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Updated: June 15, 2025
He had taken his candle with an unsteady hand, and unconsciously had blown it out himself. She restrained Claude by a look, and patiently taking the rushlight from Grio, she re-lit it and set it on the table for him to take. "As a candle goes out!" he repeated, eyeing it with drunken wisdom.
She did not cease to listen, nor did her eyes leave the staircase door. "Louis first, and now Grio. How has it reached them so quickly, do you think?" "Louis is hand in glove with the Syndic," he murmured. "And Grio?" "With Basterga." She nodded. "What do you think they will do first?" she whispered.
At the table on the hearth, staring at him in silence, sat two other men. And one of the two was Grio. Mercier paused we have said; he expected an outburst of anger if not an assault. But a second glance at the old ruffian's face relieved him: a stare of vacant wonder made it plain that Grio sober retained little of the doings of Grio drunk.
Shudderingly she tried to close her eyes to the things that might lie before her, to the things at which Grio had hinted, the things of which she had lain thinking even while they were distant and uncertain through many a night of bitter fear and fevered anticipation. They were at hand now, and though she averted her thoughts, she knew it. But the wind is tempered to the shorn.
Anne's eyes followed him; she had advanced to the foot of the stairs, and Claude understood the apprehension that held her. But the sounds did not penetrate to the room on the upper floor, or Madame Royaume did not take the alarm; perhaps she slept. And after assuring herself that Grio had entered his room the girl returned to the table.
No, for a silence fell on the room, while those who held the floor hastened to efface themselves against the wall, as if they at any rate had nothing to do with the fracas. And next moment Grio shrugged his shoulders, and with a half-stifled curse stood back. "What is this?" The same question in the same tone. This time the student saw whose voice it was had stayed Grio's arm.
The brooding eye, the infrequent smile, the start, the reverie were for him only, and for no other. They were the gift to him of her secret life, her inmost heart. It was an odd love-making, and bizarre. To Grio, even to men more delicate and more finely wrought, it might have seemed no love-making at all.
One thing only perplexed him. He understood the attitude of Basterga and Grio and Louis towards the girl. He discerned the sword of Damocles that they held over her, the fear of a charge of witchcraft, or of some vile heresy, in which they kept her. But how came Blondel in the plot? What was his part, what his object?
In a breath, in the time it takes to utter a single sound, he had hit on the secret, he had come to the bottom of the mystery, he had learnt that which Basterga, favoured by the position of his room on the upper floor, had learned two months before, that which Grio might have learned, had he been anything but the dull gross toper he was! He had learned, or in a moment of intuition guessed all.
Do you think we shed blood for you and are to be stinted of our liquor!" "Messer Grio! Messer Grio!" the landlord cried, wringing his hands. "You will be my ruin!" "No fear!" "But I do fear!" the host retorted sharply, going so far as to lay a hand on his shoulder. "I do fear."
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