The pair were silent for an instant, looking at each other with something like dismay upon their faces, and their minds were evidently busy with old days and old dangers.
Passepoil broke the silence. "They didn’t make much by their blood-money."
"Yes," said Cocardasse; "but we, who refused to hunt Lagardere, we are alive."
Passepoil cast a melancholy glance over his own dingy habiliments and then over the garments of Cocardasse, garments which, although glowing enough in color, were over-darned and over-patched to suggest opulence. "In a manner," he said, dryly.
Cocardasse drew himself up proudly and slapped his chest. "Poor but honest."
Passepoil allowed a faint smile, expressive of satisfaction, to steal over his melancholy countenance. "Thank Heaven, in Paris we can’t meet Lagardere."
Cocardasse appeared plainly to share the pleasure of his old friend. "An exile dare not return," he said, emphatically, with the air of a man who feels sure of himself and of his words. But it is the way of destiny very often, even when a man is surest of himself and surest of his words, to interpose some disturbing factor in his confident calculations, to make some unexpected move upon the chess-board of existence, which altogether baffles his plans and ruins his hopes. So many people had crossed the bridge that morning that it really seemed little less than probable that the appearance of a fresh pedestrian upon its arch could have any serious effect upon the satisfactory reflections of the two bravos. Yet at that moment a man did appear upon the bridge, who paused and surveyed Cocardasse and Passepoil, whose backs were towards him, with a significant smile.
The new-comer was humbly clad, very much in the fashion of one of those gypsies who had pitched their camp so close to the wayside tavern; but if the man’s clothes were something of the gypsy habit, he carried a sword under his ragged mantle, and it was plain from the man’s face that he was not a gypsy. His handsome, daring, humorous face, bronzed by many suns and lined a little by many experiences—a face that in its working mobility and calm inscrutability might possibly have been the countenance of a strolling player—was the face of a man still in the prime of life, and carrying his years as lightly as if he were still little more than a lad. He moved noiselessly from the bridge to the high-road, and came cautiously upon the swashbucklers at the very moment when Passepoil was saying, with a shiver: "I’m always afraid to hear Lagardere’s voice cry out Nevers’s motto."
Even on the instant the man in the gypsy habit pushed his way between the two bandits, laying a hand on each of their shoulders and saying three words: "I am here!"
Cocardasse and Passepoil fell apart, each with the same cry in the same amazed voice.