Page:Anthony Hope - Rupert of Hentzau.djvu/290

272 We must move them, then?"

"Why, yes. And the dog too."

Sapt almost glared at him; then he burst into a laugh.

"So be it," he said. "You take command. Yes, we'll be ready. The fate drives."

Then and there they set about what they had to do. It seemed indeed as though some strange influence were dominating Sapt; he went about the work like a man who is hardly awake. They placed the bodies each where the living man would be by night—the King in the guest-room, the huntsman in the sort of cupboard where the honest fellow had been wont to lie. They dug up the buried dog, Sapt chuckling convulsively, James grave as the mute whose grim doings he seemed to travesty: they carried the shot-pierced earth-grimed thing in, and laid it in the King's room. Then they made their piles of wood, pouring the store of oil over them and setting bottles of spirits near, that the flames, having cracked the bottles, might gain fresh fuel. To Sapt it seemed now as if they played some foolish game that was to end with the playing, now as if they obeyed some mysterious power which kept its great purpose hidden from the instruments. Mr. Rassendyll's servant moved and arranged and ordered all as deftly as he folded his master's clothes or stropped his master's razor. Old Sapt stopped him once as he went by.