A murmur of applause ran round. Duval’s hand went to his breast, and drew out a flask. He drank furtively, and leaned back again.
Dangeau was moving away, but he turned for a moment, the old sparkle in his eyes.
“My felicitations, Tinville,” he observed with a casual air.
“On what?”
Dangeau smiled politely.
“The convenience for you of having abolished Hell! It is a masterstroke. It only remains for me to wish you an early opportunity of verifying your statements.”
“Take him out,” said Tinville, stamping his foot, and Dangeau went down the steps, and into the long adjoining room where the prisoners waited for the tumbrils. It was too much trouble now to take them back again to prison, so the Justice Hall was itself the ante-chamber of the guillotine. It was hot, and Dangeau felt the lassitude which succeeds a strain. Of what use to bandy words with Fouquier Tinville, of what use anything, since the last word lay with the strongest, and this hour was the hour of his death? It is very difficult for a strong man, with his youth still vigorous in every vein, to realise that for him hope and fear, joy and pain, struggle and endurance, are all at an end, and that the next step is that final one into the blind and unknown pathways of the infinite.
He thought of Robespierre, out there in the tideway fighting for his life against the inexorable waves of Fate. Even now the water crept salt and sickly about his mouth. Well, if it drowned him, and swept France clean again, what did it matter if the swirl of the tide swept Dangeau from his foothold too?
Absorbed in thought, he took no note of his companions in misfortune. There was a small crowd of them at the farther end of the room, a gendarme or two stood gossiping by, and there was a harsh clipping sound now and again, for the prisoners’ hair was a perquisite of the concierge’s wife, and it was cut off here, before they went to the scaffold.
The woman stood by to-day and watched it done. The perquisite was a valuable one, and on the previous day she had been much annoyed by the careless cutting which had ruined a magnificent head of auburn hair. To-day she had noted that one of the women had a valuable crop, and she was instant in her directions for its cutting. Presently she pushed past Dangeau and lifted the lid of a basket which hung against the wall. His glance followed her idly, and saw that the basket was piled high with human hair. The woman muttered to herself as her eye rested on the ruined auburn locks. Then she took to-day’s spoil, tress by tress, from her apron, knotting the hair roughly together, and dropping it into the open basket. Dangeau watched her with a curious sick sensation. The contrast between the woman’s unsexed face and the pitiful relics she handled affected him disagreeably, but beyond this he experienced a strange, tingling sensation unlike anything in his recollection.
The auburn hair was hidden now by a bunch of gay black curls. A long, straight, flaxen mass fell next, and then a thick waving tress, gold in the light, and brown in the shade, catching the sun that crossed it for a moment, as Aline’s hair had always done.
He shuddered through all his frame, and turned away. Thank God, thank God she was safe at Rancy! And with that a sudden movement parted the crowd at the other side of the room, and he looked across and saw her.
He had heard of visions in the hour of death, but as he gazed, a cold sweat broke upon his brow, and he knew it was she herself, Aline, his wife, cast for death as he was cast. Her profile was towards him, cut sharply against the blackened wall. Her face was lifted. Her eyes dwelt on the patch of sky which an open window gave to view. How changed, O God, how changed she was! How visibly upon the threshold. The beauty had fallen away from her face, leaving it a mere frail mask, but out of her eyes looked a spirit serenely touched with immortality. It is the look worn only by those who are about to die, and look past death into the Presence.
It was a look that drove the blood from Dangeau’s heart; a wave of intolerable anger against Fate, of intolerable anguish for the wife so found again, swept it back again. He moved to go to her, and as he did so, saw a man approach and begin to pinion her arms, whilst the opening of a door and the roll of wheels outside proclaimed the arrival of the tumbrils. In the same moment Dangeau accosted the man, his last coin in his hand.
“This for you if you will get me into the same cart as this lady, and see, friend, let it be the last one.”
What desperate relic of spent hope prompted his last words he hardly knew, for after all what miracle could Goyot work? but at least he would have a few more minutes to gaze at Aline before the darkness blotted out her face.
