Doom Castle Part 27

The Chamberlain overlooked the irony and glanced perplexed about him.

There was, obviously, no place near that was not open to the objection urged. Everywhere the snow lay deep on gra.s.s and pathway; the trees were sheeted ghosts, the chill struck through his own Highland brogues.

"Come!" said he at last, with a sudden thought; "the sand's the place, though it's a bit to go," and he led the way hurriedly towards the riverside.

"One of us may go farther to-day and possibly fare worse," said Montaiglon with unwearied good-humour, stepping in his rear.

It was the beginning of the dawn. Already there was enough of it to show the world of hill and wood in vast, vague, silent ma.s.ses, to render wan the flaming windows of the castle towers behind them. In the east a sullen sky was all blotched with crimson, some pine-trees on the heights were struck against it, intensely black, intensely melancholy, perhaps because they led the mind to dwell on wild, remote, and solitary places, the savagery of old forests, the cruel destiny of man, who has come after and must go before the dead things of the wood. There was no wind; the landscape swooned in frost.

"My faith! 'tis an odd and dolorous world at six o'clock in the morning," thought Count Victor; "I wish I were asleep in Cammercy and all well."

A young fallow-deer stood under an oak-tree, lifting its head to gaze without dismay, almost a phantom; every moment the dawn spread wider; at last the sea showed, leaden in the bay, mists revealed themselves upon Ben Ime. Of sound there was only the wearying plunge of the cascades and the roll of the shallows like tumbril-wheels on causeway as the river ran below the arches.

"Far yet, monsieur?" cried Count Victor to the figure striding ahead, and his answer came in curt accents.

"We'll be there in ten minutes. You want a little patience."

"We shall be there, _par dieu!_ in time enough," cried out Count Victor.

"'Tis all one to me, but the march is pestilent dull."

"What! would ye have fiddlin' at a funeral?" asked the Chamberlain, still without turning or slowing his step; and then, as though he had been inspired, he drew out the flageolet that was ever his bosom friend, and the astounded Frenchman heard the strains of a bagpipe march. It was so incongruous in the circ.u.mstances that he must laugh.

"It were a thousand pities to kill so rare a personage," thought he, "and yet--and yet--'tis a villainous early morning."

They pa.s.sed along the river-bank; they came upon the sea-beach; the Chamberlain put his instrument into his pocket and still led the way upon the sand that lay exposed far out by the low tide. He stopped at a spot clear of weed, flat and dry and firm almost as a table. It was the ideal floor for an engagement, but from the uncomfortable sense of espionage from the neighbourhood of a town that looked with all its windows upon the place as it were upon a scene in a play-house. The whole front of the town was not two hundred yards away.

"We shall be disturbed here, monsieur," said Count Victor, hesitating as the other put off his plaid and coat.

"No!" said Sim MacTaggart shortly, tugging at a belt, and yet Count Victor had his doubts. He made his preparations, it is true, but always with an apprehensive look at that long line of sleeping houses, whose shutters--with a hole in the centre of each--seemed to stare down upon the sand. No smoke, no flames, no sign of human occupance was there: the sea-gull and the pigeon pecked together upon the door-steps or the window-sills, or perched upon the ridges of the high-pitched roofs, and a heron stalked at the outlet of a gutter that ran down the street. The sea, quiet and dull, the east turned from crimson to grey; the mountains streaming with mist----

"Cammercy after all!" said Count Victor to himself; "I shall wake in a moment, but yet for a nightmare 'tis the most extraordinary I have ever experienced."

"I hope you are a good Christian," said the Chamberlain, ready first and waiting, bending his borrowed weapon in malignant arcs above his head.

"Three-fourths of one at least," said Montaiglon; "for I try my best to be a decent man," and he daintily and deliberately turned up his sleeve upon an arm as white as milk.

"I'm waiting," said the Chamberlain.

"So! _en garde!_" said his antagonist, throwing off his hat and putting up his weapon.

There was a tinkle of steel like the sound of ice afloat in a gla.s.s.

The town but seemed to sleep wholly; as it happened, there was one awake in it who had, of all its inhabitants, the most vital interest in this stern business out upon the sands. She had gone home from the ball rent with vexation and disappointment; her husband snored, a mannikin of parchment, jaundice-cheeked, scorched at the nose with snuff; and, shuddering with distaste of her cage and her companion, she sat long at the window, all her finery on, chasing dream with dream, and every dream, as she knew, alas! with the inevitable poignancy of waking to the truth. For her the flaming east was h.e.l.l's own vestibule, for her the greying dawn was a pallor of the heart, the death of hope. She sat turning and turning the marriage-ring upon her finger, sometimes all unconsciously essaying to slip it off, and tugging viciously at the knuckle-joint that prevented its removal, and her eyes, heavy for sleep and moist with sorrow, still could pierce the woods of s.h.i.+ra Glen to their deep-most recesses and see her lover there. They roamed so eagerly, so hungrily into that far distance, that for a while she failed to see the figures on the nearer sand. They swam into her recognition like wraiths upsprung, as it were, from the sand itself or exhaled upon a breath from the sea: at first she could not credit her vision.

It was not with her eyes--those tear-blurred eyes--she knew him; it was by the inner sense, the nameless one that lovers know; she felt the tale in a thud of the heart and ran out with "Sim!" shrieked on her dumb lips. Her gown trailed in the pools and flicked up the ooze of weed and sand; a shoulder bared itself; some of her hair took shame and covered it with a veil of dull gold.

