"Then," she said, "he has been responsible for Ste. Marie's disappearance also. Ste. Marie became dangerous to him and so vanished. What can we do, Richard? What can we do?"
"'What can we do, Richard? What can we do?'"
CHAPTER XVIII
A CONVERSATION OVERHEARD
In the upper chamber at La Lierre the days dragged very slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours, and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of green things growing.
He suffered little pain. There was, for the first three or four days, a dull and feverish ache in his wounded leg, but presently even that passed and the leg hurt him only when he moved it. He thought sometimes that he would be grateful for a bit of physical anguish to make the hours pass more quickly.
The other inmates of the house held aloof from him. Once a day O'Hara came in to see to the wound, but he maintained a well-nigh complete silence over his work and answered questions only with a brief yes or no. Sometimes he did not answer them at all. The old Michel came twice daily, but this strange being had quite plainly been frightened into dumbness, and there was nothing to be got out of him. He shambled hastily about the place, his one scared eye upon the man in bed, and as soon as possible fled away, closing the door behind him. Sometimes Michel brought in the meals, sometimes his wife, a creature so like him that the two might well have passed for twin survivors of some unknown race; sometimes—thrice altogether in that first week—Coira O'Hara brought the tray, and she was as silent as the others.
So Ste. Marie was left alone to get through the interminable days as best he might, and ever afterwards the week remained in his memory as a sort of nightmare. Lying idle in his bed he evolved many surprising and fantastic schemes for escape—for getting word to the outside world of his presence here, and one by one he gave them up in disgust as their impossibility forced itself upon him. Plans and schemes were useless while he lay bed-ridden, unfamiliar even with the house wherein he dwelt, with the garden and park that surrounded it.
As for aid from any of the inmates of the place, that was to be laughed at. They were engaged together in a scheme so desperate that failure must mean utter ruin to them all. He sometimes wondered if the two servants could be bribed. Avarice unmistakable gleamed from their little glittering rat-like eyes, but he was sure that they would sell out for no small sum and, in so far as he could remember, there had been in his pockets when he came here not more than five or six louis. Doubtless the old Michel had managed to abstract those in his daily offices about the room, for Ste. Marie knew that the clothes hung in a closet across from his bed. He had seen them there once when the closet door was open.