THE QUARRIES OF MONT-ROUGE.
She turned, the dear figure. I heard her breath catch as she leaned
forward and gazed at me. Her hair was all tumbled abroad; her sweet
scared eyes looked out of a thicket of it like little frightened birds
from a copse. She took a hurried step or two in my direction, then
cried, “_C’est un coup du ciel!_” and threw up her hands and pressed
them to her face.
I dropped my yearning arms. A needle of ice pierced my heart.
“A judgment of heaven?” I cried, sorrowfully.
The sound of my voice seemed like the very stroke of a thyrsus on her
shoulders. She broke into an agitated walk--pacing to and fro in front
of me--wringing her hands and clasping them thus to her temples. Her
shadow fled before or after her like a coaxing child.
Suddenly, to my amazement, she darted upon me, and seized and shook me
in a little fury of passion.
“_Prends cela, prends cela, prends cela!_” she cried; and then as
suddenly she released me, and ran back to her ledge, and flung herself
face-downwards thereon, sobbing as if her heart would break.
Shocked and astounded beyond measure, I followed and stood over her.
“Mademoiselle de Lâge,” I said, miserably--“of what am I guilty?”
“Of everything--of nothing! Perhaps it is I that am to blame!” she
cried in a muffled voice.
“What have I done?”
She sat up, weeping, and pressed the pain from her forehead.
“Oh, monsieur! it is not a little thing to pass twelve hours in the
most terrible loneliness--in the most terrible anxiety!”
“I do not understand.”
“You do not, indeed--the feelings of others--the wisdom of
discretion.”
“Mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, in all patience.
She sat, with her palms resting upon the ledge. She looked up at me
defiantly, though she yet fought with her sobs.
“It was doubtless a fine thing in your eyes this morning,” she said,
“to throw scorn to that wretch who could have destroyed you with a
word.”
I felt my breath come quickly.
“That wretch!” I whispered--“this morning?”
“It was what I said, monsieur,--the _loup-garou_ of the Salle de la
Liberté. But where one attaches any responsibility to life, one
should learn to distinguish between bravado and courage.”
I think I must have turned very pale, for a sudden concern came into
her face.
“Mademoiselle,” I said, “will persist in giving me the best reason for
holding life cheaply--that I cannot, it seems, find favour with her.”
“Was it, then, monsieur, that you yourself were your only
consideration?”
“Oh! give me at least the indulgence,” I cried, “to retort upon an
insolent that insults me.”
“_Grand Dieu!_” she said, mockingly; “but what a perverted heroism!
And must a man’s duty be always first towards his dignity, and
afterwards, a long way----”
She broke off, panting, and tapping her foot on the ground. I looked
at her, all mazed and dumfoundered.
“And afterwards?” I repeated. She would not continue. A little silence
succeeded.
“Mademoiselle,” I said at length sadly--“let me speak out what is in
my heart, and have done with it. That little cry of pity and of
protest that I heard uttered this morning when sentence was demanded
upon me in the Palais de Justice, and that I must needs now associate
with this new dear knowledge of your freedom--if I have put upon it an
unwarrantable construction, something beyond the mere expression of a
woman’s sympathy with the unfortunate--you will, I am sure, extend
that sympathy to my blindness, the realisation of which must in itself
prove my heavy punishment. If, also, I have dared to translate the
anxiety you have by your own showing suffered, here in this savage
burrow, into a sentiment more profound than that of simple concern for
an old-time comrade, you will spare my presumption, will you not, the
bitterness of a rebuke? It shall not be needed, believe me. My very
love----”
She interrupted me, rising to her feet white and peremptory.
“Not for me, monsieur--not for me! And, for _my_ associations--they
shall never be of that word with deceit!”
“Deceit!”
“But is it not so? Have you not approached my confidence in a false
guise, under a false name? Oh!” (she stamped her foot again) “cannot
you see how my condescension to the Citizen Thibaut is stultified by
this new knowledge of his rank? how to favour now what I had hitherto
held at arm’s-length would be to place myself in the worst regard of
snobbishness!”
“No, mademoiselle--I confess that I cannot;--but then I journeyed
hither in the National hearse.”
“I do not understand.”
“Why, only that there one finds a ragpicker’s head clapt upon a
monseigneur’s neck in the fraternity that is decreed to level all
distinctions. What is the advantage of a name, then, when one is
denied a tombstone?”
