And then M. de St Prest did a thing, the self-sacrificing quality of which shall be known in full, perhaps, only to the angels. He took the lad under the arms and, lifting him away, himself knelt down in all his nicety by the sink and put his mouth to the opening.
“The little Foucaud,” he piped, “desires to see his brother!”
Presently he looked up.
“He is here, child.”
“Oh, monsieur! will you explain that I cannot speak, and ask him how ismaman?”
The message was given. I heard the poor little voice answer through the wall: “Mamansends her love to you. She has not wept so much the last night, and she has been sleeping a little. It is Lolo, who loves you well, that tells you this.”
I assisted St Prest to rise.
“I will ask the honour,” I said, “of dusting M. l’Amiral’s coat for him.”
* * * * * * *
That same afternoon, as I was again, during the hour of exercise, standing near the sewer, of a sudden I heard a most heartrending voice calling from the other side of the wall.
“Messieurs! messieurs!” it cried. “Will no one send to me my darling?”
I dropped upon my knees (I give all honour to M. de St Prest), and, with a shudder of nausea, lowered my face to the opening.
“Who speaks?” I said. “I am at madame’s service.”
The voice caught in a sob.
“Je vous rends grâce—whoever you are, I thank you from my heart. It is my little Foucaud, my dearest, that must come to hismaman, and quickly.”
I answered that I would summon him, and I rose to my feet. I had no difficulty in finding the boy. He came, white-faced and wondering, and knelt down.
“Maman, maman—canst thou hear me? My throat is a little hoarse,maman.”
“Oh, my baby, my little son! Thou wilt be sweet and tender with Lolo in the happy days that are coming. And thou wilt never forgetmaman—say it, say it, lest her heart should break.”
God of mercy! Who was I to stand and listen to these pitiful confidences! I drew aside, watchful only of the boy lest his grief and terror should drive him mad. In a moment a white hand, laden with a dark thick coil of hair, was thrust through the opening. It was all the unhappy woman could leave her darling to remember her by. No glimpse of her face—no touch of her lips on his. From the dark into the dark she must go, and his very memory of her should be associated with the most dreadful period of his life. When they came for her in another instant, I heard the agony of her soul find vent in a single cry: “My lambs, alone amongst the wolves!”
Kind Madame Beau was there beside me.
“Lift him up,” she whispered. “He will be motherless in an hour.”
As I stooped to take the sobbing and hysterical child in my arms, I heard a voice speak low on the other side of the wall—
“It is only an interruption, madame.”
Gardel’s words—but the speaker!
I stumbled with my burden—recovered myself, and consigned the boy to the good soul that awaited him. Then hurriedly I leaned down again, and hurriedly cried, “Carinne! Carinne!”
* * * * * * *
There was no answer. Probably the speaker had retreated when the wretched Madame Kolly was withdrawn from the wall. I called again. I dwelt over the noxious gutter in excitement and anguish until I was convinced it was useless to remain. Was it this, then? that out of all the voices of France one voice could set my heart vibrating like a glass vessel that responds only to the striking of its single sympathetic note? I had thought to depose this idol of an hour from its shrine; I had cried shame upon myself for ever submitting my independence to the tyranny of a woman, and here a half-dozen words from her addressed to a stranger had reinfected me with the fever of desire.
I got out a scrap of paper and wrote thereon, “Jacob to Rachel. Jean-Louis is still in the service of Mademoiselle de Lâge.”
I found a fragment of stick, notched the paper into the end of it, and gingerly passed my billet through the hole in the wall. On the instant a great voice uttered a malediction behind me, and I was jerked roughly down upon the flags. My end of the stick dropped into the gutter and wedged itself in slime. I looked up. Above me were Cabochon and a yellow-faced rascal. This last wore a sword by his side and on his head a high-crowned hat stuffed with plumes. I had seen him before—Maillard, l’Abbaye Maillard, a hound with a keen enough scent for blood to make himself a lusty living. He and his colleague Héron would often come to La Force to count their victims before following them to the scaffold.
“Plots—plots!” he muttered, shaking his head tolerantly, as if he were rebuking a child. “See to it, Citizen Cabochon.”
The jailer fetched back the stick. The paper, however, was gone from the end of it.
“It will be in the sewer,” said Maillard, quietly.
Cabochon had no scruples. He groped with his fingers.
“It is not here,” he said after a time, eyeing me and very malignant.
“Well,” said the other, “who is this fellow?”
“Mordi, Citizen President; he is a forgotten jackass that eats his head off in the revolutionary stable.”
“Vraiment?Then, it follows, his head must fall into the revolutionary manger.”
He nodded pleasantly twice or thrice; then turned and, beckoning Cabochon to walk by him, strode away.
I sat in particular cogitation against the wall. For the present, it seemed, I enjoyed a distinction that was not attractive to my fellow-prisoners; and I was left religiously to myself.
“Now,” said I aloud, “I have grown such a beard that at last the national barber must take me in hand.”
“M. Jean-Louis,” said a voice the other side of the trap, “will you keep me kneeling here for ever?”
I started and flung myself face downwards with a cry of joy. My heart swelled in a moment so that it drove the tears up to my eyes.
“Carinne!” I cried, choking and half-sobbing; “is it thou indeed?”
“Creep through the little hole,” she said, “and thou shalt see.”
I laughed and I cried in a single breath.
“Say what thou wilt,ma fillette. Yes, I will call thee as I choose. Didst thou hear but now? I think it is a dying man that speaks to thee. Carinne, say after all you keep a place in your heart for the little odd Thibaut.”
“Insidious! thou wouldst seek to devour the whole, like a little worm in a gall.”
“To hear your voice again! We are always shadows to one another now. As a shadow I swear that I love you dearly. Oh,ma mie, ma mie, I love you so dearly. And why were you cruel to leave me for that small gust of temper I soon repented of? Carinne! My God! she is gone away!”
“I am here, little Thibaut.”
“There is a sound in your voice. Oh, this savage unyielding wall! I will kiss it a foot above the trap. Will you do the same on the other side?”
“Monsieur forgets himself, I think.”
“He is light-headed with joy. But he never forgets Mademoiselle de Lâge—not though she punished him grievously for an indifferent offence in the forests of Chalus.”
“Jean-Louis, listen well to this: I was abducted.”
“My God! by whom?”
“By a vile citizen Representative journeying to Paris.”
“By a——”
“I had emerged from the trees after you left me, and was sitting very passionate by the road, when he passed with his escort and discovered me.”
I kneeled voiceless as if I were stunned.
“What would you!” said Carinne. “There was no Thibaut at hand to throw him to the pigs. He forced me to go with him, and——”
I vented a groan that quite rumbled in the gutter; and at that her voice came through the hole a little changed—
“Monsieur has a delicate faith in what he professes to love.”
I beat my hands on the wall. I cried upon Heaven in my agony to let me reach through this inexorable veil of stone.
