THE morrow—that is always, by some alchemistic process, to convert the drossy problems of the night into liquid gold—greeted Ned with leaden untransmutable skies, that were only too representative of the irresolvable heaviness of his own thoughts. He looked out of his grimy window of the little tavern on which he had quartered himself, and saw the yellow of an almost substantial atmosphere sandwiched between a sagged grey welkin and a world of livid snow; and he saw no prospect, in that before him, of any illumination of his dull perplexity.
He dressed, breakfasted, and presently went out into the streets. The desire to postpone that hour of inevitable struggle with an allurement which, he dreaded, in his present condition of emotional bewilderment, he would be unable to resist, drove him to take a rambling course to his lodgings.
He had gone down to the Quay of the Thuilleries, and was turning into the gardens, when his attention was drawn to a man who rose from a bench at the moment, and greeted him with a timid ejaculation of delight.
He stopped, somewhat impatiently—started, stared, and uttered an exclamation in his turn. For, in the ragged, large-boned stranger, who was looking at him from eyes that held the very spirit of patient deprecation, he recognised all at once the poor pariah of a long-past experience—the Cagot whom he had befriended in the woods of Méricourt.
He held out his hand in a sudden rush of emotion. The man advanced, bent down, and touched it reverently.
“Monsieur!” murmured the poor creature, “it is the sunshine breaking.”
Ned regarded him with infinite humble pity. The thought of the charity so large; of the humanity so rare and so remote from that proclaimed in the windy casuistries of liberators, who would use its name rather as a war-cry than as a message of peace; the thought of how this outcast, reflecting in his selfless chivalry the very altruism of the Man of Sorrow, had recently helped and protected a member of the race that had made him so, was like a cool breath on his troubled brain.
“I think it is—I hope it is,” he said gently.
He put his hand on the shoulder of the gaunt figure. The man was buttoned against the bitter cold into the mere scarecrow of a jacket. His feet were bare and scarred with blood; his cheeks, his flesh wherever seen—and that was in more places than custom prescribes—were fallen in upon a frame accordant with the strong soul that inhabited there.
“And so,” said Ned, “you are alone at last in the world.”
The man looked up, an expression of wonder on his face.
“How did monsieur know? Aïe, it is true! I am alone. We were on our way hither in quest of the new liberty; and God, pitying her weary feet, gave it her when but half the journey was done.”
“And the little child? Oh, my friend—perhaps she heard the little child crying for her in the night?”
“It is true, monsieur. But they will never be able to play birds’-fly or shadow-buff in the moonlight up there without me. The rogue and the little mother! And I hear them talking all the night through, wondering when I shall come.”
“And you do not complain?”
“Why should I complain? They are so safe at last. Think what it would have meant to them had God called me first.”
“Yes, yes. And—what is your name? You have never told me your name.”
“It is Laurent, monsieur. One is enough for us Cagots.”
“Laurent; what has become of the woman you brought, of your charity, to Paris?”
“Merciful God! Monsieur is a wizard. Indeed, she found her reward in the meeting with an old friend, who took her away from me.”
“Her reward!”
“Ah, monsieur! She was an angel of light to the dying mother. She prayed with and she sang to her; and sometimes she would, with her voice, earn a silver livre by the way—enough, in the end, to buy the little place of rest in the churchyard.”
“Laurent, you are starved and frozen. Laurent—do you hear? I also am alone in the world. You shall come with me, and be my servant and companion; and we will travel, always travel; until at last, wayworn and tired, we shall come back, we, too, to the little place of rest.”
He turned, greatly moved, through the gate into the gardens.
“Come!” he whispered—then he checked himself, and faced suddenly on the astonished Cagot.
“Tell me!” he cried. “What would the Cagot think of him that wilfully withheld her soul’s cure from a poor shameful woman that loved him?”
“That he feared—that he feared, monsieur.”
“Feared what?”
“To discharge his enemy from her thrall.”
“I said she loved him.”
“Yes, women love their oppressors; but it is a love that in its hour of retaliation will ask a return in kindness for every blow given. What shall be the fate of the man, then, when he kisses each bruise?”
