

"Well?" said Olivia at last. "Is it a much blacker man that is there than the one you thought? I can tell you I will count it a disgrace to my father's daughter that she ever looked twice the road he was on."

"And yet I can find it in me to forgive him the balance of his punishment," cried the Count.

"And what for might that be?" said she.

"Because, Mademoiselle Olivia, he led me to Scotland and to your father's door."

She saw a rapture in his manner, a kindling in his eye, and drew herself together with some pride.

"You were welcome to my father's door; I am sure of that of it, whatever," said she, "but it was a poor reward for so long a travelling. And now, my grief! We must steep the withies and go ourselves to the start of fortune like any beggars."

"No! no!" said he, and caught her hand that trembled in his like a bird. "Olivia!—oh, God, the name is like a song—je t'aime! je t'aime! Olivia, I love you!"

She plucked her hand away and threw her shoulders back, haughty, yet trembling and on the brink of tears.

"It is not kind—it is not kind," she stammered, almost sobbing. "The lady that is in France."

"Petite imbecile!" he cried, "there is no lady in France worthy to hold thy scarf; 'twas thyself, mignonne, I spoke of all the time; only the more I love the less I can express."

He drew her to him, crushing the jasmine till it breathed in a fragrant dissolution, bruising her breast with the topaz.



CHAPTER XXXVII — THE FUTILE FLAGEOLET

But Simon MacTaggart did not pipe wholly in vain. If Olivia was unresponsive, there was one at least in Doom who was his, whole-heartedly, and Mungo, when the flageolet made its vain appeal, felt a personal injury that the girl should subject his esteemed impersonation of all the manly graces and virtues—so to call them—to the insult of indifference.

As the melodies succeeded each other without a sign of response from overhead, he groaned, and swore with vexation and anger.

"Ye can be bummin' awa' wi' your chanter," he said as he stood listening in the kitchen. "Her leddyship wodnae hae ye playin' there lang your lane a saison syne, but thae days is done wi'; there's nae lugs for a tirlin' at the winnock whaur there's nae love—at least wi' Mistress Leevie."

Annapla heard the music with a superstitious terror; her eyes threatened to leap out of her head, and she clutched the arm of her adorer.

"Gae 'wa!" he told her, shaking her off with a contempt for her fears. "Are ye still i' the daft Hielan' notion that it's a ghaist that's playin' there? That was a story he made up himsel', and the need for 't's done. There's naethin' waur nor Sim MacTaggart oot there i' the gairden, wastin' his wund on a wumman that's owre muckle ta'en up i' the noo wi' the whillywhaes o' a French sneckdrawer that haesnae the smeddum to gi'e her a toozlin' at the 'oor she needs it maist. Ay, ay! caw awa' wi' yer chanter, Sim, ye'll play hooly and fairly ere ever ye play 't i' the lug o' Leevie Lamond, and her heid against your shoulder again."

When it seemed at last the player's patience was at an end, the little servitor took a lamp and went to the door. He drew the bolts softly, prepared to make a cautious emergence, with a recollection of his warm reception before. He was to have a great surprise, for there stood Simon Mac-Taggart leaning against the jamb—a figure of dejection!

"Dod!" cried Mungo, "ye fair started me there, wi' your chafts like clay and yer ee'n luntin'. If I hadnae been tauld when I was doon wi' yer coat the day that ye was oot and aboot again, I wad hae taen 't for your wraith."

The Chamberlain said nothing. There was something inexpressibly solemn in his aspect as he leaned wearily against the side of the door, his face like clay, as Mungo had truly said, and his eyes flaming in the light of the lantern. The flageolet was in his hand; he was shivering with cold. And he was silent. The silence of him was the most staggering fact for the little domestic, who would have been relieved to hear an oath or even have given his coat-collar to a vigorous shaking rather than be compelled to look on misery inarticulate. Simon looked past him into the shadows of the hall as a beggar looks into a garden where is no admission for him or his kind. A fancy seized Mungo that perhaps this dumb man had been drinking. "He's gey like a man on the randan," he said to himself, peering cautiously, "but he never had a name for the glass though namely for the lass."

