"You must be bold men. Otherwise you would have decamped too."
"Or innocent ones," Martin replied, hearing his words, low as they were. "You yourself have said it. Asked but now, 'Do the innocent flee?'"
The Intendant bit his lips; the riposte had gone fairly home. Then, while de Peyre gave his orders and told off some of the dragoons to enter and search every house in the village, and the marquis, who was in command of the milices, bade them take up the bodies carefully and cover them decently with their capes, Baville glanced down at Martin, saying:
"Monsieur, I do not know you. You are not, I think, of this locality. Yet I observe you are of the better classes. Where is your property?"
"In La Somme, department of the Ile de France. I am a proprietor; the property of Duplan La Rose is mine, such as it is."
Had he not in truth been the owner of this property he would have scorned to shelter himself beneath a falsehood. Had he been asked his faith it was his fixed resolve to declare it, as, had it been possible for Baville to recognise that he was an Englishman--which, after his earliest years being spent in France, was not so--he had determined to avow his nationality, no matter what the consequences might be. But so far the truth alone was necessary.
When his father waited long and eagerly for the time to come for the Stuart Restoration--as no follower of the Stuarts ever doubted it would come, sooner or later--he, hating Paris and all its garish dissipations under the then young and immoral king (the king now so old and self-righteous!), purchased this property from the Baron Duplan La Rose, a man himself broken and ruined by his participation in the outbreaks of the Fronde. Purchased it because all the Ile de France and the Pas de Calais were full of English refugees waiting like himself for happier days to come; also because, when the time did come, it would be near to England. And he dying, it became Martin's property.
Baville touched his hat as an acknowledgment of Martin's explanation, perhaps also as an acknowledgment of his position, since he was a great believer in les propriétaires as men who were almost always opposed to the murmurings and discontents of the canaille and les ordres bas, such as the wretches belonged to who had massacred the abbé and the others. And as he did so he said:
"Monsieur is therefore a visitor here only--to--perhaps"--and his eyes rested piercingly on Martin--"Monsieur Buscarlet?"
"Monsieur is," Martin replied, "a visitor here seeking for a lost person. A connection by marriage. A man who has been wronged, has partly wronged himself. Monsieur has lodged with Monsieur Buscarlet before."