PHILOSOPHY IN A FELON'S CELL
It seemed for a while as if we were fated to lie forgotten in Bicêtre
till the crack of doom; not that we were many days there when all was
done, but that in our natural hourly expectation at first of being
called forth for trial the hours passed so sluggishly that Time
seemed finally to sleep, and a week, to our fancy--to mine at all
events--seemed a month at the most modest computation.
I should have lost my reason but for the company of the priest, who, for
considerations best known to others and to me monstrously inadequate,
was permitted all the time to share my cell. In his singular society
there was a recreation that kept me from too feverishly brooding on my
wrongs, and his character every day presented fresh features of interest
and admiration. He had become quite cheerful again, and as content in
the confine of his cell as he had been when the glass coach was jolting
over the early stages of what had been intended for a gay procession
round the courts of Europe. Once more he affected the Roman manner that
was due to his devotion to Shakespeare and L'Estrange's Seneca, and
“Clarissa Harlowe,” a knowledge of which, next to the Scriptures, he
counted the first essentials for a polite education. I protest he grew
fatter every day, and for ease his corpulence was at last saved the
restraint of buttons, which was an indolent indulgence so much to
his liking that of itself it would have reconciled him to spend the
remainder of his time in prison.
“_Tiens!_ Paul,” he would say, “here's an old fool has blundered through
the greater part of his life without guessing till now how easy a thing
content is to come by. Why, 'tis no more than a loose waistcoat and a
chemise unbuttoned at the neck. I dared not be happy thus in Dixmunde,
where the folks were plaguily particular that their priest should be
point-devise, as if mortal man had time to tend his soul and keep a
constant eye on the lace of his fall.”
And he would stretch himself--a very mountain of sloth--in his chair.
With me 'twas different. Even in a gaol I felt sure a day begun untidily
was a day ill-done by. If I had no engagements with the fastidious
fashionable world I had engagements with myself; moreover, I shared my
father's sentiment, that a good day's darg of work with any thinking in
it was never done in a pair of slippers down at the heel. Thus I was
as peijink (as we say) in Bicêtre as I would have been at large in the
genteel world.
“Not,” he would admit, “but that I love to see thee in a decent habit,
and so constant plucking at thy hose, for I have been young myself, and
had some right foppish follies, too. But now, my good man Dandiprat, my
_petit-maître_, I am old--oh, so old!--and know so much of wisdom, and
have seen such a confusion of matters, that I count comfort the greatest
of blessings. The devil fly away with buttons and laces! say I, that
have been parish priest of Dixmunde--and happily have not killed a man
nor harmed a flea, though like enough to get killed myself.”
The weather was genial, yet he sat constantly hugging the fire, and I
at the window, which happily gave a prospect of the yard between our
building and that of Galbanon. I would be looking out there, and
perhaps pining for freedom, while he went prating on upon the scurviest
philosophy surely ever man gave air to.
[Illustration: 226]
“Behold, my scrivener, how little man wants for happiness! My constant
fear in Dixmunde was that I would become so useless for all but eating
and sleeping, when I was old, that no one would guarantee me either;
poverty took that place at my table the skull took among the Romans--the
thought on't kept me in a perpetual apprehension. _Nom de chien!_ and
this was what I feared--this, a hard lodging, coarse viands, and sour
wine! What was the fellow's name?--Demetrius, upon the taking of Megara,
asked Monsieur Un-tel the Philosopher what he had lost. 'Nothing at
all,' said he, 'for I have all that I could call my own about me,' and
yet 'twas no more than the skin he stood in. A cell in Bicêtre would
have been paradise to such a gallant fellow. Oh, Paul, I fear thou
may'st be ungrateful--I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining
for freedom,” he went prating on, “to this good Buhot, who has given us
such a fine lodging, and saved us the care of providing for ourselves.”
“'Tis all very well, father,” I said, leaning on the sill of the window,
and looking at a gang of prisoners being removed from one part of
Galbanon to another--“'tis all very well, but I mind a priest that
thought jaunting round the country in a chariot the pinnacle of bliss.