"Is she in?" said the Chamberlain, suddenly, without changing his attitude, and with scanty interest in his eyes.

"Oh ay! She's in, sure enough," said Mungo. "Whaur else wad she be but in?"

"And she'll have heard me?" continued the Chamberlain.

"I'll warrant ye!" said Mungo.

"What's wrong?"

Mungo pursed out his lips and shook his lantern. "Ye can be askin' that," said he. "Gude kens!"

The Chamberlain still leaned wearily against the door jamb, mentally whelmed by dejection, bodily weak as water. His ride on a horse along the coast had manifestly not been the most fitting exercise for a man new out of bed and the hands of his physician.

"What about the foreigner?" said he at length, and glowered the more into the interior as if he might espy him.

Mungo was cautious. This was the sort of person who on an impulse would rush the guard and create a commotion in the garrison; he temporised.

"The foreigner?" said he, as if there were so many in his experience that some discrimination was called for. "Oh ay, the Coont. A gey queer birkie yon! He's no' awa yet. He's sittin' on his dowp yet, waitin' a dispensation o' Providence that'll gie him a heeze somewhere else."

"Is—he—is he with her?" said Simon.

"Oh, thereaboots, thereaboots," admitted Mungo, cautiously. "There's nae doot they're gey and chief got sin! he cam' back, and she foun' oot wha created the collieshangie."

"Ay, man, and she kens that?" said the Chamberlain with unnatural calm.

"'Deed does she, brawly! though hoo she kens is mair nor I can guess. Monsher thrieps it wasnae him, and I'll gie my oath it wasnae me."

"Women are kittle cattle, Mungo. There's whiles I think it a peety the old law against witchcraft was not still to the fore. And so she kent, did she? and nobody tell't her. Well, well!" He laughed softly, with great bitterness.

Mungo turned the lantern about in his hand and had nothing to say.

"What's this I'm hearing about the Baron—the Baron and her—and her, leaving?" said the Chamberlain.

"It's the glide's truth that," said the little man; "and for the oots and ins o't ye'll hae to ask Petullo doon-by, for he's at the root o't. Doom's done wi'; it's his decreet, and I'm no' a day ower soon wi' the promise o' the Red Sodger—for the which I'm muckle obleeged to you, Factor. Doom's done; they're gaun awa' in a week or twa, and me and Annapla's to be left ahint to steek the yetts."

"So they tell me, Mungo; so they tell me," said the Chamberlain, neither up nor down at this corroboration. "In a week or twa! ay! ay! It'll be the bowrer nae langer then," he went on, unconsciously mimicking the Lowland Scots of the domestic. "Do ye ken the auld song?—

'O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, They were twa bonnie lassies! They bigged a bower on yon burn-brae, And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.'"

He lilted the air with indiscreet indifference to being heard within; and "Wheesh! man, wheesh!" expostulated Mungo. "If himsel' was to ken o' me colloguing wi' ye at the door at this 'oor o' the nicht, there wad be Auld Hornie to pay."

"Oh! there's like to be that the ways it is," said the Chamberlain, never lifting his shoulder from the door-post, beating his leg with the flageolet, and in all with the appearance of a casual gossip reluctant to be going. "Indeed, and by my troth! there's like to be that!" he repeated. "Do ye think, by the look of me, Mungo, I'm in a pleasant condition of mind?"

"Faith and ye look gey gash, sir," said Mungo; "there's no denyin' that of it."

The Chamberlain gave a little crackling laugh, and held the flageolet like a dirk, flat along the inside of his arm and his fingers straining round the thick of it.

"Gash!" said he. "That's the way I feel. By God! Ye fetched down my coat to-day. It was the first hint I had that this damned dancing master was here, for he broke jyle; who would have guessed he was fool enough to come here, where—if we were in the key for it—we could easily set hands on him? He must have stolen the coat out of my own room; but that's no' all of it, for there was a letter in the pocket of it when it disappeared. What was in the letter I am fair beat to remember, but I know that it was of some importance to myself, and of a solemn secrecy, and it has not come back with the coat."