“Ah!” she cried, “you seek to disarm me with levity. I recognise your
habit of tolerant contempt for the mental equipment of my sex. It does
not become you, monsieur;--but what does it matter! I know already
your opinion of me, and how compound it is of disdain and disgust. I
am soulless and cruel and capricious--perhaps ill-favoured also; but
there, I think, you pronounce me inoffensive or something less. But I
would have you say, monsieur--what was Lepelletier to me? I should
have sickened, rather, to break bread with my uncle--whom heaven
induce to the shame of repentance! And I was ill that night, so that
even you might have softened in your judgment of me.”
I stood amazed at the vehemence of her speech, at the rapidity of
inconsequence with which she pelted me with any chance missile that
came to her hand. It was evident the poor child was overwrought to a
degree; and I was fixed helpless between my passionate desire to
reassure and comfort her and my sense of her repudiation of my right
to do so. Now, it happened that, where words would have availed
little, a mute appeal--the manner of which it was beyond my power to
control--was to serve the best purposes of reconciliation. For
suddenly, as I dwelt bewildered upon the wet flashing of Carinne’s
eyes, emotion and fatigue, coupled with the sick pain of my wound, so
wrought upon me that the vault went reeling and I with it. I heard her
cry out; felt her clutch me,--and then there was sense for little but
exhaustion in my drugged brain.
* * * * * * *
“I am on the floor, Carinne?”
“On the floor, _mon ami_.”
“I am not so little a weight, you see. You tried to support me to the
bench and failed--for I know.”
“But you were a dead-weight.”
“Not dead yet, _chattemite_. Only I think I am dying.”
“No, no, little Thibaut! _À Dieu ne plaise!_ You will not be so
wicked. And what makes you think so?”
“I am so near heaven.”
“Do you mean me? But I burn.”
“Kiss me, then, and give me of your fire.”
“But, if you were to recover?”
“I would return it.”
“It is infamous. You presume upon my tenderness, that is all for your
cruel wound. Yet I do not think you are much hurt.”
“Not now, with your hand upon my heart. Tell me, Carinne--it was
Jacques Crépin that brought you here?”
“That had me conveyed hither by his deputy, Gusman. It was this
morning, after your trial. He had had me released from prison--_le
pécheur pénitent_. God had moved him to remorse, it seemed, and some
unknown--perhaps one that had overheard us in La Force--to knowledge
of our friendship,--yours and mine. He procured me my passport;
accompanied me beyond the barrier d’Enfer; committed me to the keeping
of this deadman of the quarries. He swore he would play his life
against yours--would win you to me here or perish in the attempt.
Judge then, you, of my waiting torture--my anguish of expectation in
this solitude!”
“Would win me to you! And you desired this thing? _Oh, ma mie, ma
mie!_ how, then, could you welcome me as you did?”
“I do not know.”
“And deny and abuse me and give me such pain?”
“I do not know.”
“For you love me very dearly... Carinne, I am dying!”
“I do not believe you. That trick shall not serve a second time.”
* * * * * * *
“And what are we to do now, Carinne?”
“Thou must be asking thyself that question,” said a
voice--Crépin’s--that clanged suddenly in the vaulted labyrinth. The
man himself stood looking down upon us. Beside him the gaunt figure of
my guide held aloft a flambeau that talked with a resinous sputter.
Its flare reddened the auburn curls of the Sectional President, and
informed his dissolute face with a radiance that was like an inner
consciousness of nobility.
“My task ends here,” he said, quietly. “And shall we cry quits, M. le
Comte?”
I lay on the floor, my head in Carinne’s lap.
“Citizen Crépin,” I said, “thou hast acquitted thyself like a
gentleman and a man of courage. I would not wish, for thy sake, that
the risk had been less; I would not, for ours, know that it hath
involved thee in the toils.”
“We are all in the toils nowadays,” said he; “and happy the lion that
can find a mouse for his friend. To the extent of my power I have
done; yet, I warn thee, thou art not out of the wood. If the weasel
wakes to the manner of his outwitting, not a river of blood shall
divert him from the scent till he has run thee down--thee, and me
also. Oh! I desire thee, do not misapprehend the importance of my
service.”
Carinne looked up. She made an involuntary gesture with her hands.
This dear child, in her sweet surrender, became the archetype of
womanhood.
“Monsieur,” she said, softly, “you have stood aside so honourably, you
have made us so greatly your debtors, that you will not now stultify
your own self-sacrifice by imposing upon us a heritage of remorse? If
you are in such danger, why not remain here with us?”
He did not answer for some moments; but he shook his head very
slightly as he gazed down on us.