CHAPTER XXVIII -- THE DUEL ON THE SANDS--Continued.

And now it was clear day. The lime-washed walls of the town gleamed in suns.h.i.+ne, and the shadows of the men at war upon the sand stretched far back from their feet toward the white land. Birds twittered, and shook the snow from the shrubbery of the Duke's garden; the river cried below the arches, but not loud enough to drown the sound of stumbling steps, and Montaiglon threw a glance in the direction whence they came, even at the risk of being spitted on his opponent's weapon.

He parried a thrust in quarte and cried, "Stop! stop! _Remettez-vous, monsieur!_ Here comes a woman."

The Chamberlain looked at the dishevelled figure running awkwardly over the rough stones and slimy weeds, muttered an oath, and put his point up again.

"Come on," said he; "we'll have the whole town about our lugs in ten minutes."

"But the lady?" said Count Victor, guarding under protest.

"It's only Kate," said the Chamberlain, and aimed a furious thrust in tierce. Montaiglon parried by a beat of the edge of his forte, and forced the blade upwards. He could have disarmed by the simplest trick of Girard, but missed the opportunity from an insane desire to save his opponent's feelings in the presence of a spectator. Yet the leniency cost them dear.

"Sim! Sim!" cried out the woman in a voice full of horror and entreaty, panting towards the combatants. Her call confused her lover: in a mingling of anger and impatience he lunged wildly, and Count Victor's weapon took him in the chest.

"Zut!" cried the Frenchman, withdrawing the sword and flicking the blood from the point with a ludicrous movement.

The Chamberlain writhed at his feet, muttered something fierce in Gaelic, and a great repugnance took possession of the other. He looked at his work; he quite forgot the hurrying woman until she ran past him and threw herself beside the wounded man.

"Oh, Sim! Sim!" she wailed, in an utterance the most distressing. Her lover turned upon his back and smiled sardonically at her out of a face of paper. "I wish ye had been a little later, Kate," he said, "or that I had begun with a hale arm. Good G.o.d! I've swallowed a hot cinder. I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear. Oh, where the de'il's my flageolet?"

And then his head fell back.

With frantic hands she unloosed his cravat, sought and staunched the wound with her handkerchief, and wept the while with no sound, though her bosom, white like the spray of seas, seemed bound to burst above her corsage.

Count Victor sheathed his weapon, and "Madame," said he with preposterous inadequacy, "this--this--is distressing; this--this--" he desired to offer some a.s.sistance, but baulked at the fury of the eyes she turned on him.

"Oh, you!--you!--you!" she gasped, choking to say even so little. "It is enough, is it not, that you have murdered him, without staying to see me tortured?"

To this he could, of course, make no reply. His quandary was immense.

Two hundred yards away was that white phantom town s.h.i.+ning in the morning sun that rose enormous over the eastern hills beyond the little lapping silver waves. A phantom town, with phantom citizens doubtless prying through the staring eyes of those closed shutters. A phantom town--town of fairy tale, with grotesque roofs, odd _corbeau_-stepped gables, smokeless chimneys, all white with snow, and wild birds on its terrace, preening in the blessed light of the sun. He stood with his back to the pair upon the sand. "My G.o.d! 'tis a dream," said he. "I shall laugh in a moment." He seemed to himself to stand thus an age, and yet in truth it was only a pause of minutes when the Chamberlain spoke with the tone of sleep and insensibility as from another world.

"I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear--Olivia."

Mrs. Petullo gave a cry of pain and staggered to her feet. She turned upon Count Victor a face distraught and eyes that were wild with the wretchedness of the disillusioned. Her fingers were playing nervously at her lips; her shoulders were roughened and discoloured by the cold; her hair falling round her neck gave her the aspect of a slattern. She, too, looked at the facade of the town and saw her husband's windows shuttered and indifferent to her grief.

"I do not know whether you have killed him or not," she said at last.

"It does not matter--oh! it matters all--no, no, it does not matter--Oh!

could you not--could you not kill me too?"

For his life he could not have answered: he but looked at her in mortal pity, and at that she ground her teeth and struck him on the lips.

"Awake, decidedly awake!" he said, and shrugged his shoulders; and then for the first time he saw that she was s.h.i.+vering.

"Madame," he said, "you will die of cold: permit me," and he stooped and picked up his coat from the sand and placed it without resistance on her shoulders, like a cloak. She drew it, indeed, about her with trembling fingers as if her senses craved the comfort though her detestation of the man who gave it was great. But in truth she was demented now, forgetting even the bleeding lover. She gave little paces on the sand, with one of her shoes gone from her feet, and wrung her hands and sobbed miserably.

Count Victor bent to the wounded man and found him regaining consciousness. He did what he could, though that of necessity was little, to hasten his restoration, and relinquished the office only when approaching footsteps on the sh.o.r.e made him look up to see a group of workmen hastening to the spot where the Chamberlain lay on the edge of the tide and the lady and the foreigner beside him.

"This man killed him," cried Mrs. Petullo, pointing an accusing finger.

"I hope I have not killed him," said he, "and in any case it was an honourable engagement; but that matters little at this moment when the first thing to do is to have him removed home. So far as I am concerned, I promise you I shall be quite ready to go with you and see him safely lodged."