“He that endureth to the end shall be saved.”
“Well done, good and faithful servant.”
“Watch and pray.”
The guardianship of the house in the Pines was in the hands of a hundred men, each of whom served a week at a time, with any one whom he might choose as a companion. Dylar himself took his turn. The rules were strict. Pierre remembered them when it was too late.
When the three travelers reached the house, therefore, there was a woman alone on guard, with strict orders to signal everything, but on no account to allow herself to be seen nor heard; and the hidden door was unbarred, and the torrent that shut the road to San Salvador was turned away.
They alighted and tied their donkeys to a post, where they could drink or browse at will.
“My opinion,” said the viscomte, “is that this old building was not always so innocent as it probably is now. It was perhaps a hiding-place for plunder or prisoners, used by the wicked old family which preceded the Dylars at the castle.”
They hung their basket of luncheon to a pine-branch, set their bottle of wine in the running water, and looked about them. To men accustomed to the luxuries of civilization, and for a time, at least, weary of them, there was something delightful in this superb solitude of rock and tree, this silence stirred only by the sweetest and most delicate sounds of nature. It seemed but a day since a pushing crowd had surrounded them, the paving-stones of a city had been beneath their feet, and the Gleipnir cord of social etiquette had bound them; and to-morrow again all that world would possess them, and this scene become as a fairy dream in their memories.
They wandered about a while under the trees, explored a few rods of the northward road, and came back to eat their luncheon, sitting on the moss and pine-needles.
The Frenchman looked up at the beetling rock that overtopped the house before them. “I have a vision,” he said. “I am clairvoyant. I see through the rock yonder into a long succession of low caves where you must walk stooping. At the entrance of these caves sits ‘une blanche aux yeux noirs,’ and all the floor is strewn with ingots of pure gold. As you look along the windings for miles, that gold lights the place up like a fire.”