The commander pulled a disappointed face. “Let me have no lies, old spectre!”he said. “My name is Tristan l’Hermite, and I am the King’s Gossip. Tristan l’Hermite, dost thou hear?”and he added, casting his eyes round the Place de Grève, “’tis a name that has echoes here.”
“And if you were Satan l’Hermite,”retorted Gudule, gathering hope, “I would have nothing different to say to you, nor would I be afraid of you!”
“Tête-Dieu!”exclaimed Tristan, “here’s a vixen! So the witch girl escaped! And which way did she go?”
“Through the Rue du Mouton, I think,”answered Gudule carelessly.
Tristan turned and signed to his men to prepare for resuming their march. The recluse breathed again.
“Monseigneur,”said an archer suddenly, “ask the old beldame how it is that her window-bars are broken thus?”
This question plunged the wretched mother back into despair. Still she did not lose all presence of mind. “They were always so,”she stammered.
“Bah!”returned the archer, “only yesterday they made a fine black cross that inclined one to devotion.”
Tristan glanced askance at the recluse. “The beldame seems uneasy,”he said.
The unhappy woman felt that all depended on her keeping up her self-possession, and so, with death in her heart, she began to laugh at them. Mothers are capable of efforts such as this.
“Bah!”said she, “the man is drunk. ’Tis more than a year since the back of a cart laden with stones ran against my window and burst the bars. I mind me well how I railed at the driver.”
“It’s true,”said another archer, “I was there.”
There are always people to be found in all places who have seen everything. This unlooked-for testimony revived the spirits of the recluse, to whom this interrogatory was like crossing an abyss on the edge of a knife.
But she was doomed to a continual see-saw between hope and alarm.
“If a cart had done that,”resumed the first soldier, “the stumps of the bars must have been driven inward, whereas they have been forced outward.”
“Ha! ha!”said Tristan to the soldier, “thou hast the nose of a cross-examiner at the Châtelet! Answer what he says, old woman!”
“Mon Dieu!”she exclaimed, reduced to the last extremity, and bursting into tears in spite of herself; “I swear to you, my lord, that it was a cart that broke those bars: you hear that man say he saw it. Besides, what has that to do with your gipsy?”
“H’m!”growled Tristan.
“Diable!”continued the soldier, flattered by the provost’s commendation; “the iron looks quite fresh broken.”
Tristan shook his head. Gudule turned pale. “How long is it, say you, since the affair of the cart?”
“A month; a fortnight may-be, my lord; I do not remember.”
“At first she said above a year!”remarked the soldier.