A RIMEY NIGHT ON ROOF-TOPS, AND A NEW USE FOR AN OLD KIRK BELL
I fastened the rope about a chimney-head with some misgivings that by
the width and breadth of the same I was reducing our chance of ever
getting down to the lower building, as the knotted sheets from the
outset had been dubious measure for the thirty feet of which my
sous-officer had given the estimate. But I said never a word to the
priest of my fears on that score, and determined for once to let what
was left of honesty go before well-fattened age and test the matter
first myself. If the cord was too brief for its purpose, or (what was
just as likely) on the frail side, I could pull myself back in the one
case as the priest was certainly unfit to do, and in the other my weight
would put less strain upon it than that of Father Hamilton.
I can hear him yet in my imagination after forty years, as he clung
to the ridge of the roof like a seal on a rock, chittering in the cold
night wind, enviously eyeing some fires that blazed in another yard and
groaning melancholiously.
“A garden,” said he, “and six beehives--no, 'faith! 'twas seven last
summer, and a roomful of books. Oh, Paul, Paul! Now I know how God cast
out Satan. He took him from his warm fireside, and his books before they
were all read, and his pantoufles, and set him straddling upon a frozen
house-top to ponder through eternal night upon the happy past. Alas,
poor being! How could he know what joys were in the simplicity of a room
of books half-read and a pair of warm old slippers?”
He was fair rambling in his fears, my poor priest, and I declare
scarcely knew the half of what he uttered, indeed he spoke out so loudly
that I had to check him lest he should attract attention from below.
“Father Hamilton,” said I, when my cord was fastened, “with your
permission I'll try it first. I want to make it sure that my seamanship
on the sloop _Sarah_, of Ayr, has not deserted me to the extent that I
cannot come down a rope without a ratline or tie a bowling knot.”
“Certainly, Paul, certainly,” said he, quite eagerly, so that I was
tempted for a second to think he gladly postponed his own descent from
sheer terror.
I threw over the free end of the cord and crouched upon the beak of the
gable to lower myself.
“Well, Paul,” said his reverence in a broken voice. “Let us say
'good-bye' in case aught should happen ere we are on the same level
again.”
“Oh!” said I, impatient, “that's the true _croque-mort_ spirit indeed!
Why, Father, it isn't--it isn't--” I was going to say it was not a
gallows I was venturing on, but the word stuck in my throat, for a
certain thought that sprung to me of how nearly in my own case it had
been to the very gallows, and his reverence doubtless saw some delicacy,
for he came promptly to my help.
“Not a priest's promise--made to be broken, you would say, good Paul,”
said he. “I promised the merriest of jaunts over Europe in a coach,
and here my scrivener is hanging in the reins! Pardon, dear Scotland,
_milles pardons_ and good-bye and good luck.” And at that he made to
embrace me.
“Here's a French ceremony just about nothing at all,” I thought, and
began my descent. The priest lay on his stomach upon the ridge. As I
sank, with my eyes turned upwards, I could see his hair blown by the
wind against a little patch of stars, that was the only break in the
Ethiopia of the sky. He seemed to follow my progress breathlessly,
and when I gained the other roof and shook the cord to tell him so he
responded by a faint clapping of his hands.
“Art all right, lad?” he whispered down to me, and I bade him follow.
“Good-night, Paul, good-bye, and God bless you!” he whispered. “Get out
of this as quick as you can; 'tis more than behemoth could do in a month
of dark nights, and so I cut my share of the adventure. One will do't
when two (and one of them a hogshead) will die in trying to do't.”
Here was a pretty pickle! The man's ridiculous regard for my safety
outweighed his natural inclinations, though his prospects in the prison
of Bicêtre were blacker than my own, having nothing less dreadful than
an execution at the end of them. He had been merely humouring me so
far--and such a brave humouring in one whose flesh was in a quaking of
alarms all the time he slid along the roof!
“Are you not coming?” I whispered.
“On the contrary, I'm going, dear Paul,” said he with a pretence at
levity. “Going back to my comfortable cell and my uniformed servant and
M. Buhot, the charmingest of hostellers, and I declare my feet are like
ice.”
“Then,” said I firmly, “I go back too. I'll be eternally cursed if I
give up my situation as scrivener at this point. I must e'en climb up
again.” And with that I prepared to start the ascent.
“Stop! stop!” said he without a second's pause, “stop where you are and
I'll go down. Though 'tis the most stupendous folly,” he added with a
sigh, and in a moment later I saw his vast bulk laboriously heaving
over the side of the roof. Fortunately the knots in the cord where
the fragments of sheet and blanket were joined made his task not so
difficult as it had otherwise been, and almost as speedily as I had done
it myself he reached the roof of the lower building, though in such a
state he quivered like a jelly, and was dumb with fear or with exertion
when the thing was done.
“Ah!” he said at last, when he had recovered himself. “Art a fool to be
so particular about an old carcase accursed of easy humours and accused
of regicide. Take another thought on't, Paul. What have you to do with
this wretch of a priest that brought about the whole trouble in your
ignorance? And think of Galbanon!”
