There he partly opened his lantern to look at the floor at his feet, for the farmer had warned him to be careful of the staircase.
[5]These sheaves, which are rare and much prized by archæologists, have retained a sort of traditional vogue in certain localities; the potteries of Verneuil make very pretty ones after old models. The small urn, with four or six handles on several different levels, and surmounted by birds or flowers, is reproduced in their system of decoration.
[XLV]
It was a spiral staircase of great beauty, broad enough for six persons and as light as the sticks of a fan. It was built of a friable white stone; many steps had been entirely destroyed by the fall of some portion of the building; but those which remained seemed freshly hewn and bore no trace of wear. At each half turn of the spiral was a step, supported by a grinning face, a fantastic beast, or the bust of an armed man carved in relief on the wall.
The marquis was interested in these figures, which seemed to move in the flickering light of his lantern.
He ascended the stairs slowly, listening whenever he stopped; and as he heard no other sound than that of the wind in the crumbling roof, and as the doors of the rooms that he passed were secured by padlocks, he became more and more doubtful of the existence of any inhabitants whatsoever. Thus he reached the upper floor, where were the two apartments originally intended for the châtelain.
As it was the custom, in the Middle Ages, for the lord of the manor to have his own quarters under the eaves, and, if necessary, to destroy the staircase and sustain a siege in his own apartments, gaps were often left in building stairways, so that the châtelain could reach his nest only by means of a ladder which he drew up after him at night. In other instances the steps of the last flight were purposely made so thin that a few blows with a bar sufficed to shatter them.
The latter was the case at the château of Brilbault; and the gaps for which the marquis had to be on the lookout were caused by accident, as we have said. With his long legs he was able to straddle them without serious danger.
These two rooms being those which the farmer had mentioned as suitable for Lucilio's occupancy in case of need, Bois-Doré's first impulse was to go in and see if they were provided with window-frames, or at least with shutters at the windows; for all of the narrow, deep-set windows in the stairway, with stone benches placed diagonally across the embrasures, admitted violent gusts of wind, from which he had difficulty in protecting his light.
But, as he was on the point of opening those seignioral apartments, of which he had the keys, the marquis hesitated.