OF A NIGHT JOURNEY AND BLACK BICETRE AT THE END OF IT
'Twas a long journey to the prison of Bicêtre, which is two miles to the
south of the city of Paris, a great building that had once (they say)
been a palace, but now in the time of my experience was little better
than a vestibule of hell. I was driven to it through a black loud night
of rain, a plunging troop of horse on either hand the coach as if I were
a traveller of state, and Buhot in front of me as silent as the priest
had been the day we left Dunkerque, though wakeful, and the tip of
his scabbard leaning on my boot to make sure that in the darkness no
movement of mine should go unobserved.
The trees swung and roared in the wind; the glass lozens of the carriage
pattered to the pelting showers; sometimes we lurched horribly in the
ruts of the highway, and were released but after monstrous efforts
on the part of the cavaliers. Once, as we came close upon a loop of a
brawling river, I wished with all fervency that we might fall in, and
so end for ever this pitiful coil of trials whereto fate had obviously
condemned poor Paul Greig. To die among strangers (as is widely
known) is counted the saddest of deaths by our country people, and so,
nowadays, it would seem to myself, but there and then it appeared an
enviable conclusion to the Spoiled Horn that had blundered from folly to
folly. To die there and then would be to leave no more than a regret and
an everlasting wonder in the folks at home; to die otherwise, as seemed
my weird, upon a block or gallows, would be to foul the name of my
family for generations, and I realised in my own person the agony of my
father when he got the news, and I bowed my shoulders in the coach below
the shame that he would feel as in solemn blacks he walked through the
Sabbath kirkyard in summers to come in Mearns, with the knowledge that
though neighbours looked not at him but with kindness, their inmost
thoughts were on the crimson chapter of his son.
Well, we came at the long last to Bicêtre, and I was bade alight in the
flare of torches. A strange, a memorable scene; it will never leave me.
Often I remit me there in dreams. When I came out of the conveyance the
lights dazzled me, and Buhot put his hands upon my shoulders and turned
me without a word in the direction he wished me to take. It was through
a vast and frowning doorway that led into a courtyard so great that
the windows on the other side seemed to be the distance of a field. The
windows were innumerable, and though the hour was late they were lit in
stretching corridors. Fires flamed in corners of the yard--great leaping
fires round which warders (as I guessed them) gathered to dry themselves
or get warmth against the chill of the early April morning. Their
scabbards or their muskets glittered now and then in the light of the
flames; their voices--restrained by the presence of Buhot--sounded
deep and dreadful to me that knew not the sum of his iniquity yet could
shudder at the sense of what portended.
[Illustration: 203]
It were vain for me to try and give expression to my feeling as I went
past these fires across the stony yard, and entered between a guard or
two at the other side. At the root of my horror was the sentiment that
all was foreign, that I was no more to these midnight monsters round
their torturing flames than a creature of the wood, less, perhaps, for
were they not at sworn war with my countrymen, and had not I a share
at least of the repute of regicide? And when, still led by the silent
officer, I entered the building itself and walked through an unending
corridor broken at intervals by black doors and little barred borrowed
lights, and heard sometimes a moan within, or a shriek far off in
another part of the building, I experienced something of that long
swound that is insanity. Then I was doomed for the rest of my brief days
to be among these unhappy wretches--the victims of the law or political
vengeance, the _forçat_ who had thieved, or poisoned, perjured himself,
or taken human blood!
At last we came to a door, where Buhot stopped me and spoke, for the
first time, almost, since we had left Versailles. He put his hand out to
check a warder who was going to open the cell for my entrance.
“I am not a hard man, M. Greig,” said he, in a stumbling English, “and
though this is far beyond my duties, and, indeed, contrary to the same,
I would give you another chance. We shall have, look you, our friend the
priest in any case, and to get the others is but a matter of time. 'Tis
a good citizen helps the law always; you must have that respect for the
law that you should feel bound to circumvent those who would go counter
to it with your cognisance.”
“My good man,” I said, as quietly as I could, and yet internally with
feelings like to break me, “I have already said my say. If the tow was
round my thrapple I would say no more than that I am innocent of any
plot against a man by whose family mine have lost, and that I myself,
for all my loyalty to my country, would do much to serve as a private
individual.”