Jean Legros, stupid and red-faced, stared a moment at the coin, then pocketed it with a nod and grunt, and fell to tying Dangeau’s arms. At the touch of the cord an exclamation escaped him, and it was at this moment that Aline, roused from her state of abstraction by something in the voice behind her, turned her head and saw him.
They were so close together that her movement brought them into contact, and at the touch, and as their eyes met, anguish was blotted out, and for one wonderful instant they leaned together whilst each heart felt the other’s throb.
“My heart!” he said, and then before either could speak again they were being pushed forward towards the open door.
The last tumbril waited; Dangeau was thrust into it, roughly enough, and as he pitched forward he saw that Aline behind him had stumbled, and would have fallen but for fat Jean’s arm about her waist. She shrank a little, and the fellow gave a stupid laugh.
“What, have you never had a man’s arm round you before?” he said loudly, and gave her a push that sent her swaying against Dangeau’s shoulder. The knot of idlers about the door broke into coarse jesting, and the bound man’s hands writhed against his bonds until the cords cut deep into the flesh of his wrist, and the blood oozed against the twisted rope.
Aline leaned nearer. She was conscious only that here was rest. Since Mlle Ange died of the prison fever two days ago, she had not slept or wept. She had thought perhaps she might die too, and be saved the knife, but now nothing mattered any more. He was here; he loved her. They would die together. God was very good.
His voice sounded from far, far away.
“I thought you safe; I thought you at Rancy, oh, God!” and she roused a little to the agony in his tone, and looked at him with those clear eyes of hers. Through all the dreamlike strangeness she felt still the woman’s impulse to comfort the beloved.
“God, who holds us in the hollow of His hand, knows that we are safe,” she said, and at that he groaned “Safe!” so that she fought against the weariness that made her long just to put her head upon his shoulder and be at peace.
“There was too much between us,” she said very low. “We could not be together here, but we could not be happy apart. I do not think God will take us away from one another. It is better like this, my dear!—it is better.”
Her voice fell on a low, contented note, and he felt her lean more closely yet. An agony of rebellion rent his very soul. To love one woman only, to renounce her, to find her after long months of pain, to hear her say what he had hoped for only in his dreams, and then to know that he must watch her die. What vision of Paradise could blot this torture out? Powerless, powerless, powerless! In the height of his strength, and not able even to strike down the brute whose coarse hand touched her, and that other brute who would presently butcher her before his very eyes.
Then, whilst his straining senses reeled, he felt a jolt and the cart stopped. All about them surged an excited crowd.
There was a confused noise, women screamed. One high, clear voice called out, “Murderers! Assassins!” and the crowd took up the cry with angry insistence.
“See the old man! and the girl! ma foi, she has an angel’s face. Is the guillotine to eat up every one?”
The muttering rose to a growl, and the growl to a roar. To and fro surged the growing crowd, the horses began to back, the car tilted. Dangeau looked round him, his heart beating to suffocation, but Aline appeared neither to know nor care what passe
d. For her the world was empty save for they two, and for them the gate of Heaven stood wide. She heard the song of the morning stars; she caught a glimpse of the glory unutterable, unthinkable.
As the shouting grew, the driver of their cart cast anxious glances over his shoulder. All at once he stood up, waving his red cap, calling, gesticulating.
A cry went up, “The gendarmerie, Henriot! Henriot and the gendarmes!” and the press was driven apart by the charge of armed horsemen. At their head rode Henriot, just freed from prison, flushed with strong drink, savage with his own impending doom.
The crowd scattered, but a man sprang for an instant to the wheels of the cart, and whispered one swift sentence in Dangeau’s ear:
“Robespierre falls; nothing can save him.”
It was Goyot in a workman’s blouse, and as he dropped off again Dangeau made curt answer.
“In time for France, if not for me. Good-bye, my friend,” and then Goyot was gone and the lumbering wheels rolled on.
