Chapter XIII: The Red Cart

At so early an hour was my trial (in the personal and suffering sense) brought to a conclusion, that mid-day was not yet struck when my guards delivered me over to the authorities at St Pélagie--a one-time _communauté de filles_ in the faubourg of St Victor, and since appropriated ostensibly to the incarceration of debtors. My arrival, by grace of Fortune, was most happily timed; and, indeed, the persistency with which throughout the long period of my difficulties this capricious _coureuse_ amongst goddesses converted for my benefit accident into opportuneness offered some excuse to me for remaining in conceit with myself.

Now I was taken in charge by a single turnkey--the others being occupied with their dinner--and conducted by him to the jailer’s room to undergo that _rapiotage_, or stripping for concealed properties, the general abuse of which--especially where women were in question--was a scandal even in those days of shameless brutality.

As he pushed me into the little ill-lighted chamber and closed the door hurriedly upon us, I noticed that the man’s hands shook, and that his face was clammy with a leaden perspiration. He made no offer to overhaul me; but, instead, he clutched me by the elbow and looked in a half-scared, half-triumphant manner into my face.

“Pay attention,” he said, in a quick, forced whisper. “Thy arrival accommodates itself to circumstance--most admirably, citizen, it accommodates itself. I, that was to expect, am here alone to receive thee. It is far better so than that I should be driven to visit thee in thy cell.”

“I foresee a call upon my gratitude,” I said, steadily regarding him. “That is at your service, citizen jailer, when you shall condescend to enlighten me as to its direction.”

“I want none of it,” he replied. “It is my own to another that procures thee this favour.”

“What other, and what favour?”

“As to the first--_en bon Français_, I will not tell thee. For the second--behold it!”

With the words, he whipt out from under his blouse a thin, strong file, a little vessel of oil, and a dab of some blue-coloured mastic in paper--and these he pressed upon me.

“Hide them about thy person--hide them!” he muttered, in a fearful voice; “and take all that I shall say in a breath!”

He glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. He was a blotched and flaccid creature, with the staring dry hair of the tippler, but with very human eyes. His fingers closed upon my arm as if for support to their trembling.

“Cell thirteen--on the first floor,” he said; “that is whither I shall convey thee. Ask no questions. Hast thou them all tight?--_Allez-vous en, mon ami!_ A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.”

“But----”

“Ah! thou must needs be talking! Cement with the putty, then, and rub the filings over the marks.”

“I was not born yesterday. It is not _that_ I would know.”

“S-st! At nine by the convent clock, be ready to drop silently into the cart that shall pass beneath thy window. Never mind what thou hit’st on. A falling man does not despise a dunghill.”

I hesitated, seeking to read this patriot’s soul. Was this all a snare to clinch my damnation? Pooh! if I had ever fancied Tinville hunted for the shadow of a pretext, this morning’s experience should have disabused me of the fallacy.

“Who commissions thee?” I said.

“One to whom I owe a measure of gratitude.”

“But not I?”

“From this time--yes.”

He pushed at me to go before him.

“At least,” I said, “acquaint me if it is the same that sent the letter.”

“I know nothing of any letter. _San’ Dieu!_ I begin to regret my complaisance. This fellow will strangle us all with his long tongue.”

“But, for thyself, my friend?”

“Oh, _nom de Dieu_! I have no fear, if thou wilt be discreet--and grateful.”

“And this tool--and the _rapiotage_!”

“Listen then! The thief that follows a thief finds little by the road. We are under no obligation to search a prisoner remanded from another prison.”

Impulsively I wrung the hand of the dear sententious; I looked into his eyes.

“The Goddess of Reason disown thee!” I said. “Thou shalt never be acolyte to a harlot!--And I--if all goes well, I will remember. And what is thy name, good fellow?”

“_M. un tel_,” said he, and added, “Bah! shall not thy ignorance of it be in a measure our safeguard?”

“True,” said I. “And take me away, then. I cannot get to work too soon.”

He opened the door, peeped out, and beckoned me.

“All is well,” he whispered. “The coast is clear.”[1]

As he drove me with harsh gestures across a yard, a turnkey, standing at a door and twirling a toothpick in his mouth, hailed him strenuously.

“What perquisites, then, comrade?”

“Bah!” cried my fellow; “I have not looked. He is a bone of Cabochon’s picking.”

