THE STAIRWAY OF SILVER
The stillness of the moment that followed was tense; then thickly the
young man answered something irrelevant about a clown, a bottle and a
loaf; with cap drawn down and half-averted face, he lurched a little
forward in the darkness, and the sentinel's weapon fell. "Oh, that's
you, is it, Henri?" he said in a different tone, stepping back. "How
did you leave the fellow?"
"Eating the bread and calling for more!" As he spoke, the other
stopped, swaying uncertainly; above the arch, the wick, ill-trimmed,
brightened and darkened to the drafts of air through break and slit of
the old lamp; and briefly he awaited a favorable moment, when the flame
blew out until almost extinguished; then with hand near sword-hilt,
somewhat over-briskly, but in keeping with the part, he stepped toward
the arch; through it, and quickly past the sentinel.
"You seem to have been feasting and drinking a little yourself,
to-night, comrade?" called out the latter after him. "I noticed it
when you went in, and-- But aren't you taking the wrong way?" As the
other, after starting toward the barracks, straightened, and then
abruptly wheeled into the road, running up the Mount.
"Bah!" A moment the young man paused. "Can't a soldier," articulating
with difficulty, "go to see his sweetheart without--"
"_Eh bien_!" The sentinel shrugged his shoulders. "It isn't my
business. I think, though, I know where they'll put you to-morrow,
when they find out through the guard at the barracks."
To this ominous threat the other deigned no response, only, after the
fashion of a man headstrong in insobriety, as well as in affairs of
gallantry, continued his upward way; at first, speedily; afterward,
when beyond hearing of the man below, with more stealth and as little
noise as possible, until the road, taking a sudden angle, brought him
abruptly to an open space at the foot of a great flight of stone stairs.
Broad, wide, broken by occasional platforms, these steps, reaching
upward in gradual ascent, had designedly, in days gone by, been made
easy for broken-down monarchs or corpulent abbots. Also they had been
planned to satisfy the discerning eye, jealous of every addition or
alteration at the Mount. My lord, the ancient potentate, leisurely
ascending in ecclesiastical gown, while conscious of an earthly power
reaching even into England, could still fancy he was going up a Jacob's
ladder into realms supernal. Saint Louis, with gaze benignly bent
toward the aerial _escalier de dentelle_ of the chapel to the left,
might well exclaim no royal road could compare with this inspiring and
holy way; nor is it difficult to understand a sudden enchantment here,
or beyond, that drew to the rock on three pilgrimages that other Louis,
more sinner than saint, the eleventh of his name to mount the throne of
France.
But those stones, worn in the past by the footsteps of the illustrious
and the lowly, were deserted now, and, for the moment, only the moon,
which had escaped from the cloud, exercised there the right of way;
looking squarely down to efface time's marks and pave with silver from
top to bottom the flight of stairs. It played, too, on facades, towers
and battlements on either side, and, at the spectacle--the disk
directly before him--the Black Seigneur, about to leave the dark and
sheltering byway, involuntarily paused. Angels might walk unseen up
and down in that effulgence, as, indeed, the old monks stoutly averred
was their habit; but a mortal intrusion on the argent way could be
fraught only with visibility.
To reach the point he had in mind, however, no choice remained; the
steps had to be mounted, and, lowering his head and looking down,
deliberately he started. As he proceeded his solitary figure seemed to
become more distinct; his presence more obtrusive and his echoing
footsteps to resound louder. No indication he had been seen or heard,
however, reached him; to all appearances espionage of his movements was
wanting, and only the saint with the sword at the top of the
steeple--guardian spirit of the rock--looked down, as if holding high a
gleaming warning of that unwonted intrusion.
Yet, though he knew it not, mortal eye had long been on him, peering
from a window of the abbot's bridge spanning the way and joining
certain long unused chambers, next to the Governor's palace, with my
lady's abode. Against the somber background of that covered passage of
granite, the face looking out would still have remained unseen, even
had the young man, drawing near, lifted his glance. This, however, he
did not do; his eyes, with the pale reflections dancing in them, had
suddenly fastened themselves lower; toward another person, not far
beyond the bridge; some one who had turned in from a passage on the
other side of the overhead architectural link, and had just begun to
come down. An old man, with flowing beard, from afar the new-comer
looked not unlike one of the ancient Druids that, in days gone by, had
lighted and watched the sacred fires of sacrifice on the rock. He,
too, guarded his light; but one set in the tall, pewter lamp of the
medieval watchman.
