And now I come to an affair of which there have been many accounts written, some of them within a mile or two of the truth, the most but sheer romantics. I have in my mind notably the account of the officer Buhot printed two years after the events in question, in which he makes the most fabulous statement as to the valiancy of Father Hamilton's stand in the private house in the Rue des Reservoirs, and maintains that myself—le fier Eccossais, as he is flattering enough to designate me—drew my sword upon himself and threatened to run him through for his proposition that I should confess to a complicity in the attempt upon his Royal Highness. I have seen his statement reproduced with some extra ornament in theEdinburgh Courant, and the result of all this is that till this day my neighbours give me credit, of which I am loth to advantage myself, for having felled two or three of the French officers before I was overcome at the hinder-end.
The matter is, in truth, more prosaic as it happened, and if these memorials of mine leave the shadow of a doubt in the minds of any interested in an old story that created some stir in its time, I pray them see the archives of M. Bertin, the late Lieut.-General of the police. Bertin was no particular friend of mine, that had been the unconscious cause of great trouble and annoyance to him, but he has the truth in the deposition I made and signed prior to my appointment to a company of the d'Auvergne regiment.
Well, to take matters in their right order, it was the evening of the day I had given the letter to the Prince that Father Hamilton expressed his intention of passing that night in the house of a friend.
I looked at him with manifest surprise, for he had been at the bottle most of the afternoon, and was by now more in a state for his bed than for going among friends.
“Well,” he cried peevishly, observing my dubiety. “Do you think me too drunk for the society of a parcel of priests?Ma foi!it is a pretty thing that I cannot budge from my ordinary habitude of things without a stuck owl setting up a silent protest.”
To a speech so wanting in dignity I felt it better there should be no reply, and instead I helped him into his great-coat. As I did so, he made an awkward lurching movement due to his corpulence, and what jumped out of an inner pocket but a pistol? Which of us was the more confused at that it would be hard to say. For my part, the weapon—that I had never seen in his possession before—was a fillip to my sleeping conscience; I picked it up with a distaste, and he took it from me with trembling fingers and an averted look.
“A dangerous place, Versailles, after dark,” he explained feebly. “One never knows, one never knows,” and into his pocket hurriedly with it.
“I shall be back for breakfast,” he went on. “Unless—unless—oh, I certainly shall be back.” And off he set.
The incident of the pistol disturbed me for a while. I made a score of speculations as to why a fat priest should burden himself with such an article, and finally concluded that it was as he suggested, to defend himself from night birds if danger offered; though that at the time had been the last thing I myself would have looked for in the well-ordered town of Versailles. I sat in the common-room orsalleof the inn for a while after he had gone, and thereafter retired to my own bedchamber, meaning to read or write for an hour or two before going to bed. In the priest's room—which was on the same landing and next to my own—I heard the whistle of Bernard the Swiss, but I had no letters for him that evening, and we did not meet each other. I was at first uncommon dull, feeling more than usually the hame-wae that must have been greatly wanting in the experience of my Uncle Andrew to make him for so long a wanderer on the face of the earth. But there is no condition of life so miserable but what one finds in it remissions, diversions, nay, and delights also, and soon I was—of all things in the world to be doing when what followed came to pass!—inditing a song to a lady, my quill scratching across the paper in spurts and dashes, and baffled pauses where the matter would not attend close enough on the mood, stopping altogether at a stanza's end to hum the stuff over to myself with great satisfaction. I was, as I say, in the midst of this; the Swiss had gone downstairs; all in my part of the house was still, though vehicles moved about in the courtyard, when unusually noisy footsteps sounded on the stair, with what seemed like the tap of scabbards on the treads.
It was a sound so strange that my hand flew by instinct to the small sword I was now in the habit of wearing and had learned some of the use of from Thurot.
There was no knock for entrance; the door was boldly opened and four officers with Buhot at their head were immediately in the room.
Buhot intimated in French that I was to consider myself under arrest, and repeated the same in indifferent English that there might be no mistake about a fact as patent as that the sword was in his hand.
For a moment I thought the consequence of my crime had followed me abroad, and that this squat, dark officer, watching me with the scrutiny of a forest animal, partly in a dread that my superior bulk should endanger himself, was in league with the law of my own country. That I should after all be dragged back in chains to a Scots gallows was a prospect unendurable; I put up the ridiculous small sword and dared him to lay a hand on me. But I had no sooner done so than its folly was apparent, and I laid the weapon down.
“Tant mieux!” said he, much relieved, and then an assurance that he knew I was a gentleman of discretion and would not make unnecessary trouble. “Indeed,” he went on, “Voyez!I take these men away; I have the infinite trust in Monsieur; Monsieur and I shall settle this little affair between us.”
And he sent his friends to the foot of the stair.
