THROUGH DARKNESS TO LIGHT
So dawned the morning of the twenty-seventh of July, the 9th Thermidor
in the new Calendar of the Revolution. A very hot, still day, with a
veiled sky dreaming of thunder. Dangeau had passed a very disturbed
night, for his fellow-prisoner was worse. The long unconsciousness
yielded at last, and slid through vague mutterings into a high delirium,
which tasked his utmost strength to control. Goyot was to come early,
since this development was not entirely unexpected; but the morning
passed, and still he did not appear. By two o'clock the patient was in a
stupour again, and visibly within an hour or two of the end. No skill
could avail him now.
Suddenly the door was thrown open, and Dangeau heard himself summoned.
"Your time at last," said Defarge, and he followed the man without a
word. In the corridor they met Goyot, his hair much rumpled, his eyes
bright and restless with excitement.
"You? Where are you going?" he panted.
"Where does one go nowadays?" returned Dangeau, with a slight shrug.
"No, no," exclaimed Goyot. "It's not possible. We had arranged--your
name was to be kept back."
"Bah," said Defarge, spitting on the ground. "You need not look at me
like that, Citizen. It is not my fault. You know that well enough.
Orders come, and must be obeyed. I 'm neither blind nor deaf. Things
are changing out there, I 'm told, but orders are orders, and a plain
man looks no further."
Goyot caught at Dangeau's arm.
"We'll save you yet," he said. "Robespierre is down. Accused this
morning in Convention. They 're all at his throat now. Keep a good
heart, my friend; his time has come at last."
"And mine," returned Dangeau.
"No, no,--I tell you there is hope. It is only a matter of hours."
"Just so."
Defarge interposed.
"Ciel, Citizens, are we to stand here all day? Citizen Goyot, your
patient is dying, and you had better see to him. This citizen and I
have an engagement,--yes, and a pressing one."
An hour later Dangeau passed in to take his trial. His predecessor's
case had taken a scant five minutes, so simple a matter had the death
penalty become.
Fouquier Tinville seated himself, his sharp features more like the fox's
mask than ever, only now it was the fox who hears the hounds so close
upon his heels that he dares not look behind to see how close they are.
Fear does not improve the temper, and he nodded maliciously at his
former colleague.
"Name," he rapped out, voice and eye alike vicious.
With smooth indifference Dangeau repeated his names, and added with a
touch of amusement:
"You know me and my names well enough, or did once, my good Tinville."
The thin lips lifted in a snarl.
"That, my friend, was when you were higher in the world than you are
now. Place of abode?"
Dangeau's gaze went past him. He shrugged his shoulders with a faintly
whimsical effect.
"Shall we say the edges of the world?" he suggested.
Fouquier Tinville spat on the floor and leaned over the table with a
yellow glitter in his eyes.
"How does it feel?" he sneered. "The edges of the world. Ma foi, how
does it feel to look over them into annihilation?"
Dangeau returned his look with composure.
"I imagine you may soon have an opportunity of judging," he observed.
At Tinville's right hand a man sat drumming on the table. Now he looked
up sharply, exhibiting a dead white face, where the lips hung loose, and
the eyes showed wildly bloodshot.
"But if one could know first," he said in a shaking voice. "When one is
so close and looks over, one should see more than others. I have asked
so many what they saw. I asked Danton. He said 'The void.' Do you
think it is that? As man to man now, Dangeau, do you think there is
anything beyond or not?"
Dangeau recognised him with a movement of half-contemptuous pity. It
was Duval, the actor who had taken to politics and drink, and sold his
soul for a bribe of Robespierre's.
Tinville plucked him down with a curse.
"Tiens, Duval, you grow too mad," he said angrily. "You and your beyond.
What should there be?"
"If there were,--Hell," muttered Duval, with shaking lips. Tinville
banged the table.
"Am I to have all the Salpetriere here?" he shouted. "Have n't we cut
off enough priests' heads yet? I tell you we have abolished Heaven, and
Purgatory, and Hell, and all the rest of those child's tales."
