The crowd dispersed slowly, leaving but a few idlers upon the pavement. She could not see the man who had questioned her, but suspicion of him remained. Nearly an hour passed before she returned to the auberge, and then she had no courage to enter it. Burly troopers, grimed with powder and half drunk, lolled everywhere about its doors. The odour of dregs and of stale tobacco, wafted even to the pavements without, made her sick and faint. She passed the doors again and again until she began to fear that her very presence was a danger to the man she would have befriended. And he was there—in that den of drink and brutality. She knew that she could not leave him in such a place.
A young girl came out of the auberge, singing. Her arms were bare, her hair unkempt; but she gave the troopers wit for brutality, and there was a smile upon her bright face as she ran from the house. When she saw Beatrix standing there, as though about to question her, she stopped abruptly and uttered a startled exclamation.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, it is you, then!”
She turned and looked up and down the street, and then continued quickly:
“He has asked for you, oh, so many times every day. He is very ill, Mademoiselle, and has no friends in Strasburg. If anyone knew that he was an Englishman from across the Rhine, he could not stay here. But you will see him now. The door is to the right there, the first past the corner. I will let you in myself: I have done what I could, but these others—they keep me always on my feet. It is ‘Jeannette’ here and ‘Jeannette’ there, and ‘Jeannette will do it’—and, oh, Mademoiselle, how tired I am!”
She made a gesture as of one very weary of her life, but a moment afterwards was in the café again with smiling face and with ready words for the brutes who bandied their wit against hers. When she opened the side door to Beatrix she had a candlestick in her hand, and she raised her finger warningly.
“We must have a care, Mademoiselle. They are not all his friends as you and I. And he will be so pleased! Ah, it is good to be loved when you are ill!”
She did not see the flush on the other’s face, the flush of shame and doubt and of denial, which could not well be spoken in that place. Indeed, she did not wait for assent or protest, but ran up the stairs with a child’s foot, and opened the door of a garret upon the third floor. And so the friends came face to face again.
“Ah, Monsieur—here is Mademoiselle at last. No more loneliness now, Monsieur; no more Jeannette. We are going to change all that. Shall we come in, Monsieur?”