226
“Behold, my scrivener, how little man wants for happiness! My constant fear in Dixmunde was that I would become so useless for all but eating and sleeping, when I was old, that no one would guarantee me either; poverty took that place at my table the skull took among the Romans—the thought on't kept me in a perpetual apprehension.Nom de chien!and this was what I feared—this, a hard lodging, coarse viands, and sour wine! What was the fellow's name?—Demetrius, upon the taking of Megara, asked Monsieur Un-tel the Philosopher what he had lost. 'Nothing at all,' said he, 'for I have all that I could call my own about me,' and yet 'twas no more than the skin he stood in. A cell in Bicêtre would have been paradise to such a gallant fellow. Oh, Paul, I fear thou may'st be ungrateful—I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom,” he went prating on, “to this good Buhot, who has given us such a fine lodging, and saved us the care of providing for ourselves.”
“'Tis all very well, father,” I said, leaning on the sill of the window, and looking at a gang of prisoners being removed from one part of Galbanon to another—“'tis all very well, but I mind a priest that thought jaunting round the country in a chariot the pinnacle of bliss. And that was no further gone than a fortnight ago.”
“Bah!” said he, and stretched his fat fingers to the fire; “he that cannot live happily anywhere will live happily nowhere at all. What avails travel, if Care waits like a hostler to unyoke the horses at every stage? I tell thee, my boy, I never know what a fine fellow is Father Hamilton till I have him by himself at a fireside; 'tis by firesides all the wisest notions come to one.”
“I wish there came a better dinner than to-day's,” said I, for we had agreed an hour ago that smoked soup was not very palatable.
“La! la! la! there goes Sir Gourmet!” cried his reverence. “Have I infected this poor Scot that ate naught but oats ere he saw France, with mine own fever for fine feeding from which, praisele bon Dieu!I have recovered? 'Tis a brutal entertainment, and unworthy of man, to place his felicity in the service of his senses. I maintain that even smoked soup is pleasant enough on the palate of a man with an easy conscience, and a mind purged of vulgar cares.”
“And you can be happy here, Father Hamilton?”
I asked, astonished at such sentiments from a man before so ill to please.
He heaved like a mountain in travail, and brought forth a peal of laughter out of all keeping with our melancholy situation. “Happy!” said he, “I have never been happy for twenty years till Buhot clapped claw upon my wrist. Thou may'st have seen a sort of mask of happiness, a false face of jollity in Dunkerque parlours, and heard a well-simulated laughter now and then as we drank by wayside inns, but may I be called coxcomb if the miserable wretch who playacted then was half so light of heart as this that sits here at ease, and has only one regret—that he should have dragged Andrew Greig's nephew into trouble with him. What man can be perfectly happy that runs the risk of disappointment—which is the case of every man that fears or hopes for anything? Here am I, too old for the flame of love or the ardour of ambition; all that knew me and understood me best and liked me most are dead long since. I have a state palace prepared for me free; a domestic in livery to serve my meals; parishioners do not vex me with their trifling little hackneyed sins, and my conclusion seems like to come some morning after an omelet and a glass of wine.”
I could not withhold a shudder.
“But to die that way, Father!” I said.
“C'est égal!” said he, and crossed himself. “We must all die somehow, and I had ever a dread of a stone. Come, come, M. Croque-mort, enough of thy confounded dolours! I'll be hanged if thou did'st not steal these shoes, and art after all but an impersonator of a Greig. The lusty spirit thou call'st thine uncle would have used his teeth ere now to gnaw his way through the walls of Bicêtre, and here thou must stop to converse cursedly on death to the fatted ox that smells the blood of the abattoir—oh lad, give's thy snuff-box, sawdust again!”
Thus by the hour went on the poor wretch, resigned most obviously to whatever was in store for him, not so much from a native courage, I fear, as from a plethora of flesh that smothered every instinct of self-preservation. As for me I kept up hope for three days that Buhot would surely come to test my constancy again, and when that seemed unlikely, when day after day brought the same routine, the same cell with Hamilton, the same brief exercise in the yard, the same vulgar struggle at thegamellein thesalle d'épreuve—I could have welcomed Galbanon itself as a change, even if it meant all the horror that had been associated with it by Buhot and my friend the sous-officer.
Galbanon! I hope it has long been levelled with the dust, and even then I know the ghosts of those there tortured in their lives will habitate the same in whirling eddies, for a constant cry for generations has gone up to heaven from that foul spot. It must have been a devilish ingenuity, an invention of all the impish courts below, that placed me at a window where Galbanon faced me every hour of the day or night, its horror all revealed. I have seen in the pool of Earn in autumn weather, when the river was in spate, dead leaves and broken branches borne down dizzily upon the water to toss madly in the linn at the foot of the fall; no less helpless, no less seared by sin and sorrow, or broken by the storms of circumstance, were the wretches that came in droves to Galbanon. The stream of crime or tyranny bore them down (some from very high places), cast them into this boiling pool, and there they eddied in a circle of degraded tasks from which it seemed the fate of many of them never to escape, though their luckier fellows went in twos or threes every other day in a cart to their doom appointed.
Be sure it was not pleasant each day for me to hear the hiss of the lash and the moans of the bastinadoed wretch, to see the blood spurt, and witness the anguish of the men who dragged enormous bilboes on their galled ankles.
At last I felt I could stand it no longer, and one day intimated to Father Hamilton that I was determined on an escape.