“Consider,” he pleaded. “After all, this Hamilton may be a madman with
nothing at all to tell that will help us.”
“But the bargain is to be that I must pry and I must listen,” said I,
“and be the tale-pyat whose work may lead to this poor old buffoon's and
many another's slaughtering. Not I, M. Buhot, and thank ye kindly! It's
no' work for one of the Greigs of Hazel Den.”
“I fear you do not consider all,” he said patiently--so patiently indeed
that I wondered at him. “I will show you to what you are condemned even
before your trial, before you make up your mind irrevocably to refuse
this very reasonable request of ours,” and he made a gesture that caused
the warder to open the door so that I could see within.
There was no light of its own in the cell, but it borrowed wanly a
little of the radiance of the corridor, and I could see that it was bare
to the penury of a mausoleum, with a stone floor, a wooden palliasse,
and no window other than a barred hole above the door. There was not
even a stool to sit on. But I did not quail.
“I have been in more comfortable quarters, M. Buhot,” I said, “but in
none that I could occupy with a better conscience.” Assuming with that a
sort of bravado, I stepped in before he asked me.
“Very good,” he cried; “but I cannot make you my felicitations on your
decision, M. Greig,” and without more ado he had the door shut on me.
I sat on the woollen palliasse for a while, with my head on my hands,
surrendered all to melancholy; and then, though the thing may seem
beyond belief, I stretched myself and slept till morning. It was not the
most refreshing of sleep, but still 'twas wonderful that I should sleep
at all in such circumstances, and I take it that a moorland life had
been a proper preparation for just such trials.
When I wakened in the morning the prison seemed full of eerie noises--of
distant shrieks as in a bedlam, and commanding voices, and of ringing
metals, the clank of fetters, or the thud of musket-butts upon the
stones. A great beating of feet was in the yard, as if soldiers were
manoeuvring, and it mastered me to guess what all this might mean, until
a warder opened my door and ordered me out for an airing.
I mind always of a parrot at a window.
This window was one that looked into the yard from some official's
dwelling in that dreadful place, and the bird occupied a great cage that
was suspended from a nail outside.
The bird, high above the rabble of rogues in livery, seemed to have a
devilish joy in the spectacle of the misery tramping round and round
beneath, for it clung upon the bars and thrust out its head to whistle,
as if in irony, or taunt us with a foul song. There was one air it
had, expressed so clearly that I picked up air and words with little
difficulty, and the latter ran something like this:
Ah! ah! Pierrot, Pierrot!
Fais ta toilette,
Voila le barbier! oh! oh!
Et sa charrette--
all in the most lugubrious key.
And who were we that heard that reference to the axe? We were the scum,
the _sordes_, the rot of France. There was, doubtless, no crime before
the law of the land, no outrage against God and man, that had not here
its representative. We were not men, but beasts, cut off from every
pleasant--every clean and decent association, the visions of sin
always behind the peering eyes, the dreams of vice and crime for ever
fermenting in the low brows. I felt 'twas the forests we should be
frequenting--the forests of old, the club our weapon, the cave our
habitation; no song ours, nor poem, no children to infect with fondness,
no women to smile at in the light of evening lamps. The forest--the
cave--the animal! What were we but children of the outer dark, condemned
from the start of time, our faces ground hard against the flints, our
feet bogged in hag and mire?
There must have been several hundreds of the convicts in the yard, and
yet I was told later that it was not a fourth of the misery that Bicêtre
held, and that scores were leaving weekly for the _bagnes_--the hulks at
Toulon and at Brest--while others took their places.
Every man wore a uniform--a coarse brown jacket, vast wide breeches of
the same hue, a high sugar-loaf cap and wooden shoes--all except some
privileged, whereof I was one--and we were divided into gangs, each gang
with its warders--tall grenadiers with their muskets ready.
Round and round and across and across we marched in the great
quadrangle, every man treading the rogues' measure with leg-weary
reluctance, many cursing their warders under breath, most scowling, all
hopeless and all lost.
'Twas the exercise of the day.
As we slouched through that mad ceremony in the mud of the yard, with
rain still drizzling on us, the parrot in its cage had a voice loud
and shrill above the commands of the grenadiers and officers; sang
its taunting song, or whistled like a street boy, a beast so free, so
careless and remote, that I had a fancy it had the only soul in the
place.
