Considering the events of that night, one may be tempted to suppose that I lay awake for a long time in restless anxiety. But I did no such thing. I had had a hard day of it, and, in addition to that, my personal sorrow and the reaction from what I had passed through, so overcame me that I fell into a kind of stupor, and slept without undressing. When I awoke in the morning it was broad day. The room, however, was not bright, for the shutters, which had been open when I went to bed, had blown together during the night. A sheet of dusty sunlight slanted through the room. I lay half awake, half asleep, watching the shadows fold like tapestry in the sunbeams. I tried to see pictures in them as one does in the clouds of a summer’s night; and soon I found myself dwelling upon the grotesque features of the dwarf, and on the words he had spoken to me when we parted the night before.

“I shall not tell you what we have been doing,” he had said. “But I swear, before God, hereafter to be your true friend.”

I knew that he had spoken the truth. A few moments before he had been engaged in an attempt 197to take my life; yet, when he said these words, his voice rang with unmistakable sincerity. He looked me in the face, which is not the way of a liar, and the expression in his face was the expression of truth itself. Of this fact I was mortally certain. What had I done to make his feeling change towards me? We had had but a small matter of words. I had helped him to carry poor old Meg to a place of safety. What else had I done? “Ha!” thought I. “It was she who first warned me of my danger.” Could it be that there was some connection between these two, some unexplained relation that would put a new light upon the small kindness I had shown her? I sprang to my feet. Then I discovered—for I had come fully awake at last—that the door of my room was shut tight and barred on the outside.

I fell into a rage. Had they not done enough the night before? Was this some new trap they had laid for me? I beat and banged upon the floor. I kicked viciously against the door. It did not take much of this to bring a response. There was a clattering of feet in the corridor without, the bolt was quickly drawn back and then the door flew open. In the hallway opposite my door stood the patroon. The white-haired dwarf, peering beneath his arm, was making strange faces at me from his half-sheltered position behind his master’s back. Did he mean them for signs of warning? Beyond 198these two clustered half a dozen surprised domestics.

Van Volkenberg gazed at me for a moment and then burst into a fit of hearty laughter.

“So they locked you in, did they? Ha, ha, ha! I forgot to tell them that there was a new lodger in the house. We forgot it, eh, Louis?”

He spoke with his usual precision, as if reciting a lesson. There was no light in his eyes and the moment he was done talking his face became stolid and set like one who has said his part and was glad to be done with it. The patroon was a good actor, and yet there were times when a child could see through his artifice. As he turned to the dwarf, Louis’ face, which a moment before had been strangely contorted, instantly grew impassive. I conceived the idea that he had been making signs, wishing to convey some secret intelligence to me. Whereupon I resolved to give him a chance to speak to me in private if he chose to do so.

“By my soul, St. Vincent!” exclaimed the patroon. “You have slept late.”

“Have I? Indeed, I do not know what time it is,” I answered, scarce knowing what to say. The patroon was so ill at ease, so manifestly acting a part, that I knew it behooved me to be careful and not to lose my temper.

“It is hard upon the hour of noon,” he continued. “Come, come; you shall break your fast royally despite the hour.”

199We set out along the corridor, which was dimly lighted and echoed the sound of our footsteps in a gloomy manner. This was the time to test the dwarf, and to find out what he had to communicate to me.

“I have forgotten my sword,” I cried to him. “Will you fetch it?”

Without a moment’s hesitation the dwarf started back towards my room. I can see him yet, almost running in his quick, mincing steps, his half-bent arms dipping to the same time, and his ill-shaped head and flowing locks of white hair all bobbing together in unison. Yet for all this apparent haste he progressed no faster than an ordinary walk.

I let him proceed but a short distance when I made some excuse to the patroon and followed his henchman to my room. When I got there, Louis was already bending over my bed, where my sword lay. One arm was up and one heel slightly off the ground, as if he had suddenly been arrested in the midst of his capricious way of walking. I touched him on the shoulder and he collapsed with startled fear. Evidently he had not heard me approach.

“Louis,” I said, “that was a strange promise you made to me last night. What did you mean by it?”

Suddenly his whole figure was transformed. I saw this change often in the next few weeks, but then it was new to me and almost took my breath 200away. When Louis walked he seemed all joints and quivering elastic bands. Now, like a flash, he turned to stone—nay, to steel and iron. Every tremor of his body vanished. Every line in his face, the very droop of his hair made one feel as if the Gorgon’s head had been thrust before him. Then he gripped my hand, and I winced inwardly from the pain of it.

“Hush,” he whispered. “You can trust me. She is my mother. Hark! The patroon is coming back. Let me warn you hastily. There is distrust here. Do not start whatever you may hear down stairs. Beware, you are treading on a powder mine. Believe me. I am your friend. She is my mother. Let that suffice for reason.”

