“Well, if it taught you also to hold your tongue,” replied the most inveterate gossip in Paris, “it has taught you enough to make you a good servant. Well, it is now time for bed. You know your duties, and should any noise awaken you in the night, your first thought will be of the plate under your keeping. You will give the alarm, call me and hold the thief should you be able to seize him. But I may tell you at once that there is little need of fear. All the doors are impossible to open, there are no windows on the ground floor, and there is always a watchman in the courtyard. Still, it is your duty to be on the qui vive.”
“You may trust that I will do my duty, Monsieur Brujon; and now, where is your bedroom, so that, in the event of anything happening, I may call you?”
“I will show you,” replied Brujon.
He led the way downstairs and showed the room, which was situated off the same passage as that on which Lavenne’s opened.
“The menservants sleep in the basement, the maids under the roof,” said Brujon, with a fat smile.
He bade good-night to the new man and shuffled off to his office, whilst Lavenne retired to his room. Lavenne had a theory that every mind is like a safe in this particular: that the strongest safe can be picked if only the locksmith is clever enough. He knew that to get at a man’s secrets all questioning is useless, unless you bring your mind in tune with his. He knew that men run in tribes, and that there is a quite unconscious freemasonry between members of the same tribe.
His instinct told him the tribe to which M. Brujon belonged, and his marvellous power of adaptability made him for the moment a member of the same tribe. In short, his scandalous stories about the unfortunate Madame Le Roux had put him at once en rapport with the jovial, easy-going, scandal-loving and eminently Gallic mind of M. Brujon.
That mind had opened without any difficulty to the skilful pick-lock, giving up the fact as to the situation of the room where his master busied himself with his strange chemistry.