"Ay, ay!" cried the whole assembly together—"confound secrecy. We are not bandits nor highwaymen; we have no need of concealment."
"I'll be as frank as you can wish, comrades," said I; "and if I lose some importance in your eyes by owning that I am not the master of a single state secret, I prefer to tell you so, to attempting any unworthy disguise. I come here, by orders from General Kilmaine, to join your expedition; and except this letter for General Humbert, I have no claim to any consideration whatever."
The old chef took the letter from my hands and examined the seal and superscription carefully, and then passed the document down the table for the satisfaction of the rest.
While I continued to watch with anxious eyes the letter on which so much of my own fate depended, a low whispering conversation went on at my side, at the end of which the chef said:
"It's more than likely, lad, that your regiment is not coming; but our general is not to be balked for that. Go he will; and let the government look to themselves if he is not supported. At all events, you had better see General Humbert at once; there's no saying what that dispatch may contain. Santerre, conduct him up stairs."
A smart young fellow arose at the bidding, and beckoned me to follow him.
It was not without difficulty that we forced our way up stairs, down which porters, and sailors, and soldiers were now carrying a number of heavy trunks and packing-cases. At last we gained an ante-room, where confusion seemed at its highest, crowded as it was by soldiers, the greater number of them intoxicated, and all in a state of riotous and insolent insubordination. Among these were a number of the townspeople, eager to prefer complaints for outrage and robbery, but whose subdued voices were drowned amid the clamor of their oppressors. Meanwhile, clerks were writing away receipts for stolen and pillaged articles, and which, signed with the name of the general, were grasped at with eager avidity. Even personal injuries were requited in the same cheap fashion, orders on the national treasury being freely issued for damaged noses and smashed heads, and gratefully received by the confiding populace.
"If the wind draws a little more to the southward before morning, we'll pay our debts with the top-sail sheet, and it will be somewhat shorter, and to the full as honest," said a man in a naval uniform.
"Where's the officer of the 'Regiment des Guides,'" cried a soldier from the door at the further end of the room; and before I had time to think over the designation of rank given me, I was hurried into the general's presence.
General Humbert, whose age might have been thirty-eight or forty, was a tall, well-built, but somewhat over-corpulent man; his features frank and manly, but with a dash of coarseness in their expression, particularly about the mouth; a sabre-cut, which had divided the upper lip, and whose cicatrix was then seen through his mustache, heightening the effect of his sinister look; his carriage was singularly erect and soldierlike, but all his gestures betrayed the habits of one who had risen from the ranks, and was not unwilling to revive the recollection.