And that was no further gone than a fortnight ago.”
“Bah!” said he, and stretched his fat fingers to the fire; “he that
cannot live happily anywhere will live happily nowhere at all. What
avails travel, if Care waits like a hostler to unyoke the horses at
every stage? I tell thee, my boy, I never know what a fine fellow
is Father Hamilton till I have him by himself at a fireside; 'tis by
firesides all the wisest notions come to one.”
“I wish there came a better dinner than to-day's,” said I, for we had
agreed an hour ago that smoked soup was not very palatable.
“La! la! la! there goes Sir Gourmet!” cried his reverence. “Have I
infected this poor Scot that ate naught but oats ere he saw France, with
mine own fever for fine feeding from which, praise _le bon Dieu!_ I have
recovered? 'Tis a brutal entertainment, and unworthy of man, to place
his felicity in the service of his senses. I maintain that even smoked
soup is pleasant enough on the palate of a man with an easy conscience,
and a mind purged of vulgar cares.”
“And you can be happy here, Father Hamilton?”
I asked, astonished at such sentiments from a man before so ill to
please.
He heaved like a mountain in travail, and brought forth a peal of
laughter out of all keeping with our melancholy situation. “Happy!” said
he, “I have never been happy for twenty years till Buhot clapped claw
upon my wrist. Thou may'st have seen a sort of mask of happiness, a
false face of jollity in Dunkerque parlours, and heard a well-simulated
laughter now and then as we drank by wayside inns, but may I be called
coxcomb if the miserable wretch who playacted then was half so light of
heart as this that sits here at ease, and has only one regret--that he
should have dragged Andrew Greig's nephew into trouble with him. What
man can be perfectly happy that runs the risk of disappointment--which
is the case of every man that fears or hopes for anything? Here am I,
too old for the flame of love or the ardour of ambition; all that knew
me and understood me best and liked me most are dead long since. I have
a state palace prepared for me free; a domestic in livery to serve my
meals; parishioners do not vex me with their trifling little hackneyed
sins, and my conclusion seems like to come some morning after an omelet
and a glass of wine.”
I could not withhold a shudder.
“But to die that way, Father!” I said.
“_C'est égal!_” said he, and crossed himself. “We must all die somehow,
and I had ever a dread of a stone. Come, come, M. Croque-mort, enough
of thy confounded dolours! I'll be hanged if thou did'st not steal
these shoes, and art after all but an impersonator of a Greig. The lusty
spirit thou call'st thine uncle would have used his teeth ere now to
gnaw his way through the walls of Bicêtre, and here thou must stop to
converse cursedly on death to the fatted ox that smells the blood of the
abattoir--oh lad, give's thy snuff-box, sawdust again!”
Thus by the hour went on the poor wretch, resigned most obviously to
whatever was in store for him, not so much from a native courage, I
fear, as from a plethora of flesh that smothered every instinct of
self-preservation. As for me I kept up hope for three days that Buhot
would surely come to test my constancy again, and when that seemed
unlikely, when day after day brought the same routine, the same cell
with Hamilton, the same brief exercise in the yard, the same vulgar
struggle at the _gamelle_ in the _salle d'épreuve_--I could have
welcomed Galbanon itself as a change, even if it meant all the
horror that had been associated with it by Buhot and my friend the
sous-officer.
Galbanon! I hope it has long been levelled with the dust, and even then
I know the ghosts of those there tortured in their lives will habitate
the same in whirling eddies, for a constant cry for generations has
gone up to heaven from that foul spot. It must have been a devilish
ingenuity, an invention of all the impish courts below, that placed me
at a window where Galbanon faced me every hour of the day or night, its
horror all revealed. I have seen in the pool of Earn in autumn weather,
when the river was in spate, dead leaves and broken branches borne down
dizzily upon the water to toss madly in the linn at the foot of the
fall; no less helpless, no less seared by sin and sorrow, or broken by
the storms of circumstance, were the wretches that came in droves to
Galbanon. The stream of crime or tyranny bore them down (some from very
high places), cast them into this boiling pool, and there they eddied in
a circle of degraded tasks from which it seemed the fate of many of them
never to escape, though their luckier fellows went in twos or threes
every other day in a cart to their doom appointed.
