The window was out of the question, for in all probability the watch was still on the other side of the fosse—a tombstone for steadfastness and constancy. Count Victor could not see him now even by standing on his box and looking through the aperture, yet he gained something, he gained all, indeed, so pregnant a thing is accident—even the cosy charcoal-fires and the friends about him in the chateau near Saint Germain-en-Laye—by his effort to pierce the dusk and see across the ditch.
For as he was standing on the box, widening softly the aperture in the drifted snow upon the little window-ledge, he became conscious of cold air in a current beating upon the back of his head. The draught, that should surely be entering, was blowing out!
At once he thought of a chimney, but there was no fireplace in his cell. Yet the air must be finding entrance elsewhere more freely than from the window. Perplexity mastered him for a little, and then he concluded that the current could come from nowhere else than behind the array of marshalled empty bottles.
“Tonnerre!” said he to himself, “I have begun my career as wine merchant rather late in life or I had taken more interest in these dead gentlemen. Avancez, donc, mes princes! your ancient spirit once made plain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us see if now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon's profit.”
One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrude a sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked.
There was an airy space.
“Très bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres, perhaps I may forgive you even yet for being empty.”
Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away a passage—that ended in a dead wall!
It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then, been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searched every inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold, clammy, substantial.
“A delusion after all!” he said, bitterly disappointed. “A delusion, and not the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine.” He had almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffing current of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him for the second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm with his exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere over the level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behind the bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing, to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, and was apparently an incompleted curtain partitioning his cell from some space farther in.