“Sober, I hope,” said a quiet voice at his elbow. “I have just looked in to see how you are after yesterday.”
“How I am, Citizen Lomaque? Petrified with astonishment. You yourself took charge of that man and woman for me, in the waiting-room, yesterday morning; and as for myself, I could swear to having read their names at the grate yesterday afternoon. Yet this morning here are no such things as these said names to be found in the list! What do you think of that?”
“And what do you think,” interrupted the aggrieved subordinate, “of his having the impudence to bully me for being careless in chalking the doors, when he was too drunk to do it himself? too drunk to know his right hand from his left! If I wasn’t the best-natured man in the world, I should report him to the head jailer.”
“Quite right of you to excuse him, and quite wrong of him to bully you,” said Lomaque, persuasively. “Take my advice,” he continued, confidentially, to the hunchback, “and don’t trust too implicitly to that slippery memory of yours, after our little drinking bout yesterday. You could not really have read their names at the grate, you know, or of course they would be down on the list. As for the waiting-room at the tribunal, a word in your ear: chief agents of police know strange secrets. The president of the court condemns and pardons in public; but there is somebody else, with the power of ten thousand presidents, who now and then condemns and pardons in private. You can guess who. I say no more, except that I recommend you to keep your head on your shoulders, by troubling it about nothing but the list there in your hand. Stick to that literally, and nobody can blame you. Make a fuss about mysteries that don’t concern you, and—”
Lomaque stopped, and holding his hand edgewise, let it drop significantly over the hunchback’s head. That action and the hints which preceded it seemed to bewilder the little man more than ever. He stared perplexedly at Lomaque; uttered a word or two of rough apology to his subordinate, and rolling his misshapen head portentously, walked away with the death-list crumpled up nervously in his hand.
“I should like to have a sight of them, and see if they really are the same man and woman whom I looked after yesterday morning in the waiting-room,” said Lomaque, putting his hand on the cell door, just as the deputy-jailer was about to close it again.
“Look in, by all means,” said the man. “No doubt you will find that drunken booby as wrong in what he told you about them as he is about everything else.”
Lomaque made use of the privilege granted to him immediately. He saw Trudaine sitting with his sister in the corner of the cell furthest from the door, evidently for the purpose of preventing her from overhearing the conversation outside. There was an unsettled look, however, in her eyes, a slowly-heightening color in her cheeks, which showed her to be at least vaguely aware that something unusual had been taking place in the corridor.
Lomaque beckoned to Trudaine to leave her, and whispered to him: “The prescription has worked well. You are safe for to-day. Break the news to your sister as gently as you can. Danville—” He stopped and listened till he satisfied himself, by the sound of the deputy-jailer’s footsteps, that the man was lounging toward the further end of the corridor. “Danville,” he resumed, “after having mixed with the people outside the grate yesterday, and having heard your names read, was arrested in the evening by secret order from Robespierre, and sent to the Temple. What charge will be laid to him, or when he will be brought to trial, it is impossible to say. I only know that he is arrested. Hush! don’t talk now; my friend outside is coming back. Keep quiet—hope everything from the chances and changes of public affairs; and comfort yourself with the thought that you are both safe for to-day.”
“And to-morrow?” whispered Trudaine.