But as a matter of habit, neither of them appeared to care very much for a regular night's rest. You would catch them, indeed, closing their eyes after dinner over a newspaper, or when Alida was practising on her noble grand piano, the chief pride and luxury of the Keller house.
But Hugh and I, who slept with our door of communication open in order to talk to one another in case of sleeplessness, could hear Keller and Linn moving about at all hours of the night down in the silence of the ground floor—sometimes advertising their presence by a little silvery rattle of glass set on a tray, the dull fall of a log on the chimney and irons, or the curious slip-shuffle of Linn's walk. Sometimes, too, we heard voices, but that not often. Once about the end of the first week, when I could not sleep, I slipped down for a stroll about the town. It was half-past two of a black February morning, and the snow swirls were waltzing like spinning tops all about the market square. But there in the archway, his back to the carven lintel, stood Keller Bey, calmly smoking his pipe and looking out on the black turmoil as though it had been the cool of an August evening. Linn heard us talking, and came quickly to see who was there. Even at that hour she was in her ordinary dress, and she dried her hands composedly on a long sheath apron of blue toile nationale.
"Why are you not asleep?" she demanded sharply. "Keller, you are teaching this young man bad habits."
His wife's accusation only made Keller wag his head wisely. Instantly I took all blame upon myself. I had not been able to sleep, I said, I was ashamed to disturb Deventer by my restlessness.
"You drank too much of that black coffee last night, Monsieur Auguste" (thus had Angus gone wrong). "I must ration you in future, so that you can get your natural sleep as young folks should."
I hastened out into the night with Keller's huge "pellerine" cast about my shoulders, and the hood reaching my ears. It was a comfortable garment of some unknown African cloth, rough as frieze and warm as wool. The sudden dashes of snow swooping upon me were turned victoriously aside by its formidable brown folds, and I felt as I wandered in the black of the streets with the buildings towering dim and shadowy above me, like one who in a storm has by some magic carried his house along with him.
No soldiers were bivouacking in the streets that night. The squares were void of bonfires. All the red shirts and blue breeches had alike found shelter, for the superfluous regiments were now quartered upon the neighbouring villages, or had marched to their head-quarters at Dijon.
Back and forth I tramped, from the Mairie clock with its dim one-candle power illumination of face to the dark mass of the towers of the Holy Trinity, I patrolled the town from end to end.
It was perhaps an hour or a little more that I wandered so, tiring myself for sleep, my face beaten upon pleasantly by the fierce gusts of snow charging down from among the chimney-pots, or driving level across the open spaces. At last I turned my face towards the market square, which I entered by the little dusky street of the Arches, and so came suddenly upon the Keller house at the angle opposite to the mayoral belfry.
I had expected Keller in the same position waiting for me, but when I sheltered in the archway, no Keller was in sight. Behind me, however, the door stood open, and as I stood dusting down and shaking out the thick folds of Keller's pellerine, I was conscious of a stir behind me. I turned my head in doubt, and was just in time to see the man himself whisk upstairs with the curious enamelled iron water-jug in his hand, which is known through all the South as a "bouillotte."