_ CHAPTER XIV
Jean Marot occupied a cell in a "panier a salade" en route for the depot, not so much the worse for his recent exciting experience as at first seemed probable he might be.
There were eight other occupants of the prison-van besides himself, one of whom was a soldier guard. Five narrow cells ranged along either side of a central aisle. Each had a solitary small, closely shuttered breathing-hole opening outside. The guard occupied a seat in the aisle near the rear door, from which he could survey the door of every cell. By this arrangement prisoners were kept separate from each other, were not subjected to a gaping crowd, and ten persons could be safely escorted by a single guard.
From the half-suppressed murmurs and objurgations that followed every severe jolt of the wagon, Jean rightly judged that most of the prisoners were more or less injured. And as the driver drove furiously, having the fight of way and being pressed with business this particular Sunday afternoon, there were still louder and more exhaustive remarks from those who narrowly escaped being run over by the cellular van.
Jean Marot, however, was too much engrossed with his own miserable reflections to pay any more than mechanical attention to all of this. Physically resuscitated and momentarily inflating his glad lungs anew, he still felt that terrible vice-like grip upon his throat,--the compression of the fingers of steel that seemed to squeeze the last drop of blood from his heart.
But it was mental suffocation now. For they were the fingers of her brother,--the flesh and sinew of the woman he loved! And it was this love that was being cruelly crushed and strangled.
It was more terrible than the late physical struggle. The latter had invoked the energy, the courage, and the superhuman strength and endurance to meet it,--had roused the fire of conscious manhood. Now the sick soul revolted at its own folly. The props of self-respect had been knocked away, and he lay prone, humiliated, deprived of the initial courage to rise and hope.
The chief cause of this self-degradation lay in the fact that he had grievously wronged the only one in the world he had found worth loving,--the one sweet being for whom he would have willingly sacrificed life. The fact that this wrong was by and in thought alone did not lessen the horrible injustice of it.
The more Jean thought of these things the more sick at heart he was, the more hopeless his love became, the more desperately dark the future appeared. There seemed to be nothing left but misery and death.
This train of bitterness was interrupted by a violent wrangle between the occupants of neighboring cells. A prisoner across the way had shouted "Vive l'armee!" Another responded by the gay chanson,--
"Entre nous, l'armee du salut,
Elle n'a jamais eu d'autre but
Que d'amasser d' la bonne galette."
It came from his next-door neighbor, and was the familiar voice of the saturnine George Villeroy.
"Shut your mouth, rascal!" yelled the guard, rapping the cell door with his sword bayonet.
A few minutes later the van was stopped, the rear door opened, and one by one the prisoners, bloody, torn, and bedraggled, were handed out and hustled not very gently by two police agents through a heavily grilled doorway into a room already crowded with victims of law and order. All of these were yet to be called before the commissaire and interrogated in turn, and by him either held or discharged. A good many were both hatless and coatless, and altogether they certainly bore a riotous and suspicious look.
In the crowd near the desk where they were led to be registered Jean met his old friend Villeroy.
"Oho!" exclaimed the latter, laughingly.
"Oh, yes; it is I, my friend."
"Pinched this time, hein?"
"So it seems."
"And in what company?"
"Yours, I suppose," retorted Jean.
"Good company!" said Villeroy. "Kill any--any agents?"
"No,--no!" said Jean, who did not relish this subject.
"See Lerouge?"
"N--that is----"
"The miserable!"
"Oh, as for that----"
"Well, he's done for, anyhow."
"Wha-at?"
"His goose is cooked!"
"How is that? Not----"
"Dead."
"Dead!"
"As a mackerel!"
Jean paled perceptibly and almost staggered against his friend.
"Impossible!" he murmured. "It can't be! How----"
"Oh, easy enough," interrupted the other, lightly. "Some ruffian choked him to death, they say. Liable to occur, is it not? Sorry, of course, but----"
Fortunately for Jean's self-control, they were rudely separated by two angry opponents who wanted to fight it out then and there. He would have betrayed himself in another moment. And, wrought up to the present tension, it seemed as if he must go mad and shriek his guilt to all the world.