“You talked once of the wicked licence of the times. How could I know, oh,ma mie! And now all my heart is melting with love and rapture.”
“But I had a knife, Jean-Louis. Well, but he was courteous to me; and at that I told him who I was—no jill-flirt, but an unhappy waif of fortune. Now,mon Dieu!—it turned out that this was the very man that had comeen missionto Pierrettes.”
“Lacombe?”
“No—a creature of the name of Crépin——”
I uttered a cry.
“Crépin! It was he that carried thee away?”
“Truly; and who has, for my obduracy, consigned me to prison. Ever since, little Thibaut, ever since—now at Les Carmes; now in the Rue de Sèvres; at last, no later than yesterday, to this ‘extraordinary question’ of La Force.”
“Now thou art a sweet-souled Carinne! Send me something of thine through the evil passage that I may mumble it with my lips. Carinne, listen,”—and I told her the story of my connection with the villain.
“I would wring his neck if they would spare mine,” I said. “But, alas! I fear I am doomed, Carinne.”
She had from me all the details in brief of my captivity.Mon Dieu!but it was ecstasy this dessert to my long feast of neglect. At the end she was silent a space; then she said very low—
“He communicates with me; but I never answer. Now I will do so, and perhaps thou shalt not die.”
“Carinne.”
“Hush, thou small citizen! The time is up; we must talk no longer.”
I breathed all my heart out in a sigh of farewell. I thought she had already gone, when suddenly she spoke again—
“Jean-Louis, Jean-Louis, do you hear?”
“Yes.”
“I would have thee just the height for thine eyes to look into mine.”
“Carinne? And what should they read there?”
Again there was a pause, again I thought she had gone; and then once more her voice came to me—
“Little Thibaut, Ididkiss the wall a foot above the trap.”
* * * * * * *
“Madame Beau,” said I, “when you shall be nearing old age—that is to say, when your present years double themselves—it is very certain that your lines will fall in pleasant places.”
“And where will they be?” said she.
“Where, but round your fine eyes and the dimples of your mouth!”
She cried, “Oh, qu’il est malin!” and tapped my shoulder archly with a great key she held in her hand.
“And what is the favour you design to ask of me?” she said.
“Firstly your permission to me to dedicate some verses to you,” said I. “After that, that you will procure me the immediate delivery of this little tube of paper.”
“To whom is it addressed?”
“To one Crépin, who lives in the Rue de Jouy, St Antoine.”
“Croyez m’en!” she cried. “Do you not see I have dropped my key?”
Then, as I stooped to pick up the instrument which she had let fall on the pavement, “Slip the little paper into the barrel!” she muttered.
I did so; and these were the words I had written on it:—
“I am imprisoned in La Force for any reason or none. It concerns me only in that I am thereby debarred from vindicating upon your body the honour of Mademoiselle de Lâge. If it gives you any shame to hear that towards this victim of your base persecution, I, your one-time comrade, entertain and have long entertained sentiments of the most profound regard, prevail with yourself, I beseech you, to procure the enlargement of a lady whose only crimes—as things are judged nowadays—are her innocence and her beauty.“Jean-Louis Thibaut.”
“I am imprisoned in La Force for any reason or none. It concerns me only in that I am thereby debarred from vindicating upon your body the honour of Mademoiselle de Lâge. If it gives you any shame to hear that towards this victim of your base persecution, I, your one-time comrade, entertain and have long entertained sentiments of the most profound regard, prevail with yourself, I beseech you, to procure the enlargement of a lady whose only crimes—as things are judged nowadays—are her innocence and her beauty.
“Jean-Louis Thibaut.”
* * * * * * *
Of all the degradations to which we in the prison were subjected, none equalled that that was a common condition of our nightly herding. Then—so early as eight o’clock during the darker months—would appear the foul Cabochon—with his satellites and three or four brace of hounds—to drive us like cattle to our sleeping-pens. Bayed into the corridors, from which our cells opened, we must answer to our names bawled out by a crapulous turnkey, who held in his jerking hands, and consulted with his clouded eyes, a list that at his soberest he could only half decipher. He calls a name—probably of one that has already paid the penalty. There is no answer. The ruffian bullies and curses, while the survivors explain the matter to him. He sulkily acquiesces; shouts the tally once more, regardless of the hiatus—of course only to repeat the error. Amidst a storm of menaces we are all ordered out of our rooms, and this again and yet again, perhaps, until the beast satisfies himself or is satisfied that none is skulking, and that nothing is in error but his own drunken vision. Then at last the dogs are withdrawn, the innumerable doors clanged to and barred, and we are left, sealed within a fetid atmosphere, to salve our wounded dignity as we can with the balm of spiritual self-possession.
But now, on this particular evening, conscious of something in my breast that overcrowed the passionless voice of philosophy, I felt myself uplifted and translated—an essence impressionable to no influence that was meaner than divine.
“And who knows,” I said to myself, as we were summoned from the yard, “but that Quatremains-Quatrepattes might have pronounced Carinne to be the bright star in my horoscope?”
“Not so fast, citizen,” growled Cabochon, who stood, list in hand, at the door.
“Rest content,” said I; “I am never in a hurry.”
“Par exemple!you grow a little rusty, perhaps, for a notable actor. It is well, then, that you have an engagement at last.”
“To perform? And where, M. Cabochon?”
“In the Palais de Justice. That is a theatre with a fine box, citizen; and the verdict of those that sit in it is generally favourable—to the public.”
WasI so very small? I had the honour of a tumbril all to myself on my journey to the Conciergerie, and I swear that I could have thought I filled it. But Mademoiselle de Lâge was the pretty white heifer that had caused me to puff out my sides in emulation of her large nobility—me, yes, of whom she would have said, as the bull of the frog, “Il n’était pas gros en tout comme un œuf.” Now I was travelling probably to my grave; yet the exaltation of that interview still dwelt with me, and I thought often of some words that had once been uttered by a certain Casimir Bertrand: “To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back! What could kings wish for better?”
We came down upon the sullen prison by way of the Pont au Change and the Quay d’Horloge, and drew up at a door on the river-side. I saw a couple of turrets, with nightcap roofs, stretch themselves, as if yawning, above me. I saw in a wide angle of the gloomy block of buildings, where the bridge discharged itself upon the quay, a vast heap of newly thrown-up soil where some excavations were being conducted; and from the mound a sort of crane or scaffold, sinisterly suggestive of a guillotine surmounting a trench dug for its dead, stood out against a falling crimson sky. The river hummed in its course; above a green spot on the embankment wall a cloud of dancing midges seemed to boil upwards like steam from a caldron. Everything suggested to me themise en scèneof a rehearsing tragedy, and then promptly I was haled, like an inanimate “property,” into the under-stage of that dark “theatre of varieties.”
Messieurs the jailers, it appeared, were at their supper, and would not for the moment be bothered with me. A gush of light and a violent voice issued from a door to one side of a stony vestibule: “Run the rascal into La Souricière, and be damned to him!”
