Not until Stargarde had crossed the veranda and entered her rooms did MacDaly permit them to go. Then, with many adjurations to be quiet, they were allowed to slip out from the washhouse and make their way back to town.
After their departure MacDaly threw himself on his bed. He might at any time be summoned to an interview with Stargarde and it would be well for him to refresh himself by a nap.
In a few minutes he was snoring loudly and going over again in his brutish sleep the tragic story of Étienne Delavigne, that had been brought to his mind first by Colonel Armour, whose appearance never failed to move him strongly, and secondly by the unexpected apparition of the young French girl, who was so marvelously like her father.
In a troubled phantasmagoria Colonel Armour was before him—not the Colonel Armour of to-day keeping up his ghastly fight with old age, but the handsome middle-aged man of twenty years before. Stanton Armour was there too, a bright-faced happy lad. Étienne Delavigne, their modest and retiring bookkeeper, and Madeleine Delavigne, his shy, proud, aristocratic wife, the pet of the Armour family. Then a horrid jumble took place—the mild and gentle Étienne Delavigne was furiously angry with the colonel, and a quarrel was taking place between the two of which he, Derrick Edward Fitz-James O’Grady MacDaly was sole witness. Delavigne was flung out of his employer’s office, the warehouse was on fire, and the evil one appeared in person to seize the eavesdropping MacDaly, who lay on his back rigid with terror.
While he was sleeping and dreaming a tall dark figure had come noiselessly up the steps to his room, a hand was laid on his shoulder, first lightly, then more heavily. MacDaly started up on his bed, bathed in perspiration and trembling violently. A tongue of flame leaping up from the dull fire showed him a brown face that in his first confusion he imagined must belong to some evil spirit that had been sent for him.
He muttered, “Not ready, spirit,” put up a frantic prayer for protection, and clutching at his bedclothes as if they would be an anchor to hold him to earth, shrunk into as small a space as possible.
His visitor was Joe the Indian, who grinned in delight at MacDaly’s terror. “Cunnel sendum,” he said in a sepulchral voice, and slipping something that rustled under MacDaly’s chin, as he found it impossible to lay hold of his hand, he withdrew as silently as he had come.
MacDaly’s terror was over. Springing up, he poked the fire, looked at the denomination of his bill, and then proceeded to caper around the room on the tips of his toes.
CHAPTER XVIII
WARM FRIENDS
When MacDaly recovered from the effect of his joy over Colonel Armour’s gift he muttered to himself: “Now for something to satisfy, regale, and otherwise gladden the inner man.”