Ned dwelt on the patient face in some astonishment.
“Philosopher,” he said, “wilt thou take service with me?”
“Monsieur takes my breath away. It is too wonderful to be true.”
“The truth, I think, Laurent, is always wonderful. Come—hurry thou! I, at least, will profit by this lesson to go and tell it.”
“And to kiss the bruises, monsieur?”
Ned did not answer, but turned once more and entered the gardens, the Cagot following at his heels.
A clamour of voices that had come distantly wafted to them as they passed through the gate took volume with every step they advanced. Suddenly, breaking from a little park of trees into one of the long, snow-covered walks that enfiladed the gardens east and west, the cause of the tumult was revealed to them in the vision of a dozen or so infuriate tricoteuses, priestesses of St Antoine, who were hurrying in their direction, driving a single woman, like a scapegoat, in their front.
At first Ned, distinguishing nothing definitely, saw only exemplified in this throng of vicious wives, with its rabble of inhuman brats hooting and pervading it, one of those exacerbated paroxysms of the mania of Fraternity that were of such frequent occurrence nowadays as to confound the very heart of autonomy. But, as the horde came into focus, and he paused to gather the import of its vehemence—all in a moment the truth leapt upon him, and he uttered a cry and sprang into the road.
For he had recognised, in the subject of all this raging ferment, no less a person than the erst-Amazon, Théroigne herself.
Her black hair floated loose; her eyes were alight with shame and terror; her bodice hung in strips from her waist. She hurried towards him, maddening and moaning, and, as she ran, the harpies scourged her bare shoulders with the leathern belts they had torn from their waists.
He rushed to intercept her flight. She saw—tried to evade him; then instantly she leapt to recognition, clutched, and fell prone at his feet.
He stood over her, while she shrieked and wailed incoherently; he warded off the rain of lashes, receiving much of it on his own arms and body.
“Beasts!” he yelled; “how has she deserved this infernal treatment?”
The air blattered with their imprecations.
“The traitress! the reactionary! the putain of Brissot!”
The thongs whistled; the mob circumgyrated; the uproar waxed murderous. In the heat and menace of it a sudden new ally appeared in the midst.
“Courage, master!” he cried; and seizing off his ragged jacket, he flung it over the victim’s bleeding shoulders, and turned upon the rabble.
“See here!” he shouted, and struck his left breast with his hand.
Upon the echo the nearest of the pack fell away, shouldering into the throng behind them.
“The duck’s foot!” went up a shriek: “it is a Cagot—a Cagot!”
Ned, in his fury, could actually laugh.
“It is a brother, sisters of the confraternity!” he cried.
They were baffled only for the moment. If they dared not touch, they could fling. There were heavy stones in plenty under the snow. They were already stooping to gather them, when a fresh diversion occurred. A patrol of the national guard broke into the rabble and disintegrated it.
At once arose a clamour of demands, retorts and counter-retorts, shrieking denunciations. Ned awaited the issue in perfect coolness. Suddenly a couple of gens-d’armes approached and collared him.
“You arrest me, messieurs?”
“Certainly, citizen.”
“But I am an Englishman, and have done nothing but help a woman in distress.”
“That is well, then. It will serve thee, no doubt, before the commissary.”
“What commissary?”
“We are of the section of the Croix Blanche. Forward, citizen!”
He was marched off to a volley of execrations. The Cagot was driven, in likewise, amidst pointing bayonets. A party of soldiers then lifted the prostrate woman, surrounded and urged her forward. She went, babbling and dancing. She was the virgin to whom the vision of Méricourt had been vouchsafed. She was the Mother of God herself. The guard chuckled coarse jests over her ravings; the mob surrounded all, going with them and spitting fury at the accursed.
Ned resigned himself to the inevitable. Only it distressed him, whenever he thought of it, to picture the lonely figure in his chambers awaiting its reprieve. The moment he was released he must hurry to it and acquit it of its trouble.
Once he called over his shoulder to the Cagot, “Thou shalt not lack a new coat, and without a badge, presently. Courage, my friend! Remember that thou art reborn into the year one of liberty and equality, sacred and indivisible.”