Thereat I was hurried, by the “blue” that was responsible for my transfer, and an understrapper with the keys, by way of a gloomy course—up and down—through doorways clinched with monstrous bolts—under vaulted stone roofs where spiders, blinded by the lamp glare, shrank back into crevices, and where all the mildew of desolation sprouted in a poisonous fungus—along passages deeply quarried, it seemed, into the very foundations of despair; and at last they stopped, thrust me forward, and a door clapped to behind me with a slam of thunder.
I stood a moment where I was and caught at my bewildered faculties. It took me, indeed, but a moment to possess myself of them. In those days one had acquired a habit of wearing one’s wits unsheathed in one’s belt. Then I fell to admiring the quite unwonted brilliancy of the illumination that pervaded the cell. It was a particularly small chamber—perhaps ten feet by eight or so—and consequently the single lighted candle, held in a cleft stick the butt of which was thrust into a chink in the stones, irradiated it to its uttermost corner. The furniture was artless in its simplicity—a tub, a broken pitcher of water, and two heaps of foul straw. But so abominable a stench filled the place that no doubt there was room for little else.
Now, from one of the straw beds, the figure of a man—my sole comrade to be, it would appear—rose up as I stirred, and stood with its back and the palms of its hands pressed against the wall. Remaining thus motionless, the shadows blue in its gaunt cheeks, and little husks of wheat caught in its dusty hair, it fixed me with eyes like staring pebbles.
“Défense d’entrer!” it snapped out suddenly, and shut its mouth like a gin.
“Oh, monsieur!” said I, “no going out, rather, for the mouse in the trap.”
He lifted one of his arms at right angles to his body, and let it drop again to his side.
“Behold!” he cried, “the peril! Hadst thou been closer thy head had fallen!”
“But thine,” said I. “Hast thou not already lost it?”
“Oh, early in the struggle, monsieur! Oh, very early! And then my soul passed into the inanimate instrument of death and made it animate.”
“What! thou art the guillotine itself?”
“Look at me, then! Is it not obvious that I am that infernal engine, nor less that I am informed with theegothat once was my victim and is now my familiar—being myself, in effect?”
“Pardieu!this is worse than the game of ‘Proverbs.’ It rests with thyego, then, to put a period to this orgy of blood.”
He gave forth a loud wailing cry.
“I am a demon, prejudged and predestined, and the saint of the Place du Trône is possessed with me.”
“A saint, possessed!”
He wrung his hands insanely.
“Oh!” he cried—“but is it not a fate to which damnation were Paradise! For me, the gentle Aubriot, who in my material form had shrunk from killing a fly—for me to thus deluge an unhappy land with the blood of martyrs! But I have threshed my conscience with a knotted discipline, and I know—yes, monsieur, I know—what gained me my punishment. A cripple once begged of me a poor two sous. I hesitated, in that I had but the one coin on me, and my nostrils yearned for snuff. I hesitated, and the devil tripped up my feet. I gave the man the piece and asked him a sou in change. For so petty a trifle did I barter my salvation. But heaven was not to be deceived, and its vengeance followed me like a snake through the grass. Ah!” (he jumped erect) “but the blade fell within an ace of thy shoulder!”
This was disquieting enough, in all truth. Yet I took comfort from the thought that the madman could avail himself of no more murderous weapon than his hands.
“Now, M. Guillotin,” said I, “observe that it is characteristic of you to lie quiescent when you are put away for the night.”
“Nenni, nenni, nenni!” he answered. “That may have been before the hideous apotheosis of the instrument. Now, possessed as I am, I slash and cut at whoever comes in my way.”
Mon Dieu!but this was a wearisome lunatic! and I longed very ardently to be left peacefully to my own reflections. I came forward with a show of extreme fortitude.
“This demon of yourself,” I said—“you wish it to be exorcised, that the soil of France may grow green again?”
A fine self-sacrificial rapture illumined his wild face.
“Let me be hurled into the bottomless pit,” he cried, “that so the Millennium may rise in the east like an August sun!”
“Now,” said I, “I will commune with my soul during the night, that perchance it may be revealed to me how the guillotine may guillotine itself.”
To my surprise the ridiculous bait took, and the poor wretch sunk down upon his straw and uttered no further word. Crossing the cell to come to my own heap, my foot struck against an iron ring that projected from a flag. For an instant a mad hope flamed up in me, only to as immediately die down. Was it probable that the “Mouse-trap”—into which, I knew, it was the custom to put newly arrived prisoners before their overhauling by the turnkeys and “scenting” by the dogs of the guard—would be furnished with a door of exit as of entrance? Nevertheless, I stooped and tugged at the ring to see what should be revealed in the lifting of the stone. It, the latter, seemed a ponderous slab. I raised one end of it a foot or so with difficulty, and, propping it with the pitcher, looked to see what was underneath. A shallow trough or excavation—that was all; probably a mere pit into which to sweep the scourings of the cell. Leaving it open, I flung myself down upon the mat of straw, and gave myself up to a melancholy ecstasy of reflection.
The maniac crouched in his corner. So long as the light lasted I was conscious of his eyes fixed in a steady bright stare upon the lifted stone. There seemed something in its position that fascinated him. Then, with a dropping splutter, the candle sank upon itself and was extinguished suddenly; and straightway we were embedded in a block of gloom.
Very soon I was asleep. Ease and sensation, drink and food—how strangely in those days one’s soul had learned to withdraw itself from its instinctive attachments; to hover apart, as it were, from that clumsy expression of its desires that is the body with its appetites; and to accept at last, as radically irreclaimable, that same body so grievously misinformed with animism. Now I could surrender to forgetfulness, and that with little effort, all the load of emotion and anxiety with which a savage destiny sought to overwhelm me. Nor did this argue a brutish insensibility on my part; but only a lifting of idealism to spheres that offered a more tranquil and serener field for meditation.
Once during the night a single drawn sound, like the pipe of wind in a keyhole, roused me to a half-recovery of my faculties. I had been dreaming of Carinne and of the little pig that fell into the pit, and, associating the phantom cry with the voluble ghosts of my brain, I smiled and fled again to the heights.
The noise of heavily grating bolts woke me at length to the iron realities of a day that might be my last on earth. I felt on my face the wind of the dungeon door as it was driven back.
“Follow me, Aubriot!” grunted an indifferent voice in the opening.
Lacking a response of any sort, the speaker, who had not even put himself to the trouble of entering the cell, cried out gutturally and ironically—
“Holà hé, holà hé, Citizen Aubriot Guillotin! thou art called to operate on thyself!Mordi, mordi, mordi!dost thou hear? thou art invited to commit suicide that France may regenerate itself of thee!”
I raised my head. A burly form, topped by a great hairy face, blocked the doorway. I made it out by the little light that filtered through a high-up grating above me.
“Mille démons!” shouted the turnkey suddenly, “what is this?”
