“Pardon!” he repeated. “It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know”—he smiled the smile of the flâneur—“I did not know it was, let me say, Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I hope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading.”
Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled—an indescribable thing, but a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in that haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue Beautreillis.
“I fear I have not intruded for the first time,” he went on, in a different tone. “It must have been your chamber I somewhat unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me—at least I had come to consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here.”
“It is easily explained,” said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.
“There is positively not the necessity,” protested Count Victor, realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.
“But you must understand that—” she went on.
Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. “The explanation is due from me, madame: I protest,” said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now. France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the crumbling walls hummed with the incessant wind and the vibration of the tempestuous sea; upon the outer stones the gargoyles poured their noisy waters—but this—but this was Paradise!
“The explanation must be mine,” said he. “I was prying upon no amour, but seeking to confirm some vague alarms and suspicions.”
“They were, perhaps, connected with my father,” she said, with a divination that Count Victor had occasion to remember again.
“Your father!” he exclaimed, astonished that one more of his misconceptions should be thus dispelled. “Then I have been guilty of the unpardonable liberty of spying upon my hostess.”