Page:The Quest Volume 13 (1921-22).djvu/111

 As a well-trained servant I considered it my duty to be surprised at nothing my master chose to do. Yet I could not help shaking my head, and it took me a considerable time before I could drop off to sleep again.

I must now skip many, many years. They passed monotonously and are recorded in my memory like so many dusty and turned leaves, yellow and fragmentary, from an old book with motley and exaggerated events in it, which I seem to have sometime read but scarcely understood in a dull feverish state of mind with half-exhausted memory.

One thing only I know quite clearly. In the spring of 1914 his lordship suddenly said to me: "I shall have to start soon on a journey—to Mauritius"—looking at me with lurking suspicion—"and I wish you to enter the service of my friend, a certain Magister Wirtzigh, at Weinstein on the Inn. Have you understood, Gustav? Besides I shall not stand any objections."

I bowed without a word.

One fine morning without any previous preparations Monseigneur left the castle. At least I had to infer this from the fact that I saw him no more, and that in his stead a strange gentleman lay in the four-poster in which the Count used to sleep.

This gentleman was, as I learned later on in Weinstein, the Rev. Magister Peter Wirtzigh.

On arriving at the Rev. Magister's place, from which you could look straight down on to the foaming stream of the Inn, I immediately busied myself with unpacking the boxes and trunks we had brought with us, and stowing away the contents into chests and drawers. Among them was an extraordinarily ancient 7