“Think of the devil! Father Hamilton,” I snapped at him, “every minute
we waste havering away here adds to the chances against any of us
getting free, and I am sure that is not your desire. The long and the
short of it is that I'll not stir a step out of Bicêtre--no, not if the
doors themselves were open--unless you consent to come with me.”
“_Ventre Dieu!_” said he, “'tis just such a mulish folly as I might have
looked for from the nephew of Andrew Greig. But lead on, good imbecile,
lead on, and blame not poor Father Hamilton if the thing ends in a
fiasco!”
We now crawled along a roof no whit more easily traversed than that
we had already commanded. Again and again I had to stop to permit my
companion to come up on me, for the pitch of the tiles was steep, and
he in a peril from his own lubricity, and it was necessary even to put
a hand under his arm at times when he suffered a vertigo through seeing
the lights in the yard deep down as points of flame.
“Egad! boy,” he said, and his perspiring hand clutching mine at one of
our pauses, “I thrill at the very entrails. I'd liefer have my nose in
the sawdust any day than thrash through thin air on to a paving-stone.”
“A minute or two more and we are there,” I answered him.
“Where?” said he, starting; “in purgatory?”
“Look up, man!” I told him. “There's a window beaming ten yards off.”
And again I pushed on.
In very truth there was no window, though I prayed as fervently for one
as it had been a glimpse of paradise, but I was bound to cozen the
old man into effort for his own life and for mine. What I had from the
higher building taken for the glow of skylights had been really the
light of windows on the top flat of the other prison block, and its
roof was wholly unbroken. At least I had made up my mind to that with
a despair benumbing when I touched wood. My fingers went over it in the
dark with frantic eagerness. It was a trap such as we had come out of at
the other block, but it was shut. Before the priest could come up to me
and suffer the fresh horror of disappointment I put my weight upon it,
and had the good fortune to throw it in. The flap fell with a shriek of
hinges and showed gaping darkness. We stretched upon the tiles as close
as limpets and as silent. Nothing stirred within.
“A garden,” said he in a little, “as sweet as ever bean grew in, with
the rarest plum-tree; and now I am so cold.”
“I could be doing with some of your complaint,” said I; “as for me, I'm
on fire. Please heaven, you'll be back in the garden again.”
I lowered myself within, followed by the priest, and found we were
upon the rafters. A good bit off there was a beam of light that led us,
groping, and in an imminent danger of going through the plaster, to
an air-hole over a little gallery whose floor was within stretch as I
lowered myself again.
Father Hamilton squeezed after me; we both looked over the edge of the
gallery, and found it was a chapel we were in!
“_Sacré nom!_” said the priest and crossed himself, with a genuflexion
to the side of the altar.
“Oh, Lord! Paul,” he said, whispering, “if 'twere the Middle Ages, and
this were indeed a sanctuary, how happy was a poor undeserving son of
Mother Church! Even Dagobert's hounds drew back from the stag in St.
Denys.”
It was a mean interior, as befitted the worship of the _misérables_ who
at times would meet there. A solemn quiet held the place, that seemed
wholly deserted; the dim light that had shown through the air-hole and
guided us came from some candles dripping before a shrine.
“Heaven help us!” said the priest. “I know just such another.”
There was nobody in the church so far as we could observe from the
little gallery in which we found ourselves, but when we had gone down a
flight of steps into the body of the same, and made to cross towards the
door, we were suddenly confronted by a priest in a white cope. My heart
jumped to my mouth; I felt a prinkling in the roots of my hair, and
stopped dumb, with all my faculties basely deserted from me. Luckily
Father Hamilton kept his presence of mind. As he told me later, he
remembered of a sudden the Latin proverb that in battles the eye is
first overcome, and he fixed the man in the stole with a glance that was
bold and disconcerting. As it happened, however, the other priest was
almost as blind as a bat, and saw but two civil worshippers in his
chapel. He did not even notice that it was a _soutane_; he passed
peeringly, with a bow to our inclinations, and it was almost
incredulous of our good fortune I darted out of the chapel into the
darkness of a courtyard of equal extent with that I had crossed on the
night of my first arrival at Bicêtre. At its distant end there were the
same flaming braziers with figures around them, and the same glitter of
arms.
Now this Bicêtre is set upon a hill and commands a prospect of the city
of Paris, of the Seine and its environs. For that reason we could see
to our right the innumerable lights of a great plain twinkling in the
darkness, and it seemed as if we had only to proceed in that direction
to secure freedom by the mere effort of walking. As we stood in the
shadow of the chapel, Father Hamilton eyed the distant prospect of the
lighted town with a singular rapture.
“Paris!” said he. “Oh, Dieu! and I thought never to clap an eye on't
again. Paris, my Paul! Behold the lights of it--_la ville lumière_ that
is so fine I could spend eternity in it. Hearts are there, lad, kind and
jocund-”
“And meditating a descent on unhappy Britain,” said I.
