The Winding Stair

by A. E. W. Mason

Marguerite waited without moving whilst he descended the stairs and crossed the court. She heard him pass into the room with the archway and the clocks. He was quite invisible to her now. Therefore, so was she to him; and she was standing very close to the doors; just within her bedroom—no more. She stepped back silently. There were rugs upon the floor, and between the rugs she stepped most carefully lest one of the heels of her satin shoes should clack upon the boards. She went straight to the little table of walnut wood set against the wall and laid her hand upon the drawer. The handle was of brass; she lifted it so that it should not rattle, and so stood with an ear towards the stairway, listening. But no sound came from the court, there was not a creak of any tread on the stairs. Reassured, Marguerite pulled open the drawer a little way. The table had been fashioned in a century when tables really were made. The drawer slid out smoothly and noiselessly just far enough for Marguerite’s hand to slip through the opening.

Her fingers, however, touched nothing. She opened the drawer wider. It was empty. Yet it had not been empty that evening when she had changed her clothes.

“Paul was standing here,” she said to herself. “Yes, facing me with his back to the table, whilst I was talking to him.”

She remembered now that when she had thrown her arms about his neck, as he stood in the doorway, he had kept his left hand behind his back. She sat down upon the edge of the bed, and a smile flitted across her face.

“I might have known that he would have understood,” she whispered. He always had understood from the first moment when, without a word, he had called her to him at the Villa Iris. But Marguerite must make sure. She stole out on to the landing. From the point where she stood she could look down and across the court into the room with the clocks. Paul was lying upon the cushions in a muse, looking at something which lay darkly gleaming on the out-stretched palm of his hand—her little automatic pistol. He had cleaned it and reloaded it and replaced it in the drawer that afternoon, after Marguerite had fainted and it had exploded on the floor. He had taken it out of the drawer when Marguerite was bidding him good-bye a few minutes back. For, mingled with her words, another and a coarser voice had been whispering in his ears. “And if it comes—the grand passion! She will blow her brains out—the little fool!”

Not from disillusionment, as Henriette with her bitter experience of life expected, but to save him, Paul Ravenel, to set him free, whilst there was still perhaps a chance that by some deft lie he might hold on to his career and his good name. “That, no!” said Paul, and he pushed the pistol into his waistbelt and composed himself for his long vigil.

The candles burned down, and one by one flickered out; mueddin succeeded mueddin in the minaret; but for their voices the town was quiet; Paul Ravenel tired with the anxiety, the sleeplessness, and the inward conflicts which through thirty hours had been his share, nodded, dozed, and in the end slept. He woke to find the grey of the morning thinning the shadows in the house, making it chill and eerie and an abode of ghosts. Surely a ghost was stirring in the house with a little flutter and hiss of unsubstantial raiment, a ripple of silver and fire—there by the balustrade above the patio, now on the stairs. . . . And now Paul Ravenel, though he did not move, was wide awake, watching from his dark corner with startled eyes. Marguerite was on the stairs, now stopping to peer over towards her lover, lest he should have moved, now most stealthily descending.

The last mueddin had ceased his chant, a hum of voices rose through the still air without the house; the city was waking to another day of massacre. And Marguerite was creeping down the stairs. She had not gone to bed that night, after all. She was still wearing her white frock with the embroidery of silver. She had thrown over her shoulders a glistening cloak. She had put on the jewels he had given her. They sparkled in the dim light on her bosom—a square sapphire hung on a chain of platinum and diamonds which went about her neck—on her wrists, on her shoes, at her waist.

“Why? Why?” he asked of himself; and as Marguerite reached the foot of the stairs and stepped into the court, he had the answer to his question. For something gleamed in her hand—the great key of the street door.

Paul Ravenel was just in time. For with the swiftness and the silence of the ghost he had almost taken her to be, Marguerite flashed across the patio, and was gone.