Ned stared, then burst out in a fury—
“It is monstrous, monsieur; it is ridiculous! You have only to listen a moment to what I say—to accept my references to a dozen of the first standing in the city, to assure yourself of my identity.”
The commissary waved his hand. Obedient to the gesture, a couple of Guards closed upon their captive.
“I take nothing from you,” he said. “In accepting your references I might constitute myself a receiver of stolen goods.”
It was an inspiration. He looked up, with a gasp, into the faces of those about him, to read in their expressions if it were possible that he himself could have said this thing. It was true he had. There must be no anticlimax.
“Take the prisoner away!” he said, smilingly self-conscious, as if he were ordering a table to be cleared for a fresh surprise-course.
Ned, protesting, threatening, fulminating, was forced from the room, hurried down a passage, and thrust into a little dark chamber that led therefrom. The sound of a key grating in its lock fell disagreeably upon his ears. Only a thin wash of light reached him from a single barred window high up under the ceiling. A couple of crippled chairs—together, it might be said, with an almost palpable smell of drains—formed the only furniture of the room. The wall-paper moulted its gaudy dyes, or hung in strips from the plaster; the floor was littered with perished rags of parchment. Evidently the closet had been at one time some office connected with the prison records—a dreary mad reflection to any one remembering to what recent use those records had been put.
Ned sank down upon one of the chairs, and, for the moment, looked about him quite stunned and aghast.
* * * * * * * *
Up and down, up and down, by the hour together. The morning had drawn to noon, the noon to evening; and still he was confined, with only an indefinite prospect of release. It was hideous, it was outrageous; yet the humour of it all might have buoyed him up against the moment of his liberation, had not his soul—in its present condition, introspective and self-torturing—so writhed in exquisite anguish over a never-ceasing fear, or foreboding, of something—some vague disaster that, it seemed to him, his prolonged absence from home must precipitate. To this something he would, or could, give no name; but his thoughts circled round the shadow of it, feigning a self-assurance that there was no core of significance therein to terrify them—yet terrified nevertheless.