Whilst the good gossipers of Paris, on the morning after the arrest of Exili at the Pont Notre Dame, were everywhere discussing the events of the preceding evening, the principal actors in the scene were quiet enough. On board the boat-mill everything was tranquil. The morning sun was high up, sparkling upon the river, and glistening in the lofty casements, indenting the tall, sloping roofs of the houses adjoining the Seine. The quays were again filled with busy crowds; the buzz and bustle of the foot passengers and the rumbling of ignoble morning vehicles—for the aristocratic quarters still slumbered—once more fell on the ear; and the mountebanks and charlatans of the Pont Neuf and Carrefour du Châtelet were arriving with their stalls and apparatus to prepare for another day’s speculation upon the credulity of their customers.
Benoit Mousel was the first of the three inmates of the mill that was stirring, and he blessed himself as the clock of the Tour d’Horloge read him a lesson upon his sluggishness. But he had been late in bed. The Garde Bourgeois had remained some little time after the prisoner had been taken; and even when they went, taking their dead comrades with them, the excitement and alarm of the Languedocian and his wife were too great to allow them to think of retiring to rest. Nor could Benoit persuade himself, in spite of some comforting assurances from the guard, that he was altogether exculpated from the suspicion of being an accomplice of Exili. In the stormy night that followed, even until morning, there was not a tile or fragment blown down from the tottering houses on the Pont Notre Dame, upon the roof of the mill, which did not cause him to start and tremble, with the belief that a fresh party of the watch were coming to arrest him. Even his usual narcotic, the clicking of the water-wheel, failed to lull him, although aided by the gentle sway of the boat as it rocked in the current, and his couch of empty sacks never before appeared so uncomfortable.
His wife had shared her bed with her young guest, and was scarcely less watchful and terrified than her husband; for Bathilde had not been very long in Paris, and never cared to leave their little floating tenement but to go to the market, or on Sunday when she donned her best costume of Languedoc, and accompanied Benoit to some of the resorts of the holiday-keepers beyond the walls; so that the wild manners of the time and city were comparatively little known to her. Louise was the only one of the party who slept throughout the night. Worn, broken down, crushed in heart and spirits, she had almost mechanically allowed Bathilde to officiate as her serving-woman; and a faint smile which passed occasionally over her sad features was the only token by which the good-tempered paysanne knew that her assistance was appreciated.
‘Pardieu!’ said Benoit, as they assembled to their morning repast; ‘I like the sun a little better than the night; how the clouds growled at the angry wind! And how the wind chafed the lighters against the piles of the bridge! Did you ever hear such a devil’s squeaking as they made? Ugh!’
Benoit shuddered at the mere recollection of the sounds that had rendered the night so fearful, and then directly afterwards attacked the large log of bread, and one of a store of small cheeses, in a manner that showed his mental disquietude had not in any way affected his appetite.
‘Did you hear the rain, Benoit?’ asked Bathilde.
‘One must have had sorry ears not to have done so,’ he replied. ‘I only dozed once; and then I dreamt I was tied to a stake in the Place de Grêve, with a painted paper cap on my head, and the executioner was lighting the faggots, when down came the rain and washed us all away. Just then the storm awoke me.’
And he drowned the recalled terror in a horn of wine, poured out from the rude earthen jug on the table.
‘You have eaten nothing, petite,’ said Bathilde, as she took the hand of Louise in her own and pressed it kindly. ‘I am afraid you do not like our city food.’
‘Indeed you are mistaken,’ returned Louise: ‘it is most excellent. But I cannot eat. And yet,’ she added sadly, ‘I have tasted nothing for two days.’