“As to life,” he said presently, “my compact is with the senses. There
is a higher ideal to reach to, no doubt; but _Mordi_! I confess, for
myself I cannot feel the epicure and play the ascetic. To continue in
love with virtue, one must take it only, like opium, in occasional
doses. An habitual indulgence in it degrades the picturesqueness of
its own early evoking. Perhaps it should be ethically grateful to me
to remain here to contemplate the fruit of my generosity ripening for
another’s picking. Perhaps the guillotine is awaiting me in Paris.
Well, mademoiselle, of the two evils I prefer the latter. Here, to
feed on my own self-righteousness would be to starve at the end of a
day; there, the glory of doing, of directing, of enjoying, will soon
woo me from memory of a sentiment that was no more part of my real
self than the mistletoe is part of the harsh trunk it beautifies. For
death, I do not fear it, if it will come to me passionately, like a
mistress.”
“Monsieur!”
“Ah, mademoiselle! believe me that I can offer no higher testimony to
your worth than the assurance that I have for six months lost myself
in you!”
I looked at this ex-waiter in marvel. His dishes could never have
shown a finer polish than his manners. Moreover, in what intervals of
supplying food to others had he sat himself down to his own feast of
reason? One was accustomed in those days to hear coal-heavers
discussing Diderot, but not in the language of Diderot. I gazed on his
face and thought I saw in it a neutral ground, whereon a beast and an
angel hobnobbed in the intervals of combat.
Beside him the torch-bearer--silent, melancholy, astringent--held his
brand aloft motionless, as if his arm were a sconce of iron.
“You are hurt, monsieur?” said Crépin, suddenly referring to me.
“It is nothing--a bite, a scratch; an excuse for a pillow.”
“Ah!” (he fetched a flask from his pocket and uncorked it)--“this is
ethereal cream of mint--a liqueur I affect, in that it reminds me of
lambs, and innocence--and shepherdesses. Let us pledge one another,
like good friends, at parting! And it will confirm thy cure, monsieur,
so happily begun.”
“Mademoiselle?” he said pleadingly, and offered it to Carinne.
She touched it with her lips--I, more effectively, with mine. Crépin
cried “_Trinquons!_” and, taking a lusty pull, handed the flask to
Gusman, who drained it.
“Now,” said he, “we are united by a bond the sweetest in the
world--the sympathy of the palate. We have made of ourselves a little
rosary of wine beads.”
He put his hand lightly on Gusman’s shoulder.
“This austerity,” he said--“this Bailly of the Municipality of the
dead--I have purchased ye his favour with the one bribe to which he is
susceptible. Kings might offer him their crowns; easy maids their
honour. They should no more draw him from his reserve than Alexander
drew Diogenes from his tub. But there is a _séductrice_ to his
integrity, and the name of it is right Hollands. My faith! I would not
swear _my_ fidelity to such a frowzy mistress; but taste is a matter
of temperament. Is it not so, Jacques?”
“While the keg lasts, I will hold the safety of thy friends in pawn to
thee.”
So replied the spectral figure--a voice, a phantom--the very enigma of
this charnel city of echoes.
The liqueur had revived and comforted me amazingly. I raised myself on
my elbow.
“Ah!” I cried, “if good intentions could find favour with thee, I
would make thy keg a kilderkin, Citizen Gusman!”
The figure stood mute, like a man of bronze. Crépin laughed
recklessly.
“He is the fast warden of these old catacombs,” he said--“the undying
worm and sole master of their intricacies. Himself hath tunnelled them
under the ground, I believe, like the tan-yard grub that bores into
poplar-trees. Silence and secrecy are his familiars; but, I tell thee,
monsieur, he will absorb Hollands till he drips with it as the roofs
of his own quarries drip with water. The keg once drained, and--if
thou renew’st it not--he will sell thee for a single measure of
schnapps. Is it not so, Jacques?”
“It is so,” said the figure, in a deep, indifferent voice.
Crépin laughed again, then suddenly turned grave, and leaned down
towards me.
“Harkee, M. le Comte!” he said, “is thy pocket well lined?”
“With good intentions, M. le Président.”
He nodded and, fetching a little bag of skin out of his breast, forced
it into my hand.
“It is all I can spare,” he said; “and with that I must acquit my
conscience of the matter.”
