“How, then?”
“At least, it would appear, its delivery by a confidential messenger was not imperative?”
“À ce qu’il paraît,” said the duke, grinning again. “At least such a commission exhibited an excess of caution.”
All the bitterness of the poor young man’s soul seemed suddenly to flush his veins.
“It is thus, then,” he cried, “that you requite the hospitality lavished upon you and yours; that you take advantage of a generous sympathy extended to you, to serve your own selfish purposes at the expense of your entertainers. You deserve that no hand be put out to you but to strike you in the face, as it is in my heart to treat you, monsieur le duc!”
He spoke loudly enough, and all his muscles tightened to the prick of onset. M. David ran up—
“Ta-ta-ta!” he exclaimed; “what the devil is here?”
Egalité’s cheeks showed mottled white, like brawn.
“Be quiet,” he said. “This is M. le Vicomte Murk, who has put himself to inconvenience to deliver me a letter.”
His lips trembled a little. The wretched creature himself had a wretched nerve.
“Monsieur would seem to imply,” he said, “that I am a party to the circumstance of some discomfiture he has suffered. It needs only a little reflection to disabuse himself of so extravagant a supposition.”
Ned made a violent effort to control his passion. Convinced now, as he was, that he had been used the victim of a practical joke, he could not turn the situation effectively by adopting a tragic vein. Besides, he was conscious of an inexplicable little feeling of rebellious attraction towards this man—a sort of emotional deference such as that with which a despairing suitor courts the guardian of his inamorata. If the light of his hope had fallen very low, here was he that might, if he would, renew it—here was a possible friend at court that he could ill afford—until that moment of the certain quenching of the light—to quarrel with or insult. He did not put this to himself. It affected him, nevertheless.
“I will acknowledge I was hasty,” he said, in some miserable perplexity. “It is possible I have jumped to unjustified conclusions. I have been a disinterested courier, as monsieur suggests, faithful to the service to which I was induced—under false pretences, it appears. But I will take monsieur’s word as to his innocence of any participation in the jest that has led me dancing over half a continent in search of monsieur.”
He looked at Egalité half piteously. The latter, scenting the reaction, shrugged his shoulders, with a relieved expression.
“I am deeply sensible,” he said coolly, “of monsieur’s kindness. For the rest” (he tapped the paper in his hands) “the message that monsieur conveys to me is capable of only one construction.”
“That madame removes with her charge to London?”
“Certainly.”
“And that is all?”
“Precisely all, monsieur.”
Ned fell back a pace, and bowed frigidly. The duke, with a second shrug of his shoulders, took M. David’s arm and made as if to withdraw. Suddenly he jerked himself free and returned to the hapless young man, a much gentler look on his face.
“Ah, monsieur!” he said, in a low voice, “that is all—yes, that is all. But I can read between the lines. Am I to hold myself to blame that madame took her own way to rid herself of an embarrassment! I talk in the dark, with only my knowledge of women—of this woman,par excellence—to illuminate me. She coaxed you to a confidential mission? Well, there was no need—believe me, there was no need. We must read between the lines.”
He again made as if to go, and again returned.
“It is extremely probable, nevertheless,” he said, “that we may see the dear emigrants back in Paris before long.”
With that he went off, taking the painter with him. Ned watched the couple receding, till the crowd absorbed them; then sat himself down, feeling benumbed and demoralised, upon a chair.
So, here was the end—the mocking means adopted to the rejection of his suit. It was a vile, cruel jest, he thought; a characteristic indulgence of selfishness inhuman, for which presently he would take fierce delight in calling a certain statesman to account. A statesman! his stricken vanity yelled to itself: a diplomatic buffoon who would sacrifice principle to a pun. So he classified Mr Sheridan, to whom he would attribute this ruin of his hopes.
But deeper emotions prevailed. Had the duke been, or was he at this last, despite his protestations, a party to the fraud? It mattered nothing at all. There was a more intimate question to put to his heart—the sadder and more sombre inquiry, Was the girl herself a confederate? And here he fell all amazed and overwhelmed; plunged in a slough of the most sorrowful speculation; struggling for foothold—for some memory at which he might clutch for the righting of his moral balance. There should have been many memories—of kind looks and words and touches, all instinct with the tender humour of truth. God in heaven! It was conceivable that the elder woman, the old practised strategist, had played a consummaterôle. It was never inconsistent with the principles of such pantological professors to indulge the hypocritical as part of their universal equipment. But Pamela, with not that of roguishness in her sweet eyes to justify a belief in anything but an innately honest soul behind them! Pamela, in the sincerity of her heart, in the womanliness of her nature, in the cleanness of her lips, craftily intriguing to indict Love’s passion of trust! He could not believe it. He could not but believe that some words, some acts of hers—most haunting in the retrospect—had been designed to express her sympathy with that in him which she could only as yet recognise in herself for a mood. And it had been, then, Madame de Genlis’ private policy to dismiss him before this mood—this bud—could timely open out into a flower.
Well, she had succeeded—thanks to one self-interested, with whom the reckoning was to come—she had succeeded, and aptly, no doubt, to the sequel. For it was not to be supposed that madame’s artifice would permit her to wean its subject from a fancy and fail to find the subject other food for a stimulated appetite. My lord the viscount had possibly, indeed, but (in the vernacular) kept the place warm for another. The sun of his passion may have only a little ripened the fruit for the delectation of lips more blest than his. By this time, it was probable, the dream that had been his was a transferred rapture.
What should he do—what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him—a shoddy, vulgarly formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (hewith his title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit.
He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and so admissible as himself.
He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses. Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now seemed to have evaded him for ever—emotion upon emotion, these wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his own capital. For he must see the girl again—to that he was determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm that with which he had so mistakenly temporised.
And then suddenly—a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever in his veins—the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms; and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the very character of which profaned his thought.
He thrust his hand in an access of tenderness into his breast.