“Monsieur may compose himself,” he assured me with a profound inclination.
“I am very much obliged to you,” I said, seating myself on the corner of the table and crushing my poor verses into my pocket as I did so, “I am very much obliged to you, but I'm at a loss to understand to what I owe the honour.”
“Indeed!” he said, also seating himself on the table to show, I supposed, that he was on terms of confidence with his prisoner. “Monsieur is Father Hamilton's secretary?”
“So I believe,” I said; “at least I engaged for the office that's something of a sinecure, to tell the truth.”
And then Buhot told me a strange story.
He told me that Father Hamilton was now a prisoner, and on his way to the prison of Bicêtre. He was—this Buhot—something of the artist and loved to make his effects most telling (which accounts, no doubt, for the romantical nature of the accounts aforesaid), and sitting upon the table-edge he embarked upon a narrative of the most crowded two hours that had perhaps been in Father Hamilton's lifetime.
It seemed that when the priest had left the Cerf d'Or, he had gone to a place till recently called the Bureau des Carrosses pour la Rochelle, and now unoccupied save by a concierge, and the property of some person or persons unknown. There he had ensconced himself in the only habitable room and waited for a visitor regarding whom the concierge had his instructions.
“You must imagine him,” said the officer, always with the fastidiousness of an artist for his effects, “you must imagine him, Monsieur, sitting in this room, all alone, breathing hard, with a pistol before him on the table, and—”
“What! a pistol!” I cried, astounded and alarmed. “Certainement” said Buhot, charmed with the effect his dramatic narrative was creating. “Your friend,mon ami, would be little good, I fancy, with a rapier. Anyway, 'twas a pistol. A carriage drives up to the door; the priest rises to his feet with the pistol in his hand; there is the rap at the door. 'Entrez!' cries the priest, cocking the pistol, and no sooner was his visitor within than he pulled the trigger; the explosion rang through the dwelling; the chamber was full of smoke.”
“Good heavens!” I cried in horror, “and who was the unhappy wretch?”
Buhot shrugged his shoulders, made a French gesture with his hands, and pursed his mouth.
“Whom did you invite to the room at the hour of ten, M. Greig?” he asked.
“Invite!” I cried. “It's your humour to deal in parables. I declare to you I invited no one.”
“And yet, my good sir, you are Hamilton's secretary and you are Hamilton's envoy. 'Twas you handed to the Prince thepouletthat was designed to bring him to his fate.”
My instinct grasped the situation in a second; I had been the ignorant tool of a madman; the whole events of the past week made the fact plain, and I was for the moment stunned.
Buhot watched me closely, and not unkindly, I can well believe, from what I can recall of our interview and all that followed after it.
“And you tell me he killed the Prince?” I cried at last.
“No, Monsieur,” said Buhot; “I am happy to say he did not. The Prince was better advised than to accept the invitation you sent to him.”
“Still,” I cried with remorse, “there's a man dead, and 'tis as much as happens when princes themselves are clay.”
“Parfaitement, Monsieur, though it is indiscreet to shout it here. Luckily there is no one at all dead in this case, otherwise it had been myself, for I was the man who entered to the priest and received his pistol fire. It was not the merriest of duties either,” he went on, always determined I should lose no iota of the drama, “for the priest might have discovered before I got there that the balls of his pistol had been abstracted.”
“Then Father Hamilton has been under watch?”
“Since ever you set foot in Versailles last Friday,” said Buhot complacently. “The Damiens affair has sharpened our wits, I warrant you.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “let me protest that I have been till this moment in utter darkness about Hamilton's character or plans. I took him for what he seemed—a genial buffoon of a kind with more gear than guidance.”
“We cannot, with infinite regret, assume that, Monsieur, but personally I would venture a suggestion,” said Buhot, coming closer on the table and assuming an affable air. “In this business, Hamilton is a tool—no more; and a poor one at that, badly wanting the grindstone. To break him—phew!—'twere as easy as to break a glass, but he is one of a great movement and the man we seek is his master—one Father Fleuriau of the Jesuits. Hamilton's travels were but part of a great scheme that has sent half a dozen of his kind chasing the Prince in the past year or two from Paris to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Orleans, from Orleans to Hamburg, Seville, Lisbon, Rome, Brussels, Potsdam, Nuremburg, Berlin. The same hand that extracted his bullets tapped the priest's portfolio and found the wretch was in promise of a bishopric and a great sum of money. You see, M. Greig, I am curiously frank with my prisoner.”
“And no doubt you have your reasons,” said I, but beat, myself, to imagine what they could be save that he might have proofs of my innocence.