A murmur of applause ran round. Duval's hand went to his breast, and
drew out a flask. He drank furtively, and leaned back again.
Dangeau was moving away, but he turned for a moment, the old sparkle in
his eyes.
"My felicitations, Tinville," he observed with a casual air.
"On what?"
Dangeau smiled politely.
"The convenience for you of having abolished Hell! It is a masterstroke.
It only remains for me to wish you an early opportunity of verifying
your statements."
"Take him out," said Tinville, stamping his foot, and Dangeau went down
the steps, and into the long adjoining room where the prisoners waited
for the tumbrils. It was too much trouble now to take them back again
to prison, so the Justice Hall was itself the ante-chamber of the
guillotine. It was hot, and Dangeau felt the lassitude which succeeds a
strain. Of what use to bandy words with Fouquier Tinville, of what use
anything, since the last word lay with the strongest, and this hour was
the hour of his death? It is very difficult for a strong man, with his
youth still vigorous in every vein, to realise that for him hope and
fear, joy and pain, struggle and endurance, are all at an end, and that
the next step is that final one into the blind and unknown pathways of
the infinite.
He thought of Robespierre, out there in the tideway fighting for his
life against the inexorable waves of Fate. Even now the water crept salt
and sickly about his mouth. Well, if it drowned him, and swept France
clean again, what did it matter if the swirl of the tide swept Dangeau
from his foothold too?
Absorbed in thought, he took no note of his companions in misfortune.
There was a small crowd of them at the farther end of the room, a
gendarme or two stood gossiping by, and there was a harsh clipping sound
now and again, for the prisoners' hair was a perquisite of the
concierge's wife, and it was cut off here, before they went to the
scaffold.
The woman stood by to-day and watched it done. The perquisite was a
valuable one, and on the previous day she had been much annoyed by the
careless cutting which had ruined a magnificent head of auburn hair.
To-day she had noted that one of the women had a valuable crop, and she
was instant in her directions for its cutting. Presently she pushed
past Dangeau and lifted the lid of a basket which hung against the wall.
His glance followed her idly, and saw that the basket was piled high
with human hair. The woman muttered to herself as her eye rested on the
ruined auburn locks. Then she took to-day's spoil, tress by tress, from
her apron, knotting the hair roughly together, and dropping it into the
open basket. Dangeau watched her with a curious sick sensation. The
contrast between the woman's unsexed face and the pitiful relics she
handled affected him disagreeably, but beyond this he experienced a
strange, tingling sensation unlike anything in his recollection.
The auburn hair was hidden now by a bunch of gay black curls. A long,
straight, flaxen mass fell next, and then a thick waving tress, gold in
the light, and brown in the shade, catching the sun that crossed it for
a moment, as Aline's hair had always done.
He shuddered through all his frame, and turned away. Thank God, thank
God she was safe at Rancy! And with that a sudden movement parted the
crowd at the other side of the room, and he looked across and saw her.
He had heard of visions in the hour of death, but as he gazed, a cold
sweat broke upon his brow, and he knew it was she herself, Aline, his
wife, cast for death as he was cast. Her profile was towards him, cut
sharply against the blackened wall. Her face was lifted. Her eyes
dwelt on the patch of sky which an open window gave to view. How
changed, O God, how changed she was! How visibly upon the threshold.
The beauty had fallen away from her face, leaving it a mere frail mask,
but out of her eyes looked a spirit serenely touched with immortality.
It is the look worn only by those who are about to die, and look past
death into the Presence.
It was a look that drove the blood from Dangeau's heart; a wave of
intolerable anger against Fate, of intolerable anguish for the wife so
found again, swept it back again. He moved to go to her, and as he did
so, saw a man approach and begin to pinion her arms, whilst the opening
of a door and the roll of wheels outside proclaimed the arrival of the
tumbrils. In the same moment Dangeau accosted the man, his last coin in
his hand.
"This for you if you will get me into the same cart as this lady, and
see, friend, let it be the last one."
What desperate relic of spent hope prompted his last words he hardly
knew, for after all what miracle could Goyot work? but at least he would
have a few more minutes to gaze at Aline before the darkness blotted out
her face.
