“I am no friend of either,” I exclaimed. “I do not—”
“Silence! march!” said the soldier.
Resistance was hopeless, escape impossible. In a daze I marched on, pointed at and hooted at by the passers-by, amid cries of,—
“A bas les mouchards! Mort aux aristocrates!” (Saint Patrick! that I should be taken for an aristocrat.) “Vive la guillotine!”
I cared not what became of me now, but when presently my conductors actually turned towards the Island of the City, and I caught sight of the high roofs of the houses on the Quai Necker, a wild hope of seeing my little mistress once more took hold of me. Alas! it was but for a moment. The cold muzzle of the soldier’s gun recalled me to myself.
I longed to know if the accuser, who seemed to know my name and all my movements, had joined the names of the ladies in my denunciation. If so, woe betide them and all of us. In the midst of my trouble the one thought that cheered me, despite the pang of jealousy that came with it, was that they were not without protection; and that Captain Lestrange, who had shown himself so ready of resource in the morning, might succeed even without my help in rescuing those innocent ones from the bloody hands of “the terror.”
A chill went through me when it dawned upon me at last that I was being conducted to the fatal Conciergerie—that half-way house between life and death towards which so many roads converged, but from which only one, that to the guillotine, led.
An angry parley took place at the door between the jailer and my captors.
“Why here?” demanded the former; “we are packed to the bursting point.”
“To-morrow you will have more room by fifty,” said the other.