Kitabı oku: «The Shoes of Fortune», sayfa 9
Father Hamilton applied himself most industriously to the bottle that afternoon, and it was not long till the last of my respect for him was gone. Something troubled him. He was moody and hilarious by turns, but neither very long, and completed my distrust of him when he intimated that there was some possibility of our trip across Europe never coming into effect. But all the same, I was to be assured of his patronage, I was to continue in his service as secretary, if, as was possible, he should take up his residence for a time in Paris. And money – why, look again! he had a ship’s load of it, and ‘twould never be said of Father Hamilton that he could not share with a friend. And there he thrust some rouleaux upon me and clapped my shoulder and was so affected at his own love for Andrew Greig’s nephew that he must even weep.
Weeping indeed was the priest’s odd foible for the week we remained at Versailles. He that had been so jocular before was now filled with morose moods, and would ruminate over his bottle by the hour at a time.
He was none the better for the company he met during our stay at the Cerf d’Or – all priests, and to the number of half a dozen, one of them an abbé with a most noble and reverent countenance. They used to come to him late at night, confer with him secretly in his room, and when they were gone I found him each time drenched in a perspiration and feverishly gulping spirits.
Every day we went to the café where we had seen the Prince first, and every day at the same hour we saw his Royal Highness, who, it appeared, was not known to the world as such, though known to me. The sight of him seemed to trouble Father Hamilton amazingly, and yet ‘twas the grand object of the day – its only diversion; when we had seen the Prince we went back straight to the inn every afternoon.
The Cerf d’Or had a courtyard, cobbled with rough stones, in which there was a great and noisy traffic. In the midst of the court there was a little clump of evergreen trees and bushes in tubs, round which were gathered a few tables and chairs whereat – now that the weather was mild – the world sat in the afternoon. The walls about were covered with dusty ivy where sparrows had begun to busy themselves with love and housekeeping; lilacs sprouted into green, and the porter of the house was for ever scratching at the hard earth about the plants, and tying up twigs and watering the pots. It was here I used to write my letters to Miss Walkinshaw at a little table separate from the rest, and I think it was on Friday I was at this pleasant occupation when I looked up to see the man with the uniform gazing at me from the other side of the bushes as if he were waiting to have the letter when I was done with it.
I went in and asked Father Hamilton who this man was.
“What!” he cried in a great disturbance, “the same as we met near the Trianon! O Lord! Paul, there is something wrong, for that was Buhot.”
“And this Buhot?” I asked.
“A police inspector. There is no time to lose. Monsieur Greig, I want you to do an office for me. Here is a letter that must find its way into the hands of the Prince. You will give it to him. You have seen that he passes the café at the same hour every day. Well, it is the easiest thing in the world for you to go up to him and hand him this. No more’s to be done by you.”
“But why should I particularly give him the letter? Why not send it by the Swiss?”
“That is my affair,” cried the priest testily. “The Prince knows you – that is important. He knows the Swiss too, and that is why I have the Swiss with me as a second string to my bow, but I prefer that he should have this letter from the hand of M. Andrew Greig’s nephew. ‘Tis a letter from his Royal Highness’s most intimate friend.”
I took the letter into my hand, and was amazed to see that the address was in a writing exactly corresponding to that of a billet now in the bosom of my coat!
What could Miss Walkinshaw and the Prince have of correspondence to be conducted on such roundabout lines? Still, if the letter was hers I must carry it!
“Very well,” I agreed, and went out to meet the Prince.
The sun was blazing; the street was full of the quality in their summer clothing. His Royal Highness came stepping along at the customary hour more gay than ever. I made bold to call myself to his attention with my hat in my hand. “I beg your Royal Highness’s pardon,” I said in English, “but I have been instructed to convey this letter to you.”
He swept his glance over me; pausing longest of all on my red shoes, and took the letter from my hand. He gave a glance at the direction, reddened, and bit his lip.
“Let me see now, what is the name of the gentleman who does me the honour?”
“Greig,” I answered. “Paul Greig.”
“Ah!” he cried, “of course: I have had friends in Monsieur’s family. Charmé, Monsieur, de faire votre connaissance. M. Andrew Greig-”
“Was my uncle, your Royal Highness?”