“Very well,” said M. Buhot. “To come to the point, it is this, that we desire to have the scheme of the Jesuits for the Prince's assassination, and other atrocities shocking to all that revere the divinity of princes, crumbled up. Father Hamilton is at the very roots of the secret; if, say, a gentleman so much in his confidence as yourself—now, if such a one were, say, to share a cell with this regicide for a night or two, and pursue judicious inquiries——”
“Stop! stop!” I cried, my blood hammering in my head, and the words like to choke me. “Am I to understand that you would make me your spy and informer upon this miserable old madman that has led me such a gowk's errand?”
Buhot slid back off the table edge and on to his feet. “Oh,” said he, “the terms are not happily chosen: 'spy'—'informer'—come, Monsieur Greig; this man is in all but the actual accomplishment of his purpose an assassin. 'Tis the duty of every honest man to help in discovering the band of murderers whose tool he has been.”
“Then I'm no honest man, M. Buhot,” said I bitterly, “for I've no stomach for a duty so dirty.”
“Think of it for a moment,” he pressed, with evident surprise at my decision. “Bicêtre is an unwholesome hostelry, I give you my word. Consider that your choice is between a night or two there and—who knows?—a lifetime of Galbanon that is infinitely worse.”
“Then let it be Galbanon!” I said, and lifted my sword and slapped it furiously, sheathed as it was, like a switch upon the table.
198
Buhot leaped back in a fear that I was to attack him, and cried his men from the stair foot.
“This force is not needed at all,” I said. “I am innocent enough to be prepared to go quietly.”
Twas a long journey to the prison of Bicêtre, which is two miles to the south of the city of Paris, a great building that had once (they say) been a palace, but now in the time of my experience was little better than a vestibule of hell. I was driven to it through a black loud night of rain, a plunging troop of horse on either hand the coach as if I were a traveller of state, and Buhot in front of me as silent as the priest had been the day we left Dunkerque, though wakeful, and the tip of his scabbard leaning on my boot to make sure that in the darkness no movement of mine should go unobserved.
The trees swung and roared in the wind; the glass lozens of the carriage pattered to the pelting showers; sometimes we lurched horribly in the ruts of the highway, and were released but after monstrous efforts on the part of the cavaliers. Once, as we came close upon a loop of a brawling river, I wished with all fervency that we might fall in, and so end for ever this pitiful coil of trials whereto fate had obviously condemned poor Paul Greig. To die among strangers (as is widely known) is counted the saddest of deaths by our country people, and so, nowadays, it would seem to myself, but there and then it appeared an enviable conclusion to the Spoiled Horn that had blundered from folly to folly. To die there and then would be to leave no more than a regret and an everlasting wonder in the folks at home; to die otherwise, as seemed my weird, upon a block or gallows, would be to foul the name of my family for generations, and I realised in my own person the agony of my father when he got the news, and I bowed my shoulders in the coach below the shame that he would feel as in solemn blacks he walked through the Sabbath kirkyard in summers to come in Mearns, with the knowledge that though neighbours looked not at him but with kindness, their inmost thoughts were on the crimson chapter of his son.
Well, we came at the long last to Bicêtre, and I was bade alight in the flare of torches. A strange, a memorable scene; it will never leave me. Often I remit me there in dreams. When I came out of the conveyance the lights dazzled me, and Buhot put his hands upon my shoulders and turned me without a word in the direction he wished me to take. It was through a vast and frowning doorway that led into a courtyard so great that the windows on the other side seemed to be the distance of a field. The windows were innumerable, and though the hour was late they were lit in stretching corridors. Fires flamed in corners of the yard—great leaping fires round which warders (as I guessed them) gathered to dry themselves or get warmth against the chill of the early April morning. Their scabbards or their muskets glittered now and then in the light of the flames; their voices—restrained by the presence of Buhot—sounded deep and dreadful to me that knew not the sum of his iniquity yet could shudder at the sense of what portended.
203
It were vain for me to try and give expression to my feeling as I went past these fires across the stony yard, and entered between a guard or two at the other side. At the root of my horror was the sentiment that all was foreign, that I was no more to these midnight monsters round their torturing flames than a creature of the wood, less, perhaps, for were they not at sworn war with my countrymen, and had not I a share at least of the repute of regicide? And when, still led by the silent officer, I entered the building itself and walked through an unending corridor broken at intervals by black doors and little barred borrowed lights, and heard sometimes a moan within, or a shriek far off in another part of the building, I experienced something of that long swound that is insanity. Then I was doomed for the rest of my brief days to be among these unhappy wretches—the victims of the law or political vengeance, theforçatwho had thieved, or poisoned, perjured himself, or taken human blood!
At last we came to a door, where Buhot stopped me and spoke, for the first time, almost, since we had left Versailles. He put his hand out to check a warder who was going to open the cell for my entrance.