As I say, we were divided into gangs, each gang taking its own course
back and forward in the yard as its commander ordered. The gang I was
with marched a little apart from the rest. We were none of us in this
gang in the ugly livery of the prison, but in our own clothing, and we
were, it appeared, allowed that privilege because we were yet to try. I
knew no reason for the distinction at the time, nor did I prize it very
much, for looking all about the yard--at the officers, the grenadiers,
and other functionaries of the prison, I failed to see a single face
I knew. What could I conclude but that Buhot was gone and that I was
doomed to be forgotten here?
It would have been a comfort even to have got a glimpse of Father
Hamilton, the man whose machinations were the cause of my imprisonment,
but Father Hamilton, if he had been taken here as Buhot had suggested,
was not, at all events, in view.
After the morning's exercise we that were the privileged were taken to
what was called the _salle dépreuve_, and with three or four to each
_gamelle_ or mess-tub, ate a scurvy meal of a thin soup and black bread
and onions. To a man who had been living for a month at heck and manger,
as we say, this might naturally seem unpalatable fare, but truth to
tell I ate it with a relish that had been all the greater had it been
permitted me to speak to any of my fellow sufferers. But speech was
strictly interdict and so our meal was supped in silence.
When it was over I was to be fated for the pleasantest of surprises!
There came to me a sous-officer of the grenadiers.
In French he asked if I was Monsieur Greig. I said as best I could in
the same tongue that I was that unhappy person at his service. Then,
said he, “Come with me.” He led me into a hall about a hundred feet long
that had beds or mattresses for about three hundred people. The room was
empty, as those who occupied it were, he said, at Mass. Its open windows
in front looked into another courtyard from that in which we had been
exercising, while the windows at the rear looked into a garden where
already lilac was in bloom and daffodillies endowed the soil of a few
mounds with the colour of the gold. On the other side of the court first
named there was a huge building. “Galbanon,” said my guide, pointing to
it, and then made me understand that the same was worse by far than
the Bastille, and at the moment full of Marquises, Counts, Jesuits, and
other clergymen, many of them in irons for abusing or writing against
the Marchioness de Pompadour.
I listened respectfully and waited Monsieur's explanation. It was
manifest I had not been brought into this hall for the good of my
education, and naturally I concluded the name of Galbanon, that I had
heard already from Buhot, with its villainous reputation, was meant to
terrify me into a submission to what had been proposed. The moment after
a hearty meal--even of _soup maigre_--was not, however, the happiest of
times to work upon a Greig's feelings of fear or apprehension, and so I
waited, very dour within upon my resolution though outwardly in the most
complacent spirit.
The hall was empty when we entered as I have said, but we had not been
many minutes in it when the tramp of men returning to it might be heard,
and this hurried my friend the officer to his real business.
He whipped a letter from his pocket and put it in my hand with a sign to
compel secrecy on my part. It may be readily believed I was quick enough
to conceal the missive. He had no cause to complain of the face I turned
upon another officer who came up to us, for 'twas a visage of clownish
vacuity.
The duty of the second officer, it appeared, was to take me to a new
cell that had been in preparation for me, and when I got there it
was with satisfaction I discovered it more than tolerable, with a
sufficiency of air and space, a good light from the quadrangle, a few
books, paper, and a writing standish.
When the door had been shut upon me, I turned to open my letter and
found there was in fact a couple of them--a few lines from her ladyship
in Dunkerque expressing her continued interest in my welfare and
adventures, and another from the Swiss through whom the first had come.
He was still--said the honest Bernard--at my service, having eluded
the vigilance of Buhot, who doubtless thought a lackey scarce worth his
hunting, and he was still in a position to post my letters, thanks to
the goodwill of the sous-officer who was a relative. Furthermore, he
was in hopes that Miss Walkinshaw, who was on terms of intimacy with the
great world and something of an _intriguante_, would speedily take steps
to secure my freedom. “Be tranquil, dear Monsieur!” concluded the brave
fellow, and I was so exceedingly comforted and inspired by these matters
that I straightway sat down to the continuation of my journal for Miss
Walkinshaw's behoof. I had scarce dipped the pen, when my cell
door opened and gave entrance to the man who was the cause of my
incarceration.
The door shut and locked behind him; it was Father Hamilton!