“Good lad!” he cried, his eye brightening. “The most sensible thing thou hast said in twenty-four hours. 'Twill be a recreation for myself to help,” and he buttoned his waistcoat.
“We can surely devise some means of breaking out if——”
“We!” he repeated, shaking his head. “No, no, Paul, thou hast too risky a task before thee to burden thyself with behemoth. Shalt escape by thyself and a blessing with thee, but as for Father Hamilton he knows when he is well-off, and he shall not stir a step out of Buhot's charming and commodious inn until the bill is presented.”
In vain I protested that I should not dream of leaving him there while I took flight; he would listen to none of my reasoning, and for that day at least I abandoned the project.
Next day Buhot helped me to a different conclusion, for I was summoned before him.
“Well, Monsieur,” he said, “is it that we have here a more discerning young gentleman than I had the honour to meet last time?”
“Just the very same, M. Buhot,” said I bluntly. He chewed the stump of his pen and shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, come, M. Greig,” he went on, “this is abêtiseof the most ridiculous. We have given you every opportunity of convincing yourself whether this Hamilton is a good man or a bad one, whether he is the tool of others or himself a genius of mischief.”
“The tool of others, certainly, that much I am prepared to tell you, but that you know already. And certainly no genius of mischief himself; man! he has not got the energy to kick a dog.”
“And—and—” said Buhot softly, fancying he had me in the key of revelation.
“And that's all, M. Buhot,” said I, with a carriage he could not mistake.
He shrugged his shoulders again, wrote something in a book on the desk before him with great deliberation and then asked me how I liked my quarters in Bicêtre.
“Tolerably well,” I said. “I've been in better, but I might be in waur.”
He laughed a little at the Scotticism that seemed to recall something—perhaps a pleasantry of my uncle's—to him, and then said he, “I'm sorry they cannot be yours very much longer, M. Greig. We calculated that a week or two of this priest's company would have been enough to inspire a distaste and secure his confession, but apparently we were mistaken. You shall be taken to other quarters on Saturday.”
“I hope, M. Buhot,” said I, “they are to be no worse than those I occupy now.”
His face reddened a little at this—I felt always there was some vein of special kindness to me in this man's nature—and he said hesitatingly, “Well, the truth is, 'tis Galbanon.”
“Before a trial?” I asked, incredulous.
“The trial will come in good time,” he said, rising to conclude the parley, and he turned his back on me as I was conducted out of the room and back to the cell, where Father Hamilton waited with unwonted agitation for my tidings.
“Well, lad,” he cried, whenever we were alone, “what stirs? I warrant they have not a jot of evidence against thee,” but in a second he saw from my face the news was not so happy, and his own face fell.
“We are to be separated on Saturday,” I told him.
Tears came to his eyes at that—a most feeling old rogue!
“And where is't for thee, Paul?” he asked.
“Where is't for yourself ought to be of more importance to you, Father Hamilton.”
“No, no,” he cried, “it matters little about me, but surely for you it cannot be Galbanon?”
“Indeed, and it is no less.”
“Then, Paul,” he said firmly, “we must break out, and that without loss of time.”
“Is it in the plural this time?” I asked him.
He affected an indifference, but at the last consented to share the whole of the enterprise.
Father Hamilton was not aware of the extent of it, but he knew I was in a correspondence with the sous-officer. More than once he had seen us in thesalle dépreuvein a manifest understanding of each other, though he had no suspicion that the gentleman was a Mercury for Miss Walkinshaw, whose name seldom, if ever, entered into our conversation in the cell. From her I had got but one other letter—a brief acknowledgment of some of my fullest budgets, but 'twas enough to keep me at my diurnal on every occasion almost on which the priest slept. I sent her (with the strictest injunction to secrecy upon so important a matter) a great deal of the tale the priest had told me—not so much for her entertainment as for the purpose of moving in the poor man's interests. Especially was I anxious that she should use her influence to have some one communicate to Father Fleuriau, who was at the time in Bruges, how hazardous was the position of his unhappy cat's-paw, whose state I pictured in the most moving colours I could command. There was, it must be allowed, a risk in entrusting a document so damnatory to any one in Bicêtre, but that the packet was duly forwarded to its destination I had every satisfaction of from the sous-officer, who brought me an acknowledgment to that effect from Bernard the Swiss.
The priest knew, then, as I say, that I was on certain terms with this sous-officer, and so it was with no hesitation I informed him that, through the favour of the latter, I had a very fair conception of the character and plan of this building of Bicêtre in which we were interned. What I had learned of most importance to us was that the block of which our cell was a part had a face to the main road of Paris, from which thoroughfare it was separated by a spacious court and a long range of iron palisades. If ever we were to make our way out of the place it must be in this direction, for on two sides of our building we were overlooked by buildings vastly more throng than our own, and bordered by yards in which were constant sentinels. Our block jutted out at an angle from one very much longer, but lower by two storeys, and the disposition of both made it clear that to enter into this larger edifice, and towards the gable end of it that overlooked the palisades of the Paris road, was our most feasible method of essay.
I drew a plan of the prison and grounds on paper, estimating as best I might all the possible checks we were like to meet with, and leaving a balance of chances in our favour that we could effect our purpose in a night.
The priest leaned his chin upon his arms as he lolled over the table on which I eagerly explained my diagram, and sighed at one or two of the feats of agility it assumed. There was, for example, a roof to walk upon—the roof of the building we occupied—though how we were to get there in the first place was still to be decided. Also there was a descent from that roof on to the lower building at right angles, though where the ladder or rope for this was to come from I must meanwhile airily leave to fortune. Finally, there was—assuming we got into the larger building, and in some unforeseeable way along its roof and clear to the gable end—a part of the yard to cross, and the palisade to escalade.