“I am not a hard man, M. Greig,” said he, in a stumbling English, “and though this is far beyond my duties, and, indeed, contrary to the same, I would give you another chance. We shall have, look you, our friend the priest in any case, and to get the others is but a matter of time. 'Tis a good citizen helps the law always; you must have that respect for the law that you should feel bound to circumvent those who would go counter to it with your cognisance.”
“My good man,” I said, as quietly as I could, and yet internally with feelings like to break me, “I have already said my say. If the tow was round my thrapple I would say no more than that I am innocent of any plot against a man by whose family mine have lost, and that I myself, for all my loyalty to my country, would do much to serve as a private individual.”
“Consider,” he pleaded. “After all, this Hamilton may be a madman with nothing at all to tell that will help us.”
“But the bargain is to be that I must pry and I must listen,” said I, “and be the tale-pyat whose work may lead to this poor old buffoon's and many another's slaughtering. Not I, M. Buhot, and thank ye kindly! It's no' work for one of the Greigs of Hazel Den.”
“I fear you do not consider all,” he said patiently—so patiently indeed that I wondered at him. “I will show you to what you are condemned even before your trial, before you make up your mind irrevocably to refuse this very reasonable request of ours,” and he made a gesture that caused the warder to open the door so that I could see within.
There was no light of its own in the cell, but it borrowed wanly a little of the radiance of the corridor, and I could see that it was bare to the penury of a mausoleum, with a stone floor, a wooden palliasse, and no window other than a barred hole above the door. There was not even a stool to sit on. But I did not quail.
“I have been in more comfortable quarters, M. Buhot,” I said, “but in none that I could occupy with a better conscience.” Assuming with that a sort of bravado, I stepped in before he asked me.
“Very good,” he cried; “but I cannot make you my felicitations on your decision, M. Greig,” and without more ado he had the door shut on me.
I sat on the woollen palliasse for a while, with my head on my hands, surrendered all to melancholy; and then, though the thing may seem beyond belief, I stretched myself and slept till morning. It was not the most refreshing of sleep, but still 'twas wonderful that I should sleep at all in such circumstances, and I take it that a moorland life had been a proper preparation for just such trials.
When I wakened in the morning the prison seemed full of eerie noises—of distant shrieks as in a bedlam, and commanding voices, and of ringing metals, the clank of fetters, or the thud of musket-butts upon the stones. A great beating of feet was in the yard, as if soldiers were manoeuvring, and it mastered me to guess what all this might mean, until a warder opened my door and ordered me out for an airing.
I mind always of a parrot at a window.
This window was one that looked into the yard from some official's dwelling in that dreadful place, and the bird occupied a great cage that was suspended from a nail outside.
The bird, high above the rabble of rogues in livery, seemed to have a devilish joy in the spectacle of the misery tramping round and round beneath, for it clung upon the bars and thrust out its head to whistle, as if in irony, or taunt us with a foul song. There was one air it had, expressed so clearly that I picked up air and words with little difficulty, and the latter ran something like this:
Ah! ah! Pierrot, Pierrot!Fais ta toilette,Voila le barbier! oh! oh!Et sa charrette—
all in the most lugubrious key.
And who were we that heard that reference to the axe? We were the scum, thesordes, the rot of France. There was, doubtless, no crime before the law of the land, no outrage against God and man, that had not here its representative. We were not men, but beasts, cut off from every pleasant—every clean and decent association, the visions of sin always behind the peering eyes, the dreams of vice and crime for ever fermenting in the low brows. I felt 'twas the forests we should be frequenting—the forests of old, the club our weapon, the cave our habitation; no song ours, nor poem, no children to infect with fondness, no women to smile at in the light of evening lamps. The forest—the cave—the animal! What were we but children of the outer dark, condemned from the start of time, our faces ground hard against the flints, our feet bogged in hag and mire?
There must have been several hundreds of the convicts in the yard, and yet I was told later that it was not a fourth of the misery that Bicêtre held, and that scores were leaving weekly for thebagnes—the hulks at Toulon and at Brest—while others took their places.
Every man wore a uniform—a coarse brown jacket, vast wide breeches of the same hue, a high sugar-loaf cap and wooden shoes—all except some privileged, whereof I was one—and we were divided into gangs, each gang with its warders—tall grenadiers with their muskets ready.
Round and round and across and across we marched in the great quadrangle, every man treading the rogues' measure with leg-weary reluctance, many cursing their warders under breath, most scowling, all hopeless and all lost.
'Twas the exercise of the day.
As we slouched through that mad ceremony in the mud of the yard, with rain still drizzling on us, the parrot in its cage had a voice loud and shrill above the commands of the grenadiers and officers; sang its taunting song, or whistled like a street boy, a beast so free, so careless and remote, that I had a fancy it had the only soul in the place.