He sought an obscure corner and sat down on the floor with his back to the wall, his chin upon his knees.
In his own soul he was condemned already. He only awaited the guillotine.
When he was aroused the room was almost cleared. A couple of agents roughly hustled him before the busy commissaire. It was the old official the student had struck that morning. The red welt across his face gave it a sinister appearance. He glanced at the arraigned, then read from the blotter,--
"Jean Marot, student,--um, um, um!--charged with--with--let's see--with uttering seditious cries calculated to lead to a breach of the peace. What have you got to say for yourself, young man?"
The prisoner had nothing to say for himself,--at least, nothing better than that,--so he was speechless.
"Ah! evidently never been here before," said the old commissaire. "Go! and never come here again. Discharged. Call the next."
"Monsieur le Commissaire," began a police agent who had here risen to his feet with an air of remonstrance,--"monsieur----"
"Call the next!" said the commissaire, waving the agent down peremptorily.
And thus Jean Marot, before he had recovered from his surprise, or could even realize what had happened, was again hustled through the corridor, this time to be unceremoniously thrust into the street--a free man.
"Hold, Monsieur Jean!" said the lively voice of Mlle. Fouchette. "What a precious long time you have been!"
"It might have been longer," he remarked, vaguely accepting her presence as not unnatural, and suffering himself to be led down the block.
"Oh, here it is," said she, going straight to a cab in waiting. "Now, don't stop to ask questions or I'll be wicked. Get in! Dinner is----"
"Dinner is, is it?" he repeated, almost hysterically.
He felt exhausted physically and mentally, indifferent as to what now befell him, prepared to accept anything. Nothing could be worse. He felt as if everything was crumbling beneath his feet. There was nobody to lean against, nobody to sympathize with him, nobody to care one way or the other, or----
Only this girl at his side.
He looked at her wonderingly, now that he came to think of her. The thin, insignificant figure, the pale face, the drooping blonde hair lying demurely on the cheeks, the bright steel-blue eyes, the pussycat purr----
"How absurd you are, Monsieur Jean, with that awful face! One would think it was because of the prospect of my dinner!"
"I am thinking of you," he said.
"Oh, thanks, monsieur! And so savagely--I have fear!"
She laughed gleefully, and affected to move away from him, only, at that instant, the hind wheel of the voiture struck a stray bowlder, and the shock threw her bodily back against him.
Both laughed now.
"It is provoking," she said.
"It is the fatality," said he.
And he put his arm about her slender form and held her there without protest.
"I was thinking of you, mon enfant," he continued, "and of what a dear, good little thing you are. Mademoiselle, you are an angel!"
"Ah! no, monsieur!" she answered, in a voice that trembled a little,--"do not believe it! I'm a devil!"
It is easy for a man in deep trouble to accept the first sympathetic woman as something angelic. And now, in his gratitude, it was perhaps natural that Jean should unhesitatingly supply Mlle. Fouchette with wings. He had humbled himself in the dust, from which point of view all virtues look beautiful and all good actions partake of heaven. His response to her self-depreciation was a human one. He drew her closer and kissed her lips.
In this he deceived neither himself nor the girl. She knew quite as well as he where his heart was. It was a kiss of gratitude and of good-will, and was received as such without affectation. In his masculine egotism, however, he quite overlooked any possible good or ill to her in the matter,--his consideration began and ended in the gratification of her conduct towards him. And he would have been cold indeed not to feel the friendly glow which answers so eloquently the touch of womanly gentleness and sympathy.
As for Mlle. Fouchette, it must be admitted that this platonic caress created in her maidenly bosom a nervous thrill of pleasure not quite consistent in a young woman known to give the "savate" to young gentlemen who approached such familiarity, and who plumed herself on her invulnerability to the masculine wiles that beset her sex. And what might have been deemed still more foreign to her nature, she never said a word from that moment until the voiture drew up in front of her place of residence in the venerable but not venerated Rue St. Jacques.
"Voila!" she then exclaimed, though it had not the tone of entire satisfaction.
