Parallel with the side of the table furthest from the great door of entrance was a low platform railed off, on which the prisoners, surrounded by their guard, were now assembled to await their trial. The sun shone in brightly from a high window, and a hum of ceaseless talking pervaded the hall cheerfully as Lomaque entered it. He was a privileged man here, as at the prison; and he made his way in by a private door, so as to pass to the prisoners' platform, and to walk round it, before he got to a place behind the president's chair. Trudaine, standing with his sister on the outermost limits of the group, nodded significantly as Lomaque looked up at him for an instant. He had contrived, on his way to the tribunal, to get an opportunity of reading the paper which the chief agent had slipped into his cravat. It contained these lines:
"I have just discovered who the citizen and citoyenne Dubois are. There is no chance for you but to confess everything. By that means you may inculpate a certain citizen holding authority, and may make it his interest, if he loves his own life, to save yours and your sister's."
Arrived at the back of the president's chair, Lomaque recognized his two trusty subordinates, Magloire and Picard, waiting among the assembled patriot officials, to give their evidence. Beyond them, leaning against the wall, addressed by no one, and speaking to no one, stood the superintendent, Danville. Doubt and suspense were written in every line of his face; the fretfulness of an uneasy mind expressed itself in his slightest gesture--even in his manner of passing a handkerchief from time to time over his face, on which the perspiration was gathering thick and fast already.
"Silence!" cried the usher of the court for the time being--a hoarse-voiced man in top-boots with a huge saber buckled to his side, and a bludgeon in his hand. "Silence for the Citizen President!" he reiterated, striking his bludgeon on the table.
The president rose and proclaimed that the sitting for the day had begun; then sat down again.
The momentary silence which followed was interrupted by a sudden confusion among the prisoners on the platform. Two of the guards sprang in among them. There was the thump of a heavy fall--a scream of terror from some of the female prisoners--then another dead silence, broken by one of the guards, who walked across the hall with a bloody knife in his hand, and laid it on the table. "Citizen President," he said, "I have to report that one of the prisoners has just stabbed himself." There was a murmuring exclamation, "Is that all?" among the women spectators, as they resumed their work. Suicide at the bar of justice was no uncommon occurrence, under the Reign of Terror.
"Name?" asked the president, quietly taking up his pen and opening a book.
"Martigne," answered the humpbacked jailer, coming forward to the table.
"Description?"
"Ex-royalist coach-maker to the tyrant Capet."
"Accusation?"
"Conspiracy in prison."
The president nodded, and entered in the book: "Martigne, coachmaker. Accused of conspiring in prison. Anticipated course of law by suicide. Action accepted as sufficient confession of guilt. Goods confiscated. 1st Thermidor, year two of the Republic."
"Silence!" cried the man with the bludgeon, as the president dropped a little sand on the entry, and signing to the jailer that he might remove the dead body, closed the book.
"Any special cases this morning?" resumed the president, looking round at the group behind him.
"There is one," said Lomaque, making his way to the back of the official chair. "Will it be convenient to you, citizen, to take the case of Louis Trudaine and Rose Danville first? Two of my men are detained here as witnesses, and their time is valuable to the Republic."
The president marked a list of names before him, and handed it to the crier or usher, placing the figures one and two against Louis Trudaine and Rose Danville.
While Lomaque was backing again to his former place behind the chair, Danville approached and whispered to him, "There is a rumor that secret information has reached you about the citizen and citoyenne Dubois. Is it true? Do you know who they are?"
"Yes," answered Lomaque; "but I have superior orders to keep the information to myself just at present."
The eagerness with which Danville put his question, and the disappointment he showed on getting no satisfactory answer to it, were of a nature to satisfy the observant chief agent that his superintendent was really as ignorant as he appeared to be on the subject of the man and woman Dubois. That one mystery, at any rate was still, for Danville, a mystery unrevealed.
"Louis Trudaine! Rose Danville!" shouted the crier, with another rap of his bludgeon.
The two came forward, at the appeal, to the front railing of the platform. The first sight of her judges, the first shock on confronting the pitiless curiosity of the audience, seemed to overwhelm Rose. She turned from deadly pale to crimson, then to pale again, and hid her face on her brother's shoulder. How fast she heard his heart throbbing! How the tears filled her eyes as she felt that his fear was all for her!
"Now," said the president, writing down their names. "Denounced by whom?"
Magloire and Picard stepped forward to the table. The first answered--"By Citizen Superintendent Danville."
The reply made a great stir and sensation among both prisoners and audience.
"Accused of what?" pursued the president.
"The male prisoner, of conspiracy against the Republic; the female prisoner, of criminal knowledge of the same."
"Produce your proofs in answer to this order."
Picard and Magloire opened their minutes of evidence, and read to the president the same particulars which they had formerly read to Lomaque in the secret police office.
"Good," said the president, when they had done, "we need trouble ourselves with nothing more than the identifying of the citizen and citoyenne Dubois, which, of course, you are prepared for. Have you heard the evidence?" he continued, turning to the prisoners; while Picard and Magloire consulted together in whispers, looking perplexedly toward the chief agent, who stood silent behind them. "Have you heard the evidence, prisoners? Do you wish to say anything? If you do, remember that the time of this tribunal is precious, and that you will not be suffered to waste it."
"I demand permission to speak for myself and for my sister," answered Trudaine. "My object is to save the time of the tribunal by making a confession."
The faint whispering, audible among the women spectators a moment before, ceased instantaneously as he pronounced the word confession. In the breathless silence, his low, quiet tones penetrated to the remotest corners of the hall; while, suppressing externally all evidences of the death-agony of hope within him, he continued his address in these words:
"I confess my secret visits to the house in the Rue de Clery. I confess that the persons whom I went to see are the persons pointed at in the evidence.