Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  The men who had taken possession of him looked at one another. “It was the boy’s cursed clothes fooled us,” Bec de Lièvre growled savagely. “We will have them, at any rate. Strip him and have done with it. And do you keep off, Master Tumbler, or we will tumble you.”

  But when the showman, who was trembling with delight and anticipation, made them understand that he would give a crown for the boy as he was in his clothes— “and that is more than the fence will give you,” he added — they began to see reason. True, they stood out for a while for a higher price; but the bargain was eventually struck at a crown and a livre, and the boy handed over.

  Master Crafty Eyes’ hand shook as he laid it on the child’s collar and turned him round so that he might see his face the better. Bec de Lièvre discerned the man’s excitement, and looked at him curiously. “You must be very fond of the lad,” he said.

  The showman’s eyes glittered ferociously. “So fond of him,” he said, in a mocking tone, “that when I get him home I shall — oh, I shall not hurt his fine clothes, or his face, or his little brown hands, for those all show, and they are worth money to me. But I shall — I shall put a poker in the fire, and then Master Jehan will take off his new clothes so that they may not be singed, and — I shall teach him several new tricks with the poker.”

  “You are a queer one,” the other answered. “I’ll be shot if you don’t look like a man with a good dinner before him.”

  “That is the man I am,” the showman answered, a hideous smile distorting his face. “I have gone without dinner or supper many a day because my little friend here chose to run away one fine night, when he was on the point of making my fortune. But I am going to dine now. I am going to feed — on him!”

  “Well, every man to his liking,” the hare-lipped beggar answered indifferently. “You have paid for your dinner, and may cook it as you please, for me.”

  “I am going to,” the showman answered, with an ugly look. He plucked the boy almost off his feet as he spoke, and while the men cried after him “Bon appétit!” and jeered, dragged him away across the open part of the market; finally disappearing with him in one of the noisome alleys which then led out of the Halles on the east side.

  His way lay through a rabbit-warren of beetling passages and narrow lanes, where the boy, once loose, could have dodged him a hundred ways and escaped; and he held him with the utmost precaution, expecting him every moment to make a desperate attempt at it. But Jehan was not the old Jehan who had turned and twisted, walked and frolicked on the rope, and in the utmost depths of ill-treatment had still kept teeth to bite and spirit to use them. He was benumbed body and soul. He had had no food for nearly twenty hours. He had passed the night exposed to the cold. He had gone through intense excitement, horror, despair. So he stumbled along, with Vidoche’s dying cries in his ears, and, famished, frozen, bemused, met the showman’s threats with a face of fixed, impassive apathy. He was within a very little of madness.

  For a time Crafty Eyes did not heed this strange impassiveness. The showman’s fancy was busy with the punishment he would inflict when he got the boy home to his miserable room. He gloated in anticipation over the tortures he would contrive, and the care he would take that they should not maim or disfigure the boy. When he had him tied down, and the door locked, and the poker heated — ah! how he would enjoy himself! The ruffian licked his lips. His eyes sparkled with pleasure. He jerked the boy along in his hideous impatience.

  But after a time the child’s bearing began to annoy him. He stopped and, holding him with one hand, beat him brutally on the head with the other, until the boy fell and hung in his grasp. Then he dragged him up roughly and hauled him on with volleys of oaths; still scowling at him from time to time, as if, somehow, he found this little foretaste of vengeance less satisfying than he had expected.

  There were people coming and going in the dark filthy lane where this happened — a place where smoke-grimed gables almost met overhead, and the gutter was choked with refuse — but no one interfered. What was a little beating more or less? Or, for the matter of that, what was a boy more or less? The hulking loafers and frowsy slatterns, who huddled for warmth in corners, nodded their heads and looked on approvingly. They had their own brats to beat and business to mind. There was no one to take the boy’s part. And another hundred yards would lodge him in the showman’s garret.

