Doom Castle | Page 3

one hand, with the other he directed at
the thicket one of the pistols that seemed of such wholesome influence.
Then he slung the bag upon his shoulder and encouraged the animal to
get upon its legs, but vainly, for the shot was fatal.
"Ah!" said he regretfully, "I must sacrifice my bridge and my good
comrade. This is an affair!"
Twice--three times, he placed the pistol at the horse's head and as often
withdrew it, reluctant, a man, as all who knew him wondered at, gentle
to womanliness with a brute, though in a cause against men the most
bitter and sometimes cruel of opponents.
A rustle in the brake at last compelled him. "Allons!" said he
impatiently with himself, "I do no more than I should have done with
me in the like case," and he pulled the trigger.

Then having deliberately charged the weapon anew, he moved off in
the direction he had been taking when the attack was made.
It was still, he knew, some distance to the castle. Half an hour before
his rencontre with those broken gentry, now stealing in his rear with the
cunning and the bloodthirstiness of their once native wolves (and
always, remember, with the possibility of the blunderbuss for aught that
he could tell), he had, for the twentieth time since he left the port of
Dysart, taken out the rude itinerary, written in ludicrous Scoto-English
by Hugh Bethune, one time secretary to the Lord Marischal in exile,
and read:--
... and so on to the Water of Leven (the brewster-wife at the howff near
Loch Lomond mouth keeps a good glass of aqua) then by Luss (with
an eye on the Gregarach), there after a bittock to Glencroe and down
upon the House of Ardkinglas, a Hanoverian rat whom 'ware. Round
the loch head and three miles further the Castle o' the Baron. Give him
my devoirs and hopes to challenge him to a Bowl when Yon comes off
which God kens there seems no hurry.
By that showing the castle of Baron Lamond must be within half an
hour's walk of where he now moved without show of eagerness, yet
quickly none the less, from a danger the more alarming because the
extent of it could not be computed.
In a little the rough path he followed bent parallel with the sea. A tide
at the making licked ardently upon sand-spits strewn with ware, and at
the forelands, overhung by harsh and stunted seaside shrubs, the
breakers rose tumultuous. On the sea there was utter vacancy; only a
few screaming birds slanted above the wave, and the coast, curving far
before him, gave his eye no sign at first of the castle to which he had
got the route from M. Hugh Bethune.
Then his vision, that had been set for something more imposing, for the
towers and embrasures of a stately domicile, if not for a Chantilly, at
least for the equal of the paternal château in the Meuse valley, with
multitudinous chimneys and the incense of kind luxuriant hearths,
suave parks, gardens, and gravelled walks, contracted with dubiety and

amazement upon a dismal tower perched upon a promontory.
Revealed against the brown hills and the sombre woods of the farther
coast, it was scarcely a wonder that his eye had failed at first to find it.
Here were no pomps of lord or baron; little luxuriance could prevail
behind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance about
those walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp,
no pleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying
man's oldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends and one crenelated
bastion or turret betraying its sinister relation to its age, its whole
aspect arrogant and unfriendly, essential of war. Caught suddenly by
the vision that swept the fretted curve of the coast, it seemed blackly to
perpetuate the spirit of the land, its silence, its solitude and terrors.
These reflections darted through the mind of Count Victor as he sped,
monstrously uncomfortable with the burden of the bag that bobbed on
his back, not to speak of the indignity of the office. It was not the kind
of castle he had looked for, but a castle, in the narrow and squalid
meaning of a penniless refugee like Bethune, it doubtless was, the only
one apparent on the landscape, and therefore too obviously the one he
sought.
"Very well, God is good!" said Count Victor, who, to tell all and leave
no shred of misunderstanding, was in some regards the frankest of
pagans, and he must be jogging on for its security.
But as he hurried, the ten broken men who had been fascinated by his
too ostentatious fob and the extravagance of his embroidery,