She slipped off her boots, and stole gently up to the door that divided her room from the pedlar's.
"Sir," she whispered, "you are very, very tired, and will sleep heavily. I am so anxious, I don't know why; but forgive me and do trust me. Push your pocket-book that contains your money under the door. See—it does not fit tight! We don't know who the people of the house are: they may try to rob you. I will tie it up inside my baby's shawls, and will give it back to you as soon as we are out of this place. Oh, would to God that we had never entered it! Your money will be safe with me, and they will never think of looking for it here. Will you give it me?"
In answer to her pleadings, a shabby little leather book was pushed into her room. As she picked it up and proceeded to hide it securely away beneath the baby's many wrappings, the pedlar said, in a voice rendered hoarse and indistinct by the spirits he had partaken of in such unaccustomed quantities: "Here, my dear, take it. It will, I know, be safe with you. I feel so tired that I don't think a cannon would wake me to-night once I get to sleep." He groped his way to his bed, and flung himself down on it, dressed as he was. Soon Babette heard him snoring loudly and regularly, and then she took off her clothes, and rolling her cloak around her, lay down by the side of her child.
In after years, when she looked on that awful time, she often wondered how, feeling as she did that she was surrounded by so many unknown perils, she had ever closed her eyes. Perhaps the long walk and the excitement she had undergone accounted for the profound sleep into which she fell almost immediately, and from which she was aroused in the dead of night by a noise in the next room. It was neither snore nor cry. It was more like a long, shuddering gurgle, and then—silence! Frightful, terrible silence, broken at last by the sound of stealthy footsteps and hushed voices. Babette sunk down on her pillow again, her baby clutched in her arms. A voiceless prayer went up to Heaven for the child's safety and her own, for already she heard them approaching her door, and made sure her last hour was come. Through nearly closed eyelids she watched two of the men enter; the one who had brought them to the house and his elder brother. They were muttering curses, low but deep.
"To have risked so much for nothing!" whispered one. "Can she have it, or was the old fool jesting with us?"
"It's a jest that has cost him dear," answered the other, as he watched his brother search the girl's clothes and then slip his murderous hands beneath her pillow. He withdrew them empty.
"Shall we settle her?" he asked, "or let her go? Is it not best to be on the safe side?"
But the smooth-shaven one said, decisively: "Let her alone; we have enough to answer for. See, she is sound asleep, and if not, it will be easy to find out before she reaches Brussels how much she knows. Let her be."
Babette lay like a log, stirring neither hand nor foot. In that awful moment, when her life or death was trembling in the balance, her mother love, that divine instinct implanted in every woman's breast, came to her and saved her. She knew that if she moved her baby's life was gone—her own she hardly cared about just then. But those little limbs that were nestling so soft and warm against her own, and that little flaxen head that was cuddled against her arm, for their sake she was brave.