Mungo was taken aback at this, but to acknowledge he had seen the letter at all would be to blunder.

"A letter!" said he; "there was nae letter that I saw;" and he concluded that he must have let it slip out of the pocket.

The Chamberlain for the first time relinquished the support of the doorway, and stood upon his legs, but his face was more dejected than ever.

"That settles it," said he, filling his chest with air. "I had a small hope that maybe it might have come into your hands without the others seeing it, but that was expecting too much of a Frenchman. And the letter's away with it! My God! Away with it!

'... Bigged a bower on yon burn-brae, And theekit it o'er wi' rashes!'"

"For gude sake!" said Mungo, terrified again at this mad lilting from a man who had anything but song upon his countenance.

"You're sure ye didnae see the letter?" asked the Chamberlain again.

"Amn't I tellin' ye?" said Mungo.

"It's a pity," said the Chamberlain, staring at the lantern, with eyes that saw nothing. "In that case ye need not wonder that her ladyship inby should ken all, for I'm thinking it was a very informing bit letter, though the exact wording of it has slipped my recollection. It would be expecting over much of human nature to think that the foreigner would keep his hands out of the pouch of a coat he stole, and keep any secret he found there to himself. I'm saying, Mungo!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Somebody's got to sweat for this!"

There was so much venom in the utterance and such a frenzy in the eye, that Mungo started; before he could find a comment the Chamberlain was gone.

His horse was tethered to a thorn; he climbed wearily into the saddle and swept along the coast. At the hour of midnight his horse was stabled, and he himself was whistling in the rear of Petullo's house, a signal the woman there had thought never to hear again.

She responded in a joyful whisper from a window, and came down a few minutes later with her head in a capuchin hood.

"Oh, Sim! dear, is it you indeed? I could hardly believe my ears."

He put down the arms she would throw about his neck and held her wrists, squeezing them till she almost screamed with pain. He bent his face down to stare into her hood; even in the darkness she saw a plain fury in his eyes; if there was a doubt about his state of mind, the oath he uttered removed it.

"What do you want with me?" she gasped, struggling to free her hands.

"You sent me a letter on the morning of the ball?" said he, a little relaxing his grasp, yet not altogether releasing her prisoned hands.

"Well, if I did!" said she.

"What was in it?" he asked.

"Was it not delivered Jo you? I did not address it nor did I sign it, but I was assured you got it."

"That I got it has nothing to do with the matter, woman. What I want to know is what was in it?"

"Surely you read it?" said she.

"I read it a score of times—"

"My dear Sim!"

"—And cursed two score of times as far as I remember; but what I am asking now is what was in it?"

Mrs. Petullo began to weep softly, partly from the pain of the man's unconsciously cruel grasp, partly frotn disillusion, partly from a fear that she had to do with a mind deranged.

"Oh, Sim, have you forgotten already? It did not use to be that with a letter of mine!"

He flung away her hands and swore again.

"Oh, Kate Cameron," he cried, "damned black was the day I first clapt eyes on you! Tell me this, did your letter, that was through all my dreams when I was in the fever of my wound, and yet that I cannot recall a sentence of, say you knew I was Drimdarroch? It is in my mind that it did so."

"Black the day you saw me, Sim!" said she. "I'm thinking it is just the other way about, my honest man. Drimdarroch! And spy, it seems, and something worse! And are you feared that I have clyped it all to Madame Milk-and-Water? No, Simon, I have not done that; I have gone about the thing another way."

"Another way," said he. "I think I mind you threatened it before myself, and Doom is to be rouped at last to pleasure a wanton woman."

"A wanton woman! Oh, my excellent tutor! My best respects to my old dominie! I'll see day about with you for this!"

"Day about!" said he, "ftly good sweet-tempered Kate! You need not fash; your hand is played; your letter trumped the trick, and I am done. If that does not please your ladyship, you are ill to serve. And I would not just be saying that the game is finished altogether even yet, so long as I know where to lay my fingers on the Frenchman."