On the other side of the cart, the Abbé Delacroix prayed audibly, and the smooth Latin made a familiar cadence, like running water heard in childhood, and kept in some secret cell of the memory. Beside the priest sat old General de Loiserolles, grey and soldierly, hugging the thought that he had saved his boy; how entirely he was not to know. Answering his son’s name, leaving that son sleeping, he was giving him, not the doubtful reprieve of a day, but all the years of his natural life, since young De Loiserolles was amongst those set free by the death of Robespierre.
As the cart stopped by the scaffold foot, he crossed himself, and followed the Abbé to the axe, with a simple dignity that drew a strange murmur from the crowd. For the heart of Paris was melting fast, and the bloodshed was become a weariness. Prisoner after prisoner went up the steps, and after each dull thud announced the fallen axe, that long ominous “ah” of the crowd went up.
Dangeau and Aline were the last, and when they came to the steps he moved to go before her, then cursed himself for a coward, and stood aside to let her pass. She looked sweetly at him for a moment and passed on, climbing with feet that never faltered. She did not note the splashed and slippery boards, nor Sanson and his assistants all grimed and daubed from their butcher’s work, but her eye was caught by the sea of upturned faces, all white, all eyeing her, and her head turned giddy. Then some one touched her, held her, pulled away the kerchief at her breast, and as the sun struck hot upon her uncovered shoulders, a burning blush rose to her very brow, and the dream in which she had walked was gone. Her brain reeled with the awakening, heaven clouded, and the stars were lost. She was aware only of Sanson’s hot hand at her throat, and all those eyes astare to see her death.
The hand pushed her, her foot felt the slime of blood beneath it, she saw the dripping knife, and all at once she felt herself naked to the abyss. In Sanson’s grip she turned wide terror-stricken eyes on Dangeau, making a little, piteous, instinctive movement towards him, her protector, and at that and his own impotence he felt each pulse in his strong body thud like a hammered drum, and with one last violent effort of the will he wrenched his eyelids down, lest he should look upon the end. All through the journey there had been as it were a sword in his heart, but at her look and gesture—her frightened look, her imploring gesture—the sword was turned and still he was alive, alive to watch her die. In those moments his soul left time and space, and hung a tortured point, infinitely lonely, infinitely agonised, in some illimitable region of never-ending pain. There was no past, no future, only Eternity and his undying soul in anguish. The thousand years were as a day, and the day as a thousand years. There was no beginning and no end. O God, no end!
He did not hear the crowd stir a little, and drift hither and thither as it was pressed upon from one side; he did not see the gendarmes press against the drift, only to be driven back again, hustled, surrounded so that their horses were too hampered to answer to the spur. Suddenly a woman went down screaming under the horses’ feet, and on the instant the crowd flamed into fury before the agonised shriek had died away. In a moment all was a seething, shouting, cursing welter of struggling humanity. The noise of it reached even Dangeau’s stunned brain, and he said within himself, “It is over. She is dead,” and opened his eyes.
The scaffold stood like an island in a sea grown suddenly wild with tempest, and even as he looked, the human waves of it broke in a fierce swirl which welled up and overflowed it on every side.
Sanson, his hand on the machinery, was whirled aside, jostled, pushed, cursed. A fat woman, with bare, mottled arms, Heaven knows how she came on the platform, dealt him a resounding smack on the face, and shrieked voluble abuse, which was freely echoed.
Dangeau was surrounded, embraced, cheered, lifted off his feet, the cord that bound his arms slashed through, and of a sudden Goyot had him round the neck, and he found voice and clamoured Aline’s name. The little surgeon, after one glance at his wild eyes, pushed with him through the surging press; they had to fight their way, and the place was slippery, but they were through at last, through and down on their knees by the woman who lay bound beneath the knife that Sanson’s hand was freeing when the tumult caught him. A dozen hands snatched her back again now, the cords were cut, and Dangeau’s shaking voice called in her ears, called loudly, and in vain.
“Air, give her air and room,” he cried, and some pushed forwards and others back. The fat woman took the girl’s head upon her lap, whilst tears rained down her crimson cheeks.
“Eh, the poor pretty one,” she sobbed hysterically, and pulled off her own ample kerchief to cover Aline’s thin bosom. Dangeau leaned over her calling, calling still, unaware of Goyot at his side, and of Goyot’s voice saying insistently, “Tiens, my friend, that was a near shave, eh?”
