Humphrey listened to a group who sat near him, rough, unkempt men of the Saint Antoine district. He had made it a practice, during the last fortnight, of dropping in here and there and listening to the talk going on around him. He sipped his hot ale, listening intently, but his knowledge of French was so meager that he could only catch a word here and there.
“They think they’re mighty fine, those aristos living snugly in their grand houses in the country. They think their fields and cattle and their hired slaves will save them. Well, they’ll sing another song soon. They’ll not stay long in hiding. They’ll be hunted out, root and branch, all of them!”
Loud laughter and applause greeted the end of this harangue. After putting down the coins to pay for his drink, Humphrey went out into the wintry night. He had heard something which gave him food for thought, and he felt that it would ease his mind to walk about the city. He was restless, but his discouragement had given place to alertness. There was so much to do that he had not a moment for brooding. For a week or more he had been wondering how it was with Lisle’s family at Pigeon Valley. The day after Lisle’s disappearance he had gone to the Marquise du Ganne’s house. Rosanne knew the house well, having gone there on state occasions with Marie Josephine. She was able to give Humphrey a fair idea of how to find it. She told him that the coat of arms on the door was different from that of the Saint Frères’. It was a shield with two swords crossed in the middle. He had found the house, but he had found, also, two soldiers of the Republic stationed in front of it. He had stopped and spoken to them.
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, citizen,” he had said, and they had answered, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, citizen.”
“You have a chilly day for doing naught but standing still,” he went on. They had laughed at his attempt to speak their Paris French, and one of them had replied:
“We are watching a nest to see that the birds do not fly away, citizen.”
Then he had gone on as unconcernedly as he could. So Lisle’s mother and his Great-aunt Hortense were prisoners, too!
Humphrey was thinking over this occurrence of a fortnight ago, as he walked toward the Place de la Bastille. He had gone back twice since to a vantage point where he could see the Du Ganne house without being observed himself. Both times he had seen the soldiers. He was thankful that Rosanne was safe for the present, at least. He was slowly trying to prepare a way of escape when the time should come that he could get away, but he knew that unless he could take the children, Lisle and Rosanne, with him, he would never go. He would not go alone.
The skipper of the schooner Sandlass, Anastasius Grubb, was a Yorkshire friend of his. He had made the voyage across from England with his crony, and he had waved him a smiling good-by from the shore. But that was some time ago now and Anastasius was as far away and unattainable as the stars, or so it seemed to Humphrey on that raw February night!
He walked on toward the rue Saint Honoré, drawing up the wide collar of his coat as the stinging wind blew about him. At last he turned in at the gilded door of the bakery at 126 rue Saint Honoré. Its blue and silver sign was flapping in the wind.