“Monsieur,” said a low, grave voice in his ear, “is in need of sympathy.”
He started, and turned about angrily. At his elbow was seated that third member of the late trio to whom the others had appeared to pay deference. This man had not followed his companions, it seemed, but had remained behind when they walked away.
In the very motion of resenting the interference, something in the nobility of the stranger’s manner gave Ned pause. The anger died from his features, gradually, in a little silence that succeeded.
“Very well, monsieur,” he said at length, quite gently. “You are very far from meaning impertinence, I see. I answer you, All men need sympathy.”
“Monsieur,” said the stranger, “that admission is the basis of our new religion of humanity.”
He leaned forward, smiling with a great sweetness. His air somehow conveyed to Ned the impression of a conscious strength that rather enjoyed indulging in itself a dormant condition of faculty, sure that it could summon up at will mental forces irresistible to any opposed to it.
“Is it new?” said Ned. “I seem to recall a hint of it in the Gospels.”
“The man Christ,” said the stranger, “was a virgin. His partisanship was necessarily limited. He was never blinded by, but always to, passion.”
“The passion of love?”
“Of love, in the erotic sense.”
“And what is that to signify in the present context?”
“Only that it enables me to see deeper than Christ the virgin.”
“You have more prospicience than Christ?”
“In one direction, assuredly.”
“You are confident, monsieur?”
“So far, I am confident. Christ was a divine—I, monsieur, am a human—advocate.”
“De causes perdues, in this instance, monsieur, I believe. But an advocate deals with proofs.”
“Without doubt. Monsieur is unfortunate in an attachment.”
“To himself? Christ could have taught him that.”
Nevertheless he was amazed.
“Ah!” cried the other, “but I am literally an advocate; and I heard monsieur le duc’s final words; and it is my business to read the soul’s confession in the face. I perceive, however, that monsieur resents my presumption, which is, of a truth, unwarrantable.”
He rose as if to go, his dark eyes still quick with a gentle, unrebukeful sympathy. Ned was impelled to cry hastily—
“It is my right at least, monsieur, to ask the title of my counsel!”
“I have none,” said the stranger simply. “My name is Vergniaud.”
Ned sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.
“Vergniaud!” he cried, and stood staring at the man whose utterances—echoed latterly to the very cliffs of England—had seemed to him the first inspired interpretation of the Revolution as a real, breathing, human, emancipatory force. Now he understood why the others had shown such deference to this one of their party.
“Vergniaud!” he cried again faintly, and so rallied himself.
“Truly,” said he, “I have entertained an angel unawares. M. Vergniaud—indeed, I have a very unhappy attachment; and I need counsel at this moment, if ever man did.”
Pierre-Victorin Vergniaud, the source of much present enthusiasm, the full fountain-head of the Gironde river of eloquence, was already—though but a few months a citizen of Paris—the director of a popular force having an admirable tendency. In him it seemed possible to hail that political architect of the new era who should have the genius to reconcile warring creeds, and shape of men’s profound but formless aspirations an enduring temple of the ideal commonwealth. Poor, yet never conceding a thought to the shame of poverty; simple-minded to the extent that he could not err in justice; hating corruption and loving truth; a moving orator, a large humanitarian, he might have led a world, undissenting, to the worship of the right Liberty, had not his great gifts, his large ideals, been always subject to eclipse by an extreme constitutional indolence. Utterly ingenuous, utterly impressionable; depending upon the moment for inspiration, and so little warped by self-consciousness as never to know the moment to fail him—it was yet often impossible to spur this Vergniaud to necessary action. Madame Roland, the superior being, to whom he was introduced by enthusiastic friends, had no belief in his capacity as a leader; distrusted, and perhaps despised him. Ned—the poor degenerate to a very human type—learned, on the other hand, to love and admire him. For in this mind—as in the mirror of sweet clear water—he found his own chastened theories shaping themselves, taking such form and gentle significance as he had never hitherto but more than conceived to be theirs. Nor this only, or chiefly. He was able to forget something of his own hard unhappiness, of his bitter sense of grievance, in the familiar contemplation of a nature so serene, so noble, so unsolicitous of its self-aggrandisement. From these closing days of darkness, the little friendship that so queerly came to him to tide him opportunely over a period of wretched indecision remained an abiding pathetic memory.
Citizen Vergniaud lived in a shabby lodging near the Tivoli Gardens. Thither Ned accompanied him on the morning of their meeting, and thither many times he found his way again. The little beggarly room became a haven of rest to his tormented spirit—a confessional-box wherein he could always leave some part of his great weight of oppression. And, now and again, even, moved to waive his personal interest in that fine spirit, and to repay some part of the healing advice so disinterestedly lavished upon himself, he would play thepère spirituelin his turn, and whip his penitent with a cobweb lash of rebuke.
“My Peter,” he would complain, “you dwell too long on the overture to your career. It may be rich in all the suggested harmonies, but it is time you set to work on the opera.”
“Time!” would cry Vergniaud, with a smile. (He might be, perhaps, unpacking a very little parcel of cheap linen that had just reached him from his family, his dear simpletons, of Bordeaux.) “But time is no arbitrary measure to the man who hath studied to make his own.”
Says Ned, “You may make it, but you will always give it away to the first specious beggar that asks.”
“Then I am only liberal with that that I do not value. ’Tis a poor habit of charity, I admit. But I could never keep it; hark! little Edward—I could never keep time, even when I danced!”
“So foolish heirs mortgage their reversions.”
“So alchemists squander their inexhaustible treasures, you mean. When time has done with me, I shall be past caring. Maybe the spendthrift will have gilded a poor home or two in his world.”
“And, had he economised, he might have gilded the temples of an epoch.”
