“It is my last chance, if I leave to-morrow,” he thought. “I shall satisfy myself as to the nocturnal visitor, the magic flautist, and the bewildering Annapla—and probably find the mystery as simple as the egg in the conjurer's bottle when all's ended!”
That night he yawned behind his hand at supper in the midst of his host's account of his interview with Petullo the Writer, who had promised to secure lodging for Count Victor in a day or two, and the Baron showed no disinclination to conclude their somewhat dull sederunt and consent to an early retirement.
“I have something pressing to do before I go to bed myself,” he said, restoring by that simple confession some of Count Victor's first suspicions. They were to be confirmed before an hour was past.
He went up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's sordid amours. On the other hand, he could not deny to himself that there was what the Baronne de Chenier would have called the little Lyons shopkeeper in the suspicions he had against his host, and in the steps he proposed to take to satisfy his curiosity. He might have debated the situation with himself till midnight, or as long as Mungo's candles lasted him, had not a shuffling and cautious step upon the stair suggested that some one was climbing to the unused chambers above. Putting punctilio in his pocket, he threw open his door, and had before him a much-perplexed Baron of Doom, wrapped from neck to heel in a great plaid of sombre tartan and carrying a candle!
Doom stammered an inaudible excuse.
“Pardon!” said Count Victor, ironically in spite of himself, as he saw his host's abashed countenance. “I fear I intrude on a masquerade. Pray, do not mind me. It was that I thought the upper flat uninhabited, and no one awake but myself.”
“You have me somewhat at a disadvantage,” said Doom coldly, resenting the irony. “I'll explain afterwards.”
“Positively, there is no necessity,” replied Count Victor, with a profound bow, and he re-entered and shut the door.
There was no longer any debate between punctilio and precaution. He had seen the bulge of the dagger below Macnaughton's plaid, and the plaid itself had not been drawn too closely round the wearer to conceal wholly the unaccountable fact that he had a Highland dress beneath it. A score of reasons for this eccentric affair came to Montaiglon, but all of them were disquieting, not the least so the notion that his host conspired perhaps with the Macfarlanes, who sought their revenge for their injured clansman. He armed himself with his sword, blew out his candles, and, throwing himself upon his bed, lay waiting for the signal he expected. In spite of himself, sleep stole on him twice, and he awakened each time to find an hour was gone.
It was a night of pouring rain. Great drops beat on the little window, a gargoyle poured a noisy stream of water, and a loud sea cried off the land and broke upon the outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and upwards to the flight where the Baron had been going. Whether he should carry his inquiry further or retire and shut his door again with a forced indifference to these perplexing events was but the toss of a coin. As he listened a slight sound at the foot of the stair—the sound of a door softly closed and a bar run in deep channels—decided him, and he waited to confound the master of Doom.