The
confusion favoured his escape, and a moment later he was hastening down
the tapestry gallery and through the vacant corridors of the palace. He
was familiar with half-a-dozen short-cuts across this network of
passages; but in his bewilderment he pressed on down the great stairs
and across the echoing guard-room that opened on the terrace. A drowsy
sentinel challenged him; and on Odo's explaining that he sought to
leave, and not to enter, the palace, replied that he had his Highness's
orders to let no one out that night. For a moment Odo was at a loss;
then he remembered his passport. It seemed to him an interminable time
before the sentinel had scrutinised it by the light of a guttering
candle, and to his surprise he found himself in a cold sweat of fear.
The rattle of the storm simulated footsteps at his heels and he felt the
blind rage of a man within shot of invisible foes.
The passport restored, he plunged out into the night. It was pitch-black
in the gardens and the rain drove down with the guttural rush of a
midsummer storm. So fierce was its fall that it seemed to suck up the
earth in its black eddies, and he felt himself swept along over a
heaving hissing surface, with wet boughs lashing out at him as he fled.
From one terrace to another he dropped to lower depths of buffeting
dripping darkness, till he found his hand on the gate-latch and swung to
the black lane below the wall. Thence on a run he wound to the tanners'
quarter by the river: a district commonly as foul-tongued as it was
ill-favoured, but tonight clean-purged of both evils by the vehement
sweep of the storm.
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