“Oh, lad! thou takest me for a bird,” cried his reverence, aghast at all this. “Is thy poor fellow prisoner a sparrow? A little after this I might do't with my own wings—the saints guide me!—but figure you that at present I am not Philetas, the dwarf, who had to wear leaden shoes lest the wind should blow him away. 'Twould take a wind indeed to stir this amplitude of good humours, this sepulchre of twenty thousand good dinners and incomputible tuns of liquid merriment. Pray, Paul, make an account of my physical infirmities, and mitigate thy transport of vaultings and soarings and leapings and divings, unless, indeed, thou meditatest sewing me up in a sheet, and dragging me through the realms of space.”
“We shall manage! we shall manage!” I insisted, now quite uplifted in a fanciful occupation that was all to my tastes, even if nothing came of it, and I plunged more boldly into my plans. They were favoured by several circumstances—the first, namely, that we were not in the uniform of the prison, and, once outside the prison, could mingle with the world without attracting attention. Furthermore, by postponing the attempt till the morrow night I could communicate with the Swiss, and secure his cooperation outside in the matter of a horse or a vehicle, if the same were called for. I did not, however, say so much as that to his reverence, whom I did not wish as yet to know of my correspondence with Bernard. Finally, we had an auspicious fact at the outset of our attempt, inasmuch as the cell we were in was in the corridor next to that of which the sous-officer had some surveillance, and I knew his mind well enough now to feel sure he would help in anything that did not directly involve his own position and duties. In other words, he was to procure a copy of the key of our cell, and find a means of leaving it unlocked when the occasion arose.
“A copy of the key, Paul!” said Father Hamilton; “sure there are no bounds to thy cheerful mad expectancy! But go on! go on! art sure he could not be prevailed on—this fairy godfather—to give us an escort of cavalry and trumpeters?”
“This is not much of a backing-up, Father Hamilton,” I said, annoyed at his skeptic comments upon an affair that involved so much and agitated myself so profoundly.
“Pardon! Paul,” he said hastily, confused and vexed himself at the reproof. “Art quite right, I'm no more than a croaker, and for penance I shall compel myself to do the wildest feat thou proposest.”
We determined to put off the attempt at escape till I had communicated with the sous-officer (in truth, though Father Hamilton did not know it, till I had communicated with Bernard the Swiss), and it was the following afternoon I had not only an assurance of the unlocked door, but in my hand a more trustworthy plan of the prison than my own, and the promise that the Swiss would be waiting with a carriage outside the palisades when we broke through, any time between midnight and five in the morning.
Next day, then, we were in a considerable agitation; to that extent indeed that I clean forgot that we had no aid to our descent of twenty or thirty feet (as the sous-sergeant's diagram made it) from the roof of our block on to that of the one adjoining. We had had our minds so much on bolted doors and armed sentinels that this detail had quite escaped us until almost on the eve of setting out at midnight, the priest began again to sigh about his bulk and swear no rope short of a ship's cable would serve to bear him.
“Rope!” I cried, in a tremendous chagrin at my stupidity. “Lord! if I have not quite forgot it. We have none.”
“Ah!” he said, “perhaps it is not necessary. Perhaps my heart is so light at parting with mycroque-mortthat I can drop upon the tiles like a pigeon.”
“Parting,” I repeated, eyeing him suspiciously, for I thought perhaps he had changed his mind again. “Who thinks of parting?”
“Not I indeed,” says he, “unless the rope do when thou hast got it.”
There was no rope, however, and I cursed my own folly that I had not asked one from the sous-officer whose complaisance might have gone the length of a fathom or two, though it did not, as the priest suggested, go so far as an armed convoy and a brace of trumpeters. It was too late now to repair the overlook, and to the making of rope the two of us had there and then to apply ourselves, finding the sheets and blankets-of our beds scanty enough for our purpose, and by no means of an assuring elegance or strength when finished. But we had thirty feet of some sort of cord at the last, and whether it was elegant or not it had to do for our purpose.
Luckily the night was dark as pitch and a high wind roared in the chimneys, and in the numerous corners of the prison. There was a sting in the air that drew many of the sentinels round the braziers flaming in the larger yard between the main entrance and the buildings, and that further helped our prospects; so that it was with some hope, in spite of a heart that beat like a flail in my breast, I unlocked the door and crept out into the dimly-lighted corridor with the priest close behind me.
Midway down this gallery there was a stair of which our plan apprised us, leading to another gallery—the highest of the block—from which a few steps led to a cock-loft where the sous-officer told us there was one chance in a score of finding a blind window leading to the roof.
No one, luckily, appeared as we hurried down the long gallery. I darted like a fawn up the stair to the next flat, Father Hamilton grievously puffing behind me, and we had just got into the shadow of the steps leading to the cock-loft when a warder's step and the clank of his chained keys came sounding down the corridor. He passed within three feet of us and I felt the blood of all my body chill with fear!
“I told thee, lad,” whispered the priest, mopping the sweat from his face, “I told thee 'twas an error to burden thyself with such a useless carcase. Another moment or two—a gasp for the wind that seems so cursed ill to come by at my years, and I had brought thee into trouble.”
I paid no heed to him, but crept up the steps and into the cock-loft that smelt villainously of bats.