She plucked her hands free, and ran from him without another word, glad for once of the sanctuary of a husband's door.



CHAPTER XXXVIII — A WARNING

Petullo was from home. It was in such circumstances she found the bondage least intolerable. Now she was to find his absence more than a pleasant respite; it gave her an opportunity of warning Doom. She had scarce made up her mind how he should be informed of the jeopardies that menaced his guest, whose skaithless departure with Olivia was even, from her point of view, a thing wholly desirable, when the Baron appeared himself. It was not on the happiest of errands he came down on the first day of favouring weather; it was to surrender the last remnant of his right to the home of his ancestors. With the flourish of a quill he brought three centuries of notable history to a close.

"Here's a lesson in humility, Mr. Campbell," said he to Petullo's clerk. "We builded with the sword, and fell upon the sheep-skin. Who would think that so foolish a bird as the grey goose would have Doom and its generations in its wing?"

He had about his shoulders a plaid that had once been of his tartan, but had undergone the degradation of the dye-pot for a foolish and tyrannical law; he threw it round him with a dignity that was half defiance, and cast his last glance round the scene of his sorriest experiences—the dusty writing-desks, the confusion of old letters; the taped and dog-eared, fouled, and forgotten records of pithy causes; and, finally, at the rampart of deed-chests, one of which had the name "Drimdarroch" blazoned on it for remembrance if he had been in danger of forgetting.

"And is it yourself, Baron?" cried a woman's voice as he turned to go. "I am so sorry my husband is from home."

He turned again with his hat off for the lady who had an influence on his fate that he could never guess of.

"It is what is left of me, ma'am," said he. "And it is more than is like to be seen of me in these parts for many a day to come," but with no complaint in his expression.

"Ah," said she, "I know; I know! and I am so sorry. You cannot leave to-day of any day without a glass of wine for deoch-an-doruis."

"I thank you, ma'am," said Doom, "but my boat is at the quay, and Mungo waits for me."

"But, indeed, you must come in, Baron," she insisted. "There is something of the greatest importance I have to say to you, and it need not detain you ten minutes."

He followed her upstairs to her parlour. It was still early in the day and there was something of the slattern in her dragging gown. As he walked behind her, the remembrance would intrude of that betraying letter, and he had the notion that perhaps she somehow knew he shared her shameful secret. Nor was the idea dispelled when she stopped and faced him in the privacy of her room with her eyes swollen and a trembling under-lip.

"And it has come to this of it, Baron?" said she.

"It has come to this," said Doom simply.

"I cannot tell you how vexed I am. But you know my husband—"

"I have the honour, ma'am," said he, bowing with an old-fashioned inclination.

"—You know my husband, a hard man, Baron, though I perhaps should be the last to say it, and I have no say in his business affairs."

"Which is doubtless proper enough," said Doom, and thought of an irony breeding forbade him to give utterance to.

"But I must tell you I think it is a scandal you should have to go from the place of your inheritance; and your sweet girl too! I hope and trust she is in good health and spirits?"

"My good girl is very well," said he, "and with some reason for cheerfulness in spite of our misfortunes. As for them, ma'am, I am old enough to have seen and known a sufficiency of ups and downs, of flux and change, to wonder at none of them. I am not going to say that what has come to me is the most joco of happenings for a person like myself that has more than ordinary of the sentimentalist in me, and is bound to be wrapped up in the country-side hereabouts. But the tail may go with the hide, as the saying runs. Doom, that's no more than a heart-break of memories and an' empty shell, may very well join Duntorvil and Drimdarroch and the Islands of Lochow, that have dribbled through the courts of what they call the law and left me scarcely enough to bury myself in another country than my own."

Mrs. Petullo was not, in truth, wholly unmoved, but it was the actress in her wrung her hands.

"I hear you are going abroad," she cried. "That must be the hardest thing of all."

"I am not complaining, ma'am," said Doom.