  At that last moment the boy awoke from his trance and understood; and in a convulsion of fear hung back and struggled, screaming and throwing himself down. The man dragged him up savagely, and was in the act of taking him up bodily to carry him, when a person, who had already passed the pair once, came back and looked at the boy again. The next moment a hand fell on the showman’s arm, and a voice said, “Stop! What boy is that?”

  The showman looked up, saw that the intervener was a priest, and sneered. “What is that to you, father?” he said, trying by a side movement to pass by. “Not one of your flock, at any rate.”

  “No, but you are!” the priest retorted in a strangely sonorous voice. He was a stalwart man, with a mobile face and sad eyes that seemed out of keeping with the rest of him. “You are! And if you do not this minute set him down and answer my question, you ruffian, when your time comes you shall go to the tree alone!”

  “Diable!” the showman muttered, startled yet scowling. “Who are you, then?”

  “I am Father Bernard. Now tell me about that boy, and truly. What have you been doing to him? Ay, you may well tremble, rascal!”

  For the showman was trembling. In the Paris of that day the name of Father Bernard was almost as well known as the name of Cardinal Richelieu. There was not a night-prowler or cutpurse, bully or swindler, who did not know it, and dream in his low fits, when the drink was out and the money spent, of the day when he would travel by Father Bernard’s side to Montfaucon, and find no other voice and no other eye to pity him in his trouble. Impelled by feelings of humanity, rare at that time, this man made it his life-work to attend on all who were cast for execution; to wait on them in prison, and be with them at the last, and by his presence and words of comfort to alleviate their sufferings here, and bring them to a better mind. He had become so well known in this course of work that the king himself did him honour, and the Cardinal granted him special rights. The mob also. The priest passed unharmed through the lowest wynds of Paris, and penetrated habitually to places where the Lieutenant of the Châtelet, with a dozen pikes at his back, would not have been safe for a moment.

  This was the man whose stern voice brought the showman to a standstill. Master Crafty Eyes faltered. Then he remembered that the boy was his boy, that his title to him was good. He said so sulkily.

  “Your boy?” the priest replied, frowning. “Who are you, then?”

  “An acrobat, father.”

  “So I thought. But do acrobats’ boys wear black velvet clothes with silver buttons?”

  “He was stolen from me,” the showman answered eagerly. He had a good conscience as to the clothes. “I have only just recovered him, father.”

  “Who stole him? Where has he been?” The priest spoke quickly, and with no little excitement. He looked narrowly at the boy the while, holding him at arm’s length. “Where did he spend last night, for instance?”

  The showman spread out his palms and shrugged his shoulders. “How should I know?” he said. “I was not with him.”

  “He has black hair and blue eyes!”

  “Yes. But what of that?” Crafty Eyes answered. “I can swear to him. He is my boy.”

  “And mine!” Father Bernard retorted with energy. “The boy I want!” The priest’s eyes sparkled, his form seemed to dilate with triumph. “Deo laus! Deo laus!” he murmured sonorously, so that a score of loiterers who had gathered round, and were staring and shivering by turns, fell back affrighted and crossed themselves. “He is the boy! God has put him in my way this day as clearly as if an angel had led me by the hand. And he goes with me; he goes with me. Chut, man!” — this
to the showman, who stood frowning in his path— “don’t dare to look black at me. The boy goes with me, I say. I want him for a purpose. If you choose you can come too.”

  “Whither?”

  “To the Châtelet,” Father Bernard answered, with a grim chuckle. “You don’t seem to relish the idea. But do as you please.”

  “You will take the boy?”

  “This moment,” the priest answered.

  “Mon Dieu! but you shall not!” the showman exclaimed. Wrath for the moment drove out fear. He seized the child by the arm. “He is my boy! You shall not, I say!” he cried, almost foaming with rage. “He is mine!”

  “‘WHO STOLE HIM? WHERE HAS HE BEEN?’” ().