“If ever I live to repay thee, good fellow----”
“Ah, bah, monsieur! I owe thee for the Médoc. And now--escape if thou
seest the way open. This strange creature will be thy bond-slave while
the keg runs. Afterwards--_eh bien! C’est à toi la balle_. For food,
thou must do as others here--take toll of the country carts as they
journey to the barriers. They will not provide thee with sweetbreads
in wine; but--well, monsieur, there are fifty ways, after all, of
cooking a cabbage.”
I rose, with difficulty, to my feet. Carinne, still seated on the
floor, held her hand in mine. Something like a gentle quinsy in my
throat embarrassed my speech.
“Good citizen----” I muttered.
Crépin made a gesture with his hand and backed in a hurry.
“I desire no expression of gratitude,” he said loudly.
“Good citizen,” I repeated, “thou wouldst not rebuke our selfishness
by denying us, thy most faithful debtors, the privilege claimed by
even a minor actor in this escapade?”
“Of whom dost thou speak?”
“Of a turnkey at St Pélagie’s.”
“_Mordi!_ I drenched him once for the colic--that is all. The fool
fancied he had swallowed an eft that was devouring his entrails.”
He cried “_Portez vous bien!_” and a quick emotion, as of physical
pain, flickered over his face like a breath of air over hot coals.
Carinne was on her feet in a moment, had gone swiftly to him, and had
taken his hand.
“Monsieur,” she said, in a wet voice, “it is true that honour, like
sweet vines, may shoot from beds of corruption. God forbid that I pass
judgment on that which influences the ways of men; but only--but only,
monsieur, I hope you may live very long, and may take comfort from the
thought of the insignificance of the subject of your so great
sacrifice.”
She drooped her dear head. The other looked at her with an intense
gaze.
“But, nevertheless,” he said, quietly, “it was the letter of M. le
Comte, of my honoured father Epicurus, that moved me to the sacrifice.
That is great, as you say. I never realised how great till this
moment. Yet--ah, mademoiselle! I would not sanctify it out of the
category of human passions by pretending that I was induced to it by
any sentiment of self-renunciation. Thyself should not have persuaded
me to spare thee--nor anything less, may be, than an appeal from my
preceptor in the metaphysics of the senses. I take no shame to say so.
I am not a traitor to my creed; and it would offend me to be called a
puritan.”
He put the girl’s hand gently away from him.
“Still,” he said, “I may not deem myself worthy to touch this flower
with my lips.”
And at that he turned and went from us, summoning Gusman to accompany
him, and crying as he vanished, “Good luck and forgetfulness to all!”
So disappeared from our lives this singular man, who persisted to the
very last in lashing me with the thong of my own twisting. We never
saw him again; once only we heard of him.
As the flash of the retreating torch glimmered into attenuation,
Carinne returned to me and sat down at my side.
“Little Thibaut,” she said softly, “he designed me so great a wrong
that I know not where to place him in my memory.”
“With the abortive children of thy fancy, Carinne; amongst the
thoughts that are ignorant of the good in themselves.”
She sighed.
“And so it was thou wast his informer as to our friendship? And why
didst thou write, Jean-Louis?”
“To urge him, by our one time intimacy, to cease his persecution of a
beautiful and most innocent lady.”
“I did not know, I did not know!” she cried; and suddenly her arms
were round my neck, and I lay in a nest of love.
“Oh! I am glad to be pretty, for the sake of the little Thibaut, that
saved me from barbarous men, and from myself, and, alas! from my
uncle! Little Thibaut, did I hurt when I beat thee? Beat me, then,
till I cry with the pain.”
She sobbed and laughed and held my face against her bosom. In the
midst, the candle on the wall dropped like a meteor, and instantly we
were immured in a very crypt of darkness.
She cried in a terrified voice: “Oh, _mon Dieu_! hold me, or I sink!”
and committed herself shuddering to my embrace.
The blackness was blind, horrible, beyond reason. We could only shut
our eyes and whisper to one another, expecting and hoping for Gusman’s
return. But he came no more that night, and by-and-by Carinne slept in
my arms.
* * * * * * *
The glare of torch-light on my face brought me to my senses. That
sombre deadman, as Carinne called him, stood above us--visionless,
without movement, it seemed--a lurid genii presented in a swirling
drift of smoke. He might never have moved from the spot since we had
last seen him there.
“Why dost thou wake us, good friend?” said I. “Hast thou a midnight
service for the dead here?”
“It is high morning,” said he, in a voice like a funeral bell.
“Morning!”
I sat up in amazement. Truly I had not thought of it. We had slept the
clock round; but there was no day in this hideous and melancholy
underworld.