"Hold on, little one, I will pay----"
But he discovered that those who had cared for him had also benevolently relieved him of his valuables. He had not a sou.
"The wretches!" cried the girl.
"They might have left me my keys, at least," he muttered.
"And your watch, monsieur?" she asked, apprehensively.
"Gone, of course!"
"Oh, the miserable cowards!"
He was less moved than she at the loss. It seemed trifling by the side of his other misfortunes.
But the coachman was interested. He carefully noted the number of the house again, and when she passed up his fare looked into her face with a knowing leer.
"If monsieur wishes to go back to the Prefecture," he said to her, tentatively.
"Oh, no!" said Jean.
The girl, however, understood the significance of this inquiry, and coldly demanded the man's number.
"If Mademoiselle Fouchette should need you again," she added, putting the slip in her pocket, "she will know where to find you."
And to the manifest astonishment of the cabman, who could not divine what a woman of Rue St. Jacques would want with a man without money, or at least valuables, she slipped her arm through Jean's and entered the house.
The shaded lamp turned low threw a dim light over a little table simply but neatly set for two in Mlle. Fouchette's chamber. A cold cut of beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives, etc.,--all fresh from the rotisserie and charcuterie below,--were flanked by a metre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked quite appetizing and formidable.
Absorbed as he was in himself, Jean could not but note the certainty implied in all of this preparation. Mlle. Fouchette could not have known that he would be at liberty, yet she had arranged things exactly as if she had possessed this foreknowledge. If they had not made a mistake and let him off so easily----
"You were, then, sure I would come?"
"Very sure," said she, without turning from the small mirror where she readjusted her hair.
"Now, Monsieur Jean," she began, in a nervous, business-like way, suiting the action to the word, "I'm the doctor. You are to do just as I tell you. First you take this good American whiskey, then you lie down--here--there--that way,--voila!"
"But----"
"No!" putting her delicate hand over his mouth gently,--"you are not to talk, you know."
He stretched himself at full length on the low couch without another protest. She brought a towel and basin and, removing the collar which had been twisted into a dirty rope, bathed his face and neck. She saw the red imprint of fingers on his throat with mingled hatred and commiseration; but she said nothing, only pressing the wet towel to the spot tenderly. In the place of the collar she put a piece of soft flannel saturated with cologne, and passed a silk scarf around the neck to hold it there. With comb and brush she softly smoothed out his hair, half toying with the locks about the temples, and perching her little head this way and that, as if to more accurately study the effect.
"Ah! now that looks better. Monsieur is beginning to look civilized."
She carefully pinned the ends of the scarf down over the shirt-front to hide the blood that was there.
All of this with a hundred exclamations and little comments and questions that required no answers, and broken sentences of pity, of raillery, of pleasure, that had no beginning and no ending as grammatical constructions.
Purr, purr, purr.
Finally she rubbed his shoes till they shone, and flecked the dust from his clothes,--to complete which operation it was necessary for him to get up.
A slight noise on the landing caused him to start nervously.
He was still thinking of one thing,--of a man lying cold and stiff at the Hotel Dieu.
Both carefully avoided the subject uppermost in either mind,--Henri Lerouge and his sister.
First, she was astonished that he had not questioned her; next, she sought to escape questioning altogether. She was secretive by nature. And now, like a contrite and wretched woman conscious of her share of responsibility for a great wrong, she could only humble herself before him and await his will.
"Now, Monsieur Jean," she concluded, "we will eat. Come! You must be hungry,--come! A table, monsieur!"
"Au contraire, I feel as if I could never eat again," he said, desperately.
"What nonsense! Come, monsieur,--sit down here and eat something! You will feel better at once."
"Oh, you do not know! you cannot know!" he groaned, reseating himself and taking his head between his hands. "It is too horrible! horrible!"
"Why, monsieur! What is it? Are you, then, hurt within? Say! Do you suffer? How foolish I have been! I should have brought a doctor!"
She was kneeling in front of him in her genuine alarm. "Where is it, Monsieur Jean? Where is the pain? Tell me! Tell me, then, monsieur!"