"Twelve o'clock and all's--" he began when his glance, sweeping down,
caught sight of the ascending figure, and, pausing, he leaned on his
staff with one hand and shaded his eyes with the other.
A half-savage exclamation of disappointment was suppressed on the young
man's lips; had he only been able to attain that parallelogram of
darkness, beneath the abbot's passage, he would have been better
satisfied, his own eyes, looking ahead, seemed to say; then gleamed
with a bolder light.
"A sword and blade
A drab and a jade;
All's one to the King's men of the army!"
he began to hum softly, as with a more reckless swing, quickly he went
up in the manner of a man assigned some easy errand. At the same time
the patriarch slowly and rather laboriously resumed his descent, and
just below the bridge, without the bar of shadow, the two came together.
"Think you it is too late for his Excellency, the Governor, to receive
a message?" at once spoke up the younger, breaking off in that dashing,
but low-murmured, song of the barracks.
"That you may learn from the guard at the palace," was the deliberate
answer, as, raising his lamp, the watchman held it full in his
questioner's face.
"Thanks! I was going to inquire." As he answered, at the old abbot's
window in the bridge above, the face, looking out, bent forward more
intently; then quickly drew back. "Good night!"
But the venerable guardian of the inner precinct was not disposed thus
lightly to part company. "I don't seem to know you, young man," he
observed, the watery, but keen and critical eyes passing deliberately
over the other's features.
"No?" Unflinching in the bright glare of the lamp, the seeming soldier
smiled. "Do you, then, know _all_ at the Mount--even the soldiers?"
"I should remember even them," was the quiet reply.
"Those, too, but lately brought from St. Dalard?"
"True, true! There may be some of those--" uncertainly.
"No doubt! So if you will lower your lamp, which smells rather
vilely--"
"From the miscreants it has smelled out," answered the old man grimly,
but obeyed; stood as if engrossed in the recollections his own response
evoked; then turned; walked on, and, a few moments later, his call,
suddenly remembered, rang, belated, in the drowsy air: "Twelve o'clock
and all's well! A new day, and St. Aubert guard us all!"
"A sword and a blade;
A drab and a jade--"
The words, scarcely begun, above his breath, died away on the seeming
soldier's lips, as the watcher on the bridge, looking down to follow
first the departing figure of the old custodian, crossed quickly to the
opposite window, and, from this point of vantage, gazed up after the
young man rapidly vanishing in the track of the moonlight. A moment
the onlooker stood motionless; then, ere the figure, so vividly defined
in shine and shimmer, had reached the top of the stairway, made an
abrupt movement and swiftly left the window and the passage.
At the head of the steps, which without further incident or
interruption, he reached, the Black Seigneur, stepping to the shadow of
a small bush against the wall, glanced about him; with knit brows and
the resolute manner of one who has come to some definite conclusion, he
left the spot for observation, almost the apex of the Mount, and
plunged diverging to the right. From glint and shimmer to darkness
unfathomable! For some time he could only grope and feel his way,
after the fashion of the blind; fortunately, however, was the path
narrow; although tortuous, fairly well paved, and no serious mishap
befell him, even when he walked forward regardlessly, in feverish
haste, beset with the conviction that time meant all in all, and delay
the closing of the toils and the failure of a desperate adventure.
Several times he struck against the stones; once fell hard, but picked
himself up; went on the faster, only, after what seemed an interminable
period, to stop.
"Am I, can I be mistaken?"
But the single star he could see plainest from the bottom of the deep
alley, and to which he looked up, answered not the fierce,
half-muttered question; coldly, enigmatically it twinkled, and, half
running, he continued his way, to emerge over-suddenly into a cooler
well of air, and--what was more to be welcomed!--an outlook whereof the
details were in a measure dimly shadowed forth.
On one side the low wall obscured not the panorama below--a ghost-like
earth fading into the mist, and nearer, the roof of the _auberge des
voleurs_, a darkened patch on the slope of the rock; but in this
direction the man hardly cast a glance. Certain buildings ahead,
austere, Norman in outline, absorbed his attention to the exclusion of
all else, and toward them, with steps now alert and noiseless, he
stole; past a structure that seemed a small _salle des gardes_ whose
window afforded a view of four men nodding at a table within; across a
space to another passage, and thence to a low door at the far corner of
a little triangular spot, alongside the walk and near a great wall. At
once the young man put out his hand to the door; tried it; pushed it
back and entered. Before him a wide opening looked out at the sky,
framing a multitude of stars, and from the bottom of this aperture ran
a strand, or rope, connecting with an indistinct object--a great wheel,
which stood at one side!