Jean Legros, stupid and red-faced, stared a moment at the coin, then
pocketed it with a nod and grunt, and fell to tying Dangeau's arms. At
the touch of the cord an exclamation escaped him, and it was at this
moment that Aline, roused from her state of abstraction by something in
the voice behind her, turned her head and saw him.
They were so close together that her movement brought them into contact,
and at the touch, and as their eyes met, anguish was blotted out, and
for one wonderful instant they leaned together whilst each heart felt
the other's throb.
"My heart!" he said, and then before either could speak again they were
being pushed forward towards the open door.
The last tumbril waited; Dangeau was thrust into it, roughly enough, and
as he pitched forward he saw that Aline behind him had stumbled, and
would have fallen but for fat Jean's arm about her waist. She shrank a
little, and the fellow gave a stupid laugh.
"What, have you never had a man's arm round you before?" he said loudly,
and gave her a push that sent her swaying against Dangeau's shoulder.
The knot of idlers about the door broke into coarse jesting, and the
bound man's hands writhed against his bonds until the cords cut deep
into the flesh of his wrist, and the blood oozed against the twisted
rope.
Aline leaned nearer. She was conscious only that here was rest. Since
Mlle Ange died of the prison fever two days ago, she had not slept or
wept. She had thought perhaps she might die too, and be saved the
knife, but now nothing mattered any more. He was here; he loved her.
They would die together. God was very good.
His voice sounded from far, far away.
"I thought you safe; I thought you at Rancy, oh, God!" and she roused a
little to the agony in his tone, and looked at him with those clear eyes
of hers. Through all the dreamlike strangeness she felt still the
woman's impulse to comfort the beloved.
"God, who holds us in the hollow of His hand, knows that we are safe,"
she said, and at that he groaned "Safe!" so that she fought against the
weariness that made her long just to put her head upon his shoulder and
be at peace.
"There was too much between us," she said very low. "We could not be
together here, but we could not be happy apart. I do not think God will
take us away from one another. It is better like this, my dear!--it is
better."
Her voice fell on a low, contented note, and he felt her lean more
closely yet. An agony of rebellion rent his very soul. To love one
woman only, to renounce her, to find her after long months of pain, to
hear her say what he had hoped for only in his dreams, and then to know
that he must watch her die. What vision of Paradise could blot this
torture out? Powerless, powerless, powerless! In the height of his
strength, and not able even to strike down the brute whose coarse hand
touched her, and that other brute who would presently butcher her before
his very eyes.
Then, whilst his straining senses reeled, he felt a jolt and the cart
stopped. All about them surged an excited crowd.
There was a confused noise, women screamed. One high, clear voice
called out, "Murderers! Assassins!" and the crowd took up the cry with
angry insistence.
"See the old man! and the girl! ma foi, she has an angel's face. Is the
guillotine to eat up every one?"
The muttering rose to a growl, and the growl to a roar. To and fro
surged the growing crowd, the horses began to back, the car tilted.
Dangeau looked round him, his heart beating to suffocation, but Aline
appeared neither to know nor care what passed. For her the world was
empty save for they two, and for them the gate of Heaven stood wide.
She heard the song of the morning stars; she caught a glimpse of the
glory unutterable, unthinkable.
As the shouting grew, the driver of their cart cast anxious glances over
his shoulder. All at once he stood up, waving his red cap, calling,
gesticulating.
A cry went up, "The gendarmerie, Henriot! Henriot and the gendarmes!"
and the press was driven apart by the charge of armed horsemen. At
their head rode Henriot, just freed from prison, flushed with strong
drink, savage with his own impending doom.
The crowd scattered, but a man sprang for an instant to the wheels of
the cart, and whispered one swift sentence in Dangeau's ear:
"Robespierre falls; nothing can save him."
It was Goyot in a workman's blouse, and as he dropped off again Dangeau
made curt answer.
"In time for France, if not for me. Good-bye, my friend," and then
Goyot was gone and the lumbering wheels rolled on.