“So! a dear fellow, but, if I remember rightly, with a fatal gift of irony. ‘Tis a quality to be used with tact. I hope you have tact, M. Greig. Your good uncle once did me the honour to call me a – what was it now? – a gomeral.”
“It was very like my uncle, that, your Royal Highness,” I said. “But I know that he loved you and your cause.”
“I daresay he did, Monsieur; I daresay he did,” said the Prince, flushing, and with a show of pleasure at my speech. “I have learned of late that the fair tongue is not always the friendliest. In spite of it all I liked M. Andrew Greig. I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing Monsieur Greig’s nephew soon again. Au plaisir de vous revoir!” And off he went, putting the letter, unread, into his pocket.
When I went back to the Cerf d’Or and told Hamilton all that had passed, he was straightway plunged into the most unaccountable melancholy.
CHAPTER XXI
THE ATTEMPT ON THE PRINCE
And now I come to an affair of which there have been many accounts written, some of them within a mile or two of the truth, the most but sheer romantics. I have in my mind notably the account of the officer Buhot printed two years after the events in question, in which he makes the most fabulous statement as to the valiancy of Father Hamilton’s stand in the private house in the Rue des Reservoirs, and maintains that myself —le fier Eccossais, as he is flattering enough to designate me – drew my sword upon himself and threatened to run him through for his proposition that I should confess to a complicity in the attempt upon his Royal Highness. I have seen his statement reproduced with some extra ornament in the Edinburgh Courant, and the result of all this is that till this day my neighbours give me credit, of which I am loth to advantage myself, for having felled two or three of the French officers before I was overcome at the hinder-end.
The matter is, in truth, more prosaic as it happened, and if these memorials of mine leave the shadow of a doubt in the minds of any interested in an old story that created some stir in its time, I pray them see the archives of M. Bertin, the late Lieut. – General of the police. Bertin was no particular friend of mine, that had been the unconscious cause of great trouble and annoyance to him, but he has the truth in the deposition I made and signed prior to my appointment to a company of the d’Auvergne regiment.
Well, to take matters in their right order, it was the evening of the day I had given the letter to the Prince that Father Hamilton expressed his intention of passing that night in the house of a friend.
I looked at him with manifest surprise, for he had been at the bottle most of the afternoon, and was by now more in a state for his bed than for going among friends.
“Well,” he cried peevishly, observing my dubiety. “Do you think me too drunk for the society of a parcel of priests? Ma foi! it is a pretty thing that I cannot budge from my ordinary habitude of things without a stuck owl setting up a silent protest.”
To a speech so wanting in dignity I felt it better there should be no reply, and instead I helped him into his great-coat. As I did so, he made an awkward lurching movement due to his corpulence, and what jumped out of an inner pocket but a pistol? Which of us was the more confused at that it would be hard to say. For my part, the weapon – that I had never seen in his possession before – was a fillip to my sleeping conscience; I picked it up with a distaste, and he took it from me with trembling fingers and an averted look.
“A dangerous place, Versailles, after dark,” he explained feebly. “One never knows, one never knows,” and into his pocket hurriedly with it.
“I shall be back for breakfast,” he went on. “Unless – unless – oh, I certainly shall be back.” And off he set.
The incident of the pistol disturbed me for a while. I made a score of speculations as to why a fat priest should burden himself with such an article, and finally concluded that it was as he suggested, to defend himself from night birds if danger offered; though that at the time had been the last thing I myself would have looked for in the well-ordered town of Versailles. I sat in the common-room or salle of the inn for a while after he had gone, and thereafter retired to my own bedchamber, meaning to read or write for an hour or two before going to bed. In the priest’s room – which was on the same landing and next to my own – I heard the whistle of Bernard the Swiss, but I had no letters for him that evening, and we did not meet each other. I was at first uncommon dull, feeling more than usually the hame-wae that must have been greatly wanting in the experience of my Uncle Andrew to make him for so long a wanderer on the face of the earth. But there is no condition of life so miserable but what one finds in it remissions, diversions, nay, and delights also, and soon I was – of all things in the world to be doing when what followed came to pass! – inditing a song to a lady, my quill scratching across the paper in spurts and dashes, and baffled pauses where the matter would not attend close enough on the mood, stopping altogether at a stanza’s end to hum the stuff over to myself with great satisfaction. I was, as I say, in the midst of this; the Swiss had gone downstairs; all in my part of the house was still, though vehicles moved about in the courtyard, when unusually noisy footsteps sounded on the stair, with what seemed like the tap of scabbards on the treads.
