‘Which floor?’ I asked my guide.
‘The fourth,’ he answered quietly.
‘Morbleu!’ I muttered, as I began to ascend, my hand on the wall. ‘What is the meaning of this?’
For I was perplexed. The revenues of Marsac, though small, should have kept my mother, whom I had last seen in Paris before the Nemours edict, in tolerable comfort—such modest comfort, at any rate, as could scarcely be looked for in such a house as this—obscure, ill-tended, unlighted. To my perplexity was added, before I reached the top of the stairs, disquietude—disquietude on her account as well as on mademoiselle’s. I felt that something was wrong, and would have given much to recall the invitation I had pressed on the latter.
What the young lady thought herself I could pretty well guess, as I listened to her hurried breathing at my shoulder. With every step I expected her to refuse to go farther. But, having once made up her mind, she followed me stubbornly, though the darkness was such that involuntarily I loosened my dagger, and prepared to defend myself should this turn out to be a trap.
We reached the top, however, without accident. Our guide knocked softly at a door and immediately opened it without waiting for an answer. A feeble light shone out on the stair-head, and bending my head, for the lintel was low, I stepped into the room.
I advanced two paces and stood looking about me in angry bewilderment. The bareness of extreme poverty marked everything on which my eyes rested. A cracked earthenware lamp smoked and sputtered on a stool in the middle of the rotting floor. An old black cloak nailed to the wall, and flapping to and fro in the draught like some dead gallowsbird, hung in front of the unglazed window. A jar in a corner caught the drippings from a hole in the roof. An iron pot and a second stool—the latter casting a long shadow across the floor—stood beside the handful of wood ashes, which smouldered on the hearth. And that was all the furniture I saw, except a bed which filled the farther end of the long narrow room, and was curtained off so as to form a kind of miserable alcove.
A glance sufficed to show me all this, and that the room was empty, or apparently empty. Yet I looked again and again, stupefied. At last finding my voice, I turned to the young man who had brought us hither, and with a fierce oath demanded of him what he meant.
He shrank back behind the open door, and yet; answered with a kind of sullen surprise that I had asked for Madame de Bonne’s, and this was it.
‘Madame de Bonne’s!’ I muttered. ‘This Madame de Bonne’s!’