Jean Marot occupied a cell in a "panier à salade" en route for the
dépôt, not so much the worse for his recent exciting experience as at
first seemed probable he might be.
There were eight other occupants of the prison-van besides himself,
one of whom was a soldier guard. Five narrow cells ranged along either
side of a central aisle. Each had a solitary small, closely shuttered
breathing-hole opening outside. The guard occupied a seat in the aisle
near the rear door, from which he could survey the door of every cell.
By this arrangement prisoners were kept separate from each other, were
not subjected to a gaping crowd, and ten persons could be safely
escorted by a single guard.
From the half-suppressed murmurs and objurgations that followed every
severe jolt of the wagon, Jean rightly judged that most of the
prisoners were more or less injured. And as the driver drove
furiously, having the fight of way and being pressed with business
this particular Sunday afternoon, there were still louder and more
exhaustive remarks from those who narrowly escaped being run over by
the cellular van.
Jean Marot, however, was too much engrossed with his own miserable
reflections to pay any more than mechanical attention to all of this.
Physically resuscitated and momentarily inflating his glad lungs anew,
he still felt that terrible vice-like grip upon his throat,--the
compression of the fingers of steel that seemed to squeeze the last
drop of blood from his heart.
But it was mental suffocation now. For they were the fingers of her
brother,--the flesh and sinew of the woman he loved! And it was this
love that was being cruelly crushed and strangled.
It was more terrible than the late physical struggle. The latter had
invoked the energy, the courage, and the superhuman strength and
endurance to meet it,--had roused the fire of conscious manhood. Now
the sick soul revolted at its own folly. The props of self-respect had
been knocked away, and he lay prone, humiliated, deprived of the
initial courage to rise and hope.
The chief cause of this self-degradation lay in the fact that he had
grievously wronged the only one in the world he had found worth
loving,--the one sweet being for whom he would have willingly
sacrificed life. The fact that this wrong was by and in thought alone
did not lessen the horrible injustice of it.
The more Jean thought of these things the more sick at heart he was,
the more hopeless his love became, the more desperately dark the
future appeared. There seemed to be nothing left but misery and death.
This train of bitterness was interrupted by a violent wrangle between
the occupants of neighboring cells. A prisoner across the way had
shouted "Vive l'armée!" Another responded by the gay chanson,--
"Entre nous, l'armée du salut,
Elle n'a jamais eu d'autre but
Que d'amasser d' la bonne galette."
It came from his next-door neighbor, and was the familiar voice of the
saturnine George Villeroy.
"Shut your mouth, rascal!" yelled the guard, rapping the cell door
with his sword bayonet.
A few minutes later the van was stopped, the rear door opened, and one
by one the prisoners, bloody, torn, and bedraggled, were handed out
and hustled not very gently by two police agents through a heavily
grilled doorway into a room already crowded with victims of law and
order. All of these were yet to be called before the commissaire and
interrogated in turn, and by him either held or discharged. A good
many were both hatless and coatless, and altogether they certainly
bore a riotous and suspicious look.
In the crowd near the desk where they were led to be registered Jean
met his old friend Villeroy.
"Oho!" exclaimed the latter, laughingly.
"Oh, yes; it is I, my friend."
"Pinched this time, hein?"
"So it seems."
"And in what company?"
"Yours, I suppose," retorted Jean.
"Good company!" said Villeroy. "Kill any--any agents?"
"No,--no!" said Jean, who did not relish this subject.
"See Lerouge?"
"N--that is----"
"The misérable!"
"Oh, as for that----"
"Well, he's done for, anyhow."
"Wha-at?"
"His goose is cooked!"
"How is that? Not----"
"Dead."
"Dead!"
"As a mackerel!"
Jean paled perceptibly and almost staggered against his friend.
"Impossible!" he murmured. "It can't be! How----"
"Oh, easy enough," interrupted the other, lightly. "Some ruffian
choked him to death, they say. Liable to occur, is it not? Sorry, of
course, but----"
Fortunately for Jean's self-control, they were rudely separated by two
angry opponents who wanted to fight it out then and there. He would
have betrayed himself in another moment. And, wrought up to the
present tension, it seemed as if he must go mad and shriek his guilt
to all the world.
