Doom Castle | Page 7

of his sword.

CHAPTER III
-- BARON OF DOOM
Deep in some echoing corridor of the stronghold a man's voice rose in
the Gaelic language, ringing in a cry for service, but no one came.
Count Victor stepped back and looked again upon the storm-battered
front, the neglected garden, the pathetic bower. He saw smoke but at a
single chimney, and broken glass in the little windows, and other
evidences that suggested meagre soup was common fare in Doom.
"M. Bethune's bowl," he said to himself, "is not likely to be brimming
over if he is to drink it here. M. le Baron shouting there is too much of
the gentleman to know the way to the back of his own door; Glengarry
again for a louis!--Glengarry sans feu ni lieu, but always the most
punctilious when most nearly penniless."
Impatiently he switched with the sword at the weeds about his feet;
then reddened at the apprehension that had made him all unconsciously
bare the weapon at a door whose hospitality he was seeking, rapped
again, and sheathed the steel.
A shuffling step sounded on the stones within, stopped apparently just
inside the door, and there fell silence. No bolt moved, no chain clanked.
But something informed the Count Victor that he was being observed,
and he looked all over the door till he saw that one bolt-boss was
missing about the height of his head and that through the hole an eye
was watching him. It was the most absurd thing, and experiment with a
hole in the door will not make plain the reason of it, but in that eye
apparently little discomfited by the stranger having observed it, Count
Victor saw its owner fully revealed.
A grey eye inquiring, an eye of middle age that had caution as well as
humour. A domestic--a menial eye too, but for the life of him Count
Victor could not resist smiling back to it.
And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold,

with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or
thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at the
cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He put his
heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a military
salute.
"Doom?" inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.
"Jist that," answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile
puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled
brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply
smacked of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in
the port of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was
hearing again for the first time with an amused wonder the native
mariners crying to each other on the quays.
"Is your master at home?" he asked.
"At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken,"
said the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of
natural geniality and burlesque importance, "It's the auld styles aboot
Doom, sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether
the Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously
before the like o' me could say."
"My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I--"
"Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon," cried the little man with
a salute more profound than before. "We're prood to see you, and hoo
are they a' in France?"
"Tolerably well, I thank you," said Count Victor, amused at this
grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.
Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been
standing to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the
stranger's bag. With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the
mechanical time of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a

second, squared his shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and
chilly interior.
"This way, your honour," said he. "Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for it's
a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and
ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's
droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom
withoot the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's
time wi' a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found
themselves in a wasp's byke."
The Count stumbled in the dusk of the interior, for the door had shut of
itself behind them, and the corridor was unlit except by what it
borrowed from an open door at the far end, leading