On the other side of the cart, the Abbe Delacroix prayed audibly, and
the smooth Latin made a familiar cadence, like running water heard in
childhood, and kept in some secret cell of the memory. Beside the
priest sat old General de Loiserolles, grey and soldierly, hugging the
thought that he had saved his boy; how entirely he was not to know.
Answering his son's name, leaving that son sleeping, he was giving him,
not the doubtful reprieve of a day, but all the years of his natural
life, since young De Loiserolles was amongst those set free by the death
of Robespierre.
As the cart stopped by the scaffold foot, he crossed himself, and
followed the Abbe to the axe, with a simple dignity that drew a strange
murmur from the crowd. For the heart of Paris was melting fast, and the
bloodshed was become a weariness. Prisoner after prisoner went up the
steps, and after each dull thud announced the fallen axe, that long
ominous "ah" of the crowd went up.
Dangeau and Aline were the last, and when they came to the steps he
moved to go before her, then cursed himself for a coward, and stood
aside to let her pass. She looked sweetly at him for a moment and
passed on, climbing with feet that never faltered. She did not note the
splashed and slippery boards, nor Sanson and his assistants all grimed
and daubed from their butcher's work, but her eye was caught by the sea
of upturned faces, all white, all eyeing her, and her head turned giddy.
Then some one touched her, held her, pulled away the kerchief at her
breast, and as the sun struck hot upon her uncovered shoulders, a
burning blush rose to her very brow, and the dream in which she had
walked was gone. Her brain reeled with the awakening, heaven clouded,
and the stars were lost. She was aware only of Sanson's hot hand at her
throat, and all those eyes astare to see her death.
The hand pushed her, her foot felt the slime of blood beneath it, she
saw the dripping knife, and all at once she felt herself naked to the
abyss. In Sanson's grip she turned wide terror-stricken eyes on
Dangeau, making a little, piteous, instinctive movement towards him, her
protector, and at that and his own impotence he felt each pulse in his
strong body thud like a hammered drum, and with one last violent effort
of the will he wrenched his eyelids down, lest he should look upon the
end. All through the journey there had been as it were a sword in his
heart, but at her look and gesture--her frightened look, her imploring
gesture--the sword was turned and still he was alive, alive to watch her
die. In those moments his soul left time and space, and hung a tortured
point, infinitely lonely, infinitely agonised, in some illimitable
region of never-ending pain. There was no past, no future, only
Eternity and his undying soul in anguish. The thousand years were as a
day, and the day as a thousand years. There was no beginning and no
end. O God, no end!
He did not hear the crowd stir a little, and drift hither and thither as
it was pressed upon from one side; he did not see the gendarmes press
against the drift, only to be driven back again, hustled, surrounded so
that their horses were too hampered to answer to the spur. Suddenly a
woman went down screaming under the horses' feet, and on the instant the
crowd flamed into fury before the agonised shriek had died away. In a
moment all was a seething, shouting, cursing welter of struggling
humanity. The noise of it reached even Dangeau's stunned brain, and he
said within himself, "It is over. She is dead," and opened his eyes.
The scaffold stood like an island in a sea grown suddenly wild with
tempest, and even as he looked, the human waves of it broke in a fierce
swirl which welled up and overflowed it on every side.
Sanson, his hand on the machinery, was whirled aside, jostled, pushed,
cursed. A fat woman, with bare, mottled arms, Heaven knows how she came
on the platform, dealt him a resounding smack on the face, and shrieked
voluble abuse, which was freely echoed.
Dangeau was surrounded, embraced, cheered, lifted off his feet, the cord
that bound his arms slashed through, and of a sudden Goyot had him round
the neck, and he found voice and clamoured Aline's name. The little
surgeon, after one glance at his wild eyes, pushed with him through the
surging press; they had to fight their way, and the place was slippery,
but they were through at last, through and down on their knees by the
woman who lay bound beneath the knife that Sanson's hand was freeing
when the tumult caught him. A dozen hands snatched her back again now,
the cords were cut, and Dangeau's shaking voice called in her ears,
called loudly, and in vain.
