Consciousness returned very slowly, very painfully.
It was night when last Marguerite had clearly known what was going on
around her; it was daylight before she realized that she still lived,
that she still knew and suffered.
Her head ached intolerably: that was the first conscious sensation which
came to her; then she vaguely perceived a pale ray of sunshine, very
hazy and narrow, which came from somewhere in front of her and struck
her in the face. She kept her eyes tightly shut, for that filmy light
caused her an increase of pain.
She seemed to be lying on her back, and her fingers wandering restlessly
around felt a hard paillasse, beneath their touch, then a rough pillow,
and her own cloak laid over her: thought had not yet returned, only the
sensation of great suffering and of infinite fatigue.
Anon she ventured to open her eyes, and gradually one or two objects
detached themselves from out the haze which still obscured her vision.
Firstly, the narrow aperture--scarcely a window--filled in with tiny
squares of coarse, unwashed glass, through which the rays of the morning
sun were making kindly efforts to penetrate, then the cloud of dust
illumined by those same rays, and made up--so it seemed to the poor
tired brain that strove to perceive--of myriads of abnormally large
molecules, over-abundant, and over-active, for they appeared to be
dancing a kind of wild saraband before Marguerite's aching eyes,
advancing and retreating, forming themselves into groups and taking on
funny shapes of weird masques and grotesque faces which grinned at the
unconscious figure lying helpless on the rough paillasse.
Through and beyond them Marguerite gradually became aware of three walls
of a narrow room, dank and grey, half covered with whitewash and half
with greenish mildew! Yes! and there, opposite to her and immediately
beneath that semblance of a window, was another paillasse, and on it
something dark, that moved.
The words: “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite ou la Mort!” stared out at her
from somewhere beyond those active molecules of dust, but she also saw
just above the other paillasse the vague outline of a dark crucifix.
It seemed a terrible effort to co-ordinate all these things, and to
try and realize what the room was, and what was the meaning of the
paillasse, the narrow window and the stained walls, too much altogether
for the aching head to take in save very slowly, very gradually.
Marguerite was content to wait and to let memory creep back as
reluctantly as it would.
“Do you think, my child, you could drink a little of this now?”
It was a gentle, rather tremulous voice which struck upon her ear.
She opened her eyes, and noticed that the dark something which had
previously been on the opposite paillasse was no longer there, and
that there appeared to be a presence close to her only vaguely defined,
someone kindly and tender who had spoken to her in French, with that
soft sing-song accent peculiar to the Normandy peasants, and who now
seemed to be pressing something cool and soothing to her lips.
“They gave me this for you!” continued the tremulous voice close to her
ear. “I think it would do you good, if you tried to take it.”
A hand and arm was thrust underneath the rough pillow, causing her to
raise her head a little. A glass was held to her lips and she drank.
The hand that held the glass was all wrinkled, brown and dry, and
trembled slightly, but the arm which supported her head was firm and
very kind.
“There! I am sure you feel better now. Close your eyes and try to go to
sleep.”
She did as she was bid, and was ready enough to close her eyes. It
seemed to her presently as if something had been interposed between her
aching head and that trying ray of white September sun.
Perhaps she slept peacefully for a little while after that, for though
her head was still very painful, her mouth and throat felt less parched
and dry. Through this sleep or semblance of sleep, she was conscious of
the same pleasant voice softly droning Paters and Aves close to her ear.
Thus she lay, during the greater part of the day. Not quite fully
conscious, not quite awake to the awful memories which anon would crowd
upon her thick and fast.
From time to time the same kind and trembling hands would with gentle
pressure force a little liquid food through her unwilling lips: some
warm soup, or anon a glass of milk. Beyond the pain in her head, she
was conscious of no physical ill; she felt at perfect peace, and an
extraordinary sense of quiet and repose seemed to pervade this small
room, with its narrow window through which the rays of the sun came
gradually in more golden splendour as the day drew towards noon, and
then they vanished altogether.