“Oh, thou art an elegant moraliser! But I am more modest for myself—a Fabian by sentiment, not policy. I tell thee, an age so rich in opportunities invites to procrastination. A multiplicity of choice is the last inducement to choose. I loiter, like a child, in the fair, with my silverlivre-tournoisin my pocket, and, until I spend it, I am lord of a hundred prospective delights. Let me wait till the lights are burning low, and then I will make my selection—the crown to a pyramid of enjoyments.”
“And find that others before you have taken the pick of the fair while you ecstatically considered, and that you have at the last paid full price for a discarded residue.”
“What, then, my friend! I shall be richer than the prudent by measure of a whole feast of anticipation—more satisfied, if less gorged. The early bird eats his chicken in the egg. (Corne de Dieu! there is a fine marriage of proverbs!) He has nothing to look forward to but a day of blank satiety. I cannot at once have the dreams of youth and the sober retrospections of age.”
So he would talkex curia, a dilatory, lovable vagabond, with a rare power of enchantment drawn from some hidden depths, as from a fern-curtained well. Perhaps this sensuous personal charm—whereby he would appear to flatter with signal affectionate regard each in turn of his numerous acquaintances—would of itself have failed after the first to win a poor love-stricken from prolonged contemplation of any but his own interests. It was the man’s spasmodic revelations of unexpected virile forces held in reserve that would suddenly convert in another a little growing sentiment of tolerant disdain to an eager desire to be acclaimed friend by this subject of his condescension. So, may be, the force operated upon Ned. For succeeding his first gratification over an introduction to one in whom he had latterly prefigured the regenerator of France, came a thought ofdésagrémentin his soul’s nominee, a feeling of disillusionment in which he was prepared to recognise another example of Fortune’s wanton baiting of his personal cherished ideals. Then one day he heard this seeming waiter on Providence, this almost coatless landholder of Utopia, speak in the Assembly; and thenceforth he had nothing but reverence for the ardent soul, whose misfortune only it was to be bounded by a love more human in its essence than divine. He had seen the familiar figure sitting with its hand over its face; he had next seen the face revealed from the tribune, inspired, transformed, as if the hand itself, consecrate as a priest’s, had touched and wrought the priestly sacrament of confirmation; and the sermon of high government that followed had taken wings of fire from the burning spirit that informed it; and the hearts of men had kindled and glowed, flaring at length—alas, too self-consumingly!—into roaring flame.
Well, such moments were for Ned’s holiday moods. This present friendship and admiration saved him, perhaps, from hobnobbing with more harmfully potent spirits. Yet the one enthusiasm could galvanise him only fitfully into an interest in the passionate scenes amongst which he moved. So negative a pole is love—when turned from the north-star of its hopes—to all that in less misconverted circumstances would attract it. Here was he a spectator at last of the stupendous drama in the early rehearsals of which he had been so profoundly interested; and he had nothing for it all but a lack-lustre eye, which he must always keep from turning inwards by an effort. He lived, in fact, in a little miserable tub of his own choosing, while the Alexanders of a political renaissance made history around, and unregarded of, him.
Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards, with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts, swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash—vociferous or intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy Paris—a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would think, the history of their municipal government was always to be likened to the story of an iceberg—a story of top-heaviness periodically recurring—of base and summit exchanging positions again and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!
By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city—its bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares—both by day and lamp-light. Once he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully leaving them after a dull inspection—or rather retrospection—looked half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens, whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby—an improvident actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly—in the days before its dissolution—for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour of applause and of relegation to the official minutes—where it slept forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to oblivion—which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a few months longer—a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary, she was adjudged—a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured grave.
Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain, through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution.
Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that laced the city in all directions.
He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon; though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour.
Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden—a long, broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the inscription, “Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne tient à un fil.”
“It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of the former. “Tient à un fil,” he murmured, and shook his head, with a sigh.
On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a discordant rabble came upon them—a mouthing, sweltering throng of patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum.
“Voilà la prêtresse habituée, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.
Ned gasped and stared. He had not alighted on this woman—had recalled her only fitfully—since the night when she fled from his uncle’s house. Even Madame de Lawoestine’s reference to her had affected him but indifferently. If, during his present sojourn in Paris, he, absorbed in more introspective searchings, had heard casual mention of the “Liége courtesan,” the “coryphéeof the Orleanists,” the beloved (according to the wits ofLes Actes des Apôtres) of the Deputy Populus (who did not so much as know her), a least desire to identify this reputation with the one of his experience had not overtaken him. Théroigne—were it, indeed, the Théroigne of his knowledge—had only followed the course he might have predicted for her. To drain the rich for the benefit of the needy—that were a noble form of solicitation. To feed starving patriots and their cause with the fruits of her dishonour was a rendering of the theme that scarcely commended itself to other than Parisian morals. Yet he had lost sight, no doubt, of the motive that induced her to wage war, by whatever means, upon the order patrician. It was to be recalled to his memory.
For now, suddenly, he was face to face with the embodiment of a passion to whose early processes he had unwittingly contributed. The girl saw, halted her vociferous troupe, and the next instant came towards him. A fantastic figure, a thing of shreds and gaudy tatters, detached itself from the throng and followed at her heels.
“Corne de Dieu!” muttered Vergniaud, “the dog too?”
Théroigne stopped in front of the Englishman—a presentment, in flesh and clothing, of vivid, barbaric licence. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed. For four years the “Defier of God,” she had walked with her face to the sun. She was, and was to be, “Mater Tenebrarum—the mother of lunacies, the suggestress of suicides”—a flaming evolution from the scorned and abandoned village beauty.
She had on a little military jacket of dark-blue, over a white chemisette cut low to her swelling figure; a tricolour sash, in which was stuck a pistol, went round her waist, and from this fell to her ankles a short skirt of scarlet. Cocked daintily on her head was an elfin hat with feathersà la Henri IV., and suspended from her shoulder by a red ribbon a little smart drum bobbed and tinkled at her side as she walked.