As I say, we were divided into gangs, each gang taking its own course back and forward in the yard as its commander ordered. The gang I was with marched a little apart from the rest. We were none of us in this gang in the ugly livery of the prison, but in our own clothing, and we were, it appeared, allowed that privilege because we were yet to try. I knew no reason for the distinction at the time, nor did I prize it very much, for looking all about the yard—at the officers, the grenadiers, and other functionaries of the prison, I failed to see a single face I knew. What could I conclude but that Buhot was gone and that I was doomed to be forgotten here?
It would have been a comfort even to have got a glimpse of Father Hamilton, the man whose machinations were the cause of my imprisonment, but Father Hamilton, if he had been taken here as Buhot had suggested, was not, at all events, in view.
After the morning's exercise we that were the privileged were taken to what was called thesalle dépreuve, and with three or four to eachgamelleor mess-tub, ate a scurvy meal of a thin soup and black bread and onions. To a man who had been living for a month at heck and manger, as we say, this might naturally seem unpalatable fare, but truth to tell I ate it with a relish that had been all the greater had it been permitted me to speak to any of my fellow sufferers. But speech was strictly interdict and so our meal was supped in silence.
When it was over I was to be fated for the pleasantest of surprises!
There came to me a sous-officer of the grenadiers.
In French he asked if I was Monsieur Greig. I said as best I could in the same tongue that I was that unhappy person at his service. Then, said he, “Come with me.” He led me into a hall about a hundred feet long that had beds or mattresses for about three hundred people. The room was empty, as those who occupied it were, he said, at Mass. Its open windows in front looked into another courtyard from that in which we had been exercising, while the windows at the rear looked into a garden where already lilac was in bloom and daffodillies endowed the soil of a few mounds with the colour of the gold. On the other side of the court first named there was a huge building. “Galbanon,” said my guide, pointing to it, and then made me understand that the same was worse by far than the Bastille, and at the moment full of Marquises, Counts, Jesuits, and other clergymen, many of them in irons for abusing or writing against the Marchioness de Pompadour.
I listened respectfully and waited Monsieur's explanation. It was manifest I had not been brought into this hall for the good of my education, and naturally I concluded the name of Galbanon, that I had heard already from Buhot, with its villainous reputation, was meant to terrify me into a submission to what had been proposed. The moment after a hearty meal—even ofsoup maigre—was not, however, the happiest of times to work upon a Greig's feelings of fear or apprehension, and so I waited, very dour within upon my resolution though outwardly in the most complacent spirit.
The hall was empty when we entered as I have said, but we had not been many minutes in it when the tramp of men returning to it might be heard, and this hurried my friend the officer to his real business.
He whipped a letter from his pocket and put it in my hand with a sign to compel secrecy on my part. It may be readily believed I was quick enough to conceal the missive. He had no cause to complain of the face I turned upon another officer who came up to us, for 'twas a visage of clownish vacuity.
The duty of the second officer, it appeared, was to take me to a new cell that had been in preparation for me, and when I got there it was with satisfaction I discovered it more than tolerable, with a sufficiency of air and space, a good light from the quadrangle, a few books, paper, and a writing standish.
When the door had been shut upon me, I turned to open my letter and found there was in fact a couple of them—a few lines from her ladyship in Dunkerque expressing her continued interest in my welfare and adventures, and another from the Swiss through whom the first had come. He was still—said the honest Bernard—at my service, having eluded the vigilance of Buhot, who doubtless thought a lackey scarce worth his hunting, and he was still in a position to post my letters, thanks to the goodwill of the sous-officer who was a relative. Furthermore, he was in hopes that Miss Walkinshaw, who was on terms of intimacy with the great world and something of anintriguante, would speedily take steps to secure my freedom. “Be tranquil, dear Monsieur!” concluded the brave fellow, and I was so exceedingly comforted and inspired by these matters that I straightway sat down to the continuation of my journal for Miss Walkinshaw's behoof. I had scarce dipped the pen, when my cell door opened and gave entrance to the man who was the cause of my incarceration.
The door shut and locked behind him; it was Father Hamilton!
It was indeed Father Hamilton, by all appearance none the worse in body for his violent escapade, so weighty with the most fatal possibilities for himself, for he advanced to me almost gaily, his hand extended and his face red and smiling.
“Scotland! to my heart!” cries he in the French, and throws his arms about me before I could resist, and kisses me on the cheeks after the amusing fashion of his nation. “La! la! la! Paul,” he cried, “I'd have wanted three breakfasts sooner than miss this meeting with my good secretary lad that is the lovablest rogue never dipped a pen in his master's service. Might have been dead for all I knew, and run through by a brutal rapier, victim of mine own innocence. But here's my Paul,pardieu!I would as soon have mycroque-mortnow as that jolly dog his uncle, that never waked till midnight or slept till the dull, uninteresting noon in the years when we went roving. What! Paul! Paul Greig! mycroque-mort!my Don Dolorous!—oh, Lord, my child, I am the most miserable of wretches!”
