As the wounded man was borne through the lodge gate with Count Victor, coatless, in attendance, the latter looked back and saw Mrs. Petullo, again bare-shouldered, standing before her husband's door and gazing after them.

Her temper had come back; she had thrown his laced coat into the approaching sea!

CHAPTER XXIX -- THE CELL IN THE FOSSE

By this time the morning was well gone; the town had wakened to the day's affairs--a pleasant light grey reek with the acrid odour of burning wood soaring from chimneys into a sky intensely blue; and the roads that lay interlaced and s.p.a.cious around the castle of Argyll were--not thronged, but busy at least with labouring folk setting out upon their duties. To them, meeting the wounded form of the Chamberlain, the hour was tragic, and figured long at fireside stories after, acutely memorable for years. They pa.s.sed astounded or turned to follow him, making their own affairs secondary to their interest in the state of one who, it was obvious even to Montaiglon, was deep in their affections.

He realised that a few leagues farther away from the seat of a Justiciary-General it might have gone ill with the man who had brought Simon MacTaggart to this condition, for menacing looks were thrown at him, and more than once there was a significant gesture that made plain the animosity with which he was regarded. An attempt to escape--if such had occurred to him--would doubtless have been attended by the most serious consequences.

Argyll met his Chamberlain with the signs of genuine distress: it was touching, indeed, to see his surrender to the most fraternal feeling, and though for a while the Duke's interest in his Chamberlain left him indifferent to him who was the cause of it, Count Victor could not but perceive that he was himself in a position of exceeding peril. He remembered the sinister comments of the Baron of Doom upon the hazards of an outsider's entrance to the boar's cave, and realised for the first time what that might mean in this country, where the unhappy wretch from Appin, whose case had some resemblance to his own, had been remorselessly made the victim (as the tale went) to world-old tribal jealousies whose existence was incredible to all outside the Highland line. In the chill morning air he stood, coatless and shivering, the high embrasured walls lifting above him, the jabbering menials of the castle grouped a little apart, much of the language heard savage and incomprehensible in his ears, himself, as it were, of no significance to any one except the law that was to manifest itself at any moment.

Last night it had been very gay in this castle, the Duke was the most gracious of hosts; here, faith! was a vast difference.

"May I have a coat?" he asked a bystander, taking advantage of a bustle in the midst of which the wounded man was taken into the castle. He got the answer of a scullion.

"A coat!" exclaimed the man he addressed. "A rope's more like it." And so, Count Victor, shrugging his shoulders at this impertinence, was left to suffer the air that bit him to the marrow.

The Chamberlain disposed of, and in the leech's hands, Argyll had the Frenchman brought to his rooms, still in his shirt-sleeves. The weapon of his offence was yet in his hand for evidence, had that been wanting, of an act he was prepared to admit with frankness.

"Well, Monsieur Montaiglon," said his Grace, pacing nervously up and down the room before him, "this is a pretty matter. You have returned to see my pictures somewhat sooner than I had looked for, and in no very ceremonious circ.u.mstances."

"Truly," said the Count, with a difficult essay at meeting the man in his own humour--"Truly, but your Grace's invitation was so pressing--_ah! c'est grand dommage! mais--mais_--I am not, with every consideration, in the key for badinage. M. le Duc, you behold me exceedingly distressed at the discommoding of your household. At your age this--"

He pulled himself up, confused a little, aware that his customary politeness had somehow for once shamefully deserted him with no intention on his part.

"That is to put the case with exceeding delicacy," said the Duke. "At my age, as you have said, my personal inconvenience is of little importance in face of the fact that a dear friend of mine may be at death's door.

At all events there is a man, if signs mislead me not, monstrously near death under this roof, a man well liked by all that know him, a strong man and a brave man, and a man, in his way, of genius. He goes out, as I say, hale and hearty, and comes back b.l.o.o.d.y in your company. You came to this part of the world, monsieur, with the deliberate intention of killing my Chamberlain!"

"That's as Heaven, which arranges these things without consulting us, may have decided, my lord; on my honour, I had much preferred never to have set eyes on your Chamberlain."

"Come, come!" said the Duke with a high head and slapping with open hand the table beside him--"Come, come! I am not a fool, Montaiglon--even at my age. You deliberately sought this unfortunate man."

"Monsieur the Duke of Argyll has my word that it was not so," said the Count softly.

"I fancy in that case, then, you had found him easy to avoid," said the Duke, who was in an ir-restrainable heat. "From the first--oh, come!

sir, let us not be beating about the bush, and let us sink all these evasions--from the first you have designed a meeting with MacTaggart, and your every act since you came to this country has led up to this d.a.m.ned business that is likely to rob me of the bravest of servants. It was not the winds of heaven that blew you against your will into this part of Scotland, and brought you in contact with my friend on the very first night of your coming here."

"And still, M. le Duc, with infinite deference, and a coolness that is partly due to the unpleasant fact (as you may perceive) that I have no coat on, 'twas quite the other way, and your bravest of servants thrust himself upon my attention that had otherwise been directed to the real object of my being in Scotland at all."

The Duke gave a gesture of impatience. "I am not at the heart of these mysteries," said he, "but--even at my age--I know a great deal more about this than you give me credit for. If it is your whim to affect that this wretched business was no more than a pa.s.sage between gentlemen, the result of a quarrel over cards or the like in my house--"

"Ah!" cried the Count, "there I am all to blame. Our affair ought more properly to have opened elsewhere. In that detail your Grace has every ground for complaint."

