Once more the figure withdrew and returned.
“He accepts. You are to fear no outrage at his hands.”
The Colonel exclaimed cynically, “Fie, fie! I protest you wrong our manners!”—and, giving some orders sub voce for the precautionary disposal of his men, entered with his staff. They were ushered into a stone-cold hall, set deep in the heart of the building—a great windowless crypt, it seemed, whose glooms no warmth but that of tapers had ever penetrated. It was bare of all furniture save benches and a long trestle-table, and a few sacred pictures on the walls. While the rest waited there, de Regnac was invited to his quarters—a cell quarried still deeper into that hill of brick. No sound in all the place was audible to them as they went. He pushed Pepino before him.
“This is my servant,” he said. “He will attend me, by your leave.”
The girl made no least demur. She went even jocundly, turning now and again to him with her tongue in her cheek. He, for his part, was in a rapture of slyness; but he kept a reserve of precaution. They were escorted by the giant down a single dim corridor, into a decent habitable cell, fitted with chairs, a little stove, and a prie-Dieu; but the bed was abominably rocky. De Regnac made a wry face at it for his companion’s secret delectation.
The ghostly monk, intimating that he would await outside the señor commandante’s toilet, that he might re-escort his charge to the refectory, closed the door upon the two. De Regnac cursed his officiousness, groaning; but Pepino reassured his impatience with a hundred drolleries. However, when the Colonel came out presently, he came out alone; and, moreover, turned the key in the door and pocketed it.
“Merely a prudential measure,” he explained to his guide. “These gaillards are not to be trusted in strange houses. I will convey him his supper by and by with my own hands.”
The figure neither answered nor seemed to hear. De Regnac, joining a rollicking company, dismissed him from his mind.
And alone in the cell stood mad Pepino.
But not for long. A trap opened in the floor, and from it sprouted, like a monstrous fungus, the head and shoulders of the giant monk. Massively, sombrely he arose, until the whole of his great bulk was emerged and standing in a burning scrutiny of the prisoner. A minute passed. Then, “Whence comest thou, Pepa Manoele? With whom, and for what purpose?” said the voice behind the folds.