I looked down at my companion. She had slipped from my hold of her,
and lay across my knees. Her hair curled low on her forehead; her
eyelids were misted with a faint blue shadow, like the sheaths of
hyacinth buds before they open; her lips were a little parted, as Love
had left them. _Mon Dieu!_ there is no sight so tender and so pathetic
as that of a fair child asleep; and what was Carinne but a child!
In an access of emotion I bent and softly touched the lips with mine.
This infant so brave and so forlorn, whose head should have been
pillowed on flowers, whose attendants should have been the lady
fairies!
“She is very pretty,” said the deadman.
“Ha, ha!” I cried. “Hast thou found it out? There shall spring a
blossom for thee yet, old Gusman, in this lifeless city of thine!”
He twirled his torch for the first time, so that it spouted fire like
a hand-grenade.
“Blossoms!” he barked. “But thou shalt know I have my garden walks
down here--bowers of mildew, parterres of fine rank funguses, royal
worms even, that have battened for centuries on the seed of men.”
He crooked his knees, so that he might stare into my face.
“Not altogether a city of the dead,” said he.
“Is it peopled with ghosts, then?”
“Very thickly, without doubt. Thou shalt see them swarm like maggots
in its streets.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The creature stood erect once more, and made
a comprehensive gesture.
“This?” he said,--“you must not judge by this. It is the Holy of
Holies, to which none has access but the High Priest of the
Catacombs--and such as he favours.”
“And what, in a rude age, keeps it sacred?”
He swept his torch right and left.
“Look, then!” said he.
We lay in a vaulted chamber hewn out of the rock. On all sides I
fancied I caught dim vision of the mouths of innumerable low tunnels
that exhaled a mist of profound night.
“Knowledge!” exclaimed the fearful man; “the age-long lore of one that
hath learnt his every footstep in this maze of oubliettes. There are
beaten tracks here and there. Here and there a fool has been known to
leave them. It may be days or weeks before I happen across his
body--the eyes slipping forward of their lids, his mouth puckered out
of shape from sucking and gnawing at the knuckles of his hands.”
“It is terrible! And none comes hither but thou?”
“I, and the beasts of blood that must not be denied. When they hunt, I
lead; therefore it is well to win my favour.”
Carinne hurriedly raised herself. She threw her arms about me.
“Oh, my husband!” she cried, “take me where I may see the sweet
daylight, if only for a moment!”
I had thought the poor child slept.
“Hush!” I murmured. “Citizen Gusman is going to show us his township!”
* * * * * * *
By interminable corridors, so intricate that one would have thought
their excavators must have lain down to die, each at the limit of his
boring, from sheer despair of ever finding their way to the open
again, we followed the flare of the torch, our eyes smarting in its
smoke, our arms most fervently linked, Carinne’s to mine, in
inseparable devotion. Now and again I would hear my poor little friend
whisper, “Light, light!” as if her very heart were starving; and then
I would draw her face to mine and cry confidently, “It is coming, _ma
mie_!” Still on we went over the uneven ground, thridding an endless
labyrinth of death, oppressed, weighed upon, hustled by inhuman walls,
breathing and exhaling the thin black fluid that is the atmosphere of
the disembodied.
Sometimes, as if it crouched beneath a stroke, the flame of the torch
would dip and shrink under a current of gas, then leap jocund again
when the peril was swept by; sometimes the tinkle of falling water
would gladden our ears as with a memory of ancient happiness; and,
passing on, in a moment we should be bedewed with spray, and catch a
glimpse, in the glare, of a very dropping well of fire. At length, at
the turning of a corridor, Gusman called us to a halt.
He hollowed his left hand to his mouth.
“_Holà--làee--eh--h--h!_” he yelled, like a very _lutin_.
“_Là--là--là--là--làee--eh--làee--eh--làee--eh!_” was hooted
and jangled back in a tumbling torrent of sound, that seemed to issue
from the throat of a passage facing us and to shake the very roofs
with merriment. Involuntarily we shrunk against the wall, as if to
allow space to the impetuous rush we foresaw. _Mon Dieu_, the strange
illusion! Only the swarming imps of echoes, summoned to the Master
call, came hurrying forth, leaping and falling over one another,
fighting and struggling, clanging with reverberant laughter,
distributing themselves, disappearing down this or that corridor,
shouting over their shoulders as they fled--faint, fainter--till
silence settled down once more like water in the wake of a vessel.
Gusman slewed his head about--cockt as it had been to the outcry--to
view of us.
“They are lively to-day,” he said, with an unearthly distortion of his
features.