She clinched a hand upon her bosom, scorning and daring, in the fierce exultation of her beauty, this possible critic of it.
“We are well met,” she said. “Dost thou know me, citizen Englishman?”
“I know you, Théroigne.”
“Thou liest, thou! Thou takest me, I can see it, for some past poor victim of thy use and abuse, or, if not of thine, of another’s. I never was in Méricourt—dost thou hear?—unless it is a province of hell! I never appealed to the honour of a class that knows no honour but in name.”
Vergniaud, in some serene astonishment, came forward.
“Citizeness,” he said, “you surely amaze my friend, who is a child of the land of freedom.”
She laughed in one breath.
“Do I amaze him? I thought his looks claimed knowledge of me.”
Then she turned upon Ned once more, her furious disdain giving to the woman in her.
“I heard thou wert in Paris, monsieur le vicomte. Believe me, it is an evil place at this present for such as thou.”
“And from whom did you hear it, Mademoiselle Lambertine of Méricourt?” said Ned, with perfect coolness.
Her eyes flashed, her lips set at him.
“Ah,” she cried, rage overmastering the scorn in her voice, “but it is pitiful, is it not, for one so particular in his reputation to be jilted by the bastard of Orleans!”
Hearing her laugh, the grotesque creature, who stood still at her elbow, began to chuckle and caper.
“But yes,” he babbled in a wryed, indistinct voice, “Pamela—yes, yes—the bastard of Orleans!”
Ned, gone pale as a sheet, took a fierce step forwards, and at that the woman sprang and intercepted him, putting her hand on her vile henchman’s shoulder.
“Thou shalt not touch him!” she cried. Her fingers caught at the pistol-stock in her belt. Menacing oaths came from the ragged group that awaited her return.
“Tell him, Lucien,” she said to the wretched creature, “who it is we are ever seeking through the streets of Paris.”
“My brother Basile,” answered the man.
His face was a fearful sight—melted featureless it seemed, and with tangs of rusty hair dropping stiff from it in the unscarred patches. For the rest he was nothing but a foul-clad cripple—idiotic, distorted.
She turned upon Ned again.
“Dost thou know me now?” she cried; “or am I still to thee the simple fool that could be wronged and insulted with impunity?”
She bent forward and dropped her voice, so that every word came from it distinct.
“Listen to me. All these years I have sought and found him not. Now, at last, word comes to me that he is here in Paris, that he is identical with one that insults, through the faction she represents, the woman he has outraged beyond endurance.”
She paused and drew herself up, then raised her hand in a threatening attitude.
“My star brightens! First one, and again one! Out of the past they are drawn—drawn like night birds into a charcoal-burner’s fire, and they shall fall before me and my foot trample their necks!”
She turned and struck her dog roughly on the shoulder.
“Is thy tooth sharp, Lucien? are thy claws like a devil’s rake to rend and to scorch? Courage, my friend! the moment arrives—for you and for me, Lucien, the moment arrives!”
She had fetched drumsticks from her sash, and now brought them down with a little snapping roll and break.
“Forward!” she cried (and she looked back significantly over her shoulder). “The crown of martyrdom to the devotee that would rather wed than make a bastard!”
Again the sticks alighted with a crash and roll.
“C’est nous qu’on ose méditer de rendre à l’antique esclavage!” she sang out shrilly; and all the throaty mob took up the chorus, “Aux armes, citoyens!”
So, reeling and howling, and drifting backwards a black smoke of menace towards the stranger whose name, for any or no particular reason, seemed to be written in the dark book of itscafé-chantantHippolyté, the procession passed on its way. The stragglers, who had been drawn by curiosity to the neighbourhood of the interview, dispersed, and the two men were left alone.
Vergniaud, with a shrug of his shoulders, looked at Ned, who seemed to be muttering to himself.
“A veryprécieuse-ridicule,” murmured the Frenchman. “I would not have you take the little pretty rogue seriously.”
Ned seized him by the wrist.
“Did you hear her?” he exclaimed in a concentrated agony of voice.
Vergniaud nodded his head.
“About monsieur le duc’sprotégée?” he answered uneasily.
“How did she know of her—of me?”
“Mon ami, cannot you tell?” was the compassionate, evasive reply.
“Yes,” cried Ned violently, “I can tell. He lied about the letter. The woman told him in it why she had wished to get rid of me, and he lied about it.”
“Come,” said Vergniaud, “if it is so, the lie acquitted him, at least, of a cruel discourtesy towards you.”
Ned laughed like a devil.
“Acquitted him!” he shrieked; “and while he reserved the jest to retail it to his brazen drab here! Oh, I know that no road is too common for Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans! And my—and this that I have hugged to my soul and cherished as almost too sacred for my own thoughts to prey upon! To be used to the foul purposes of a harlot and her lecher! Oh, my God!—I will kill him!”
Vergniaud essayed a manner of soothing.
“The shrine of love can only be desecrated from within. These may storm at the closed windows of thy soul, and the draught but make the sacred lamp of thy heart burn brighter. Hold up thy head, my dear friend.”
“I have never lowered it,” muttered Ned; but he seemed hardly to hear what the other said.
“’Tis a specious theatrical jade,” went on Vergniaud, “and always alert for situations. Witness her babbling reunions in the Rue de Rohan, where enough gas is brewed in a night to float ten balloons. Witness her habit of attire, her drum, her dog—the misbegotten maniac that she rescued months ago from the Salpétrière, and hath devoted to some mission of devilry that is the crowning infirmity of his brain. Bah! It is all affectation, I believe. She will certainly pose by-and-by before the judgment-seat.”
Inthe early morning of the 10th of August a young man, wearing the uniform of the National Guards, was arrested in the Champs Elysées by a patrol of the very corps to which he presumably belonged. This young man—of a bright, confident complexion, crisp gold hair, and a rather girlish turn of feature—took his mishap with an admirablesang-froid.
