The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

Both men laughed, the stranger showing sound teeth against the other’s snaggy ones.

“So, then, you have knocked off a good job, wanted doing in a hurry, and well paid?” said the former, like one who advances only a step at a time, but still does advance. “Hard work, no doubt?”

“You bet it was hard. Worse than a secret lock – an invisible door. What do you think of one house inside of another? some one who wants to hide away, be sure. What a game he could have – in or out, as he pleased. ‘Your master in?’ ‘No, sir: just stepped out.’ ‘You are a liar – he came in just now.’ ‘You had better look, since you are so cocksure.’ So they look round, but I defy them to find the gentleman. An iron door, you will understand, which closes on a beading-framed panel, while it runs on balls in a groove as on wheels. On the metal is a veneer of old oak, so that you can rap with your knuckles on it and the sound is identical with that of a solid plank. I tell you when the job was done, it would take me in myself.”

“Where the mischief would you do a job like that? but I suppose you would not tell even a pal?”

“I cannot tell because I do not know.”

“What hoodwinked you?”

“Guess again and you will be wrong. A hack was waiting for me at the city turnpike bars. A chap came up and asked: ‘Are you so and-so?’ I said ‘I am.’ ‘Good, we are waiting for you: jump in.’ So I got inside the coach, where they bandaged my eyes, and after the wheels had gone round for about half an hour, a big carriage-door was opened. They took me out and up ten steps of a flight of stairs into a vestibule, where I found a German servant who said to the others: ‘Goot! make scarce of yourseluffs; no longer want we you.’ They slung their hook out of it, while the blinders were taken me off, and I was shown what I had to do. I had pitched into the work like a good hand, and was done in an hour. They paid me in bran-new gold, tied up my eyes, put me back in the carriage, dropped me on the same spot where I was taken up, wished me safe home – and here I am.”

“Without your having seen anything, even out of the tail of the eye? Deuse take me if ever I heard of a bandage which would stop a man catching a glimpse on one side or t’other. Better own up that you had a peep at something?” pursued the stranger.

“Well, I did make a misstep at the first stone of the stairs so that, in throwing up my hands to keep from falling, I got a peep from its disarranging the handkerchief. I saw a regular row of trees on my left hand which made me think that I was in some avenue. That is all, on my honor.”

“I can’t say it is much. For the main avenue is long and more than one house has a carriage-doorway betwixt the St. Honore Coffeehouse and the Bastile.”

“The fact is,” said the locksmith, scratching his head, “I don’t think I am up to telling the house.”

The questioner appeared satisfied, although his countenance did not usually betray his feelings.

“But,” exclaimed he, as if skipping to another topic, “are there no good locksmiths at Paris that they have to send to Versailles for one?”

CHAPTER II

THE THREE ODDITIES

THE locksmith lifted his tumbler to his eye’s level, admired the liquor with pleasure, and said after sipping it with gratification:

“Bless you, yes, plenty of locksmiths at Paris.”

He drank a few drops more.

“Ay, and masters of the craft.” He drank again. “Yes, but there is a difference between them.”

“Hang me,” said the other, “but I believe you are like St. Eloi, our patron saint, master among the master-workmen.”

“Are you one of us?”

“Akin, my boy: I am a gunsmith. All smiths are brothers. This is a sample of my work.”

The locksmith took the gun from the speaker’s hands, examined it with attention, clicked the hammers and approved with a nod of the sharp action of the lock: but spying the name on the plate, he said:

“Leclere? this won’t do, friend, for Leclere is scanty thirty, and we are both a good forty, without meaning to hurt your feelings.”

“Quite true, I am not Leclere, but it is the same thing, only a little more so. For I am his master.”

“Oh, capital!” chuckled the locksmith; “it is the same as my saying ‘I am not the King but I am the same thing, only more so, as I am his master.'”

“Oho,” said the other rising and burlesquing the military salute, “have I the honor of addressing Master Gamain, the King of Locksmiths?”

“Himself in person, and delighted if he can do anything for you,” replied Gamain, enchanted at the effect his name had produced.

“The devil! I had no idea I was talking to one of the high flyers in our line,” said the other. “A man so well considered.”

“Of such consequence, do you mean?”

“Well, maybe I have not used the right word, but then I am only a poor smith, and you are the master smith for the master of France. I say,” he went on in another tone, “it can’t be always funny to have a king for a ‘prentice, eh?”

“Why not?”

“Plain enough. You cannot eternally be wearing gloves to say to the mate on your bench: ‘Chuck us the hammer or pass the retail file along.'”

“Certainly not.”

“I suppose you have to say: ‘Please your gracious Majesty, don’t hold the drill askew.'”

“Why, that is just the charm with him, d’ye see, for he is a plain-dealer at heart. Once in the forge, when he has the anvil to the fore, and the leathern apron tied on, none would ever take him for the Son of St. Louis, as he is called.”

“Indeed you are right, it is astonishing how much he is like the next man.”

“And yet these perking courtiers are a long time seeing that.”

“It would be nothing if those close around him found that out,” said the stranger, “but those who are at a distance are beginning to get an idea of it.”

His queer laugh made Gamain look at him with marked astonishment. But he saw that he had blundered in his pretended character by making a witticism, and gave the man no time to study his sentence, for he hastened to recur to the topic by saying:

“A good thing, too; for I think it lowers a man to have to slaver him with Your Majesty here and My Noble Sire there.”

“But you do not have to call him high names. Once in the workshop we drop all that stuff. I call him Citizen, and he calls me Gamain, but I ain’t what you would call chummy with him, while he is familiar with me.”

“That is all very well; but when the dinner hour comes round I expect he sends you off to the kitchen to have your bread and cheese with the flunkeys.”

“Oh, Lor', No! he has never done that; quite the other way about, for he gets me to bring in a table all set into the workshop and he will often put his legs under the mahogany with me, particularly at breakfast, saying: ‘I shall not bother about having breakfast with the Queen, as I should have to wash my hands.'”

“I can’t make this out.”

“You can’t understand that when the King works like us, he has his hands smeared with oil and rust and filings, which does not prevent us being honest folks, and the Queen would say to him, with her hoity-toity prudish air: ‘Dirty beggar, your hands are foul.’ How can a man have a fop’s hands if he works at the forge?”

“Don’t talk to me about that – I might have married high if I could have kept my fingers nice,” sighed the stranger.

“Let me tell you that the old chap does not have a lively time in his geographical study or his library; but I believe he likes my company the best.”

“That is all very amusing for you, except having to endure so poor a pupil.”

“Poor,” repeated Gamain. “Oh, no, you must not say that. He is to be pitied, to tell the truth, in his coming into the world as a king, for he is but a man – and having to waste himself on a pack of nonsense instead of sticking to our art, in which he makes good way. He will never be but a third-rate king for he is too honest, but he would have made an excellent locksmith. There is one man I execrate for stealing away his time – that Necker fellow, who made him lose such a lot of time!”