The window was unfastened! I stuck out my head upon the tiles and sniffed the fine fresh air of freedom as it had been a rare perfume.
Luckily the window was scarcely any height, and it proved easy to aid his reverence into the open air. Luckily, further, it was too dark for him to realise the jeopardies of his situation for whether his precarious gropings along the tiles were ten feet or thirty from the yard below was indiscoverable in the darkness. He slid his weighty body along with an honest effort that was wholly due to his regard for my interests, because 'twas done with groans and whispered protestations that 'twas the maddest thing for a man to leave a place where he was happy and risk his neck in an effort to discover misery. A rime of frost was on the tiles, and they were bitter cold to the touch. One fell, too, below me as I slid along, and rattled loudly over its fellows and plunged into the yard.
Naturally we stopped dead and listened breathless, a foolish action for one reason because in any case we had been moving silently at a great height above the place where the tile should fall so that there was no risk of our being heard or seen, but our listening discovered so great an interval between the loosening of the tile and its dull shattering on the stones below that the height on which we were perched in the darkness was made more plain—more dreadful to the instincts than if we could actually measure it with the eye. I confess I felt a touch of nausea, but nothing compared with the priest, whose teeth began to chitter in an ague of horror.
“Good Lord, Paul!” he whispered to me, clutching my leg as I moved in front of him, “it is the bottomless pit.”
“Not unless we drop,” said I. And to cheer him up I made some foolish joke.
If the falling tile attracted any attention in the yard it was not apparent to us, and five minutes later we had to brace ourselves to a matter that sent the tile out of our minds.
For we were come to the end of the high building, and twenty feet below us, at right angles, we could plainly see the glow of several skylights in the long prison to which it was attached. It was now the moment for our descent on the extemporised rope.
Ifastened the rope about a chimney-head with some misgivings that by the width and breadth of the same I was reducing our chance of ever getting down to the lower building, as the knotted sheets from the outset had been dubious measure for the thirty feet of which my sous-officer had given the estimate. But I said never a word to the priest of my fears on that score, and determined for once to let what was left of honesty go before well-fattened age and test the matter first myself. If the cord was too brief for its purpose, or (what was just as likely) on the frail side, I could pull myself back in the one case as the priest was certainly unfit to do, and in the other my weight would put less strain upon it than that of Father Hamilton.
I can hear him yet in my imagination after forty years, as he clung to the ridge of the roof like a seal on a rock, chittering in the cold night wind, enviously eyeing some fires that blazed in another yard and groaning melancholiously.
“A garden,” said he, “and six beehives—no, 'faith! 'twas seven last summer, and a roomful of books. Oh, Paul, Paul! Now I know how God cast out Satan. He took him from his warm fireside, and his books before they were all read, and his pantoufles, and set him straddling upon a frozen house-top to ponder through eternal night upon the happy past. Alas, poor being! How could he know what joys were in the simplicity of a room of books half-read and a pair of warm old slippers?”
He was fair rambling in his fears, my poor priest, and I declare scarcely knew the half of what he uttered, indeed he spoke out so loudly that I had to check him lest he should attract attention from below.
“Father Hamilton,” said I, when my cord was fastened, “with your permission I'll try it first. I want to make it sure that my seamanship on the sloopSarah, of Ayr, has not deserted me to the extent that I cannot come down a rope without a ratline or tie a bowling knot.”
“Certainly, Paul, certainly,” said he, quite eagerly, so that I was tempted for a second to think he gladly postponed his own descent from sheer terror.
I threw over the free end of the cord and crouched upon the beak of the gable to lower myself.
“Well, Paul,” said his reverence in a broken voice. “Let us say 'good-bye' in case aught should happen ere we are on the same level again.”
“Oh!” said I, impatient, “that's the truecroque-mortspirit indeed! Why, Father, it isn't—it isn't—” I was going to say it was not a gallows I was venturing on, but the word stuck in my throat, for a certain thought that sprung to me of how nearly in my own case it had been to the very gallows, and his reverence doubtless saw some delicacy, for he came promptly to my help.
“Not a priest's promise—made to be broken, you would say, good Paul,” said he. “I promised the merriest of jaunts over Europe in a coach, and here my scrivener is hanging in the reins! Pardon, dear Scotland,milles pardonsand good-bye and good luck.” And at that he made to embrace me.
“Here's a French ceremony just about nothing at all,” I thought, and began my descent. The priest lay on his stomach upon the ridge. As I sank, with my eyes turned upwards, I could see his hair blown by the wind against a little patch of stars, that was the only break in the Ethiopia of the sky. He seemed to follow my progress breathlessly, and when I gained the other roof and shook the cord to tell him so he responded by a faint clapping of his hands.
“Art all right, lad?” he whispered down to me, and I bade him follow.
“Good-night, Paul, good-bye, and God bless you!” he whispered. “Get out of this as quick as you can; 'tis more than behemoth could do in a month of dark nights, and so I cut my share of the adventure. One will do't when two (and one of them a hogshead) will die in trying to do't.”
Here was a pretty pickle! The man's ridiculous regard for my safety outweighed his natural inclinations, though his prospects in the prison of Bicêtre were blacker than my own, having nothing less dreadful than an execution at the end of them. He had been merely humouring me so far—and such a brave humouring in one whose flesh was in a quaking of alarms all the time he slid along the roof!
“Are you not coming?” I whispered.
