Doom Castle

Doom Castle, by Neil Munro

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Title: Doom Castle
Author: Neil Munro
Release Date: May 5, 2007 [EBook #21333]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOOM CASTLE ***

Produced by David Widger

DOOM CASTLE
By NEIL MUNRO
Copyright, 1900, 1901, by Doubleday, Page & Co.
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I
�� COUNT VICTOR COMES TO A STRANGE COUNTRY
CHAPTER II
�� THE PURSUIT
CHAPTER III
�� BARON OF DOOM
CHAPTER IV
�� WANTED, A SPY
CHAPTER V
�� THE FLAGEOLET
CHAPTER VI
�� MUNGO BOYD
CHAPTER VII
�� THE BAY OF THE BOAR'S HEAD
CHAPTER VIII
�� AN APPARITION
CHAPTER IX
�� TRAPPED
CHAPTER X
�� SIM MACTAGGART, CHAMBERLAIN
CHAPTER XI
�� THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW
CHAPTER XII
�� OMENS AND ALARMS
CHAPTER XIII
�� A LAWYER'S GOOD LADY
CHAPTER XIV
�� CLAMOUR
CHAPTER XV
�� A RAY OF LIGHT
CHAPTER XVI
�� OLIVIA
CHAPTER XVII
�� A SENTIMENTAL SECRET
CHAPTER XVIII
�� "Loch Sloy!"
CHAPTER XIX
�� REVELATION
CHAPTER XX
�� AN EVENING'S MELODY IN THE BOAR'S HEAD INN
CHAPTER XXI
�� COUNT VICTOR CHANGES HIS QUARTERS
CHAPTER XXII
�� THE LONELY LADY
CHAPTER XXIII
�� A MAN OF NOBLE SENTIMENT
CHAPTER XXIV
�� A BROKEN TRYST
CHAPTER XXV
�� RECONCILIATION
CHAPTER XXVI
�� THE DUKE'S BALL
CHAPTER XXVII
�� THE DUEL ON THE SANDS
CHAPTER XXVIII
�� THE DUEL ON THE SANDS��Continued.
CHAPTER XXIX
�� THE CELL IN THE FOSSE
CHAPTER XXX
�� A DUCAL DISPUTATION
CHAPTER XXXI
�� FLIGHT
CHAPTER XXXII
�� THE INDISCRETION OF THE DUCHESS
CHAPTER XXXIII
�� BACK IN DOOM
CHAPTER XXXIV
�� IN DAYS OF STORM
CHAPTER XXXV
�� A DAMNATORY DOCUMENT
CHAPTER XXXVI
�� LOVE
CHAPTER XXXVII
�� THE FUTILE FLAGEOLET
CHAPTER XXXVIII
�� A WARNING
CHAPTER XXXIX
�� BETRAYED BY A BALLAD
CHAPTER XL
�� THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
CHAPTER XLI
�� CONCLUSION

DOOM CASTLE
CHAPTER I
-- COUNT VICTOR COMES TO A STRANGE COUNTRY
It was an afternoon in autumn, with a sound of wintry breakers on the shore, the tall woods copper-colour, the thickets dishevelled, and the nuts, in the corries of Ardkinglas, the braes of Ardno, dropping upon bracken burned to gold. Until he was out of the glen and into the open land, the traveller could scarcely conceive that what by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders, the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the faubourgs that were at once his vexation and his joy, and from the eager ride that had brought him through Normandy when its orchards were busy from morning till night with cheerful peasants plucking fruit, his ear had not grown accustomed to the still of the valleys, the terrific hush of the mountains, in whose mist or sunshine he had ridden for two days. The woods, with leaves that fell continually about him, seemed in some swoon of nature, with no birds carolling on the boughs; the cloisters were monastic in their silence. A season of most dolorous influences, a land of sombre shadows and ravines, a day of sinister solitude; the sun slid through scudding clouds, high over a world blown upon by salt airs brisk and tonic, but man was wanting in those weary valleys, and the heart of Victor Jean, Comte de Montaiglon, was almost sick for very loneliness.
Thus it came as a relief to his ear, the removal of an oppression little longer to be endured, when he heard behind him what were apparently the voices of the odd-looking uncouth natives he had seen a quarter of an hour ago lurking, silent but alert and peering, phantoms of old story rather than humans, in the fir-wood near a defile made by a brawling cataract. They had wakened no suspicions in his mind. It was true they were savage-looking rogues in a ragged plaid-cloth of a dull device, and they carried arms he had thought forbidden there by law. To a foreigner fresh from gentle lands there might well be a menace in their ambuscade, but he had known men of their race, if not of so savage an aspect, in the retinues of the Scots exiles who hung about the side-doors of Saint Germains, passed mysterious days between that domicile of tragic comedy and Avignon or Rome, or ruffled it on empty pockets at the gamingtables, so he had no apprehension. Besides, he was in the country of the Argyll, at least on the verge of it, a territory accounted law-abiding even to dul-ness by every Scot he had known since he was a child at Cammercy, and snuff-strewn conspirators, come to meet his uncles, took him on their knees when