Doom Castle | Page 9

be awkwardly circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast with but one name of a friend, pardieu, to make the strange cliffs cheerful."
"You are very good," said the Baron simply, with half a bow. "And Hugh Bethune, now--well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old friend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!"--a strange wistfulness came to the Baron's utterance--"Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail."
"I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it at a bal masque."
"So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit."
Count Victor smiled.
"It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with less dignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit, M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates."
"Ay, man!" said the Baron, heedless of the irony, "and Hugh wears the tartan?"
"Only in the waistcoat," repeated Count Victor, complacently looking at his own scallops.
"Even that!" said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. And then he added hurriedly, "Not that the tartan's anything wonderful. It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another. There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks, says I--the douce, honest breeks----"
"Unless it be the petticoats," murmured the Count, smiling, and his fingers went to the pointing of his moustache.
"Nothing like the breeks. The philabeg was aye telling your parentage in every line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there but any drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family of caterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should be proscribed, but what does it matter?"
"The tartan is forbidden?" guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled.
Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes. He turned to fumble noisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard.
"I thought that was widely enough known," said he. "Put down by the law, and perhaps a good business too. Diaouil!" He came back to the table with this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film of the peat-fire. "There was a story in every line," said he, "a history in every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but crotal-colour--the old stuff stained with lichen from the rock."
"Ah, what damage!" said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. "But there are some who wear it yet?"
The Baron started slightly. "Sir?" he questioned, without taking his eyes from the embers.
"The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must have something of an air of impertinence," said Count Victor briskly, unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; "but the cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and sans culottes too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings. I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an oyster-man with my bag on my back."
"Good God!" cried the Baron. "I forgot the tide. Could you not have whistled?"
"Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to be ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. Mon Dieu! but I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first introduction to your tartan among its own mountains."
"It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some of the king's soldiers," suggested the Baron.
Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. "I think I know a red-coat when I see one," said he. "These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's call for signal too."
"Are you sure?" cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an unbelieving tone.
"My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner of introducing myself