“On the contrary, I'm going, dear Paul,” said he with a pretence at levity. “Going back to my comfortable cell and my uniformed servant and M. Buhot, the charmingest of hostellers, and I declare my feet are like ice.”
“Then,” said I firmly, “I go back too. I'll be eternally cursed if I give up my situation as scrivener at this point. I must e'en climb up again.” And with that I prepared to start the ascent.
“Stop! stop!” said he without a second's pause, “stop where you are and I'll go down. Though 'tis the most stupendous folly,” he added with a sigh, and in a moment later I saw his vast bulk laboriously heaving over the side of the roof. Fortunately the knots in the cord where the fragments of sheet and blanket were joined made his task not so difficult as it had otherwise been, and almost as speedily as I had done it myself he reached the roof of the lower building, though in such a state he quivered like a jelly, and was dumb with fear or with exertion when the thing was done.
“Ah!” he said at last, when he had recovered himself. “Art a fool to be so particular about an old carcase accursed of easy humours and accused of regicide. Take another thought on't, Paul. What have you to do with this wretch of a priest that brought about the whole trouble in your ignorance? And think of Galbanon!”
“Think of the devil! Father Hamilton,” I snapped at him, “every minute we waste havering away here adds to the chances against any of us getting free, and I am sure that is not your desire. The long and the short of it is that I'll not stir a step out of Bicêtre—no, not if the doors themselves were open—unless you consent to come with me.”
“Ventre Dieu!” said he, “'tis just such a mulish folly as I might have looked for from the nephew of Andrew Greig. But lead on, good imbecile, lead on, and blame not poor Father Hamilton if the thing ends in a fiasco!”
We now crawled along a roof no whit more easily traversed than that we had already commanded. Again and again I had to stop to permit my companion to come up on me, for the pitch of the tiles was steep, and he in a peril from his own lubricity, and it was necessary even to put a hand under his arm at times when he suffered a vertigo through seeing the lights in the yard deep down as points of flame.
“Egad! boy,” he said, and his perspiring hand clutching mine at one of our pauses, “I thrill at the very entrails. I'd liefer have my nose in the sawdust any day than thrash through thin air on to a paving-stone.”
“A minute or two more and we are there,” I answered him.
“Where?” said he, starting; “in purgatory?”
“Look up, man!” I told him. “There's a window beaming ten yards off.” And again I pushed on.
In very truth there was no window, though I prayed as fervently for one as it had been a glimpse of paradise, but I was bound to cozen the old man into effort for his own life and for mine. What I had from the higher building taken for the glow of skylights had been really the light of windows on the top flat of the other prison block, and its roof was wholly unbroken. At least I had made up my mind to that with a despair benumbing when I touched wood. My fingers went over it in the dark with frantic eagerness. It was a trap such as we had come out of at the other block, but it was shut. Before the priest could come up to me and suffer the fresh horror of disappointment I put my weight upon it, and had the good fortune to throw it in. The flap fell with a shriek of hinges and showed gaping darkness. We stretched upon the tiles as close as limpets and as silent. Nothing stirred within.
“A garden,” said he in a little, “as sweet as ever bean grew in, with the rarest plum-tree; and now I am so cold.”
“I could be doing with some of your complaint,” said I; “as for me, I'm on fire. Please heaven, you'll be back in the garden again.”
I lowered myself within, followed by the priest, and found we were upon the rafters. A good bit off there was a beam of light that led us, groping, and in an imminent danger of going through the plaster, to an air-hole over a little gallery whose floor was within stretch as I lowered myself again.
Father Hamilton squeezed after me; we both looked over the edge of the gallery, and found it was a chapel we were in!
“Sacré nom!” said the priest and crossed himself, with a genuflexion to the side of the altar.
“Oh, Lord! Paul,” he said, whispering, “if 'twere the Middle Ages, and this were indeed a sanctuary, how happy was a poor undeserving son of Mother Church! Even Dagobert's hounds drew back from the stag in St. Denys.”
It was a mean interior, as befitted the worship of themisérableswho at times would meet there. A solemn quiet held the place, that seemed wholly deserted; the dim light that had shown through the air-hole and guided us came from some candles dripping before a shrine.
“Heaven help us!” said the priest. “I know just such another.”
There was nobody in the church so far as we could observe from the little gallery in which we found ourselves, but when we had gone down a flight of steps into the body of the same, and made to cross towards the door, we were suddenly confronted by a priest in a white cope. My heart jumped to my mouth; I felt a prinkling in the roots of my hair, and stopped dumb, with all my faculties basely deserted from me. Luckily Father Hamilton kept his presence of mind. As he told me later, he remembered of a sudden the Latin proverb that in battles the eye is first overcome, and he fixed the man in the stole with a glance that was bold and disconcerting. As it happened, however, the other priest was almost as blind as a bat, and saw but two civil worshippers in his chapel. He did not even notice that it was asoutane; he passed peeringly, with a bow to our inclinations, and it was almost incredulous of our good fortune I darted out of the chapel into the darkness of a courtyard of equal extent with that I had crossed on the night of my first arrival at Bicêtre. At its distant end there were the same flaming braziers with figures around them, and the same glitter of arms.
Now this Bicêtre is set upon a hill and commands a prospect of the city of Paris, of the Seine and its environs. For that reason we could see to our right the innumerable lights of a great plain twinkling in the darkness, and it seemed as if we had only to proceed in that direction to secure freedom by the mere effort of walking. As we stood in the shadow of the chapel, Father Hamilton eyed the distant prospect of the lighted town with a singular rapture.
