THE RED CART.
At so early an hour was my trial (in the personal and suffering
sense) brought to a conclusion, that mid-day was not yet struck when
my guards delivered me over to the authorities at St Pélagie--a
one-time _communauté de filles_ in the faubourg of St Victor, and
since appropriated ostensibly to the incarceration of debtors. My
arrival, by grace of Fortune, was most happily timed; and, indeed, the
persistency with which throughout the long period of my difficulties
this capricious _coureuse_ amongst goddesses converted for my benefit
accident into opportuneness offered some excuse to me for remaining in
conceit with myself.
Now I was taken in charge by a single turnkey--the others being
occupied with their dinner--and conducted by him to the jailer’s room
to undergo that _rapiotage_, or stripping for concealed properties,
the general abuse of which--especially where women were in
question--was a scandal even in those days of shameless brutality.
As he pushed me into the little ill-lighted chamber and closed the
door hurriedly upon us, I noticed that the man’s hands shook, and that
his face was clammy with a leaden perspiration. He made no offer to
overhaul me; but, instead, he clutched me by the elbow and looked in a
half-scared, half-triumphant manner into my face.
“Pay attention,” he said, in a quick, forced whisper. “Thy arrival
accommodates itself to circumstance--most admirably, citizen, it
accommodates itself. I, that was to expect, am here alone to receive
thee. It is far better so than that I should be driven to visit thee
in thy cell.”
“I foresee a call upon my gratitude,” I said, steadily regarding him.
“That is at your service, citizen jailer, when you shall condescend to
enlighten me as to its direction.”
“I want none of it,” he replied. “It is my own to another that
procures thee this favour.”
“What other, and what favour?”
“As to the first--_en bon Français_, I will not tell thee. For the
second--behold it!”
With the words, he whipt out from under his blouse a thin, strong
file, a little vessel of oil, and a dab of some blue-coloured mastic
in paper--and these he pressed upon me.
“Hide them about thy person--hide them!” he muttered, in a fearful
voice; “and take all that I shall say in a breath!”
He glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. He was a blotched and
flaccid creature, with the staring dry hair of the tippler, but with
very human eyes. His fingers closed upon my arm as if for support to
their trembling.
“Cell thirteen--on the first floor,” he said; “that is whither I shall
convey thee. Ask no questions. Hast thou them all tight?--_Allez-vous
en, mon ami!_ A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.”
“But----”
“Ah! thou must needs be talking! Cement with the putty, then, and rub
the filings over the marks.”
“I was not born yesterday. It is not _that_ I would know.”
“S-st! At nine by the convent clock, be ready to drop silently into
the cart that shall pass beneath thy window. Never mind what thou
hit’st on. A falling man does not despise a dunghill.”
I hesitated, seeking to read this patriot’s soul. Was this all a snare
to clinch my damnation? Pooh! if I had ever fancied Tinville hunted
for the shadow of a pretext, this morning’s experience should have
disabused me of the fallacy.
“Who commissions thee?” I said.
“One to whom I owe a measure of gratitude.”
“But not I?”
“From this time--yes.”
He pushed at me to go before him.
“At least,” I said, “acquaint me if it is the same that sent the
letter.”
“I know nothing of any letter. _San’ Dieu!_ I begin to regret my
complaisance. This fellow will strangle us all with his long tongue.”
“But, for thyself, my friend?”
“Oh, _nom de Dieu_! I have no fear, if thou wilt be discreet--and
grateful.”
“And this tool--and the _rapiotage_!”
“Listen then! The thief that follows a thief finds little by the road.
We are under no obligation to search a prisoner remanded from another
prison.”
Impulsively I wrung the hand of the dear sententious; I looked into
his eyes.
“The Goddess of Reason disown thee!” I said. “Thou shalt never be
acolyte to a harlot!--And I--if all goes well, I will remember. And
what is thy name, good fellow?”
“_M. un tel_,” said he, and added, “Bah! shall not thy ignorance of it
be in a measure our safeguard?”
“True,” said I. “And take me away, then. I cannot get to work too
soon.”
He opened the door, peeped out, and beckoned me.