“Very well, my friends,” he said. “And I am arrested on suspicion—of what?”
“Of being an accursed Royalist in disguise,” answered the corporal gruffly.
The stranger nodded to the soldier.
“When the good cause triumphs,” said he, “it shall be remembered to your credit that you could recognise a gentleman through the trappings of a brigand.”
“Ah-hé s’il ne tient qu’à ça!” replied the corporal briefly, with a sniff. “Before this sun sets there will be, perhaps, some hundreds of you gentry the fewer.”
“My faith!” said the other, “and what a shortsighted policy: to post a cloud of educated witnesses to the skies, to testify in advance to your moral inefficiency!”
They took him to the Cour des Feuillans—a yard neighbouring on that very spot where Ned, a day or two earlier, had had hiscontretempswith Théroigne and her satellites. Here, thrust into an outbuilding that had been temporarily converted into a guard-room, he alighted upon many acquaintances in a like predicament.
“Does it all read failure?” he whispered to a colossal creature beside him. This—also, presumably, a grenadier of the nation—was, in fact, the Abbé Bougon, an ecclesiastic of the Court, who wrote plays, yet had never conceived a situation one-half so dramatic as this in which he now found himself.
“Hush!” murmured the giant. “Yes; the worst is to be feared.”
By-and-by the prisoners were summoned, in order, to examination in an adjoining room. Long, however, before it came to the cool young stranger’s turn, a sound of growing uproar without the building had swelled to a thunder harsh and violent enough to ominously interfere, one might have thought, with theprocès-verbalwithin. The deep diapason of massed voices, the crisp clash of pikes, the flying of furious ejaculations—startling accents to the whole context of menace—assured him that here was evidence of such a counterbuff to palace intrigue as palace fatuity had never conceived might threaten it.
Suddenly, in the midst of the tumult, he thought he heard his own name cried.
“Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”
He got upon a bench by a window that commanded a view of the court. This, he saw,—a wide, enclosed space,—was full of blue-coated soldiers. A posse of them made a present show of keeping the gates of the yard; but the gates themselves, significant to the true character of their defence, they had neglected to close. Beyond, in the road, and extending at least so far over the Thuilleries gardens as his view could compass, a packed congregation of patriots—quite typical savages—rested for a moment on its weapons. It listened, it appeared, to a commissary of the section, who, mounted on a tub by the gates, counselled methods judicial. A little space had been left about the orator, and now into this in an instant broke a woman—a wildvivandière, she seemed, of the new religious service of blood and wine—of the transubstantiation of Liberty. Without a moment’s hesitation she caught the commissary by a leg, and, hurling him to the ground, usurped his place. An exultant roar of applause shook the air. The poor deposed tribune, rubbing his bones, rose, and bolted for shelter. Suleau chuckled.
Now he did not know Théroigne; but he had laughed consumedly at her and her pseudo-classical pretensions in more than one Royalist print. He laughed at many things, did this Suleau—not sparing the gloom-distilling Jacobins, nor, in particular, Citizen Philip Egalité and his faction, of whom was Citizeness Lambertine; and he was so breezily headstrong, so romantically sworn to a picturesque cause, that he would not calculate the cost of pitting his wit against the vanity of acoryphéewhose nod, in this height of her popularity, often confirmed a wavering sentence, whose smile rarely franked an acquittal. Besides, women—even the most foolish of them—like to be taken seriously.
This woman, it would seem, spoke vigorously, and entirely to the humour of her auditors. Only there appeared to prevail something rankly personal against himself, of all the twenty-two arrested, in her diatribe. He caught the sound of his own name uttered again and again to an accompaniment of oaths and execrations. This, at least, flattered him with the assurance that he had done something to earn the transcendent animosity of the many-headed.
“I present myself with an order of merit,” he murmured, gratified; and immediately he was summoned to his examination.
He was conducted between guards to the room of inquisition. In it he recognised many of his pre-indicted comrades in misfortune—twenty-one in all—huddled into a corner by a window. The room was otherwise crammed with soldiers, commissaries, and a few of the breechless. A thin man, in a state of palpable nervous excitement, sat behind a table. This was the Sieur Bonjour, first clerk of the Marines and President of the Section of the Feuillans. He opened upon the prisoner at once.
“It is useless to deny that you are Suleau, the Royalist pamphleteer.”
“Indeed,” replied the captive, with equal promptitude, “I would not so stultify monsieur’s fine perspicacity in discovering what I have never concealed.”
“Yet you disguise yourself in the garb of liberty.”
“No more than monsieur, surely.”
The president struck his hand on the table.
“It is not for me to bandy words with you. You were arrested when patrolling the Champs Elysées, at an hour when all respectable men are in bed.”
“If,” said Suleau, “at an hour when all respectable men are in bed, where was monsieur?”
“Enough!” cried Bonjour angrily. “You are accused of conspiring with these to resist the will of the people—by innuendo, by direct insult to the people’s representatives—finally, by banding yourself with others to inquire secretly into, that you might successfully out-manœuvre, the processes of the movement having forfeiture for its object.”
“I congratulate monsieur,” said Suleau irrelevantly, “uponhisadmirable manœuvring for election to the Ministership of Marines.”
The president scrambled to his feet with an oath. The room broke into ferment.
“I beg to inform monsieur,” cried the prisoner, raising his voice, “that I am in possession of a municipal pass to the chateau of the Thuilleries!”
“Yes, yes—and we!” cried the huddle of captives by the window.
With the very echo of their words there came tumult in the vestibule, a trample of feet, and the head of a frowzy deputation burst into the room. The young Royalist turned about and, folding his arms, quietly faced the inrush. A woman was to its front—she he had seen mount the rough tribune in the yard to denounce him. He saw her now marking him down with a triumphant fury in her eyes—a strange, beautiful creature—his own enigmatical Nemesis, it seemed.