* * * * * * *

With what a conflict of emotions I set to work--tentatively at first; then, seeing how noiselessly the file ran in its oiled groove, with a concentration of vigour--upon the bars of my window, it is not difficult to imagine. So hard I wrought that for hours I scarce gave heed to my growling hunger or attention to my surroundings. As to the latter, indeed, I was by this time sensibly inured to the conditions of confinement, and found little in my cell when I came to examine it to distinguish it from others I had inhabited. A bench, a pitcher, a flattened mess of straw; here and there about the stone flags marks as if some frantic beast had sought to undermine himself a passage to freedom; here and there, engraved with a nail or the tooth of a comb on the plaster coating of the walls, ciphers, initials, passionate appeals to heaven or blasphemous indecencies unnameable; in one spot a forlorn cry: “_Liberté, quand cesseras-tu d’être un vain mot!_” in another, in feminine characters, the poor little utterance: “_On nous dit que nous sortirons demain_,” made so pathetic by the later supplement underscored, “_Vain espoir!_”--with all these, or their like, was I grievously familiar--resigned, not hardened to them, I am sure.

The window at which I stood looked across a little-frequented passage--the Puit d’Ermite--upon a blank wall; and was terminated with a pretty broad sill of stone that screened my operations from casual wayfarers in the street below. Once, peering forth as I could, with my face pressed to the bars, I found myself to be situated so indifferent high as that, free of the grate, I might drop to the pavement without incurring risk of severer damage than a fractured leg or ankle, perhaps. Obviously, every point had been considered in this trifling matter of my escape. By whom? By him that had put me that pawn up my sleeve in the Palais de Justice? Well, the pawn had checked the king, it appeared; and now it must content me to continue the game with a handkerchief over my eyes, like the great M. Philidor.

By two o’clock, having cut through a couple of the bars close by their junction with the sill, so that a vigorous pull at both would open a passage for me large enough to squeeze through, I was absorbed in the careful process of cementing and concealing the evidences of my work when I heard a sound behind me and twisted myself about with a choke of terror. But it was my friendly jailer, come with a trencher of broken scraps for the famished animal in the cage.

“_Corps de Christ!_” he muttered, his face white and scared--“but here is an admirable precaution! What if I had been Fouquier-Tinville himself, then?”

“You made no noise.”

“_Par exemple!_ I can shoot a hundredweight of bolts, it seems, so as not to wake a weasel. I made no noise to deaf ears. But, for thyself, monsieur--He that would steal corn must be careful his sack has no holes in it. And now I’ll wager thou’st dusted thy glittering filings out into the sunbeams, and a sentry, with pistols and a long musket, pacing the cobbles down there!”

“_Soyez tranquille!_ I have all here in my pocket.”

He put down the platter, shrugged his shoulders, and came on tiptoe to the window.

“Well, it is excellent,” he whispered grudgingly--“if only thy caution matched thy skill.”

Then he came close up to me.

“I have news,” he muttered. “All is in preparation. It needs only that thou play’st thy part silently and surely. A moment’s decision and the game is thine.”

“But, the sentry, say’st thou?”

“He will be withdrawn. What, is it not the eve of the _Décadi_?[2] To-night, the wine-shops; to-morrow, full suburbs and an empty Paris, but for thee the Public Accuser with his questions.”

“And why should he not visit me to-day?”

“Rest assured. He hath a double baking to occupy him.”

A noise sounded in the corridor. The man put his finger to his lips, pointed significantly at the remainder litter about the sill, stole to the door, jangled his keys viciously and bellowed at me: “Thou shalt have that or nothing! _Saint Sacrement_, but the dainty bellies of these upstarts!”--and off he went, slamming the door after him, and grumbling till he was out of hearing.

“Excellent nameless one!” I cried to myself; and so, having most scrupulously removed every trace of my work, I fell, while attacking with appetite the meal left for me, into a sort of luminous meditation upon the alluring prospect half opened out to my vision.

“And whence, in the name of God,” I marvelled, “issues this unknown influence that thus exerts itself on my behalf; and by what process of gratitude can my jailer, in these days of a general repudiation of obligations, have attached himself to a cause that, on the face of it, seems a purely quixotic one?”

Then, “Oh, merciful Heaven!” I thought, “can it be possible that set in the far haze of a narrow vista of hope, an image--to whose wistful absorption into the Paradise of dreams I have sought to discipline myself--yet yearns to and beckons me from the standpoint of its own material sweetness? I see the smile on its mouth, the lift of its arms; I hear the little cry of welcome wafted to me. My God, the cry!”

