"Excellency live here, sir," said he; "the gun-room—you go right through to him; but Excellency, he have the key. Me only doorman. I speak true, sir!"
I opened the door of the room he indicated, and feeling upon the wall switched on a lamp. It was the palace of a place, with great book-racks all round it, and arm-chairs as long as beds in every corner, and instruments and tables and pretty ornaments enough to furnish a mansion; but for none of these things had I eyes that night. Yonder, at the end of the room, a curtain opened above a door of iron; and through that door I saw at a glance the way to the gun-room lay. Ah, how my head tried to grapple with the trouble! The keys—where lay the keys? What chance or miracle would show me those? Was the key on Czerny's person or here in one of the drawers about? How much would I have paid to have been told that truly! But how to open it!
Now the Italian watched me with curious eyes as I went up to the door and drew the curtain back from it. A quick glance round the room did not show me what common sense was seeking—an iron safe in which Czerny's keys might lie. That he would keep the key of the armoury in the room, unless it were on his person, I had no doubt; and argument began to tell me that, after all, a safe might not be necessary. If alarm came it would come from the sea; or from the lower doors, which were locked against his devil's crew. I began to say that the keys would be in a drawer or bureau, and I was going to ransack every piece of furniture, when—and this seemed beyond all reason—I saw something shining bright upon a little table in the corner, and crossing the room I picked up the very thing for which a man might have offered the half of his fortune.
"Heaven above!" said I, "if this is it—if this is it———"
And why should it not have been? News of the wreck had come to the house like a sudden alarm leaping up in the night; the keys, which I held with greedy fingers, might they not have been in Czerny's hands when the bell clanged loudly through the startled corridors? I saw him, forgetful in his very greed, serving out rifles to his willing men, running up at hazard to be sure of the truth, leaving behind him that which might open his house to the world forever. And in my hand the fruit of his alarm was lying.
Ah, Heaven! it was the truth, and the door opened at my touch, and arms for a hundred men glittered in the dim light about me.
CHAPTER XX
THE FIRST ATTACK IS MADE BY CZERNY'S MEN
We carried the shot to the stairs' head, each man working as though his own life were the price of willing labour. If Miss Ruth had tidings of the great good fortune the night had sent to us, she would neither stay our hands with questions nor wait for idle answers. For a moment I saw her, a figure to haunt a man, looking out from the door of her own room; but a long hour passed before I changed a word with her or knew if that which we had done would win her consent. Now, indeed, was Ruth Bellenden at the parting of the ways, and of all in Czerny's house her lot must have been the hardest to bear. She had blotted the page of her old life that night and it never would be rewritten. None the less, a woman's courage could show me a bright face and all that girlish gentleness which was her truest charm. Never once would she speak of her own trouble, but always lightly of ours; so that we three—little Ruth, Dr. Gray, and Jasper Begg—might have been friends met upon any common adventure, and not at the crisis of that desperate endeavour. And so I think it will befall in all the perilous days, that what is written in the story-books about loud exclamations and pale faces and all the rest of it is the property of the story-teller, and that in plain truth you find none of these things, but just silent actors and simple talk, and no more noise of the difficulty than the common day will bring. This, at least, is my memory of that never-to-be-forgotten night. To-morrow might give us life or death—a grave beneath the seas or mastership of that house of mystery; though of this no word passed between us, but briefly we gave each other the news and asked it in return.