"No, no; but oh! it is so sad, Baron—and your dear girl too, so sweet and nice—"

The Baron grew impatient; the "something of importance" was rather long of finding an expression, and he took the liberty of interrupting.

"Quite so, ma'am," said he, "but there was something in particular you had to tell me. Mungo, as I mentioned, is waiting me at the quay, and time presses, for we have much to do before we leave next week."

A look of relief came to Mrs. Petullo's face.

"Next week!" she cried. "Oh, then, that goes far to set my mind at ease." Some colour came to her cheeks; she trifled with a handkerchief. "What I wished to say, Baron, was that your daughter and—and—and the French gentleman, with whom we are glad to hear she is like to make a match of it, could not be away from this part of the country a day too soon. I overheard a curious thing the other day, it is only fair I should tell you, for it concerns your friend the French gentleman, and it was that Simon MacTaggart knew the Frenchman was back in your house and threatened trouble. There may be nothing in it, but I would not put it past the same person, who is capable of any wickedness."

"It is not the general belief, ma'am," said the Baron, "but I'll take your word for it, and, indeed, I have long had my own suspicions. Still, I think the same gentleman has had his wings so recently clipped that we need not be much put about at his threats."

"I have it on the best authority that he broods mischief," said she.

"The best authority," repeated Doom, with never a doubt as to what that was. "Well, it may be, but I have no fear of him. Once, I'll confess, he troubled me, but the man is now no more than a rotten kail-stock so far as my household is concerned. I thank God Olivia is happy!"

"And so do I, I'm sure, with all my heart," chimed in the lady. "And that is all the more reason why the Count—you see we know his station—should be speedily out of the way of molestation, either from the law or Simon MacTaggart."

Doom made to bring the interview to a conclusion. "As to the Count," said he, "you can take my word for it, he is very well able to look after himself, as Drimdarroch, or MacTaggart, or whatever is the Chamberlain's whim to call himself, knows very well by now. Drimdarroch, indeed! I could be kicking him myself for his fouling of an honest old name."

"Kicking!" said she; "I wonder at your leniency. I cannot but think you are far from knowing the worst of Simon MacTaggart."

"The worst!" said Doom. "That's between himself and Hell, but I know as much as most, and it's enough to make me sure the man's as boss as an empty barrel. He was once a sort of friend of mine, till twenty years ago my wife grew to hate the very mention of his name. Since then I've seen enough of him at a distance to read the plausible rogue in his very step. The man wears every bawbee virtue he has like a brooch in his bonnet; and now when I think of it, I would not dirty my boots with him."

Mrs. Petullo's lips parted. She hovered a second or two on a disclosure that explained the wife's antipathy of twenty years ago, but it involved confession of too intimate a footing on her own part with the Chamberlain, and she said no more.



CHAPTER XXXIX — BETRAYED BY A BALLAD

Some days passed and a rumour went about the town, in its origin as indiscoverable as the birthplace of the winds. It engaged the seamen on the tiny trading vessels at the quay, and excited the eagerest speculation in Ludovic's inn. Women put down their water-stoups at the wells and shook mysterious heads over hints of Sim MacTaggart's history. No one for a while had a definite story, but in all the innuendoes the Chamberlain figured vaguely as an evil influence. That he had slain a man in some parts abroad was the first and the least astonishing of the crimes laid to his charge, though the fact that he had never made a brag of it was counted sinister; but, by-and-by, surmise and sheer imagination gave place to a commonly accepted tale that Simon had figured in divers escapades in France with the name Drimdarroch; that he had betrayed men and women there, and that the Frenchman had come purposely to Scotland seeking for him. It is the most common of experiences that the world will look for years upon a man admiringly and still be able to recall a million things to his discredit when he is impeached with some authority. It was so in this case. The very folks who had loved best to hear the engaging flageolet, feeling the springs of some nobility bubble up in them at the bidding of its player, and drunk with him and laughed with him and ever esteemed his free gentility, were the readiest to recall features of his character and incidents of his life that—as they put it—ought to have set honest men upon their guard. The tale went seaward on the gabbards, and landward, even to Lorn itself, upon carriers' carts and as the richest part of the packman's budget. Furthermore, a song or two was made upon the thing, that even yet old women can recall in broken stanzas, and of one of these, by far the best informed, Petullo's clerk was the reputed author.