"No! no! it is not that, my child! It is here! here! here!" He struck his breast at every word, and bowed his head with abject grief.
She was silent, thinking only of his hapless love. There was no word for that!
"Ah! if it were only that! If it had been me instead of him!"
"Monsieur! My poor Monsieur Jean! You must not give way thus!"
"I am not fit to sit at the table with you, mademoiselle! My hands are red with blood! Do not touch them! Understand? Red!"
"But you are crazy, monsieur!"
"No! I am--I am simply a
murderer! Do you hear? A MURDERER!"
He whispered it with awful solemnity. Mlle. Fouchette, now thoroughly frightened, recoiled from him. He was mad!
"That's right!" he cried. "That's right, mademoiselle! I'm not fit to touch you! No wonder you shrink from me! For I have blood on my hands,--his blood,--understand?--my friend's! Lerouge dead! dead! And by me!"
"What's that?" she demanded. "Lerouge dead? Nonsense! It is not so! Who told you that? I say it is not true!"
He seized her almost fiercely,--
"Not dead? Her brother not dead? Say it again! Give me some hope!" he pleaded, pitifully.
"I tell you again it is not so! I saw one who knows but a few minutes before I met you!"
He sank on his knees at her feet and kissed her hands, now trembling with excitement.
"Again!" he exclaimed.
"It is as true as God!" said she. "And he is doing well!"
He took her in his arms passionately, pouring out the thankfulness of his soul in kisses and loving caresses, sobbing like a child. They mingled their tears,--the blessed tears of joy and sympathy!
For a long time they rested thus, immobile, with thoughts too deep for expression,--in a sacred silence broken only by sighs. Then when the calm was complete she softly disengaged herself in saying, "And
she is there, Jean," as if completing the sentence long before begun. But it required an effort.
He answered by a pressure of the hand. That was all.
"And now, then, monsieur," she observed, abruptly and with playful satire, "I'm going to eat. I'm sorry you are not hungry, but----"
"Eat? Little one," he joyously cried, "I can eat a house and lot!" He took her bodily between his hands, he who a moment before had been so weak, and tossed her as one plays with a child.
"For shame! There is no house here for you, but I've got a lot to eat! There! No more of that, Monsieur Jean, or you shall have no supper!"
As he threatened her again with his exuberant spirits, she wisely but laughingly put the table between them. But she looked a world of happiness from her eyes.
From the extreme of mental depression Jean Marot was thus suddenly transported to the extreme of happiness and hopefulness. Simply because the life of the man whom he would have done to death, in his insane jealousy of a successful rival, had become precious, priceless, as that of the brother of his beloved. The conditions were desperate enough as they were. To have slain her brother would not only have rendered them hopeless, it would have condemned the survivor to a lifetime of remorse, unless, indeed, that life had not been happily shortened by the guillotine.
So they laughed, talked, ate, drank, and made merry, these two, taking no thought of the morrow until both the supper and the time necessary to dispose of it were consumed.
Jean lighted a cigarette that she gave him, and threw himself on the couch. Meanwhile, the girl, with the assistance of Poupon, got some hot water and washed the dishes, putting them one by one carefully back on the shelves in the wall. Finally the empty bottle found its place under the couch.
Then she discovered that Jean was sleeping soundly. He had succumbed in spite of rattling dishes and her talk, and slept the heavy sleep of physical exhaustion. The cigarette had fallen from his fingers half finished. His throat was still muffled in her silken scarf, but she tried to see if the marks were still there. For fully a minute she remained standing over him, buried in thought. The old clock in the Henri IV. tower behind the Pantheon chimed eleven. She sighed.
"Very well!" she murmured. "Monsieur is right. He has no money, no keys, and he is weary. He shall rest where he is. C'est egal!"
With this philosophical reflection she immediately began preparation for retiring on her own account, completing this as if the monsieur snoring on the couch had no material existence.
"Voila!" said she, when she had drawn her curtains.
And in two minutes more she was as oblivious to the world as was Jean Marot. _