He sought an obscure corner and sat down on the floor with his back to
the wall, his chin upon his knees.
In his own soul he was condemned already. He only awaited the
guillotine.
When he was aroused the room was almost cleared. A couple of agents
roughly hustled him before the busy commissaire. It was the old
official the student had struck that morning. The red welt across his
face gave it a sinister appearance. He glanced at the arraigned, then
read from the blotter,--
"Jean Marot, student,--um, um, um!--charged with--with--let's
see--with uttering seditious cries calculated to lead to a breach of
the peace. What have you got to say for yourself, young man?"
The prisoner had nothing to say for himself,--at least, nothing better
than that,--so he was speechless.
"Ah! evidently never been here before," said the old commissaire. "Go!
and never come here again. Discharged. Call the next."
"Monsieur le Commissaire," began a police agent who had here risen to
his feet with an air of remonstrance,--"monsieur----"
"Call the next!" said the commissaire, waving the agent down
peremptorily.
And thus Jean Marot, before he had recovered from his surprise, or
could even realize what had happened, was again hustled through the
corridor, this time to be unceremoniously thrust into the street--a
free man.
"Hold, Monsieur Jean!" said the lively voice of Mlle. Fouchette. "What
a precious long time you have been!"
"It might have been longer," he remarked, vaguely accepting her
presence as not unnatural, and suffering himself to be led down the
block.
"Oh, here it is," said she, going straight to a cab in waiting. "Now,
don't stop to ask questions or I'll be wicked. Get in! Dinner is----"
"Dinner is, is it?" he repeated, almost hysterically.
He felt exhausted physically and mentally, indifferent as to what now
befell him, prepared to accept anything. Nothing could be worse. He
felt as if everything was crumbling beneath his feet. There was nobody
to lean against, nobody to sympathize with him, nobody to care one way
or the other, or----
Only this girl at his side.
He looked at her wonderingly, now that he came to think of her. The
thin, insignificant figure, the pale face, the drooping blonde hair
lying demurely on the cheeks, the bright steel-blue eyes, the pussycat
purr----
"How absurd you are, Monsieur Jean, with that awful face! One would
think it was because of the prospect of my dinner!"
"I am thinking of you," he said.
"Oh, thanks, monsieur! And so savagely--I have fear!"
She laughed gleefully, and affected to move away from him, only, at
that instant, the hind wheel of the voiture struck a stray bowlder,
and the shock threw her bodily back against him.
Both laughed now.
"It is provoking," she said.
"It is the fatality," said he.
And he put his arm about her slender form and held her there without
protest.
"I was thinking of you, mon enfant," he continued, "and of what a
dear, good little thing you are. Mademoiselle, you are an angel!"
"Ah! no, monsieur!" she answered, in a voice that trembled a
little,--"do not believe it! I'm a devil!"
It is easy for a man in deep trouble to accept the first sympathetic
woman as something angelic. And now, in his gratitude, it was perhaps
natural that Jean should unhesitatingly supply Mlle. Fouchette with
wings. He had humbled himself in the dust, from which point of view
all virtues look beautiful and all good actions partake of heaven. His
response to her self-depreciation was a human one. He drew her closer
and kissed her lips.
In this he deceived neither himself nor the girl. She knew quite as
well as he where his heart was. It was a kiss of gratitude and of
good-will, and was received as such without affectation. In his
masculine egotism, however, he quite overlooked any possible good or
ill to her in the matter,--his consideration began and ended in the
gratification of her conduct towards him. And he would have been cold
indeed not to feel the friendly glow which answers so eloquently the
touch of womanly gentleness and sympathy.
As for Mlle. Fouchette, it must be admitted that this platonic caress
created in her maidenly bosom a nervous thrill of pleasure not quite
consistent in a young woman known to give the "savate" to young
gentlemen who approached such familiarity, and who plumed herself on
her invulnerability to the masculine wiles that beset her sex. And
what might have been deemed still more foreign to her nature, she
never said a word from that moment until the voiture drew up in front
of her place of residence in the venerable but not venerated Rue St.
Jacques.
"Voilà!" she then exclaimed, though it had not the tone of entire
satisfaction.
