“Old toad!” Castanier murmured piteously.

“Here come the master and mistress; hide yourself!  Stay, get in here, Monsieur Leon,” said Jenny.  “The master won’t stay here for very long.”

Castanier watched the sergeant hide himself among Aquilina’s gowns in her dressing room.  Almost immediately he himself appeared upon the scene, and took leave of his mistress, who made fun of him in “asides” to Jenny, while she uttered the sweetest and tenderest words in his ears.  She wept with one side of her face, and laughed with the other.  The audience called for an encore.

“Accursed creature!” cried Castanier from his box.

Aquilina was laughing till the tears came into her eyes.

“Goodness!” she cried, “how funny Perlet is as the Englishwoman!...  Why don’t you laugh?  Everyone else in the house is laughing.  Laugh, dear!” she said to Castanier.

Melmoth burst out laughing, and the unhappy cashier shuddered.  The Englishman’s laughter wrung his heart and tortured his brain; it was as if a surgeon had bored his skull with a red-hot iron.

“Laughing! are they laughing?” stammered Castanier.

He did not see the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing a cab on the Boulevard, bargaining with the man to take him to Versailles.  Then once more the scene changed.  He recognized the sorry inn at the corner of the Rue de l’Orangerie and the Rue des Recollets, which was kept by his old quartermaster.  It was two o’clock in the morning, the most perfect stillness prevailed, no one was there to watch his movements.  The post-horses were put into the carriage (it came from a house in the Avenue de Paris in which an Englishman lived, and had been ordered in the foreigner’s name to avoid raising suspicion).  Castanier saw that he had his bills and his passports, stepped into the carriage, and set out.  But at the barrier he saw two gendarmes lying in wait for the carriage.  A cry of horror burst from him, but Melmoth gave him a glance, and again the sound died in his throat.

“Keep your eyes on the stage, and be quiet!” said the Englishman.

In another moment Castanier saw himself flung into prison at the Conciergerie; and in the fifth act of the drama, entitled The Cashier, he saw himself, in three months’ time, condemned to twenty years of penal servitude.  Again a cry broke from him.  He was exposed upon the Place du Palais-de-Justice, and the executioner branded him with a red-hot iron.  Then came the last scene of all; among some sixty convicts in the prison yard of the Bicetre, he was awaiting his turn to have the irons riveted on his limbs.

“Dear me!  I cannot laugh any more!...” said Aquilina.  “You are very solemn, dear boy; what can be the matter?  The gentleman has gone.”