It was a sound so strange that my hand flew by instinct to the small sword I was now in the habit of wearing and had learned some of the use of from Thurot.
There was no knock for entrance; the door was boldly opened and four officers with Buhot at their head were immediately in the room.
Buhot intimated in French that I was to consider myself under arrest, and repeated the same in indifferent English that there might be no mistake about a fact as patent as that the sword was in his hand.
For a moment I thought the consequence of my crime had followed me abroad, and that this squat, dark officer, watching me with the scrutiny of a forest animal, partly in a dread that my superior bulk should endanger himself, was in league with the law of my own country. That I should after all be dragged back in chains to a Scots gallows was a prospect unendurable; I put up the ridiculous small sword and dared him to lay a hand on me. But I had no sooner done so than its folly was apparent, and I laid the weapon down.
“Tant mieux!” said he, much relieved, and then an assurance that he knew I was a gentleman of discretion and would not make unnecessary trouble. “Indeed,” he went on, “Voyez! I take these men away; I have the infinite trust in Monsieur; Monsieur and I shall settle this little affair between us.”
And he sent his friends to the foot of the stair.
“Monsieur may compose himself,” he assured me with a profound inclination.
“I am very much obliged to you,” I said, seating myself on the corner of the table and crushing my poor verses into my pocket as I did so, “I am very much obliged to you, but I’m at a loss to understand to what I owe the honour.”
“Indeed!” he said, also seating himself on the table to show, I supposed, that he was on terms of confidence with his prisoner. “Monsieur is Father Hamilton’s secretary?”
“So I believe,” I said; “at least I engaged for the office that’s something of a sinecure, to tell the truth.”
And then Buhot told me a strange story.
He told me that Father Hamilton was now a prisoner, and on his way to the prison of Bicêtre. He was – this Buhot – something of the artist and loved to make his effects most telling (which accounts, no doubt, for the romantical nature of the accounts aforesaid), and sitting upon the table-edge he embarked upon a narrative of the most crowded two hours that had perhaps been in Father Hamilton’s lifetime.
It seemed that when the priest had left the Cerf d’Or, he had gone to a place till recently called the Bureau des Carrosses pour la Rochelle, and now unoccupied save by a concierge, and the property of some person or persons unknown. There he had ensconced himself in the only habitable room and waited for a visitor regarding whom the concierge had his instructions.
“You must imagine him,” said the officer, always with the fastidiousness of an artist for his effects, “you must imagine him, Monsieur, sitting in this room, all alone, breathing hard, with a pistol before him on the table, and – ”
“What! a pistol!” I cried, astounded and alarmed. “Certainement” said Buhot, charmed with the effect his dramatic narrative was creating. “Your friend, mon ami, would be little good, I fancy, with a rapier. Anyway, ‘twas a pistol. A carriage drives up to the door; the priest rises to his feet with the pistol in his hand; there is the rap at the door. ‘Entrez!’ cries the priest, cocking the pistol, and no sooner was his visitor within than he pulled the trigger; the explosion rang through the dwelling; the chamber was full of smoke.”
“Good heavens!” I cried in horror, “and who was the unhappy wretch?”
Buhot shrugged his shoulders, made a French gesture with his hands, and pursed his mouth.
“Whom did you invite to the room at the hour of ten, M. Greig?” he asked.
“Invite!” I cried. “It’s your humour to deal in parables. I declare to you I invited no one.”
“And yet, my good sir, you are Hamilton’s secretary and you are Hamilton’s envoy. ‘Twas you handed to the Prince the poulet that was designed to bring him to his fate.”
My instinct grasped the situation in a second; I had been the ignorant tool of a madman; the whole events of the past week made the fact plain, and I was for the moment stunned.
Buhot watched me closely, and not unkindly, I can well believe, from what I can recall of our interview and all that followed after it.
“And you tell me he killed the Prince?” I cried at last.
“No, Monsieur,” said Buhot; “I am happy to say he did not. The Prince was better advised than to accept the invitation you sent to him.”