“Citizen president,” she cried in a full bold voice, “while St Antoine awaits your decision St Antoine is paralysed. Its cannon yawn in the faubourg; its pikes stab only at the air. To clear the ground of these outposts—bah! here needs not the interminable civil processes. Mouchards all, arrested armed in a state of belligerency, they shall be subject to martial law. In the name of the national fraternity, that to-day shall be confirmed and cemented, I demand that these prisoners be handed over to the people.”
A murmur succeeded her outcry. The president, white to the ears, stilled it with uplifted hand. He looked a moment at the young Royalist, a bitter stiff smile on his lips.
“It is just!” he cried in a sudden thin voice. “This is no time to dally, as the demoiselle Théroigne informs us. Conduct all the prisoners into the yard.”
The order had not passed his lips when there came a splintering crash, and in an instant the whole room was in roaring racket and confusion. Some half of the prisoners, forereading their certain doom, had made a desperate plunge for escape through the rearward window by which they stood. They got clear away. Their less prompt, or fortunate, companions were in the same moment surrounded and isolated each from each.
Suleau lifted his voice above the din.
“Commit me, my friends, to the sacrifice. Perhaps my blood, which, it seems, they most desire, will appease their fury!”
He struggled to throw himself towards the door. His motive misunderstood, a half-dozensans-culottesflung themselves upon and pinioned him in their arms. At the same instant Théroigne leapt like a cat and seized him by his collar.
“At last!” she hissed in his ear. “Dost thou know me?”
“Thou art Théroigne!” he panted. He had caught the president’s words. He understood now something of the reason of this woman’s violence.
“Ah!” she cried in a hurried fury of speech, “and has notmytime come, thou dog with a false name, thou nameless cur, so to slander and revile the woman thou drovest to ruin?”
They were slowly edging him towards the door. He could only shake his head at her.
“Why dost thou not speak?” she urged. “Why dost thou not implore my mercy? I could save thee if I would.”
He still did not answer.
“Ah!” she sighed, with a cruel feint of tenderness, “for the sake of the old days, Basile! Ask me, by the memory of our embraces, of thy child that I bore in my womb, to pity and protect thee!”
“You are mad,” he cried. “I have never seen you in my life.”
She struck him across the mouth. The blow, the sight of the little blood that sprang from the wound, were a double provocation to the beasts of prey. They bore him with a rush to the outer door, through it, into the yard beyond. Torn, bleeding, fighting every foot of his way, but never protesting, he would sell his life dearly to these mongrels. The yelling crowd surged and rocked before him. Suddenly—with that exaltation of the perceptions that often seems to signify the first flight-essay of the soul—he saw far back in the thick of the press of inhuman faces one face that he recognised as that of a man who, years before, on the morning of the Reveillon riots, had spoken to him, mistaking him for another. Now, from the expression of this one face, he educed a desperate hope. He gathered it from the anguish of its features, from the conviction that its owner was frantically endeavouring to thrust and beat a passage towards him through the throng. God! he thought; if he could only reach the face, he would somehow be saved.
With a furious effort he tore himself free, and snatched at and wrenched a sabre from a hand that threatened him.
“Here!” he shrieked to the face; “to meet me, monsieur—to meet me!”
He had actually cut his way a half-dozen yards before a hand—the woman’s—seized him from the back and dragged him to the ground. With a groan he fell, trampled into a forest of tattered legs.
“Cry to me for mercy!” screamed the harlot.
“No,” he answered faintly.
She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it is the moment that has come!”
Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and flung itself upon the fallen man.
* * * * * * * *
Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little bloody arena. A woman—her foot upon the neck of something, some bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her—looked stupidly down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed.
“Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.”
Fromthe day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when—a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood—he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him. Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase.
And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his own—absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed, in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong wind.
Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot, until—puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto.
The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud—“a ragged bastion fringed with fire”—sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting; the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that—sated, perhaps, with her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre—she was inclining to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in his mind.
So the month sped by—its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon the city,—and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of the general tragedy.
Ned, aimlessly strolling through the Faubourg of St Marcel in the south-east quarter of the city, had turned, on the evening of this day, into the boulevard that ran straight northward, by the ancient city wall, from the Place Mouffetard to the Seine. His way took him past the horse-market, and—inevitably, therefore, to the context—past an adjacent house of correction for blacklegs. This ironically named hospital—an iron-cased lazaretto, in truth, the prison of the Salpétrière—was situate upon a dismal wedge of waste land between the new and old enceintes of the city. It was a brutal, gloomy pile, its walls exuding, one might have thought, the ichor of a thousand diseases, moral and physical. Sooty, unlovely as a factory—as indeed it was, of the devil’s wares—its noisome towers, blotted on the sky, decharmed the soft reflected burning of the sunset, and made a vulgarity of their whole leafy neighbourhood. From its grated windows, high up in the foul air of its own exhaling, behind which the gallows-tree birds built their nests, caws and screams issuing were evidences of a very swarming rookery. Here and there, the white, hair-draggled face of a strumpet stared from behind bars; here and there an inward light—like a wandering fen candle—could be seen travelling from story to story.
Ned, as he approached the building, quickened in his walk; for he was aware of a batch of fresh prisoners, under escort, being driven across the boulevard towards the central gate; and with the instinct to spare misfortune the impertinence of unofficial inquest, he would hurry to put himself beyond suspicion of prying. In this good motive, however, he was baulked; for a subsequent party—a solitary culprit walking between guards—issued from the same direction, and cut across and encountered him just as he approached the entrance.
He started, and strangled an immediate inclination to exclaim aloud. For in the lonely malefactor, going by him with bent head and lowering, preoccupied face, he recognised—he was sure of it—Basile de St Denys.
