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d. The Count lived in solitude. Half his house--and that the other half--was brilliantly lighted, and he left his bedroom because of a cat. Here were circumstances that might set the least inquisitive of men thinking. It crossed Dieppe's mind that his host was eccentric, but the Count's manner gave little warrant for the supposition; and Dieppe could not believe that so courteous a gentleman would amuse himself by making fun of a guest. He listened eagerly when the Count, after a long silence, went on to say:
"The reason I put forward must, no doubt, sound ludicrous, but the fact is that the animal, in itself a harmless beast, became the occasion, or was made the means, of forcing on me encounters with a person whom I particularly wish to avoid. You, however, will not be annoyed in that way."
There he stopped, and turned the conversation to general topics. Never had Dieppe's politeness been subjected to such a strain.
No relief was granted to him. The Count talked freely and well on a variety of questions till eleven o'clock, and then proposed to show his guest to his bedroom. Dieppe accepted the offer in despair, but he would have sat up all night had there seemed any chance of the Count's becoming more explicit.
The Cardinal's Room was a large apartment situated on the upper floor , about the middle of the house; its windows looked across the river, which rippled pleasantly in the quiet of the night when Dieppe flung up the sash and put his head out. He turned first to the left. Save his own room, all was dark: the Count, no doubt, slept at the back. Then, craning his neck, he tried to survey the right wing. The illumination was quenched; light showed in one window only, a window on the same level with his and distant from it perhaps forty feet. With a deep sigh the Captain drew his head back and shut out the chilly air.
Ah, there was an inner door on the right hand side of the room; that the Captain had not noticed before. Walking up to it, he perceived that it was bolted at top and bottom; but the key was in the lock. He stood and looked at this door; it seemed that it must lead, either directly or by way of another apartment between, to the room whose lights he had just seen. He pulled his moustache thoughtfully; and he remembered that there was a person whom the Count particularly wished to avoid and, owing to a cat, could not rely on being able to avoid if he slept in the Cardinal's Room.
"Well, then--" began Dieppe with a thoughtful frown. "Oh, I can't stand it much longer!" he ended, with a smile and a shrug.
And then there came--the Captain was really not surprised, he had been almost expecting it--a mew, a peevish, plaintive mew. "I won't open that door," said the Captain. The complaint was repeated. "Poor beast!" murmured the Captain. "Shut up in that--in that--deuce take it, in that what?" His hand shot up to the top bolt and pressed it softly back. "No, no," said he. Another mew defeated his struggling conscience. Pushing back the lower bolt in its turn, he softly unlocked the door and opened it cautiously. There in the passage--for a narrow passage some twelve or fifteen feet long was revealed--near his door, visible in the light from his room, was a large, sleek, yellow cat from whose mouth was proceeding energetic lamentation. But on sight of Dieppe the creature ceased its cries, and in apparent alarm ran half-way along the passage and sat down beside a small hole in the wall. From this position it regarded the intruder with solemn, apprehensive eyes. Dieppe, holding his door wide open, returned the animal's stare. This must be the cat which had ejected the Count. But why--?
In a moment the half-formed question found its answer, though the answer seemed rather to ask a new riddle than to answer the old one. A door at the other end of the passage opened a little way, and a melodious voice called softly, "Papa, papa!" The cat ran towards the speaker, the door was opened wide, and for an instant Dieppe had the vision of a beautiful young woman, clad in a white dressing-gown and with hair about her shoulders. As he saw her she saw him, and gave a startled shriek. The cat, apparently bewildered, raced back to the aperture in the wall and disappeared with an agitated whisk of its tail. The lady's door and the Captain's closed with a double simultaneous reverberating bang, and the Captain drove his bolts home with guilty haste.
His first act was to smoke a cigarette. That done, he began to undress slowly and almost unconsciously. During the process he repeated to himself more than once the Count's measured but emphatic words: "A person whom I particularly wish to avoid." The words died away as Dieppe climbed into the big four-poster with a wrinkle of annoyance on his brow.
For the lady at the other end of the passage did not, to the Captain's mind, look the sort of person whom a handsome and lonely young man would particularly wish to avoid. In spite of the shortness of his vision, in spite of her obvious alarm and confusion, she had, in fact, seemed, to him very much indeed the opposite.
THE MAN BY THE STREAM
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