Valerie, alone in her room and oppressed by the vague infection of wakefulness and fear, moved from window to window listening to the wild noises that were abroad, and trying to reason herself out of the conviction of coming danger, which held her from sleep.
She had thrown back the curtains from the windows. Her room occupied an exposed corner of the Castle tower, which stood on the edge of the gorge through which the Kofn chafed its way to the plains below the Ford. A narrow strip of ground scarcely six feet in width alone separated the wall of the tower from the precipice that fell sheer away to the foaming water far below.
She tried to read but could not fix her attention. Her heart seemed in her ears and answered to every sound.
And all the while in the scattered rooms and shadowy passages the drama which involved her life was being slowly played out. Below on the ground floor of the tower Elmur and Sagan sat together.
'By the way, my dear Count, have you ever thought of the possibility of Captain Colendorp's refusal to see things in our light?' Elmur was asking, after an interval filled in by the noises of wind and water which could not be shut out of the Castle on such a night.
The Count looked up and scowled.
'Leave the management of the affair to me,' he said. 'Unless I were sure of my man, I should not be such a fool as to bring him here to listen to what I shall say to him to-night;' then he added as an afterthought, 'When once we have begun, Baron von Elmur, there can be no going back. Remember that! The game must now be played to the end, whatever that end is.'
Elmur pondered. Sagan was a bad tool, at once stubborn and secretive, cunning enough to recognise and to resent handling, thickheaded and vain enough to blunder ruinously. And Elmur found at the last and most important moment that for some unexplained reason he had lost the whip-hand of Count Simon.
Up to this interview, by alternate effrontery and flattery, he had kept his place in the Count's confidence, and exerted a guiding and restraining influence over him. Now Sagan held him at arm's length, and was plainly determined to act according to his own judgment without consulting the German. The mischief had, of course, been done by the news of Elmur's engagement to Selpdorf's daughter, for Sagan, like others of his limited mental development, was sensitively suspicious. Hence the bond between the two men was weak, inasmuch as neither liked nor trusted the other, but it was strong, since both were tenacious and both had staked all the future on the chance of forcing a new régime upon Maäsau the Free. At this crisis, however, Elmur would gladly have hedged or masked his position, for he knew himself to be overmuch at the mercy of the equivocal tact and discretion of his ungovernable coadjutor.
'I cannot help thinking that my presence at the outset will make Captain Colendorp shy at any proposition whatever,' said Elmur again.