Now he stood to the struggle between his pride and his humanity. She was slight and thinly clad. He might have carried her in his arms the little remaining distance. But a hard devil rasped his heart—that particular Belial that tempts consciences to very wanton self-mutilations.
“I had not thought,” he said coldly. “I should have been more considerate. I will walk slowly the rest of the way.”
“I hardly feel it—indeed, monsieur, indeed,” she answered, brokenly and eagerly. “I will come faster.”
He went on again, and she crept behind him. Arrived at last at his door, he rapped on it, and stood away, signing to her to enter.
The citizen Theophilus, although he was a good patriot, bowed the gentleman and his companion into the sadly lit hall with a conscious elaboration of the bel air. He was at different times cook and concierge, and always proprietor—a man of admirable tact. Now he smiled, and informed monsieur the Englishman that there was a grateful hot fire in his room; that the night was a disgrace to Paris; that a steaming potage could be served to the citoyenne in a moment, did monsieur desire it.
He did not shrug his shoulders, or appear to notice the bare raw feet set upon the mat, or anything strange in this apparition of a dazed young woman standing there with the snow in her hair. That was his delicacy. For the rest, reputations were not marred nowadays by any refusal to subscribe to such old-fashioned codes of propriety as were only practised, if at all, in the prisons, where the remnants of a social hypocrisy awaited consignment to the rag-tearing machine in the Place Louis XV. Citizen Theophilus would have as little thought of bestowing a suggestive wink on the mating of a couple of swallows as on the foregathering of a young man and maid under his eaves.
“I will do myself the honour,” he said, “to conduct monsieur’s dear young friend to monsieur’s apartments.”
He skipped up the stairs in advance, candle in hand, like an ignis fatuus. He was a little man—always dancingly restless—with a lean face, and iron-grey corkscrew curls that he would keep well oiled, as though they were the actual springs of his movements.
Arrived in Ned’s apartments (they were in one suite, sitting- and bed-rooms, with a folding-door between), he lit the candles, poked the logs into a blaze, and stood for orders.
“The potage, monsieur?”