* * * * *
Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and
trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and
good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would
she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a
King Cophetua!
* * * * *
What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.
Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.
Thank Heaven for that!
What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred
years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.
* * * * *
But meanwhile!
* * * * *
The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is
fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!
* * * * *
They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain
exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people
opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for
_you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!
* * * * *
"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"
* * * * *
"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.
Mais ça va ma coûter cher!"
* * * * *
Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!
* * * * *
Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as
many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from
the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was
caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!
Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people
once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true
since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams
are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!
* * * * *
After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has
not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been,
had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!
* * * * *
And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my
secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating
circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift
penalty of death.
"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"
By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless,
recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the
terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at
the Old Bailey.
It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth
recording--even hard to remember.
But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so
poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before
another twenty-four hours could possibly pass over me.
The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of
tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me
for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face
death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me
again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....
And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other
seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it
came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that
ever was.
I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto
oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb,
resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.
I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when,
overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream
true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.
I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and
wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved
duchess to succor me, as they ran me in, each butting at me sideways,
and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me
with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all
distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful
Duchess of Towers to wave the horror away.
* * * * *
It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.
The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was
insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was
soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not
wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel
Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured
man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man
old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for
the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left
a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."
Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is
duly recorded in the reports of the trial.
The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day,
without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and
unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced
to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on
the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my
education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and
uncontrollable passions to so deplorable an end.
Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my
nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my
trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does
after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I
knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual
relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.
Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was
almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember
eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight
from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good
grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.
I resolved to write the whole true story to the Duchess of Towers, with
an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression
of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow,
and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of
the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with
two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner
life began.
* * * * *
Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the
avenue gate.
The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the
sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance,
and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.
I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to
feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_
La Mère François sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was
singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre
ménage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.
[Illustration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MÉNAGE."]
The facetious postman, Yverdon, went in at the gate of my old garden;
the bell rang as he pushed it, and I followed him.
Under the apple-tree, which was putting forth shoots of blossom in
profusion, sat my mother and Monsieur le Major. My mother took the
letter from the postman's hand as he said, "Pour Vous? Oh yes, Madame
Pasquier, God sev ze Kveen!" and paid the postage. It was from Colonel
Ibbetson, then in Ireland, and not yet a colonel.
Médor lay snoring on the grass, and Gogo and Mimsey were looking at the
pictures in the _musée des familles._
In a garden chair lolled Dr. Seraskier, apparently asleep, with his long
porcelain pipe across his knees.
Madame Seraskier, in a yellow nankeen gown with gigot sleeves, was
cutting curl-papers out of the _Constitutionnel_.
I gazed on them all with unutterable tenderness. I was gazing on them
perhaps for the last time.