'Pshaw!' she answered with a laugh of disdain. 'Those boys, Martin? They can laugh, fight, and ride; but for the rest, pouf! They are not company. However, it is bedtime, and you must go. I think you have done me good. Good night. I wish--I wish I could do you good,' she added kindly, almost timidly.
To some extent she had. I went away feeling that mine was not the only trouble in the world, nor my loneliness the only loneliness. She was a stranger in a besieged city, a woman among men, exposed, despite her rank, to many of a woman's perils; and doubtless she had felt Fraulein Max's defection and the Waldgrave's strange conduct more deeply than any one watching her daily bearing would have supposed. So much the greater reason was there that I should do my duty loyally, and putting her first to whom I owed so much, let no sorrow of my own taint my service.
But God knows there is one passion that defies argument. The house next Herr Krapp's had a fascination for me which I could not resist; and though I did not again leave my lady unguarded, but arranged that Steve should stop at home and watch the door, four o'clock the next afternoon saw me sneaking away in search of St. Austin's. Of course I soon found it; but there I came to a check. Round the churchyard stood a number of quiet family houses, many-gabled and shaded by limes, and doubtless once occupied by reverend canons and prebendaries. But no one of these held such a position that it could shoulder Herr Krapp's, or be by any possibility the house I wanted. The churchyard lay too far from the street for that.
I walked up the row twice before I would admit this; but at last I made it certain. Still Herr Krapp must know his own premises, and not much cast down, I was going to knock at a chance door and put the question, when my eyes fell on a man who sat at work in the churchyard. He wore a mason's apron, and was busily deepening the inscription on a tablet let into the church wall. He seemed to be the very man to know, and I went to him.
'I want a house which looks into the Neu Strasse,' I said. 'It is the next house to Herr Krapp's. Can you direct me to the door?'
He looked at me for a moment, his hammer suspended. Then he pointed to the farther end of the row. 'There is an alley,' he said in a hoarse, croaking voice. 'The door is at the end.'
I thought his occupation an odd one, considering the state of the city; but I had other things to dwell on, and hastened off to the place he indicated. Here, sure enough, I found the mouth of a very narrow passage which, starting between the last house and a blind wall, ran in the required direction. It was a queer place, scarcely wider than my shoulders, and with two turns so sharp that I remember wondering how they brought their dead out. In one part it wound under the timbers of a house; it was dark and somewhat foul, and altogether so ill-favoured a path that I was glad I had brought my arms.
In the end it ran into a small, paved court, damp but clean, and by comparison light. Here I saw the door I wanted facing me. Above it the house, with its narrow front of one window on each floor, and every floor jutting out a little, gave a strange impression of gloomy height. The windows were barred and dusty, the plaster was mildewed, the beams were dark with age. Whatever secrets, innocent or the reverse, lay within, one thing was plain--this front gave the lie to the other.
I liked the aspect of things so little that it was with a secret tremor I knocked, and heard the hollow sound go echoing through the house. So certain did I feel that something was wrong, that I wondered what the inmates would do, and whether they would lie quiet and refuse to answer, or show force and baffle me that way. No foreign windows looked into the little court in which I stood; three of the walls were blind. The longer I gazed about me, the more I misdoubted the place.
Yet I turned to knock again; but did not, being anticipated. The door slid open under my hand, slowly wide open, and brought me face to face with an old toothless hag, whose bleared eyes winked at me like a bat's in sunshine. I was so surprised both by her appearance and the opening of the door, that I stood tongue-tied, staring at her and at the bare, dusty, unswept hall behind her.