“Hold thy tongue!” growled a sergeant.
“I have spoken,” said the Englishman.
Their progress, by way of the Quays, and so round, by the Place de Grève, into the Rue St Antoine, made small stir amongst the few passengers abroad in the bitter weather. They were hurried, traversing a medley of little streets, into one—the Rue Pavée—very gloomy and noisome; and from this they were suddenly wheeled, leaving the crowd stranded without, into the courtyard of a sinister dark building—the Hôtel de la Force.
Ned’s heart sickened before the recent associations of the place. Involuntarily he drew back.
“Up, then!” cried the sergeant, shouldering him on. “It is sometimes safer to enter than to leave here.”
He pulled himself together and mounted a flight of steps leading to a narrow door. The woman passed in before him—passed there and then out of his life. He never saw her again. From that hour, to the day of her death twenty years later, she raved and rotted in a maniac’s cell. She had become, indeed, Mater Tenebrarum. Blood-guilt and vanity had undermined a reason that was already shaken, before the humiliation of that public chastisement came to finally overthrow it. She died in the Salpétrière—in the very prison that had witnessed the triumph of her vengeance. And the spirit of her victim, blown in the moonlit nights against the bars of her cell, might cling to them like a bat, and peer in, and take its evil rapture of the retribution that had consigned her to that one haunted spot out of all the haunted city.
Ned—carried into a dusky vestibule, and thence into a little side office where he must await, under guard, the commissary’s pleasure—was ushered, after no great interval, into the presence of that tremendous functionary. He found him a young man—rather a revolutionary blondin—military and fastidious, with a nose as high-bridged as the fifth proposition in Euclid, and an under-jaw like a griffin’s. He was seated in an elbow-chair in the front of his men. The Cagot, under care of a turnkey, stood before and well away from him; and between him and the Cagot a soldier held out a burning pastile on the point of a bayonet. He made a little gesture to the new-comer, almost as if he were kissing his finger-tips, and addressed him at once in a lisping voice.
“Your name, if you please?”
Ned satisfied him.
“Citizen Edward Murk,” he said, waving away the superfluous title with a scented hand, “thou art accused of interfering with the processes of the law and inciting to a riot.”
Ned exploded immediately.
“The law, monsieur! But I interfered in vindication of it.”
“How, then? Didst thou not oppose thyself to the people’s will?”
“To their violence, rather.”
“It was their will, nevertheless; and the people’s will is the law. Therefore thou opposedst the law.”
“It is a new law, that, monsieur.”
“Truly. It dates from the year one.”
“Of Fraternity? And what has the law one of Fraternity to say to my servant here?”
He indicated the dazed Laurent. The commissary lifted his passionless eyebrows.
“This man is, I understand, a Cagot—(another pastile, Benoît)—a Cagot, sir; and yet he will venture into the public ways, gloveless and without shoes.”
“Thus poisoning what he touches, you will say. Monsieur, it is a superstition. This year one is surely no better than other years the first—than other opening pages to our periodic new ledgers of reform—if we carry forward into it a tyrannical superstition.”
“What has that to do with the matter? This is a man——”
“It is indeed, monsieur,” answered Ned sharply. He was growing impatient of this meaningless arraignment. He had other and more important business to attend to. He looked into the vacuous young face.
“Is not this all inapplicable?” he said. “I tell monsieur that the man is my servant; that we saw a woman suffering ill-treatment; that we went to her assistance humanely and without violence. We are guilty of no assault, no resistance to or outrage against any law, either of the year one or of the year one thousand and one; and I must ask monsieur to discharge us on the simple facts of the case.”
He took, it is to be acknowledged, the wrong way with a fool.
“I know nothing of the year one thousand and one,” said the officer, with feeble irony. “It was before my time.”
“Doubtless,” snapped in Ned, “monsieur was born yesterday.”
The commissary, supporting his right elbow with his left hand, sank back in his chair, pinched his callow throat into a bag, and closed his eyes.
“The simple facts,” he said—as if reasoning with himself, as the one most needing the lesson of reason—“are that you have defied the authority of the plebiscite.”