“Good neighbourly hearts, or I'm a gourd else,” he went on, unheeding my
interruption. “The stars in heaven are not so good, are no more notably
the expression of a glowing and fraternal spirit. There is laughter in
the streets of her.”
“Not at this hour, Father Hamilton,” said I, and the both of us always
whispering. “I've never seen the place by day nor put a foot in it,
but it will be droll indeed if there is laughter in its streets at two
o'clock in the morning.”
“Ah, Paul, shall we ever get there?” said he longingly. “We can but try,
anyway. I certainly did not come all this way, Father Hamilton, just to
look on the lowe of Paris.”
What had kept us shrinking in the shadow of the chapel wall had been
the sound of footsteps between us and the palisades that were to be
distinguished a great deal higher than I had expected, on our right.
On the other side of the rails was freedom, as well as Paris that so
greatly interested my companion, but the getting clear of them seemed
like to be a more difficult task than any we had yet overcome, and all
the more hazardous because the footsteps obviously suggested a
sentinel. Whether it was the rawness of the night that tempted him to
a relaxation, or whether he was not strictly on duty, I know not, but,
while we stood in the most wretched of quandaries, the man who was in
our path very soon ceased his perambulation along the palisades, and
went over to one of the distant fires, passing within a few yards of us
as we crouched in the darkness. When he had gone sufficiently out of the
way we ran for it. So plain were the lights of the valley, so flimsy a
thing had seemed to part us from the high-road there, that never a doubt
intruded on my mind that now we were as good as free, and when I came
to the rails I beat my head with my hands when the nature of our folly
dawned upon me.
“We may just go back,” I said to the priest in a stricken voice.
“_Comment?_” said he, wiping his brow and gloating on the spectacle of
the lighted town.
“Look,” I said, indicating the railings that were nearly three times my
own height, “there are no convenient trap-doors here.”
“But the cord--” said he simply.
“Exactly,” I said; “the cord's where we left it snugly tied with a
bowling knot to the chimney of our block, and I'm an ass.”
“Oh, poor Paul!” said the priest in a prostration at this divulgence of
our error. “I'm the millstone on your neck, for had I not parleyed at
the other end of the cord when you had descended, the necessity for it
would never have escaped your mind. I gave you fair warning, lad, 'twas
a quixotic imbecility to burden yourself with me. And are we really at
a stand? God! look at Paris. Had I not seen these lights I had not
cared for myself a straw, but, oh lord! lad, they are so pleasant and so
close! Why will the world sleep when two unhappy wretches die for want
of a little bit of hemp?”
“You are not to blame,” said I, “one rope was little use to us in any
case. But anyhow I do not desire to die of a little bit of hemp if I can
arrange it better.” And I began hurriedly to scour up and down the
palisade like a trapped mouse. It extended for about a hundred yards,
ending at one side against the walls of a gate-house or lodge; on the
other side it concluded at the wall of the chapel. It had no break in
all its expanse, and so there was nothing left for us to do but to go
back the way we had come, obliterate the signs of our attempt and find
our cells again. We went, be sure, with heavy hearts, again ventured
into the chapel, climbed the stairs, went through the ceiling, and
stopped a little among the rafters to rest his reverence who was finding
these manoeuvres too much for his weighty body. While he sat regaining
sufficient strength to resume his crawling on rimey tiles I made a
search of the loft we were in and found it extended to the gable end of
the chapel, but nothing more for my trouble beyond part of a hanging
chain that came through the roof and passed through the ceiling. I had
almost missed it in the darkness, and even when I touched it my first
thought was to leave it alone. But I took a second thought and tried the
lower end, which came up as I hauled, yard upon yard, until I had the
end of it, finished with a bell-ringer's hempen grip, in my hands. Here
was a discovery if bell-pulls had been made of rope throughout in
Bicêtre prison! But a chain with an end to a bell was not a thing to be
easily borrowed.
I went back to where Father Hamilton was seated on the rafters, and told
him my discovery.
“A bell,” said he. “Faith! I never liked them. Pestilent inventions of
the enemy, that suggested duties to be done and the fleeting hours. But
a bell-rope implies a belfry on the roof and a bell in it, and the
chain that may reach the ground within the building may reach the same
desirable place without the same.”
“That's very true,” said I, struck with the thing. And straight got
through the trap and out upon the roof again. Father Hamilton puffed
after me and in a little we came upon a structure like a dovecot at the
very gable-end. “The right time to harry a nest is at night,” said I,
“for then you get all that's in it.” And I started to pull up the chain
that was fastened to the bell.
I lowered behemoth with infinite exertion till he reached the ground
outside the prison grounds in safety, wrapped the clapper of the bell in
my waistcoat, and descended hand over hand after him.
We were on the side of a broad road that dipped down the hill into a
little village. Between us and the village street, across which hung a
swinging lamp, there mounted slowly a carriage with a pair of horses.
“Bernard!” I cried, running up to it, and found it was the Swiss in the
very article of waiting for us, and he speedily drove us into Paris.