Doom Castle Part 34

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 pa.s.sion. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.sumed 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 embarra.s.sing 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 G.o.d!'" 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 pa.s.sion 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 p.r.i.c.king 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 pa.s.s 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."