“All is well,” he whispered. “The coast is clear.”[1]
As he drove me with harsh gestures across a yard, a turnkey, standing
at a door and twirling a toothpick in his mouth, hailed him
strenuously.
“What perquisites, then, comrade?”
“Bah!” cried my fellow; “I have not looked. He is a bone of Cabochon’s
picking.”
* * * * * * *
With what a conflict of emotions I set to work--tentatively at first;
then, seeing how noiselessly the file ran in its oiled groove, with a
concentration of vigour--upon the bars of my window, it is not
difficult to imagine. So hard I wrought that for hours I scarce gave
heed to my growling hunger or attention to my surroundings. As to the
latter, indeed, I was by this time sensibly inured to the conditions
of confinement, and found little in my cell when I came to examine it
to distinguish it from others I had inhabited. A bench, a pitcher, a
flattened mess of straw; here and there about the stone flags marks as
if some frantic beast had sought to undermine himself a passage to
freedom; here and there, engraved with a nail or the tooth of a comb
on the plaster coating of the walls, ciphers, initials, passionate
appeals to heaven or blasphemous indecencies unnameable; in one spot
a forlorn cry: “_Liberté, quand cesseras-tu d’être un vain mot!_” in
another, in feminine characters, the poor little utterance: “_On nous
dit que nous sortirons demain_,” made so pathetic by the later
supplement underscored, “_Vain espoir!_”--with all these, or their
like, was I grievously familiar--resigned, not hardened to them, I am
sure.
The window at which I stood looked across a little-frequented
passage--the Puit d’Ermite--upon a blank wall; and was terminated with
a pretty broad sill of stone that screened my operations from casual
wayfarers in the street below. Once, peering forth as I could, with my
face pressed to the bars, I found myself to be situated so indifferent
high as that, free of the grate, I might drop to the pavement without
incurring risk of severer damage than a fractured leg or ankle,
perhaps. Obviously, every point had been considered in this trifling
matter of my escape. By whom? By him that had put me that pawn up my
sleeve in the Palais de Justice? Well, the pawn had checked the king,
it appeared; and now it must content me to continue the game with a
handkerchief over my eyes, like the great M. Philidor.
By two o’clock, having cut through a couple of the bars close by their
junction with the sill, so that a vigorous pull at both would open a
passage for me large enough to squeeze through, I was absorbed in the
careful process of cementing and concealing the evidences of my work
when I heard a sound behind me and twisted myself about with a choke
of terror. But it was my friendly jailer, come with a trencher of
broken scraps for the famished animal in the cage.
“_Corps de Christ!_” he muttered, his face white and scared--“but here
is an admirable precaution! What if I had been Fouquier-Tinville
himself, then?”
“You made no noise.”
“_Par exemple!_ I can shoot a hundredweight of bolts, it seems, so as
not to wake a weasel. I made no noise to deaf ears. But, for thyself,
monsieur--He that would steal corn must be careful his sack has no
holes in it. And now I’ll wager thou’st dusted thy glittering filings
out into the sunbeams, and a sentry, with pistols and a long musket,
pacing the cobbles down there!”
“_Soyez tranquille!_ I have all here in my pocket.”
He put down the platter, shrugged his shoulders, and came on tiptoe to
the window.
“Well, it is excellent,” he whispered grudgingly--“if only thy caution
matched thy skill.”
Then he came close up to me.
“I have news,” he muttered. “All is in preparation. It needs only that
thou play’st thy part silently and surely. A moment’s decision and the
game is thine.”
“But, the sentry, say’st thou?”
“He will be withdrawn. What, is it not the eve of the _Décadi_?[2]
To-night, the wine-shops; to-morrow, full suburbs and an empty Paris,
but for thee the Public Accuser with his questions.”
“And why should he not visit me to-day?”
“Rest assured. He hath a double baking to occupy him.”
A noise sounded in the corridor. The man put his finger to his lips,
pointed significantly at the remainder litter about the sill, stole to
the door, jangled his keys viciously and bellowed at me: “Thou shalt
have that or nothing! _Saint Sacrement_, but the dainty bellies of
these upstarts!”--and off he went, slamming the door after him, and
grumbling till he was out of hearing.