"That is a mere side affair," said the Duke, "and something else more closely affects me. I am expected to accept it, then, that the Comte de Mont-aiglon, travelling incognito in the una.s.suming _role_ of a wine merchant, came here at this season simply from a pa.s.sion for our Highland scenery. I had not thought the taste for dreary mountains and black glens had extended to the Continent."

"At least 'twas not to quarrel with a servant I came here," retorted Count Victor.

"That is ill said, sir," said his Grace. "My kinsman has ten generations of ancestry of the best blood of Scotland and the Isles underground."

"To that, M. le Duc, there is an obvious and ancient retort--that therein he is like a potato plant; the best of him is buried."

Argyll stood before the Frenchman dubious and embarra.s.sed; vexed at the tone of the encounter, and convinced, for reasons of his own, that in one particular at least the foreigner prevaricated, yet impressed by the manly front of the gentleman whose affair had brought a morning's tragedy so close upon the heels of an evening's mirth. Here was the sort of quandary in which he would naturally have consulted with his d.u.c.h.ess, but it was no matter to wake a woman to, and she was still in her bed-chamber.

"I a.s.sume you look for this unhappy business to be treated as an affair of honour?" he asked at last.

"So to call it," replied Count Victor, "though in truth, the honour, on my word, was all on one side."

"You are in doubtful taste to put it quite in these terms," said the Duke more sternly, "particularly as you are the one to come out of it so far scathless."

"Would M. le Duc know how his servant compelled my--my attentions?"

"Compelled your attentions! I do not like the tone of your speeches, monsieur. Dignity--"

"_Pardieu!_ M. le Duc, would you expect a surfeit of dignity from a man without a jacket?" said the Count, looking pathetically at his arms.

"Dignity--I mean the sense of it--would dictate a more sober carriage in face of the terrible act you have committed. I am doing my best to find the slightest excuse for you, because you are a stranger here, a man of good family though engaged upon a stupendous folly, and I have before now been in the reverence of your people. You ask me if I know what compelled your attention (as you say) to my Chamberlain, and I will answer you frankly that I know all that is necessary."

At that the Count was visibly amazed. This was, indeed, to put a new face on matters and make more regrettable his complacent surrender after his affair on the sands.

"In that case, M. le Duc," said he, "there is no more to be said. I protest I am unable to comprehend your Grace's complacence towards a rogue--even of your own household."

Argyll rang a bell and concluded the interview.

"There has been enough of this," he said. "I fear you do not clearly realise all the perils of your situation. You came here--you will pardon a man at my age insisting upon it, for I know the facts--with the set design of challenging one who properly or improperly has aroused your pa.s.sion; you have accomplished your task, and must not consider yourself harshly treated if you have to pay the possible penalty."

"Pardon, M. le Duc, it is not so, always with infinite deference, and without a coat as I have had the boldness to remark before: my task had gone on gaily enough had your Monsieur MacTaggart not been the victim of some inexplicable fever--unless as I sometimes suspect it were a preposterous jealousy that made me the victim of his somewhat stupid folly play."

"You have accomplished your task, as I say," proceeded Argyll, heedless of the interruption, "and to tell the truth, the thing has been done with an unpardonably primitive absence of form. I am perhaps an indifferent judge of such ceremonies; at my age--as you did me the honour to put it--that is only to be expected, but we used, when I was younger, to follow a certain formula in inviting our friend the enemy out to be killed. What is this hasty and clandestine encounter before the law of the land but a deliberate attempt at murder? It would be so even in your own country under the circ.u.mstances. M. le Comte, where were your seconds? Your wine-selling has opened in villainously bad circ.u.mstances, and you are in error to a.s.sume that the details of the code may be waived even among the Highland hills."

A servant entered.

"Take this gentleman to the fosse," said the Duke, with the ring of steel in his voice and his eyes snapping.

"At least there is as little form about my incarceration as about my poor duel," said Count Victor.

"My father would have been somewhat more summary in circ.u.mstances like these,", said the Duke, "and, by Heaven! the old style had its merits too; but these are different days, though, if I were you, I fancy I'd prefer the short shrift of Long David the dempster to the felon's cell.

Be good enough to leave your sword."

Count Victor said never a word, but placed the weapon in a corner of the room, made a deep _conge_, and went forth a prisoner.

In the last few minutes of the interview he had forgotten the cold, but now when he was led into the open air he felt it in his coatless condition more poignant than his apprehension at his position otherwise.

He shivered as he walked along the fosse, through which blew a shrewd north wind, driving the first flakes of an approaching snowstorm. The fosse was wide and deep, girding the four-square castle, mantled on its outer walls by dense ivy, where a few birds twittered. The wall was broken at intervals by the doors of what might very well serve as cells if cells were wanted, and it was to one of these that Count Victor found himself consigned.

"My faith, Victor, thou art a fool of the first water!" he said to himself as he realised the ignominy of his situation. For he was in the most dismal of dungeons, furnished as scantily as a cellar, fireless, damp, and almost in sepulchral darkness, for what light might have entered by a little window over the door was obscured by drifted snow.

By-and-by his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, and he concluded that he was in what had at one time been a wine-cellar, as bottles were racked against the back wall of his arched apartment. They were empty--he confirmed his instinct on that point quickly enough, for the events of the morning left him in the mood for refreshment. It was uncomfortable all this; there was always the possibility of justice miscarried; but at no time had he any fear of savage reprisals such as had alarmed him when Mungo Boyd locked him up in Doom and the fict.i.tious broken clan cried "Loch Sloy!" in darkness. For this was not wholly the wilds, and Argyll's manner, though stern, was that of one who desired in all circ.u.mstances to be just.