“I can speak only from the evidence. In the afternoon I looked into the Salle de la Liberté, as I sometimes will, to hear the cases that were on. There was a little excitement about a girl who had been seized that morning in one of the passages of the Palais de Justice with a long knife in her hand. She had made no secret of the fact that it was her intention to assassinate one or other of the judges as they came forth at mid-day. She was brought in for trial while I was there. I swear—my God, monsieur! I swear I had no shadowy thought of the truth. It was monsieur’s young friend. I shrank into an angle of the court, in agony lest she should see and endeavour to implicate me.”
“Thou needst not have feared, I think—thou needst not have feared.”
“Monsieur, she made no defence. ‘Vive la tyrannie!’ she cried, ‘I love the aristocrats!’ (Ah, praise to heaven, monsieur, that she put it in the plural!) ‘I would sooner be spurned by one,’ she said, ‘than exalted by an upstart chicaneur.’ That was a stroke at the Public Accuser. ‘Maybe thou shalt be exalted, nevertheless,’ said he, ‘to a prominent place. And which of us was it, lover of aristocrats, that thou design’dst to murder?’ ‘What needs to specify?’ she cried. ‘When one wants to die, any poisonous snake will serve for one to handle!’”
A little terrible groan broke from the listener.
“Monsieur—monsieur!” cried Théophile in emotion. “But they condemned her—they condemned her. Oh, the poor child! And she revealed nothing; refused to answer any questions as to her associates, her place of abode, her manner of life. To-day she was to be taken to the scaffold. If she has kept silence, we are safe.”
Ned looked upon the speaker with a shocking expression.
“If she has kept silence?” he muttered.
“Monsieur,” said the little man (the tears were trickling down his lean cheeks), “the carts passed but ten minutes ago. I hurried forth, and ran till I could get glimpse of them down a side-street. She was there. She sat with her arms bound, looking up and smiling; and the snow fell upon her blue eyes, like feathers from the wings of the angels that fluttered overhead awaiting her.”
He uttered a little cry, staggered, recovered himself, and clutched feebly at the figure that drove by him.
“Monsieur! It is too late—it is useless! In God’s name do nothing to compromise us!—monsieur!”