“Excellent nameless one!” I cried to myself; and so, having most
scrupulously removed every trace of my work, I fell, while attacking
with appetite the meal left for me, into a sort of luminous meditation
upon the alluring prospect half opened out to my vision.
“And whence, in the name of God,” I marvelled, “issues this unknown
influence that thus exerts itself on my behalf; and by what process of
gratitude can my jailer, in these days of a general repudiation of
obligations, have attached himself to a cause that, on the face of it,
seems a purely quixotic one?”
Then, “Oh, merciful Heaven!” I thought, “can it be possible that set
in the far haze of a narrow vista of hope, an image--to whose wistful
absorption into the Paradise of dreams I have sought to discipline
myself--yet yearns to and beckons me from the standpoint of its own
material sweetness? I see the smile on its mouth, the lift of its
arms; I hear the little cry of welcome wafted to me. My God, the cry!”
All in an instant some shock of association seemed to stun my brain.
The cry--the single cry that had issued upon my condemnation in the
hall of Justice! Had it not been the very echo of that I had once
heard uttered by a poor swineherd fallen into the hands of savages?
I got to my feet in agitation. Now, suddenly it was borne to me that
from the moment of issue of that little incisive wail a formless
wonder had been germinating in my soul. Carinne present at my
trial!--no, no, it was impossible--unless----
“Citizen, the patriots in this corridor send thee greeting.”
I started as if a bullet had flown past my ear. The voice seemed to
come from the next cell. I swept the cobwebs from my forehead.
“A thousand thanks!” I cried.
“They have dreamt that the ass cursed the thorough-bred for the
niceness of his palate,” went on the voice, “and most heartily they
commiserate thee.”
There followed a faint receding sound like laughter and the clapping
of hands. I had no idea what to say; but the voice relieved me of the
embarrassment.
“May I ask the citizen’s name?”
“I am the Comte de la Muette.”
“_Allons donc!_”--and the information, it seemed, was passed from cell
to cell.
“Monsieur,” then came the voice, “we of the Community of the Eremites
of St Pélagie offer thee our most sympathetic welcome, and invite
thee to enrol thyself a member of our Society. Permit me, the
President, by name Marino, to have the honour of proposing thee for
election.”
“By all means. And what excludes, Monsieur le Président?”
“_D’une haleine_ (I mention it to monsieur as a matter of form), to
have been a false witness or a forger of assignats.”
“Then am I eligible.”
“Surely, monsieur. How could one conceive it otherwise! And it remains
only to ask--again as a matter of form--thy profession, thy abode, and
the cause of thy arrest.”
“Very well. My profession is one of attachment to a beautiful lady; I
live, I dare to believe, in her heart; and, for my arrest, it was
because, in these days of equality, I sought to remain master of
myself.”
My answer was passed down the line. It elicited, I have the
gratification to confess, a full measure of applause.
“I have the honour to inform M. le Comte,” said the President, “that
he is duly elected to the privileges of the Society. I send him a
fraternal embrace.”
My inclination jumped with the humour of the thing. It was thus that
these unfortunates, condemned to solitary confinement, had conceived a
method of relieving the deadly tedium of their lot. Thus they passed
to one another straws of information gleaned from turnkeys or from
prisoners newly arrived. And in order to the confusion of any guard
that might overhear them, they studied, in their inter-communications,
to speak figuratively, to convey a fact through a fable, or, at the
least, to refer their statements to dreams that they had dreamt. At
the same time they formed a Society rigidly exclusive. Admitted
rascals, imprisoned in the corridor, they would by no means condescend
to notice. I had an example of this once during the afternoon, when
the whole place echoed with phantom merriment over a jest uttered by a
member.
“M. le Comte!” cried a voice from the opposite row: “I could tell thee
a better tale than that.”
Before the speaker could follow up his words, the President hammered
at my wall.
“I beseech thee do not answer the fellow,” he said. “It is a rogue
that was suborned in the most pitiful case of the St Amaranthe.”
