"My friend Martin-Roget forgot himself for the moment, citizen Carrier," he said suavely, "already he is ready to make amends."
Jacques Lalouët looked down for a moment with infinite scorn expressed in his fine eyes, on the presumptuous creature who had dared to defy the omnipotent representative of the People. Then he turned on his heel, but he did not go far this time: he remained standing close beside the door—the terrier guarding his master.
Carrier laughed loud and long. It was a hideous, strident laugh which had not a tone of merriment in it.
"Wake up, friend Martin-Roget," he said harshly, "I bear no malice: I am a good dog when I am treated the right way. But if anyone pulls my tail or treads on my paws, why! I snarl and growl of course. If the offence is repeated ... I bite ... remember that; and now let us resume our discourse, though I confess I am getting tired of your Kernogan rabble."
While the great man spoke, Martin-Roget had succeeded in pulling himself together. His throat felt parched, his hands hot and moist: he was like a man who had been stumbling along a road in the dark and been suddenly pulled up on the edge of a yawning abyss into which he had all but fallen. With a few harsh words, with a monstrous insult Carrier had made him feel the gigantic power which could hurl any man from the heights of self-assurance and of ambition to the lowest depths of degradation: he had shown him the glint of steel upon the guillotine.
He had been hit as with a sledge-hammer—the blow hurt terribly, for it had knocked all his self-esteem into nothingness and pulverised his self-conceit. It had in one moment turned him into a humble and cringing sycophant.
"I had no mind," he began tentatively, "to give offence. My thoughts were bent on the Kernogans. They are a fine haul for us both, citizen Carrier, and I worked hard and long to obtain their confidence over in England and to induce them to come with me to Nantes."
"No one denies that you have done well," retorted Carrier gruffly and not yet wholly pacified. "If the haul had not been worth having you would have received no help from me."
"I have shown my gratitude for your help, citizen Carrier. I would show it again ... more substantially if you desire...."
He spoke slowly and quite deferentially but the suggestion was obvious. Carrier looked up into his face: the light of measureless cupidity—the cupidity of the coarse-grained, enriched peasant—glittered in his pale eyes. It was by a great effort of will that he succeeded in concealing his eagerness beneath his habitual air of lofty condescension: