* * * * * * *
My God! the frightfulness of that journey! of the company I lay with! We drove, as I gathered, by the less-frequented streets, and reached the barrier of St Jacques by way of the Rue de Biron. Here, for the first time, we were stopped.
“Halte là!” bawled a tipsy voice. “What goods to declare, friend?”
“Content thyself,” I heard Crépin answer. “They bear the Government mark.”
“How, then, carrier?”
“Peep under the cart-tail, and thou shalt see.”
The gendarme lifted a corner of the canvas with his sword-point. A wedge of light entered, and amazed my panic-stricken eyes.
“Il est bon là!” chuckled the fellow, and withdrew his sword. He had noticed nothing of me; but, as we whipped to a start, he made a playful cut at the canvas with his weapon. The blade touched my thigh, inflicting a slight flesh-wound, and I could not forbear a spasmodic jerk of pain. At this he cried out, “Holà hé! here is a dead frog that kicks!” and came scuttling after us. Now I gave myself up for lost; but at the moment a frolicsome comrade hooked the runner’s ankle with a stick, and brought the man heavily to the ground. There followed a shout; a curse of fury, and—Fortune, it appeared, had again intervened on my behalf.
Silence succeeded, for all but the long monotonous jolting and pitching over savage ground. At length Crépin pulled up his horses, and, leaning back from his seat, tossed open a flap of the canvas.
“Come, then,” he said in a queer voice. “We have won clear by the grace of Heaven.”
I wallowed, faint and nauseated, from my horrible refuge. Sick, and in pain of mind and body, I crept to a seat beside my companion. We were on a dark and desolate waste. A little moon lay low in the sky. Behind us the enceinte of the city twinkled with goblin lights.
“And these?” I said, weakly, signifying our dreadful load. “Whither dost thou carry them, Crépin?”
“Whither I carry thee, Monsieur le Comte—to the quarries under the Plain of Mont-Rouge.”
“To unconsecrated ground?”
“What would you? The yards are glutted. The Madeleine bulges like a pie-crust. At last by force of necessity we consecrate this, the natural cemetery of the city, dug by itself, to the city’s patron saint, La Guillotine.”
* * * * * * *
“Tell me, my preserver and, as God shall quit thee, also my friend—you received my letter?”
“Else, why art thou here?”
“But, thou hast done me an incalculable wrong!”
“And an incalculable benefit. Oh, monsieur, do I not atone?”
“To me, yes.”
“Let that pass, then. But, even there, I would not have thee underrate my service. Have I not, to save thee, annihilated time; called in a debt of gratitude that I kept in reversion for my own needs; suborned the very hangman’s carter that I might help thee in thy extremity?”
“And all this is due to thee?”
“Assuredly—and for what reason? Because, in total ignorance of thy claim to it, I took a fancy to a sweet face. Now I think you will acknowledge, M. le Comte, that the Revolution, for all its excesses, is capable of producing a gentleman of honour who knows how to make reparation.”
“Truly, this is no small thing that you have done.”
“Truly I think thou might’st apply superlatives to it, without extravagance. To outwit and baulk the Public Accuser—the cat-fish of the Committee of Safety—Dame! is there a hole in all Paris too small to admit his tentacles? But I tell thee, monsieur, I am already in the prison of my own holy namesake.”
“I would kiss thy hands, but——”
“What now?”
“My letter referred to other than myself.”
He turned and, I thought, looked at me oddly.
“In these days, what safer refuge for a woman than prison,” he said, “provided she hath a friend at Court? Understand, monsieur, I have found Mademoiselle de Lâge respectable lodgings, that is all.”
“Where you hold her as Lovelace held the estimable Clarisse. Crépin, I cannot accept my life on these terms.”
The words jerked on my lips as the waggon was brought to a stand with a suddenness that made the harness rattle. A tall figure, that seemed to have sprung out of the earth, stood at the horses’ heads.
“Gusman,” said my companion quietly; “this is Citizen Thibaut, whom you are to conduct to the secret lodging. Hurry, then, Thibaut.”
I got with some difficulty to the ground.
“And you?” said I.
“I go yet a mile to deliver my goods. We will discuss this matter further, bien entendu, on my return.”
He flogged his cattle to an immediate canter, leaving me in all bewilderment alone with the stranger. On every side about us, it seemed, stretched a melancholy waste—a natural graveyard sown with uncouth slabs of stone. The wind swayed the grasses, as if they were foam on black water; the tide of night murmured in innumerable gulfs of darkness.
“Come, then!” muttered the figure, and seized my hand.
We walked twenty cautious paces. I felt the clutch of brambles at my clothes. Suddenly he put his arm about me, and, as we moved, forcibly bent down my head and shoulders. At once I was conscious of a confined atmosphere—damp, earthy, indescribable. It thickened—grew closer and infinitely closer as we advanced.
Now I could walk upright; but my left shoulder rasped ever against solid rock. The blackness of utter negation was terrible; the cabined air an oppression that one almost felt it possible to lift from one’s head like an iron morion. For miles, I could have fancied, we thridded this infernal tunnel before the least little blur of light spread itself like salve on my aching vision.
Then suddenly, like a midnight glowworm, the blur revealed itself, a fair luminous anther of fire in a nest of rays—and was a taper burning on the wall of a narrow chamber or excavation set in the heart of the bed-stone.
“Voilà ton ressui!” exclaimed my sardonic guide; and, without another word, he turned and left me.
I stood a moment confounded; then, with a shrug of my shoulders, walked into the little cellar and paused again in astonishment. From a stone ledge, on which it had been lying, it seemed, prostrate, a figure lifted itself and, standing with its back to me, swept the long hair from its eyes.
I stared, I choked, I held out my arms as if in supplication.
“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” I cried—“if it is not Carinne, let me die!”
She turned, the dear figure. I heard her breath catch as she leaned forward and gazed at me. Her hair was all tumbled abroad; her sweet scared eyes looked out of a thicket of it like little frightened birds from a copse. She took a hurried step or two in my direction, then cried, “C’est un coup du ciel!” and threw up her hands and pressed them to her face.
I dropped my yearning arms. A needle of ice pierced my heart.
“A judgment of heaven?” I cried, sorrowfully.
The sound of my voice seemed like the very stroke of a thyrsus on her shoulders. She broke into an agitated walk—pacing to and fro in front of me—wringing her hands and clasping them thus to her temples. Her shadow fled before or after her like a coaxing child.
Suddenly, to my amazement, she darted upon me, and seized and shook me in a little fury of passion.
“Prends cela, prends cela, prends cela!” she cried; and then as suddenly she released me, and ran back to her ledge, and flung herself face-downwards thereon, sobbing as if her heart would break.
Shocked and astounded beyond measure, I followed and stood over her.
“Mademoiselle de Lâge,” I said, miserably—“of what am I guilty?”
“Of everything—of nothing! Perhaps it is I that am to blame!” she cried in a muffled voice.
“What have I done?”
She sat up, weeping, and pressed the pain from her forehead.
“Oh, monsieur! it is not a little thing to pass twelve hours in the most terrible loneliness—in the most terrible anxiety!”
“I do not understand.”
“You do not, indeed—the feelings of others—the wisdom of discretion.”
“Mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, in all patience.
She sat, with her palms resting upon the ledge. She looked up at me defiantly, though she yet fought with her sobs.
“It was doubtless a fine thing in your eyes this morning,” she said, “to throw scorn to that wretch who could have destroyed you with a word.”
I felt my breath come quickly.
“That wretch!” I whispered—“this morning?”
“It was what I said, monsieur,—the loup-garou of the Salle de la Liberté. But where one attaches any responsibility to life, one should learn to distinguish between bravado and courage.”
I think I must have turned very pale, for a sudden concern came into her face.
“Mademoiselle,” I said, “will persist in giving me the best reason for holding life cheaply—that I cannot, it seems, find favour with her.”
“Was it, then, monsieur, that you yourself were your only consideration?”
“Oh! give me at least the indulgence,” I cried, “to retort upon an insolent that insults me.”
“Grand Dieu!” she said, mockingly; “but what a perverted heroism! And must a man’s duty be always first towards his dignity, and afterwards, a long way——”
She broke off, panting, and tapping her foot on the ground. I looked at her, all mazed and dumfoundered.
“And afterwards?” I repeated. She would not continue. A little silence succeeded.
“Mademoiselle,” I said at length sadly—“let me speak out what is in my heart, and have done with it. That little cry of pity and of protest that I heard uttered this morning when sentence was demanded upon me in the Palais de Justice, and that I must needs now associate with this new dear knowledge of your freedom—if I have put upon it an unwarrantable construction, something beyond the mere expression of a woman’s sympathy with the unfortunate—you will, I am sure, extend that sympathy to my blindness, the realisation of which must in itself prove my heavy punishment. If, also, I have dared to translate the anxiety you have by your own showing suffered, here in this savage burrow, into a sentiment more profound than that of simple concern for an old-time comrade, you will spare my presumption, will you not, the bitterness of a rebuke? It shall not be needed, believe me. My very love——”
She interrupted me, rising to her feet white and peremptory.
“Not for me, monsieur—not for me! And, for my associations—they shall never be of that word with deceit!”
“Deceit!”
“But is it not so? Have you not approached my confidence in a false guise, under a false name? Oh!” (she stamped her foot again) “cannot you see how my condescension to the Citizen Thibaut is stultified by this new knowledge of his rank? how to favour now what I had hitherto held at arm’s-length would be to place myself in the worst regard of snobbishness!”
“No, mademoiselle—I confess that I cannot;—but then I journeyed hither in the National hearse.”
“I do not understand.”
“Why, only that there one finds a ragpicker’s head clapt upon a monseigneur’s neck in the fraternity that is decreed to level all distinctions. What is the advantage of a name, then, when one is denied a tombstone?”
“Ah!” she cried, “you seek to disarm me with levity. I recognise your habit of tolerant contempt for the mental equipment of my sex. It does not become you, monsieur;—but what does it matter! I know already your opinion of me, and how compound it is of disdain and disgust. I am soulless and cruel and capricious—perhaps ill-favoured also; but there, I think, you pronounce me inoffensive or something less. But I would have you say, monsieur—what was Lepelletier to me? I should have sickened, rather, to break bread with my uncle—whom heaven induce to the shame of repentance! And I was ill that night, so that even you might have softened in your judgment of me.”
I stood amazed at the vehemence of her speech, at the rapidity of inconsequence with which she pelted me with any chance missile that came to her hand. It was evident the poor child was overwrought to a degree; and I was fixed helpless between my passionate desire to reassure and comfort her and my sense of her repudiation of my right to do so. Now, it happened that, where words would have availed little, a mute appeal—the manner of which it was beyond my power to control—was to serve the best purposes of reconciliation. For suddenly, as I dwelt bewildered upon the wet flashing of Carinne’s eyes, emotion and fatigue, coupled with the sick pain of my wound, so wrought upon me that the vault went reeling and I with it. I heard her cry out; felt her clutch me,—and then there was sense for little but exhaustion in my drugged brain.
* * * * * * *
“I am on the floor, Carinne?”
“On the floor, mon ami.”
“I am not so little a weight, you see. You tried to support me to the bench and failed—for I know.”
“But you were a dead-weight.”
“Not dead yet, chattemite. Only I think I am dying.”
“No, no, little Thibaut! À Dieu ne plaise! You will not be so wicked. And what makes you think so?”
“I am so near heaven.”
“Do you mean me? But I burn.”
“Kiss me, then, and give me of your fire.”
“But, if you were to recover?”
“I would return it.”
“It is infamous. You presume upon my tenderness, that is all for your cruel wound. Yet I do not think you are much hurt.”
“Not now, with your hand upon my heart. Tell me, Carinne—it was Jacques Crépin that brought you here?”
“That had me conveyed hither by his deputy, Gusman. It was this morning, after your trial. He had had me released from prison—le pécheur pénitent. God had moved him to remorse, it seemed, and some unknown—perhaps one that had overheard us in La Force—to knowledge of our friendship,—yours and mine. He procured me my passport; accompanied me beyond the barrier d’Enfer; committed me to the keeping of this deadman of the quarries. He swore he would play his life against yours—would win you to me here or perish in the attempt. Judge then, you, of my waiting torture—my anguish of expectation in this solitude!”
“Would win me to you! And you desired this thing? Oh, ma mie, ma mie! how, then, could you welcome me as you did?”
“I do not know.”
“And deny and abuse me and give me such pain?”
“I do not know.”
“For you love me very dearly... Carinne, I am dying!”
“I do not believe you. That trick shall not serve a second time.”
* * * * * * *
“And what are we to do now, Carinne?”
“Thou must be asking thyself that question,” said a voice—Crépin’s—that clanged suddenly in the vaulted labyrinth. The man himself stood looking down upon us. Beside him the gaunt figure of my guide held aloft a flambeau that talked with a resinous sputter. Its flare reddened the auburn curls of the Sectional President, and informed his dissolute face with a radiance that was like an inner consciousness of nobility.
“My task ends here,” he said, quietly. “And shall we cry quits, M. le Comte?”
I lay on the floor, my head in Carinne’s lap.
“Citizen Crépin,” I said, “thou hast acquitted thyself like a gentleman and a man of courage. I would not wish, for thy sake, that the risk had been less; I would not, for ours, know that it hath involved thee in the toils.”
“We are all in the toils nowadays,” said he; “and happy the lion that can find a mouse for his friend. To the extent of my power I have done; yet, I warn thee, thou art not out of the wood. If the weasel wakes to the manner of his outwitting, not a river of blood shall divert him from the scent till he has run thee down—thee, and me also. Oh! I desire thee, do not misapprehend the importance of my service.”
Carinne looked up. She made an involuntary gesture with her hands. This dear child, in her sweet surrender, became the archetype of womanhood.
“Monsieur,” she said, softly, “you have stood aside so honourably, you have made us so greatly your debtors, that you will not now stultify your own self-sacrifice by imposing upon us a heritage of remorse? If you are in such danger, why not remain here with us?”
He did not answer for some moments; but he shook his head very slightly as he gazed down on us.
“As to life,” he said presently, “my compact is with the senses. There is a higher ideal to reach to, no doubt; but Mordi! I confess, for myself I cannot feel the epicure and play the ascetic. To continue in love with virtue, one must take it only, like opium, in occasional doses. An habitual indulgence in it degrades the picturesqueness of its own early evoking. Perhaps it should be ethically grateful to me to remain here to contemplate the fruit of my generosity ripening for another’s picking. Perhaps the guillotine is awaiting me in Paris. Well, mademoiselle, of the two evils I prefer the latter. Here, to feed on my own self-righteousness would be to starve at the end of a day; there, the glory of doing, of directing, of enjoying, will soon woo me from memory of a sentiment that was no more part of my real self than the mistletoe is part of the harsh trunk it beautifies. For death, I do not fear it, if it will come to me passionately, like a mistress.”
“Monsieur!”
“Ah, mademoiselle! believe me that I can offer no higher testimony to your worth than the assurance that I have for six months lost myself in you!”
I looked at this ex-waiter in marvel. His dishes could never have shown a finer polish than his manners. Moreover, in what intervals of supplying food to others had he sat himself down to his own feast of reason? One was accustomed in those days to hear coal-heavers discussing Diderot, but not in the language of Diderot. I gazed on his face and thought I saw in it a neutral ground, whereon a beast and an angel hobnobbed in the intervals of combat.
Beside him the torch-bearer—silent, melancholy, astringent—held his brand aloft motionless, as if his arm were a sconce of iron.
“You are hurt, monsieur?” said Crépin, suddenly referring to me.
“It is nothing—a bite, a scratch; an excuse for a pillow.”
“Ah!” (he fetched a flask from his pocket and uncorked it)—“this is ethereal cream of mint—a liqueur I affect, in that it reminds me of lambs, and innocence—and shepherdesses. Let us pledge one another, like good friends, at parting! And it will confirm thy cure, monsieur, so happily begun.”
“Mademoiselle?” he said pleadingly, and offered it to Carinne.
She touched it with her lips—I, more effectively, with mine. Crépin cried “Trinquons!” and, taking a lusty pull, handed the flask to Gusman, who drained it.
“Now,” said he, “we are united by a bond the sweetest in the world—the sympathy of the palate. We have made of ourselves a little rosary of wine beads.”
He put his hand lightly on Gusman’s shoulder.
“This austerity,” he said—“this Bailly of the Municipality of the dead—I have purchased ye his favour with the one bribe to which he is susceptible. Kings might offer him their crowns; easy maids their honour. They should no more draw him from his reserve than Alexander drew Diogenes from his tub. But there is a séductrice to his integrity, and the name of it is right Hollands. My faith! I would not swear my fidelity to such a frowzy mistress; but taste is a matter of temperament. Is it not so, Jacques?”
“While the keg lasts, I will hold the safety of thy friends in pawn to thee.”
So replied the spectral figure—a voice, a phantom—the very enigma of this charnel city of echoes.
The liqueur had revived and comforted me amazingly. I raised myself on my elbow.
“Ah!” I cried, “if good intentions could find favour with thee, I would make thy keg a kilderkin, Citizen Gusman!”
The figure stood mute, like a man of bronze. Crépin laughed recklessly.
“He is the fast warden of these old catacombs,” he said—“the undying worm and sole master of their intricacies. Himself hath tunnelled them under the ground, I believe, like the tan-yard grub that bores into poplar-trees. Silence and secrecy are his familiars; but, I tell thee, monsieur, he will absorb Hollands till he drips with it as the roofs of his own quarries drip with water. The keg once drained, and—if thou renew’st it not—he will sell thee for a single measure of schnapps. Is it not so, Jacques?”
“It is so,” said the figure, in a deep, indifferent voice.
Crépin laughed again, then suddenly turned grave, and leaned down towards me.
“Harkee, M. le Comte!” he said, “is thy pocket well lined?”
“With good intentions, M. le Président.”
He nodded and, fetching a little bag of skin out of his breast, forced it into my hand.
“It is all I can spare,” he said; “and with that I must acquit my conscience of the matter.”
“If ever I live to repay thee, good fellow——”
“Ah, bah, monsieur! I owe thee for the Médoc. And now—escape if thou seest the way open. This strange creature will be thy bond-slave while the keg runs. Afterwards—eh bien! C’est à toi la balle. For food, thou must do as others here—take toll of the country carts as they journey to the barriers. They will not provide thee with sweetbreads in wine; but—well, monsieur, there are fifty ways, after all, of cooking a cabbage.”
I rose, with difficulty, to my feet. Carinne, still seated on the floor, held her hand in mine. Something like a gentle quinsy in my throat embarrassed my speech.
“Good citizen——” I muttered.
Crépin made a gesture with his hand and backed in a hurry.
“I desire no expression of gratitude,” he said loudly.
“Good citizen,” I repeated, “thou wouldst not rebuke our selfishness by denying us, thy most faithful debtors, the privilege claimed by even a minor actor in this escapade?”
“Of whom dost thou speak?”
“Of a turnkey at St Pélagie’s.”
“Mordi! I drenched him once for the colic—that is all. The fool fancied he had swallowed an eft that was devouring his entrails.”
He cried “Portez vous bien!” and a quick emotion, as of physical pain, flickered over his face like a breath of air over hot coals. Carinne was on her feet in a moment, had gone swiftly to him, and had taken his hand.
“Monsieur,” she said, in a wet voice, “it is true that honour, like sweet vines, may shoot from beds of corruption. God forbid that I pass judgment on that which influences the ways of men; but only—but only, monsieur, I hope you may live very long, and may take comfort from the thought of the insignificance of the subject of your so great sacrifice.”
She drooped her dear head. The other looked at her with an intense gaze.
“But, nevertheless,” he said, quietly, “it was the letter of M. le Comte, of my honoured father Epicurus, that moved me to the sacrifice. That is great, as you say. I never realised how great till this moment. Yet—ah, mademoiselle! I would not sanctify it out of the category of human passions by pretending that I was induced to it by any sentiment of self-renunciation. Thyself should not have persuaded me to spare thee—nor anything less, may be, than an appeal from my preceptor in the metaphysics of the senses. I take no shame to say so. I am not a traitor to my creed; and it would offend me to be called a puritan.”
He put the girl’s hand gently away from him.
“Still,” he said, “I may not deem myself worthy to touch this flower with my lips.”
And at that he turned and went from us, summoning Gusman to accompany him, and crying as he vanished, “Good luck and forgetfulness to all!”
So disappeared from our lives this singular man, who persisted to the very last in lashing me with the thong of my own twisting. We never saw him again; once only we heard of him.
As the flash of the retreating torch glimmered into attenuation, Carinne returned to me and sat down at my side.
“Little Thibaut,” she said softly, “he designed me so great a wrong that I know not where to place him in my memory.”
“With the abortive children of thy fancy, Carinne; amongst the thoughts that are ignorant of the good in themselves.”
She sighed.
“And so it was thou wast his informer as to our friendship? And why didst thou write, Jean-Louis?”
“To urge him, by our one time intimacy, to cease his persecution of a beautiful and most innocent lady.”
“I did not know, I did not know!” she cried; and suddenly her arms were round my neck, and I lay in a nest of love.
“Oh! I am glad to be pretty, for the sake of the little Thibaut, that saved me from barbarous men, and from myself, and, alas! from my uncle! Little Thibaut, did I hurt when I beat thee? Beat me, then, till I cry with the pain.”
She sobbed and laughed and held my face against her bosom. In the midst, the candle on the wall dropped like a meteor, and instantly we were immured in a very crypt of darkness.
She cried in a terrified voice: “Oh, mon Dieu! hold me, or I sink!” and committed herself shuddering to my embrace.
The blackness was blind, horrible, beyond reason. We could only shut our eyes and whisper to one another, expecting and hoping for Gusman’s return. But he came no more that night, and by-and-by Carinne slept in my arms.
* * * * * * *
The glare of torch-light on my face brought me to my senses. That sombre deadman, as Carinne called him, stood above us—visionless, without movement, it seemed—a lurid genii presented in a swirling drift of smoke. He might never have moved from the spot since we had last seen him there.
“Why dost thou wake us, good friend?” said I. “Hast thou a midnight service for the dead here?”
“It is high morning,” said he, in a voice like a funeral bell.
“Morning!”
I sat up in amazement. Truly I had not thought of it. We had slept the clock round; but there was no day in this hideous and melancholy underworld.
I looked down at my companion. She had slipped from my hold of her, and lay across my knees. Her hair curled low on her forehead; her eyelids were misted with a faint blue shadow, like the sheaths of hyacinth buds before they open; her lips were a little parted, as Love had left them. Mon Dieu! there is no sight so tender and so pathetic as that of a fair child asleep; and what was Carinne but a child!
In an access of emotion I bent and softly touched the lips with mine. This infant so brave and so forlorn, whose head should have been pillowed on flowers, whose attendants should have been the lady fairies!
“She is very pretty,” said the deadman.
“Ha, ha!” I cried. “Hast thou found it out? There shall spring a blossom for thee yet, old Gusman, in this lifeless city of thine!”
He twirled his torch for the first time, so that it spouted fire like a hand-grenade.
“Blossoms!” he barked. “But thou shalt know I have my garden walks down here—bowers of mildew, parterres of fine rank funguses, royal worms even, that have battened for centuries on the seed of men.”
He crooked his knees, so that he might stare into my face.
“Not altogether a city of the dead,” said he.
“Is it peopled with ghosts, then?”
“Very thickly, without doubt. Thou shalt see them swarm like maggots in its streets.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The creature stood erect once more, and made a comprehensive gesture.
“This?” he said,—“you must not judge by this. It is the Holy of Holies, to which none has access but the High Priest of the Catacombs—and such as he favours.”
“And what, in a rude age, keeps it sacred?”
He swept his torch right and left.
“Look, then!” said he.
We lay in a vaulted chamber hewn out of the rock. On all sides I fancied I caught dim vision of the mouths of innumerable low tunnels that exhaled a mist of profound night.
“Knowledge!” exclaimed the fearful man; “the age-long lore of one that hath learnt his every footstep in this maze of oubliettes. There are beaten tracks here and there. Here and there a fool has been known to leave them. It may be days or weeks before I happen across his body—the eyes slipping forward of their lids, his mouth puckered out of shape from sucking and gnawing at the knuckles of his hands.”
“It is terrible! And none comes hither but thou?”
“I, and the beasts of blood that must not be denied. When they hunt, I lead; therefore it is well to win my favour.”
Carinne hurriedly raised herself. She threw her arms about me.
“Oh, my husband!” she cried, “take me where I may see the sweet daylight, if only for a moment!”
I had thought the poor child slept.
“Hush!” I murmured. “Citizen Gusman is going to show us his township!”
* * * * * * *
By interminable corridors, so intricate that one would have thought their excavators must have lain down to die, each at the limit of his boring, from sheer despair of ever finding their way to the open again, we followed the flare of the torch, our eyes smarting in its smoke, our arms most fervently linked, Carinne’s to mine, in inseparable devotion. Now and again I would hear my poor little friend whisper, “Light, light!” as if her very heart were starving; and then I would draw her face to mine and cry confidently, “It is coming, ma mie!” Still on we went over the uneven ground, thridding an endless labyrinth of death, oppressed, weighed upon, hustled by inhuman walls, breathing and exhaling the thin black fluid that is the atmosphere of the disembodied.
Sometimes, as if it crouched beneath a stroke, the flame of the torch would dip and shrink under a current of gas, then leap jocund again when the peril was swept by; sometimes the tinkle of falling water would gladden our ears as with a memory of ancient happiness; and, passing on, in a moment we should be bedewed with spray, and catch a glimpse, in the glare, of a very dropping well of fire. At length, at the turning of a corridor, Gusman called us to a halt.
He hollowed his left hand to his mouth.
“Holà—làee—eh—h—h!” he yelled, like a very lutin.
“Là—là—là—là—làee—eh—làee—eh—làee—eh!” was hooted and jangled back in a tumbling torrent of sound, that seemed to issue from the throat of a passage facing us and to shake the very roofs with merriment. Involuntarily we shrunk against the wall, as if to allow space to the impetuous rush we foresaw. Mon Dieu, the strange illusion! Only the swarming imps of echoes, summoned to the Master call, came hurrying forth, leaping and falling over one another, fighting and struggling, clanging with reverberant laughter, distributing themselves, disappearing down this or that corridor, shouting over their shoulders as they fled—faint, fainter—till silence settled down once more like water in the wake of a vessel.
Gusman slewed his head about—cockt as it had been to the outcry—to view of us.
“They are lively to-day,” he said, with an unearthly distortion of his features.
