“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 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 that's like to be left to us before long.”
“À la santé de la bonne cause!” said the Count politely, choking upon the fiery liquor and putting down the glass with an apology.
“I am come from France—from Saint Germains,” he said. “You may have heard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon.”
The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion.
“Do you tell me, now?” said he. “Then you are the more welcome. I wish I could say so in your own language—that is, so far as ease goes, known to me only in letters. From Saint Germains—” making a step or two up and down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing. “H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of the Highland gentry about the place.”
“There is one Bethune—Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron,” replied Count Victor meaningly. “Knowing that I was coming to this part of the world, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardly circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast with but one name of a friend, pardieu, to make the strange cliffs cheerful.”
“You are very good,” said the Baron simply, with half a bow. “And Hugh Bethune, now—well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old friend in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!”—a strange wistfulness came to the Baron's utterance—“Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail.”
“I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it at a bal masque.”
“So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit.”
Count Victor smiled.
“It is perhaps his only weakness