“Well, my fine fellow, and what have you to say for yourself?” The words were careless, but the tone was so different from anything which Mme de Trélan had yet heard him use, that, for the first time, she realised how Georges Camain might have been a Terrorist.
To this the prisoner was understood to mutter, in a strong patois, that he hoped the citizen would not be too severe on a poor man, that the times were bitter hard—no work, no food—and he had thought he might light on something or other in Mirabel that nobody would miss . . .
His dishevelled appearance, the blood trickling down one cheek, and a certain amount of dirt that M. de Brencourt had somehow accumulated, went really a good way to obliterate the marks of race. Perhaps he would succeed in carrying it off that he was a common thief. The Deputy seemed inclined to believe it.
“I rather think, my man,” he said, with a smile which had in it nothing of amiable, “that you have known the inside of a gaol already, from the look of you. However, we shall hear all about that later. You had better take him to the guard-house for the present,” he remarked to the corporal, “and make arrangements for having him conveyed to Paris.”
By the end of this little speech Valentine had realised where the captive’s eyes, which had already removed themselves from his inquisitor’s, were now fixed—on the portrait of her husband as a young man which faced him all the while.
CHAPTER XII
THE ROOK’S MOVE: CHECK TO THE ROOK
(1)
If, owing to the slackness of the once fire-eating Grégoire and his superior, Roland’s apparition in the gardens of Mirabel had produced but little stir in official quarters, it was not so with the actual capture of a delinquent made within the château, and practically under the eyes of the Deputy himself. For two days Mirabel was turned inside out, and Camain, the outwardly easy-going, piqued by this daring intrusion, superintended much of the search in person. What the soldiers and police agents expected to find appeared doubtful; and indeed there was actually little for them to discover, since, already aware of the strangely open method of ingress selected by the invader, they paid no attention to the broken shutter at the back of Mirabel which had originally admitted him. The one genuine discovery which they made intrigued them a good deal—the lantern lying in the colonnade not far from the windows of the sallette—for why should a man want a lantern in the daytime?
It puzzled Valentine also when she came to hear of it; but, after thought, she came to the conclusion that the lantern was, for her at least, the key to the whole mystery of the Comte’s arrest—as indeed it was. She recalled that he had had a lantern when she found him in the sallette that evening; on searching her memory was fairly sure that he had not brought it with him to her room, and supposed that next morning, suddenly remembering having left it where its presence, if discovered, might prove very awkward for him—or for her—he had gone, at a most unfortunate moment, to retrieve it, had nearly been trapped in the sallette by the advent of Camain and his party, and in desperation had climbed with it through the window, trusting to the colonnading outside to hide him. But on returning, after an interval, by the same way, he had had the ill-luck to be seen. For all she knew, that had been the road by which he had originally entered Mirabel.