“The echoes?”
“C’est cela, citoyen. So men entitle them. No doubt it is human to think to put terror out of countenance by miscalling it.”
“How, then?”
He beckoned us to follow; plunged into the very funnel mouth that had vomited the eerie babble; led us swiftly by a winding passage, and stopped.
“Behold!” said he, flashing his torch to and fro over the surface of a roughly piled and cemented wall that seemed to close the entrance to a vast recess.
“Behold!” said he, sweeping the flame to the ground at the wall-foot.
We saw a skull or two; a few scattered bones. An indescribable brassy odour assailed our nostrils. The stones shone with an oily exudation.
“What company lies here, citizen?”
“A brave one, by my faith—a whole cemetery en bloc. Comment diable! shall they have fitted themselves each with his own by the day of Judgment! They pretend to sleep, piecemeal as they were bundled in; but utter so little as a whisper down there, and they will begin to stir and to talk. Then if thou shout’st, as I did—my God, what a clamour in reply! But one would have thought they had protested enough already.”
“In what manner?”
“Ask the killers of September, thou. They are held honest men, I believe.”
“It is enough,” said I. “Lead on, Citizen Gusman, and find us a glint of light, in the name of God!”
I glanced, with a shudder, at Carinne. Thank heaven! she had not, it appeared, understood. So here, in one dreadful lime-cemented heap, were massed the victims of those unspeakable days! I remembered the Abbaye and the blood-mark on the lip of Mademoiselle de Lâge; and I held the girl to my side, as we walked, with a pressure that was convulsive.
Again the torch danced before us, and again we followed; and yet again the deadman called us to a stop, and whirled his half-devoured brand.
“Observe well,” said he; “for it is in this quarter ye must sojourn, and here seek refuge when warning comes.”
This time a very hill of skulls and ribs and shanks—a lifeless crater—a Monte Testaccio of broken vessels that had once contained the wine of life. The heap filled a wide recess and rose twenty feet to the roof.
“The contribution of ‘Les Innocens,’” said Gusman, as if he were some spectral minister of affairs announcing in the Convention of the dead a Sectional subscription.
He pointed to a little closet of stone, like a friar’s cell, that pierced the wall to one side of the heap.
“Behold your hermitage!” said he.
Carinne, clinging to me, cried, “No, no!” in a weeping voice.
“Eh bien!” said the creature, indifferently; “you can take or leave, as you will.”
“We will take, citizen.”
“Look, then!” (he gripped my arm and haled me to the mound) “and note what I do.”
There was a point—roughly undistinguishable from the rest—where a welded mass of calcareous bone and rubbish lay upon the litter. This was, in effect, a door in one piece, with an infant’s skull for handle and concealed hinges of gut to one side to prevent its slipping out of place. Removed, it revealed a black mouth opening into an inner vacancy.
“Underneath lies a great box or kennel of wood,” said Gusman, “with a manhole cut in its side; and round and over the box the stuff is piled. At the very word of warning, creep in and close the entrance. It is like enough ye will need it.”
“And here we are to stay?”
“That is according to your inclination.”
“But Mor’ Dieu, my friend! if thou wert to forget or overlook us entombed in this oubliette?”
“Soyez content. I might forget thou wert lacking food, but never that the citizen President gave thee a purse.”
“But——”
“Tst, tst! Wouldst thou explore farther my city of shadows? Here the wild quarries merge into the catacombs. Hence, a little space, thou wilt find company and to spare;—light, also, if Mademoiselle wills.”
The poor child uttered a heart-moving sigh.
“Come, then,” said Gusman, with a shrug of his shoulders.
He preceded us the length of a single corridor, low and narrow—a mere human mole-run. All throughout it the rock seemed to grip us, the air to draw like wire into our lungs. And then, suddenly, we were come to a parapet of stone that cut our path like a whitewashed hoarding. For through a fissure in the plain above it a wedge of light entered—a very wise virgin with her lamp shining like snow;—and under the beam we stopped, and gazed upwards, and could not gaze enough.
But, for Carinne—she was translated! She laughed; she murmured; she made as if she caught the sweet wash like water in her hands and bathed her face with it.
“And now I am ready,” said she.
Then we scaled the wall, jumping to a lower terrace of rock: and thereafter ran the corridor again, descending, but now of ample enough width and showing a design of masonry at intervals, and sometimes great stone supports to the roof where houses lay above. And in a moment our path swept into a monstrous field of bones—confused, myriad, piled up like slag about a pit-mouth; and we thridded our way therethrough along a dusty gully, and emerged at once into a high vaulted cavern and the view of living things.
Living things!—Grand Dieu! the bats of the living Terror. They peered from holes and alcoves; they mowed and chattered; they shook their sooty locks at us and hailed Gusman in the jargon of the underworld. Thieves and rogues and cowards—here they swarmed in the warrens of despair, the very sacristans of devil-worship, the unclean acolytes of the desecrated rock-chapels, whose books of the Gospel were long since torn for fuel.
Out of one pestilent cavern, wherein I caught glimpse of an altar faced with an arabesque of cemented bones, something like a dusky ape, that clung with both hands to a staff for support, came mouthing and gesticulating at us.
“Bread, bread!” it mumbled, working its black jaws; and it made an aimless pick at Carinne’s skirt.
“There is for thee, then!” thundered Gusman; and he flapped his torch into the thing’s face. The animal vented a hideous cry and shuffled back into its hole, shedding sparks on its way as if it smouldered like an old rag.
“Oh, mon ami!” whispered Carinne, in a febrile voice—“better the den by the skulls than this!”
The deadman gave an acrid grin.
“À la bonne heure,” said he. “Doubtless hunger pinches. Come back, then; and I will open my wallet and thou shalt thy purse.”
* * * * * * *
Early in the afternoon—so far as in that rayless desolation one could judge it to be—there broke upon our eyes the flutter of an advancing light, upon our ears the quick secret patter of hurrying steps. These ran up to the very opening of our lair and stopped.
“Hide!” said the deadman’s voice, “I hear them call me to the search! Hide!” and, without another word, he retreated as he had come.
Carinne uttered a little shuddering “Oh!” She took my head between her hands and kissed my lips, the admirable child. Then we emerged from our den (the ghostliest glimmer reached us from some distant corner, where, no doubt, Gusman had left a light burning), and stole swiftly to the mound-foot. I felt about for the infant’s skull (the position of which I had intensely remarked), and in a moment found it and laid bare the aperture.
“Dive, little rabbit,” said I.
“I am within, Jean-Louis.”