The drony voice close beside her acted as a soporific upon her nerves.
In the afternoon she fell into a real and beneficent sleep....
But after that, she woke to full consciousness!
Oh! the horror, the folly of it all!
It came back to her with all the inexorable force of an appalling
certainty.
She was a prisoner in the hands of those who long ago had sworn to bring
The Scarlet Pimpernel to death!
She! his wife, a hostage in their hands! her freedom and safety offered
to him as the price of his own! Here there was no question of dreams
or of nightmares: no illusions as to the ultimate intentions of her
husband's enemies. It was all a reality, and even now, before she had
the strength fully to grasp the whole nature of this horrible situation,
she knew that by her own act of mad and passionate impulse, she had
hopelessly jeopardized the life of the man she loved.
For with that sublime confidence in him begotten of her love, she never
for a moment doubted which of the two alternatives he would choose, when
once they were placed before him. He would sacrifice himself for her; he
would prefer to die a thousand deaths so long as they set her free.
For herself, her own sufferings, her danger or humiliation she cared
nothing! Nay! at this very moment she was conscious of a wild passionate
desire for death.... In this sudden onrush of memory and of thought she
wished with all her soul and heart and mind to die here suddenly, on
this hard paillasse, in this lonely and dark prison... so that she
should be out of the way once and for all... so that she should NOT be
the hostage to be bartered against his precious life and freedom.
He would suffer acutely, terribly at her loss, because he loved her
above everything else on earth, he would suffer in every fibre of his
passionate and ardent nature, but he would not then have to endure
the humiliations, the awful alternatives, the galling impotence and
miserable death, the relentless “either--or” which his enemies were even
now preparing for him.
And then came a revulsion of feeling. Marguerite's was essentially a
buoyant and active nature, a keen brain which worked and schemed and
planned, rather than one ready to accept the inevitable.
Hardly had these thoughts of despair and of death formulated themselves
in her mind, than with brilliant swiftness, a new train of ideas began
to take root.
What if matters were not so hopeless after all?
Already her mind had flown instinctively to thoughts of escape. Had she
the right to despair? She, the wife and intimate companion of the man
who had astonished the world with his daring, his prowess, his amazing
good luck, she to imagine for a moment that in this all-supreme moment
of adventurous life the Scarlet Pimpernel would fail!
Was not English society peopled with men, women and children whom his
ingenuity had rescued from plights quite as seemingly hopeless as her
own, and would not all the resources of that inventive brain be brought
to bear upon this rescue which touched him nearer and more deeply than
any which he had attempted hitherto.
Now Marguerite was chiding herself for her doubts and for her fears.
Already she remembered that amongst the crowd on the landing stage
she had perceived a figure--unusually tall--following in the wake of
Chauvelin and his companions. Awakened hope had already assured her that
she had not been mistaken, that Percy, contrary to her own surmises,
had reached Boulogne last night: he always acted so differently to what
anyone might expect, that it was quite possible that he had crossed over
in the packet-boat after all unbeknown to Marguerite as well as to his
enemies.
Oh yes! the more she thought about it all, the more sure was she that
Percy was already in Boulogne, and that he knew of her capture and her
danger.
What right had she to doubt even for a moment that he would know how to
reach her, how--when the time came--to save himself and her?
A warm glow began to fill her veins, she felt excited and alert,
absolutely unconscious now of pain or fatigue, in this radiant joy of
reawakened hope.
She raised herself slightly, leaning on her elbow: she was still very
weak and the slight movement had made her giddy, but soon she would
be strong and well... she must be strong and well and ready to do his
bidding when the time for escape would have come.
“Ah! you are better, my child, I see...” said that quaint, tremulous
voice again, with its soft sing-song accent, “but you must not be so
venturesome, you know. The physician said that you had received a cruel
blow. The brain has been rudely shaken... and you must lie quite still
all to-day, or your poor little head will begin to ache again.”