All in an instant some shock of association seemed to stun my brain. The cry--the single cry that had issued upon my condemnation in the hall of Justice! Had it not been the very echo of that I had once heard uttered by a poor swineherd fallen into the hands of savages?

I got to my feet in agitation. Now, suddenly it was borne to me that from the moment of issue of that little incisive wail a formless wonder had been germinating in my soul. Carinne present at my trial!--no, no, it was impossible--unless----

“Citizen, the patriots in this corridor send thee greeting.”

I started as if a bullet had flown past my ear. The voice seemed to come from the next cell. I swept the cobwebs from my forehead.

“A thousand thanks!” I cried.

“They have dreamt that the ass cursed the thorough-bred for the niceness of his palate,” went on the voice, “and most heartily they commiserate thee.”

There followed a faint receding sound like laughter and the clapping of hands. I had no idea what to say; but the voice relieved me of the embarrassment.

“May I ask the citizen’s name?”

“I am the Comte de la Muette.”

“_Allons donc!_”--and the information, it seemed, was passed from cell to cell.

“Monsieur,” then came the voice, “we of the Community of the Eremites of St Pélagie offer thee our most sympathetic welcome, and invite thee to enrol thyself a member of our Society. Permit me, the President, by name Marino, to have the honour of proposing thee for election.”

“By all means. And what excludes, Monsieur le Président?”

“_D’une haleine_ (I mention it to monsieur as a matter of form), to have been a false witness or a forger of assignats.”

“Then am I eligible.”

“Surely, monsieur. How could one conceive it otherwise! And it remains only to ask--again as a matter of form--thy profession, thy abode, and the cause of thy arrest.”

“Very well. My profession is one of attachment to a beautiful lady; I live, I dare to believe, in her heart; and, for my arrest, it was because, in these days of equality, I sought to remain master of myself.”

My answer was passed down the line. It elicited, I have the gratification to confess, a full measure of applause.

“I have the honour to inform M. le Comte,” said the President, “that he is duly elected to the privileges of the Society. I send him a fraternal embrace.”

My inclination jumped with the humour of the thing. It was thus that these unfortunates, condemned to solitary confinement, had conceived a method of relieving the deadly tedium of their lot. Thus they passed to one another straws of information gleaned from turnkeys or from prisoners newly arrived. And in order to the confusion of any guard that might overhear them, they studied, in their inter-communications, to speak figuratively, to convey a fact through a fable, or, at the least, to refer their statements to dreams that they had dreamt. At the same time they formed a Society rigidly exclusive. Admitted rascals, imprisoned in the corridor, they would by no means condescend to notice. I had an example of this once during the afternoon, when the whole place echoed with phantom merriment over a jest uttered by a member.

“M. le Comte!” cried a voice from the opposite row: “I could tell thee a better tale than that.”

Before the speaker could follow up his words, the President hammered at my wall.

“I beseech thee do not answer the fellow,” he said. “It is a rogue that was suborned in the most pitiful case of the St Amaranthe.”

“Monsieur, monsieur!” exclaimed the accused; “it is a slander and a lie. And how wouldst thou pick thy words with thy shoulder bubbling and hissing under the branding-iron?”

“As I would pick nettles,” I said.

“I beseech thee!” cried again my neighbour the President, in a warning voice, “this man can boast no claim to thy attention.”

The poor rascal cried out: “It is inhuman! I perish for a word of sympathy!”

I would have given it him; but his protests were laughed into silence. He yelled in furious retort. His rage was over-crowed, and drifted into sullenness.

“I dreamt I belaboured a drum,” said the President, “and it burst under my hands.”

* * * * * * *

Truly I did not regret the distraction this whimsical Society afforded me. Left to myself, the fever of my mind would have corroded my very reason, I think. To have been condemned to face those hours of tension indescribable, with no company but that of my own thoughts, would have proved such an ordeal as, I felt, would have gone far to render me nerveless at the critical moment. So, responding to the dig of circumstance in my ribs, I abandoned myself to frolic, and almost, in the end, lapsed into the other extreme of hysteria.

But, about five o’clock, closing in from the far end of the corridor, a swift ominous silence succeeded the jangle; and I was immediately aware of heavy footsteps treading the cemented floor of the passage, and, following upon these, the harsh snap of locks and the rumbling of a deep voice--

“Follow me, De la Chatière.”

The words were the signal for a shrilling chorus of sounds--whoops, cat-calls, verberant renderings of a whole farmyard of demoniac animals.

“_Miau, miau_, Émile! Thou art caught in thine own springe!”

“They will ask thee one of thy nine lives, Émile!”

“Ah--bah! if he pleads as he reasons, upside-down, they will only cut off his feet.”

“Plead thy poor sick virtue, Émile!”

“No, no! that were one _coup de tête_ that shall procure him another.”

“What need to lie when the truth will serve! Plead thy lost virtue, Émile, and the jury will love thee.”

“_Taisez-vous, donc!_” roared a jailer. He was answered by a shriek of laughter. In the midst of the noise I heard the door of my neighbouring cell flung open and Marino summoned forth. As the party retreated: “M. le Président, M. le Président!” shouted a voice--“Art thou going without a word? But do not, I beseech thee, in the pride of thy promotion neglect to nominate thy successor!”

“Lamarelle, then,” answered the poor fellow, in a voice that he tried vainly to control.

He was led away. The babble boiled over and simmered down. In a very few moments a tense quiet had succeeded the uproar. This--due partly to the reaction from excitement, partly to the fact that jailers were loitering at hand--wrought in me presently a mood of overbearing depression. I durst give no rein to my hopes or to my apprehensions, lest, getting the bit between their teeth, they should fairly run away with my reason. The prospect of another four hours of this mindless inaction--hours of which every second seemed to be marked off by the tick of a nerve--was a deplorable one, indeed.

I tramped ceaselessly to and fro in my cage, humming to myself and assuming the habit of a philosophy that fitted me about as well as Danton’s breeches would have done. I grimaced to my own reflections like a coquette to her mirror. I suffered from my affectation of self-containment as severely as though I were a tight-laced _femme à la mode_ weeping to hear a tale of pity. The convent clock, moving somewhere with a thunderous click as if it were the very _doyen_ of death-watches, chimed the dusk upon me in reluctant quarters. Ghostly emanations seemed to rise from the stones of my cell, sorrowful shapes of the lost and the hopeless to lean sobbing in its corners. Sometimes I could have fancied I heard a thin scratching on the walls about me, as if the returned spectres of despair were blindly tracing with a finger the characters they had themselves engraved thereon; sometimes, as I wheeled to view of the dull square of the window, a formless shadow, set against it, would appear to drop hurriedly and fold upon itself like a bat. By the time, at last, that, despite my resolves, I was worked up to a state of agitation quite pitiful, some little relief of distraction was afforded me by the entrance into my cell of a stranger turnkey, with some coarse food on a plate in his one hand, and, in the other, a great can of water, from which he replenished my pitcher. During the half minute he was with me a shag beast of a dog kept guard at the door.

“Fall to, then,” growled the man; “if thou hast the stomach for anything less dainty than fat pullets and butter.”

In effect, I had none for anything; yet I thought it the sensible policy to take up the plate, when the fellow was withdrawn, and munch away the drawling minutes lest I should spend them in eating out my heart.

Other than this rascal no soul came near me. I had had, it seemed, my full warning--my complete instructions. Yet, lacking reassurance during this long trial of suspense, I came to feel as if all affecting my escape must be a chimera--a fancy bred of the delirium that precedes death.

Well, as my friendly _huissier_ might have said, Time flies, however strong the head-wind; and at length the quarters clanged themselves into that one of them that was the prelude to my most momentous adventure. And immediately thereon (God absolve me for the inconsistency!) a frantic revulsion of feeling set in, so that I would have given all but my chance of escape to postpone the act of it indefinite hours. Now I heard the throb of the seconds with a terror that was like an acute accent to my agony of suspense. It grew--it waxed monstrous and intolerable. I must lose myself in some physical exertion if I would preserve my reason.

Suddenly a nightmare thought faced me. What if, when the time came, the cut bars should remain stubborn to my efforts to bend them! What if I had neglected to completely sever either or both, and that, while I madly wrought to remedy my error, the moment should pass and with it the means to my deliverance!

Sweating, panting, in a new reaction to the frenzy for liberty, I sprang to the window, gripped the bars, and, with all my force, dragged them towards me. They parted at the cuts and yielded readily. A sideway push to each, and there would freedom gape at me.

