We are just under the eaves here; the dim ceiling slants; and there are two doors: that in the rear wall is closed; the other, upon our right, and evidently leading to an inner chamber, we find ajar. The furniture of this mean apartment is chipped, faded, insecure, yet still possessed of a haggard elegance; shamed odds and ends, cheaply acquired by the proprietor of the lodging-house, no doubt at an auction of the confiscated leavings of some emigrant noble. The single window, square and mustily curtained, is so small that it cannot be imagined to admit much light on the brightest of days; however, it might afford a lodger a limited view of the houses opposite and the street below. In fact, as our eyes grow accustomed to the obscurity we discover it serving this very purpose at the present moment, for a tall woman stands close by in the shadow, peering between the curtains with the distrustfulness of a picket thrown far out into an enemy's country. Her coarse blouse and skirt, new and as ill-fitting as sacks, her shop-woman's bonnet and cheap veil, and her rough shoes are naïvely denied by her sensitive, pale hands and the high-bred and in-bred face, long profoundly marked by loss and fear, and now very white, very watchful. She is not more than forty, but her hair, glimpsed beneath the clumsy bonnet, shows much grayer than need be at that age. This is Anne de Laseyne.
The intent young man at the desk, easily recognizable as her brother, fair and of a singular physical delicacy, is a finely completed product of his race; one would pronounce him gentle in each sense of the word. His costume rivals his sister's in the innocence of its attempt at disguise: he wears a carefully soiled carter's frock, rough new gaiters, and a pair of dangerously aristocratic shoes, which are not too dusty to conceal the fact that they are of excellent make and lately sported buckles. A tousled cap of rabbit-skin, exhibiting a tricolor cockade, crowns these anomalies, though not at present his thin, blond curls, for it has been tossed upon a dressing-table which stands against the wall to the left. He is younger than Madame de Laseyne, probably by more than ten years; and, though his features so strikingly resemble hers, they are free from the permanent impress of pain which she bears like a mourning-badge upon her own.
He is expending a feverish attention upon his task, but with patently unsatisfactory results; for he whispers and mutters to himself, bites the feather of his pen, shakes his head forebodingly, and again and again crumples a written sheet and throws it upon the floor. Whenever this happens Anne de Laseyne casts a white glance at him over her shoulder—his desk is in the center of the room—her anxiety is visibly increased, and the temptation to speak less and less easily controlled, until at last she gives way to it. Her voice is low and hurried.
Anne. Louis, it is growing dark very fast.
Louis. I had not observed it, my sister. [He lights a second candle from the first; then, pen in mouth, scratches at his writing with a little knife.]
Anne. People are still crowding in front of the wine-shop across the street.
Louis [smiling with one side of his mouth]. Naturally. Reading the list of the proscribed that came at noon. Also waiting, amiable vultures, for the next bulletin from Paris. It will give the names of those guillotined day before yesterday. For a good bet: our own names [he nods toward the other room]—yes, hers, too—are all three in the former. As for the latter—well, they can't get us in that now.
Anne [eagerly]. Then you are certain that we are safe?
Louis. I am certain only that they cannot murder us day before yesterday. [As he bends his head to his writing a woman comes in languidly through the open door, bearing an armful of garments, among which one catches the gleam of fine silk, glimpses of lace and rich furs—a disordered burden which she dumps pell-mell into a large portmanteau lying open upon a chair near the desk. This new-comer is of a startling gold-and-ivory beauty; a beauty quite literally striking, for at the very first glance the whole force of it hits the beholder like a snowball in the eye; a beauty so obvious, so completed, so rounded, that it is painful; a beauty to rivet the unenvious stare of women, but from the full blast of which either king or man-peasant would stagger away to the confessional. The egregious luster of it is not breathed upon even by its overspreading of sullen revolt, as its possessor carelessly arranges the garments in the portmanteau. She wears a dress all gray, of a coarse texture, but exquisitely fitted to her; nothing could possibly be plainer, or of a more revealing simplicity. She might be twenty-two; at least it is certain that she is not thirty. At her coming, Louis looks up with a sigh of poignant wistfulness, evidently a habit; for as he leans back to watch her he sighs again. She does not so much as glance at him, but speaks absently to Madame de Laseyne. Her voice is superb, as it should be; deep and musical, with a faint, silvery huskiness.]