Although Falmy and he had almost ceased now, from very weariness during the passage of time--perhaps from heartbrokenness--to communicate much, they did occasionally do so when either considered that he had anything to tell the other that might cause him some faint stir of interest; and one morning the former, appearing at his window, made signs to Bertie that he was about to signal. Then when the other nodded to show that he was attending to him, the Genevese traced on his board the sentence, "Have you heard anything unusual?" To this Bertie, with a bound of his heart--for, in spite of his long incarceration and his growing hopelessness, he still had, although he knew it not, a ray of courage, of presentiment, left in him--shook his head, and by eager facial signs asked Falmy to explain his meaning. But he, whether it might be that he was afraid of communicating too swiftly anything he had gathered, only signalled back, "Say nothing to De Chevagny as yet. It is rumoured that they have remembered him."
"Remembered him," thought Bertie, "at last!" and as he so reflected he looked round upon the poor old man sitting with his white head bent over his knees, and wondered if, should this be true, it would be for his good to go forth.
"'Tis now forty-five years," he said to himself, "since he came here. A lifetime! Of what use for him to regain his liberty? He said once to me, when first I was brought to this room, that this awful place was his only home. Heaven grant, if they release him, that he may not find it to be so!"
He watched Bluet's manner when he removed the remains of their next meal--which meals had gradually, as month followed month, become more sparse and meagre, possibly because De Launey had now come to suppose that neither of them would ever be able to publish to anyone outside those gloomy walls the story of his neglect and parsimony, to call it by no other name--and as he did so he noticed that this good-natured fellow seemed even kinder to the old man than ever.
"Mon Dieu!" he began now, with his usual exclamation, varied only occasionally with his ma foi--"mon Dieu, 'tis cold, Monsieur le Marquis. Yet, I'll warrant me, there are blazing fires in many a happy home in France. Par exemple, now, in the Château de Chevagny I will dare to say they keep good fires for monsieur."
The old man looked up at him with a startled, hurt look; then he said softly:
"Bluet, you have always been good and kind to me. In the ten years you have been here I have come to look on you as a friend. Yet, when you recall needlessly to me my--my long-vanished home--that I shall never see more--you hurt, you wound me."
"Ah! avec ça!" said Bluet, "I'll wager you see that home again yet. Or, perhaps--mon Dieu! why not?--the Hôtel de Chevagny in Paris itself. Monsieur le Marquis is not to suppose we shall entertain him for ever; no, no! Neither is he to imagine that because he has dwelt with us so long--it is a little long, I concede--he shall never leave us."
The old man regarded him fixedly for a moment, then he sighed and gave a true French shrug to his shoulders. "If," he exclaimed, in his gentle, well-bred voice, the aristocratic tones of which he had never lost--"if it pleases you to wound me, Bluet, you must do so. Yet I know not why. We have always been such good friends."
"Cease," said Bertie to the turnkey in a whisper. "Why play with an old man thus?"