II
A few minutes later, the portière was lifted, and a girl came into the room. She held a shawl, very much the worse for wear, tightly wrapped around her meagre shoulders, and from beneath her rough wollen skirt her small feet appeared clad in well-worn shoes and darned worsted stockings. Her hair, which was fair and soft, was partially hidden under a white muslin cap, and as she walked with a brisk step across the room, she looked neither to right nor left, appeared to move as in a dream. And her large grey eyes were brimming over with tears.
Neither her rapid passage across the room nor her exit through a door immediately opposite the window created the slightest stir amongst those who were waiting. Only one of the men, a huge ungainly giant, whose long limbs appeared to stretch half-across the bare wooden floor, looked up lazily as she passed.
After the girl had gone, silence once more fell on the small assembly. Not a sound came from behind the portière; but from beyond the other door the faint patter of the girl’s feet could be heard gradually fading away as she went slowly down the stone stairs.
A few more minutes went by, then the door behind the portière was opened and a cadaverous voice spoke the word, “Enter!”
There was a faint stir among those who waited. A woman rose from her seat, said dully: “My turn, I think?” and, gliding across the room like some bodiless spectre, she presently vanished behind the portière.
“Are you going to the Fraternal Supper tonight, citizen Langlois?” the giant said, after the woman had gone. His tone was rasping and harsh and his voice came with a wheeze and an obviously painful effort from his broad, doubled-up chest.
“Not I!” Langlois replied. “I must speak with Mother Théot. My wife made me promise. She is too ill to come herself, and the poor unfortunate believes in the Théot’s incantations.”
“Come out and get some fresh air, then,” the other rejoined. “It is stifling in here!”
It was indeed stuffy in the dark, smoke-laden room. The man put his bony hand up to his chest, as if to quell a spasm of pain. A horrible, rasping cough shook his big body and brought a sweat to his brow. Langlois, a wizened little figure of a man, who looked himself as if he had one foot in the grave, waited patiently until the spasm was over, then, with the indifference peculiar to these turbulent times, he said lightly:
“I would just as soon sit here as wear out shoe-leather on the cobblestones of this Godforsaken hole. And I don’t want to miss my turn with mother Théot.”
“You’ll have another four hours mayhap to wait in this filthy atmosphere.”
“What an aristo you are, citizen Rateau!” the other retorted drily. “Always talking about the atmosphere!”
“So would you, if you had only one lung wherewith to inhale this filth,” growled the giant through a wheeze.
“Then don’t wait for me, my friend,” Langlois concluded with a careless shrug of his narrow shoulders. “And, if you don’t mind missing your turn …”
“I do not,” was Rateau’s curt reply. “I would as soon be last as not. But I’ll come back presently. I am the third from now. If I’m not back you can have my turn, and I’ll follow you in. But I can’t—”
His next words were smothered in a terrible fit of coughing, as he struggled to his feet. Langlois swore at him for making such a noise, and the women, roused from their somnolence, sigh with impatience or resignation. But all those who remained seated on the benches watched with a kind of dull curiosity the ungainly figure of the asthmatic giant as he made his way across the room and anon went out through the door.
His heavy footsteps were heard descending the stone stairs with a shuffling sound, and the clatter of his wooden shoes. The women once more settled themselves against the dank walls, with feet stretched out before them and arms folded over their breasts, and in that highly uncomfortable position prepared once more to go to sleep.
Langlois buried his hands in the pockets of his breeches, spat contentedly upon the floor, and continued to wait.