“Still,” I cried with remorse, “there’s a man dead, and ‘tis as much as happens when princes themselves are clay.”
“Parfaitement, Monsieur, though it is indiscreet to shout it here. Luckily there is no one at all dead in this case, otherwise it had been myself, for I was the man who entered to the priest and received his pistol fire. It was not the merriest of duties either,” he went on, always determined I should lose no iota of the drama, “for the priest might have discovered before I got there that the balls of his pistol had been abstracted.”
“Then Father Hamilton has been under watch?”
“Since ever you set foot in Versailles last Friday,” said Buhot complacently. “The Damiens affair has sharpened our wits, I warrant you.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “let me protest that I have been till this moment in utter darkness about Hamilton’s character or plans. I took him for what he seemed – a genial buffoon of a kind with more gear than guidance.”
“We cannot, with infinite regret, assume that, Monsieur, but personally I would venture a suggestion,” said Buhot, coming closer on the table and assuming an affable air. “In this business, Hamilton is a tool – no more; and a poor one at that, badly wanting the grindstone. To break him – phew! – ‘twere as easy as to break a glass, but he is one of a great movement and the man we seek is his master – one Father Fleuriau of the Jesuits. Hamilton’s travels were but part of a great scheme that has sent half a dozen of his kind chasing the Prince in the past year or two from Paris to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Orleans, from Orleans to Hamburg, Seville, Lisbon, Rome, Brussels, Potsdam, Nuremburg, Berlin. The same hand that extracted his bullets tapped the priest’s portfolio and found the wretch was in promise of a bishopric and a great sum of money. You see, M. Greig, I am curiously frank with my prisoner.”
“And no doubt you have your reasons,” said I, but beat, myself, to imagine what they could be save that he might have proofs of my innocence.
“Very well,” said M. Buhot. “To come to the point, it is this, that we desire to have the scheme of the Jesuits for the Prince’s assassination, and other atrocities shocking to all that revere the divinity of princes, crumbled up. Father Hamilton is at the very roots of the secret; if, say, a gentleman so much in his confidence as yourself – now, if such a one were, say, to share a cell with this regicide for a night or two, and pursue judicious inquiries – ”
“Stop! stop!” I cried, my blood hammering in my head, and the words like to choke me. “Am I to understand that you would make me your spy and informer upon this miserable old madman that has led me such a gowk’s errand?”
Buhot slid back off the table edge and on to his feet. “Oh,” said he, “the terms are not happily chosen: ‘spy’ – ‘informer’ – come, Monsieur Greig; this man is in all but the actual accomplishment of his purpose an assassin. ‘Tis the duty of every honest man to help in discovering the band of murderers whose tool he has been.”
“Then I’m no honest man, M. Buhot,” said I bitterly, “for I’ve no stomach for a duty so dirty.”
“Think of it for a moment,” he pressed, with evident surprise at my decision. “Bicêtre is an unwholesome hostelry, I give you my word. Consider that your choice is between a night or two there and – who knows? – a lifetime of Galbanon that is infinitely worse.”
“Then let it be Galbanon!” I said, and lifted my sword and slapped it furiously, sheathed as it was, like a switch upon the table.
Buhot leaped back in a fear that I was to attack him, and cried his men from the stair foot.
“This force is not needed at all,” I said. “I am innocent enough to be prepared to go quietly.”
CHAPTER XXII
OF A NIGHT JOURNEY AND BLACK BICETRE AT THE END OF IT
Twas a long journey to the prison of Bicêtre, which is two miles to the south of the city of Paris, a great building that had once (they say) been a palace, but now in the time of my experience was little better than a vestibule of hell. I was driven to it through a black loud night of rain, a plunging troop of horse on either hand the coach as if I were a traveller of state, and Buhot in front of me as silent as the priest had been the day we left Dunkerque, though wakeful, and the tip of his scabbard leaning on my boot to make sure that in the darkness no movement of mine should go unobserved.