I followed, feet first, and with my toes just touching bottom, reached out and pulled the trap upon us. Then, with a feeling as if I were wrenching off a blouse over my shoulders, I let myself back into the hole—upon a carpet of muffling dust—and ma bonne amie caught at me, and we stood to hear our own hearts beating. Like the thick throb of a clock in an under-room—thus, I swear, our pulses sounded to us in that black and horrible stillness. The box had, it appeared, been very compactly built in at the first—and before the superincumbent litter of rubbish had been discharged over and around it—with the strongest bones, for that these were calculated to endure, without shifting, the onset of one hurriedly concealing himself; yet this necessary precaution went near to stultifying itself by so helping to exclude the air as to make breathing a labour to one confined within. Fortunately, however, no long strain upon our endurance was demanded of us.
Now the hunters came upon us so silently, that there, in our ghastly prison, a spray of light, scattered through the chinks of the trap, was our first intimation of their presence. Then, as we maddened to see the glint withdrawn, a low voice came to our ears.
“Stop, then! What is this?”
“The dust of the Innocents, citizen.” (Gusman’s voice.)
“It is with the dust of the depraved in breeding fat maggots, is it not?”
“Ay, so long as they can find flesh food.”
“But what if such food were concealed herein? That little babouin of St Pélagie—peste! a big thigh-bone would afford him cover.”
I felt my hand carried to Carinne’s lips in the darkness.
Gusman kicked at the mound with his sabot.
“Close litter,” said he. “A man would suffocate that burrowed into it.”
“Is that so? Rake me over that big lump yonder—voilà!—with the little skull sticking from it.”
I felt my heart turn like a mountebank—felt Carinne stoop suddenly and rise with something huddled in her hands. The astonishing child had, unknown to me, preconceived a plan and was prepared with it on the very flash of emergency. She leant past me, swift and perfectly silent, and immediately the little spars of light about the trap went out, it seemed. If in moving she made the smallest sound, it was opportunely covered by the ragged cough that issued at the moment from Gusman’s throat.
“Dépêche-toi!” said the authoritative voice. “That projecting patch, citizen—turn it for me!”
“There is nothing here.”
“But, there, I say! No, no! Mille tonnerres,—I will come myself, then!”
I heard Gusman’s breath vibrant outside the trap; heard him hastily raise the covering an inch or two, with an affectation of labouring perplexity. I set my teeth; I “saw red,” like flecks of blood; I waited for the grunt of triumph that should announce the discovery of the hole.
“It is as I told thee,” said the deadman; “there is nothing.”
I caught a note of strangeness in his voice, a suppressed marvel that communicated itself to me. The sweat broke out on my forehead.
“H’mph!” muttered the inquisitor; and I heard him step back.
Suddenly he cried, “En avant, plus avant! To thy remotest boundaries, citizen warden! We will run the little rascal to earth yet!”
The light faded from our ken; the footsteps retreated. I passed a shaking hand over my eyes—I could not believe in the reality of our escape.
At length, unable any longer to endure the silence, I caught at Carinne in the blackness.
“Little angel,” I said; “in God’s name, what didst thou do?”
She bowed her sweet face to my neck.
“Only this, Jean-Louis. I had noticed that my poor ragged skirt was much of the colour of this heap; and so I slipped it off and stuffed it into the hole.”
* * * * * * *
We dwelt an hour in our horrible retreat, from time to time cautiously lifting the trap a finger’s-breadth for air. At the end, Gusman reappeared with his torch and summoned us to our release. He looked at Carinne, as St Hildephonsus might have gazed on the Blessed Virgin.
“It was magnificent,” he said. “I saw at once. Thou hast saved me no less than thyself. That I will remember, citoyenne, when the opportunity serves.”
* * * * * * *
On the third day our deadman came to us with a copy of the ‘Moniteur’ in his hand. He pointed silently to a name in the list of the latest executed. Carinne turned to me with pitiful eyes.
“Ah, le pauvre Crépin!” I cried, in great emotion. “What can one hope but that death came to him passionately, as he desired!”
* * * * * * *
“Citizen Gusman, we are resolved. We must go forth, if it is only to perish. We can endure this damning gloom no longer.”
He looked down on us as we sat, this genii of the torch. His face was always framed to our vision in a lurid wreath; was the sport of any draught that swayed the leaping fire. Submitted to daylight, his features might have resolved themselves into expressionlessness and immobility. To us they were ever shifting, fantastic, possessed with the very devils of the underworld.
“Well,” he said at length—“I owe the citizeness a debt of gratitude; but—sang Dieu! after all I might repudiate it when the keg threatened to suck dry. I am myself only when I am not myself. That would be a paradox in the world above there, eh? At least the moment is opportune. They hunt counter for thee, Thibaut. For the wench—she is not in their minds, nor associated in any manner with thee. That lends itself to an artifice. The idea tickles me. Sang Dieu! Yes, I will supply thee with a passport to Calais. Wait!”
He went from us. We knew better than to interrupt or question him; but we held together during his absence and whispered our hopes. In less than half an hour he returned to us, some papers grasped in his hand.
“Observe,” said he. “It is not often, after a harvest of death, that the glaneurs of the Municipality overlook a stalk; yet now and again one will come to me. Citizen Tithon Riouffe, it appears, meditated a descent upon la maudite Angleterre. He had his papers, signed and countersigned, for himself, and for his wife Sabine, moreover. It is lucky for you that he proved a rascal, for they shaved him nevertheless. What Barrère had granted, St Just rendered nugatory. But, if they took his head, they left him his passports, and those I found in his secret pocket.”
He broke off, with a quick exclamation, and peered down at me, holding the torch to my face.
“Mother of God!” he cried—“I will swear there is something a likeness here! I have a mind to fetch the head and set it to thine, cheek by jowl! Hé bien, comment, la petite babiole—that disturbs her! Well, well—take and use the papers, then, and, with discretion, ye shall win free!”
Carinne caught at the rough hand of our preserver and kissed it.
“Monsieur, thou art a deadman angel!” she cried; and broke into a little fit of weeping.
His lids fell. I saw his throat working. He examined his hand as if he thought something had stung it.
“Yes, she is very pretty,” he muttered. “I think I would give my life for her.”
Then he added, vaguely: “Chou pour chou—I will take it out in Hollands.”
Citoyen Tithon Riouffe et femme had yet to experience the most extraordinary instance of that favouritism, by an after-display of which, towards those whom she has smitten without subduing, Fortune proclaims herself the least supernatural of goddesses. Truly, they had never thrown into the lottery of events with a faint heart; and now a first prize was to be the reward of their untiring persistency.
Possibly, indeed, the papers of recommendation might have sufficed of themselves; yet that they would have carried us (having regard to our moulting condition, poor cage-worn sparrows! and the necessary slowness of our advance) in safety to the coast, I most strenuously doubt.
Dear God! the soughing of the May wind, the whisper of the grasses, the liquid flutter of the stars, that were like lights reflected in a lake! The hour of ten saw us lifted to the plain in body—to the heavens in spirit. For freedom, we were flying from the land of liberty; for life, from the advocates of the Rights of Man. We sobbed and we embraced.