It was indeed Father Hamilton, by all appearance none the worse in body
for his violent escapade, so weighty with the most fatal possibilities
for himself, for he advanced to me almost gaily, his hand extended and
his face red and smiling.
“Scotland! to my heart!” cries he in the French, and throws his arms
about me before I could resist, and kisses me on the cheeks after the
amusing fashion of his nation. “La! la! la! Paul,” he cried, “I'd have
wanted three breakfasts sooner than miss this meeting with my good
secretary lad that is the lovablest rogue never dipped a pen in his
master's service. Might have been dead for all I knew, and run through
by a brutal rapier, victim of mine own innocence. But here's my Paul,
_pardieu!_ I would as soon have my _croque-mort_ now as that jolly dog
his uncle, that never waked till midnight or slept till the dull,
uninteresting noon in the years when we went roving. What! Paul! Paul
Greig! my _croque-mort!_ my Don Dolorous!--oh, Lord, my child, I am the
most miserable of wretches!”
And there he let me go, and threw himself upon a chair, and gave his
vast body to a convulsion of arid sobs. The man was in hysterics,
compounding smiles and sobs a score to the minute, but at the end 'twas
the natural man won the bout, else he had taken a stroke. I stood by
him in perplexity of opinions whether to laugh or storm, whether to give
myself to the righteous horror a good man ought to feel in the presence
of a murtherer, or shrug my shoulders tolerantly at the imbecile.
“There!” said he, recovering his natural manner, “I have made a mortal
enemy of Andrew Greig's nephew. Yes, yes, master, glower at Misery,
fat Misery--and the devil take it!--old Misery, without a penny in 'ts
pocket, and its next trip upon wheels a trip to the block to nuzzle at
the dirty end in damp sawdust a nose that has appreciated the bouquet
of the rarest wines. Paul, my boy, has't a pinch of snuff? A brutal
bird out there sings a stave of the _Chanson de la Veuve_ so like the
confounded thing that I heard my own foolish old head drop into the
basket, and there! I swear to you the smell of the sawdust is in my
nostrils now.”
I handed him my box; 'twas a mull my Uncle Andy gave me before he died,
made of the horn of a young bullock, with a blazon of the house on the
silver lid. He took it eagerly and drenched himself with the contents.
“Oh, la! la!” he cried; “I give thanks. My head was like yeast. I wish
it were Christmas last, and a man called Hamilton was back in Dixmunde
parish. But there! that is enough, I have made my bed and I must lie
on't, with a blight on all militant jesuitry! When last I had this box
in my fingers they were as steady as Mont St. Michel, now look--they are
trembling like aspen, _n'est-ce pas?_ And all that's different is that I
have eaten one or two better dinners and cracked a few pipkins of better
wine, and--and--well-nigh killed a police officer. Did'st ever hear of
one Hamilton, M. Greig? 'Twas a cheery old fellow in Dixmunde whose name
was the same as mine, and had a garden and bee-hives, and I am on the
rack for my sins.”
He might be on the rack--and, indeed, I daresay the man was in a passion
of feelings so that he knew not what he was havering about, but what
impressed me most of all about him was that he seemed to have some
momentary gleams of satisfaction in his situation.
“I have every ground of complaint against you, sir,” I said.
“What!” he interrupted. “Would'st plague an old man with complaints when
M. de Paris is tapping him on the shoulder to come away and smell the
sawdust of his own coffin? Oh, 'tis not in this wise thy uncle had done,
but no matter!”
“I have no wish, Father Hamilton, to revile you for what you have
brought me,” I hastened to tell him. “That is far from my thoughts,
though now that you put me in mind of it, there is some ground for my
blaming you if blaming was in my intention. But I shall blame you for
this, that you are a priest of the Church and a Frenchman, and yet did
draw a murderous hand upon a prince of your own country.”
This took him somewhat aback. He helped himself to another voluminous
pinch of my snuff to give him time for a rejoinder and then--“Regicide,
M. Greig, is sometimes to be defended when----”
“Regicide!” I cried, losing all patience, “give us the plain English
of it, Father Hamilton, and call it murder. To call it by a Latin name
makes it none the more respectable a crime against the courts of heaven
where the curse of Babel has an end. But for an accident, or the cunning
of others, you had a corpse upon your conscience this day, and your name
had been abhorred throughout the whole of Europe.”
