Despite the haste they made, it was nearly ten o'clock when M. Plantat
and his guests quitted the chateau of Valfeuillu. Instead of taking the
high road, they cut across a pathway which ran along beside Mme. de
Lanascol's park, and led diagonally to the wire bridge; this was the
shortest way to the inn where M. Lecoq had left his slight baggage. As
they went along, M. Plantat grew anxious about his good friend, M.
Courtois.
"What misfortune can have happened to him?" said he to Dr. Gendron.
"Thanks to the stupidity of that rascal of a servant, we learned nothing
at all. This letter from Mademoiselle Laurence has caused the trouble,
somehow."
They had now reached the Faithful Grenadier.
A big red-faced fellow was smoking a long pipe at the door, his back
against the house. He was talking with a railway employee. It was the
landlord.
"Well, Monsieur Plantat," he cried, "what a horrible affair this is!
Come in, come in; there are several folks in the hall who saw the
assassins. What a villain old Bertaud is! And that Guespin; ah, I would
willingly trudge to Corbeil to see them put up the scaffold!"
"A little charity, Master Lenfant; you forget that both these men were
among your best customers."
Master Lenfant was confused by this reply; but his native impudence soon
regained the mastery.
"Fine customers, parbleu!" he answered, "this thief of a Guespin has got
thirty francs of mine which I'll never see again."
"Who knows?" said Plantat, ironically. "Besides, you are going to make
more than that to-night, there's so much company at the Orcival
festival."
During this brief conversation, M. Lecoq entered the inn for his
night-gown. His office being no longer a secret, he was not now welcomed
as when he was taken for a simple retired haberdasher. Mme. Lenfant, a
lady who had no need of her husband's aid to show penniless sots the
door, scarcely deigned to answer him. When he asked how much he owed,
she responded, with a contemptuous gesture, "Nothing." When he returned
to the door, his night-gown in hand, M. Plantat said:
"Let's hurry, for I want to get news of our poor mayor."
The three hastened their steps, and the old justice of the peace,
oppressed with sad presentiments, and trying to combat them, continued:
"If anything had happened at the mayor's, I should certainly have been
informed of it by this time. Perhaps Laurence has written that she is
ill, or a little indisposed. Madame Courtois, who is the best woman in
the world, gets excited about nothing; she probably wanted to send her
husband for Laurence at once. You'll see that it's some false alarm."
No; some catastrophe had happened. A number of the village women were
standing before the mayor's gate. Baptiste, in the midst of the group,
was ranting and gesticulating. But at M. Plantat's approach, the women
fled like a troop of frightened gulls. The old man's unexpected
appearance annoyed the placid Baptiste not a little, for he was
interrupted, by the sudden departure of his audience, in the midst of a
superb oratorical flight. As he had a great fear of M. Plantat, however,
he dissimulated his chagrin with his habitual smile.
"Ah, sir," cried he, when M. Plantat was three steps off, "ah, what an
affair! I was going for you--"
"Does your master wish me?"
"More than you can think. He ran so fast from Valfeuillu here, that I
could scarcely keep up with him. He's not usually fast, you know; but
you ought to have seen him this time, fat as he is!"