The quick glance of Exili detected that they had been interrupted in some earnest conversation. He, however, took no notice of it. Sainte-Croix took his departure as soon as he imagined François d’Aubray was out of the way; and Exili extinguished the fire in his small furnace, and also prepared to leave the room.
‘I shall go to rest,’ he said to his assistant. ‘The only other visitor we expect to-night will be content with your augury. See that he pays, however; and, after you have got all you can by agreement, see what else can be wrung from him by fear.’
He gathered a few articles together and left the chamber, proceeding to the one immediately over it, where his slow and measured tread could soon be heard pacing the old and ill-secured floor ere he retired to bed.
Lachaussée remained for a few minutes after he left in deep reflection, from which he was aroused by the sound of the curfew, as the adjacent bell of Notre Dame, on the other side the left branch of the Seine, swung its booming echoes over the dreary precincts of the Rue de l’Hirondelle. It had not ceased when the restless manner of the mastiff betokened the arrival of another stranger. A growl was followed by a deep hoarse bark, and the beast rose from his crouching position at the feet of Lachaussée, and shambled round the room with the gait of some huge wild animal; his strange head-gear giving him the appearance in the obscurity of a superhuman monster. At a word from Lachaussée the mastiff returned and resumed his place; and, after a blundering noise up the staircase, mingled with a few oaths from the new-comer, the door opened, and no less a personage entered the room than honest Benoit, the master of the mill-boat at the Pont Notre Dame.
Lachaussée pulled his cowl closer over his head than ever as the visitor advanced, apparently in great awe, and making numberless obeisances as he approached.
‘You made an appointment here this evening,’ said Lachaussée in a feigned voice, ‘touching some theft committed at your mill.’
‘I did, most infernal seigneur,’ replied Benoit, searching for some term of appropriate respect. ‘That is—my wife, Monsieur—Monseigneur—Bathilde would have me come, and never let me have any rest until I did, though she is not often so fidgety.’
‘And what does she want to know?’
‘Mass! she told me to ask more things than I can recollect, when she found I had made up my mind to come. Woman’s curiosity, monsieur—nothing more. She would have known who the young gallant is that spends all his time talking to the pretty wife of Pierre Huchet when he is on guard as a good bourgeois; and why the Veuve Boidart always goes to mass at St. Jacques la Boucherie, living, as she does, in the Rue de la Harpe; and if it was the students or the Bohemians, or both together, who stole the gilded weathercock from our mill-boat, which was given to me by Monsieur le Rouge, and belonged to the tourelle of the Grand Châtelet that tumbled down the other day.’
‘You had better look for it amongst the scholars of Mazarin and Cluny than in the Cours des Miracles,’ replied Lachaussée. ‘But this is not all?’