AT THE MORGUE.
It was midnight when John Treverton went upstairs to his study, where
there were lighted candles, and a newly replenished fire; for it was
one of his habits to read or write late at night. This evening he was
in no mood for sleep. He lifted the curtain that hung between the two
rooms, and looked into the bedroom. Laura had sobbed herself to sleep.
The disordered hair, the hand convulsively clasped upon the pillow,
told how far from peace her thoughts had been when she sank into the
slumber of mental exhaustion. John Treverton bent down and then turned
from the bed with a sigh.
‘My sins have fallen heavily upon you, my poor girl,’ he said to
himself as he went back to his study and sat down by the fire to think
over his position, with all its perplexities and entanglements.
Sleep was out of the question. He could only sit and stare at the fire,
and review his past life and its manifold follies.
How lightly had he flung away the treasure of liberty! Without a
thought of the future he had bound himself to a woman for whom he had
but the transient liking born of a young man’s fancy--of whom he knew
so little, that looking back now, he was unable to recall anything
beyond the barest outline of her history. Well, he was paying dearly
for that brief infatuation--he was paying a heavy forfeit for those
careless days in which he had lived among men without principle, and
had sunk almost to as low a level as his companions. He tried to
remember anything that his wife had ever told him of her childhood and
youth; but he could only remember that she had been very silent as to
the past. Once, and once only, on a summer Sabbath night, when they two
had been driving home alone together from a dinner in the Bois, and
when Zaïre’s tongue had been loosened by champagne and curaçao, she had
talked of her journey to Paris; that long, lonely journey, during which
she had so little money in her pocket that she could not even afford to
give herself an occasional stage in a _diligence_, but had been content
to get a gratuitous lift now and then in an empty wagon, or on the top
of a load of buckwheat. She told him how she had entered Paris faint
and thirsty, white with dust from head to foot, as if she had come out
of a flour-mill; and how the great city--with its myriad lamps and
voices, and the thunder of its wheels--had made her dazed and giddy as
she stood at the junction of two great boulevards, looking down the
endless vista, where the lights dwindled to a point on the edge of the
dark sky. She told him of her career in Paris--how she had begun as
a laundress on the quay, and how one Sunday night at the Chateau des
Fleurs a man had come up to her after one of the quadrilles--a fat man
with a gray moustache and a large white waistcoat--and had asked her
where she had learned to dance; and how she had told him, laughingly,
that she had never learned at all--that it came naturally to her, like
eating and drinking and sleeping; and then he had asked her whether she
would like to be a dancer at one of the theatres, and wear a petticoat
of golden tissue and white satin boots embroidered with gold--such as
she might have seen in the last great spectacle of the Hind in the
Wood; and she had told him yes, such a life would suit her exactly;
whereupon the gentleman in the white waistcoat told her to present
herself at eleven o’clock next morning at a certain big theatre on the
Boulevard. She obeyed, saw the gentleman in his private room at the
theatre, was engaged as one of a hundred and fifty figurantes, at a
salary of twenty francs a week. ‘And from that to the time when I was
the rage at the Students’ Theatre, it was easy,’ said La Chicot, with
an insolent smile upon her full, red lips. ‘If I had any other man for
my husband I should be the rage at one of the Boulevard Theatres, and
the _Figaro_ would have an article about me every other week.’
‘You have never had any fancy for going back to Auray, to see your old
friends?’ asked the husband once, wondering at the cold egotism of the
creature.
‘I never had a friend in Brittany for whom I cared that,’ answered
Zaïre, snapping her fingers. ‘Every one ill-treated me. My father was a
perambulating cider-vat--my poor mother--well, I can pity her, because
she was so miserable--whined and whimpered. It was a mercy to all of us
when the good God took her.’
‘And you never had any one else to care for?’ asked Jack, in a
speculative mood. ‘No lover, for instance?’
‘Lover!’ cried La Chicot, her great eyes flashing upon him angrily.
‘What had I to do with a lover? I was but nineteen when I left that
hole.’
‘Lovers have been heard of even at that early age,’ suggested Jack, in
his quietest tone; and after that his wife said no more about her past
history.
To-night, sitting in idle despondency, looking into the fire, John
Treverton, master of Hazlehurst Manor, husband of a wife he adored,
utterly dissociated from that reckless, happy-go-lucky Jack Chicot
of Bohemian surroundings, for whom the good and evil of each day had
been all-sufficient, and who had never dared to look forward to the
inevitable to-morrow, let his thoughts slip back to the bygone days,
and saw, as in a picture, those scenes of the past which had impressed
themselves most vividly upon his mind when they happened.
There was one incident in his married life which had made him wonder,
for his wife had not been a woman of a sensitive temper, or easily
moved to strong emotion, save when her own pleasure or her own interest
was at stake. Yet in this particular instance she had shown herself as
susceptible to pity and terror as a girl of seventeen, fresh from a
convent school.
They two, husband and wife, had been strolling one summer afternoon
upon the quays and bridges, loitering to look at the traffic on the
river, sitting to rest under the trees, or turning over the leaves of
the old books upon the stalls, and so sauntering carelessly on till
they came to the Pont Neuf.
‘Let us go across and look at Notre Dame,’ said the husband, for whom
the old church had an inexhaustible charm.
