The sight of that mark upon the vagabond's arm caused Chauvelin to pause a moment, then to come down the stairs again.
"Citizen Rateau!" he called.
The man jumped as if he had been struck with a whip, tried to struggle to his feet, but collapsed on the floor, while a terrible fit of coughing took his breath away. Chauvelin, standing beside the barrel, looked down with a grim smile on this miserable wreckage of humanity whom he had so judiciously put out of the way of further mischief. The dim flicker of the lantern illumined the gaunt, bony arm, so that the charred flesh stood out like a crimson, fiery string against à coating of grime.
Rateau appeared terrified, scared by the sudden apparition of the man who had inflicted the shameful punishment upon him. Chauvelin's face, lighted from below by the lantern, did indeed appear grim and forbidding. Some few seconds elapsed before the coalheaver had recovered sufficiently to stand on his feet.
"I seem to have scared you, my friend," Chauvelin remarked dryly.
"I—I did not know," Rateau stammered with a painful wheeze, "that any one was here . . . I came for shelter. . . ."
"I am here for shelter, too," Chauvelin rejoined, "and did not see you enter."
"Mother Théot allows me to sleep here," Rateau went on mildly. "I have had no work for two days . . . not since . . ." And he looked down ruefully upon his arm. "People think I am an escaped felon," he explained with snivelling timidity. "And as I have always lived just from hand to mouth . . ."
He paused, and cast an obsequious glance on the Terrorist, who retorted dryly:
"Better men than you, my friend, live from hand to mouth these days. Poverty," he continued with grim sarcasm, "exalts a man in this glorious revolution of ours. 'Tis riches that shame him."