"I am now. I shall not be to-morrow night. There will be hundreds. I shall look! I shall see!"
"For Heaven's sake," cried François, "talk a little sense. A man who fears a mouse to talk of killing this terrible fellow!"
"The law will kill him, not I. The law—the knife."
"Stuff! A certain commissioner, Grégoire, is after thee, and, worse, after me. He hath a wart on his nose. I ran away to avoid those cursed Jacobins. Passport all right—name of Jean François. Mind thee! My father is old and failing. Thou wilt have to find me a papa. Grégoire has—he has doubts, this Grégoire. So have I. When I told him you were my friend, he shut me up in a cellar, and that I liked not. I was a fool to run away; but, mon Dieu! there was my errand—to see that poor father—all set out on my passport, and the man with the wart inquisitive. I had to get here and find my papa."
Another man's difficulties took off Pierre's mind from his own. He was clear enough now, and asked questions, some hard to answer, but all reasonable.
François related his story. The fencing-master had fallen under suspicion and run away. He, François, likewise suspected, had got a passport from a Jacobin fencing-pupil, and come hither to fall on the neck of his dear friend Pierre. It was neat, and hung together well. It had many omissions, and as a whole lacked the fundamental quality of truth, but it answered. When a man's head is set to save his head, it may not always be desirable to be accurate.
Pierre reflected; then he cried out suddenly: "This Grégoire! That for him! Let him take care. Art thou still a Royalist?"
François was a Jacobin of the best, unjustly suspected. He was eager to know what deviltry was in Pierre's mind as to this marquis; and there, too, was the daughter. If he meant to stir these peasants to riot in order to gratify himself and his well-justified hatred, that might sadly influence François's fate. The central power in Paris was merciless to lawless violence which did not aid its own purposes.
François talked on and on slackly, getting time to think. Pierre's speech had troubled him. He was puzzled as he saw more distinctly the nature of the man whom he was forced to trust. He did not analyze him. He merely apprehended and distrusted one who was to-day a shrinking coward and to-morrow a man to be feared less for what he might do than for what he might lead others to do when himself remote from sources of immediate physical fear. François did not—could not—fully know that he was now putting himself in the power of one who was the victim of increasing attacks of melancholy, with intervals of excitement during which the victim was eagerly homicidal, and possessed for a time the recklessness and the cunning of the partly insane.
"Come," said François, at last; "you must hide me until you can find me that papa, or until Citizen Grégoire has come and gone. I like him not."