"Air, give her air and room," he cried, and some pushed forwards and
others back. The fat woman took the girl's head upon her lap, whilst
tears rained down her crimson cheeks.
"Eh, the poor pretty one," she sobbed hysterically, and pulled off her
own ample kerchief to cover Aline's thin bosom. Dangeau leaned over her
calling, calling still, unaware of Goyot at his side, and of Goyot's
voice saying insistently, "Tiens, my friend, that was a near shave, eh?"
"My wife," he muttered, "my wife--my wife is dead," and with that he
gazed round wildly, cried "No, no!" in a sharp voice, and fell to
calling her again.
Goyot knelt on the reeking boards, caught the frail wrist in that brown
skilful hand of his, shifted his grasp once, twice, a third time, shook
his head, and took another grip. "No, she 's alive," he said at last,
and had to say it more than once, for Dangeau took no heed.
"Aline! Aline! Aline!" he called in hoarse, trembling tones, and Goyot
dropped the girl's wrist and took him harshly by the shoulder.
"Rouse, man, rouse!" he cried. "She's alive. I tell you. I swear it.
For the love of Heaven, wake up, and help me to get her away. It's
touch and go for all of us these next few hours. At any moment Henriot
may have the upper hand, and half an hour would do our business, with
this pretty toy so handy." He grimaced at the red axe above them,
"Come, Dangeau, play the man!"
Dangeau stared at him.
"What am I to do?" he asked irritably.
Goyot pressed his shoulder with a firm hand.
"Lift your wife, and bring her along after me. Can you manage? She
looks light enough."
It was no easy matter to come through the excited crowd, but Dangeau's
height told, and with Aline's head against his shoulder he pushed
doggedly in the wake of Goyot, who made his way through the press with a
wonderful agility. Down the steps now, and inch by inch forward through
the jostling excited people. Up a by way at last, and then sharp to the
left where a carriage waited, and with that Goyot gave a gasp of relief,
and mopped a dripping brow.
"Eh, mon Dieu!" he said; "get in, get in!"
The carriage had mouldy straw on the floor, and the musty odour of it
mounted in the hot air.
Dangeau complained of it sharply.
"A devil of a smell, this, Goyot!" and the little surgeon fixed him with
keen, watchful eyes, as he nodded acquiescence.
What house they came to, or how they came to it, Dangeau knew no more
than his unconscious wife. She lay across his breast, white and still
as the dead, and when he laid her down on the bed in the upper room they
reached at last, she fell limply from his grasp, and he turned to Goyot
with a groan.
A soft, white-haired woman, dark-eyed and placid,--afterwards he knew
her for Goyot's housekeeper,--tried to turn him out of the room, but he
would go no farther than the window, where he sat staring, staring at
the houses across the way, watching them darken in the gathering dusk,
and mechanically counting the lights that presently sprang into view.
Behind him Marie Carlier came and went, at Goyot's shortly worded
orders, until at last Dangeau's straining ears caught the sound of a
faint, fluttering sigh. He turned then, the lights in the room dancing
before his burning eyes. For a moment the room seemed full of the small
tongues of flame, and then beyond them he saw his wife's eyes open
again, whilst her hand moved in feeble protest against the draught which
Goyot himself was holding to her lips.
Dangeau got up, stood a moment gazing, and then stumbled from the room
and broke into heavy sobbing. Presently Goyot brought him something in a
glass, which he drank obediently.
"Now you will sleep," said the little man in cheerful accents, and sleep
he did, and never stirred until the high sun struck across his face and
waked him to France's new day, and his.
For in that night fell Robespierre, cast down by the Convention he had
dominated so long. The dawn that found him shattered, praying for the
death he had vainly sought, awakened Paris from the long nightmare which
had been the marriage gift of her nuptials with this incubus.
At four o'clock on the afternoon of the 10th Thermidor, Robespierre's
head fell under the bloody axe of the Terror, and with his last gasp the
life went out of the greatest tyranny of modern times.
When Goyot came home with the news, Dangeau's face flamed, and he put
his hand before his eyes for a moment.