As usual, the object of the scandal was for a while unconscious. He went about experiencing a new aloofness in his umquhile friends, and finally concluded that it was due to his poor performance in front of the foreigner on the morning of the ball, and that but made him the more venomously ruminant upon revenge. In these days he haunted the avenues like a spirit, brooding on his injuries, pondering the means of a retaliation; there were no hours of manumission in the inn; the reed was still. And yet, to do him justice, there was even then the frank and suave exterior; no boorish awkward silence in his ancient gossips made him lose his jocularity; he continued to embellish his conversation with morals based on universal kindness and goodwill.

At last the thunder broke, for the scandal reached the castle, and was there overheard by the Duchess in a verse of the ballad sung under her window by a gardener's boy. She made some inquiries, and thereafter went straight to her husband.

"What is this I hear about your Chamberlain?" she asked.

Argyll drew down his brows and sighed. "My Chamberlain?" said he. "It must be something dreadful by the look of her grace the Duchess. What is it this time? High treason, or marriage, or the need of it? Or has old Knapdale died by a blessed disposition and left him a fortune? That would save me the performance of a very unpleasant duty."

"It has gone the length of scurrilous songs about our worthy gentleman. The town has been ringing with scandals about him for a week, and I never heard a word about it till half-an-hour ago."

"And so you feel defrauded, my dear, which is natural enough, being a woman as well as a duchess. I am glad to know that so squalid a story should be so long of reaching your ears; had it been anything to anybody's credit you would have been the first to learn of it. To tell the truth, I've heard the song myself, and if I have seemed unnaturally engaged for a day or two it is because I have been in a quandary as to what I should do. Now that you know the story, what do you advise, my dear?"

"A mere woman must leave that to the Lord Justice-General," she replied. "And now that your Chamberlain turns out a greater scamp than I thought him, I'm foolish enough to be sorry for him."

"And so am I," said the Duke, and looked about the shelves of books lining the room. "Here's a multitude of counsellors, a great deal of the world's wisdom so far as it has been reduced to print, and I'll swear I could go through it from end to end without learning how I should judge a problem like Sim MacTaggart."

She would have left him then, but he stopped her with a smiling interrogation. "Well?" he said.

She waited.

"What about the customary privilege?" he went on.

"What is that?"

"Why, you have not said 'I told you so.'"

She smiled at that. "How stupid of me!" said she. "Oh! but you forgave my Frenchman, and for that I owe you some consideration."

"Did I, faith?" said he. "'Twas mighty near the compounding of a felony, a shocking lapse in a Justice-General. To tell the truth, I was only too glad, in MacTaggart's interest, while he was ill, to postpone disclosures so unpleasant as are now the talk of the country; and like you, I find him infinitely worse in these disclosures than I guessed."

The Duchess went away, the Duke grew grave, reflecting on his duty. What it clearly was he had not decided until it was late in the evening, and then he sent for his Chamberlain.



CHAPTER XL — THE DAY OF JUDGMENT

Simon went to the library and saw plainly that the storm was come.

"Sit down, Simon, sit down," said his Grace and carefully sharped a pen.

The Chamberlain subsided in a chair; crossed his legs; made a mouth as if to whistle. There was a vexatious silence in the room till the Duke got up and stood against the chimney-piece and spoke.

"Well," said he, "I could be taking a liberty with the old song and singing 'Roguery Parts Good Company' if I were not, so far as music goes, as timber as the table there and in anything but a key for music even if I had the faculty. Talking about music, you have doubtless not heard the ingenious ballant connected with your name and your exploits. It has been the means of informing her Grace upon matters I had preferred she knew nothing about, because I liked to have the women I regard believe the world much better than it is. And it follows that you and I must bring our long connection to an end. When will it be most convenient for my Chamberlain to send me his resignation after 'twelve years of painstaking and intelligent service to the Estate,' as we might be saying, on the customary silver salver?"