Marguerite turned to look at the speaker, and in spite of her
excitement, of her sorrow and of her anxieties, she could not help
smiling at the whimsical little figure which sat opposite to her, on a
very rickety chair, solemnly striving with slow and measured movement
of hand and arm, and a large supply of breath, to get up a polish on the
worn-out surface of an ancient pair of buckled shoes.
The figure was slender and almost wizened, the thin shoulders round
with an habitual stoop, the lean shanks were encased in a pair of
much-darned, coarse black stockings. It was the figure of an old man,
with a gentle, clear-cut face furrowed by a forest of wrinkles, and
surmounted by scanty white locks above a smooth forehead which looked
yellow and polished like an ancient piece of ivory.
He had looked across at Marguerite as he spoke, and a pair of innately
kind and mild blue eyes were fixed with tender reproach upon her.
Marguerite thought that she had never seen quite so much goodness and
simple-heartedness portrayed on any face before. It literally beamed out
of those pale blue eyes, which seemed quite full of unshed tears.
The old man wore a tattered garment, a miracle of shining cleanliness,
which had once been a soutane of smooth black cloth, but was now a
mass of patches and threadbare at shoulders and knees. He seemed deeply
intent in the task of polishing his shoes, and having delivered himself
of his little admonition, he very solemnly and earnestly resumed his
work.
Marguerite's first and most natural instinct had, of course, been one of
dislike and mistrust of anyone who appeared to be in some way on guard
over her. But when she took in every detail of the quaint figure of the
old man, his scrupulous tidiness of apparel, the resigned stoop of his
shoulders, and met in full the gaze of those moist eyes, she felt that
the whole aspect of the man, as he sat there polishing his shoes, was
infinitely pathetic and, in its simplicity, commanding of respect.
“Who are you?” asked Lady Blakeney at last, for the old man after
looking at her with a kind of appealing wonder, seemed to be waiting for
her to speak.
“A priest of the good God, my dear child,” replied the old man with a
deep sigh and a shake of his scanty locks, “who is not allowed to serve
his divine Master any longer. A poor old fellow, very harmless and very
helpless, who had been set here to watch over you.
“You must not look upon me as a jailer because of what I say, my child,”
he added with a quaint air of deference and apology. “I am very old and
very small, and only take up a very little room. I can make myself very
scarce; you shall hardly know that I am here. They forced me to it much
against my will.... But they are strong and I am weak, how could I deny
them since they put me here. After all,” he concluded naively, “perhaps
it is the will of le bon Dieu, and He knows best, my child, He knows
best.”
The shoes evidently refused to respond any further to the old man's
efforts at polishing them. He contemplated them now, with a whimsical
look of regret on his furrowed face, then set them down on the floor and
slipped his stockinged feet into them.
Marguerite was silently watching him, still leaning on her elbow.
Evidently her brain was still numb and fatigued, for she did not seem
able to grasp all that the old man said. She smiled to herself too as
she watched him. How could she look upon him as a jailer? He did not
seem at all like a Jacobin or a Terrorist, there was nothing of the
dissatisfied democrat, of the snarling anarchist ready to lend his hand
to any act of ferocity directed against a so-called aristocrat, about
this pathetic little figure in the ragged soutane and worn shoes.
He seemed singularly bashful too and ill at ease, and loath to meet
Marguerite's great, ardent eyes, which were fixed questioningly upon
him.
“You must forgive me, my daughter,” he said shyly, “for concluding my
toilet before you. I had hoped to be quite ready before you woke, but I
had some trouble with my shoes; except for a little water and soap the
prison authorities will not provide us poor captives with any means of
cleanliness and tidiness, and le bon Dieu does love a tidy body as well
as a clean soul.
“But there, there,” he added fussily, “I must not continue to gossip
like this. You would like to get up, I know, and refresh your face and
hands with a little water. Oh! you will see how well I have thought it
out. I need not interfere with you at all, and when you make your little
bit of toilette, you will feel quite alone... just as if the old man was
not there.”