He put his shoulders up till his dew-laps fell in massive folds.
“'Fore God!” said he, “here's a treatise in black letter from Andrew
Greig's nephew. It comes indifferently well, I assure thee, from
Andrew's nephew. Those who live in glass houses, _cher ami_,--those who
live in glass houses----”
He tapped me upon the breast with his fat finger and paused, with a
significant look upon his countenance.
“Oh, ye can out with it, Father Hamilton!” I cried, certain I knew his
meaning.
“Those who live in glass houses,” said he, “should have some pity for a
poor old devil out in the weather without a shelter of any sort.”
“You were about to taunt me with my own unhappy affair,” I said, little
relishing his consideration.
“Was I, M. Greig?” he said softly. “Faith! a glass residence seems to
breed an ungenerous disposition! If thou can'st credit me I know nothing
of thine affair beyond what I may have suspected from a Greig travelling
hurriedly and in red shoes. I make you my compliments, Monsieur, of your
morality that must be horror-struck at my foolish play with a pistol,
yet thinks me capable of a retort so vile as that you indicate. My dear
lad, I but spoke of what we have spoken of together before in our happy
chariot in the woods of Somme--thine uncle's fate, and all I expected
was, that remembering the same, thou his nephew would'st have enough
tolerance for an old fool to leave his punishment in the hands of
the constitute authority. _Voilà!_ I wish to heaven they had given me
another cell, after all, that I might have imagined thy pity for one
that did thee no harm, or at least meant to do none, which is the main
thing with all our acts else Purgatory's more crowded than I fancy.”
He went wearily over to the fire and spread his trembling hands to
the blaze; I looked after him perplexed in my mind, but not without an
overpowering pity.
“I have come, like thyself, doubtless,” he said after a little, “over
vile roads in a common cart, and lay awake last night in a dungeon--a
pretty conclusion to my excursion! And yet I am vastly more happy to-day
than I was this time yesterday morning.”
“But then you were free,” I said, “you had all you need wish for--money,
a conveyance, servants, leisure----”
“And M' Croque-mort's company,” he added with a poor smile. “True, true!
But the thing was then to do,” and he shuddered. “Now my part is done,
'twas by God's grace a failure, and I could sing for content like one of
the little birds we heard the other day in Somme.”
He could not but see my bewilderment in my face.
“You wonder at that,” said he, relinquishing the Roman manner as he
always did when most in earnest. “Does Monsieur fancy a poor old priest
can take to the ancient art of assassination with an easy mind? _Nom de
nom!_ I could skip to the block like a ballet-dancer if 'twere either
that or live the past two days over again and fifty years after. I have
none of the right stomach for murder; that's flat! 'tis a business that
keeps you awake too much at night, and disturbs the gastric essence;
calls, too, for a confounded agility that must be lacking in a person of
my handsome and plenteous bulk. I had rather go fishing any day in the
week than imbrue. When Buhot entered the room where I waited for a less
worthy man and I fired honestly for my money and missed, I could have
died of sheer rapture. Instead I threw myself upon his breast and
embraced him.”
“He said none of that to me.”
“Like enough not, but 'tis true none the less, though he may keep so
favourable a fact out of his records. A good soul enough, Buhot! We knew
him, your uncle and I, in the old days when I was thinner and played a
good game of chess at three in the morning. Fancy Ned Hamilton cutting
short the glorious career of old Buhot! I'd sooner pick a pocket.”
“Or kill a prince!”
“Felicitations on your wit, M. Greig! Heaven help the elderly when
the new wit is toward! _N'importe!_ Perhaps 'twere better to kill some
princes than to pick a pocket. Is it not better, or less wicked, let us
say, to take the life of a man villainously abusing it than the purse of
a poor wretch making the most of his scanty _livres?_”
And then the priest set out upon his defence. It is too long here to
reproduce in his own words, even if I recalled them, and too specious
in its terms for the patience of the honest world of our time. With his
hands behind his back he marched up and down the room for the space of
a half-hour at the least, recounting all that led to his crime. The
tale was like a wild romance, but yet, as we know now, true in every
particular. He was of the Society of Jesus, had lived a stormy youth,
and fallen in later years into a disrepute in his own parish, and there
the heads of his Society discovered him a very likely tool for their
purposes. They had only half convinced him that the death of Charles
Edward was for the glory of God and the good of the Church when they
sent him marching with a pistol and £500 in bills of exchange and
letters of credit upon a chase that covered a great part of three or
four countries, and ended at Lisbon, when a German Jesuit in the secret
gave him ten crusadoes to bring him home with his task unaccomplished.
