Doom Castle | Page 4

and
inspired furthermore by a natural detestation of any foreign duine
uasail apparently bound for the seat of MacCailen Mor, gathered
boldness, and soon he heard the thicket break again behind him.
He paused, turned sharply with the pistols in his hands. Instantly the
wood enveloped his phantom foes; a bracken or two nodded, a hazel
sapling swung back and forward more freely than the wind accounted
for. And at the same time there rose on the afternoon the wail of a wild
fowl high up on the hill, answered in a sharp and querulous
too-responsive note of the same character in the wood before.

The gentleman who had twice fought à la barrière felt a nameless new
thrill, a shudder of the being, born of antique terrors generations before
his arms were quartered with those of Rochefoucauld and Modene.
It was becoming all too awkward, this affair. He broke into a more
rapid walk, then into a run, with his eyes intent upon the rude dark keep
that held the promontory, now the one object in all the landscape that
had to his senses some aspect of human fellowship and sympathy.
The caterans were assured; Dieu du ciel, how they ran too! Those in
advance broke into an appalling halloo, the shout of hunters on the
heels of quarry. High above the voice of the breakers it sounded savage
and alarming in the ears of Count Victor, and he fairly took to flight,
the valise bobbing more ludicrously than ever on his back.
It was like the man that, in spite of dreads not to be concealed from
himself, he should be seized as he sped with a notion of the grotesque
figure he must present, carrying that improper burden. He must even
laugh when he thought of his, austere punctilious maternal aunt, the
Baronne de Chenier, and fancied her horror and disgust could she
behold her nephew disgracing the De Chenier blood by carrying his
own baggage and outraging several centuries of devilishly fine history
by running--positively running--from ill-armed footpads who had never
worn breeches. She would frown, her bosom would swell till her
bodice would appear to crackle at the armpits, the seven hairs on her
upper lip would bristle all the worse against her purpling face as she
cried it was the little Lyons shopkeeper in his mother's grandfather that
was in his craven legs. Doubt it who will, an imminent danger will not
wholly dispel the sense of humour, and Montàiglon, as he ran before
the footpads, laughed softly at the Baronne.
But a short knife with a black hilt hissed past his right ear and buried
three-fourths of its length in the grass, and so abruptly spoiled the
comedy. This was ridiculous. He stopped suddenly, turned him round
about in a passion, and fired one of the pistols at an unfortunate robber
too late to duck among the bracken. And the marvel was that the bullet
found its home, for the aim was uncertain, and the shot meant more for
an emphatic protest than for attack.

The gled's cry rose once more, rose higher on the hill, echoed far off,
and was twice repeated nearer head with a drooping melancholy
cadence. Gaunt forms grew up straight among the undergrowth of trees,
indifferent to the other pistol, and ran back or over to where the
wounded comrade lay.
"Heaven's thunder!" cried Count Victor, "I wish I had aimed more
carefully." He was appalled at the apparent tragedy of his act. A
suicidal regret and curiosity kept him standing where he fired, with the
pistol still smoking in his hand, till there came from the men clustered
round the body in the brake a loud simultaneous wail unfamiliar to his
ear, but unmistakable in its import. He turned and ran wildly for the
tower that had no aspect of sanctuary in it; his heart drummed noisily at
his breast; his mouth parched and gaped. Upon his lips in a little
dropped water; he tasted the salt of his sweating body. And then he
knew weariness, great weariness, that plucked at the sinews behind his
knees, and felt sore along the hips and back, the result of his days of
hard riding come suddenly to the surface. Truly he was not happy.
But if he ran wearily he ran well, better at least than his pursuers, who
had their own reasons for taking it more leisurely, and in a while there
was neither sight nor sound of the enemy.
He was beginning to get some satisfaction from this, when, turning a
bend of the path within two hundred yards of the castle, behold an
unmistakable enemy barred his way!--an ugly, hoggish, obese man,
with bare legs most grotesquely like pillars of granite, and a
protuberant paunch; but the devil