Chapter Eighteen.
Days of terror.
I confess, delighted as I was to find again my lady and my little mistress, I could have wished them anywhere but in Paris at such a time as this. How they reached the place at all it was difficult to understand, till I heard that they had crossed from Dublin under the escort of a prominent member of the Jacobin Club, with whom his honour had large dealings in the matter of arms, and who had provided the necessary passports.
“Indeed,” said Miss Kit, “the soldiers everywhere were so respectful to us that I think Monsieur Cazin must have passed us off as his wife and daughter. At any rate he accompanied us into Paris, only quitting us at the barrier, and has promised to call on us at the hotel to-morrow. See here is his letter to the maître d’hôtel, in which he states that we are French ladies, kinswomen of his own.”
The maître d’hôtel, when he read the letter, made no difficulty about admitting “les citoyennes Cazin” as he entered them in his book, and their valet. So for that night, at least, we were safe. And as both ladies spoke French fluently, and I tolerably, we passed well enough for what we were not.
But I disliked the whole business, still more when I heard from some of the attendants in the hotel that this citizen Cazin was a man looked askance upon by some of his own party, and reputed to be both greedy and heartless.
If I could have had my own way, I would have tried that very night to get them out of the city they had been at so much trouble to reach. But they were worn-out with fatigue and anxiety, and were fain to lay their heads anywhere. Before the night was out their baggage, rescued from the overturned diligence, was brought to the hotel, labelled (as I could not help noticing) with the name “Cazin,” which only involved us all in deeper complication and trouble.
Next day we waited for the promised visit from my ladies’ travelling companion, but he never came. And in the evening we discovered the reason. The maître d’hôtel demanded admission to their apartment and announced, with a roughness very different from his civility of the night before, that at the Convention that day several suspected persons had been denounced, among others the citizen Cazin, for having been in traitorous treaty with the enemies of the Republic. In a few hours it would become known that he had travelled to Paris with two ladies, and it was as much as his (my host’s) neck was worth to allow those ladies to remain another hour in his house. Indeed his duty was to inform the authorities at once who his guests were.