‘M. Lachaussée here!’
‘Yes, Ma’amselle Louise,’ returned Sainte-Croix’s confidant, as he rose from his seat. ‘You do not give me a very hearty welcome. Come here.’
He advanced towards her; but Louise uttered a slight cry, and retired in the direction of her chamber, appealing to Benoit for protection. The miller immediately seized a partisan, which had been left behind in the tumult of the preceding night, and put himself before the door.
‘Look you, monsieur,’ he said; ‘I heard your name from her lips last night, under no very pleasant circumstances. I think you hold some situation at the Gobelins.’
‘Well?’ returned Lachaussée coolly. ‘Well, my good fellow?’
‘Well!’ continued Benoit; ‘it is not well, and I am not a good fellow,—at least, I would rather not be, according to your opinion of one. Now take this hint, and don’t be too pressing in your attentions.’
‘Pshaw! you are a fool!’
‘Without doubt,’ said Benoit; ‘or rather I was. Yesterday it was part of my profession; to-day I am a bourgeois, if I please to call myself so. But fool or not, you shall not annoy that poor girl.’
‘When you have come to the end of your heroics, perhaps you will let me speak,’ said Lachaussée. ‘Mademoiselle Gauthier,’ he continued, addressing himself to Louise, ‘you had a hurried interview here last evening with M. de Sainte-Croix. I am the bearer of a message from him.’
‘An apology, I hope, for his brutality,’ again interrupted Benoit, gaining fresh courage every minute. And he was going on with an invective, when an appealing look from Louise restrained him, and he contented himself by performing feats of revenge in imagination, flourishing his halbert about to the great terror of Bathilde, who had never seen her husband so furious.