"I'll win my lady!"
ucas's prophecy came to grief within five minutes of the making. For when the musketeer unbarred the house door for me, the first thing I saw was the morning sun.
My spirits danced at sight of him, as he himself might dance on Easter day. Within the close, candle-lit room I had had no thought but that it was still black midnight; and now at one step I passed from the gloomy house into the heartening sunshine of a new clean day. I ran along as joyously as if I had left the last of my troubles behind me, forgotten in some dark corner of the Hôtel de Lorraine. Always my heart lifts when, after hours within walls, I find myself in the open again. I am afraid in houses, but out of doors I have no fear of harm from any man or any thing.
Though Sir Sun was risen this half-hour, and at home we should all have been about our business, these lazy Paris folk were still snoring. They liked well to turn night into day and lie long abed of a morning. Although here a shopkeeper took down shutters, and there a brisk servant-lass swept the door-step, yet I walked through a sleeping city, quiet as our St. Quentin woods, save that here my footsteps echoed in the emptiness. At length, with the knack I have, whatever my stupidities, of finding my way in a strange place, I arrived before the courtyard of the Trois Lanternes. The big wooden doors were indeed shut, but when I had pounded lustily awhile a young tapster, half clad and cross as a bear, opened to me. I vouchsafed him scant apology, but, dropping on a heap of hay under a shed in the court, passed straightway into dreamless slumber.
When I awoke my good friend the sun was looking down at me from near his zenith, and my first happy thought was that I was just in time for dinner. Then I discovered that I had been prodded out of my rest by the pitchfork of a hostler.
"Sorry to disturb monsieur, but the horses must be fed."
"Oh, I am obliged to you," I said, rubbing my eyes. "I must go up to M. le Comte."
"He has been himself to look at you, and gave orders you were not to be disturbed. But that was last week. Dame! you slept like a sabot."
It did not take me long to brush the straw off me, wash my face at the trough, and present myself before monsieur. He was dressed and sitting at table in his bedchamber, while a drawer served him with dinner.