And there he let me go, and threw himself upon a chair, and gave his vast body to a convulsion of arid sobs. The man was in hysterics, compounding smiles and sobs a score to the minute, but at the end 'twas the natural man won the bout, else he had taken a stroke. I stood by him in perplexity of opinions whether to laugh or storm, whether to give myself to the righteous horror a good man ought to feel in the presence of a murtherer, or shrug my shoulders tolerantly at the imbecile.
“There!” said he, recovering his natural manner, “I have made a mortal enemy of Andrew Greig's nephew. Yes, yes, master, glower at Misery, fat Misery—and the devil take it!—old Misery, without a penny in 'ts pocket, and its next trip upon wheels a trip to the block to nuzzle at the dirty end in damp sawdust a nose that has appreciated the bouquet of the rarest wines. Paul, my boy, has't a pinch of snuff? A brutal bird out there sings a stave of theChanson de la Veuveso like the confounded thing that I heard my own foolish old head drop into the basket, and there! I swear to you the smell of the sawdust is in my nostrils now.”
I handed him my box; 'twas a mull my Uncle Andy gave me before he died, made of the horn of a young bullock, with a blazon of the house on the silver lid. He took it eagerly and drenched himself with the contents.
“Oh, la! la!” he cried; “I give thanks. My head was like yeast. I wish it were Christmas last, and a man called Hamilton was back in Dixmunde parish. But there! that is enough, I have made my bed and I must lie on't, with a blight on all militant jesuitry! When last I had this box in my fingers they were as steady as Mont St. Michel, now look—they are trembling like aspen,n'est-ce pas?And all that's different is that I have eaten one or two better dinners and cracked a few pipkins of better wine, and—and—well-nigh killed a police officer. Did'st ever hear of one Hamilton, M. Greig? 'Twas a cheery old fellow in Dixmunde whose name was the same as mine, and had a garden and bee-hives, and I am on the rack for my sins.”
He might be on the rack—and, indeed, I daresay the man was in a passion of feelings so that he knew not what he was havering about, but what impressed me most of all about him was that he seemed to have some momentary gleams of satisfaction in his situation.
“I have every ground of complaint against you, sir,” I said.
“What!” he interrupted. “Would'st plague an old man with complaints when M. de Paris is tapping him on the shoulder to come away and smell the sawdust of his own coffin? Oh, 'tis not in this wise thy uncle had done, but no matter!”
“I have no wish, Father Hamilton, to revile you for what you have brought me,” I hastened to tell him. “That is far from my thoughts, though now that you put me in mind of it, there is some ground for my blaming you if blaming was in my intention. But I shall blame you for this, that you are a priest of the Church and a Frenchman, and yet did draw a murderous hand upon a prince of your own country.”
This took him somewhat aback. He helped himself to another voluminous pinch of my snuff to give him time for a rejoinder and then—“Regicide, M. Greig, is sometimes to be defended when——”
“Regicide!” I cried, losing all patience, “give us the plain English of it, Father Hamilton, and call it murder. To call it by a Latin name makes it none the more respectable a crime against the courts of heaven where the curse of Babel has an end. But for an accident, or the cunning of others, you had a corpse upon your conscience this day, and your name had been abhorred throughout the whole of Europe.”
He put his shoulders up till his dew-laps fell in massive folds.
“'Fore God!” said he, “here's a treatise in black letter from Andrew Greig's nephew. It comes indifferently well, I assure thee, from Andrew's nephew. Those who live in glass houses,cher ami,—those who live in glass houses——”
He tapped me upon the breast with his fat finger and paused, with a significant look upon his countenance.
“Oh, ye can out with it, Father Hamilton!” I cried, certain I knew his meaning.
“Those who live in glass houses,” said he, “should have some pity for a poor old devil out in the weather without a shelter of any sort.”
“You were about to taunt me with my own unhappy affair,” I said, little relishing his consideration.
“Was I, M. Greig?” he said softly. “Faith! a glass residence seems to breed an ungenerous disposition! If thou can'st credit me I know nothing of thine affair beyond what I may have suspected from a Greig travelling hurriedly and in red shoes. I make you my compliments, Monsieur, of your morality that must be horror-struck at my foolish play with a pistol, yet thinks me capable of a retort so vile as that you indicate. My dear lad, I but spoke of what we have spoken of together before in our happy chariot in the woods of Somme—thine uncle's fate, and all I expected was, that remembering the same, thou his nephew would'st have enough tolerance for an old fool to leave his punishment in the hands of the constitute authority.Voilà!I wish to heaven they had given me another cell, after all, that I might have imagined thy pity for one that did thee no harm, or at least meant to do none, which is the main thing with all our acts else Purgatory's more crowded than I fancy.”