“Paris!” said he. “Oh, Dieu! and I thought never to clap an eye on't again. Paris, my Paul! Behold the lights of it—la ville lumièrethat is so fine I could spend eternity in it. Hearts are there, lad, kind and jocund-”
“And meditating a descent on unhappy Britain,” said I.
“Good neighbourly hearts, or I'm a gourd else,” he went on, unheeding my interruption. “The stars in heaven are not so good, are no more notably the expression of a glowing and fraternal spirit. There is laughter in the streets of her.”
“Not at this hour, Father Hamilton,” said I, and the both of us always whispering. “I've never seen the place by day nor put a foot in it, but it will be droll indeed if there is laughter in its streets at two o'clock in the morning.”
“Ah, Paul, shall we ever get there?” said he longingly. “We can but try, anyway. I certainly did not come all this way, Father Hamilton, just to look on the lowe of Paris.”
What had kept us shrinking in the shadow of the chapel wall had been the sound of footsteps between us and the palisades that were to be distinguished a great deal higher than I had expected, on our right. On the other side of the rails was freedom, as well as Paris that so greatly interested my companion, but the getting clear of them seemed like to be a more difficult task than any we had yet overcome, and all the more hazardous because the footsteps obviously suggested a sentinel. Whether it was the rawness of the night that tempted him to a relaxation, or whether he was not strictly on duty, I know not, but, while we stood in the most wretched of quandaries, the man who was in our path very soon ceased his perambulation along the palisades, and went over to one of the distant fires, passing within a few yards of us as we crouched in the darkness. When he had gone sufficiently out of the way we ran for it. So plain were the lights of the valley, so flimsy a thing had seemed to part us from the high-road there, that never a doubt intruded on my mind that now we were as good as free, and when I came to the rails I beat my head with my hands when the nature of our folly dawned upon me.
“We may just go back,” I said to the priest in a stricken voice.
“Comment?” said he, wiping his brow and gloating on the spectacle of the lighted town.
“Look,” I said, indicating the railings that were nearly three times my own height, “there are no convenient trap-doors here.”
“But the cord—” said he simply.
“Exactly,” I said; “the cord's where we left it snugly tied with a bowling knot to the chimney of our block, and I'm an ass.”
“Oh, poor Paul!” said the priest in a prostration at this divulgence of our error. “I'm the millstone on your neck, for had I not parleyed at the other end of the cord when you had descended, the necessity for it would never have escaped your mind. I gave you fair warning, lad, 'twas a quixotic imbecility to burden yourself with me. And are we really at a stand? God! look at Paris. Had I not seen these lights I had not cared for myself a straw, but, oh lord! lad, they are so pleasant and so close! Why will the world sleep when two unhappy wretches die for want of a little bit of hemp?”
“You are not to blame,” said I, “one rope was little use to us in any case. But anyhow I do not desire to die of a little bit of hemp if I can arrange it better.” And I began hurriedly to scour up and down the palisade like a trapped mouse. It extended for about a hundred yards, ending at one side against the walls of a gate-house or lodge; on the other side it concluded at the wall of the chapel. It had no break in all its expanse, and so there was nothing left for us to do but to go back the way we had come, obliterate the signs of our attempt and find our cells again. We went, be sure, with heavy hearts, again ventured into the chapel, climbed the stairs, went through the ceiling, and stopped a little among the rafters to rest his reverence who was finding these manoeuvres too much for his weighty body. While he sat regaining sufficient strength to resume his crawling on rimey tiles I made a search of the loft we were in and found it extended to the gable end of the chapel, but nothing more for my trouble beyond part of a hanging chain that came through the roof and passed through the ceiling. I had almost missed it in the darkness, and even when I touched it my first thought was to leave it alone. But I took a second thought and tried the lower end, which came up as I hauled, yard upon yard, until I had the end of it, finished with a bell-ringer's hempen grip, in my hands. Here was a discovery if bell-pulls had been made of rope throughout in Bicêtre prison! But a chain with an end to a bell was not a thing to be easily borrowed.
I went back to where Father Hamilton was seated on the rafters, and told him my discovery.
“A bell,” said he. “Faith! I never liked them. Pestilent inventions of the enemy, that suggested duties to be done and the fleeting hours. But a bell-rope implies a belfry on the roof and a bell in it, and the chain that may reach the ground within the building may reach the same desirable place without the same.”
“That's very true,” said I, struck with the thing. And straight got through the trap and out upon the roof again. Father Hamilton puffed after me and in a little we came upon a structure like a dovecot at the very gable-end. “The right time to harry a nest is at night,” said I, “for then you get all that's in it.” And I started to pull up the chain that was fastened to the bell.
I lowered behemoth with infinite exertion till he reached the ground outside the prison grounds in safety, wrapped the clapper of the bell in my waistcoat, and descended hand over hand after him.
We were on the side of a broad road that dipped down the hill into a little village. Between us and the village street, across which hung a swinging lamp, there mounted slowly a carriage with a pair of horses.
“Bernard!” I cried, running up to it, and found it was the Swiss in the very article of waiting for us, and he speedily drove us into Paris.