That moment the patroon returned. Louis began helping me to buckle on my sword. In a moment all his rigidity had disappeared and his old manner returned to him. I had no time then to think of the suspicion he had referred to, for the patroon led me down stairs to the dining room at once. As we traversed the corridor for the second time, I could hear Louis’ pattering steps behind us like a faithful dog; and in my mind’s eye I saw his wagging head and bent arms keeping time to his nimble step.

As I say, we went below, but had hardly entered the dining room when Mistress Miriam darted into it. She was bonneted, dressed in riding clothes, and her cheeks were flushed with exercise.

201“Oh, father,” she cried passionately, “Monsieur Le Bourse is dead.”

“Dead!” echoed the patroon.

At that moment I felt Louis Van Ramm’s fingers close on my wrist like a vise. In an instant he relaxed his grip, for the patroon turned to look at me.

“You are pale,” he said abruptly. “You should be hungry.”

But of the two, he must have been the paler.

However, he would have nothing more to say to me till I had eaten. I was not sorry, for, in very truth, I was as hungry as a bear, and the silence that followed gave me time to think over what had happened.

Evidently Louis’s warning and the locking of my door were pieces of the same cloth. No doubt of Louis’s honesty came into my mind. I knew by an experience I had had in France that a deformed person like this dwarf was likely, however vicious he might be at heart, to feel a dog-like attachment to any one who had befriended him. The fact that Meg was his mother was enough to justify my belief in his honesty. I felt now that, beyond peradventure, I might trust in him. But the suspicion he had warned me against—what was that? What could it be but that I was discovered? I recalled the fact that both Lady Marmaduke and Pierre had recognized me. Had the patroon? I 202confess to trembling at the moment, and I looked up to see if I were noticed.

“Your hand trembles,” said the patroon. Trust him for seeing everything that was in sight!

“Trembles,” I answered. “Which?”

“Your right,” he replied, with a vicious smile on his dark features.

I stretched my right hand out before him as steady as his own.

“Mere accident,” I said, careful not to show either too much disregard or too much interest in what he had just said. “What made you think so, or did it really tremble for an instant?”

“I thought it did, Le Bourse, but I may have been mistaken.”

I fell to eating savagely. He had called me by my right name! Ah, yes; Louis was right. That was his master’s suspicion, was it? But now I was fully warned. He should not catch me napping. I paid no attention to his remark and went on eating. This behavior seemed to reassure the patroon. When I next looked up he wore a more satisfied expression. His elbows were on the edge of the table and his eyes fixed on the tips of his fingers, which were tapping each other softly.

“Now you are done eating,” he said at last, “let us hear her story. Miriam, tell us of your visit.”

I then learned that, for some reason unknown to herself, Mistress Van Volkenberg had been sent by her father to Lady Marmaduke’s, in New York. 203Her errand was to inquire my whereabouts. She was told at the hall that I was dead and that my body lay in the small room upstairs, which had been mine.

“Ay, but was he dead?” interrupted her father. “Did you see him, Miriam?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I saw him. Oh!” She shuddered and turned to leave the room.

Mistress Van Volkenberg, then almost unknown to me, was a woman who could not pass unnoticed in any place. She was tall and slender, with a high forehead and piercing brown eyes like her father’s. What most characterized her, however, was the color in her cheeks. I have seen her since in sickness and in health, and always there was the same color of blooming red, which was the more welcome for the beauty it gave her face. She was flushed, perhaps overflushed, when she left the room, and both the patroon and I noticed it.

“Poor child,” he said softly with a yearning look in his eyes. “She has had too much excitement. I should not have sent her.”

Van Volkenberg had little to say for a while. He was wholly taken up with the news his daughter had brought. Often he would be in a brown study for minutes at a time. I said nothing to rouse him, for I was bound that he should lead our conversation till I should be less in the dark as to what he knew about me. At last he seemed to notice how evident his moody conduct was.

204“This man Le Bourse,” he said, at the same time bending his bright eyes upon my face as if he would read me through and through, “this man, Le Bourse, was a man I wished to see. Alas the while! I wish he were yet alive.”

“A friend of yours?” I asked, mustering my voice as well as I could. I knew instinctively that I was under examination.

“No, hardly a friend; and yet I owed him some reparation for an injury. I wish he were here.”

“There is no fetching dead men back to life,” I said. And then I added: “At least in the flesh.”

“He will not haunt me, if that is what you mean.”

The patroon walked thoughtfully across the room, and stood for some time with his back towards me, looking out of the window across the broad terrace where I had seen Ronald Guy and the execution the night before. I could see his figure relax and droop a little.

“Alas, poor Guy,” I heard him mutter. He could afford to pity, now that it was all over.

Then his figure against the lighted window stiffened and he seemed to gather strength again. Two minutes later, when he turned to face us once more, he was quite himself. The night before I had asked myself a question; now I was ready to answer it. Yes, there were two actors in Van Volkenberg manor. I was one. The other was the patroon.

And from that moment I conceived a fair notion 205of how the ground lay between us. Perhaps he knew me, perhaps not; but, at a............