Then he went up to Aline. She had lain in a deep sleep for many, many
hours, but towards the afternoon she had wakened, taken food, and
dressed herself, all in a strange, mechanical fashion. She was neither
to be gainsaid nor persuaded, and Dangeau, reasonable once more, had
left her to the kind and unexciting ministrations of Marie Carlier. Now
he could keep away no longer; Goyot followed him and the housekeeper met
them by the door.
"She is strange, Monsieur," she whispered.
"She has not roused at all?" inquired Goyot rather anxiously.
Marie shook her head.
"She just sits and stares at the sky. God knows what she sees there,
poor lamb. If she would weep----"
"Just so, just so," Goyot nodded once or twice. Then he turned a
penetrating look on Dangeau.
"Ha, you are all right again. A near thing, my friend, eh? Small
wonder you were upset by it."
"Oh, I!" said Dangeau, with an impatient gesture. "It is my wife we are
speaking of."
"Yes, yes, of course--a little patience, my dear Dangeau--yes, your
wife. Marie here, without being scientific, is a sensible woman, and
it's a wonderful thing how common-sense comes to the same conclusions as
science. A fascinating subject that, but, as you are about to observe,
this is not the time to pursue it. What I mean to say is, that your wife
is suffering from severe shock; her brain is overcharged, and Marie is
quite right when she suggests that tears would relieve it. Now, my good
Dangeau, do you think you can make your wife cry?"
"I don't know--I must go to her."
"Well, well, go. Don't excite her, but--dear me, Marie, how impatient
people are. When one has saved a man's life, he might at least let one
finish a sentence, instead of breaking away in the middle of it. Get me
something to eat, for, parbleu, I 've earned it."
Dangeau had closed the door, and stood looking at his wife.
"Aline," he said, "have they told you? We are safe--Robespierre is
dead."
Then he threw back his head, took a long, deep breath, and cried:
"It is new life--new life for France, new work for those who love
her--new life for us--for us, Aline."
Aline stood by the window, very still. At the sound of Dangeau's voice
she turned her head. He saw that she was smiling, and his heart
contracted as he looked at her.
Death had come so close to her, so very close, that it seemed to him the
shadow of it lay cold and still above that strange unchanging smile; and
he called to her abruptly, with a rough tenderness.
"Aline! Aline!"
She looked up then, and he saw then the same smile lie deep within her
eyes. Unfathomably peaceful they were, but not with the peace of the
living.
"Won't you come to me, my dear," he said gently, and with the simplicity
he would have used to a child.
A little shiver just stirred the stillness of her form, and she came
slowly, very slowly, across the room, and then stood waiting, and with a
sudden passion Dangeau laid both hands upon her shoulders insistently,
heavily.
He wondered had she lost the memory of the last time he had touched and
held her thus. Then he had fought with pride and been defeated. Now he
must fight again, fight for her very soul and reason, and this time he
must win, or the whole world would be lost. He paused, gathering all
the forces of his soul, then looked at her with passionate uneasiness.
If she would tremble, if she would even shrink from him--anything but
that calm which was there, and shone serenely fixed, like the smile upon
the faces of the dead.
It hinted of the final secret known.
"Mon Dieu! Aline, don't look like that!" he cried, and in strong
protest his arms slipped lower, and drew her close to his heart that
beat, and beat, as if it would supply the life hers lacked. She came
passively at his touch, and stood in his embrace unresisting and
unresponsive.
Remembering how she had flushed at a look and quivered at a touch, his
fears redoubled, and he caught her close, and closer, kissing her, at
first gently, but in the end with all the force of a passion so long
restrained. For now at last the dam was down, and they stood together in
love's full flowing tide.
When he drew back, the smile was gone, and the lips that it had left
trembled piteously, as her colour came and went to each quickened
breath.
"Aline," he said, very low, "Aline, my heart! It is new life--new life
together."
She pushed him back a pace then, and raised her eyes with a look he
never forgot. The peace had left them now, and they were troubled to
the depths, and brimmed with tears. Her lips quivered more and more,
the breath came from them in a great sob, and suddenly she fell upon his
breast in a passion of weeping.
THE END