Bluet shrugged his shoulders ere he answered, then he said:
"'Tis scarce possible to say. Mon Dieu! in this place day and night scarce know distinction. They may sit till daybreak--I have known them do it when making a great clearance, and we have had to rouse our guests from their beds to go before them. Yet, 'tis not always so; ordinarily, by midnight, the affair is finished."
"So that," said Bertie, "I can know nothing for certain until the morrow."
Again Bluet shrugged his shoulders, again he answered dubiously that, "en vêrité, that might be so;" and then, saying that "Monsieur le Capitaine must hope for the best," he took himself off.
So, in this hapless frame of mind, Bertie sat down to pass the first night in his new lodging. That he should sleep was impossible, and therefore bidding the marquis, who had already got into his bed, "Good-night," he dragged a chair in front of the barred fireplace and sat there brooding through the hours. Of Fordingbridge, who was lying outside his bed, neither of the others had taken any heed, and even when he muttered incoherently Bertie regarded him not.
As he sat there watching the fire die, he heard the great clock over the gateway strike eleven; as he still sat on, listening for any sound which might announce the coming of those who would be sent to fetch him, he heard it strike twelve. Yet still no one came. By this time the candle in the socket high up out of reach was flickering and flaring at its last ebb and throwing great shadows on the walls; and once, as he looked round the room, disturbed by some movement of Fordingbridge's, he saw that the latter was sitting up on his bed peering at him with his great hollow vacant eyes, in which the glare of madness was almost intensified by the unsteady waverings of the candle's flame. Then, as the great clock tolled one, the light went out, and he heard Fordingbridge throw himself back on his bed.
Still the time went on--once Fordingbridge laughed in the dark, an imbecile, vacant laugh; once, he could have sworn, he heard him mutter "Sholto!" and once he moved uneasily on his pallet and groaned--and then the clock struck two. But still he sat on in the darkness before the dead fire, waiting, waiting. And, at last, he heard a sound of a door opening in a distant corridor, then another, and then footsteps approaching. And a moment later Bluet's voice was speaking outside.
"Monsieur," he heard him say, "Je regrette beau-coup, but the judges have departed; monsieur's chance is not yet arrived."
And with a heartbroken groan Bertie groped his way to where his bed had been placed and flung himself upon it, while, as he did so, he heard his maniacal foe at the other end of the calotte muttering to himself and laughing once more.