“My wife,” he muttered, “my wife—my wife is dead,” and with that he gazed round wildly, cried “No, no!” in a sharp voice, and fell to calling her again.
Goyot knelt on the reeking boards, caught the frail wrist in that brown skilful hand of his, shifted his grasp once, twice, a third time, shook his head, and took another grip. “No, she’s alive,” he said at last, and had to say it more than once, for Dangeau took no heed.
“Aline! Aline! Aline!” he called in hoarse, trembling tones, and Goyot dropped the girl’s wrist and took him harshly by the shoulder.
“Rouse, man, rouse!” he cried. “She’s alive. I tell you. I swear it. For the love of Heaven, wake up, and help me to get her away. It’s touch and go for all of us these next few hours. At any moment Henriot may have the upper hand, and half an hour would do our business, with this pretty toy so handy.” He grimaced at the red axe above them, “Come, Dangeau, play the man!”
Dangeau stared at him.
“What am I to do?” he asked irritably.
Goyot pressed his shoulder with a firm hand.
“Lift your wife, and bring her along after me. Can you manage? She looks light enough.”
It was no easy matter to come through the excited crowd, but Dangeau’s height told, and with Aline’s head against his shoulder he pushed doggedly in the wake of Goyot, who made his way through the press with a wonderful agility. Down the steps now, and inch by inch forward through the jostling excited people. Up a by way at last, and then sharp to the left where a carriage waited, and with that Goyot gave a gasp of relief, and mopped a dripping brow.
“Eh, mon Dieu!” he said; “get in, get in!”
The carriage had mouldy straw on the floor, and the musty odour of it mounted in the hot air.
Dangeau complained of it sharply.
“A devil of a smell, this, Goyot!” and the little surgeon fixed him with keen, watchful eyes, as he nodded acquiescence.
What house they came to, or how they came to it, Dangeau knew no more than his unconscious wife. She lay across his breast, white and still as the dead, and when he laid her down on the bed in the upper room they reached at last, she fell limply from his grasp, and he turned to Goyot with a groan.
A s
oft, white-haired woman, dark-eyed and placid,—afterwards he knew her for Goyot’s housekeeper,—tried to turn him out of the room, but he would go no farther than the window, where he sat staring, staring at the houses across the way, watching them darken in the gathering dusk, and mechanically counting the lights that presently sprang into view.
Behind him Marie Carlier came and went, at Goyot’s shortly worded orders, until at last Dangeau’s straining ears caught the sound of a faint, fluttering sigh. He turned then, the lights in the room dancing before his burning eyes. For a moment the room seemed full of the small tongues of flame, and then beyond them he saw his wife’s eyes open again, whilst her hand moved in feeble protest against the draught which Goyot himself was holding to her lips.
Dangeau got up, stood a moment gazing, and then stumbled from the room and broke into heavy sobbing. Presently Goyot brought him something in a glass, which he drank obediently.
“Now you will sleep,” said the little man in cheerful accents, and sleep he did, and never stirred until the high sun struck across his face and waked him to France’s new day, and his.
For in that night fell Robespierre, cast down by the Convention he had dominated so long. The dawn that found him shattered, praying for the death he had vainly sought, awakened Paris from the long nightmare which had been the marriage gift of her nuptials with this incubus.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of the 10th Thermidor, Robespierre’s head fell under the bloody axe of the Terror, and with his last gasp the life went out of the greatest tyranny of modern times.
When Goyot came home with the news, Dangeau’s face flamed, and he put his hand before his eyes for a moment.
Then he went up to Aline. She had lain in a deep sleep for many, many hours, but towards the afternoon she had wakened, taken food, and dressed herself, all in a strange, mechanical fashion. She was neither to be gainsaid nor persuaded, and Dangeau, reasonable once more, had left her to the kind and unexciting ministrations of Marie Carlier. Now he could keep away no longer; Goyot followed him and the housekeeper met them by the door.
A Marriage Under the Terror Page 32