  “Idiot! Beast! Gallows-bird!” the priest thundered in reply. “For one-half of a denier I would throw you into the next street! Let go, or I will blast you with — Oh, it is well for you you are reasonable. Now begone! Begone! or, at a word from me, there are a score here will — —”

  He did not finish his sentence, for the showman fell back panic-stricken, and stood off among the crowd, malevolence and craven fear struggling for the mastery in his countenance. The priest took the boy up gently in his arms and looked at him. His face grew strangely mild as he did so. The black brows grew smooth, the lips relaxed. “Get a little water,” he said to the nearest man, a hulking, olive-skinned Southerner. “The child has swooned.”

  “Your pardon, father,” the man answered. “He is dead.”

  But Father Bernard shook his head. “No, my son,” he said kindly. “He who led me here to-day will keep life in him a little longer. God’s ways never end in a cul-de-sac. Get the water. He has swooned only.”

  CHAPTER IX.

  BEFORE THE COURT.

  Since the poisoning of the Prince of Condé by his servant, Brillaut, at the instigation — as was alleged and commonly believed — of Madame la Princesse, no tragedy of the kind had caused a greater sensation in Paris, or been the subject of more talk, than the murder of M. de Vidoche. The remarkable circumstances which attended it — and which lost nothing in the narration — its immediate discovery, the apparent lack of motive, and the wealth, rank, and youth of the guilty wife, all helped, with the fulness of Paris at this time and the absence of any stirring political news, to make it the one topic of interest. Nothing else was talked of in chamber or tennis court, in the Grand Gallery at the Louvre, or in the cardinal’s ante-room at the Palais Richelieu. Culprit and victim were alike well known. M. de Vidoche, if no favourite, had been at least a conspicuous figure in society. He had been cast for one of the parts in the royal troupe at the Christmas carnival. His flirtation with Mademoiselle de Farincourt had been sufficiently marked to cause both amusement and interest. And if madame was a less familiar figure at Court, if she had a reputation somewhat prudish, and an air of rusticity that did not belie it, and was even less of a favourite than her husband, her position as a great heiress and the last of an old family gave her a cachet which did not fail to make her interesting now.

  Gladly would the great ladies in their coaches have gone down to the Châtelet to stare at her after the cruel fashion of that day; and, after buzzing round her in her misery, have gone away with a hundred tales of how she looked, and what she wore, and what she said in prison. But madame was saved this — this torture worse than the question — by the physician’s order that no one should be admitted to her. He laid this down so strenuously — telling the lieutenant that if she had not complete repose for twenty-four hours he would be answerable neither for her life nor her reason — that that officer, who, like the Chevalier du Guet, was an old soldier, replied “No” to the most pressing insistences; and save and except Father Bernard, who had the entrée at all hours by the king’s command, would let no one go in to her. “It will be bad enough by-and-bye,” he said, with an oath. “If she did it, she will be punished. But she shall have a little peace to-day.”

  But the great world, baffled on this point, grew only the more curious; circulated stories only the more outrageous; and nodded and winked and whispered only the more assiduously. Would she be put to the question? And by the rack, or the boot, or the water torture? And who was the man? Of course there was a man. Now if it had been M. de Vidoche who had poisoned her, that would have been plain, intelligible, perspicuous; since everyone knew — and so on, and so on, with Mademoiselle de Farincourt’s name at intervals.

  It was believed that madame would be first examined in private; but late at night, on the day before Christmas Eve, a sealed order came to the Lieutenant of the Châtelet, commanding him to present madame, with her servants and all concerned in the case, at the Palais de Justice on the following morning. Late as it was, the news was known in every part of Paris that night. Marshal Bassompierre, lying in the Bastille, heard it, and regretted he could not see the sight. It was rumoured that the king would attend in person; even that the trial had been hastened for his pleasure. It was certain that half the Court would be there, and the other half, if it could find room. The great ladies, who had failed to storm the Châtelet, hoped to succeed better at the Palais, and the First President of the Court, and even the Commissioners appointed to sit with him, found their doors beset at dawn with delicate “poulets,” or urgent, importunate applications.