Degraded, vitiated—a shameful, ravaged personality, as unlike, in his existing condition, the bright soul who had served, unconsciously to them both, for his scapegoat—here was, without question, the unlicensed once-lord of Méricourt. And the woman, his victim, had erred only, it seemed, as to the direction of his presence in the city—had erred, perhaps, because she could not realise that, consistent to his nature, he must be sought, after all these years, along the lower levels of existence.
The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream. On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was faced by a turnkey.
“What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine porter!”
“I thought I saw one I knew pass in.”
“It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”—and he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and produced his “tip.”
“That is another question,” said the man.
“Now,” said Ned, “is the name of that last prisoner that entered Basile de St Denys?”
“I know nothing of thede. What sort of citizen art thou? But, otherwise—yes.”
“And what is he accused of?”
“A common enough matter: forging assignats.”
Citoyenne Théroignehad not, it is to be supposed, the wit of a Mohl, or the tact of a Recamier; but her sensuous and long-practised beauty so vindicated her sins of omission in these respects as to procure her reunions a social distinction than which none more catholic was accorded thesalonsof a later period. At her rooms in the Rue de Rohan she held, and had long held, weekly Sundayséances, of a quasi-political character, at which revolutionary propagandists of such opposed principles as Mirabeau, Brissot, Pétion were in turn, or out of it, to be met. Thither sometimes came Philip of Orleans, with his sick, affable smile; thither Desmoulins, galvanic and stuttering, the “attorney-general to the lantern”; thither the poet Joseph Chénier; thither the younger Sieyes, eager to sniff the incense exhaled to his less accessible brother, to whose exalted virtues Théroigne, by some queer freak of contrariety, consistently and reverently testified. To what earlier condescensions on her part were due her present political intimacies it need not here be questioned. One form of sympathetic largesse is part of the necessary equipment of women of a naturally assimilative character.
She had adaptability; for four years her face and figure had brought her a succession of ardent ministers to it. Thus, nourished on the unconsidered mental pabulum of manifold intellects, she was become an omniparous vessel, brazen and beautiful—emitting such a medley of discordant sounds as had once the window bells, to Ned, in the “landlust” of her native village. Yet, through all, whatever her inconsequent show of principles, detestation of a social system to the abuse of which she attributed her early downfall abided within her unwaveringly, and induced her to those deeds of violence that, in the end, alienated from her all those of her once familiars to whom Reason figured as something higher than the goddess of licence.
But still she had a store of reflected light with which to illuminate her Sunday reunions.
* * * * * * * *
“Citoyenne,” said an acrid young patriot, whose eyes were just cut apart by the mere blade of a nose, and who wore a little silver guillotine for a seal, “whither wilt thou fly when the Brunswicker enters to make good his manifesto?”
“At his throat, Pollio,” (the company clapped its hands).
“To hang round his neck?”
“Ay, like a millstone.”
“But, indeed,” said the young man, affecting to show trouble, “thou wilt surely be included amongst the proscribed.”
“There will be none!” cried the girl: “the capitol is saved! the geese have begun to cackle!”
Pollio, amidst the laughter, shook his head in pretended distress.
“It is all very well. Yet not Paris but the world were lost to see our Judith under a wall, the mark to a platoon of dirty jägers.”
Théroigne came to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed; her thick brown curls were slumbrous shadows upon the pale slopes of her shoulders. She was dressed quite simply, in the suggestiveness (something misread) of virgin white.
But she was not at her ease. Radiant, glowing, voluptuous (she always looked, this woman, as if she were but just risen from a warm bed), there had yet been all the evening an unwonted rigidity in her manner, a distraught expression in her face, such as that with which one vouchsafes to another the shadow of an attention whose substance is given elsewhere. She would break into feverish fits of merriment. She would start and seem to listen, as if to some tiny voice making itself heard within the compass of many voices. It may have passed unregarded, this spasmodic manner of distraction; it may have been observed and accepted as a new accent to charms so many-humoured. The times took little note, little surprise, of unaccustomed tricks of speech or feature. It was because men and women had so lost sight of what were their true selves that moods passed for convictions.
Now she stood like a Pythoness, the light from above falling upon her head, rounding and sleepily caressing all the fair curves of her figure, of the smooth naked arm she raised as in inspiration.
“It is not the Brunswicker I fear,” she cried. “It is the enemy from within—from within!”
She dropped her hand to her heart, as if that were her secret foe.
“Citoyenne,” whispered a voice in her ear, “there is one waiting in thefoyerthat is peremptory to see thee.”
She stared a moment, with a lost expression; then looked aside, half in anger, to see her country Grisel regarding her appealingly.
“What one, little fool—little Bona?”
“Indeed, I do not know. He implored me by the love of God.”
Théroigne laughed uneasily.
“Rather by the love that is gratuitous, thou littlegrand’-bêta. Hush! Go before, and I will follow.”
Some one drew aside theportière; she passed out, with a smile that fled from her face as she descended the stairs. Under the dim oil-lamp in the hall a cloaked figure was standing. As she came upon it, she saw it was the English lord. The warmth and fragrance of a remoter atmosphere that she brought with her shivered into frost on the instant. That was inevitable; yet she would always have foregone many plenary indulgences to draw this man into sin on her account.
He took a quick step forward, made as if to seize her by the arm—but checked the impulse.
“You must come with me!” he whispered.
She exclaimed, incredulous, “Come with you!” then quickly bent forward, and looked intensely into his face.
“Why does your voice break? Is it some trouble of your own, and you seek me—meout of all the world?”
“It is not of my own.”
“Whose, then?”
“Yours.”
“Mon Dieu!” she cried, with a little sharp laugh of mockery. “I know of none—of no trouble or pleasure—that is our mutual concern.”
He clapped his hand roughly at that on her naked shoulder. His fingers clawed angry marks in the flesh.
“Ah!” she cried, “you hurt me!”
“Hurt!” he echoed. “Do you know what they are doing to-night in this devil’s city of yours?”
