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This time, however, the members of the procession did not remain in the street, but entered the house, and the landlord, who had just gone down stairs to fetch some more bottles of wine from the cellar, hastened back to the balcony-room and announced that all the commanders of the Landsturm, and the municipal officers had arrived to pay their respects to the commander-in-chief of the Tyrol and communicate a request to him.
During all this, the boy lay still. If he had ever been mischievous and shut the cellar door on his father or mother, he understood now how they had felt; for it was hours and hours before that teacher got through. At last the teacher went out into the courtyard again.
Its frigid atmosphere and lack of grace and charm did not appear to his eyes. It was nothing short of princely after his cellar. His knowledge of the inner life of the common Western homes made him feel that this rigid coldness between the Judge and his wife was only their way. The touch of the Judge's hand on her shoulder meant more than a thousand worn phrases spoken every day.
They were charmingly kind to me, all these young people, and took a mischievous pleasure in doing me the honours of the cellar so often and so copiously, that my tongue commenced to become heavy, uncertain, and as the young folk said to me, in their somewhat free language. "Uncle, you are babbling."
The lantern threw its light on a perpendicular grating at their feet, through which could be discerned a cellar. They both knelt down, and peered into the subterranean chamber. On a broken chair a young man sat listlessly with closed eyes, his head leaning heavily forward on his chest. In the feeble light of the lantern he had the livid and ghastly appearance of a corpse.
Money is wanted in any case. But there! nobody knows you are here, you must live buried away in the cellar if needs must. I will go at once to Paris as fast as I can; I can hear the mail coach from Brest." In a moment the old man recovered the faculties of his youth his agility and vigor.
"We went through the yard and the out- houses like a fine tooth-comb and made a clean sweep of the cellar. He may have gotten over the wall, but I don't think it. There's a lot of broken bottles on top. I'll try the bedrooms now." As the words fell from his lips Mrs. Horn rose from her seat on the stairs, straight as a soldier on guard.
The man was puzzled. He could not have been said to have been actually afraid, and yet the terror of the boy was so intense, so real, that it could scarce but have had its suggestive effect upon the other; and, too, there was an uncanny element of the supernatural in what they had seen and heard in the deserted house the dead man on the floor below, the inexplicable clanking of a chain by some unseen THING from the depth of the cellar upward toward them; and, to heighten the effect of these, there were the grim stories of unsolved tragedy and crime.
Through chinks and splintered bullet-holes, the light stole in, making daggers across the darkness. It splashed the walls, the great stone-flags, the black mouth of the cellar, and the dresser in the corner. There sat Knapp, a grey ghost spotted here and there with light. The little rifleman was naked now, save for a pair of fighting drawers. A heap of clothes sprawled at his feet.
"When the Prince has proven himself worthy to be the Prince Consort of so wonderful a Princess," he replied, "then he, too, may come and live in the beautiful house, but not until then." His thoughts harked back to the cellar.
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