But Moche was in no joking mood; he demanded: “And now?”
“Now,” Nini proceeded, still speaking under her breath; but opening the door a little wider, so that Moche could slip into the room, which was still in darkness, “now he’s snoring like a good ’un! suppose it’s the powder you tipped into his champagne; I bet he’s good to sleep on till to-morrow morning, come what may.”
Moche looked down at Ascott, who lay stretched on the divan, and saw that Nini was speaking the truth; the young man was sleeping like a top. The old usurer shook him by the arm, twitched his hair, but the Englishman, as drunk as a lord and bowled over into the bargain by the soporific he had swallowed, was beyond rousing.
Without relighting the lights, Moche ran to the window and waved his hat out of it; then coming back into the room, he laughed delightedly.
“First-rate, my gal, it’s going first-rate,” he assured Nini; “to my mind the job’s as good as done!”
The two accomplices fell silent a moment, then with one impulse both stood listening. On the stairs communicating directly with the street the sound of stealthy footsteps could be heard. It was “Bull’s-eye” and the “Gasman” coming up.
CHAPTER XVI
NEXT MORNING!
Heavy-eyed, with a smarting brow and a raging headache, Ascott awoke late the following morning. It was about ten o’clock when the young man in the big four-poster, whose twisted Renaissance pillars almost touched the ceiling, stretched his cramped limbs and slowly came back to a consciousness of his surroundings. His throat was parched with an insatiable thirst; mechanically and without opening his eyes, for he knew to a nicety the position of the various articles that stood near his bed, he extended a faltering arm towards a little table at the bedside, reaching for the water bottle his carefully trained servant used to put there every night full of water. His hand felt over the marble top of the table, but failed to find what he sought. He was so weary, his head was throbbing so painfully he could not at first summon up courage enough to rise. Again lazily stretching, he turned over between the sheets and tried to get to sleep again, setting his face to the wall to guard his smarting eyes against the light of day that penetrated the heavy curtains drawn across the window.
Not a sound was audible; the mansion the wealthy Englishman had purchased some weeks ago was as silent as the grave, the domestics far away in the basement where the offices and kitchen were situated going about their business softly so as not to disturb their master’s slumbers. Nor did the latter feel the smallest desire to get up, though out of doors the weather was magnificent, the sky of Paris as blue as on an Italian summer’s day and the temperature, genial even at this morning hour, promising an afternoon of almost tropical heat.
But sleep refused to come at the young man’s call; his throat was burning, his mouth dry as a bone. Drink he must at all costs to quench the fire that consumed him, to mitigate these painful and inevitable consequences of his over indulgence in the generous wines of the night before. Screwing up his courage to the needful effort, slowly, painfully, moving like an automaton, Ascott sat up in bed, clasped his damp brow, then slipped one leg from between the sheets; the other followed, his naked feet shivering as they touched the bedside mat. Catching a glimpse of a dressing gown lying within reach on a chair, he put it on with the cross and sulky looks of an ill-used martyr.