"
I smiled, and tried hard to keep the heart-soreness out of my reply.
"As for that, my lad, I have had my stirrup-cup long since, and have
drained it to the dregs with a wry face, as an old man must when a young
man brews for him. But if the priest--"
Jennifer had resumed his pacing sentry beat, and at this juncture a most
singular thing happened. Though we were sealed in, as I have said, from
all the outer world with no crack nor cranny for a peephole, a blinding
flash of lightning, blue and ghastly, came suddenly to fill the whole
cellar with its vivid glare.
"Good Lord!" says Richard, clapping his hands to his eyes; "where did
that come from?"
I was wholly at a loss for a moment. Then I remembered that there was,
or had been in my boyhood days, a narrow, iron-barred window in the
farther end of the wine cellar, opening beneath that other window of the
great south room where I had climbed to spy upon the conspirators on the
night of Captain John Stuart's visit to Appleby. So it chanced that when
another flash came I was looking straight over Dick's head at the place
in the farther arching of the vault where the little window should be.
The momentary glare showed me the low square of the window opening, and
framed for a flitting instant therein a face of most devilish malignity
peering in upon me with foxy-fierce eyes; the face, to wit, of Gilbert
Stair's lawyer-factor.
In a twinkling the vision was gone, and in the space between the flash
and the crash there was a sound as of a wooden shutter slamming in
place.
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