“I have what amounts almost to a genius for losing the opportunities
of which I do not desire to avail myself,” said Father Hamilton with a
whimsical smile.
And then he had lain in disgrace with the Jesuits for a number of
years until it became manifest (as he confessed with shame) that his
experience of leisure, wealth, and travel had enough corrupted him to
make the prospect of a second adventure of a similar kind pleasing. At
that time Charles, lost to the sight of Europe, and only discovered at
brief and tantalising intervals by the Jesuit agents, scarce slept two
nights in the same town, but went from country to country _incognito_,
so that 'twas no trivial task Father Hamilton undertook to run him to
earth.
“The difficulty of it--indeed the small likelihood there was of my ever
seeing him,” he said, “was what mainly induced me to accept the office,
though in truth it was compelled. I was doing very well at Dunkerque,”
he went on, “and very happy if I had never heard more of prince or
priesthood, when Father Fleuriau sent me a hurried intimation that my
victim was due at Versailles on Easter and ordered my instant departure
there.”
The name of Fleuriau recalled me to my senses. “Stop, stop, Father
Hamilton!” I cried, “I must hear no more.”
“What!” said he, bitterly, “is't too good a young gentleman to listen to
the confession of a happy murderer that has failed at his trade?”
“I have no feeling left but pity,” said I, almost like to weep at this,
“but you have been put into this cell along with me for a purpose.”
“And what might that be, M. Greig?” he asked, looking round about him,
and seeing for the first time, I swear, the sort of place he was
in. “Faith! it is comfort, at any rate; I scarce noticed that, in my
pleasure at seeing Paul Greig again.”
“You must not tell me any more of your Jesuit plot, nor name any of
those involved in the same, for Buhot has been at me to cock an ear
to everything you may say in that direction, and betray you and your
friends. It is for that he has put us together into this cell.”
“_Pardieu!_ am not I betrayed enough already?” cried the priest,
throwing up his hands. “I'll never deny my guilt.”
“Yes,” I said, “but they want the names of your fellow conspirators, and
Buhot says they never expect them directly from you.”
“He does, does he?” said the priest, smiling. “Faith, M. Buhot has a
good memory for his friend's characteristics. No, M. Greig, if they
put this comfortable carcase to the rack itself. And was that all
thy concern? Well, as I was saying--let us speak low lest some one be
listening--this Father Fleuriau-”
Again I stopped him.
“You put me into a hard position, Father Hamilton,” I said. “My
freedom--my life, perhaps--depends on whether I can tell them your
secret or not, and here you throw it in my face.”
“And why not?” he asked, simply. “I merely wish to show myself largely
the creature of circumstances, and so secure a decent Scot's most
favourable opinion of me before the end.”
“But I might be tempted to betray you.”
The old eagle looked again out at his eyes. He gently slapped my
cheek with a curious touch of fondness almost womanly, and gave a low,
contented laugh.
“_Farceur!_” he said. “As if I did not know my Don Dolorous, my merry
Andrew's nephew!” His confidence hugely moved me, and, lest he should
think I feared to trust myself with his secrets, I listened to the
remainder of his story, which I shall not here set down, as it bears but
slightly on my own narrative, and may even yet be revealed only at cost
of great distress among good families, not only on the Continent but in
London itself.
When he had done, he thanked me for listening so attentively to a matter
that was so much on his mind that it gave him relief to share it with
some one. “And not only for that, M. Greig,” said he, “are my thanks
due, for you saved the life that might have been the prince's instead
of my old gossip, Buhot's. To take the bullet out of my pistol was
the device your uncle himself would have followed in the like
circumstances.”
“But I did not do that!” I protested.
He looked incredulous.
“Buhot said as much,” said he; “he let it out unwittingly that I had had
my claws clipped by my own household.”
“Then assuredly not by me, Father Hamilton.”
“So!” said he, half incredulous, and a look of speculation came upon his
countenance.