“Wait a moment.”
She was almost overcome by so many successive emotions. She felt her
legs give way under her, and her eyes become dim. In her heart she
preserved all her usual energy; but the flesh escaped from her will and
failed her at the last moment.
“Are you sick?” asked the jailer. “What is the matter?”
She prayed to God for courage and strength: when her prayer was
finished, she said,--
“Now, let us go in.”
And, making a great noise with the keys and the bolts, Blangin opened
the door to Jacques de Boiscoran’s cell.
Jacques counted no longer the days, but the hours. He had been
imprisoned on Friday morning, June 23, and this was Wednesday night,
June 28, He had been a hundred and thirty-two hours, according to the
graphic description of a great writer, “living, but struck from the roll
of the living, and buried alive.”
Each one of these hundred and thirty-two hours had weighed upon him
like a month. Seeing him pale and haggard, with his hair and beard
in disorder, and his eyes shining brightly with fever, like
half-extinguished coals, one would hardly have recognized in him the
happy lord of Boiscoran, free from care and trouble, upon whom fortune
had ever smiled,--that haughty sceptical young man, who from the height
of the past defied the future.
The fact is, that society, obliged to defend itself against criminals,
has invented no more fearful suffering than what is called “close
confinement.” There is nothing that will sooner demoralize a man, crush
his will, and utterly conquer the most powerful energy. There is no
struggle more distressing than the struggle between an innocent man
accused of some crime, and the magistrate,--a helpless being in the
hands of a man armed with unlimited power.
If great sorrow was not sacred, to a certain degree, Dionysia might have
heard all about Jacques. Nothing would have been easier. She would have
been told by Blangin, who was watching M. de Boiscoran like a spy, and
by his wife, who prepared his meals, through what anguish he had passed
since his imprisonment.
Stunned at first, he had soon recovered; and on Friday and Saturday he
had been quiet and confident, talkative, and almost cheerful. But Sunday
had been a fatal day. Two gendarmes had carried him to Boiscoran to take
off the seals; and on his way out he had been overwhelmed with insults
and curses by the people who had recognized him. He had come back
terribly distressed.
On Tuesday, he had received Dionysia’s letter, and answered it. This
had excited him fearfully, and, during a part of the night, Trumence
had seen him walk up and down in his cell with all the gestures and
incoherent imprecations of a madman.
He had hoped for a letter on Wednesday. When none came, he had sunk into
a kind of stupor, during which M. Galpin had been unable to draw a word
from him. He had taken nothing all day long but a little broth and a cup
of coffee. When the magistrate left him, he had sat down, leaning his
head on his elbows, facing the window; and there he had remained, never
moving, and so deeply absorbed in his reveries, that he had taken no
notice when they brought him light. He was still in this state, when, a
little after ten o’clock, he heard the grating of the bolts of his cell.
He had become so well acquainted with the prison that he knew all its
regulations. He knew at what hours his meals were brought, at what
time Trumence came to clean up his room, and when he might expect
the magistrate. After night, he knew he was his own master till next
morning. So late a visit therefore, must needs bring him some unexpected
news, his liberty, perhaps,--that visitor for whom all prisoners look so
anxiously.
He started up. As soon as he distinguished in the darkness the jailer’s
rugged face, he asked eagerly,--
“Who wants me?”