The trees swung and roared in the wind; the glass lozens of the carriage pattered to the pelting showers; sometimes we lurched horribly in the ruts of the highway, and were released but after monstrous efforts on the part of the cavaliers. Once, as we came close upon a loop of a brawling river, I wished with all fervency that we might fall in, and so end for ever this pitiful coil of trials whereto fate had obviously condemned poor Paul Greig. To die among strangers (as is widely known) is counted the saddest of deaths by our country people, and so, nowadays, it would seem to myself, but there and then it appeared an enviable conclusion to the Spoiled Horn that had blundered from folly to folly. To die there and then would be to leave no more than a regret and an everlasting wonder in the folks at home; to die otherwise, as seemed my weird, upon a block or gallows, would be to foul the name of my family for generations, and I realised in my own person the agony of my father when he got the news, and I bowed my shoulders in the coach below the shame that he would feel as in solemn blacks he walked through the Sabbath kirkyard in summers to come in Mearns, with the knowledge that though neighbours looked not at him but with kindness, their inmost thoughts were on the crimson chapter of his son.
Well, we came at the long last to Bicêtre, and I was bade alight in the flare of torches. A strange, a memorable scene; it will never leave me. Often I remit me there in dreams. When I came out of the conveyance the lights dazzled me, and Buhot put his hands upon my shoulders and turned me without a word in the direction he wished me to take. It was through a vast and frowning doorway that led into a courtyard so great that the windows on the other side seemed to be the distance of a field. The windows were innumerable, and though the hour was late they were lit in stretching corridors. Fires flamed in corners of the yard – great leaping fires round which warders (as I guessed them) gathered to dry themselves or get warmth against the chill of the early April morning. Their scabbards or their muskets glittered now and then in the light of the flames; their voices – restrained by the presence of Buhot – sounded deep and dreadful to me that knew not the sum of his iniquity yet could shudder at the sense of what portended.
It were vain for me to try and give expression to my feeling as I went past these fires across the stony yard, and entered between a guard or two at the other side. At the root of my horror was the sentiment that all was foreign, that I was no more to these midnight monsters round their torturing flames than a creature of the wood, less, perhaps, for were they not at sworn war with my countrymen, and had not I a share at least of the repute of regicide? And when, still led by the silent officer, I entered the building itself and walked through an unending corridor broken at intervals by black doors and little barred borrowed lights, and heard sometimes a moan within, or a shriek far off in another part of the building, I experienced something of that long swound that is insanity. Then I was doomed for the rest of my brief days to be among these unhappy wretches – the victims of the law or political vengeance, the forçat who had thieved, or poisoned, perjured himself, or taken human blood!
At last we came to a door, where Buhot stopped me and spoke, for the first time, almost, since we had left Versailles. He put his hand out to check a warder who was going to open the cell for my entrance.
“I am not a hard man, M. Greig,” said he, in a stumbling English, “and though this is far beyond my duties, and, indeed, contrary to the same, I would give you another chance. We shall have, look you, our friend the priest in any case, and to get the others is but a matter of time. ‘Tis a good citizen helps the law always; you must have that respect for the law that you should feel bound to circumvent those who would go counter to it with your cognisance.”
“My good man,” I said, as quietly as I could, and yet internally with feelings like to break me, “I have already said my say. If the tow was round my thrapple I would say no more than that I am innocent of any plot against a man by whose family mine have lost, and that I myself, for all my loyalty to my country, would do much to serve as a private individual.”
“Consider,” he pleaded. “After all, this Hamilton may be a madman with nothing at all to tell that will help us.”
“But the bargain is to be that I must pry and I must listen,” said I, “and be the tale-pyat whose work may lead to this poor old buffoon’s and many another’s slaughtering. Not I, M. Buhot, and thank ye kindly! It’s no’ work for one of the Greigs of Hazel Den.”
“I fear you do not consider all,” he said patiently – so patiently indeed that I wondered at him. “I will show you to what you are condemned even before your trial, before you make up your mind irrevocably to refuse this very reasonable request of ours,” and he made a gesture that caused the warder to open the door so that I could see within.
There was no light of its own in the cell, but it borrowed wanly a little of the radiance of the corridor, and I could see that it was bare to the penury of a mausoleum, with a stone floor, a wooden palliasse, and no window other than a barred hole above the door. There was not even a stool to sit on. But I did not quail.
“I have been in more comfortable quarters, M. Buhot,” I said, “but in none that I could occupy with a better conscience.” Assuming with that a sort of bravado, I stepped in before he asked me.