“Good heavens!” cried Ned.
The officer coming upright again, his lids, in the act, seemed to open mechanically, like those of a doll.
“I must tell you plainly,” he said, “that, to my mind, your interference was questionable and suspicious.”
“Believe me, sir,” said Ned politely, “that, in quoting your own mind, you use an empty argument.”
“You state,” continued the commissary, “that this man is your servant. Who ever heard of a respectable person taking a Cagot for a servant!”
There rose murmured acclamations from the bystanders. This was the first really apposite thing uttered by the officer. He seemed greatly stimulated by the applause, and moved thereby to clinch a fine situation.
“I shall remand you,” he said quite briskly, “for inquiries to be made into the truth of your statements.”
Ned stared, then burst out in a fury—
“It is monstrous, monsieur; it is ridiculous! You have only to listen a moment to what I say—to accept my references to a dozen of the first standing in the city, to assure yourself of my identity.”
The commissary waved his hand. Obedient to the gesture, a couple of Guards closed upon their captive.
“I take nothing from you,” he said. “In accepting your references I might constitute myself a receiver of stolen goods.”
It was an inspiration. He looked up, with a gasp, into the faces of those about him, to read in their expressions if it were possible that he himself could have said this thing. It was true he had. There must be no anticlimax.
“Take the prisoner away!” he said, smilingly self-conscious, as if he were ordering a table to be cleared for a fresh surprise-course.
Ned, protesting, threatening, fulminating, was forced from the room, hurried down a passage, and thrust into a little dark chamber that led therefrom. The sound of a key grating in its lock fell disagreeably upon his ears. Only a thin wash of light reached him from a single barred window high up under the ceiling. A couple of crippled chairs—together, it might be said, with an almost palpable smell of drains—formed the only furniture of the room. The wall-paper moulted its gaudy dyes, or hung in strips from the plaster; the floor was littered with perished rags of parchment. Evidently the closet had been at one time some office connected with the prison records—a dreary mad reflection to any one remembering to what recent use those records had been put.
Ned sank down upon one of the chairs, and, for the moment, looked about him quite stunned and aghast.
* * * * * * * *
Up and down, up and down, by the hour together. The morning had drawn to noon, the noon to evening; and still he was confined, with only an indefinite prospect of release. It was hideous, it was outrageous; yet the humour of it all might have buoyed him up against the moment of his liberation, had not his soul—in its present condition, introspective and self-torturing—so writhed in exquisite anguish over a never-ceasing fear, or foreboding, of something—some vague disaster that, it seemed to him, his prolonged absence from home must precipitate. To this something he would, or could, give no name; but his thoughts circled round the shadow of it, feigning a self-assurance that there was no core of significance therein to terrify them—yet terrified nevertheless.
At the first he had flattered himself that mid-day, or thereabouts, would bring him his deliverance. The whole incident was so preposterous that, under the burden of his more private affairs, he would not consider it seriously. But, as the morning passed, and the chill dark day drew on, his anger and anxiety increased upon him to such an extent that he might hardly restrain himself from giving them childish expression in a furious onslaught on the panels of his door.
He refrained, however, and, listening at the keyhole instead, was presently aware of the regular tramp of a sentry in the passage. By-and-by, when the footsteps came opposite him, he kicked out and hailed—
“Hullo, there!”
The man stopped.
“Qu’as-tu?” he growled. “Ne t’emporte pas, citoyen.”
“My temper!” shouted Ned; “but I shall likely lose my senses if I am left longer without food.”
“As to that,” said the sentry—and broke off and retreated.
In a very little while the key turned once more, and a jailer entered with a platter of uninviting scraps.
“Take the filth away!” cried Ned furiously. “Thou canst procure me something fit to eat, I suppose?”
“Surely, for the paying, citizen.”
“Go, then!”
He commissioned the man, and then must drag out another half-hour, awaiting the fellow’s reappearance. At length the latter returned, bearing a basket containing a cold fowl, bread, and a bottle of red wine.
“Now, monsieur jaquemart,” said Ned, as he tackled the provender, “how long is permitted to this farce in the playing?”
“I do not understand you.”
“Why, a joke is a joke; but I would have you go and explain to our pleasant commissary, of the Section Croix Blanche, that brevity is the soul of wit.”
“Again, I do not understand.”
Ned wagged his finger at the man.
“I have submitted to this outrage very patiently; but, I warn you, there will be reprisals by-and-by.”
“That is all one to me.”
“Wilt thou take a message from me to the commissary?”
“He has left the prison these many hours.”
“And, when to return?”
The jailer shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps to-morrow—at any time, or not at all.”
Ned jumped to his feet, upsetting the basket.
“What!” he shrieked. Then, in a moment, realising the practical fact of his isolation—realising all that was implied by it—he fell upon his agitation and smothered it.
“My friend,” he said, “wilt thou convey a letter for me?”
“That depends.”
“Naturally. See, then” (he fetched out a pencil; tore a square from the white paper that lined his basket of provisions)—“I write to the citizen Vergniaud—dating my billet, ‘Prison of La Force’—these words: ‘I am detained here on a ridiculous charge. In the name of sanity, come at once and release me—Murk.’ I put the paper in your hands; as I will put a louis-d’or when you stand before me with the answer.”
The jailer’s eyes twinkled. Said he—
“I go off duty after the ‘Evening Gazette’ is issued. The citizen may depend upon me.”
Ned groaned.
“Well,” he said, “what can’t be cured must be endured. But, the earlier the respite, the more generous my acknowledgment.”
He was locked in again; the sentry resumed his tramp; the little window under the ceiling dusked like a drowsing eyelid.
Presently, drugged by utter weariness of brain and nerve, he dozed on one of the rickety chairs, and woke to the glare of a candle, and the presence of his friendly jailer in the room.
“Behold my despatch, citizen!”
He seized the scrap of paper (that bearing his own message), and read, scribbled on the back of it, “I fly to the succour of my dear friend the very moment I may quit myself of a little present business of urgency.”
“Here are thy vails,” said Ned, in a tone of glad relief; “and leave me the candle, my friend. I shall not need it long.”
* * * * * * * *
Up and down—up and down. The shape of the window under the ceiling became intimate to the desolate character of the room, rather than to that segment of the free sky without which it had once appropriated to itself. It was like a regard turned inwards—an eye glazing in the trance of self-inquisition; and as such it was illustrative of the vision of the tormented soul it imprisoned from light.
Up and down. The candle had long guttered and fallen upon itself; his only ray of comfort from the outer world came in a stretched thread of lamp-shine under the door. Dark night had crept upon him, with the screak and thunder of slamming oak and iron, and an increased emotion, rather than a sense, of muffled deep confinement; and still the respite delayed, and must now delay, he was sick to think, until the morrow.
For, at last the voices of introspection, that all day he had striven, yet feared, to interpret, were become soul-audible sounds in the tenseness of black silence; and at last his brain was clearing, throwing truth, like a precipitate, into his heart.
How in two days had the flood of destiny burst, obliterating all his ancient landmarks! He was carried down like a dead thing. Should he drift, then?—or, if not, where strand and crawl ashore, a fragment of human wreck? “I clutch and stop myself,” he thought; “scramble out; lie half blind upon a little island of rest. The flood still washes my feet; but I will not yield to it. Then slowly it subsides; the old beautiful landmarks reveal themselves—soiled and stained, perhaps; but, they are dear to me, and I would not have my retrospect without them.”
He paced wildly to and fro again.
“I have been in the flood. What madness has it wrought in me!”
“Pamela!” he whispered aloud in great emotion—“Pamela!”
Yet his soul—though he believed it steadfast to its allegiance through all the numbing thunder of the race on which it had been borne—was rent by conflicting devils; for must not his sympathies at least extend to one who nursed a hopeless passion?
“Oh!” he groaned in his heart, “if, upon my release, I could only find her gone, on her own initiative, out of my life!”
“And so to leave you a heritage of everlasting remorse,” the fiends would cry.
One moment he would be the brutal tyrant, another the slave to his own nature of kindness. He was, indeed, in a pitiable state of indetermination. And always, marking off the crawling hours, that sense of inner foreboding pattered loud or soft like the ticking of a death-watch.