"Hold on, little one, I will pay----"
But he discovered that those who had cared for him had also
benevolently relieved him of his valuables. He had not a sou.
"The wretches!" cried the girl.
"They might have left me my keys, at least," he muttered.
"And your watch, monsieur?" she asked, apprehensively.
"Gone, of course!"
"Oh, the miserable cowards!"
He was less moved than she at the loss. It seemed trifling by the side
of his other misfortunes.
But the coachman was interested. He carefully noted the number of the
house again, and when she passed up his fare looked into her face with
a knowing leer.
"If monsieur wishes to go back to the Préfecture," he said to her,
tentatively.
"Oh, no!" said Jean.
The girl, however, understood the significance of this inquiry, and
coldly demanded the man's number.
"If Mademoiselle Fouchette should need you again," she added, putting
the slip in her pocket, "she will know where to find you."
And to the manifest astonishment of the cabman, who could not divine
what a woman of Rue St. Jacques would want with a man without money,
or at least valuables, she slipped her arm through Jean's and entered
the house.
The shaded lamp turned low threw a dim light over a little table
simply but neatly set for two in Mlle. Fouchette's chamber. A cold cut
of beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of
sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives,
etc.,--all fresh from the rôtisserie and charcuterie below,--were
flanked by a mètre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked
quite appetizing and formidable.
Absorbed as he was in himself, Jean could not but note the certainty
implied in all of this preparation. Mlle. Fouchette could not have
known that he would be at liberty, yet she had arranged things exactly
as if she had possessed this foreknowledge. If they had not made a
mistake and let him off so easily----
"You were, then, sure I would come?"
"Very sure," said she, without turning from the small mirror where she
readjusted her hair.
"Now, Monsieur Jean," she began, in a nervous, business-like way,
suiting the action to the word, "I'm the doctor. You are to do just as
I tell you. First you take this good American whiskey, then you lie
down--here--there--that way,--voilà!"
"But----"
"No!" putting her delicate hand over his mouth gently,--"you are not
to talk, you know."
He stretched himself at full length on the low couch without another
protest. She brought a towel and basin and, removing the collar which
had been twisted into a dirty rope, bathed his face and neck. She saw
the red imprint of fingers on his throat with mingled hatred and
commiseration; but she said nothing, only pressing the wet towel to
the spot tenderly. In the place of the collar she put a piece of soft
flannel saturated with cologne, and passed a silk scarf around the
neck to hold it there. With comb and brush she softly smoothed out his
hair, half toying with the locks about the temples, and perching her
little head this way and that, as if to more accurately study the
effect.
"Ah! now that looks better. Monsieur is beginning to look civilized."
She carefully pinned the ends of the scarf down over the shirt-front
to hide the blood that was there.
All of this with a hundred exclamations and little comments and
questions that required no answers, and broken sentences of pity, of
raillery, of pleasure, that had no beginning and no ending as
grammatical constructions.
Purr, purr, purr.
Finally she rubbed his shoes till they shone, and flecked the dust
from his clothes,--to complete which operation it was necessary for
him to get up.
A slight noise on the landing caused him to start nervously.
He was still thinking of one thing,--of a man lying cold and stiff at
the Hôtel Dieu.
Both carefully avoided the subject uppermost in either mind,--Henri
Lerouge and his sister.
First, she was astonished that he had not questioned her; next, she
sought to escape questioning altogether. She was secretive by nature.
And now, like a contrite and wretched woman conscious of her share of
responsibility for a great wrong, she could only humble herself before
him and await his will.
"Now, Monsieur Jean," she concluded, "we will eat. Come! You must be
hungry,--come! À table, monsieur!"
"Au contraire, I feel as if I could never eat again," he said,
desperately.
"What nonsense! Come, monsieur,--sit down here and eat something! You
will feel better at once."
"Oh, you do not know! you cannot know!" he groaned, reseating himself
and taking his head between his hands. "It is too horrible! horrible!"
"Why, monsieur! What is it? Are you, then, hurt within? Say! Do you
suffer? How foolish I have been! I should have brought a doctor!"
She was kneeling in front of him in her genuine alarm. "Where is it,
Monsieur Jean? Where is the pain? Tell me! Tell me, then, monsieur!"