He caught only a faint protesting murmur from her lips.
“God wither you if you do!” he said hoarsely. “They are murdering the prisoners. Do you hear?—in all the prisons they are murdering the prisoners; and Basile de St Denys is one of them!”
She sprang back from him. Her face was like a face seen in moonlight—white, round a black glare of eyes.
“You lie!” she cried. “He at least is dead already!”
He came at her again—seized her in a very fiend’s grip.
“Is it a time to equivocate? You know, as I, how your wicked hand miscarried on that day. The man is in prison. I myself saw him borne thither three days ago. You must come, and quickly, to be of use. There is no question but that.”
She shook herself free, standing back so that her face seemed to twitch and palpitate in the gusty sway of the lamp-light.
“You are imperious,” she muttered.
“It must not be,” he cried violently, “this horrible thing. You can save him if you will.”
“And can you so master your loathing of me as to ask it?” she said.
“I swear—deny yourself this gratification of a lust so inhuman, and I will think better of you than ever before.”
“That will be compensation for all I have suffered,” she said.
Her voice seemed too toneless, too passionless even for irony. She stood without a movement before him, the marks of his clutch slowly fading from her shoulder.
“Théroigne,” he cried, “you have the chance to a little atone. You will not so clinch your damnation! In the name of God, Théroigne! This man was the father of your child.”
“True,” she said, “of my dead child. I will come, monsieur.”
He gave a gasp of terrible relief.
“Hurry!” he said, “or it will be too late.”
She had already seized a cloak from a recess: in a moment they were speeding on their way together.
He talked to her as they hurried on—half unconsciously, almost hysterically. He told of his chance encounter, of Basile’s degradation, of anything or nothing. It was such emotional gabble as even reserved men vent during the first moments of respite from intolerable anguish. His voice echoed back from the silent houses. He did not even notice that the girl returned him never an answer, so assured was he now of her sympathy.
The streets were curiously still and deserted, the familiar life of them all shrunk and cowering behind a thousand lightless blinds. Now and again phantom cries seemed wafted to them from remote quarters; now and again a glimmer of torches would flash from far perspectives, and travel a moment on the blackness and vanish.
It was a weary way by which they must go. The man led his companion through the Place du Carousel down to the river, along the endless line of quays by the wash of night-bound waters, over the Isle St-Louis and the street of the two bridges; again, along the gloomy quay of St-Bernard, and so into the dark leafy boulevard that ran southwards to the thieves’ prison. And here, for the first time, a spectral suggestion, an attenuated wind of sounds, began to take shape and body; and here suddenly the girl gave a quick gasp, and jerked to a stop.
“The Salpétrière!” she muttered, clutching her cloak to her throat.
“The Salpétrière, Théroigne.”
She seemed to turn her head and look at him. Then on again she went, and he followed.
The noise increased to their every onward step. Ambiguous sounds resolved themselves into sounds unnamable. Dim light, seen phantomly ahead, flared out in a moment across their path, as if some hellish furnace were refuelling. And then, in an instant—as it were stokers labouring at the mouth of flame—a scurry of fantastic shapes, grotesquely busy about the entrance to a lighted yard, grew into their vision.
Ned turned upon his companion.
“Take my arm,” he said, in a ghastly voice.
She shrank from him.
“Not unless it is thou needst support,” she whispered.
He seized her hand, and reached and drove into the thick of the bestial throng, dragging her after him. A horrible reek seemed to fasten upon his brain.
“Malédiction!” shrieked a filthy Alsatian, whom he had sent reeling with his elbow; “but I will teach thee the answer to that!”
He swung up a bloody cleaver, clearing a space about him. The girl, on the thought, ran under his guard.
“Théroigne!” screamed a woman’s voice across the yard. “It is la belle Liégeoise—our little amazon!”
Her cloak had fallen apart. She was revealed to these her friends. At the word, a roar went up from the mob; the offending patriot was struck down, trampled upon; the girl herself stamped upon his face.
“Hither!” screamed the voice again, “to the best seats in all the theatre!”
Then at once Ned felt himself urged forward. He went, dazed. His feet slid on the stones—plashed once or twice. He saw a great light—light jumping from the brands held high by a lurid row of women stationed on the topmost step of the shallow flight that led to the great door. He saw Théroigne seized and embraced by these harpies. Her skirt, that had been all white, bore a clownish fringe of crimson.
“I cannot stay here,” she cried. “I have business within.”
They answered, clattering: “Get it over and return, little badine, for the sight is good.”
The next moment he and the girl were at the door. A group of four, issuing, scrambled past, almost upsetting them. A patriot to each shoulder and one fastened on like a dog at the back! It seemed an extravagant guard to one sick collapsed thing borne in the midst. They ran it down the steps; the torches fluttered and poised steady. Ned flung himself through the doorway, crushing his hands against his ears. Somebody touched and led him forward.
As his brain cleared, he saw that he was standing—somewhat apart from any other—in a large, dimly lighted room. A man of a fierce and sensual mould of feature was seated hard by at a table, a great open register before him, a tin box of tobacco and some bottles within his ready reach. Round about lolled on benches pulled away from the walls, perhaps a dozen, more or less tipsy, judges (saving the mark!) subordinate to the president. A couple of men with red-stained arms and in steaming shirts stood by the closed door. An old dumb-faced turnkey held his hand to the lock.
A voice—a name lately uttered, still rang confusedly in his memory. What did it signify? He caught at his reeling faculties.
“Behold, citizeness, the man!”
All in an instant, it seemed, the room sank into profound stillness. He struck the film from his eyes, and saw St Denys.
The wretched creature stood before the table, between guards. He appeared utterly amazed and demoralised. Even in the moment of terror, Ned shrunk to see how the brute had come to predominate in that handsome debauched face.
Then, suddenly, the harsh voice of the president shattered the silence.