The Yellow Poppy. D. K. Broster

must be conceded that, as the godsend came nearer, he suffered a measure of disappointment. The woman was not young—but neither was she old. She was walking rather slowly, with her eyes on the ground, but when she was quite near she lifted them and looked at him, and M. Thibault perceived that she was about to stop of her own accord.

      “Good-day, la femme!”

      “Good-day, citizen sentry,” she returned. “This is the only entrance to the château, is it not?”

      Her voice was very sweet—though indeed any voice would have fallen like music on the ears of Grégoire just then. The eyes which she raised to him were noticeably well-set; under her decent black bonnet he saw fair hair turning grey. She was tall and generously made; he took her to be about forty-five. Then her little covered basket and her air of having business there suddenly recalled to him a fact he had totally forgotten.

      “Name of a pipe!” exclaimed he, slapping his musket. “Is it possible, citoyenne, that you are the new concierge?”

      The woman nodded. “Yes, citizen sentry. I was instructed to come this afternoon. My baggage, a small trunk, should have arrived already.”

      “I don’t believe it has,” said M. Grégoire Thibault musingly, and he rubbed a rather bristly chin. “If I had seen anything of it, I shouldn’t have forgotten that you were coming. But perhaps it arrived this morning before I was on duty.” He appeared to be ruminating on this possibility, but in reality he was thinking to himself, “She has been a fine woman, that, once!” Aloud, he said, “I knew, of course, that Mère Prévost was giving up her job, but I had forgotten that she was to leave to-day. Her man has come back from the wars, I believe, short of an arm. And so you are the new caretaker, citoyenne?”

      He took another look at her. “Le diable m’emporte,” he thought this time, “if she is not a fine woman still!”

      Resting his musket against the sentry-box he went slowly, fishing out a key, to the movable portion of the barrier. But having got there, instead of unfastening the padlock he turned round again, leaning against the bar.

      “I’m sure I hope you’ll like this business, citoyenne,” he began conversationally. “Pretty dreary, I take it, living alone in that great house there, full of nothing but memories of the time of the Tyrant, and of the bloodshed the day the people took it. If one believed in ghosts, now——”

      “You don’t believe in them, evidently, Citizen?”

      “I hope I am a better patriot,” responded the National Guard with dignity. “Ghosts, the so-called saints, prayers for the dead, the Republic has done away with all that nonsense.”

      “Yes, there has been a good deal done away with these last ten years.” The tone of this remark a little puzzled Grégoire, but he continued nevertheless, “Still, I must confess that Décadi doesn’t often see me at the Temple, unless there’s a wedding. It’s just a little wearisome. . . . But my wife in Paris goes to the Temple of Genius regularly—the late edifice Roch, as you know—and says she likes it, especially since they have instituted recitations by the children, and our youngest took a prize. But what were we speaking of?—ah, the château. Well, if I were not a good patriot, and disbelieved in saints and angels and all that rubbish, I might be tempted to think that the ci-devant Duchesse walked there o’ nights without her head, or maybe with it, looking in her silks and satins as she did before they stuck it on a pike, for I have heard that she was a famous beauty.”

      “Yes, I have heard that,” said the newcomer with a shade of impatience. “But I have also heard that it is incorrect,” she added.

      “Well, beauty or not, it was all the same to her, poor wretch, when she came out of La Force that day,” observed Grégoire, comfortably leaning back on his elbows on the barrier. And having thus dismissed the subject he went on, “The ci-devant Duc now,—supposed to be alive, he is. So you won’t meet him walking there. Instead of Monseigneur we have M. le Député Camain; he often comes, and sometimes the Citoyenne Dufour, who used to be at the Opera, with him. She acts at the Ambigu-Comique now. They say he’s going to marry her. Curious world, isn’t it, Citoyenne? Think, if the Duc and Duchesse could see Mirabel now!” He laughed.

      The new caretaker drew her shawl round her as if the April breeze caught her. “I think I had better——” she began, making a fresh move towards the barrier. And then she said abruptly, “You spoke just now of the Duc. Has anything been heard—here in Mirabel-le-Château, I mean—about him?”

      M. Grégoire shook a waggish finger at her. “No, no, nothing more is known about him. And take care, citoyenne concierge!” he added grinning. “It doesn’t do, since Fructidor, to be too much interested in aristocrats as high up as that, especially when they are still émigrés. But I believe from what I have heard, that Monseigneur le Duc could turn any woman’s head. I don’t suppose, however, that you ever saw him, did you?”

      “I am from the provinces,” was the new concierge’s reply. “I only came to Paris after the tenth of August.”

      “Ah, you missed something!” said the National Guard regretfully. “I wasn’t at the storming of the Tuileries, but I saw the place afterwards. And this nest of ci-devants, as I daresay you’ve heard, was rushed two days later, by patriots from Paris. Not so much fighting, of course, as in the Place du Carrousel, since there were no troops here, but they barricaded the place as well as they could, and the Duchesse’s maître d’hôtel was killed outside her boudoir, and two or three servants on the stairs and so on. Then the house was pretty well looted; I’ve heard the citizen Camain regret that.”

      The concierge looked away from him at the great façade. “And how was it that the Duc escaped?” she asked.

      “How did he escape! He did not need to escape!” retorted the sentry. “He wasn’t there. He had emigrated long before that. That’s what saved him.”

      “But he could not know, long before, what was going to happen in 1792,” said the woman, almost as if she were defending M. de Trélan.

      “Maybe not,” returned the National Guard indifferently. “All I know is that he wasn’t here. But she was—the ci-devant Duchesse—and that was the end of her, after a few days of La Force. Myself, I don’t approve of murdering prisoners, especially those of the sex, though the woman Lamballe, being such a friend of the female Capet—as we used to call her before Thermidor—doubtless deserved what she got. But as for this Duchesse, I have heard that she was always kind to the poor, here and elsewhere. But what would you have? Mistakes happen.”

      “Yes,” agreed the concierge, looking at him. “But, no doubt, she is well out of this world. It is not too merry a one, Citizen, even, perhaps, for a Duchesse.”

      M. Thibault, who was in reality a sympathetic soul, and by no means the blood-boltered patriot he liked to paint himself at times, said to this, “You have known trouble, Citoyenne?”

      “I have known what it is to lose my husband, my home, and every penny I had. But I am not faint-hearted; do not think that! One goes on to the end, does one not, citizen sentry—till the relief?”

      “Sacré tonnerre, yes!” asseverated the citizen sentry, struck. “I see you are a good-plucked one, Madame. Well, I shall like to think of you behind me in the château there, and if ever there’s anything you want doing for you, I’m your man. Grégoire Thibault is my name.”

      The new concierge thanked him with a smile which caused a sensible warmth to flow over the Citizen Grégoire, and made him regret still more that he could not decently keep her waiting any longer. He fitted the key slowly into the lock, saying, “You’ve got your warrant with you, I suppose, Madame?”

      The woman held it out at once—an official document duly stamped and sealed, appointing the widow Vidal, sempstress, of the Rue de Seine, concierge of the ci-devant château of Mirabel, in room of the woman Prévost, resigning that charge. The document was signed by the Deputy Camain, the administrator of Mirabel, and countersigned by one of the five Directors, Larevellière-Lépeaux.