He came pounding into the cell, paused, and lifted his hands like a benedictory priest. “Mille démons!” he whispered again, with his jaw dropped.
I had jumped to my feet.
“Pardieu!Mr Jailer!” said I; “the guillotine, it appears, has anticipated upon itself that law of which it is the final expression. The rest of us you will of necessity acquit.”
I looked down, half-dazed; but I recalled the odd sound that had awakened me in the night. Here, then, was the explanation of it—in this swollen and collapsed form, whose head, it seemed, was plunged beneath the floor, as if it had dived for Tartarus and had stuck at the shoulders.
“He has guillotined himself with a vengeance!” I exclaimed.
“But how?” said the turnkey, stupidly.
“But thus, it is obvious: by propping the slab-end on the pitcher; by lying down with his neck over the brink of the trough; by upsetting the vessel with a sweep of his arm as he lay.Mon Dieu!see how he sprouts from the chink like a horrible dead polypus! This is no mouse-trap, but a gin to catch human vermin!”
“It was not to be foreseen,” muttered the man, a little scared. “Who would have fancied a madman to be in earnest!”
“And that remark,” said I, “comes oddly from the lips of a patriot.”
He questioned me with his eyes in a surly manner.
“Bah!” I cried; “are not Robespierre, Couthon, St Just in earnest? are not you in earnest? and do you not all put your heads into traps? But I beg you to take me out of La Souricière.”
He had recovered his composure while I spoke.
“Come, then,” he said; “thou art wanted down below. And as to that rascal—Mordi!” he chuckled, “he has run into acul-de-sacon his way to hell; but at any rate he has saved the axe an extra notch to its edge.”
On the threshold of the room he stopped me and looked into my face.
“How much for abillet?” said he.
“You have one for me?”
“That depends.”
“But doubtless you have been paid to deliver it?”
“And doubtless thou wilt pay to receive it.”
“Oh,mon Dieu!” said I; “but these vails! And patriots, I see, are not so far removed from the lackeys they despise.”
“Pardi!” said the bulky man. “Listen to the fox preaching to the hens! But I will lay odds that in another twelve hours thou wilt be stripped of something besides thy purse. What matter, then! thou wilt have thy crown of glory to carry to the Lombard-house.”
I gave him what was left to me.
“Now,” said I; and he put a scrap of paper into my hand.
I unfolded it in the dim light and read these words, hurriedly scrawled thereon in a hand unknown to me: “Play, if nothing else avails, the hidden treasures of Pierrettes.”
“Follow me, Thibaut,” said the jailer.
* * * * * * *
As might feel a martyr, who, with a toy knife in his hand, is driven to face the lions, so felt I on my way to the Tribunal with that fragment of paper thrust into my breast. At one moment I could have cried out on the travesty of kindness that could thus seek to prolong my agony by providing me with an inadequate weapon; at another I was reminded how one might balance oneself in a difficult place with a prop no stronger than one’s own little finger. Yet this thin shaft of light cutting into desperate gloom had disquieted me strangely. Foreseeing, and prepared stoically to meet, the inevitable, I had even—before thebilletwas placed in my hands—felt a certain curiosity to witness—though as an accused—the methods of procedure of a Court that was as yet only known to me through the infamy of its reputation. Now, however, caught back to earth with a rope of straw, I trembled over the very thought of the ordeal to which I was invited.
Coming, at the end of melancholy vaulted passages, to a flight of stone steps leading up to a door, I was suddenly conscious of a droning murmur like that of hived bees. The jailer, in the act of running the key into the lock, beckoned me to mount to him, and, thus possessed of me, caught me under the arm-pit.
“Play thy card, then, like a gambler!” said he.
“What!” I exclaimed in astonishment.
“Ah bah!” he growled; “didst thou think delicacy kept me from reading the message? But, fear not. Thou art too little a gudgeon for my playing”—and he swung open the door. Immediately the hiss and patter of voices swept upon me like rain. That, and the broad glare of daylight after so much darkness, confused me for a moment. The next I woke to the consciousness that at last my foot was on the precipice path—the gangway for the passage of the pre-damned into the Salle de la Liberté—thearêteof the “Montagne,” it might be called, seeing how it served that extreme faction for a ridge most perilous to its enemies to walk on.
This gangway skirted a wooden barricade that cut the hall at about a third of its length. To my left, as I advanced, I caught glimpse over the partition of the dismal black plumes on the hats of the judges, as they bobbed in juxtaposition of evil under a canopy of green cloth. To my right, loosely filling the body of the hall, was the public; and here my extreme insignificance as a prisoner was negatively impressed upon me by the indifference of those whom I almost brushed in passing, for scarce apoissardeof them all deigned to notice the little gudgeon as he wriggled on the national hook. Then in a moment my conductor twisted me through an opening cut in the barricade, and I was delivered over to the Tribunal.
A certain drumming in my ears, a certain mist before my eyes, resolved themselves into a very set manner of attention. The stark, whitewashed walls seemed spotted with a plague of yellow faces—to my left a throng of mean blotches, the obsequious counsel for the defence; to my front the President and judges, in number three, like skulls decked with hearse-plumes; to my right the jury, a very Pandora-box of goblins, the lid left off, the evil countenances swarming over the edge. All seemed to my excited imagination to be faces and nothing else—drab, dirty, and malignant—ugly motes set against the staring white of the walls, dancing fantastically in the white day-beams that poured down from the high windows. Yet that I sought for most I could not at first distinguish,—not until the owner of it stood erect by a little table—placed to one side and a little forward of the judicial dais—over which he had been leaning. Then I recognised him instantly—Tinville, the Devil’s Advocate, the blood-boltered vampire—and from that moment he was the court to me, judge, jury, and counsel, and his dark face swam only in my vision like a gout of bile.
Now, I tell you, that so dramatic was this Assembly by reason of the deadliness of purpose that characterised it, that one, though a prisoner, almost resented the flippant coxcombry of the three sightless busts standing on brackets above the bench. For these—Brutus, Marat, St Fargeau (his gods quit the indignant Roman of responsibility for entertaining such company)—being jauntily decorated with a red bonnet apiece and a grimy cockade of the tricolour, jarred hopelessly in the context, and made of the bloodiest tragedy a mere clownish extravaganza. And, behold! of this extravaganza Fouquier-Tinville, when he gave reins to his humour, discovered himself to be the very Sannio—the rude powerful buffoon, with a wit only for indecency.