“The echoes?”
“_C’est cela, citoyen._ So men entitle them. No doubt it is human to
think to put terror out of countenance by miscalling it.”
“How, then?”
He beckoned us to follow; plunged into the very funnel mouth that had
vomited the eerie babble; led us swiftly by a winding passage, and
stopped.
“Behold!” said he, flashing his torch to and fro over the surface of a
roughly piled and cemented wall that seemed to close the entrance to a
vast recess.
“Behold!” said he, sweeping the flame to the ground at the wall-foot.
We saw a skull or two; a few scattered bones. An indescribable brassy
odour assailed our nostrils. The stones shone with an oily exudation.
“What company lies here, citizen?”
“A brave one, by my faith--a whole cemetery _en bloc_. _Comment
diable!_ shall they have fitted themselves each with his own by the
day of Judgment! They pretend to sleep, piecemeal as they were bundled
in; but utter so little as a whisper down there, and they will begin
to stir and to talk. Then if thou shout’st, as I did--my God, what a
clamour in reply! But one would have thought they had protested enough
already.”
“In what manner?”
“Ask the killers of September, thou. They are held honest men, I
believe.”
“It is enough,” said I. “Lead on, Citizen Gusman, and find us a glint
of light, in the name of God!”
I glanced, with a shudder, at Carinne. Thank heaven! she had not, it
appeared, understood. So here, in one dreadful lime-cemented heap,
were massed the victims of those unspeakable days! I remembered the
Abbaye and the blood-mark on the lip of Mademoiselle de Lâge; and I
held the girl to my side, as we walked, with a pressure that was
convulsive.
Again the torch danced before us, and again we followed; and yet again
the deadman called us to a stop, and whirled his half-devoured brand.
“Observe well,” said he; “for it is in this quarter ye must sojourn,
and here seek refuge when warning comes.”
This time a very hill of skulls and ribs and shanks--a lifeless
crater--a Monte Testaccio of broken vessels that had once contained
the wine of life. The heap filled a wide recess and rose twenty feet
to the roof.
“The contribution of ‘Les Innocens,’” said Gusman, as if he were some
spectral minister of affairs announcing in the Convention of the dead
a Sectional subscription.
He pointed to a little closet of stone, like a friar’s cell, that
pierced the wall to one side of the heap.
“Behold your hermitage!” said he.
Carinne, clinging to me, cried, “No, no!” in a weeping voice.
“_Eh bien!_” said the creature, indifferently; “you can take or leave,
as you will.”
“We will take, citizen.”
“Look, then!” (he gripped my arm and haled me to the mound) “and note
what I do.”
There was a point--roughly undistinguishable from the rest--where a
welded mass of calcareous bone and rubbish lay upon the litter. This
was, in effect, a door in one piece, with an infant’s skull for handle
and concealed hinges of gut to one side to prevent its slipping out of
place. Removed, it revealed a black mouth opening into an inner
vacancy.
“Underneath lies a great box or kennel of wood,” said Gusman, “with a
manhole cut in its side; and round and over the box the stuff is
piled. At the very word of warning, creep in and close the entrance.
It is like enough ye will need it.”
“And here we are to stay?”
“That is according to your inclination.”
“But _Mor’ Dieu_, my friend! if thou wert to forget or overlook us
entombed in this oubliette?”
“_Soyez content._ I might forget thou wert lacking food, but never
that the citizen President gave thee a purse.”
“But----”
“Tst, tst! Wouldst thou explore farther my city of shadows? Here the
wild quarries merge into the catacombs. Hence, a little space, thou
wilt find company and to spare;--light, also, if Mademoiselle wills.”
The poor child uttered a heart-moving sigh.
“Come, then,” said Gusman, with a shrug of his shoulders.
He preceded us the length of a single corridor, low and narrow--a mere
human mole-run. All throughout it the rock seemed to grip us, the air
to draw like wire into our lungs. And then, suddenly, we were come to
a parapet of stone that cut our path like a whitewashed hoarding. For
through a fissure in the plain above it a wedge of light entered--a
very wise virgin with her lamp shining like snow;--and under the beam
we stopped, and gazed upwards, and could not gaze enough.
But, for Carinne--she was translated! She laughed; she murmured; she
made as if she caught the sweet wash like water in her hands and
bathed her face with it.
“And now I am ready,” said she.