“Some day,” we cried to Gusman, “we will come back and roll thee under a hogshead of schnapps!”—and then we set our faces to the north, and our teeth to a long task of endurance—one no less, indeed, than a sixty-league tramp up the half of the Isle de France and the whole of Picardie. Well, at least, as in the old days, we should walk together, with only the little rogue that laughs at locksmiths riding sedan between us.
It was our design to skirt, at a reasonable distance, the east walls of the city, and to strike at Pantin, going by way of Gentilly and Bercy—the road to Meaux. Thence we would make, by a north-westerly course, the Amiens highway; and so, with full hearts and purses tight-belted for their hunger, for the pathetically distant sea.
And all this we did, though not as we had foreseen. We toiled onwards in the dark throughout that first sweet night of liberty. For seven hours we tramped without resting; and then, ten miles north of the walls, we lay down under the lee of a skilling, and, rolled in one another’s arms, slept for four hours like moles.
* * * * * * *
I woke to the prick of rain upon my face. Before my half-conscious eyes a hectic spot faded and went wan in a grey miasma like death. It was the sun—the cheek of the virgin day, grown chill in a premature decline.
I sat up. From the south-west, like the breath of the fatal city pursuing us, a melancholy draft of cloud flowed and spread itself, making for the northern horizon. It wreathed in driving swirls and ripples, as if it were the very surface of a stream that ran above us; and, indeed almost before we were moved to a full wakefulness, we were as sopt as though we lay under water.
A swampy day it was to be. The drops soon fell so thickly that heaven seemed shut from us by a skylight of blurred glass. The interval from cloud to earth was like a glaze upon the superficies of a fire-baked sphere. The starved clammy fields shone livid; the highway ran, literally; the poplars that skirted it were mere leafy piles in a lagoon. Then the wind rose, shouldering us forward and bombarding us from the rear in recurrent volleys, till I, at least, felt like a fugitive saurian escaping from the Deluge with my wet tail between my legs.
I looked at my comrade, the delicate gallant lady. Her hair was whipped about her face, her skirt about her ankles. The red cap on her head, with which Gusman had provided her, hung over like the comb of a vanquished cockerel. She was not vanquished, however. Her white teeth clicked a little with the cold; but when she became conscious of my gaze, she returned it with an ardour of the sweetest drollery.
“Enfin, mon p’tit Thibaut,” she said; “I prefer Liberty in her chilly moods, though she make a noyade of us.”
“It is almost come to that. With a brave effort, it seems, we might rise to the clouds by our own buoyancy. Take a long breath, Carinne. Canst thou swim?”
She laughed and stopped a moment, and took me by the hands.
“I should be able to,” she said; “I feel so like a fish, or a lizard, whose skin is a little loose on his body. Am I not a dreadful sight, Jean-Louis?”
“Thou art never anything but beautiful in my eyes.”
“Fie, then, fie then! cannot I see myself in them! Very small and very ugly, Jean-Louis—an imp of black waters.”
“And I see babies in thine, Carinne. That is what the peasants call them. And I never loved my own image so well as now. It has a little blue sky to itself to spite the reality. It is a fairy peeping from a flower. Ma mie, and art thou so very cold and hungry?”
“Truly, my teeth go on munching the air for lack of anything better.”
“It is pitiful. We must brave the next town or village to procure food. There are no berries here, Carinne; no little conies to catch in a springe of withe and spit for roasting on an old sabre; and if there were, we must not stop to catch them.”
“It is true we must eat, then. The plunge has to be made—for liberty or death. Formez vos bataillons! Advance, M. le Comte, with thy heart jumping to the hilt of thy sword!”
She cried out merrily. She was my own, my property, the soul of my confidence; yet I could have cheered her in the face of a multitude as (God forgive the comparison!) the mob cheered the guenipe Théroigne when she entered the Bastille.
So, once more we drove and were driven forward; and presently, six miles north of St Denis, down we came, with stout courage, I hope, upon the village of Écouen, and into immediate touch with that fortune that counselled us so amiably in the crisis of our affairs.
Yet at the outset this capricieuse essayed to terrify us out of all assurance of self-confidence, and was the coquette to give us a bad quarter of an hour before she smiled on our suit. For at the very barrier occurred a contretemps that, but for its happy adaptation by us to circumstance, threatened to put a short end to our fugitive romance.
We assumed a breezy deportment, under the raking scrutiny of five or six patriot savages—mere arrogant péagers, down whose dirty faces the rain trickled sluggishly like oil. Foul straw was stuft into their clogs; over their shoulders, nipped with a skewer at the neck, were flung frowzy squares of sacking, in the hanging corners of which they held the flint-locks of their pieces for dryness’ sake. By the door of the village taxing-house, that stood hard by the barrier, a ferret-faced postilion—the only man of them all in boots—lounged, replaiting the lash of his whip and drawing the string through his mouth.
“Graceless weather, citizens!” said I.
A squinting bonnet-rouge damned me for un âne ennuyant.
“Keep thy breath,” said he, “for what is less obvious;” and he surlily demanded the production of our papers.
“A good patriot,” growled another, “walks with his face to Paris.”
“So many of them have their heads turned, it is true,” whispered Carinne.
The squinting man wedged his eyes upon her.
“What is that?” he said sharply—“some mot de ralliement? Be careful, my friends! I have the gift to look straight into the hearts of traitors!”
It was patent, however, that he deceived himself. He snatched the papers rudely from me, and conned them all at cross-purposes.
“Sacré corps!” he snapped—“what is thy accursed name?”
“It is plain to read, citizen.”
“For a mincing aristocrat, yes. But, for us—we read only between the lines.”
“Read on them, then, the names of Citizen Tithon Riouffe and wife.”
The indolent postilion spat the string from his lips, looked up suddenly, and came swiftly to the barrier.
“How?” said he, “what name?”
I repeated the words, with a little quaver in my voice. The man cockt his head evilly, his eyes gone into slits.
“Oh, le bon Dieu!” he cried, in acrid tones, “but the assurance of this ragged juggler!”
Carinne caught nervously at my hand.
“I do not understand the citizen,” said I, in my truculent voice.
“But I think, yes.”
“That that is not the name on the passport?”
“I know nothing of the passport. I know that thou art not Riouffe, and it is enough.”
Squint-eyes croaked joyously.
“Come!” he said; “here is a sop to the weather.”
As for me, I could have whipped Gusman for his talk of a fortuitous resemblance.
“I am Riouffe,” said I, stubbornly, “whatever thou mayst think.”
“Well, it is said,” cried the postilion. He chirped shrilly like a ferret. “And, if thou art Riouffe, thou art a damned aristocrat; and how art thou the better for that?”