Yet he did not at a first glance figure altogether unprepossessing. Livid-skinned though he was, with a low forehead, which his hair, brushed back and stiffly hooked at its ends, seemed to claw about the middle like a black talon, there was yet little in his countenance that bespoke an active malignancy. His large eyes had that look of good-humoured weariness in them that, superficially, one is apt to associate with unvindictive long-sufferingness. His brows, black also and thick, were set in the habitual lift of suspense and inquiry. His whole expression was that of an anxious dwelling upon the prisoner’s words, lest the prisoner should incriminate himself; and it was only when one marked the tigerish steadiness of his gaze and thesootyprojection of his under-lip over a strongly cleft chin that one realised how the humour of the man lay all upon the evil side. For the rest—as each detail of his personality was hammered into me by my pulses—his black clothes had accommodated themselves to his every ungainly habit of movement, his limp shirt was caught up about his neck with a cravat like a rag of dowlas, and over his shoulders hung a broad national ribbon ending in a silver medallion, with the one wordLoiimprinted on it like a Judas kiss.
Thus the man, as he stood scrutinising me after an abstracted fashion, his left arm bent, the hand of it knuckled upon the table, the Lachesis thumb of it—flattened from long kneading of the yarn of life—striding over a form of indictment.
The atmosphere of the court was frowzy as that of a wine-shop in the early hours of morning. It repelled the freshness of the latter and communicated its influence to public and tribunal alike. Over all hung a slackness and a peevish unconcern as to business. Bench and bar yawned, and exchanged spiritless commonplaces of speech. True enough, a gudgeon was an indifferent fish with which to start the traffic of the day.
At length the Public Accuser slightly turned and nodded his head.
“Maître Greffier,” said he, in quite a noiseless little voice, “acquaint us of the charge, I desire thee, against thispatte-pelu.”
Nom de Dieu!here was a finecoup d’archetto the overture. My heart drummed very effectively in response.
A little black-martin of a fellow, with long coat-tails and glasses to his eyes, stood up by the notaries’ table and handled a slip of paper. Everywhere the murmur of Tinville’s voice had brought the court to attention. I listened to thegreffierwith all my ears.
“Act of Accusation,” he read out brassily, “against Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé,ci-devantComte de la Muette, and since calling himself the Citizen Jean-Louis Thibaut.”
Very well, and very well—I was discovered, then; through whose agency, if not through Jacques Crépin’s, I had no care to learn. The wonder to me was that, known and served as I had been, I should have enjoyed so long an immunity from proscription as an aristocrat. But I accused Crépin—and wrongfully, I believe—in my heart.
“Hath rendered himself answerable to the law of the 17th Brumaire,” went on thegreffier, mechanically, “in that he, anémigré, hath ventured himself in the streets of Paris in disguise, and——”
The Public Accuser waved him impatiently to a stop. There fell a dumb silence.
“One pellet out of a charge is enough to kill a rat,” said he, quietly: then in an instant his voice changed to harsh and terrible, and he bellowed at me—
“What answer to that, Monsieurr-r-r-rat, Monsieurratatouille?”
The change of manner was so astounding that I jumped as at the shock of a battery. Then a hot flush came to my face, and with it a dreadful impulse to strike this insolent on the mouth. I folded my arms, and gave him back glare for glare.
“Simply, monsieur,” I said, “that it is not within reason to accuse me of returning to what I have never quitted.”
“Paris?”
“The soil of France.”
“That shall not avail thee!” he thundered. “What right hast thou to the soil that thou and thine have manured with the sacred blood of the people?”
“Oh, monsieur!” I began—“but if you will convert my very refutation——”
He over-roared me as I spoke. He was breathing himself, at my expense, for the more serious business of the day. Positively I was being used as a mere punching-bag on which this “bruiser” (comme on dit à l’Anglaise) might exercise his muscles.
“Silence!” he shouted; “I know of what I speak! thou walk’st on a bog, where to extricate the right foot is to engulf the left. Emigrant art thou—titular at least by force of thy accursed rank; and, if that is not enough, thou hast plotted in prison with others that are known.”
I smiled, awaiting details of the absurd accusation. I had formed, it was evident, no proper conception of this court of summary jurisdiction. The President leaned over his desk at the moment and spoke with Tinville, proffering the latter his snuff-box. They exchanged some words, a pantomime of gesticulation to me. As they nodded apart, however, I caught a single wafted sentence: “We will whip her like the Méricourt if she is obstinate.”
To what vile and secret little history was this the key! To me it only signified that, while I had fancied them discussing a point of my case, the two were passing confidences on a totally alien matter. At last I felt very small; and that would have pleased Carinne.
“But, at any rate,” I thought, “the charge against me must now assume some definite form.”
He, that darkbouche de ferof the Terror, stared at me gloomily, as if he had expected to find me already removed. Then suddenly he flung down upon the table the paper he had in his hand, and cried automatically, as if in a certain absence of mind, “I demand this man of the law to which he is forfeit.”
God in heaven! And so my trial was ended. They had not even allotted me one from the litter of mongrel counsel that, sitting there like begging curs, dared never, when retained, score a point in favour of a client lest the hags and the brats should hale them off to the lamp-irons. This certainly was Justice paralysed down one whole side.
I heard a single little cry lift itself from the hall behind me and the clucking of thetricoteuses. I felt it was all hopeless, but I clutched at the last desperate chance as the President turned to address (in three words) the jury.
“M. l’Accusateur Public,” I said, hurriedly, “I am constrained to tell you that I have in my possession that which may induce you to consider the advisability of a remand.”
The fellow stared dumfoundered at me, as if I had thrown my cap in his face. The President hung on his charge.
“Oh!” said the former, with an ironical nicety of tone—“and what is the nature of this magnificent evidence?”
I had out my scrap of paper, folded like abillet-doux.
“If the citizen will condescend to cast his eye on this?” I said.
He considered a minute. Curiosity ever fights in the bully with arrogance. At length he made a sign to agendarmeto bring him that on which, it seemed, my life depended.
Every moment while he dwelt on the words was like the oozing of a drop of blood to me. I had in a flash judged it best to make him sole confidant with me in the contents of the paper, that so his private cupidity might be excited, and he not be driven by necessity to play therôleof the incorruptible. The instant he looked up my whole heart expanded.
“The prisoner,” he said, “acquits his conscience of a matter affecting the State. I must call upon you,M. le Président, to grant for the present a remand.”
Oh,mon Dieu! but the shamelessness of this avarice! I believe the scoundrel would have blushed to be discovered in nothing but an act of mercy.
“The prisoner is remanded to close confinement in the Convent of St Pélagie,” were the words that dismissed me from the court; and I swear Fouquier-Tinville’s large eyes followed me quite lovingly as I was marched away.
Atso early an hour was my trial (in the personal and suffering sense) brought to a conclusion, that mid-day was not yet struck when my guards delivered me over to the authorities at St Pélagie—a one-timecommunauté de fillesin the faubourg of St Victor, and since appropriated ostensibly to the incarceration of debtors. My arrival, by grace of Fortune, was most happily timed; and, indeed, the persistency with which throughout the long period of my difficulties this capriciouscoureuseamongst goddesses converted for my benefit accident into opportuneness offered some excuse to me for remaining in conceit with myself.
Now I was taken in charge by a single turnkey—the others being occupied with their dinner—and conducted by him to the jailer’s room to undergo thatrapiotage, or stripping for concealed properties, the general abuse of which—especially where women were in question—was a scandal even in those days of shameless brutality.
