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 fictitious 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 circumstances to be just.
So Count Victor sat on a box and shivered in his shirt-sleeves and fervently wished for breakfast. The snow fell heavily now, and drifted in the fosse and whitened the world; outside, therefore, all was silent; there must be bustle and footsteps, but here they were unheard: it seemed in a while that he was buried in catacombs, an illusion so vexatious that he felt he must dispel it at all hazards.
There was but one way to do so. He stood on his box and tried to reach the window over his door. To break the glass was easy, but when that was done and the snow was cleared away by his hand, he could see out only by pulling himself up with an awkward and exhausting grasp on the narrow ledge. Thus he secured but the briefest of visions of what was outside, and that was not a reassuring one.
Had he meditated escape from the window, he must now abandon it; for on the other side of the ditch, cowering in the shelter of one of the castle doors, was standing one of the two men who had placed him in the cell, there apparently for no other purpose than to keep an eye on the only possible means of exit from the discarded wine-cellar.
The breaking glass was unheard by the watcher; at all events he made no movement to suggest that he had observed it, and he said nothing about it when some time later in the forenoon he came with Count Victor's breakfast, which was generous enough to confirm his belief that in Argyll's hands he was at least assured of the forms of justice, though that, in truth, was not the most consoling of prospects.
His warder was a dumb dog, a squint-eyed Cerberus with what Count Victor for once condemned as a tribal gibberish for his language, so that he was incapable of understanding what was said to him even if he had been willing to converse.
“It is little good to play the guitar to an ass,” said the Frenchman, and fell to his viands.