He began busying himself about the room, dragging the rickety,
rush-bottomed chairs forward. There were four of these in the room, and
he began forming a kind of bulwark with them, placing two side by side,
then piling the two others up above.
“You will see, my child, you will see!” he kept repeating at intervals
as the work of construction progressed. It was no easy matter, for
he was of low stature, and his hands were unsteady from apparently
uncontrollable nervousness.
Marguerite, leaning slightly forward, her chin resting in her hand, was
too puzzled and anxious to grasp the humour of this comical situation.
She certainly did not understand. This old man had in some sort of way,
and for a hitherto unexplained reason, been set as a guard over her; it
was not an unusual device on the part of the inhuman wretches who now
ruled France, to add to the miseries and terrors of captivity, where a
woman of refinement was concerned, the galling outrage of never leaving
her alone for a moment.
That peculiar form of mental torture, surely the invention of brains
rendered mad by their own ferocious cruelty, was even now being
inflicted on the hapless, dethroned Queen of France. Marguerite, in
far-off England, had shuddered when she heard of it, and in her heart
had prayed, as indeed every pure-minded woman did then, that proud,
unfortunate Marie Antoinette might soon find release from such torments
in death.
There was evidently some similar intention with regard to Marguerite
herself in the minds of those who now held her prisoner. But this old
man seemed so feeble and so helpless, his very delicacy of thought as
he built up a screen to divide the squalid room in two, proved him to be
singularly inefficient for the task of a watchful jailer.
When the four chairs appeared fairly steady, and in comparatively little
danger of toppling, he dragged the paillasse forward and propped it
up against the chairs. Finally he drew the table along, which held the
cracked ewer and basin, and placed it against this improvised partition:
then he surveyed the whole construction with evident gratification and
delight.
“There now!” he said, turning a face beaming with satisfaction to
Marguerite, “I can continue my prayers on the other side of the
fortress. Oh! it is quite safe...” he added, as with a fearsome hand he
touched his engineering feat with gingerly pride, “and you will be quite
private.... Try and forget that the old abbe is in the room.... He does
not count... really he does not count... he has ceased to be of any
moment these many months now that Saint Joseph is closed and he may no
longer say Mass.”
He was obviously prattling on in order to hide his nervous bashfulness.
He ensconced himself behind his own finely constructed bulwark, drew a
breviary from his pocket and having found a narrow ledge on one of
the chairs, on which he could sit, without much danger of bringing the
elaborate screen onto the top of his head, he soon became absorbed in
his orisons.
Marguerite watched him for a little while longer: he was evidently
endeavouring to make her think that he had become oblivious of her
presence, and his transparent little manoeuvers amused and puzzled her
not a little.
He looked so comical with his fussy and shy ways, yet withal so gentle
and so kindly that she felt completely reassured and quite calm.
She tried to raise herself still further and found the process
astonishingly easy. Her limbs still ached and the violent, intermittent
pain in her head certainly made her feel sick and giddy at times, but
otherwise she was not ill. She sat up on the paillasse, then put
her feet to the ground and presently walked up to the improvised
dressing-room and bathed her face and hands. The rest had done her good,
and she felt quite capable of co-ordinating her thoughts, of moving
about without too much pain, and of preparing herself both mentally and
physically for the grave events which she knew must be imminent.
While she busied herself with her toilet her thoughts dwelt on the one
all-absorbing theme: Percy was in Boulogne, he knew that she was here,
in prison, he would reach her without fail, in fact he might communicate
with her at any moment now, and had without a doubt already evolved a
plan of escape for her, more daring and ingenious than any which he had
conceived hitherto; therefore, she must be ready, and prepared for any
eventuality, she must be strong and eager, in no way despondent, for if
he were here, would he not chide her for her want of faith?
By the time she had smoothed her hair and tidied her dress, Marguerite
caught herself singing quite cheerfully to herself.
So full of buoyant hope was she.