As he pushed me into the little ill-lighted chamber and closed the door hurriedly upon us, I noticed that the man’s hands shook, and that his face was clammy with a leaden perspiration. He made no offer to overhaul me; but, instead, he clutched me by the elbow and looked in a half-scared, half-triumphant manner into my face.
“Pay attention,” he said, in a quick, forced whisper. “Thy arrival accommodates itself to circumstance—most admirably, citizen, it accommodates itself. I, that was to expect, am here alone to receive thee. It is far better so than that I should be driven to visit thee in thy cell.”
“I foresee a call upon my gratitude,” I said, steadily regarding him. “That is at your service, citizen jailer, when you shall condescend to enlighten me as to its direction.”
“I want none of it,” he replied. “It is my own to another that procures thee this favour.”
“What other, and what favour?”
“As to the first—en bon Français, I will not tell thee. For the second—behold it!”
With the words, he whipt out from under his blouse a thin, strong file, a little vessel of oil, and a dab of some blue-coloured mastic in paper—and these he pressed upon me.
“Hide them about thy person—hide them!” he muttered, in a fearful voice; “and take all that I shall say in a breath!”
He glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. He was a blotched and flaccid creature, with the staring dry hair of the tippler, but with very human eyes. His fingers closed upon my arm as if for support to their trembling.
“Cell thirteen—on the first floor,” he said; “that is whither I shall convey thee. Ask no questions. Hast thou them all tight?—Allez-vous en, mon ami!A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.”
“But——”
“Ah! thou must needs be talking! Cement with the putty, then, and rub the filings over the marks.”
“I was not born yesterday. It is notthatI would know.”
“S-st! At nine by the convent clock, be ready to drop silently into the cart that shall pass beneath thy window. Never mind what thou hit’st on. A falling man does not despise a dunghill.”
I hesitated, seeking to read this patriot’s soul. Was this all a snare to clinch my damnation? Pooh! if I had ever fancied Tinville hunted for the shadow of a pretext, this morning’s experience should have disabused me of the fallacy.
“Who commissions thee?” I said.
“One to whom I owe a measure of gratitude.”
“But not I?”
“From this time—yes.”
He pushed at me to go before him.
“At least,” I said, “acquaint me if it is the same that sent the letter.”
“I know nothing of any letter.San’ Dieu!I begin to regret my complaisance. This fellow will strangle us all with his long tongue.”
“But, for thyself, my friend?”
“Oh,nom de Dieu! I have no fear, if thou wilt be discreet—and grateful.”
“And this tool—and therapiotage!”
“Listen then! The thief that follows a thief finds little by the road. We are under no obligation to search a prisoner remanded from another prison.”
Impulsively I wrung the hand of the dear sententious; I looked into his eyes.
“The Goddess of Reason disown thee!” I said. “Thou shalt never be acolyte to a harlot!—And I—if all goes well, I will remember. And what is thy name, good fellow?”
“M. un tel,” said he, and added, “Bah! shall not thy ignorance of it be in a measure our safeguard?”
“True,” said I. “And take me away, then. I cannot get to work too soon.”
He opened the door, peeped out, and beckoned me.
“All is well,” he whispered. “The coast is clear.”[1]
As he drove me with harsh gestures across a yard, a turnkey, standing at a door and twirling a toothpick in his mouth, hailed him strenuously.
“What perquisites, then, comrade?”
“Bah!” cried my fellow; “I have not looked. He is a bone of Cabochon’s picking.”
* * * * * * *
With what a conflict of emotions I set to work—tentatively at first; then, seeing how noiselessly the file ran in its oiled groove, with a concentration of vigour—upon the bars of my window, it is not difficult to imagine. So hard I wrought that for hours I scarce gave heed to my growling hunger or attention to my surroundings. As to the latter, indeed, I was by this time sensibly inured to the conditions of confinement, and found little in my cell when I came to examine it to distinguish it from others I had inhabited. A bench, a pitcher, a flattened mess of straw; here and there about the stone flags marks as if some frantic beast had sought to undermine himself a passage to freedom; here and there, engraved with a nail or the tooth of a comb on the plaster coating of the walls, ciphers, initials, passionate appeals to heaven or blasphemous indecencies unnameable; in one spot a forlorn cry: “Liberté, quand cesseras-tu d’être un vain mot!” in another, in feminine characters, the poor little utterance: “On nous dit que nous sortirons demain,” made so pathetic by the later supplement underscored, “Vain espoir!”—with all these, or their like, was I grievously familiar—resigned, not hardened to them, I am sure.
The window at which I stood looked across a little-frequented passage—the Puit d’Ermite—upon a blank wall; and was terminated with a pretty broad sill of stone that screened my operations from casual wayfarers in the street below. Once, peering forth as I could, with my face pressed to the bars, I found myself to be situated so indifferent high as that, free of the grate, I might drop to the pavement without incurring risk of severer damage than a fractured leg or ankle, perhaps. Obviously, every point had been considered in this trifling matter of my escape. By whom? By him that had put me that pawn up my sleeve in the Palais de Justice? Well, the pawn had checked the king, it appeared; and now it must content me to continue the game with a handkerchief over my eyes, like the great M. Philidor.
By two o’clock, having cut through a couple of the bars close by their junction with the sill, so that a vigorous pull at both would open a passage for me large enough to squeeze through, I was absorbed in the careful process of cementing and concealing the evidences of my work when I heard a sound behind me and twisted myself about with a choke of terror. But it was my friendly jailer, come with a trencher of broken scraps for the famished animal in the cage.
“Corps de Christ!” he muttered, his face white and scared—“but here is an admirable precaution! What if I had been Fouquier-Tinville himself, then?”
“You made no noise.”
“Par exemple!I can shoot a hundredweight of bolts, it seems, so as not to wake a weasel. I made no noise to deaf ears. But, for thyself, monsieur—He that would steal corn must be careful his sack has no holes in it. And now I’ll wager thou’st dusted thy glittering filings out into the sunbeams, and a sentry, with pistols and a long musket, pacing the cobbles down there!”
“Soyez tranquille!I have all here in my pocket.”
He put down the platter, shrugged his shoulders, and came on tiptoe to the window.
“Well, it is excellent,” he whispered grudgingly—“if only thy caution matched thy skill.”
Then he came close up to me.
“I have news,” he muttered. “All is in preparation. It needs only that thou play’st thy part silently and surely. A moment’s decision and the game is thine.”
“But, the sentry, say’st thou?”
“He will be withdrawn. What, is it not the eve of theDécadi?[2]To-night, the wine-shops; to-morrow, full suburbs and an empty Paris, but for thee the Public Accuser with his questions.”
“And why should he not visit me to-day?”
“Rest assured. He hath a double baking to occupy him.”
