And then it disappeared and the door opened, showing on the threshold, with a stool in his hand, a very little bow-legged man of fifty years or thereby, having a face all lined, like a chart, with wrinkles, ruddy at the cheeks as a winter apple, and attired in a mulberry-brown. He put his heels together with a mechanical precision and gravely gave a military salute.
“Doom?” inquired Count Victor formally, with a foot inside the door.
“Jist that,” answered the servitor a little dryly, and yet with a smile puckering his face as he put an opposing toe of a coarse unbuckled brogue under the instep of the stranger. The accent of the reply smacked of Fife; when he heard it, Count Victor at a leap was back in the port of Dysart, where it shrank beneath tall rocks, and he was hearing again for the first time with an amused wonder the native mariners crying to each other on the quays.
“Is your master at home?” he asked.
“At hame, quo' he! It wad depend a'thegether on wha wants to ken,” said the servant cautiously. Then in a manner ludicrously composed of natural geniality and burlesque importance, “It's the auld styles aboot Doom, sir, though there's few o' us left to keep them up, and whether the Baron's oot or in is a thing that has to be studied maist scrupulously before the like o' me could say.”
“My name is De Montaiglon; I am newly from France; I—”
“Step your ways in, Monsher de Montaiglon,” cried the little man with a salute more profound than before. “We're prood to see you, and hoo are they a' in France?”
“Tolerably well, I thank you,” said Count Victor, amused at this grotesque combination of military form and familiarity.
Mungo Boyd set down the stool on which he had apparently been standing to look through the spy-hole in the door, and seized the stranger's bag. With three rapid movements of the feet, executed in the mechanical time of a soldier, he turned to the right about, paused a second, squared his shoulders, and led the way into a most barren and chilly interior.
“This way, your honour,” said he. “Ye'll paurdon my discretion, for it's a pernikity hoose this for a' the auld bauld, gallant forms and ceremonies. I jalouse ye came roond in a wherry frae the toon, and it's droll I never saw ye land. There was never mony got into Doom withoot the kennin' o' the garrison. It happened aince in Black Hugh's time wi' a corps o' Campbells frae Ardkinglas, and they found themselves in a wasp's byke.”