He rode quietly through the town, therefore, observing what good and comfortable-looking inns those were which the man had mentioned, but at the same time regretfully avoiding them. For under no circumstances would he have felt justified in alighting at either—he doubted if he could have afforded to do so. When he received Rooke's hasty summons to join him he had but forty-five guineas, saved after two years of an existence that at best had been a hard one. It had been a task to accumulate even that sum, a task entailing careful living, abstinence, almost even a life of total deprivation; when he had paid scrupulously every farthing he owed in the neighbourhood where he lodged, the sum had dwindled down to thirty-five guineas. It was little enough to enable him now to reach Troyes and provide for himself and the horse he had become possessed of on the road, to regain his child, and find his way back to England—if he succeeded in doing so.
To find his way back to England! Would that be possible? Could he pass through the north of France undiscovered? Could he, the ex-galley slave, the man whose face had become known to hundreds of persons connected with the galleys, besides having been known to hundreds of soldiers also, with whom he had been quartered, hope to escape recognition?
"God only knows!" he murmured as he rode through the empty streets of the already dead-and-gone city. "He alone knows. Yet, ere I will be taken alive—ere the mark upon my shoulder shall ever testify against me—I will end it all! Yet, courage! courage! At present I am safe."
He reached the neighbourhood of the east gate, for he had traversed the whole of Bayeux by now, and knew that if he would rest for a night in the old city he must make choice of a halting place. Casting, therefore, his eyes round the wide streets, he saw an auberge—a place, indeed, that in France is known as a pant—a low-roofed, poor drinking place, yet with, inscribed upon its walls over the door, the usual words, "Logement à pied et à cheval."
Around the door several scraggy chickens were picking up anything they could find in the interstices of the stones, and two or three gaunt half-starved-looking dogs lay about basking in the sun and snapping at real or imaginary flies. The place looked none too clean. Yet it was obscure, and it would do for one night. None would molest him here.
"Can I have a room until daybreak to-morrow and a meal?" he asked of a slatternly looking woman leaning against the doorpost; "I have ridden some distance and am very fatigued."
"Without doubt," she answered. "'Tis for that we keep house. Come in."
"And my horse?"
"That also—hard by," she said. "I will call my good man," and uttering a shriek, which was answered from the back by a gruff male voice, she called out again: "Come and take the traveller's horse, scélérat! Mon Dieu, have you nothing else to do but sit drinking there all day?"
A heavy footfall sounded in the passage, and presently a large, unkempt man came along it, and, seeing the traveller standing there, put up a dirty hand to his tousled hair and said, "Bon jour, voyageur." But the next moment he pushed that hair away from his eyes and, staring at St. Georges, said: "I know your face, stranger. Where have I seen it before?"