"Perhaps the others will be afraid," she added meaningly.
"I must admit," replied the Deputy with a nervous assumption of jocularity, "I am relieved to think that for the moment I am beyond the reach of those pretty hands of yours. For I have no desire, believe me, to be added to the list of your victims!"
Charlotte smiled scornfully. "You need have no fears," she said. "Were my hands as free as yours, or my heart as black, you would still be safe. You surely cannot flatter yourself that the question of the life or death of such as you could be of any importance to the State."
The natural egotism of the man was wounded; his vanity was touched. Confident of Charlotte's helplessness, he approached to within a few feet of her.
"Are you not afraid to speak in such a tone to me?" he asked. "We are alone here—" he looked meaningly round at the empty cell. "The walls are thick. No one can hear us."
Charlotte looked him up and down with a slow, scornful gaze. "Afraid?" she asked. "Of you?" She smiled. "Do you think that one can look at you; at your shifty eyes—at your restless mouth—" involuntarily the Deputy's hand rose to his lips—"without discovering the secret which you conceal so badly behind a mask of insult and of bluster? Do you think I cannot see what a coward you are at heart?"
"Truly polite!" exclaimed the other nervously. "At any rate, I am no murderer!"
"Because you have not the courage!" replied the girl. "But be sure that however great the guilt of those who have shed all this innocent blood, you who have allowed it to be spilt will also have to answer for it."
Her face was transfigured by emotion as she spoke. She seemed to be gazing into the caverns of eternity with the eyes of some inspired prophetess. "I look forward into the future," she continued, "and I see you, and the other brigands who surrounded Marat, whom God only allows to live so as to make their fall the more terrible,—so as to frighten all who would attempt to establish their fortunes on the ruins of a misguided people,—I see you dragged by force up the scaffold steps—the ladder to Eternity which I scale so willingly—till your coward's eyes gaze forth flinching from that blood-stained casement, that is for me the window looking out on immortality!"
Chabot stared in amazement at this young girl, who seemed to speak with the assurance of a seer. He could not subdue his admiration of a woman who was so obviously fearless of death. "Come," he said, "I like your pluck." He inspected her with a critical eye. "You're not a bad-looking girl, either, for an aristocrat." He came very close to her, apparently unconscious of the loathing with which she regarded his approach. "Turn round and let me have a look at you," he ordered. Charlotte did not seem to have heard him, but kept her head high in the air, and the same lofty look of disdain in her eye.