It was a beautiful sapphire, surrounded with small diamonds and he thought that it must be worth at least a hundred louis; but all of them shook their heads. One after another they pointed out that neither gold nor jewels were of use to any man if he was lying rotting at the bottom of the sea, and that as the waves were riding too high for the packet it would be suicide to attempt the crossing in one of their much smaller craft.
A little before three, Roger realised that further efforts were useless. Neither prayers nor bribes would induce any master to leave Dieppe harbour that night. In the dram-shops that he had visited he had had several cognacs to whip up his failing energies but now he felt utterly done, and knew that when he did sleep it would be for many hours.
By morning it was as good as certain that the authorities would be hunting him. De Crosne's agent would have picked up the fact overnight that the fugitive had left the Lion d'Or at Neufchatel on a roan horse, and the steed not having been handed in at the Dieppe posting-stage would be searched for throughout the public stables of the town. It would be found at Le Bon Matelot, so for him to spend the night there obviously involved a considerable risk. In consequence, he went to another small inn, near the Eglise St. Jacques, called the Chapon Fin, and took a room there.
Going straight upstairs he emptied his pockets, pulled off his soaking clothes, and gave them to the chambermaid to be dried at the kitchen fire, then flopped naked into bed. He was utterly exhausted and, despite his anxieties, was overcome almost instantly by a deep and dreamless sleep.
He slept for sixteen hours, waking a little before eight the following morning. He was terribly stiff, but his head was clear and he felt ravenously hungry. Giving scarcely a thought to any of these things, he jumped out of bed and ran to the window. In a second he saw that the rain was sheeting down and being driven in violent gusts against the panes. With a curse, he turned away; but, none the less, seeing that the maid had brought back his dried clothes while he slept he began to hurry into them.
On getting downstairs he at once questioned the landlord about the prospects of the packet sailing that day, but the man said that the weather had worsened during the night and it was certain that no ships would be leaving port while the gale continued. Roger could only attempt to console himself by ordering two boiled eggs and a fillet steak to be served in the coffee-room with his petit dejeuner.
The astounded landlord gave him a nasty jar by declaring that he "must be an Englishman in disguise." For a second he thought that he had aroused the man's suspicions in connection with a description of himself which might have been circulated to innkeepers during the night; then he remembered that he was, after a lapse of years, once more on a coast where the habits of the English were well known, and realised that the man was only joking.
Yet, all the same, while Roger was eating his eggs and steak he knew he must face the fact that M. de Crosne's courier would have reached Dieppe the preceding night, and the odds were that the police would be combing the town for him that morning. As he had arrived at the Chapon Fin hatless, coatless and without baggage of any kind, it seemed certain that suspicion would swiftly fall on hun in the event of any inquiry being made there. So after breakfast he paid his bill and left the inn.
In spite of the rain and the blustering wind he went along to the harbour to make quite certain that no ships were leaving. He found it practically deserted and an old salt who was splicing a rope under a lean-to told him that, even if the wind dropped, which he thought unlikely, the seas would be running too high for any vessel to venture out into them for another twenty-four hours at least.
Cursing the weather that, by its foulness, was placing his life in jeopardy, Roger set about endeavouring to alter his appearance. After buying a large canvas grip he visited a secondhand clothes' shop, where he bought a tattered cloak and a seaman's stocking-cap. Putting these on outside, to conceal the clothes in which he had left Paris and hide his hair, he visited another secondhand shop in a better part of the town and bought there a more expensive outfit. It included sea-boots, blue trousers and reefer coat, a topcoat with a triple collar and a low, square-crowned bowler hat with a shiny leather band, of a type often worn by the officers of merchant ships.
Having crammed his purchases into the bag he carried it to the far side of the channel leading from the harbour to the sea, where he had noticed that morning a number of sheds and half-built boats on stocks. No one was working there in the teeming rain so he entered one of the wooden sheds and, without fear of interruption, changed into his new clothes. Next, he plaited his back hair and, doubling the thin end under, tied it with a piece of ribbon in a nautical queue. Then he made a bundle of his Paris clothes, weighted it with stones and, carrying it to the water's edge, threw it in.
It was only with the greatest reluctance that he parted with his elegant, soft-leather riding-boots and the expensive lace at his wrists and throat, but he knew that it would have been madness to keep them, as they were just the sort of things that would have given him away.
Returning to the town side of the harbour it struck him that, since he must remain in Dieppe for at least one more night, he would be seen by fewer people if he took lodgings rather than a room at another inn; so he set about hunting for something suitable. Happening to notice a street sign reading "Rue d'Ecosse" he thought that a good omen and turned along it. Sure enough a hundred yards from its entrance he came upon a neat little house with a card bearing the carefully-drawn words Apartement a Louer in its ground-floor window.
The door was opened to him by an immensely fat woman who, puffing and wheezing, took him upstairs to a sparsely furnished but clean-looking bedroom and sitting-room. For appearance sake he haggled a little over the price and made her include his petit dejeuner in it; then he took the rooms, paid her a deposit and went out again, to get himself a midday meal.
After eating reasonably well in an unpretentious restaurant he bought a bottle of wine and some cold food for his supper, and a few toilet articles; then he returned to the house in the Rue d'Ecosse and, since he had nothing else to do and would at least not be seen there, went to bed.
For the first time since leaving the Rue St. Honord to fight his duel with de Caylus he had leisure to think over the tornado of events in which he had been caught up. The duel seemed to him to have taken place at least a week ago, yet, curiously enough, he was under a vague impression that it was only that morning that Athenais, if all had gone well, had married de la Tour d'Auvergne in Evreux. But after a minute's thought he realised that while the duel had taken place less than forty-four hours ago, Ath£nals had most probably been Madame la Vicomtesse for thirty hours or more. It was actually Wednesday the 30th of August, the day that she was to have married de Caylus, and while the long hours of Monday night had been crammed with happenings that stood out in Roger's mind Tuesday had passed him by almost unnoticed, owing to his exhausted state in the morning and his having slept through the whole of the latter part of the day.
As he thought again of the fateful conference, he got out the letter signed by the Comte de Montmorin and re-read it. When he had done so it struck him more forcibly than ever how extraordinarily fortunate he was to have secured such a document. Despite his periodical communications to the mysterious Mr. Gilbert Maxwell, the British Government might well hesitate to accept his bare word as conclusive evidence on a matter of such extreme significance. In view of the Commercial Treaty with France and their greatly improved relations with that country, it seemed certain that his revelations would come as an appalling shock to them; and doubt that he could possibly be right would almost certainly prevent them from taking any positive action until his statements could be verified. Yet in some immediate demarche, such as an ultimatum, lay their only hope of preventing the French from seizing the Dutch ports.