M.

CHAPTER XVII

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

There came to me one day a surprise, a marked hour among my weeks struck
calm. Charles, Cloe, and Aileen had been wont to visit me regularly; once
Selwyn had dropped in on me; but I had not before been honoured by a visit
from Sir Robert Volney. He sauntered into my cell swinging a clouded cane,
dressed to kill and point device in every ruffle, all dabbed with scented
powder, pomatum, and jessamine water. To him, coming direct from the
strong light of the sun, my cell was dark as the inside of Jonah's whale.
He stood hesitating in the doorway, groping with his cane for some guide
to his footsteps.

For an instant I drew back, thinking he had come to mock me; then I put
the idea from me. However much of evil there was in him, Volney was not a
small man. I stepped forward to greet him.

"Welcome to my poor best, Sir Robert! If I do not offer you a chair it is
because I have none. My regret is that my circumstances hamper my
hospitality."

"Not at all. You offer me your best, and in that lies the essence of
hospitality. Better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and
hatred, Egad," returned my guest with easy irony.

All the resources of the courtier and the beau were his. One could but
admire the sparkle and the versatility of the man. His wit was brilliant
as the play of a rapier's point. Set down in cold blood, remembered
scantily and clumsily as I recall it, without the gay easy polish of his
manner, the fineness is all out of his talk. After all 'tis a
characteristic of much wit that it is apposite to the occasion only and
loses point in the retelling.

He seated himself on the table with a leg dangling in air and looked
curiously around on the massive masonry, the damp floor, the walls oozing
slime. I followed his eye and in some measure his thoughts.

"Stone walls do not a prison make," I quoted gaily.

"Ecod, they make a pretty fair imitation of one!" he chuckled.

I was prodigious glad to see him.

His presence stirred my sluggish blood. The sound of his voice was to me
like the crack of a whip to a jaded horse. Graceful, careless, debonair, a
man of evil from sheer reckless wilfulness, he was the one person in the
world I found it in my heart to both hate and admire at the same time.

He gazed long at me. "You're looking devilish ill, Montagu," he said.

I smiled. "Are you afraid I'll cheat the hangman after all?"

His eyes wander