A shallow flight of stairs, broad and oaken, led straight up to a little low gallery that bisected the hall like a transom. Up these steps we scuttled, the escort driving the prisoner amongst them, and came to a corridor from which a number of closed doors shut off the living rooms of the house.
Suddenly Crépin put up his hand and motioned us to silence. From one of the invisible chambers, some distance down the corridor, rose and fell, like wind in a key-hole, a little blasphemous complaining voice.
“In the sober moonlight of my days!” we made it out to cry—“after scaling the rough peaks of self-denial, thus to be tilted over into the depths again by a lying Providence!”
There followed some shrill storming of nouns and epithets; then a pause, out of which the voice snapped once more—
“I hear you, you scum of ditches—you stinking offal of the Faubourgs—you publicans ennobled of a short-sighted Saviour!—Come back and finish your work, and I will spit poison on you that you shall follow me to the hell—to the hell, I say——”
The furious dragging of a chair mangled the sentence; then came a jarring thump and a further shrieking of oaths. With one impulse we made for the door, threw it open, and burst into the room. In the midst of a lofty chamber lay a little man struggling on the floor, a pretty heavy prie-dieu, to which he had been bound with his arms behind his back, jerking and bobbing above him with his every kick.
“Mais c’est une tortue!” cried one of the crew, with a howl of laughter.
The tortoise twisted up its face, disfigured with passion. It was the face, without doubt, of the little fesse-Mathieu of Février’s restaurant.
The room in which he lay was of good proportions, but furnished meagrely, and informed with the same spirit of graceless economy as was apparent without. For the dark ancient panels of its walls had been smeared with some light-grey wash, and an attempt made to decorate them with plaster wreaths and festoons in the Louis Quinze style. The work, however, had been left unfinished, and, so far as it went, was crude and amateurish to a degree. Obviously, here was an example of that species of niggard that will try to cheat a dozen trades by wringing the gist of all out of one poor factotum.
But Crépin stood with corrugated forehead; for there were other signs in the room than those of parsimony—signs in plenty, in fact, that he had been forestalled in his quest. Chairs and tables were overturned, a bureau was smashed almost to pieces, great rents appeared in the panelling of the walls, where search had been instituted, one would judge, for secret depositories.