XV
Beyond the door that was open stretched a passageway, and at the end of the passageway came another door. Once we were through the latter, the spotlight of my escort fell upon a flight of stairs, six steps high, as I counted. I noted also that the treads were of the same red square tiles as the floor of the reception hall. Only the nosings were of wood, a wood much worn from long service. At the top of the steps my guide opened one last door.
I now found myself in a very dark room, so dark, indeed, that I paused just inside the threshold from fear of colliding with some piece of furniture. The man, however, drew aside the top of his lantern and from the flame within it began to light the three wicks of a massive iron candlestick, a sort of tripod fashioned to represent three lances supporting one another.
The room brightened. I noted that it contained this candelabrum, one chair, and one bed, the latter simple, home-made articles such as a peasant might improvise for himself.
“And I wish you a good night, Monsieur,” said my guide, with a bow. “Please sleep quite at your ease. I shall have the honor of waking you in time, myself.”
“At sunrise?” said I.
“At sunrise,” he answered, “or perhaps ... perhaps a moment or two before sunrise....”
That seemed to me a very natural thing to say, and I returned his courtesy:
“Good night, Monsieur!”
He went away. I listened to his footsteps as they clacked on the tiles of the six steps, and then on the pavement of the passage. Finally I heard the door into the anteroom swing to, and, less to my surprise than to my alarm, the great iron bolts slide back into their places: the grating sound they made, however slight, was quite audible in the absolute silence of the mansion.
I sat down on the wicker chair at the foot of the plain pine bedstead.
In sitting down I had intended to collect my thoughts if possible, bring a little order into the chaos of impressions, suspicions and fears that were whirling in my bewildered brain. But I had hardly touched the seat, when an unexpected sensation put an end to my reflections.
I had cast my eyes about the four walls of the room where I now was—four walls cheaply papered in a stock design of loud colors. Again the miserable poverty of the furnishings had impressed me, with the exception of the antique candlestick. The place, indeed, in its present condition, had all the appearances of a spare room, roughly fitted up with these few odd and ill-matched articles. I should not have thought it strange had I detected there the close musty odor that one always meets in apartments long unoccupied and rarely aired.
But that was not the smell that came to my nostrils. Quite the contrary in fact! The room was suddenly fragrant with a warm living perfume, a perfume that now reminded me of the one I had vaguely perceived in the draught from under the closed door of the anteroom. It was not the same perfume, by any means, though it was of the same general kind, one of those essences which float about every house where women are, combining the most diverse aromas into a single fragrance that is the alluring fragrance of feminine beauty.
I brought all my senses to bear upon it. “Heliotrope,” I analyzed, ... “and rose”! The isolation of these two essences seemed all at once to sharpen my memory of the earlier perfume; the latter, unmistakably, had been a lily of the valley.
“Muguet,” I said aloud, “lily of the valley!”
All a-quiver I leapt to my feet, terrified, stunned, but ferociously determined. Of course! Of course! The two syllables of that French word, muguet, had brought a flood of light into my clouded mind. Of course! Muguet! Her perfume! Madeleine! Madeleine!
It is curious that in the overwhelming anguish that had now seized upon me, an insignificant thought came to the surface of my seething consciousness and restored all the coolness and self-control that I had lost: “What an unconscionable ass I have been! Fool! Fool! Fool! Of course! Of course! Why did I not get the point at the very first? Long ago, long ago? After the very first suspicious words I heard from the mouths of those two weird hosts of mine?... Fool of fools! Why did I not recognize her perfume out there in the hall where I first perceived it—before those three bolts were drawn upon me, leaving me a helpless prisoner in this hole where I am caught like a rat in a trap?
“Helpless, eh? Like a rat in a trap, eh? Not quite.”
I was almost normally calm as I put a hand to my belt and drew my revolver. Helpless, eh? There were eight cartridges in my automatic, and I had used only one—the one that put poor Siegfried out of his misery! “Seven left! Helpless? Not so helpless as all that? There must be seven of them!”
I snapped the lock on the hammer and opened the magazine. The seven bullets were in place. I threw the barrel back into position and released the lock again, testing the trigger lightly with my finger to be sure the requisite free play was there. I put the pistol into my coat pocket, with my right hand upon it.
“At sunrise, eh? You were coming back at sunrise, old Methuselah? Do! I shall be glad to see you!”
I looked at my watch. Two o’clock! It was mid-winter time. The dawn would be long in coming.
I rose from the chair and stepped over to the bed. The sheets were singularly delicate, the coverlets thick and downy. Another breath of perfume floated past my nostrils.—I buried a fist in my hot, feverish cheek.... That bed, so daintily prepared! It had been offered to me! But for whom had it been made so cosy? Who slept there ordinarily? And my thoughts flashed out through the walls and partitions of that accursed mansion to another room, where there would be another bed and in it a woman, sleeping! Madeleine, my Madeleine!
The dart of horrified jealousy that ran through my heart was like the thrust of a sharp, white-hot sword. Madeleine! There, in that other chamber, at night! The victim of what unconscionable sorcery! The plaything of what loathsome and unmentionable desires!
But no—my calmer judgment soon concluded. Those men—demons, perhaps—could not have been dastards in the thrall of lust! That secret house could not be a House of Love! What was the mystery, then? What? Oh, what?
The three candles were flickering at the three points of their tripod of lances. The door! I looked at it. Here also the joinings yawned from age. And that would doubtless be the case with the window.
For there was a window in the room, the room that was really my prison.
I stepped over to examine it, pressing my forehead to the panes and plunging my gaze into the outer blanket of darkness.
Nothing! Nothing at all. An impenetrable pall of inky blackness came right up against my eyes. A thick growth of ivy formed an outer curtain over the window, weaving a fabric through and around the heavy iron bars which guarded it.
A prison! That was the very name for it!
I heard footsteps moving softly along one of the partitions behind me. I held my breath. Soon silence returned, complete death-like silence.
I went back to the bed and lay down upon it, waiting, ready for anything. I had my clothes and my boots on. My hand clutched the butt of the automatic in my pocket.
I waited, my eyes glued upon the door, my ears straining to catch the slightest sound.
I waited!