“Bah!” I exclaimed. “What dost thou know of me, pig of a stable-boy?”
“Of thee, nothing. Of Riouffe, enough to say that thou art not he.”
“Explain, citizen!” growled a curt-spoken patriot, spitting on the ground for full-stop.
“Mes amis,” cried the deplorable rogue. “Myself, I conveyed the Citizen Tithon Riouffe to Paris in company with the Englishman. The Englishman, within the fifteen days, returns alone. He breaks his journey here, as you know, to breakfast at the ‘Anchor.’ But, for Riouffe—I heard he was arrested.”
Grace of God! here was a concatenation of mishaps—as luckless a rencontre as Fate ever conceived of cruelty. My heart turned grey. The beastly triumphant faces of the guard swam in my vision like spectres of delirium. Nevertheless, I think, I preserved my reason sufficiently to assume a sang froid that was rather of the nature of a fever.
“The question is,” said I, coolly, “not as to whether this lout is a fool or a liar, but as to whether or no my papers are in order. You will please to observe by whom they are franked.” (I remembered, in a flash, the deadman’s statement.) “The name of the Citizen Deputy, who assured me a safe conduct to Paris, being on this return passport, should be a sufficient guarantee that his good offices did not end with my arrival. I may have been arrested and I may have been released. It is not well, my friends, to pit the word of a horse-boy against that of a member of the Committee of Public Safety.”
My high manner of assurance had its effect. The faces lowered into some expression of chagrin and perplexity. And then what must I do but spoil the effect of all by a childishly exuberant anti-climax.
“I will grant,” said I, “that a change in the habit of one’s dress may confuse a keener headpiece than a jockey’s. What then! I arrive from England; I return from Paris—there is the explanation. Moreover, in these days of equality one must economise for the common good, and, rather than miss my return seat in the Englishman’s carriage and have to charter another, I follow in his track, when I find he is already started, in the hope to overtake him. And now you would delay us here while he stretches longer leagues between us!”
Carinne gave a little soft whimper. The postilion capered where he stood.
“Mes amis!” he cried, “he speaks well! It needs only to confront him with the Englishman to prove him an impostor.”
Misérable! What folly had I expressed! It had not been sufficiently flogged into my dull brain that the islander was here, now, in the village! I had obtusely fancied myself safe in claiming knowledge of him, while my secure policy was to have blustered out the situation as another and independent Riouffe. That course I had now made impossible. I could have driven my teeth through my tongue with vexation. Carinne touched my hand pitifully. It almost made my heart overflow. “Thus,” I said by-and-by to her, “the condemned forgives his executioner,” and—“Ah, little Thibaut,” she whispered, “but you do not know how big you looked.”
* * * * * * *
For the moment they could not find the Englishman. He had finished his breakfast and wandered afield. That was a brief respite; but nothing, it seemed, to avail in the end.
In the meantime they marched us into the taxing-house, where at a table sat a commissary of a strange figure. I had blundered desperately; yet here, I flatter myself, I turned my faculty for construing character to the account of retrieving my own.
In Citizen Tristan I read—and quite rightly, as events showed—a decent burgher aggrandised, not against his will, but against the entire lack of one. His face was shaped, and something coloured, like a great autumn pear. It was narrow at the forehead, with restless, ineffective eyes, and it dropped to a monstrous chin—a self-protective evolution in the era Sainte Guillotine. Obviously he had studied to save his neck by surrounding it with a rampart of fat. For the rest he was very squat and ungainly; and he kept shifting the papers on his desk rather than look at us.
“Here is a man,” thought I, “who has been promoted because in all his life he has never learned to call anything his own.”
Our guard presented us arrogantly; the wizened post-boy laid his charge volubly.
“Call your witness,” said I in a pet. “The case lies in a nutshell.”
My words made an impression, no doubt, though they were uttered in mere hopeless bravado.
“But, it seems he cannot be found,” protested the commissary, plaintively.
“Then,” I urged, “it is bad law to detain us.”
“You are detained on suspicion.”
“Of not being ourselves? Oh, monsieur——!”
He took me up peevishly.
“Eh, eh! voilà ce que c’est! Monsieur to me? Art thou not an aristocrat, then?”
I answered pregnantly, “The question in itself is a reflection upon him that signed this passport.”
He looked about him like a trapped creature, dumbly entreating the Fates for succour. It was my plain policy to harp upon the strings of his nerves.
“Well,” said I, “a citizen commissary, I perceive, must have the courage of his opinions; and I can only hope thine will acquit thee when the reckoning is called.”
He shifted in his chair; he spluttered little deprecatory interjections under his breath; he shot small furtive glances at his truculent following. Finally he bade all but us two out of the room, and the guard to their post at the barrier. The moment they were withdrawn grumbling, he opened upon me with a poor assumption of bluster—
“Thou art very big with words; but here I am clearly within my rights.”
“Are not my papers in order, then?”
“It would at least appear so.”
His lids rose and fell. Patently his self-possession was an insecure tenure.
“Citizen,” I said, shaking my finger at him. “Since when hast thou learned to set thy will in opposition to that of Barrère?”
“Oh, nom de Dieu!” he whimpered, in great distress; and rose and trundled up and down the room. “I oppose nobody. I am a most unhappy being, condemned by vile circumstance to give the perpetual lie to my conscience.”
“It is an ignoble rôle,” said I, “and quite futile of itself.”
He paused suddenly opposite me. His fat lips were shaking; his eyes blinked a nerveless anxiety.
“I contradict nobody,” he cried; and added afflictedly, “I suppose, if you are Riouffe, you are Riouffe, I suppose.”
“It all lies in that,” said I.
“Then,” he cried feebly—“what the devil do you want of me?”
I could have laughed in his poor gross face.
“What, indeed,” said I. “My account with you will come later. You will be prepared then, no doubt, to justify this detention. For me, there remains Barrère.”
“No, no!” he cried; “I desire only to steer wide of quicksands. You may guess, monsieur, how I am governed. This fripon takes my fellows by the ears. He gives you the lie, and you return it in his teeth. What am I to say or think or do?”
“Is it for me to advise a commissary?”
He rumpled his limp hair desperately as he walked.
“You will not help me! You drive me to distraction!”
He stopped again.
“Are you Riouffe?” he cried.
“You have my passport, monsieur.”
“Yes, yes, I know!” he exclaimed in a frenzy; “but—Mother of God, monsieur! do you not comprehend the post-boy to swear you are not the Englishman’s Riouffe?”
“Confront me, then, with the Englishman.”
“He cannot be found.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I can only recall monsieur’s attention,” said I, “to the fact that certain citizens, travelling under safe-conduct of a member of the Committee of Safety, and with their papers in indisputable order, are suffering a detention sufficiently unwarrantable to produce the gravest results.”