He went wearily over to the fire and spread his trembling hands to the blaze; I looked after him perplexed in my mind, but not without an overpowering pity.
“I have come, like thyself, doubtless,” he said after a little, “over vile roads in a common cart, and lay awake last night in a dungeon—a pretty conclusion to my excursion! And yet I am vastly more happy to-day than I was this time yesterday morning.”
“But then you were free,” I said, “you had all you need wish for—money, a conveyance, servants, leisure——”
“And M' Croque-mort's company,” he added with a poor smile. “True, true! But the thing was then to do,” and he shuddered. “Now my part is done, 'twas by God's grace a failure, and I could sing for content like one of the little birds we heard the other day in Somme.”
He could not but see my bewilderment in my face.
“You wonder at that,” said he, relinquishing the Roman manner as he always did when most in earnest. “Does Monsieur fancy a poor old priest can take to the ancient art of assassination with an easy mind?Nom de nom!I could skip to the block like a ballet-dancer if 'twere either that or live the past two days over again and fifty years after. I have none of the right stomach for murder; that's flat! 'tis a business that keeps you awake too much at night, and disturbs the gastric essence; calls, too, for a confounded agility that must be lacking in a person of my handsome and plenteous bulk. I had rather go fishing any day in the week than imbrue. When Buhot entered the room where I waited for a less worthy man and I fired honestly for my money and missed, I could have died of sheer rapture. Instead I threw myself upon his breast and embraced him.”
“He said none of that to me.”
“Like enough not, but 'tis true none the less, though he may keep so favourable a fact out of his records. A good soul enough, Buhot! We knew him, your uncle and I, in the old days when I was thinner and played a good game of chess at three in the morning. Fancy Ned Hamilton cutting short the glorious career of old Buhot! I'd sooner pick a pocket.”
“Or kill a prince!”
“Felicitations on your wit, M. Greig! Heaven help the elderly when the new wit is toward!N'importe!Perhaps 'twere better to kill some princes than to pick a pocket. Is it not better, or less wicked, let us say, to take the life of a man villainously abusing it than the purse of a poor wretch making the most of his scantylivres?”
And then the priest set out upon his defence. It is too long here to reproduce in his own words, even if I recalled them, and too specious in its terms for the patience of the honest world of our time. With his hands behind his back he marched up and down the room for the space of a half-hour at the least, recounting all that led to his crime. The tale was like a wild romance, but yet, as we know now, true in every particular. He was of the Society of Jesus, had lived a stormy youth, and fallen in later years into a disrepute in his own parish, and there the heads of his Society discovered him a very likely tool for their purposes. They had only half convinced him that the death of Charles Edward was for the glory of God and the good of the Church when they sent him marching with a pistol and £500 in bills of exchange and letters of credit upon a chase that covered a great part of three or four countries, and ended at Lisbon, when a German Jesuit in the secret gave him ten crusadoes to bring him home with his task unaccomplished.
“I have what amounts almost to a genius for losing the opportunities of which I do not desire to avail myself,” said Father Hamilton with a whimsical smile.
And then he had lain in disgrace with the Jesuits for a number of years until it became manifest (as he confessed with shame) that his experience of leisure, wealth, and travel had enough corrupted him to make the prospect of a second adventure of a similar kind pleasing. At that time Charles, lost to the sight of Europe, and only discovered at brief and tantalising intervals by the Jesuit agents, scarce slept two nights in the same town, but went from country to countryincognito, so that 'twas no trivial task Father Hamilton undertook to run him to earth.
“The difficulty of it—indeed the small likelihood there was of my ever seeing him,” he said, “was what mainly induced me to accept the office, though in truth it was compelled. I was doing very well at Dunkerque,” he went on, “and very happy if I had never heard more of prince or priesthood, when Father Fleuriau sent me a hurried intimation that my victim was due at Versailles on Easter and ordered my instant departure there.”
The name of Fleuriau recalled me to my senses. “Stop, stop, Father Hamilton!” I cried, “I must hear no more.”
“What!” said he, bitterly, “is't too good a young gentleman to listen to the confession of a happy murderer that has failed at his trade?”
“I have no feeling left but pity,” said I, almost like to weep at this, “but you have been put into this cell along with me for a purpose.”
“And what might that be, M. Greig?” he asked, looking round about him, and seeing for the first time, I swear, the sort of place he was in. “Faith! it is comfort, at any rate; I scarce noticed that, in my pleasure at seeing Paul Greig again.”
“You must not tell me any more of your Jesuit plot, nor name any of those involved in the same, for Buhot has been at me to cock an ear to everything you may say in that direction, and betray you and your friends. It is for that he has put us together into this cell.”