Be sure it was not pleasant each day for me to hear the hiss of the lash
and the moans of the bastinadoed wretch, to see the blood spurt, and
witness the anguish of the men who dragged enormous bilboes on their
galled ankles.
At last I felt I could stand it no longer, and one day intimated to
Father Hamilton that I was determined on an escape.
“Good lad!” he cried, his eye brightening. “The most sensible thing thou
hast said in twenty-four hours. 'Twill be a recreation for myself to
help,” and he buttoned his waistcoat.
“We can surely devise some means of breaking out if----”
“We!” he repeated, shaking his head. “No, no, Paul, thou hast too risky
a task before thee to burden thyself with behemoth. Shalt escape by
thyself and a blessing with thee, but as for Father Hamilton he knows
when he is well-off, and he shall not stir a step out of Buhot's
charming and commodious inn until the bill is presented.”
In vain I protested that I should not dream of leaving him there while
I took flight; he would listen to none of my reasoning, and for that day
at least I abandoned the project.
Next day Buhot helped me to a different conclusion, for I was summoned
before him.
“Well, Monsieur,” he said, “is it that we have here a more discerning
young gentleman than I had the honour to meet last time?”
“Just the very same, M. Buhot,” said I bluntly. He chewed the stump of
his pen and shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, come, M. Greig,” he went on, “this is a _bêtise_ of the most
ridiculous. We have given you every opportunity of convincing yourself
whether this Hamilton is a good man or a bad one, whether he is the tool
of others or himself a genius of mischief.”
“The tool of others, certainly, that much I am prepared to tell you, but
that you know already. And certainly no genius of mischief himself; man!
he has not got the energy to kick a dog.”
“And--and--” said Buhot softly, fancying he had me in the key of
revelation.
“And that's all, M. Buhot,” said I, with a carriage he could not
mistake.
He shrugged his shoulders again, wrote something in a book on the desk
before him with great deliberation and then asked me how I liked my
quarters in Bicêtre.
“Tolerably well,” I said. “I've been in better, but I might be in waur.”
He laughed a little at the Scotticism that seemed to recall
something--perhaps a pleasantry of my uncle's--to him, and then said
he, “I'm sorry they cannot be yours very much longer, M. Greig. We
calculated that a week or two of this priest's company would have been
enough to inspire a distaste and secure his confession, but apparently
we were mistaken. You shall be taken to other quarters on Saturday.”
“I hope, M. Buhot,” said I, “they are to be no worse than those I occupy
now.”
His face reddened a little at this--I felt always there was some vein of
special kindness to me in this man's nature--and he said hesitatingly,
“Well, the truth is, 'tis Galbanon.”
“Before a trial?” I asked, incredulous.
“The trial will come in good time,” he said, rising to conclude the
parley, and he turned his back on me as I was conducted out of the
room and back to the cell, where Father Hamilton waited with unwonted
agitation for my tidings.
“Well, lad,” he cried, whenever we were alone, “what stirs? I warrant
they have not a jot of evidence against thee,” but in a second he saw
from my face the news was not so happy, and his own face fell.
“We are to be separated on Saturday,” I told him.
Tears came to his eyes at that--a most feeling old rogue!
“And where is't for thee, Paul?” he asked.
“Where is't for yourself ought to be of more importance to you, Father
Hamilton.”
“No, no,” he cried, “it matters little about me, but surely for you it
cannot be Galbanon?”
“Indeed, and it is no less.”
“Then, Paul,” he said firmly, “we must break out, and that without loss
of time.”
“Is it in the plural this time?” I asked him.
He affected an indifference, but at the last consented to share the
whole of the enterprise.