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Then he sat a long time with his untasted coffee at his elbow and the crumpled little sheet in his hand. "Of course, sir," Masin said at last, "I owe you everything, and if you ordered me " He paused significantly, but his master did not understand. "What?" he asked, starting nervously.
Masin had climbed up by the rope, after making knots in it and when Malipieri had called out, from the inner place to which he had retired with the end, that it was made fast.
No one would see Sabina and Sassi enter, and if it seemed advisable they could be got out in the same way. No one but Masin and Malipieri himself need ever know that they had been in the palace that afternoon. It was all very well prepared, by a man well accustomed to emergencies, and it was not easy to see how anything could go wrong.
He was much more alarmed than he would allow her to guess, for he was now quite convinced that Masin was not working on the other side; he knew that his strength would never be equal to breaking through, unless the crowbar ran suddenly into an open space beyond, within the next half- hour.
Masin enquired with a quiet grin and raising his voice a little. "I am not sure," Malipieri answered, at once entering into his man's scheme. "He is caught in his own trap. It is not midnight yet, and there is plenty of time to consider the matter. Let us sit here and talk about it." He now turned himself and sat beside the hole, placing his lantern near the edge.
"It is easier to drill holes in stone than in water," said Masin, who had put his ear to the hole. "I can hear it much louder now." "Of course you can," answered Malipieri. "We are wasting time," he added, picking up the drill and holding it against the block at a point six inches higher than before. Masin took his sledge again and hammered away with dogged regularity.
Life in the Volterra establishment had been distinctly more bearable since Malipieri's appearance on the scene, and her old existence in the palace had been almost as really gloomy as it now seemed to her to have been. Moreover, she was intensely interested in what Malipieri was going to shew her. Masin was waiting at the head of the winding stair with lanterns already lighted.
"There is a certain sense in what the man says, sir," Masin said thoughtfully. "My good man," said Malipieri, speaking down, "we do not want anybody to know the way to this place for a few days, and as you evidently know it better than we do, we intend to keep you quiet." "If you will let me out, I can serve you," answered the man below. "There is nobody in Rome who can serve you as I can."
Malipieri might have suspected the porter himself, for it was possible that there might be another key to the outer entrance of the cellar; but there was a second door further in, to which Masin had put a patent padlock, and even Masin had not the key to that. The little flat bit of steel, with its irregular indentations, was always in Malipieri's pocket.
"It seems so," answered Toto, shaking his shoulders, as if he were stiff. "Are you going to let him go free, sir?" asked Masin, standing ready. "If you do, he will be down the shaft, before you can catch him. These men know their way underground like moles." "Moles, yourselves!" answered Toto in a growl, putting his head up above the level of the vault.
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