“Monsieur, monsieur!” exclaimed the accused; “it is a slander and a
lie. And how wouldst thou pick thy words with thy shoulder bubbling
and hissing under the branding-iron?”
“As I would pick nettles,” I said.
“I beseech thee!” cried again my neighbour the President, in a warning
voice, “this man can boast no claim to thy attention.”
The poor rascal cried out: “It is inhuman! I perish for a word of
sympathy!”
I would have given it him; but his protests were laughed into silence.
He yelled in furious retort. His rage was over-crowed, and drifted
into sullenness.
“I dreamt I belaboured a drum,” said the President, “and it burst
under my hands.”
* * * * * * *
Truly I did not regret the distraction this whimsical Society afforded
me. Left to myself, the fever of my mind would have corroded my very
reason, I think. To have been condemned to face those hours of tension
indescribable, with no company but that of my own thoughts, would have
proved such an ordeal as, I felt, would have gone far to render me
nerveless at the critical moment. So, responding to the dig of
circumstance in my ribs, I abandoned myself to frolic, and almost, in
the end, lapsed into the other extreme of hysteria.
But, about five o’clock, closing in from the far end of the corridor,
a swift ominous silence succeeded the jangle; and I was immediately
aware of heavy footsteps treading the cemented floor of the passage,
and, following upon these, the harsh snap of locks and the rumbling of
a deep voice--
“Follow me, De la Chatière.”
The words were the signal for a shrilling chorus of sounds--whoops,
cat-calls, verberant renderings of a whole farmyard of demoniac
animals.
“_Miau, miau_, Émile! Thou art caught in thine own springe!”
“They will ask thee one of thy nine lives, Émile!”
“Ah--bah! if he pleads as he reasons, upside-down, they will only cut
off his feet.”
“Plead thy poor sick virtue, Émile!”
“No, no! that were one _coup de tête_ that shall procure him
another.”
“What need to lie when the truth will serve! Plead thy lost virtue,
Émile, and the jury will love thee.”
“_Taisez-vous, donc!_” roared a jailer. He was answered by a shriek of
laughter. In the midst of the noise I heard the door of my
neighbouring cell flung open and Marino summoned forth. As the party
retreated: “M. le Président, M. le Président!” shouted a voice--“Art
thou going without a word? But do not, I beseech thee, in the pride of
thy promotion neglect to nominate thy successor!”
“Lamarelle, then,” answered the poor fellow, in a voice that he tried
vainly to control.
He was led away. The babble boiled over and simmered down. In a very
few moments a tense quiet had succeeded the uproar. This--due partly
to the reaction from excitement, partly to the fact that jailers were
loitering at hand--wrought in me presently a mood of overbearing
depression. I durst give no rein to my hopes or to my apprehensions,
lest, getting the bit between their teeth, they should fairly run away
with my reason. The prospect of another four hours of this mindless
inaction--hours of which every second seemed to be marked off by the
tick of a nerve--was a deplorable one, indeed.
I tramped ceaselessly to and fro in my cage, humming to myself and
assuming the habit of a philosophy that fitted me about as well as
Danton’s breeches would have done. I grimaced to my own reflections
like a coquette to her mirror. I suffered from my affectation of
self-containment as severely as though I were a tight-laced _femme à
la mode_ weeping to hear a tale of pity. The convent clock, moving
somewhere with a thunderous click as if it were the very _doyen_ of
death-watches, chimed the dusk upon me in reluctant quarters. Ghostly
emanations seemed to rise from the stones of my cell, sorrowful shapes
of the lost and the hopeless to lean sobbing in its corners. Sometimes
I could have fancied I heard a thin scratching on the walls about me,
as if the returned spectres of despair were blindly tracing with a
finger the characters they had themselves engraved thereon; sometimes,
as I wheeled to view of the dull square of the window, a formless
shadow, set against it, would appear to drop hurriedly and fold upon
itself like a bat. By the time, at last, that, despite my resolves, I
was worked up to a state of agitation quite pitiful, some little
relief of distraction was afforded me by the entrance into my cell of
a stranger turnkey, with some coarse food on a plate in his one hand,
and, in the other, a great can of water, from which he replenished my
pitcher. During the half minute he was with me a shag beast of a dog
kept guard at the door.
