“But there are accidents.”
“I answer for her, I say,” insisted the demagogue, with an air of pompous finality. “You may, trust to my own share, citizen—grossly as you libel it—in her modern scheme, which provides against such possibilities. No trick of Fortune is permitted nowadays to spare the guilty or condemn the innocent.”
“But are you sure, monsieur? Monsieur, in God’s name!”
Paine waved the creature aside with a peremptory gesture, and continued his way across the yard. They were the last to enter the prison, and they mounted the naked stairs almost together. In the same corridor above were their cells situated, and Torné, the surly gaoler, was already holding half-closed the door of Garat’s, which came first. It was bare of the fatal sign, and Garat ran into his fold with a bleat like a comforted sheep.
Mr. Thomas Paine, with a shrug and sneer, tripped on his way to his own cell. Reaching it, he raised his eyes, staggered slightly, and gave a single gasp. Its door was flung back against the outer wall, and the mark was on it.
Inside! He had but to close it upon himself, and the mark would vanish. Fouquier’s hurrying emissary, not being of the wise minority, had overlooked that contingency.
Torné, having locked in Garat, was coming down the corridor. Screening the sign with his arm, the ex-Deputy swung round the door and shut himself in.
He died a dozen deaths before he heard the key turn in the lock outside—a hundred before the news of next day’s coup d’état came to restore life to ten thousand withering hopes.
But the tumbrils went on the morrow, and for the last time, all the same—only he was not a passenger by them. It was just his luck that Fortune was offered such a characteristic way of retaliating upon him for his boasted command of her.