"No! no! it is not that, my child! It is here! here! here!" He struck
his breast at every word, and bowed his head with abject grief.
She was silent, thinking only of his hapless love. There was no word
for that!
"Ah! if it were only that! If it had been me instead of him!"
"Monsieur! My poor Monsieur Jean! You must not give way thus!"
"I am not fit to sit at the table with you, mademoiselle! My hands are
red with blood! Do not touch them! Understand? Red!"
"But you are crazy, monsieur!"
"No! I am--I am simply a _murderer_! Do you hear? A MURDERER!"
He whispered it with awful solemnity. Mlle. Fouchette, now thoroughly
frightened, recoiled from him. He was mad!
"That's right!" he cried. "That's right, mademoiselle! I'm not fit to
touch you! No wonder you shrink from me! For I have blood on my
hands,--his blood,--understand?--my friend's! Lerouge dead! dead! And
by me!"
"What's that?" she demanded. "Lerouge dead? Nonsense! It is not so!
Who told you that? I say it is not true!"
He seized her almost fiercely,--
"Not dead? Her brother not dead? Say it again! Give me some hope!" he
pleaded, pitifully.
"I tell you again it is not so! I saw one who knows but a few minutes
before I met you!"
He sank on his knees at her feet and kissed her hands, now trembling
with excitement.
"Again!" he exclaimed.
"It is as true as God!" said she. "And he is doing well!"
He took her in his arms passionately, pouring out the thankfulness of
his soul in kisses and loving caresses, sobbing like a child. They
mingled their tears,--the blessed tears of joy and sympathy!
For a long time they rested thus, immobile, with thoughts too deep for
expression,--in a sacred silence broken only by sighs. Then when the
calm was complete she softly disengaged herself in saying, "And _she_
is there, Jean," as if completing the sentence long before begun. But
it required an effort.
He answered by a pressure of the hand. That was all.
"And now, then, monsieur," she observed, abruptly and with playful
satire, "I'm going to eat. I'm sorry you are not hungry, but----"
"Eat? Little one," he joyously cried, "I can eat a house and lot!" He
took her bodily between his hands, he who a moment before had been so
weak, and tossed her as one plays with a child.
"For shame! There is no house here for you, but I've got a lot to eat!
There! No more of that, Monsieur Jean, or you shall have no supper!"
As he threatened her again with his exuberant spirits, she wisely but
laughingly put the table between them. But she looked a world of
happiness from her eyes.
From the extreme of mental depression Jean Marot was thus suddenly
transported to the extreme of happiness and hopefulness. Simply
because the life of the man whom he would have done to death, in his
insane jealousy of a successful rival, had become precious, priceless,
as that of the brother of his beloved. The conditions were desperate
enough as they were. To have slain her brother would not only have
rendered them hopeless, it would have condemned the survivor to a
lifetime of remorse, unless, indeed, that life had not been happily
shortened by the guillotine.
So they laughed, talked, ate, drank, and made merry, these two, taking
no thought of the morrow until both the supper and the time necessary
to dispose of it were consumed.
Jean lighted a cigarette that she gave him, and threw himself on the
couch. Meanwhile, the girl, with the assistance of Poupon, got some
hot water and washed the dishes, putting them one by one carefully
back on the shelves in the wall. Finally the empty bottle found its
place under the couch.
Then she discovered that Jean was sleeping soundly. He had succumbed
in spite of rattling dishes and her talk, and slept the heavy sleep of
physical exhaustion. The cigarette had fallen from his fingers half
finished. His throat was still muffled in her silken scarf, but she
tried to see if the marks were still there. For fully a minute she
remained standing over him, buried in thought. The old clock in the
Henri IV. tower behind the Panthéon chimed eleven. She sighed.
"Very well!" she murmured. "Monsieur is right. He has no money, no
keys, and he is weary. He shall rest where he is. C'est égal!"
With this philosophical reflection she immediately began preparation
for retiring on her own account, completing this as if the monsieur
snoring on the couch had no material existence.
"Voilà!" said she, when she had drawn her curtains.
And in two minutes more she was as oblivious to the world as was Jean
Marot.