Of the town of Paris that is so lamentably notable in these days I have but the recollection that one takes away from a new scene witnessed under stress of mind due to matters more immediately affecting him than the colour, shape, and properties of things seen, and the thought I had in certain parts of it is more clear to me to-day than the vision of the place itself. It is, in my mind, like a fog that the bridges thundered as our coach drove over them with our wretched fortunes on that early morning of our escape from Bicêtre, but as clear as when it sprung to me from the uproar of the wheels comes back the dread that the whole of this community would be at their windows looking out to see what folks untimeously disturbed their rest. We were delayed briefly at a gate upon the walls; I can scarcely mind what manner of men they were that stopped us and thrust a lantern in our faces, and what they asked eludes me altogether, but I mind distinctly how I gasped relief when we were permitted to roll on. Blurred, too—no better than the surplusage of dreams, is my first picture of the river and its isles in the dawn, but, like a favourite song, I mind the gluck of waters on the quays and that they made me think of Earn and Cart and Clyde.
We stopped in the place of the Notre Dame at the corner of a street; the coach drove off to aremisewhence it had come, and we went to an hospital called the Hôtel Dieu, in the neighbourhood, where Hamilton had a Jesuit friend in one of the heads, and where we were accommodated in a room that was generally set aside for clergymen. It was a place of the most wonderful surroundings, this Hôtel Dieu, choked, as it were, among towers, the greatest of them those of Our Lady itself that were in the Gothic taste, regarding which Father Hamilton used to say, “Dire gothique, c'est dire mauvais gout,” though, to tell the truth, I thought the building pretty braw myself. Alleys and wynds were round about us, and so narrow that the sky one saw between them was but a ribbon by day, while at night they seemed no better than ravines.
'Twas at night I saw most of the city, for only in the darkness did I dare to venture out of the Hôtel Dieu. Daundering my lone along the cobbles, I took a pleasure in the exercise of tenanting these towering lands with people having histories little different from the histories of the folks far off in my Scottish home—their daughters marrying, their sons going throughither (as we say), their bairns wakening and crying in their naked beds, and grannies sitting by the ingle-neuk cheerfully cracking upon ancient days. Many a time in the by-going I looked up their pend closes seeking the eternal lovers of our own burgh towns and never finding them, for I take it that in love the foreign character is coyer than our own. But no matter how eagerly I went forth upon my nightly airing in aroquelaureborrowed from Father Hamilton's friend, the adventure always ended, for me, in a sort of eerie terror of those close-hemming walls, those tangled lanes where slouched the outcast and the ne'er-do-weel, and not even the glitter of the moon upon the river between its laden isles would comfort me.
“La! la! la!” would Father Hamilton cry at me when I got home with a face like a fiddle. “Art the most ridiculous rustic ever ate a cabbage or set foot in Arcady. Why, man! the woman must be wooed—this Mademoiselle Lutetia. Must take her front and rear, walk round her, ogling bravely. Call her dull! call her dreadful!Ciel!Has the child never an eye in his mutton head? I avow she is the queen of the earth this Paris. If I were young and wealthy I'd buy the glittering stars in constellations and turn them into necklets for her. With thy plaguey gift of the sonnet I'd deave her with ecstasies and spill oceans of ink upon leagues of paper to tell her about her eyes. Go to! Scotland, go to! Ghosts! ghosts! devil the thing else but ghosts in thy rustic skull, for to take a fear of Lutetia when her black hair is down of an evening and thou canst not get a glimpse of that beautiful neck that is rounded like the same in the Psyche of Praxiteles. Could I pare off a portion of this rotundity and go out in a masque as Apollo I'd show thee things.”
And all he saw of Paris himself was from the windows of the hospital, where he and I would stand by the hour looking out into the square. For the air itself he had to take it in a little garden at the back, surrounded by a high wall, and affording a seclusion that even the priest could avail himself of without the hazard of discovery. He used to sit in an arbour there in the warmth of the day, and it was there I saw another trait of his character that helped me much to forget his shortcomings.
Over his head, within the doorway of the bower, he hung a box and placed therein the beginnings of a bird's nest. The thing was not many hours done when a pair of birds came boldly into his presence as he sat silent and motionless in the bower, and began to avail themselves of so excellent a start in householding. In a few days there were eggs in the nest, and 'twas the most marvellous of spectacles to witness the hen sit content upon them over the head of the fat man underneath, and the cock, without concern, fly in and out attentive on his mate.
But, indeed, the man was the friend of all helpless things, and few of the same came his way without an instinct that told them it was so. Not the birds in the nest alone were at ease in his society; he had but to walk along the garden paths whistling and chirping, and there came flights of birds about his head and shoulders, and some would even perch upon his hand. I have never seen him more like his office than when he talked with the creatures of the air, unless it was on another occasion when two bairns, the offspring of an inmate in the hospital, ventured into the garden, finding there another child, though monstrous, who had not lost the key to the fields where blossom the flowers of infancy, and frolic is a prayer.
But he dare not set a foot outside the walls of our retreat, for it was as useless to hide Ballageich under a Kilmarnock bonnet as to seek a disguise for his reverence in any suit of clothes. Bernard would come to us rarely under cover of night, but alas! there were no letters for me now, and mine that were sent through him were fewer than before. And there was once an odd thing happened that put an end to these intromissions; a thing that baffled me to understand at the time, and indeed for many a day thereafter, but was made plain to me later on in a manner that proved how contrary in his character was this mad priest, that was at once assassin and the noblest friend.
Father Hamilton was not without money, though all had been taken from him at Bicêtre. It was an evidence of the width and power of the Jesuit movement that even in the Hôtel Dieu he could command what sums he needed, and Bernard was habituated to come to him for moneys that might pay for himself and the coachman and the horses at theremise. On the last of these occasions I took the chance to slip a letter for Miss Walkinshaw into his hand. Instead of putting it in his pocket he laid it down a moment on a table, and he and I were busy packing linen for the wash when a curious cry from Father Hamilton made us turn to see him with the letter in his hand.
