After which the gloom beyond appeared to swallow up the newcomer. But a number of these, as they went by, added a quick and eager query:
"Has he come?"
And one of the men invariably replied:
"Yes! Last night. Just escaped being murdered by one of those accursed spies."
Outside were noise, bustle, wild excitement, made up partly of horror, partly and mainly of eager curiosity. Folk rushed aimlessly hither and thither: the military charged the populace with loud commands to make way; the police shouted and used their swords to cut a passage through the crowd for the firemen; everybody shouted or screamed; some women fainted; on everyone's lips was the one agonised query: "The Emperor! Is he dead?"
But inside the derelict house in the Rue aux Juifs a dignified hush reigned. The narrow double room on the floor above was filled with a throng as passionately excited as was the one which shouted itself hoarse in the streets; but the men and women assembled here only spoke in whispers, even though the query which was on everyone's lips was not a whit less eager: "De Livardot! Is he here?"
"He and Blue-Heart fired the fuse," said White-Beak in reply. "No doubt they are held up by the crowd. They will be here soon."
A score or so of men and women wandered about aimlessly from room to room, or sat on the gimcrack chairs and the steps of the rickety stairs. They talked in whispers, communicating their excitement to one another. Only now and then a young voice would be raised in sudden, half-hysterical laughter.
The shutters were hermetically closed so that no sound should filter through. The usurper was dead, but his sycophants were still abroad and his paid minions still in power, and the populace was still intoxicated with the glamour which Austerlitz and Wagram, Jena and Rivoli had cast over the hated Corsican's name. Therefore the conspirators, though certain of victory, still went about with bated breath, whilst an air of mystery still clung to the shabby, tumbledown house in the Rue aux Juifs.
White-Beak and his mates, who had prepared the foul crime which had just achieved its grim culmination, stood apart from the rest of the company, in the narrow hall below—at respectful distance from the noble ladies and gentlemen who had paid them to do their cowardly task.