Simon cursed within but outwardly never quailed.

"I know nothing about a ballant," said he coolly, "but as for the rest of it, I thank God I can be taking a hint as ready as the quickest. Your Grace no doubt has reasons. And I'll make bold to say the inscription it is your humour to suggest would not be anyway extravagant, for the twelve years have been painstaking enough, whatever about their intelligence, of which I must not be the judge myself."

"So far as that goes, sir," said the Duke, "you have been a pattern. And it is your gifts that make your sins the more heinous; a man of a more sluggish intelligence might have had the ghost of an excuse for failing to appreciate the utmost loathsomeness of his sins."

"Oh! by the Lord Harry, if it is to be a sermon—!" cried Simon, jumping to his feet.

"Keep your chair, sir! keep your chair like a man!" said the Duke. "I am thinking you know me well enough to believe there is none of the common moralist about me. I leave the preaching to those with a better conceit of themselves than I could afford to have of my indifferent self. No preaching, cousin, no preaching, but just a word among friends, even if it were only to explain the reason for our separation."

The Chamberlain resumed his chair defiantly and folded his arms.

"I'll be cursed if I see the need for all this preamble," said he; "but your Grace can fire away. It need never be said that Simon MacTaggart was feared to account for himself when the need happened."

"Within certain limitations, I daresay that is true," said the Duke.

"I aye liked a tale to come to a brisk conclusion," said the Chamberlain, with no effort to conceal his impatience.

"This one will be as brisk as I can make it," said his Grace. "Up till the other day I gave you credit for the virtue you claim—the readiness to answer for yourself when the need happened. I was under the delusion that your duel with the Frenchman was the proof of it."

"Oh, damn the Frenchman!" cried the Chamberlain with contempt and irritation. "I am ready to meet the man again with any arm he chooses."

"With any arm!" said the Duke dryly. "'Tis always well to have a whole one, and not one with a festering sore, as on the last occasion. Oh yes," he went on, seeing Simon change colour, "you observe I have learned about the old wound, and what is more, I know exactly where you got it."

"Your Grace seems to have trustworthy informants," said the Chamberlain less boldly, but in no measure abashed. "I got that wound through your own hand as surely as if you had held the foil that gave it, for the whole of this has risen, as you ought to know, from your sending me to France."

"And that is true, in a sense, my good sophist. But I was, in that, the unconscious and blameless link in your accursed destiny. I had you sent to France on a plain mission. It was not, I make bold to say, a mission on which the Government would have sent any man but a shrewd one and a gentleman, and I was mad enough to think Simon Mac-Taggart was both. When you were in Paris as our agent—"

"Fah!" cried Simon, snapping his fingers and drawing his face in a grimace. "Agent, quo' he! for God's sake take your share of it and say spy and be done with it!"

The Duke shrugged his shoulders, listening patiently to the interruption. "As you like," said he. "Let us say spy, then. You were to learn what you could of the Pretender's movements, and incidentally you were to intromit with certain of our settled agents at Versailles. Doubtless a sort of espionage was necessary to the same. But I make bold to say the duty was no ignoble one so long as it was done with some sincerity and courage, for I count the spy in an enemy's country is engaged upon the gallantest enterprise of war, using the shrewdness that alone differs the quarrel of the man from the fury of the beast, and himself the more admirable, because his task is a thousand times more dangerous than if he fought with the claymore in the field."

"Doubtless! doubtless!" said the Chamberlain. "That's an old tale between the two of us, but you should hear the other side upon it."

"No matter; we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart—and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. Countersap with a vengeance! We know now where Bertin got his information. You betrayed us and the woman Cecile Favart in the one filthy transaction."

The Chamberlain showed in his face that the blow was home. His mouth broke and he grew as grey as a rag.

"And that's the way of it?" he said, after a moment's silence.

"That's the way of it," said the Duke. "She was as much the agent—let us say the spy, then—as you were yourself, and seems to have brought more cunning to the trade than did our simple Simon himself. If her friend Montaiglon had not come here to look for you, and thereby put us on an old trail we had abandoned, we would never have guessed the source of her information."

"I'll be cursed if I have a dog's luck!" cried Simon.

Argyll looked pityingly at him. "So!" said he. "You mind our old country saying, Ni droch dhuine dan da fein—a bad man makes his own fate?"

"Do you say so?" cried MacTaggart, with his first sign of actual insolence, and the Duke sighed.

"My good Simon," said he, "I do not require to tell you so, for you know it very well. What I would add is that all I have said is, so far as I am concerned, between ourselves; that's my only tribute to our old acquaintanceship. Only I can afford to have no more night escapades at Doom or anywhere else with my fencibles, and so, Simon, the resignation cannot be a day too soon."

"Heaven forbid that I should delay it a second longer than is desirable, and your Grace has it here and now! A fine fracas all this about a puddock-eating Frenchman! I do not value him nor his race to the extent of a pin. And as for your Grace's Chamberlain—well, Simon MacTaggart has done very well hitherto on his own works and merits."

"You may find, for all that," says his Grace, "that they were all summed up in a few words—'he was a far-out cousin to the Duke.' Sic itur ad astra."

At that Simon put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as he descended.

"The man is fey," said the Duke to himself, listening with a startled gravity.



CHAPTER XLI — CONCLUSION

Simon MacTaggart went out possessed by the devils of hatred and chagrin. He saw himself plainly for what he was in truth—a pricked bladder, his career come to an ignoble conclusion, the single honest scheme he had ever set his heart on brought to nought, and his vanity already wounded sorely at the prospect of a contemptuous world to be faced for the remainder of his days. All this from the romantics of a Frenchman who walked through life in the step of a polonaise, and a short season ago was utterly unaware that such a man as Simon MacTaggart existed, or that a woman named Olivia bloomed, a very flower, among the wilds! At whatever angle he viewed the congregated disasters of the past few weeks, he saw Count Victor in their background—a sardonic, smiling, light-hearted Nemesis; and if he detested him previously as a merely possible danger, he hated him now with every fibre of his being as the cause of his upheaval.

And then, in this way that is not uncommon with the sinner, he must pity himself because circumstances had so consistently conspired against him.

He had come into the garden after the interview with Argyll had made it plain that the darkest passages in his servant's history were known to him, and had taken off his hat to get the night breeze on his brow which was wet with perspiration. The snow was still on the ground; among the laden bushes, the silent soaring trees of fir and ash, it seemed as if this was no other than the land of outer darkness whereto the lost are driven at the end. It maddened him to think of what he had been brought to; he shook his fist in a childish and impotent petulance at the spacious unregarding east where Doom lay—the scene of all his passions.

"God's curse on the breed of meddlers!" he said. "Another month and I was out of these gutters and hell no more to tempt me. To be the douce good-man, and all the tales of storm forgotten by the neighbours that may have kent them; to sit perhaps with bairns—her bairns and mine—about my knee, and never a twinge of the old damnable inclinations, and the flageolet going to the honestest tunes. All lost! All lost for a rat that takes to the hold of an infernal ship, and comes here to chew at the ropes that dragged me to salvation. This is where it ends! It's the judgment come a day ower soon for Sim MacTaggart. But Sim MacTaggart will make the rat rue his meddling."

He had come out with no fixed idea of what he next should do, but one step seemed now imperative—he must go to Doom, otherwise his blood would burst every vein in his body. He set forth with the stimulus of fury for the barracks where his men lay, of whom half-a-dozen at least were his to the gate of the Pit itself, less scrupulous even than himself because more ignorant, possessed of but one or two impulses—a foolish affection for him and an inherited regard for rapine too rarely to be indulged in these tame latter days. To call them out, to find them armed and ready for any enterprise of his was a matter of brief time. They set out knowing nothing at all of his object, and indifferent so long as this adorable gentleman was to lead them.

THE END