“Fall to, then,” growled the man; “if thou hast the stomach for
anything less dainty than fat pullets and butter.”
In effect, I had none for anything; yet I thought it the sensible
policy to take up the plate, when the fellow was withdrawn, and munch
away the drawling minutes lest I should spend them in eating out my
heart.
Other than this rascal no soul came near me. I had had, it seemed, my
full warning--my complete instructions. Yet, lacking reassurance
during this long trial of suspense, I came to feel as if all affecting
my escape must be a chimera--a fancy bred of the delirium that
precedes death.
Well, as my friendly _huissier_ might have said, Time flies, however
strong the head-wind; and at length the quarters clanged themselves
into that one of them that was the prelude to my most momentous
adventure. And immediately thereon (God absolve me for the
inconsistency!) a frantic revulsion of feeling set in, so that I would
have given all but my chance of escape to postpone the act of it
indefinite hours. Now I heard the throb of the seconds with a terror
that was like an acute accent to my agony of suspense. It grew--it
waxed monstrous and intolerable. I must lose myself in some physical
exertion if I would preserve my reason.
Suddenly a nightmare thought faced me. What if, when the time came,
the cut bars should remain stubborn to my efforts to bend them! What
if I had neglected to completely sever either or both, and that, while
I madly wrought to remedy my error, the moment should pass and with it
the means to my deliverance!
Sweating, panting, in a new reaction to the frenzy for liberty, I
sprang to the window, gripped the bars, and, with all my force,
dragged them towards me. They parted at the cuts and yielded readily.
A sideway push to each, and there would freedom gape at me.
In the very instant of settling my shoulder to the charge, I was aware
of a sound at my cell door--the cautious groping of wards in a lock.
With a suppressed gasp I came round, with my back to the tell-tale
grating, and stood like a discovered murderer.
A lance of dull light split the blackness perpendicularly.
“Open again when I tap,” said a little voice--that cracked like
thunder in my brain, nevertheless,--and the light closed upon itself.
God of all irony!--the little voice--the little dulcet undertone that
had cried _patte-pelu_ upon me in the hall of Justice! So the turnkey
had miscalculated or had been misinformed, and M. l’Accusateur Public
would not postpone the verbal satisfaction of his cupidity to the
_Décadi_. _Le limier rencontrait_; I was bayed into a corner, and my
wit must measure itself against a double row of teeth.
For an instant a mad resentment against Fate for the infernal
wantonness of its cruelty blazed up in my breast, so that I could
scarce restrain myself from bounding upon my enemy with yells of fury.
Then reason--set, contained and determined--was restored to me, and I
stood taut as a bowstring and as vicious.
A moment or two passed in silence. I could make out a dusky undefined
heap by the door. “In the dark all cats are grey.”
At length: “Who is there?” I said quietly.
The figure advanced a pace or two.
“Speak small, my friend,” it said, “as if thou wert the very voice of
conscience.”
This time there was no doubt. I ground my teeth as I answered: “Of
_thy_ conscience, monsieur? Then should I thunder in thy ears like a
bursting shell.”
“What is this!” said he, taking a backward step.
On my honour I could not have told him. I felt only to myself that if
this man baulked me of my liberty I should kill him with my hands. But
doubtless indignation was my bad counsellor.
“How!” he muttered, with a menacing devil in his voice. “Does the fool
know me?”
I broke into wicked laughter.
“Hear the unconscious humorist!” I cried--and the cry seemed to reel
in my throat; for on the instant, dull and fateful, clanged the first
note of the hour.
Now God knows what had urged me to this insanity of defiance, when it
was obvious that my best hope lay in throwing a sop of lies to my
Cerberus. God knows, I say; and to Him I leave the explanation. Yet,
having fallen upon this course, I can assert that not once during the
day had I felt in such good savour with myself.
He came forward again with a raging malediction.
