Herrick did as he was told, and dropped into a dark attic, followed by the dwarf.
"You please me, friend Roger," said Jean, chuckling quietly. "My private road is not an easy one to travel in a hurry, and the man who takes it is not likely to wear a scared face and feel his knees tremble when danger comes."
"I like not murder, friend Jean."
"You'd like being murdered less, I warrant," was the prompt answer. "Besides it wasn't murder, for two reasons. Killing a man in self-defence is not murder, and you're likely to do it yourself before many hours have passed if you would serve Mademoiselle; and secondly, the sentry yonder isn't dead. I had to let his strength out of an artificial hole lest it should come through his mouth in a shout which would have betrayed us. He will be well on his way to recovery before a new moon, and, if not, there are plenty more sentries in the castle to take his place. Come, you are not out of Vayenne yet, and you must be on your way to Passey before the dawn."
The dwarf led the way down two flights of broken stairs, and through the door of the house, and passed into a narrow, deserted street.
"We'll go quickly," he whispered. "No one will suspect you in those garments. We shall meet few, and they will think that some one dying has need of a priest, and that I have fetched you. I have done it often before."
They passed through a perfect labyrinth of narrow streets in silence, and the two or three night wanderers they met took no notice of them.
Vayenne was asleep under the pale moon; that temporary death called sleep was in every habitation. The dead Duke in his chamber in the castle was hardly less silent than the sleeping thousands he had ruled.
Presently the dwarf stopped before the door of a house at the end of a blind alley.
"We go in here, friend Roger," he said, "but by a window. The door is locked, because they who own the place still hope for a tenant, which is a forlorn hope. The house grows more rotten every day, water rats make a retreat of it, and some mischievous person has said it is haunted by a horrible ghost."