“And doubtless thou wilt pay to receive it.”
“Oh, mon Dieu!” said I; “but these vails! And patriots, I see, are not so far removed from the lackeys they despise.”
“Pardi!” said the bulky man. “Listen to the fox preaching to the hens! But I will lay odds that in another twelve hours thou wilt be stripped of something besides thy purse. What matter, then! thou wilt have thy crown of glory to carry to the Lombard-house.”
I gave him what was left to me.
“Now,” said I; and he put a scrap of paper into my hand.
I unfolded it in the dim light and read these words, hurriedly scrawled thereon in a hand unknown to me: “Play, if nothing else avails, the hidden treasures of Pierrettes.”
“Follow me, Thibaut,” said the jailer.
* * * * * * *
As might feel a martyr, who, with a toy knife in his hand, is driven to face the lions, so felt I on my way to the Tribunal with that fragment of paper thrust into my breast. At one moment I could have cried out on the travesty of kindness that could thus seek to prolong my agony by providing me with an inadequate weapon; at another I was reminded how one might balance oneself in a difficult place with a prop no stronger than one’s own little finger. Yet this thin shaft of light cutting into desperate gloom had disquieted me strangely. Foreseeing, and prepared stoically to meet, the inevitable, I had even—before the billet was placed in my hands—felt a certain curiosity to witness—though as an accused—the methods of procedure of a Court that was as yet only known to me through the infamy of its reputation. Now, however, caught back to earth with a rope of straw, I trembled over the very thought of the ordeal to which I was invited.
Coming, at the end of melancholy vaulted passages, to a flight of stone steps leading up to a door, I was suddenly conscious of a droning murmur like that of hived bees. The jailer, in the act of running the key into the lock, beckoned me to mount to him, and, thus possessed of me, caught me under the arm-pit.