“Thy pledge!” he hissed; “the paper--the treasure! God’s name! dost
thou know who it is thou triflest with?”
I heard the rumble of wheels over the stones down below. My very soul
seemed to rock as if it were launched on waves of air. The wheels
stopped.
“Listen,” I said, in a last desperation. “It was a ruse, a lie to gain
time. I know of no treasure, nor, if I did, would I acquaint thee of
its hiding-place.”
A terrible silence succeeded. I stood with clinched hands. Had I heard
the cart move away again I should have thrown myself upon this demon
and sought to strangle him. Then, “Oh, my God! oh, my God!” he said
twice, in a dreadful strained voice, and that was all.
Suddenly he made a swift movement towards me. I stood rigid, still
with my back to the damning grate; but, come within a foot of me, he
as suddenly wheeled and went to the door.
“Open, Gamache,” he whispered, like a man winded, and tapped on the
oak: “open--I have something to say to thee.”
In another moment I was alone. I turned, and, in a frenzy of haste,
drove the bars right and left with all my force. Like a veritable ape
of destiny I leapt to the sill and looked down. A white face stared up
at me. The owner of it was already in the act of gathering his reins
together. I heard a soft tremulous _ouf!_ issue from his lips, and on
the breath of it I dropped and alighted with a thud upon something
that squelched beneath my weight. As I got to my knees, he on the
driving-board was already whipping his horses to a canter.
“Quick, quick!” he said. “Come up and sit here beside me.”
I managed to do so, though the cargo we carried gave perilous
foothold.
Then at once I turned and regarded my preserver.
“Saints in heaven!” I whispered, “Crépin!”
* * * * * * *
He was a very _sans-culotte_, and his face and eyebrows were darkened.
But I knew him.
“Well,” he said; “I am no rogue of a Talma to act a part. But what, in
God’s name, delayed thee?”
“Fouquier-Tinville.”
His jaw dropped at me.
“_Si fait vraiment_,” I said, and gave him the facts.
He shivered as I spoke. The instant I was done, “Get under the
canvas!” said he, in a terrible voice. “There will be hue-and-cry, and
if I am followed, we are both lost. Get under the canvas, and endure
what thou canst not cure!”
* * * * * * *
My God! the frightfulness of that journey! of the company I lay with!
We drove, as I gathered, by the less-frequented streets, and reached
the barrier of St Jacques by way of the Rue de Biron. Here, for the
first time, we were stopped.
“_Halte là!_” bawled a tipsy voice. “What goods to declare, friend?”
“Content thyself,” I heard Crépin answer. “They bear the Government
mark.”
“How, then, carrier?”
“Peep under the cart-tail, and thou shalt see.”
The gendarme lifted a corner of the canvas with his sword-point. A
wedge of light entered, and amazed my panic-stricken eyes.
“_Il est bon là!_” chuckled the fellow, and withdrew his sword. He
had noticed nothing of me; but, as we whipped to a start, he made a
playful cut at the canvas with his weapon. The blade touched my thigh,
inflicting a slight flesh-wound, and I could not forbear a spasmodic
jerk of pain. At this he cried out, “_Holà hé!_ here is a dead frog
that kicks!” and came scuttling after us. Now I gave myself up for
lost; but at the moment a frolicsome comrade hooked the runner’s ankle
with a stick, and brought the man heavily to the ground. There
followed a shout; a curse of fury, and--Fortune, it appeared, had
again intervened on my behalf.
Silence succeeded, for all but the long monotonous jolting and
pitching over savage ground. At length Crépin pulled up his horses,
and, leaning back from his seat, tossed open a flap of the canvas.
“Come, then,” he said in a queer voice. “We have won clear by the
grace of Heaven.”
I wallowed, faint and nauseated, from my horrible refuge. Sick, and in
pain of mind and body, I crept to a seat beside my companion. We were
on a dark and desolate waste. A little moon lay low in the sky. Behind
us the _enceinte_ of the city twinkled with goblin lights.
“And these?” I said, weakly, signifying our dreadful load. “Whither
dost thou carry them, Crépin?”
“Whither I carry thee, Monsieur le Comte--to the quarries under the
Plain of Mont-Rouge.”