  Madame de Vidoche, the man and maid, were brought from the Châtelet to the Conciergerie an hour before daylight — madame in her coach, with her woman, the man on foot. That cold morning ride was such as few, thank God, are called on to endure. To the horrors of anticipation the lost wife, scarcely more than a girl, had to add the misery of retrospection; to the knowledge of what she had done, a woman’s shrinking from the doom that threatened her, from shame and pain and death. But that which she felt perhaps as keenly as anything, as she crouched in a corner of her curtained vehicle and heard the yells which everywhere saluted its appearance, was the sudden sense of loneliness and isolation. True, the Lieutenant sat opposite to her, but his face was hard. She was no longer a woman to him, but a prisoner, a murderess, a poisoner. And the streets were thronged, in spite of the cold and the early hour. On the Pont au Change the people ran beside the coach and strove to get a sight of her, and jeered and sang and shouted. And at the entrance to the Palais, in the room in the Conciergerie where she had to wait, on the staircase to the court above, everywhere it was the same; all were set so thick with faces — staring, curious faces — that the guards could scarcely make a way for her. But she was cut off from all. She was no longer of them — of things living. Not one said a kind word to her; not one looked sympathy or pity. On a sudden, in a moment, with hundreds gazing at her, she, a delicate woman, found herself a thing apart, unclean, to be shunned. A thing, no longer a person. A prisoner, no longer a woman.

  They placed a seat for her, and she sank into it, feeling at first nothing but the shame of being so stared at. But presently she had to rise and be sworn, and then, as she became conscious of other things, as the details of the crowded chamber forced themselves on her attention, and she saw which were the judges, and heard herself called upon to answer the questions that should be put to her, the instinct of self-preservation, the desire to clear herself, to escape and live, took hold of her. A late instinct, for hitherto all her thoughts had been of the man she had killed — her husband; but the fiercer for that. A burning flush suddenly flamed in her cheeks. Her eyes grew bright, her heart began to beat quickly. She turned giddy.

  She knew only of one way in which she could escape; only of one man that could help her; and even while the first judge was in the act of calling upon her, she turned from him and looked round. She looked to the right, to the left, then behind her, for Nôtredame. He, if he told the truth, could clear her! He could say that she had come to him for a charm, and not for poison! And he only! But where was he? There was her woman, trembling and weeping, waiting to be called. There was the valet, pale and frightened. There were twice a hundred indifferent people. But Nôtredame? He was not visible. He was not there. Wh
en she had satisfied herself of this, she sank back with a moan of despair. She gave up hope again. A hundred curious eyes saw the colour fade from her cheeks; her eyes grew dull, the whole woman collapsed.

  The examination began. She gave her name in a hollow whisper.

  It was the practice of that day, and still is, in French courts, to take advantage of any self-betrayal or emotion on the part of the accused person. It is the duty of the judges to observe the prisoner constantly and narrowly; and the First President, on an occasion such as this, was not the man to overlook anything which was visible to the ordinary spectator. Instead, therefore, of pursuing the regular interrogatory he had in his mind, he leaned forward and asked madame what was the matter.

  “I wish for the man Solomon Nôtredame,” Madame de Vidoche answered, rising and speaking in a choking voice.

  “That is the man from whom you bought the poison, I think?” the judge answered, affecting to look at his notes.

  “Yes, but as a love-philtre — not a poison,” madame said in a whisper. “I wish him to be here.”

  “You wish to be confronted with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the man Solomon Nôtredame?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you shall be, presently,” the judge replied, leaning back, and casting a singular glance at his colleagues. “Be satisfied. And now, madame,” he continued gravely, as his eyes returned to her, “it is my duty to help you to tell, and your duty to confess frankly, all that you know concerning this matter. Be good enough, therefore, to collect yourself, and answer my questions fully and truly, as you hope for mercy here and hereafter. So you will save yourself pain, and such also as shall examine you; and may best deserve, in the worst case, the king’s indulgence.”