“An old custom in the Highlands,” he explained. “I set, perhaps, too little store by it myself, but Mungo likes to maintain it, though he plays the pipe but indifferently, and at this distance you might think the performance not altogether without merit.
“I love all music,” replied Count Victor with polite ambiguity, and he marvelled at the signs of some deep feeling in his host.
Till a late hour they sat together while Count Victor explained his mission to the Highlands. He told much, but, to be sure, he did not at first tell all. He recounted the evidences of the spy's guilt as a correspondent with the British Government, whose pay he drew while sharing the poor fortunes and the secrets of the exiled Jacobites. “Iscariot, my dear Baron,” he protested, “was a Bayard compared with this wretch. His presence in your locality should pollute the air; have you not felt a malaise?”
“It's dooms hard,” admitted the Baron, throwing up distressed hands, “but, man, I'm feared he's not the only one. Do you know, I could mention well-kent names far ben in the Cause—men not of hereabouts at all, but of Lochaber no less, though you may perhaps not guess all that means—and they're in Paris up to the elbow now in the same trade. It's well known to some of yourselves, or should be, and it puzzles me that you should come to the shire of Argyll on account of one, as I take it, no worse than three or four you might have found by stepping across the road to Roisin's coffee-house in the Rue Vaugirard. The commoners in the late troubles have been leal enough, I'll give them that credit, but some of the gentry wag their tongues for Prince Tearlach and ply their pens for Geordie's pay.”
The servant came in with two candles, placed them on the table, and renewed the fire. He had on a great woollen night-cowl of gaudy hue with a superb tassel that bobbed grotesquely over his beady eyes.
“I'll awa' to my bed, if it's your will, Baron,” said he with the customary salute. “I was thinkin' it might be needful for me to bide up a while later in case ony o' the Coont's freends cam' the way; but the tide'll keep them aff till mornin' anyway, and I'm sure we'll meet them a' the baulder then if we hae a guid sleep.” He got permission to retire, and passed into the inky darkness of the corridor, and crept to that part of the vacant dwelling in which he had his bed.
“There might be another reason for my coming here,” said Montaiglon, resuming the conversation where Mungo's entrance had broken it off. “In this affair there was a lady. I knew her once.” He paused with a manner showing discomposure.
“And there was liking; I can comprehend,” said Doom with sympathy.
“Liking is but love without wings,” said Montaiglon. “My regard soared above the clay; I loved her, and I think she was not indifferent to me till this man came in her way. He had, they say, the devil's tongue; at least he had the devil's heart, and she died six months ago with her head on my arm. I could tell you the story, M. le Baron, but it is in all the books, and you can fancy it easily. She died forgiving her betrayer, and sending a message to that effect by me. I come to deliver it, and, by God! to push it to his heart.”
“It is a dangerous errand in this country and at this time,” said Doom, looking into the fire.
“Ah! but you did not know Cecile,” replied Montaiglon, simply.
“But I know the human heart. I know it in any man under the sober age of thirty. Better to let it rest thus. Excuse my interference. It does not matter much to me that it should be out of my house you should go seeking for your vengeance, but I'm an older man than you, and have learned how quickly the worst misfortunes and wrongs may be forgotten. In your place I would leave this man to the punishment of his own conscience.”
Montaiglon laughed bitterly. “That,” said he, “is to assume a mechanism that in his case never existed. Pardon me, I pray you, but I prefer the old reckoning, which will be all the fairer because he has the reputation of being a good swordsman, and I am not without some practice.”
“And the man's name? you have not mentioned it.”
“But there you puzzle me. He was eight months in France, six of these in a lodging beside the Baigneurs on the Estrapade, Rue Dauphine. He came with no credentials but from Glengarry, and now Glengarry can give no account of him except that he had spoken familiarly to him of common friends in the Highlands.”
“Oh, Glengarry—Alasdair Rhuadh!” exclaimed the Baron, dryly.
“And presumed to be burdened with a dangerous name, he passed with the name of Drimdarroch.”
“Drimdarroch!” repeated the Baron with some apparent astonishment.
“I have never seen the man, so far as I know, for I was at Cammercy when he hung about the lady.”
“Drimdarroch!” repeated Doom reflectively, “a mere land title.”
“And some words he dropped in the ear of the lady made me fancy he might be found about the Court of Argyll.”
“Drimdarroch! Drimdarroch! I ken no one of the name, though the name itself, for very good reasons, is well known to me. Have you any description of the man?”
“Not much. A man older than myself, dark, well-bred. I should say a man something like yourself, if you will pardon the comparison, with a less easy mind, if he remembers his friends and his past.”
Doom pushed back his chair a little from the fire, but without taking his eyes from the peats, and made a curious suggestion.
“You would not take it to be me, would you?” he asked.
Count Victor laughed, with a gesture of his hands that made denial all unnecessary.
“Oh, but you do not know,” went on the Baron. “Some months of caballing with our friends—even our Hielan' friends—in the France, left me with an unwholesome heart that would almost doubt my father in his grave. You mentioned the name Drimdarroch—is it not the odd thing that you should speak it to the only man in the shire that ever had the right to use it? Do you see this?” and rising he stepped to a recess in the wall, only half curtained, so that its contents overflowed into the chamber, and by a jerk of the hand revealed a strange accumulation of dusty documents in paper and in parchment. He looked at them with an aspect of disgust, and stirred them with a contemptuous toe as if he meddled with the litter of a stye.
“That's Drimdarroch!” said he, intensely bitter; “that's Drimdarroch, and Duntorvil, that's the Isles, the bonny Isles of Lochow; that's damn like to be Doom too! That and this ruckle of stones we sit in are all that's left of what was my father's and my grandfather's and their forebears back till the dark of time. And how is it, ye may ask? Let us pretermit the question till another occasion; anyway here's Drimdarroch wi' the lave, at any rate the weight of it in processes, records, caveats, multiple poindings, actions of suspension and declator, interim decrees, fugie warrants, compts, and reckonings—God! I have the cackle of the law in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that wi' all my practice?”
He stooped and picked up from the confused heap of legal scrivenings by finger-tips that seemed to fear infection a parchment fouled with its passage through the courts and law offices. “You're in luck indeed,” said he; “for there's Drimdarroch—all that's left of it to me: the land itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and scab seize his bestial!”
Back he threw the relic of his patrimony; he dropped the curtain; he turned