“Pardieu!am not I betrayed enough already?” cried the priest, throwing up his hands. “I'll never deny my guilt.”
“Yes,” I said, “but they want the names of your fellow conspirators, and Buhot says they never expect them directly from you.”
“He does, does he?” said the priest, smiling. “Faith, M. Buhot has a good memory for his friend's characteristics. No, M. Greig, if they put this comfortable carcase to the rack itself. And was that all thy concern? Well, as I was saying—let us speak low lest some one be listening—this Father Fleuriau-”
Again I stopped him.
“You put me into a hard position, Father Hamilton,” I said. “My freedom—my life, perhaps—depends on whether I can tell them your secret or not, and here you throw it in my face.”
“And why not?” he asked, simply. “I merely wish to show myself largely the creature of circumstances, and so secure a decent Scot's most favourable opinion of me before the end.”
“But I might be tempted to betray you.”
The old eagle looked again out at his eyes. He gently slapped my cheek with a curious touch of fondness almost womanly, and gave a low, contented laugh.
“Farceur!” he said. “As if I did not know my Don Dolorous, my merry Andrew's nephew!” His confidence hugely moved me, and, lest he should think I feared to trust myself with his secrets, I listened to the remainder of his story, which I shall not here set down, as it bears but slightly on my own narrative, and may even yet be revealed only at cost of great distress among good families, not only on the Continent but in London itself.
When he had done, he thanked me for listening so attentively to a matter that was so much on his mind that it gave him relief to share it with some one. “And not only for that, M. Greig,” said he, “are my thanks due, for you saved the life that might have been the prince's instead of my old gossip, Buhot's. To take the bullet out of my pistol was the device your uncle himself would have followed in the like circumstances.”
“But I did not do that!” I protested.
He looked incredulous.
“Buhot said as much,” said he; “he let it out unwittingly that I had had my claws clipped by my own household.”
“Then assuredly not by me, Father Hamilton.”
“So!” said he, half incredulous, and a look of speculation came upon his countenance.
It seemed for a while as if we were fated to lie forgotten in Bicêtre till the crack of doom; not that we were many days there when all was done, but that in our natural hourly expectation at first of being called forth for trial the hours passed so sluggishly that Time seemed finally to sleep, and a week, to our fancy—to mine at all events—seemed a month at the most modest computation.
I should have lost my reason but for the company of the priest, who, for considerations best known to others and to me monstrously inadequate, was permitted all the time to share my cell. In his singular society there was a recreation that kept me from too feverishly brooding on my wrongs, and his character every day presented fresh features of interest and admiration. He had become quite cheerful again, and as content in the confine of his cell as he had been when the glass coach was jolting over the early stages of what had been intended for a gay procession round the courts of Europe. Once more he affected the Roman manner that was due to his devotion to Shakespeare and L'Estrange's Seneca, and “Clarissa Harlowe,” a knowledge of which, next to the Scriptures, he counted the first essentials for a polite education. I protest he grew fatter every day, and for ease his corpulence was at last saved the restraint of buttons, which was an indolent indulgence so much to his liking that of itself it would have reconciled him to spend the remainder of his time in prison.
“Tiens!Paul,” he would say, “here's an old fool has blundered through the greater part of his life without guessing till now how easy a thing content is to come by. Why, 'tis no more than a loose waistcoat and a chemise unbuttoned at the neck. I dared not be happy thus in Dixmunde, where the folks were plaguily particular that their priest should be point-devise, as if mortal man had time to tend his soul and keep a constant eye on the lace of his fall.”
And he would stretch himself—a very mountain of sloth—in his chair.
With me 'twas different. Even in a gaol I felt sure a day begun untidily was a day ill-done by. If I had no engagements with the fastidious fashionable world I had engagements with myself; moreover, I shared my father's sentiment, that a good day's darg of work with any thinking in it was never done in a pair of slippers down at the heel. Thus I was as peijink (as we say) in Bicêtre as I would have been at large in the genteel world.
“Not,” he would admit, “but that I love to see thee in a decent habit, and so constant plucking at thy hose, for I have been young myself, and had some right foppish follies, too. But now, my good man Dandiprat, mypetit-maître, I am old—oh, so old!—and know so much of wisdom, and have seen such a confusion of matters, that I count comfort the greatest of blessings. The devil fly away with buttons and laces! say I, that have been parish priest of Dixmunde—and happily have not killed a man nor harmed a flea, though like enough to get killed myself.”
The weather was genial, yet he sat constantly hugging the fire, and I at the window, which happily gave a prospect of the yard between our building and that of Galbanon. I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom, while he went prating on upon the scurviest philosophy surely ever man gave air to.