“That is just where you make a mistake. He has taken a green hand on to help him, who is as much of an amateur as himself; a young sprig who popped in upon me one morning at Versailles, and says he: ‘Look here, Daddy Gamain, the King and me tried to make a lock, and by Jove we have made a muddle of it. The old thing won’t work! ‘What have I to do with it?’ I wanted to know. ‘You are wanted to set it right,’ says he, and as I said that it was a plant and he did not come from the King, he slaps some gold on the bench and says: ‘Is not this earnest enough? here are twenty-five louis which the King sends you to remove any doubts.’ He gave me them, too.”
“So these are what you are sporting round with you?”
“No: these are another lot. These were for traveling expenses and a sort of a payment on account!”
“Fifty louis for filing up an old lock? there is a snake in the grass, Friend Gamain.”
“Just what I said to myself: particularly as the ’prentice does not seem a regular craftsman but dodged my question about work and where you stop when you are on tramp in France, as well as who is Mother Marianne.”
“But you are not the man to be taken in when you see a boy at work.”
“I do not say so much as that. The lad plied the file and the chisel handily. I have seen him cut a rod of iron through velean at a blow, and put a hole in a band with a rattail file as if using a gimlet on a lath. But there is more theory than practice about his style: he no sooner finishes the job than he washed his hands, and what hands? so white that never did a locksmith boast the like. You don’t see me scrubbing my hands till they are white!”
With pride he showed his grubby, black and callous hands which indeed seemed to defy all the cosmetics and skin-bleaches in the world.
“But in short what did you do when you got to the King’s?” asked the other, bringing the man to the point most interesting to him.
“It looked as though we were expected: in the forge the King showed me a lock commenced not badly, but he had got in a corner. It was one with three wards, d’ye see, which few locksmiths can grapple with and royal ones least of all. I looked at it and saw where the key caught. ‘All right,’ I says; ‘let me alone with it for an hour and it will work as if greased,’ ‘Go ahead,’ said the King, ‘consider yourself at home; call for anything you like while we get the cupboard ready on which the lock goes.’ On which he went out with the imp of a ’prentice.”