“You ought to have known me better, Count. As if all this prinking wouldn’t tell me what was on hand even if I hadn’t used my eyes last night! You deserve I should make a real blood-curdling, soul-thrilling, romantic, pathetic life-drama out of you and your Queen, but you and I are partners, and I’m on the square, any way.”
The rock-cut staircase up which Cyril and Mansfield made their way was narrow and winding, but quite dry, and the edges of the stone were as sharp as if they had only been hewn a day. Air was admitted from the outer world by means of shafts reaching to the face of the rock, but these were too small to allow the entrance of more than a ray of light, which served to increase by contrast the surrounding darkness. A quantity of sand, admitted in the course of ages through these air-shafts, was heaped in the corners, but Cyril pointed out to Mansfield that the flowing robes of the nocturnal visitors had swept a clear pathway in the middle of the steps. The two men went on, up and up, now turning to the right and now to the left, sometimes finding themselves on ground which was almost level, and again confronted with steps nearly two feet high, until there was a change in the sound of their echoing footsteps, and they discovered that instead of solid rock the walls and roof were now of masonry.
“This is the wall of the fortress, then!” said Cyril. “Interesting question where we shall come out—in the palace itself, or hopelessly outside.”
He was hot and panting, and his voice vibrated strangely. Mansfield suggested a rest, but he shook his head. “No, no,” he said impatiently; “let us go through with it now, and know the worst.”
The passage ended abruptly in a stone door like that by which they had left the cave. Mansfield pushed it open, cautiously at first, for in the blinding glare of sunlight into which it admitted them they could not at once see where they were. Then came disappointment. True, they stood inside the circuit of the vast wall visible from the plain, but before them loomed the huge side of the palace, blank and windowless, built of immense blocks of bevelled stone. Travelling upwards from one course of Cyclopean masonry to another, the eye could discover no opening into the interior of the building until it reached the colonnade supported on columns which crowned the roof. Between the palace and the outer wall was a space of waste ground overgrown with coarse dry grass and low bushes, and Mansfield crept softly among the scattered rocks and fragments of carved stone, which lay everywhere around, towards the back of the building, and peered round the corner.
“Nothing there but a few servants’ huts and attempts at gardening—certainly no door into the palace,” he whispered, returning.
“Very well, we will try this way,” said Cyril, turning to the right, but here again was disappointment. The entrance to the palace was before them, indeed—a huge pillared portico with great stone doors; but these were as closely shut as the wooden gate facing them, which the angry lady had fastened behind her two days before. A small grated window above the door was the only opening here, and it was far beyond even Mansfield’s reach. But Cyril did not exhibit any sign of discouragement.
“Take one,” he said, sitting down at the base of one of the columns and holding out his cigar-case. “There are only two left, but Sir Philip Sidney’s generosity was nothing to mine when there is anything to be gained by it. What I want to gain just now is an interview with the lady of the gateway, whom I take to be Princess Anna Mirkovics.”
Mansfield obeyed, much puzzled, and they smoked in silence for some minutes. Then a female voice, speaking in German, broke the stillness.
“Those servants again!” it said. “How often have I forbidden them to smoke in the neighbourhood of the Queen’s apartments! They know how much she dislikes the smell. Which of them can it be?”