Then we scaled the wall, jumping to a lower terrace of rock: and
thereafter ran the corridor again, descending, but now of ample enough
width and showing a design of masonry at intervals, and sometimes
great stone supports to the roof where houses lay above. And in a
moment our path swept into a monstrous field of bones--confused,
myriad, piled up like slag about a pit-mouth; and we thridded our way
therethrough along a dusty gully, and emerged at once into a high
vaulted cavern and the view of living things.
Living things!--_Grand Dieu!_ the bats of the living Terror. They
peered from holes and alcoves; they mowed and chattered; they shook
their sooty locks at us and hailed Gusman in the jargon of the
underworld. Thieves and rogues and cowards--here they swarmed in the
warrens of despair, the very sacristans of devil-worship, the unclean
acolytes of the desecrated rock-chapels, whose books of the Gospel
were long since torn for fuel.
Out of one pestilent cavern, wherein I caught glimpse of an altar
faced with an arabesque of cemented bones, something like a dusky ape,
that clung with both hands to a staff for support, came mouthing and
gesticulating at us.
“Bread, bread!” it mumbled, working its black jaws; and it made an
aimless pick at Carinne’s skirt.
“There is for thee, then!” thundered Gusman; and he flapped his torch
into the thing’s face. The animal vented a hideous cry and shuffled
back into its hole, shedding sparks on its way as if it smouldered
like an old rag.
“Oh, _mon ami_!” whispered Carinne, in a febrile voice--“better the
den by the skulls than this!”
The deadman gave an acrid grin.
“_À la bonne heure_,” said he. “Doubtless hunger pinches. Come back,
then; and I will open my wallet and thou shalt thy purse.”
* * * * * * *
Early in the afternoon--so far as in that rayless desolation one could
judge it to be--there broke upon our eyes the flutter of an advancing
light, upon our ears the quick secret patter of hurrying steps. These
ran up to the very opening of our lair and stopped.
“_Hide!_” said the deadman’s voice, “I hear them call me to the
search! Hide!” and, without another word, he retreated as he had come.
Carinne uttered a little shuddering “Oh!” She took my head between her
hands and kissed my lips, the admirable child. Then we emerged from
our den (the ghostliest glimmer reached us from some distant corner,
where, no doubt, Gusman had left a light burning), and stole swiftly
to the mound-foot. I felt about for the infant’s skull (the position
of which I had intensely remarked), and in a moment found it and laid
bare the aperture.
“Dive, little rabbit,” said I.
“I am within, Jean-Louis.”
I followed, feet first, and with my toes just touching bottom, reached
out and pulled the trap upon us. Then, with a feeling as if I were
wrenching off a blouse over my shoulders, I let myself back into the
hole--upon a carpet of muffling dust--and _ma bonne amie_ caught at
me, and we stood to hear our own hearts beating. Like the thick throb
of a clock in an under-room--thus, I swear, our pulses sounded to us
in that black and horrible stillness. The box had, it appeared, been
very compactly built in at the first--and before the superincumbent
litter of rubbish had been discharged over and around it--with the
strongest bones, for that these were calculated to endure, without
shifting, the onset of one hurriedly concealing himself; yet this
necessary precaution went near to stultifying itself by so helping to
exclude the air as to make breathing a labour to one confined within.
Fortunately, however, no long strain upon our endurance was demanded
of us.
Now the hunters came upon us so silently, that there, in our ghastly
prison, a spray of light, scattered through the chinks of the trap,
was our first intimation of their presence. Then, as we maddened to
see the glint withdrawn, a low voice came to our ears.
“Stop, then! What is this?”
“The dust of the Innocents, citizen.” (Gusman’s voice.)
“It is with the dust of the depraved in breeding fat maggots, is it
not?”
“Ay, so long as they can find flesh food.”
“But what if such food were concealed herein? That little _babouin_ of
St Pélagie--_peste!_ a big thigh-bone would afford him cover.”
I felt my hand carried to Carinne’s lips in the darkness.
Gusman kicked at the mound with his sabot.
“Close litter,” said he. “A man would suffocate that burrowed into
it.”
“Is that so? Rake me over that big lump yonder--_voilà!_--with the
little skull sticking from it.”
I felt my heart turn like a mountebank--felt Carinne stoop suddenly
and rise with something huddled in her hands. The astonishing child
had, unknown to me, preconceived a plan and was prepared with it on
the very flash of emergency. She leant past me, swift and perfectly
silent, and immediately the little spars of light about the trap went
out, it seemed. If in moving she made the smallest sound, it was
opportunely covered by the ragged cough that issued at the moment from
Gusman’s throat.