He was gazing with astonishment on the direction.
“Ah!” said he, “and so my Achilles is not consoling himself exclusively with the Haemonian lyre, but has taken to that far more dangerous instrument the pen. The pen, my child, is the curse of youth. When we are young we use it for our undoing, and for the facture of regrets for after years—even if it be no more than the reading of our wives' letters that I'm told are a bitter revelation to the married man. And so—and so, Monsieur Croque-mort keeps up a correspondence with the lady. H'm!” He looked so curiously and inquiringly at me that I felt compelled to make an explanation.
“It is quite true, Father Hamilton,” said I. “After all, you gave me so little clerkly work that I was bound to employ my pen somehow, and how better than with my countrywoman?”
“'Tis none of my affair—perhaps,” he said, laying down the letter. “And yet I have a curiosity. Have we here the essential Mercury?” and he indicated Bernard who seemed to me to have a greater confusion than the discovery gave a cause for.
“Bernard has been good enough,” said I. “You discover two Scots, Father Hamilton, in a somewhat sentimental situation. The lady did me the honour to be interested in my little travels, and I did my best to keep her informed.”
He turned away as he had been shot, hiding his face, but I saw from his neck that he had grown as white as parchment.
“What in the world have I done?” thinks I, and concluded that he was angry for my taking the liberty to use the dismissed servant as a go-between. In a moment or two he turned about again, eying me closely, and at last he put his hand upon my shoulder as a schoolmaster might do upon a boy's.
“My good Paul,” said he, “how old are you?”
“Twenty-one come Martinmas,” I said.
“Expiscate! elucidate! 'Come Martinmas,'” says he, “and what does that mean? But no matter—twenty-one says my barbarian; sure 'tis a right young age, a very baby of an age, an age in frocks if one that has it has lived the best of his life with sheep and bullocks.”
“Sir,” I said, indignant, “I was in very honest company among the same sheep and bullocks.”
“Hush!” said he, and put up his hand, eying me with compassion and kindness. “If thou only knew it, lad, thou art due me a civil attention at the very least. Sure there is no harm in my mentioning that thou art mighty ingenuous for thy years. 'Tis the quality I would be the last to find fault with, but sometimes it has its inconveniences. And Bernard”—he turned to the Swiss who was still greatly disturbed—“Bernard is a somewhat older gentleman. Perhaps he will say—our good Bernard—if he was the person I have to thank for taking the sting out of the wasp, for extracting the bullet from my pistol? Ah! I see he is the veritable person. Adorable Bernard, let that stand to his credit!”
Then Bernard fell trembling like a saugh tree, and protested he did but what he was told.
“And a good thing, too,” said the priest, still very pale but with no displeasure. “And a good thing too, else poor Buhot, that I have seen an infinity of headachy dawns with, had been beyond any interest in cards or prisoners. For that I shall forgive you the rest that I can guess at. Take Monsieur Grog's letter where you have taken the rest, and be gone.”
The Swiss went out much crestfallen from an interview that was beyond my comprehension.
When he was gone Father Hamilton fell into a profound meditation, walking up and down his room muttering to himself.
“Faith, I never had such a problem presented to me before,” said he, stopping his walk; “I know not whether to laugh or swear. I feel that I have been made a fool of, and yet nothing better could have happened. And so my Croque-mort, my good Monsieur Propriety, has been writing the lady? I should not wonder if he thought she loved him.”
“Nothing so bold,” I cried. “You might without impropriety have seen every one of my letters, and seen in them no more than a seaman's log.”
“A seaman's log!” said he, smiling faintly and rubbing his massive chin; “nothing would give the lady more delight, I am sure. A seaman's log! And I might have seen them without impropriety, might I? That I'll swear was what her ladyship took very good care to obviate. Come now, did she not caution thee against telling me of this correspondence?”
I confessed it was so; that the lady naturally feared she might be made the subject of light talk, and I had promised that in that respect she should suffer nothing for her kindly interest in a countryman.
The priest laughed consumedly at this.
“Interest in her countryman!” said he. “Oh, lad, wilt be the death of me for thy unexpected spots of innocence.”
“And as to that,” I said, “you must have had a sort of correspondence with her yourself.”
“I!” said he. “Comment!”
“To be quite frank with you,” said I, “it has been the cause of some vexatious thoughts to me that the letter I carried to the Prince was directed in Miss Walkinshaw's hand of write, and as Buhot informed me, it was the same letter that was to wile his Royal Highness to his fate in the Rue des Reservoirs.” Father Hamilton groaned, as he did at any time the terrible affair was mentioned.
“It is true, Paul, quite true,” said he, “but the letter was a forgery. I'll give the lady the credit to say she never had a hand in it.”
“I am glad to hear that, for it removes some perplexities that have troubled me for a while back.”
“Ah,” said he, “and your perplexities and mine are not over even now, poor Paul. This Bernard is like to be the ruin of me yet. For you, however, I have no fear, but it is another matter with the poor old fool from Dixmunde.”
His voice broke, he displayed thus and otherwise so troubled a mind and so great a reluctance to let me know the cause of it that I thought it well to leave him for a while and let him recover his old manner.
To that end I put on my coat and hat and went out rather earlier than usual for my evening walk.