A noise sounded in the corridor. The man put his finger to his lips, pointed significantly at the remainder litter about the sill, stole to the door, jangled his keys viciously and bellowed at me: “Thou shalt have that or nothing!Saint Sacrement, but the dainty bellies of these upstarts!”—and off he went, slamming the door after him, and grumbling till he was out of hearing.
“Excellent nameless one!” I cried to myself; and so, having most scrupulously removed every trace of my work, I fell, while attacking with appetite the meal left for me, into a sort of luminous meditation upon the alluring prospect half opened out to my vision.
“And whence, in the name of God,” I marvelled, “issues this unknown influence that thus exerts itself on my behalf; and by what process of gratitude can my jailer, in these days of a general repudiation of obligations, have attached himself to a cause that, on the face of it, seems a purely quixotic one?”
Then, “Oh, merciful Heaven!” I thought, “can it be possible that set in the far haze of a narrow vista of hope, an image—to whose wistful absorption into the Paradise of dreams I have sought to discipline myself—yet yearns to and beckons me from the standpoint of its own material sweetness? I see the smile on its mouth, the lift of its arms; I hear the little cry of welcome wafted to me. My God, the cry!”
All in an instant some shock of association seemed to stun my brain. The cry—the single cry that had issued upon my condemnation in the hall of Justice! Had it not been the very echo of that I had once heard uttered by a poor swineherd fallen into the hands of savages?
I got to my feet in agitation. Now, suddenly it was borne to me that from the moment of issue of that little incisive wail a formless wonder had been germinating in my soul. Carinne present at my trial!—no, no, it was impossible—unless——
“Citizen, the patriots in this corridor send thee greeting.”
I started as if a bullet had flown past my ear. The voice seemed to come from the next cell. I swept the cobwebs from my forehead.
“A thousand thanks!” I cried.
“They have dreamt that the ass cursed the thorough-bred for the niceness of his palate,” went on the voice, “and most heartily they commiserate thee.”
There followed a faint receding sound like laughter and the clapping of hands. I had no idea what to say; but the voice relieved me of the embarrassment.
“May I ask the citizen’s name?”
“I am the Comte de la Muette.”
“Allons donc!”—and the information, it seemed, was passed from cell to cell.
“Monsieur,” then came the voice, “we of the Community of the Eremites of St Pélagie offer thee our most sympathetic welcome, and invite thee to enrol thyself a member of our Society. Permit me, the President, by name Marino, to have the honour of proposing thee for election.”
“By all means. And what excludes, Monsieur le Président?”
“D’une haleine(I mention it to monsieur as a matter of form), to have been a false witness or a forger of assignats.”
“Then am I eligible.”
“Surely, monsieur. How could one conceive it otherwise! And it remains only to ask—again as a matter of form—thy profession, thy abode, and the cause of thy arrest.”
“Very well. My profession is one of attachment to a beautiful lady; I live, I dare to believe, in her heart; and, for my arrest, it was because, in these days of equality, I sought to remain master of myself.”
My answer was passed down the line. It elicited, I have the gratification to confess, a full measure of applause.
“I have the honour to inform M. le Comte,” said the President, “that he is duly elected to the privileges of the Society. I send him a fraternal embrace.”
My inclination jumped with the humour of the thing. It was thus that these unfortunates, condemned to solitary confinement, had conceived a method of relieving the deadly tedium of their lot. Thus they passed to one another straws of information gleaned from turnkeys or from prisoners newly arrived. And in order to the confusion of any guard that might overhear them, they studied, in their inter-communications, to speak figuratively, to convey a fact through a fable, or, at the least, to refer their statements to dreams that they had dreamt. At the same time they formed a Society rigidly exclusive. Admitted rascals, imprisoned in the corridor, they would by no means condescend to notice. I had an example of this once during the afternoon, when the whole place echoed with phantom merriment over a jest uttered by a member.
“M. le Comte!” cried a voice from the opposite row: “I could tell thee a better tale than that.”
Before the speaker could follow up his words, the President hammered at my wall.
“I beseech thee do not answer the fellow,” he said. “It is a rogue that was suborned in the most pitiful case of the St Amaranthe.”
“Monsieur, monsieur!” exclaimed the accused; “it is a slander and a lie. And how wouldst thou pick thy words with thy shoulder bubbling and hissing under the branding-iron?”
“As I would pick nettles,” I said.
“I beseech thee!” cried again my neighbour the President, in a warning voice, “this man can boast no claim to thy attention.”
The poor rascal cried out: “It is inhuman! I perish for a word of sympathy!”
I would have given it him; but his protests were laughed into silence. He yelled in furious retort. His rage was over-crowed, and drifted into sullenness.
“I dreamt I belaboured a drum,” said the President, “and it burst under my hands.”
* * * * * * *
Truly I did not regret the distraction this whimsical Society afforded me. Left to myself, the fever of my mind would have corroded my very reason, I think. To have been condemned to face those hours of tension indescribable, with no company but that of my own thoughts, would have proved such an ordeal as, I felt, would have gone far to render me nerveless at the critical moment. So, responding to the dig of circumstance in my ribs, I abandoned myself to frolic, and almost, in the end, lapsed into the other extreme of hysteria.
But, about five o’clock, closing in from the far end of the corridor, a swift ominous silence succeeded the jangle; and I was immediately aware of heavy footsteps treading the cemented floor of the passage, and, following upon these, the harsh snap of locks and the rumbling of a deep voice—
“Follow me, De la Chatière.”
The words were the signal for a shrilling chorus of sounds—whoops, cat-calls, verberant renderings of a whole farmyard of demoniac animals.
“Miau, miau, Émile! Thou art caught in thine own springe!”
“They will ask thee one of thy nine lives, Émile!”
“Ah—bah! if he pleads as he reasons, upside-down, they will only cut off his feet.”
“Plead thy poor sick virtue, Émile!”
“No, no! that were onecoup de têtethat shall procure him another.”
“What need to lie when the truth will serve! Plead thy lost virtue, Émile, and the jury will love thee.”
“Taisez-vous, donc!” roared a jailer. He was answered by a shriek of laughter. In the midst of the noise I heard the door of my neighbouring cell flung open and Marino summoned forth. As the party retreated: “M. le Président, M. le Président!” shouted a voice—“Art thou going without a word? But do not, I beseech thee, in the pride of thy promotion neglect to nominate thy successor!”
“Lamarelle, then,” answered the poor fellow, in a voice that he tried vainly to control.
He was led away. The babble boiled over and simmered down. In a very few moments a tense quiet had succeeded the uproar. This—due partly to the reaction from excitement, partly to the fact that jailers were loitering at hand—wrought in me presently a mood of overbearing depression. I durst give no rein to my hopes or to my apprehensions, lest, getting the bit between their teeth, they should fairly run away with my reason. The prospect of another four hours of this mindless inaction—hours of which every second seemed to be marked off by the tick of a nerve—was a deplorable one, indeed.