“To unconsecrated ground?”
“What would you? The yards are glutted. The Madeleine bulges like a
pie-crust. At last by force of necessity we consecrate this, the
natural cemetery of the city, dug by itself, to the city’s patron
saint, La Guillotine.”
* * * * * * *
“Tell me, my preserver and, as God shall quit thee, also my
friend--you received my letter?”
“Else, why art thou here?”
“But, thou hast done me an incalculable wrong!”
“And an incalculable benefit. Oh, monsieur, do I not atone?”
“To me, yes.”
“Let that pass, then. But, even there, I would not have thee underrate
my service. Have I not, to save thee, annihilated time; called in a
debt of gratitude that I kept in reversion for my own needs; suborned
the very hangman’s carter that I might help thee in thy extremity?”
“And all this is due to thee?”
“Assuredly--and for what reason? Because, in total ignorance of thy
claim to it, I took a fancy to a sweet face. Now I think you will
acknowledge, M. le Comte, that the Revolution, for all its excesses,
is capable of producing a gentleman of honour who knows how to make
reparation.”
“Truly, this is no small thing that you have done.”
“Truly I think thou might’st apply superlatives to it, without
extravagance. To outwit and baulk the Public Accuser--the cat-fish of
the Committee of Safety--_Dame!_ is there a hole in all Paris too
small to admit his tentacles? But I tell thee, monsieur, I am already
in the prison of my own holy namesake.”
“I would kiss thy hands, but----”
“What now?”
“My letter referred to other than myself.”
He turned and, I thought, looked at me oddly.
“In these days, what safer refuge for a woman than prison,” he said,
“provided she hath a friend at Court? Understand, monsieur, I have
found Mademoiselle de Lâge respectable lodgings, that is all.”
“Where you hold her as Lovelace held the estimable Clarisse. Crépin,
I cannot accept my life on these terms.”
The words jerked on my lips as the waggon was brought to a stand with
a suddenness that made the harness rattle. A tall figure, that seemed
to have sprung out of the earth, stood at the horses’ heads.
“Gusman,” said my companion quietly; “this is Citizen Thibaut, whom
you are to conduct to the secret lodging. Hurry, then, Thibaut.”
I got with some difficulty to the ground.
“And you?” said I.
“I go yet a mile to deliver my goods. We will discuss this matter
further, _bien entendu_, on my return.”
He flogged his cattle to an immediate canter, leaving me in all
bewilderment alone with the stranger. On every side about us, it
seemed, stretched a melancholy waste--a natural graveyard sown with
uncouth slabs of stone. The wind swayed the grasses, as if they were
foam on black water; the tide of night murmured in innumerable gulfs
of darkness.
“Come, then!” muttered the figure, and seized my hand.
We walked twenty cautious paces. I felt the clutch of brambles at my
clothes. Suddenly he put his arm about me, and, as we moved, forcibly
bent down my head and shoulders. At once I was conscious of a confined
atmosphere--damp, earthy, indescribable. It thickened--grew closer and
infinitely closer as we advanced.
Now I could walk upright; but my left shoulder rasped ever against
solid rock. The blackness of utter negation was terrible; the cabined
air an oppression that one almost felt it possible to lift from one’s
head like an iron morion. For miles, I could have fancied, we thridded
this infernal tunnel before the least little blur of light spread
itself like salve on my aching vision.
Then suddenly, like a midnight glowworm, the blur revealed itself, a
fair luminous anther of fire in a nest of rays--and was a taper
burning on the wall of a narrow chamber or excavation set in the heart
of the bed-stone.
“_Voilà ton ressui!_” exclaimed my sardonic guide; and, without
another word, he turned and left me.
I stood a moment confounded; then, with a shrug of my shoulders,
walked into the little cellar and paused again in astonishment. From a
stone ledge, on which it had been lying, it seemed, prostrate, a
figure lifted itself and, standing with its back to me, swept the long
hair from its eyes.
I stared, I choked, I held out my arms as if in supplication.
“_Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!_” I cried--“if it is not Carinne, let me die!”