Doom Castle | Page 8

into a room. An
odour of burning peats filled the place; the sound of the sea-breakers
was to be heard in a murmur as one hears far-off and magic seas in a
shell that is held to the ear. And Count Victor, finding all his pleasant
anticipations of the character of this baronial dwelling utterly erroneous,
mentally condemned Bethune to perdition as he stumbled behind the
little grotesque aping the soldier's pompous manner.
The door that lent what illumination there was to his entrance was held
half open by a man who cast at the visitor a glance wherein were
surprise and curiosity.
"The Monsher de Montaiglon frae France," announced Mungo,
stepping aside still with the soldier's mechanical precision, and standing
by the door to give dignity to the introduction and the entrance.
The Baron may have flushed for the overdone formality of his servant
when he saw the style of his visitor, standing with a Kevenhuller
cocked hat in one hand and fondling the upturned moustache with the
other; something of annoyance at least was in his tone as he curtly
dismissed the man and gave admission to the stranger, on whom he
turned a questioning and slightly embarrassed countenance, handing
him one of the few chairs in the most sparsely furnished of rooms.
"You are welcome, sir," he said simply in a literal rendering of his

native Gaelic phrase; "take your breath. And you will have
refreshment?"
Count Victor protested no, but his host paid no heed. "It is the custom
of the country," said he, making for a cupboard and fumbling among
glasses, giving, as by a good host's design, the stranger an opportunity
of settling down to his new surroundings--a room ill-furnished as a
monk's cell, lit by narrow windows, two of them looking to the sea and
one along the coast, though not directly on it, windows sunk deep in
massive walls built for a more bickering age than this. Count Victor
took all in at a glance and found revealed to him in a flash the colossal
mendacity of all the Camerons, Macgregors, and Macdonalds who had
implied, if they had not deliberately stated, over many games of piquet
or lansquenet at Cammercy, the magnificence of the typical Highland
stronghold.
The Baron had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire
of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was
characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and
Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head
slightly to see what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds. And
the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folio of arms,
"Les Arts de l'Homme d'Epée; ou, Le Dictionnaire du Gentilhomme,"
by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place, but
apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described its master
as "ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his déjeune, but a
scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron (of a vastly
different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not
much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his
idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled
for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a
reader of the beau langage, and a student of the lore of arme
blanche--come, here was luck!
And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle of
quaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners and two
glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams upon the

table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the book of
arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the native tartan
of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat and breeches of
some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more of the look
of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a man at least
twenty years the senior of his visitor--a handsome man of his kind, dark,
deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, but seemingly, to
the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of one unpardonable
weakness in a gentleman--a shame of his obvious penury.
"I have permitted myself, M. le Baron, to interrupt you on the counsel
of a common friend," said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to a
situation somewhat droll.
"After the goblet, after the goblet," said Lamond softly, himself but
sipping at the rim of his glass. "It is the custom of the country--one of
the few