“One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from every brawler and—”
“Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?”
The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely. Gentlemen, they were, hastily but richly dressed—one of them wounded severely in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving aside Wessel’s ready miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the room and with their swords went through the business of poking carefully into all suspected dark spots in the room, further extending their search to Wessel’s bedchamber.
“Is he hid here?” demanded the wounded man fiercely.
“Is who here?”
“Any man but you.”
“Only two others that I know of.”
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the gallants made as though to prick him through.
“I heard a man on the stairs,” he said hastily, “full five minutes ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up.”
He went on to explain his absorption in “The Faerie Queene” but, for the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were anaesthetic to culture.