He moved from the window out of which he had been gazing with a fondness that surprised and amused his visitor, and called loudly for Mungo.
In a moment the little retainer was at the door jauntily saluting in his military manner.
“Hae ye been foraging the day, Mungo?” asked the master indulgently.
“Na, na, there was nae need wi' a commissariat weel provided for voluntary. Auld Dugald brought in his twa kain hens yesterday; ane's on the bank and the cauld corp o' the ither o' them's in the pantry. There's the end o' a hench o' venison frae Strathlachlan, and twa oors syne, when the tide was oot, there was beef padovies and stoved how-to wdies, but I gied them to twa gaun-aboot bodies.”
They both looked inquiringly at Count Victor.
“I regret the what-do-you-call-it?—the stoved howtowdy,” said he, laughing, “more for the sound of it than for any sense its name conveys to me.”
“There's meat as weel as music in it, as the fox said when he ate the bagpipes,” said Mungo.
“There's waur nor howtowdy. And oh! I forgot the het victual, there's jugged hare.”
“Is the hare ready?” asked the Baron suspiciously.
“It's no jist a'thegether what ye micht ca' ready,” answered Mungo without hesitation; “but it can be here het in nae time, and micht agree wi' the Count better nor the cauld fowl.”
“Tell Annapla to do the best she can,” broke in the Baron on his servant's cheerful garrulity; and Mungo with another salute disappeared.
“How do your women-folk like the seclusion of Doom?” asked Count Victor, to make conversation while the refection was in preparation. “With the sea about you so, and the gang of my marauding obese friend in the wood behind, I should think you had little difficulty in keeping them under your eye.”
The Baron was obviously confused. “Mungo's quite enough to keep his eye on Annapla,” said he. “He has the heart and fancy to command a garrison; there's a drum forever beating in his head, a whistle aye fifing in his lug, and he will amuse you with his conceits of soldiering ancient and modern, a trade he thinks the more of because Heaven made him so unfit to become 'prentice to it. Good Mungo! There have been worse men; indeed what need I grudge admitting there have been few better? He has seen this place more bien than it is to-day in my father's time, and in my own too before the law-pleas ate us up; you will excuse his Scots freedom of speech, Count, he—”
A shot rang outside in some shrubbery upon the mainland, suddenly putting an end to Doom's conversation. Count Victor, sure that the Macfarlanes were there again, ran to the window and looked out, while his host in the rear bit his lip with every sign of annoyance. As Montaiglon looked he saw Mungo emerge from the shrubbery with a rabbit in his hand and push off hurriedly in a little boat, which apparently was in use for communication with the shore under such circumstances.
“And now,” said the Count, without comment upon what he had seen, “I think, with your kind permission, I shall change my boots before eating.
“There's plenty of time for that, I jalouse,” said Doom, smiling somewhat guiltily, and he showed his guest to a room in the turret. It was up a flight of corkscrew stairs, and lit with singular poverty by an orifice more of the nature of a porthole for a piece than a window, and this port or window, well out in the angle of the turret, commanded a view of the southward wall or curtain of the castle.
Montaiglon, left to himself, opened the bag that Mungo had placed in readiness for him in what was evidently the guest-room of the castle, transformed the travelling half of himself into something that was more in conformity with the gay nature of his upper costume, complacently surveyed the result when finished, and hummed a chanson of Pierre Gringoire's, altogether unremembering the encounter in the wood, the dead robber, and the stern nature of his embassy here so far from France.
He bent to close the valise, and with a start abruptly concluded his song at the sight of a miniature with the portrait of a woman looking at him from the bottom of the bag.
“Mort de ma vie! what a fool I am; what a forgetful vengeur, to be chanting Gringoire in the house of Doom and my quarry still to hunt!” His voice had of a sudden gained a sterner accent; the pleasantness of his aspect became clouded by a frown. Looking round the constricted room, and realising how like a prison-cell it was compared with what he had expected, he felt oppressed as with the want of air. He sought vainly about the window for latch or hinge to open it, and as he did so glanced along the castle wall painted yellow by the declining sun. He noticed idly that some one was putting out upon the sill of a window on a lower stage what might have been a green kerchief had not the richness of its fabric and design suggested more a pennon or banneret. It was carefully placed by a woman's hands—the woman herself unseen. The incident recalled an old exploit of his own in Marney, and a flood of humorous memories of amorous intrigue.
“Mademoiselle Annapla,” said he whimsically, “has a lover, and here's his signal. The Baron's daughter? The Baron's niece? The Baron's ward? Or merely the Baron's domestic? M. Bethune's document suffers infernally from the fault of being too curt. He might at least have indicated the fair recluse.”
CHAPTER IV—WANTED, A SPY
The wail of a mountain pipe, poorly played, as any one accustomed to its strains would have admitted, even if the instrument was one he loved, and altogether execrable in the ears of Montaiglon, called him to the salle, where Doom joined him in a meal whereof good Mungo's jugged hare formed no part. Mungo, who had upheld ancient ceremony by his crude performance on the piob mhor, was the attendant upon the table—an office he undertook with his bonnet on his head, “in token,” as his master whisperingty explained to Count Victor, “of his sometimes ill-informed purpose of conducting every formal task in Doom upon the strict letter of military codes as pertained in camps, garrisons, and strongholds.” It was amusing to witness the poor fellow's pompous precision of movement as he stood behind his master's chair or helped the guest to his humble meal; the rigidity of his inactive moments, or the ridiculous jerkiness with which he passed a platter as 'twere to the time of a drill-sergeant's baton. More amusing still to one able, like Count Victor, to enter into the humour of the experience, was it to have his garrulity get the better of him in spite of the military punctilio.
“The Baron was telling me aboot your exploit wi' the Loch Sloy pairty. Man! did I no' think ye had come by boat,” he whispered over a tendered ale-glass. “It was jist my luck to miss sic a grand ploy. I wad hae backed ye to haud the water against Black Andy and all his clan, and they're no' slack at a tulzie.”
“Ye may be grand in a fight, Mungo, but only a middling man at forage,” interrupted his master. “I think ye said jugged hare?”
“It wasna my faut,” explained the domestic, “that ye havena what was steepulated; the Baron wadna bide till the beast was cooked.”
Doom laughed. “Come, come, Mungo,” said he, “the Count could scarcely be expected to wait for the cooking of an animal running wild in the bracken twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh, it disna tak' sae terrible lang to cook a hare,” said the unabashed retainer.
“But was it a hare after a', Mungo?” asked his master. “Are ye sure it wasna a rabbit?”
“A rabbit!” cried he in astonishment; then more cautiously, “Weel, if it was a rabbit, it was a gey big ane, that's a' I can say,” and he covered his perturbation by a retreat from the room to resume his office of musician, which, it appeared, demanded a tune after dinner as well as before it.