Pamela and Théroigne and Nicette! Vanity and vanity and vanity. And one Love had claimed, and one the hell of passion, and one——
He threw himself upon the floor, blaspheming, hugging himself in the ecstasy of this protracted torment.
At last, completely worn out, he fell asleep.
He awoke, having slumbered, despite the hardness of his couch, far into the morning. He could only recollect himself and his circumstances with a mastering effort. Sitting up, he saw his jailer standing by a little table that he had brought into the room.
“What is that for?” he said.
“The citizen’s meals.”
“Meals! Good God! And has not the commissary yet touched his acme of folly? Has not M. Vergniaud yet called to effect my release?”
The man shook his head.
“Where did you overtake him?” said Ned desperately. “What was he doing that was so urgent when you delivered to him my note?”
“He was conducting the actress Simon-Candeille to the theatre. I heard madame engage him to a p’tit-souper when the play was over.”
Ned turned away, sick at heart; then flashed round upon the man again in a fury.
“The beast! the philosophic egoist! Thou must carry him another message from me.”
“Truly, when I can,” said the jailer.
It must be when he could. In the meantime the distracted captive was faced by the prospect of fresh long hours of cold, gloom, and anxiety. Again the morning dawdled on to mid-day, to the desolate turn from noon. His lunch was brought in by a stranger turnkey, taciturn and unapproachable. Ned let him go without a commission. His agitation could not stomach food.
At last, when, about four o’clock in the afternoon, he was feeling that, unless soon relieved, he must pay with his reason for that little act of humane interference, steps sounded coming hurriedly down the corridor, the key turned in the lock, the door was flung open, and there entered the room—the young lord, Pamela’s betrothed.
He was full of quick manliness and pity.
“My dear lord!” he cried—“my dear lord!”
He took Ned’s hand; wrung it with hard, sympathetic fervour.
“I was with Vergniaud and Tommy Paine last night, after your note had been received by the minister. It is the vilest piece of official insolence! Vergniaud will make hell about it; I will make hell. He was frantically engaged at the time, and begged me to represent him in this release of his dear friend. A certain lady was deeply concerned this morning to hear about it. She would drive me down by-and-by on the way to her dressmaker. I have come the moment I was able; have made inquiries, learnt the truth, procured the release of your servant, and given these scoundrels a foretaste of what they are to expect.”
He was amazingly frank and cordial. For a moment Ned was stupefied from any thought of response. He looked into the handsome, intelligent face, and a dull realisation of his own inefficiency as a suitor possessed him. “Would this romantic Fortunatus,” might have been his fancy, “have ever committed himself to a situation so ridiculous as this of mine?” His lordship was of the soldierly type, very upright and spruce. He wore at his neck a kerchief of the green that was later to bring him into trouble. And the unhappy prisoner, for a contrast, was haggard, unshorn, unkempt—his coat dusted with litter from the floor.
“I can’t find words to thank you,” muttered Ned at last.
“Faith,” cried the other cheerily, “ye’ve scattered your vocabulary, I shouldn’t wonder. Come, then, to the rogues at the gate, and I’ll help ye out with a loan.”
Ned drew back from the proffered grasp.
“No,” he said—“no!”
Then he passed his hand before his eyes.
“Your lordship must excuse me. This suspense—it hath driven me half mad. I am just a caged rat, flying the instant the spring is raised. Mistress Pamela, and my prompt, affectionate Vergniaud! Their disinterested consideration for me—and yours, my lord, yours—they touch me to the quick. I have such friends—Madame Simon-Candeille, possibly, among the number. But I am at the last stage of anxiety and agitation. I have no thought for the moment but to escape, and alone. I beg your lordship to forgive my apparent discourtesy, and to let me pass. God knows, it may be too late even now.”
The other, looking very much surprised and offended, bowed and drew away.
“As your lordship pleases,” said he.
And at that, Ned, without another word, his face as stiff as a mask, staggered past him, hurried out into the corridor, sped down it, and made unaccosted for the street.