‘Bah!’ cried the wife. ‘What a fancy you have for staring at old
stones!’
They crossed the bridge, and sauntered to the front of the noble old
cathedral, where already the hand of improvement was beginning to
clear away the houses that surrounded and overshadowed its beauty.
Jack Chicot was looking up at the glorious western door, built by
Philip Augustus, thickly wrought with _fleurs-de-lys_, where in
days of old had appeared the sculptured images of all the kings of
Judah, shrined in niches of stonework, as delicate as lace or spring
foliage. His wife’s eyes roved right and left, and all around, seeking
some diversion for a mind prone to weariness when not stimulated by
amusement or dissipation.
‘See, my friend,’ she cried suddenly, clutching her husband’s arm.
‘There is something! Look, what a crowd of people. Is it a procession
or an accident?’
‘An accident, I think,’ answered Chicot, looking down the street facing
them, along which a closely-packed crowd was hastening, rolling towards
them like a mighty wave of black water. ‘We had better get out of the
way.’
‘But, no,’ cried the wife eagerly. ‘If there is something to see, let
us see it. Life is not too full of distractions.’
‘It may be something unpleasant,’ suggested Jack. ‘I am afraid they are
carrying some poor creature to the Morgue.’
‘That matters nothing. We may as well see.’
So they waited, and fell in among the hurrying crowd, and heard many
voices discussing the thing that had happened, every voice offering a
different version of the same ghastly story.
A man had been run over on the Boulevard--a seafaring man from the
provinces--knocked down by the horses of a huge wagon. The horses had
kicked him, the wheels had gone over his body. ‘He was dead when they
picked him up,’ said one. ‘No, he spoke, and hardly seemed conscious
he was hurt,’ said another. ‘He died while they were waiting for the
_brancard_ on which to carry him to the hospital,’ said a third.
And now they were taking him to the Morgue, the famous dead-house of
the city, down by the river yonder. He was being carried in the midst
of that dense crowd, which had been gathering ever since the bearers
started with their ghastly burden, from the Porte St. Denis, where the
accident happened. He was there in the centre of that mass of human
life, an awful figure, covered from head to foot, and hidden from all
those curious eyes.
Jack and his wife were borne along with the rest, past the great
cathedral, down by the river, to the doors of the dead-house.
Here they all came to a stop: no one was allowed to enter save the dead
man and his bearers, and three or four _sergents de ville_.
‘We must wait till they have made his toilet,’ said La Chicot to her
husband, ‘and then we can go in and see him.’
‘What!’ cried Jack, ‘surely you would not wish to look at a piece of
shattered humanity? He must be a dreadful sight, poor creature.’
‘On the contrary, monsieur,’ said some one near them in the crowd. ‘The
poor man’s face was not injured. He is a handsome fellow, tanned by the
sun; a seafaring man, a fine fellow.’
‘Let’s go in and see him,’ urged La Chicot, and when La Chicot wanted
to do a thing she always did it.
So they waited amongst the crowd, close-packed still, though about
two-thirds of the people had dropped off and gone back to their
business or their pleasure; not because they shrank from looking
upon death in its most awful aspect, but because the toilet might be
long, and the spectacle was not worth the trouble of waiting a weary
half-hour in the summer sun.
La Chicot waited with a dogged patience which was a part of her
character when she had made up her mind about anything. Jack waited
patiently too; for he was watching the faces in the crowd, and had an
artistic delight in studying these various specimens of a somewhat
debased humanity. Thus the half-hour wore itself out, the doors were
opened, and the crowd poured into the dead-house, just as it would have
poured into a theatre or a circus.
There he lay, the new-comer, with the summer light shining on him--a
calm figure behind a sheet of glass, a brave, bronzed face, bearded,
with strongly-marked brows and close-cropped black hair, gold rings
in the ears, and on one bare arm, the arm which had escaped the wagon
wheel, an inscription tattooed in purple and red.
Jack Chicot, after contemplating the dead man’s face with curious
interest, fixing the well-marked features in his mind, bent down to
look at the tattooed device and inscription.
There was a ship, a rose, and these words, ‘Dedicated to Saint Anne of
Auray.’
The man was doubtless a native of Auray, La Chicot’s birthplace.
Jack turned to remark this to his wife. She was standing close at his
elbow, livid as the corpse behind the glass, her face convulsed, big
tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Do you know him?’ asked Jack. ‘Is it any one you remember?’
‘No, no!’ she sobbed; ‘but it is too dreadful. Take me away--take me
out of this place, or I shall drop down in a fit.’
He hurried her out through the crowd, pushing his way into the open
air.
‘You overrated your strength of nerve,’ he said, vexed at the folly
which had exposed her to such a shock. ‘You should not have a fancy for
such horrid sights.’
‘I shall be better presently,’ answered La Chicot. ‘It is nothing.’
She was not better presently. She was hysterical all the rest of the
day, and at night had no sooner closed her eyes than she started up
from her pillow, sobbing violently, and holding her hands before her
face.
‘Don’t let me see him!’ she cried passionately. ‘Jack, why are you so
cruel as to make me see him? You are holding me against the glass--you
are forcing me to look at him. Take me away.’
Pondering to-night upon this strange scene of five years ago, John
Treverton asked himself if there might not have been some kind of link
between this man and Zaïre Chicot.