I tramped ceaselessly to and fro in my cage, humming to myself and assuming the habit of a philosophy that fitted me about as well as Danton’s breeches would have done. I grimaced to my own reflections like a coquette to her mirror. I suffered from my affectation of self-containment as severely as though I were a tight-lacedfemme à la modeweeping to hear a tale of pity. The convent clock, moving somewhere with a thunderous click as if it were the verydoyenof death-watches, chimed the dusk upon me in reluctant quarters. Ghostly emanations seemed to rise from the stones of my cell, sorrowful shapes of the lost and the hopeless to lean sobbing in its corners. Sometimes I could have fancied I heard a thin scratching on the walls about me, as if the returned spectres of despair were blindly tracing with a finger the characters they had themselves engraved thereon; sometimes, as I wheeled to view of the dull square of the window, a formless shadow, set against it, would appear to drop hurriedly and fold upon itself like a bat. By the time, at last, that, despite my resolves, I was worked up to a state of agitation quite pitiful, some little relief of distraction was afforded me by the entrance into my cell of a stranger turnkey, with some coarse food on a plate in his one hand, and, in the other, a great can of water, from which he replenished my pitcher. During the half minute he was with me a shag beast of a dog kept guard at the door.
“Fall to, then,” growled the man; “if thou hast the stomach for anything less dainty than fat pullets and butter.”
In effect, I had none for anything; yet I thought it the sensible policy to take up the plate, when the fellow was withdrawn, and munch away the drawling minutes lest I should spend them in eating out my heart.
Other than this rascal no soul came near me. I had had, it seemed, my full warning—my complete instructions. Yet, lacking reassurance during this long trial of suspense, I came to feel as if all affecting my escape must be a chimera—a fancy bred of the delirium that precedes death.
Well, as my friendlyhuissiermight have said, Time flies, however strong the head-wind; and at length the quarters clanged themselves into that one of them that was the prelude to my most momentous adventure. And immediately thereon (God absolve me for the inconsistency!) a frantic revulsion of feeling set in, so that I would have given all but my chance of escape to postpone the act of it indefinite hours. Now I heard the throb of the seconds with a terror that was like an acute accent to my agony of suspense. It grew—it waxed monstrous and intolerable. I must lose myself in some physical exertion if I would preserve my reason.
Suddenly a nightmare thought faced me. What if, when the time came, the cut bars should remain stubborn to my efforts to bend them! What if I had neglected to completely sever either or both, and that, while I madly wrought to remedy my error, the moment should pass and with it the means to my deliverance!
Sweating, panting, in a new reaction to the frenzy for liberty, I sprang to the window, gripped the bars, and, with all my force, dragged them towards me. They parted at the cuts and yielded readily. A sideway push to each, and there would freedom gape at me.
In the very instant of settling my shoulder to the charge, I was aware of a sound at my cell door—the cautious groping of wards in a lock. With a suppressed gasp I came round, with my back to the tell-tale grating, and stood like a discovered murderer.
A lance of dull light split the blackness perpendicularly.
“Open again when I tap,” said a little voice—that cracked like thunder in my brain, nevertheless,—and the light closed upon itself.
God of all irony!—the little voice—the little dulcet undertone that had criedpatte-peluupon me in the hall of Justice! So the turnkey had miscalculated or had been misinformed, and M. l’Accusateur Public would not postpone the verbal satisfaction of his cupidity to theDécadi.Le limier rencontrait; I was bayed into a corner, and my wit must measure itself against a double row of teeth.
For an instant a mad resentment against Fate for the infernal wantonness of its cruelty blazed up in my breast, so that I could scarce restrain myself from bounding upon my enemy with yells of fury. Then reason—set, contained and determined—was restored to me, and I stood taut as a bowstring and as vicious.
A moment or two passed in silence. I could make out a dusky undefined heap by the door. “In the dark all cats are grey.”
At length: “Who is there?” I said quietly.
The figure advanced a pace or two.
“Speak small, my friend,” it said, “as if thou wert the very voice of conscience.”
This time there was no doubt. I ground my teeth as I answered: “Ofthyconscience, monsieur? Then should I thunder in thy ears like a bursting shell.”
“What is this!” said he, taking a backward step.
On my honour I could not have told him. I felt only to myself that if this man baulked me of my liberty I should kill him with my hands. But doubtless indignation was my bad counsellor.
“How!” he muttered, with a menacing devil in his voice. “Does the fool know me?”
I broke into wicked laughter.
“Hear the unconscious humorist!” I cried—and the cry seemed to reel in my throat; for on the instant, dull and fateful, clanged the first note of the hour.
Now God knows what had urged me to this insanity of defiance, when it was obvious that my best hope lay in throwing a sop of lies to my Cerberus. God knows, I say; and to Him I leave the explanation. Yet, having fallen upon this course, I can assert that not once during the day had I felt in such good savour with myself.
He came forward again with a raging malediction.
“Thy pledge!” he hissed; “the paper—the treasure! God’s name! dost thou know who it is thou triflest with?”
I heard the rumble of wheels over the stones down below. My very soul seemed to rock as if it were launched on waves of air. The wheels stopped.
“Listen,” I said, in a last desperation. “It was a ruse, a lie to gain time. I know of no treasure, nor, if I did, would I acquaint thee of its hiding-place.”
A terrible silence succeeded. I stood with clinched hands. Had I heard the cart move away again I should have thrown myself upon this demon and sought to strangle him. Then, “Oh, my God! oh, my God!” he said twice, in a dreadful strained voice, and that was all.
Suddenly he made a swift movement towards me. I stood rigid, still with my back to the damning grate; but, come within a foot of me, he as suddenly wheeled and went to the door.
“Open, Gamache,” he whispered, like a man winded, and tapped on the oak: “open—I have something to say to thee.”
In another moment I was alone. I turned, and, in a frenzy of haste, drove the bars right and left with all my force. Like a veritable ape of destiny I leapt to the sill and looked down. A white face stared up at me. The owner of it was already in the act of gathering his reins together. I heard a soft tremulousouf!issue from his lips, and on the breath of it I dropped and alighted with a thud upon something that squelched beneath my weight. As I got to my knees, he on the driving-board was already whipping his horses to a canter.
“Quick, quick!” he said. “Come up and sit here beside me.”
I managed to do so, though the cargo we carried gave perilous foothold.
Then at once I turned and regarded my preserver.
“Saints in heaven!” I whispered, “Crépin!”
* * * * * * *
He was a verysans-culotte, and his face and eyebrows were darkened. But I knew him.
“Well,” he said; “I am no rogue of a Talma to act a part. But what, in God’s name, delayed thee?”
“Fouquier-Tinville.”
His jaw dropped at me.
“Si fait vraiment,” I said, and gave him the facts.
He shivered as I spoke. The instant I was done, “Get under the canvas!” said he, in a terrible voice. “There will be hue-and-cry, and if I am followed, we are both lost. Get under the canvas, and endure what thou canst not cure!”