Mungo punctiliously saluted his master as that gentleman emerged beneath the frowning doorway and joined Count Victor in the dejected garden, lifted the faggot of firewood he had laid at his feet during his talk with the visitor, and sought his kitchen.
In Doom's aspect there was restraint: Count Victor shared the feeling, for now he realised that, in some respects, at all events, he had been doing an injustice to his host.
“I find, M. le Count,” said Doom, after some trivial introductories, “that you cannot be accommodated in the inn down by for some days yet—possibly another week. The Circuit Court has left a pack of the legal gentlemen and jurymen there, who will not be persuaded to return to Edinburgh so long as the cellar at the inn holds out, and my doer, Mr. Petullo, expresses a difficulty in getting any other lodging.”
“I regret exceedingly—”
“No regret at all, M. le Count,” said Doom, “no regret at all, unless it be that you must put up with a while longer of a house that must be very dull to you. It is my privilege and pleasure to have you here—without prejudice to your mission—and the only difficulty there might be about it has been removed through—through—through your meeting with my daughter Olivia. I learn you met her on the stair last night. Well—it would look droll, I dare say, to have encountered that way, and no word of her existence from me, but—but—but there has been a little disagreement between us. I hope I am a decently indulgent father, M. le Count, but—”
“You see before you one with great shame of his awkwardness, Baron,” said Montaiglon. “Ordinarily, I should respect a host's privacy to the extent that I should walk a hundred miles round rather than stumble upon it, but this time I do not know whether to blame myself for my gaucherie or feel pleased that for once it brought me into good company. Mungo has just hinted with his customary discretion at the cause of the mystery. I sympathise with the father; I am, with the daughter, très charmé and—”
This hint of the gallant slightly ruffled Doom.
“Chut!” he cried. “The man with an only daughter had need be a man of patience. I have done my best with this Olivia of mine. She lost her mother when a child”—an accent of infinite tenderness here came to his voice. “These woods and this shore and this lonely barn of ours, all robbed of what once made it a palace to me and mine, were, I fancied, uncongenial to her spirit, and I sent her to the Lowlands. She came back, educated, as they call it—I think she brought back as good a heart as she took away, but singularly little tolerance sometimes for the life in the castle of Doom. It has been always the town for her these six months, always the town, for there she fell in with a fellow who is no fancy of mine.”
Count Victor listened sympathetically, somewhat envying the lover, reviving in his mental vision the figure he had seen first twelve hours ago or less. He was brought to a more vivid interest in the story by the altered tone of Doom, who seemed to sour at the very mention of the unwelcome cavalier.
“Count,” said he, “it's the failing of the sex—the very best of them, because the simplest and the sweetest—that they will prefer a fool to a wise man and a rogue to a gentleman. They're blind, because the rogue is for ever showing off his sham good qualities till they shine better than an ordinary decent man's may. To my eyes, if not quite to my knowledge, this man is as great a scoundrel as was ever left unhung. It's in his look—well, scarcely so, to tell the truth, but something of it is in his mouth as well as in his history, and sooner than see my daughter take up for life with a creature of his stamp I would have her in her grave beside her mother. Unluckily, as I say, the man's a plausible rogue: that's the most dangerous rogue of all, and the girl's blind to all but the virtues and graces he makes a display of. I'll forgive Petullo his cheatry in the common way of his craft sooner than his introduction of such a man to my girl.”