III
Just before the main Paris-Chartres road plunges into the woods, about a kilomètre from Maintenon, where two narrow roads which lead, the one to Houdan and the other to Dreux, branch off from the diligence route, there stood in this year of grace 1810 an isolated inn by the wayside. The house itself was ugly enough; square and devoid of any engaging architectural features, it was built of mottled brick, but it nestled at the cross roads on the margin of the wood and was flanked by oak and chestnut coppice, interspersed here and there with a stately beech or sycamore, and its dilapidated sign bore the alluring legend, "The Farmer's Paradise."
The Paris-Chartres road with its intermittent traffic provided the "Paradise" with a few customers—with some, at least, who were not to be scared by the uninviting appearance of the house and its not too enviable reputation. Wayfarers, coming from Houdan or from Dreux on their way to Chartres, were forced to halt here in order to pick up the diligence, and would sometimes turn into the squalid inn for a cup of that tepid, acid fluid which Alain Gorot, the landlord, so grandiloquently termed "steaming nectar." But during the greater part of the day the place appeared deserted. The light-fingered gentry—footpads and vagabonds—who were its chief customers, were wont to use it as a meeting-place at night, but during the day they preferred the shelter of the woods, for the police were mostly always at their heels.
On this cold winter's afternoon, however, quite a goodly company was gathered in the coffee-room. A log fire blazed in the open hearth and lent a semblance of cheeriness and comfort to the bare, ugly room, in which the fumes of rank tobacco and wet, steaming clothes vied with the odour of stale food and wine to create an almost insufferable atmosphere.
The Paris-Chartres diligence had gone by an hour ago, and had picked up one solitary passenger at the cross roads. Soon after that a hired chaise, coming from Dreux, had driven up to the "Farmers Paradise." A lady and a gentleman had alighted from it and gone into the house, while the driver sought shelter for his horse in the tumbledown barn at the back of the house and a warm corner for himself in the kitchen.
It was then three o'clock in the afternoon, and the roads and country around appeared desolate and still. M. le Marquis de Trévargan sat with his niece, Constance de Plélan, at a trestle-table in a corner of the coffee-room. It was they who had driven over from Dreux in the hired chaise. The landlord had served them with soup which, though unpalatable in other ways, was, at any rate, hot and therefore very welcome after the long, cold journey in the narrow, rickety chaise.
Three or four men—ill-clad, travel-stained and unwashed—were assembled in the opposite corner of the room, talking in whispers, and near the door a couple of farm labourers were settling accounts with mine host, whilst a third, seemingly overcome by papa Gorot's "nectar," was sprawling across the table with arms outstretched and face buried between them—fast asleep.
Gorot, having settled with the two labourers, shook this lout vigorously by the shoulder.
"Now, then," he shouted roughly. "Up you get! You cannot stay here all night, you know!"
The sleeper raised a puckered, imbecile face to the disturber of his peace.
"Can't I?" he said slowly with the deliberateness of the drunkard. And his head fell down again with a thud upon his arm.
Gorot swore lustily.
"Out you get!" he shouted into the man's ear. "You drunken oaf—I'll put you out if you don't go!"
Once more the sleeper raised his head and stared with dim, bleary eyes at his host.
"I am not drunk," he said thickly and with comical solemnity. "I am not nearly so drunk as you think I am."
"We'll soon see about that," retorted Gorot. "Here!" he added, turning to the three ruffians at the farther end of the room. "One of you give me a hand. We'll put this lout the other side of the door."
There was more than one volunteer for the diverting job. One of the men without more ado seized the sleeper under the armpits. Gorot took hold of his legs, and together they carried him out of the room and deposited him in the passage, where he rolled over contentedly and settled down to sleep in the angle of the door even whilst he continued to mutter thickly: "I am not nearly so drunk as you think I am."
When the landlord returned to the coffee-room he was summarily ordered out again by M. de Trévargan, and he, nothing loth, accustomed as he was to his house being used for every kind of secret machinations and nameless plottings, shuffled out complacently—unastonished and incurious—and retired to the purlieus of the kitchen, leaving his customers to settle their own affairs without interference from himself.