‘You are wrong, young man; and you shall smart for thus bearding one to whom occult nature is as his alphabet. We have met before—and we shall meet again.’
‘Pshaw! I know you not,’ replied the other heedlessly.
‘But I know you,’ continued the physician. ‘Do you remember an inn at Milan—do you recollect a small room that opened upon the grape-covered balcony of the Croce Bianca? Can you call that to mind, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix?’
As the officer heard his name pronounced, he turned round; and stared with mingled surprise and alarm at the physician. The latter beckoned him to return to the platform, and he eagerly obeyed. The crowd collected round them closer than ever, hustling one another in their anxiety to push nearer to the platform, for affairs appeared to be assuming a turn rather more than ordinary. And so intent were they upon the principal personages of the scene, that they paid no attention to the girl who had been sitting at the cross, and who, upon hearing the name, started from her resting-place, and rushed to the outside of the throng that now closely surrounded the waggon. But the crowd was too dense for her to penetrate; and she passed along from one portion to the other, vainly endeavouring to force her way through it. Some persons roughly thrust her back; others bade her desist from pressing against them; and not a few launched out into some questionable hints, as to the object of her anxiety to get closer to the two officers.
Meanwhile, Sainte-Croix, as we may now call him, had again reached the edge of the platform. The physician bent down and whispered a word or two into his ear, which, with all his efforts to retain his self-possession before the mob, evidently startled him. He looked with a scrutinising attention, as if his whole perception were concentrated in that one gaze, at the face of the other, and then with an almost imperceptible nod of recognition, caught his companion by the arm, and dragged him forcibly through the crowd.
As the two cavaliers departed, the interest of the bystanders ceased, and they fell back from the platform, except the girl, who glided quickly between them, towards where the officers had been standing. But they were gone; and, after a vain search amidst the crowd in the carrefour, she retired back to where she had been sitting, and covering her face with her hands, was once more unheeded and alone.
CHAPTER II.
THE BOAT-MILL ON THE RIVER
At last the sun went down, and twilight fell upon the towers and pointed roofs of the old chatelet. The loiterers gradually disappeared from the place and bridge. The rough voitures de place, which clattered incessantly over a pavement so rude and uneven that it became a wonder how they were enabled to progress at all, one by one withdrew from the thoroughfares, carrying a great portion of the general noise with them, not more proceeding from the hoarse voices of the drivers than from the ceaseless cracking of their long whips, which was thus always going on. The cries of those who sold things in the streets was also hushed, as well as the tolling and chiming of the innumerable bells in the steeples of the churches, which until dusk never knew rest, but tried to outclang each other as noisily as the supporters of the different sects, whose hour of meeting they announced. One or two lanterns were already glimmering from the windows of private houses; for by this means only were the streets of Paris preserved from utter darkness throughout the night: and the full moon began to rise slowly behind the turrets of Notre Dame.
There was little security, then, in the most public places, and few cared to be about after dusk, except in the immediate company of the horse or foot patrol, save those who only stalked abroad with the night, so that it was not long before the carrefour was nearly deserted. Two persons alone remained there. One was the assistant to the physician, who had left him in charge of the platform; and he was now occupied in harnessing two miserable mules to the waggon, in which the platform and the apparatus had been stowed away. The other was the girl whom we have before spoken of, and who had remained at the cross in almost the same attitude—one of deep sorrow and despondency.
The fool had nearly finished his labours, and was preparing to leave the square, when the young female quitted her resting-place, and advanced towards him with a timid and faltering step. Believing her to be some wretched wanderer of the carrefour proceeding to her home before the curfew sounded, he took but little notice of her, and was about to seize the mules by the bridle and lead them onwards, when she placed her hand upon his arm and implored him to stop.