On this the coiners gathered round Monsieur Giraumont, shook him by the hand, and commenced many questions with a view to ascertain his skill.
“Show me your coinage first; I see you use both the die and the furnace. Hem! this piece is not bad—you have struck it from an iron die?—right—it makes the impression sharper than plaster of Paris. But you take the poorest and the most dangerous part of the trade in taking the home market. I can put you in a way to make ten times as much—and with safety. Look at this!”—and Monsieur Giraumont took a forged Spanish dollar from his pocket, so skilfully manufactured that the connoisseurs were lost in admiration—“you may pass thousands of these all over Europe, except France, and who is ever to detect you? But it will require better machinery than you have here.”
Thus conversing, Monsieur Giraumont did not perceive that Mr. Gawtrey had been examining him very curiously and minutely. But Birnie had noted their chief’s attention, and once attempted to join his new ally, when Gawtrey laid his hand on his shoulder, and stopped him.
“Do not speak to your friend till I bid you, or—” he stopped short, and touched his pistols.
Birnie grew a shade more pale, but replied with his usual sneer:
“Suspicious!—well, so much the better!” and seating himself carelessly at the table, lighted his pipe.
“And now, Monsieur Giraumont,” said Gawtrey, as he took the head of the table, “come to my right hand. A half-holiday in your honour. Clear these infernal instruments; and more wine, mes amis!”
The party arranged themselves at the table. Among the desperate there is almost invariably a tendency to mirth. A solitary ruffian, indeed, is moody, but a gang of ruffians are jovial. The coiners talked and laughed loud. Mr. Birnie, from his dogged silence, seemed apart from the rest, though in the centre. For in a noisy circle a silent tongue builds a wall round its owner. But that respectable personage kept his furtive watch upon Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something false in the chief’s blandness to their guest—something dangerous in the glittering eye that Gawtrey ever, as he spoke to Giraumont, bent on that person’s lips as he listened to his reply. For, whenever William Gawtrey suspected a man, he watched not his eyes, but his lips.
Waked from his scornful reverie, a strange spell chained Morton’s attention to the chief and the guest, and he bent forward, with parted mouth and straining ear, to catch their conversation.
“It seems to me a little strange,” said Mr. Gawtrey, raising his voice so as to be heard by the party, “that a coiner so dexterous as Monsieur Giraumont should not be known to any of us except our friend Birnie.”