THE PRISONER AT HOME.
They were together at last, that weary old man, his wife and child. That
crowd of women had brought him to the door of his home, and set him down
on its threshold. When he saw the steep flight of stairs, stretching
darkly upwards, a look of bewilderment and dismay came to his face. He
had forgotten their uses. So those triumphant furies carried him up in
their arms and would have laid him on the bed, but he struggled away
from them, and creeping into a corner, laid his face against the wall,
as if he felt some comfort in its coldness. Then the women went away in
search of better work than the caring for an old, worn out man.
Madame Gosner aroused him; she carried a plate of soup in her hand, and
when he sat up on the floor, held a spoonful to his mouth; but lifting
his terrified eyes to her face, as if she were something to dread, he
refused it, with a look of gentle repugnance.
“He is dazed with the noise, they have killed him with their violence,”
said Marguerite in a passion of grief. “Oh father, will you eat
nothing?” She brought him fruit and wine. He seemed pleased with their
rich colors, but refused to touch them.
All at once the girl bethought herself and got an earthen pitcher full
of water and some black bread. His eyes brightened. He looked at this
food wistfully, and when she turned her back, began to eat.
Marguerite sat down on the floor beside her father. She broke his bread
and held the water to his lips. Then he began to smile and lying down by
the wall again, dropped into a broken sleep.
Once or twice during that night Madame Gosner bent over the sleeping
man, but even in his dreams her presence made him shrink. She had
clasped him in her arms, and held him to view in that awful crowd. The
wretched man had lost many things in that dungeon, but his sensitive
delicacy nothing could destroy. It was a part of his soul. A dawning
consciousness that she was his wife had struggled in his brain for a
little time at their first meeting, but that rude scene on the cannon
obliterated it entirely. From that hour he recognised Marguerite as
Therese, who had no other embodiment for him.
The next day a crowd of women came forcibly in, and demanded that feeble
old man for exhibition at the Place de Grève, where his presence was
intended to enflame the populace, and prepare it for deeper revolt and
still more awful scenes.
Marguerite protested against this coarse outrage, and would have
defeated it had that been in her power. But the wife, given up heart and
soul to the spirit of anarchy, joined with her fierce compatriots, and
placed the wronged man by her side on the platform from which she
harangued the people.
Was it strange that a being so true and gentle, refused to recognize in
this amazon the sweet and loving wife from whom he had been torn in his
youth?
One night, when everything was still in the house, the prisoner got up
from the floor, and wandered about in the darkness, which he had learned
to love in those long years, when it became second nature to him.
Marguerite heard him, and left her bed.
“Father!”
“My Therese! I know the voice.”
Marguerite, guided by the glad tone in which her father spoke, crept
toward him, and put her hand in his.
“What is it that troubles you, my father?”
“I want to go back, Therese; this is not home. Everything is so warm and
dry here; I cannot hear the water whispering to me. I cannot find my
friend. Ah me! I want to go back, life is so full of noises.”
“Your friend! had you a friend in the Bastille, father?”
“Hush, Therese! they did not know it. I used to hide him when they came.
They would have killed him else. Ah me! he may be dead now. My little
friend who never left me, cannot know that they forced me away from
him!”
“Father, of whom are you speaking?”
“Hush, hush; I will not tell, only I must go back: say nothing, Therese;
but let me go back. I cannot rest here. The stars keep me awake; you
know where to look for me, I remember how you came there with Doudel.”
Marguerite shuddered at the sound of that name.
“Dear father, try to rest,” she pleaded.
“Rest, Therese? there will be no rest for me, or any of my race, until
that ring of old Egypt is found. Oh! where is it—where is it?”
“What ring, father?”
“What ring? that which gave to the possessor of our blood the power and
wisdom of a god. The ring which was wrested from my hand, on the day I
was torn from the light.”
“Tell me about it, father; I have heard my mother speak of it as an
ancient relic, such as comes out of the tombs of monarchs, and once I
saw one like the thing she described.”
“Where? when—who had it? tell me its form and color. There was but one
such in the world; treasures of wisdom are locked up in that ring!
Therese, Therese, the ring is gone! It is gone! The Talisman, which
gives happiness to me and mine, but misery to all others! Alas! until
that is found, I am nothing. Worse than that, worse than that. I know
full surely that it will bring sorrow and death to any hand that wears
it! Describe to me, Therese, the ring you saw.”
“It was a serpent of twisted gold, father, holding a beetle, cut from
some green stone, in its coils. The beetle was covered with strange
characters.”
The prisoner started forward in the darkness and grasped Marguerite by
the arm.
“It is my ring—It is my ring! tell me where you saw it!”
“Father, I saw it on the hand of Queen Marie Antoinette.”
The prisoner gasped for breath. Even in that dim light Marguerite could
see the glitter of his eyes.
“She wears it and it is cursing her. All France is in mad rebellion. Ah,
now I understand how the poison has been working! Therese, where is the
queen?”
“At Versailles.”
“I know where that is—she is there—and the ring? Go away, Therese, I
want to think. I want to be still.”
Marguerite went back to her bed and had hardly closed her eyes, when
that shadowy old man crept softly down the stair-case and was gone.