II
Without a knock the door opened, Leece slipped in and stood with her back to it, looking down. Rodvard began hastily to make good his jacket-laces.
“It was my fault,” she said in a thin voice, then hurriedly; “What I did was contrary to the law of love. Do you want me to bring your breakfast in the morning?”
Her eyes were veiled, but one could guess what lay behind them (and one must—one must tread the right measure). “Yes.”
“You are still angry with me.”
He ran across the room and seized her in his arms, so she let her dark head slide down against his neck. “What can I say?” kissing her ear and the side of her neck (yet at the same time feeling a revulsion almost physical, and all the time the thought of that other was at the back of his mind, not coming forward because he dared not let it).
A sudden tenseness was in her grip; she flung her head back and looked at him (out of eyes that spoke distrust). “Rodvard! What is wrong?”
“Nothing. We must hurry and go to supper or they will miss us.” A rivulet of perspiration coursed down his spine. She kissed him long and hard (with the doubt still there) and was gone.
Afterward it was the tall Vyana who went to walk with them. Leece took his hand; all gay, but casting glances that seemed to show an unasked question in her mind (so that Rodvard wondered whether she might not have some part of the Blue Star’s gift). He said to Vyana; “Tell me something. If you were in the Myonessae, how could I come to see you?”
Her face fell sober. “I am not a Myonessan yet. But if I were, it would not be easy unless you became at least a learner. The Myonessans have no contacts with the outer world save those they make themselves.”
“A strange rule,” he said, not daring to push the matter further lest he betray his thought.
Now Leece spoke, trying to justify the regimen under which the girls lived, but Vyana, being so near to the sisterhood, was doubtful, and Rodvard heard both of them with only part of his mind, considering what he must do. There was no question but he must do it, ah, no; the expelled of the Myonessae, he knew well, were shut away in gloomy prisons for “instruction”, it might be for years. The couvertine Lolau was—
“—do you not think so, Rodvard?” said Leece’s voice.
“I am sorry. I was thinking of a thing.”
All her attention and affection suddenly rushed at him; she pressed his hand hard. “I was only saying—” and in spite of that warm grip, his mind went off again under the babble. The Blue Star would perhaps let him make his way in, if the light were good—and they reached the door. Leece squeezed his hand again, possessively; he knew she would have sought a corner and kissed him, but he managed to avoid that, with a certain shame picking at him.
Inside he went rapidly upstairs, then stood tingling in his own room as outer steps went to and fro. His mind toiled at details—the lock of the street-door was a heavy one, usually turning with a grating sound, he must have a story ready to tell if someone woke and asked him questions. But before he could work out a tale the small sounds died to a single series of pat, pat, pat, and he had a moment of dreadful fear and excitement mingled that it might be Leece, coming to him that night.
This was his turning-point in life (he thought) and the choice was being made from outside himself. The steps went past; Rodvard released his breath, sat down and, trying to use up the time until all should be asleep, began to repeat to himself Iren Dostal’s ballad of the archer and the bear. But at the third stanza a rhyme somehow eluded him, and he nearly went mad trying to recall it, while at the same time the other half of his mind went round the problem of Leece-Lalette, Lalette-Leece, without once making a real effort toward the plan he must have. Then he tried to solve how the line of duty might be considered to lie, according to one or another system of philosophy; but all this yielded was the unsatisfactory conclusion that he did not know where duty or even true desire lay, only what he was going to do. Now he began to count boards in the floor, as he had counted the cask-staves of the ship, merely to pass time; and time passed. He cracked the door ajar, heard someone snore, and reached the odd thought that even the loveliest of girls sometimes snore. Tip, tap, and he was down the hall to the stairs. A board creaked there; he paused. The key grated even more harshly than he had anticipated, and again he stood breathless a minute, then was in the street.
A sense of freedom swelled through him as he looked up at the winter stars—this must be the right line, the glorious line, hurrah! even though the adventure failed. A silent street, down which advanced in the near distance a cloaked couple, picking their way along with a light-boy before. The checkered gleams from the window of his lantern caught the tree-trunks and half-reflected from the dull surfaces, seemed like weary fireflies. A one-horse caleche went past, its form dimly outlined against the darker shadows beneath the branches. Step on, Rodvard, the way is here. He stumbled in the dark over the edge of a cobble, turned a corner and another, wondering how the glass stood, and reached the couvertine Lolau at last.
He remembered it as the building he had passed on his first day in Charalkis, with a foreyard in which a dead tree stood. The lodge-box held no porter; its window was broken. Rodvard thought—now this is somehow the model of the Myonessae, if I could trace the resemblance, as his feet clicked on the pave up to the door, where one light burned behind a transom in a fan of glass. Summing his force, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again.
Far in the interior a step sounded, coming. The door was thrown back to show a fat beldame with a robe gathered round her, whose hand trembled slightly with palsy.
“What is it?” she said. The light was above and behind her, he could not see her eyes to use his jewel.
“I am from the office of account,” he said (depending upon sudden inspiration), “in the matter of the Demoiselle Asterhax.”
“A poor hour to be coming,” she grumbled. “Ay, ay, the Lalette. I will call the mattern. They will take her in the morning.”
She moved aside to let him enter, and as she did so, the light caught her face. (His glance, quickened by emergency, caught in those muddy eyes a green flash of mingled hate and greed.)
“Wait,” he said, and touched her wrist. “Perhaps it is not needed to rouse anyone.” (That covetousness—if he could use it.)
“What do you mean?”
“It is a simple matter; not official accounts.” He fumbled out a coin or two and pressed them in her hand.
The fat face moved into a leer. “Eh, eh, so that’s the story. Want to take her, do you? And poor Mircella will be blamed, maybe sent for instruction. It should be worth more.”
(Money again; he experienced a moment of panic.) “I am from the office of account,” he repeated. “I am to take her there to close her reckoning. You will have the perquisite of her possessions.”
“He, he, and you the best perquisite. It should be worth more.”
“Sh, someone will hear us.” He found another pair of coins. “This is all—if not, give back the rest and call your mattern.”
He turned; she clutched his arm, grumbling in her throat (and he could see she did not believe him in the least, but would be satisfied if given a story to tell). “Come. Come.”
Another stair-journey through a silent house, this time upward. The place had the indefinable perfume of many women. The guide shuffled along in a dark almost complete; Rodvard heard the chink of keys, then a tick against the lock and the door opened.
“Strike a light.” Rodvard felt a candle pressed into his hand; being forced to give his attention to it, Lalette saw him first when the light flared, he heard her gasp and looked past the little flame to see her standing with disheveled hair, so lovely beyond the imagined picture that he could not resist running across the room to kiss her astonished lips. She must have been sitting fully dressed in the dark.
“Rodvard! How did you come here?” The fat woman shuffled in the background, and he:
“No matter now, it can wait. We must go quickly.”
She stared at him like a sleepwalker. “Where?”
“Hurry.”
There were no more words between them at this time or place. Lalette turned in the feeble light to make a package, but the fat woman said; “Nah, my perquisite,” so she only snatched a cloak. The beldame addressed Rodvard; “Now you use your knife on the lock to show where it was picked, then leave it. Then they know my story is true, a man was here.”
He hacked at the brass plate that held the keyhole for a moment, and fortune favored by letting one of the screws come loose with a snap, and the fat woman clawed his arm to indicate that was enough. She led the way down the stair, Rodvard could see no eyes, and he and Lalette were suddenly out the door.