“_Dépêche-toi!_” said the authoritative voice. “That projecting
patch, citizen--turn it for me!”
“There is nothing here.”
“But, there, I say! No, no! _Mille tonnerres_,--I will come myself,
then!”
I heard Gusman’s breath vibrant outside the trap; heard him hastily
raise the covering an inch or two, with an affectation of labouring
perplexity. I set my teeth; I “saw red,” like flecks of blood; I
waited for the grunt of triumph that should announce the discovery of
the hole.
“It is as I told thee,” said the deadman; “there is nothing.”
I caught a note of strangeness in his voice, a suppressed marvel that
communicated itself to me. The sweat broke out on my forehead.
“H’mph!” muttered the inquisitor; and I heard him step back.
Suddenly he cried, “_En avant, plus avant!_ To thy remotest
boundaries, citizen warden! We will run the little rascal to earth
yet!”
The light faded from our ken; the footsteps retreated. I passed a
shaking hand over my eyes--I could not believe in the reality of our
escape.
At length, unable any longer to endure the silence, I caught at
Carinne in the blackness.
“Little angel,” I said; “in God’s name, what didst thou do?”
She bowed her sweet face to my neck.
“Only this, Jean-Louis. I had noticed that my poor ragged skirt was
much of the colour of this heap; and so I slipped it off and stuffed
it into the hole.”
* * * * * * *
We dwelt an hour in our horrible retreat, from time to time cautiously
lifting the trap a finger’s-breadth for air. At the end, Gusman
reappeared with his torch and summoned us to our release. He looked at
Carinne, as St Hildephonsus might have gazed on the Blessed Virgin.
“It was magnificent,” he said. “I saw at once. Thou hast saved me no
less than thyself. That I will remember, _citoyenne_, when the
opportunity serves.”
* * * * * * *
On the third day our deadman came to us with a copy of the ‘Moniteur’
in his hand. He pointed silently to a name in the list of the latest
executed. Carinne turned to me with pitiful eyes.
“_Ah, le pauvre Crépin!_” I cried, in great emotion. “What can one
hope but that death came to him passionately, as he desired!”
* * * * * * *
“Citizen Gusman, we are resolved. We must go forth, if it is only to
perish. We can endure this damning gloom no longer.”
He looked down on us as we sat, this genii of the torch. His face was
always framed to our vision in a lurid wreath; was the sport of any
draught that swayed the leaping fire. Submitted to daylight, his
features might have resolved themselves into expressionlessness and
immobility. To us they were ever shifting, fantastic, possessed with
the very devils of the underworld.
“Well,” he said at length--“I owe the citizeness a debt of gratitude;
but--_sang Dieu!_ after all I might repudiate it when the keg
threatened to suck dry. I am myself only when I am not myself. That
would be a paradox in the world above there, eh? At least the moment
is opportune. They hunt counter for thee, Thibaut. For the wench--she
is not in their minds, nor associated in any manner with thee. That
lends itself to an artifice. The idea tickles me. _Sang Dieu!_ Yes, I
will supply thee with a passport to Calais. Wait!”
He went from us. We knew better than to interrupt or question him; but
we held together during his absence and whispered our hopes. In less
than half an hour he returned to us, some papers grasped in his hand.
“Observe,” said he. “It is not often, after a harvest of death, that
the _glaneurs_ of the Municipality overlook a stalk; yet now and again
one will come to me. Citizen Tithon Riouffe, it appears, meditated a
descent upon _la maudite Angleterre_. He had his papers, signed and
countersigned, for himself, and for his wife Sabine, moreover. It is
lucky for you that he proved a rascal, for they shaved him
nevertheless. What Barrère had granted, St Just rendered nugatory.
But, if they took his head, they left him his passports, and those I
found in his secret pocket.”
He broke off, with a quick exclamation, and peered down at me, holding
the torch to my face.
“Mother of God!” he cried--“I will swear there is something a likeness
here! I have a mind to fetch the head and set it to thine, cheek by
jowl! _Hé bien, comment, la petite babiole_--that disturbs her! Well,
well--take and use the papers, then, and, with discretion, ye shall
win free!”
Carinne caught at the rough hand of our preserver and kissed it.
“Monsieur, thou art a deadman angel!” she cried; and broke into a
little fit of weeping.
His lids fell. I saw his throat working. He examined his hand as if he
thought something had stung it.
“Yes, she is very pretty,” he muttered. “I think I would give my life
for her.”
Then he added, vaguely: “_Chou pour chou_--I will take it out in
Hollands.”