“Very good,” he cried; “but I cannot make you my felicitations on your decision, M. Greig,” and without more ado he had the door shut on me.
I sat on the woollen palliasse for a while, with my head on my hands, surrendered all to melancholy; and then, though the thing may seem beyond belief, I stretched myself and slept till morning. It was not the most refreshing of sleep, but still ‘twas wonderful that I should sleep at all in such circumstances, and I take it that a moorland life had been a proper preparation for just such trials.
When I wakened in the morning the prison seemed full of eerie noises – of distant shrieks as in a bedlam, and commanding voices, and of ringing metals, the clank of fetters, or the thud of musket-butts upon the stones. A great beating of feet was in the yard, as if soldiers were manoeuvring, and it mastered me to guess what all this might mean, until a warder opened my door and ordered me out for an airing.
I mind always of a parrot at a window.
This window was one that looked into the yard from some official’s dwelling in that dreadful place, and the bird occupied a great cage that was suspended from a nail outside.
The bird, high above the rabble of rogues in livery, seemed to have a devilish joy in the spectacle of the misery tramping round and round beneath, for it clung upon the bars and thrust out its head to whistle, as if in irony, or taunt us with a foul song. There was one air it had, expressed so clearly that I picked up air and words with little difficulty, and the latter ran something like this:
Ah! ah! Pierrot, Pierrot!
Fais ta toilette,
Voila le barbier! oh! oh!
Et sa charrette —
all in the most lugubrious key.
And who were we that heard that reference to the axe? We were the scum, the sordes, the rot of France. There was, doubtless, no crime before the law of the land, no outrage against God and man, that had not here its representative. We were not men, but beasts, cut off from every pleasant – every clean and decent association, the visions of sin always behind the peering eyes, the dreams of vice and crime for ever fermenting in the low brows. I felt ‘twas the forests we should be frequenting – the forests of old, the club our weapon, the cave our habitation; no song ours, nor poem, no children to infect with fondness, no women to smile at in the light of evening lamps. The forest – the cave – the animal! What were we but children of the outer dark, condemned from the start of time, our faces ground hard against the flints, our feet bogged in hag and mire?
There must have been several hundreds of the convicts in the yard, and yet I was told later that it was not a fourth of the misery that Bicêtre held, and that scores were leaving weekly for the bagnes– the hulks at Toulon and at Brest – while others took their places.
Every man wore a uniform – a coarse brown jacket, vast wide breeches of the same hue, a high sugar-loaf cap and wooden shoes – all except some privileged, whereof I was one – and we were divided into gangs, each gang with its warders – tall grenadiers with their muskets ready.
Round and round and across and across we marched in the great quadrangle, every man treading the rogues’ measure with leg-weary reluctance, many cursing their warders under breath, most scowling, all hopeless and all lost.
‘Twas the exercise of the day.
As we slouched through that mad ceremony in the mud of the yard, with rain still drizzling on us, the parrot in its cage had a voice loud and shrill above the commands of the grenadiers and officers; sang its taunting song, or whistled like a street boy, a beast so free, so careless and remote, that I had a fancy it had the only soul in the place.
As I say, we were divided into gangs, each gang taking its own course back and forward in the yard as its commander ordered. The gang I was with marched a little apart from the rest. We were none of us in this gang in the ugly livery of the prison, but in our own clothing, and we were, it appeared, allowed that privilege because we were yet to try. I knew no reason for the distinction at the time, nor did I prize it very much, for looking all about the yard – at the officers, the grenadiers, and other functionaries of the prison, I failed to see a single face I knew. What could I conclude but that Buhot was gone and that I was doomed to be forgotten here?
It would have been a comfort even to have got a glimpse of Father Hamilton, the man whose machinations were the cause of my imprisonment, but Father Hamilton, if he had been taken here as Buhot had suggested, was not, at all events, in view.
After the morning’s exercise we that were the privileged were taken to what was called the salle dépreuve, and with three or four to each gamelle or mess-tub, ate a scurvy meal of a thin soup and black bread and onions. To a man who had been living for a month at heck and manger, as we say, this might naturally seem unpalatable fare, but truth to tell I ate it with a relish that had been all the greater had it been permitted me to speak to any of my fellow sufferers. But speech was strictly interdict and so our meal was supped in silence.