In the very instant of settling my shoulder to the charge, I was aware of a sound at my cell door--the cautious groping of wards in a lock. With a suppressed gasp I came round, with my back to the tell-tale grating, and stood like a discovered murderer.

A lance of dull light split the blackness perpendicularly.

“Open again when I tap,” said a little voice--that cracked like thunder in my brain, nevertheless,--and the light closed upon itself.

God of all irony!--the little voice--the little dulcet undertone that had cried _patte-pelu_ upon me in the hall of Justice! So the turnkey had miscalculated or had been misinformed, and M. l’Accusateur Public would not postpone the verbal satisfaction of his cupidity to the _Décadi_. _Le limier rencontrait_; I was bayed into a corner, and my wit must measure itself against a double row of teeth.

For an instant a mad resentment against Fate for the infernal wantonness of its cruelty blazed up in my breast, so that I could scarce restrain myself from bounding upon my enemy with yells of fury. Then reason--set, contained and determined--was restored to me, and I stood taut as a bowstring and as vicious.

A moment or two passed in silence. I could make out a dusky undefined heap by the door. “In the dark all cats are grey.”

At length: “Who is there?” I said quietly.

The figure advanced a pace or two.

“Speak small, my friend,” it said, “as if thou wert the very voice of conscience.”

This time there was no doubt. I ground my teeth as I answered: “Of _thy_ conscience, monsieur? Then should I thunder in thy ears like a bursting shell.”

“What is this!” said he, taking a backward step.

On my honour I could not have told him. I felt only to myself that if this man baulked me of my liberty I should kill him with my hands. But doubtless indignation was my bad counsellor.

“How!” he muttered, with a menacing devil in his voice. “Does the fool know me?”

I broke into wicked laughter.

“Hear the unconscious humorist!” I cried--and the cry seemed to reel in my throat; for on the instant, dull and fateful, clanged the first note of the hour.

Now God knows what had urged me to this insanity of defiance, when it was obvious that my best hope lay in throwing a sop of lies to my Cerberus. God knows, I say; and to Him I leave the explanation. Yet, having fallen upon this course, I can assert that not once during the day had I felt in such good savour with myself.

He came forward again with a raging malediction.

“Thy pledge!” he hissed; “the paper--the treasure! God’s name! dost thou know who it is thou triflest with?”

I heard the rumble of wheels over the stones down below. My very soul seemed to rock as if it were launched on waves of air. The wheels stopped.

“Listen,” I said, in a last desperation. “It was a ruse, a lie to gain time. I know of no treasure, nor, if I did, would I acquaint thee of its hiding-place.”

A terrible silence succeeded. I stood with clinched hands. Had I heard the cart move away again I should have thrown myself upon this demon and sought to strangle him. Then, “Oh, my God! oh, my God!” he said twice, in a dreadful strained voice, and that was all.

Suddenly he made a swift movement towards me. I stood rigid, still with my back to the damning grate; but, come within a foot of me, he as suddenly wheeled and went to the door.

“Open, Gamache,” he whispered, like a man winded, and tapped on the oak: “open--I have something to say to thee.”

In another moment I was alone. I turned, and, in a frenzy of haste, drove the bars right and left with all my force. Like a veritable ape of destiny I leapt to the sill and looked down. A white face stared up at me. The owner of it was already in the act of gathering his reins together. I heard a soft tremulous _ouf!_ issue from his lips, and on the breath of it I dropped and alighted with a thud upon something that squelched beneath my weight. As I got to my knees, he on the driving-board was already whipping his horses to a canter.

“Quick, quick!” he said. “Come up and sit here beside me.”

I managed to do so, though the cargo we carried gave perilous foothold.

Then at once I turned and regarded my preserver.

“Saints in heaven!” I whispered, “Crépin!”

* * * * * * *

He was a very _sans-culotte_, and his face and eyebrows were darkened. But I knew him.

“Well,” he said; “I am no rogue of a Talma to act a part. But what, in God’s name, delayed thee?”

“Fouquier-Tinville.”

His jaw dropped at me.

“_Si fait vraiment_,” I said, and gave him the facts.

He shivered as I spoke. The instant I was done, “Get under the canvas!” said he, in a terrible voice. “There will be hue-and-cry, and if I am followed, we are both lost. Get under the canvas, and endure what thou canst not cure!”

* * * * * * *

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!”