The Mysteries of Paris, Volume 2 of 6

"I'll be hanged if it isn't, then!" cried the other bailiff, bursting into a horse-laugh; "why, I took it for something tied up in an old sack. Look! her old head is shaved quite close; it seems as though she had got a white skull-cap on."

"Go, children, and kneel down, and beg of these good gentlemen not to take away your poor father, our only support," said Madeleine, anxious by a last effort to touch the hearts of the bailiffs. But, spite of their mother's orders, the terrified children remained weeping on their miserable mattress.

At the unusual noise which prevailed, added to the aspect of two strange men in the room, the poor idiot turned herself towards the wall, as though striving to hide from them, uttering all the time the most discordant cries and moans. Morel, meanwhile, appeared unconscious of all that was going on; this last stroke of fate had been so frightful and unexpected, and the consequences of his arrest were so dreadful, that his mind seemed almost unequal to understanding its reality. Worn out by all manner of privations, and exhausted by over-toil, his strength utterly forsook him, and he remained seated on his stool, pale and haggard, and as though incapable of speech or motion, his head drooping on his breast, and his arms hanging listlessly by his side.

"Deuce take me," cried Malicorne, "if that old patterer is not going fast asleep! Why, I say, my chap, you seem to think nothing of keeping gen'l'men like us waiting; just remember, will you, our time is precious! You know this is not exactly a party of pleasure, so march, or I shall be obliged to make you."

Suiting the action to the word, the man grasped the artisan by the shoulder, and shook him roughly; which so alarmed the children, that, unable to restrain their terror, the three little boys emerged from their paillasse, and, half naked as they were, came in an agony of tears to throw themselves at the feet of the bailiffs, holding up their clasped hands, and crying, in tones of touching earnestness:

"Pray, pray don't hurt our dear father!"

At the sight of these poor, shivering, half-clad infants, weeping with affright, and trembling with cold, Bourdin, spite of his natural callousness and long acquaintance with scenes of this sort, could not avoid a feeling almost resembling compassion from stealing over him, while his pitiless companion, brutally disengaging himself from the grasp of the small, weak creatures who were clinging to him, exclaimed:

"Hands off, you young ragamuffins! A devilish fine trade ours would be, if we were to allow ourselves to be mauled about by a set of beggars' brats like you!"

As though the scene were not sufficiently distressing, a fearful addition was made to its horrors. The eldest of the little girls, who had remained in the paillasse with her sick sister, suddenly exclaimed:

"Mother! mother! I don't know what's the matter with Adèle! She is so cold, and her eyes are fixed on my face, and yet she does not breathe."

The poor little child, whose consumptive appearance we have before noticed, had expired gently, and without a sigh, her looks fixed earnestly on the sister she so tenderly loved.

No language can describe the cry which burst from the lips of the lapidary's wife at these words, which at once revealed the dreadful truth; it was one of those wild, despairing, convulsive shrieks, which seem to sever the very heart-strings of a mother.

"My poor little sister looks as though she were dead!" continued the child; "she frightens me, with her eyes fixed on me, and her face so cold!"

Saying which, in an agony of terror, she leaped from beside the corpse of the infant, and ran to shelter herself in her mother's arms, while the distracted parent, forgetting that her almost paralysed limbs were incapable of supporting her, made a violent effort to rise and go to the assistance of her child, whom she could not believe was actually past recovery; but her strength failed her, and with a deep sigh of despair she sunk upon the floor. That cry found an echo in the heart of Morel, and roused him from his stupor. He sprang with one bound to the paillasse, and withdrew from it the stiffened form of an infant four years old, dead and cold. Want and misery had accelerated its end, although its complaint, which had originated in the positive want of common necessaries, was beyond the reach of any human aid to remove. Its poor little limbs were already rigid with death. Morel, whose very hair seemed to stand on end with despair and terror, stood holding his dead child in his arms, motionlessly contemplating its thin features with a fixed bloodshot gaze, though no tear moistened his dry, burning eyeballs.

"Morel! Morel, give Adèle to me!" cried the unhappy mother, extending her arms towards him; "she is not dead, – it is not possible! Let me have her, and I shall be able to warm her in my arms."

The curiosity of the idiot was excited by observing the pertinacity with which the bailiffs kept close to the lapidary, who would not part with the body of his child. She ceased her yells and cries, and, rising from her mattress, approached gently, protruded her hideous, senseless countenance over Morel's shoulder, staring in vacant wonder at the pale corpse of her grandchild, the features of the idiot retaining their usual expression of stupid sullenness. At the end of a few minutes, she uttered a sort of horrible yawning noise, almost resembling the roar of a famished animal; then, hurrying back to her mattress, she threw herself upon it, exclaiming:

"Hungry! hungry! hungry!"

"Well, gentlemen," said the poor, half-crazed artisan, with haggard looks, "you see all that is left me of my poor child, my Adèle, – we called her Adèle, she was so pretty she deserved a pretty name; and she was just four years old last night. Ay, and this morning even I kissed her, and she put her little arms about my neck and embraced me, – oh, so fondly! And now, you see, gentlemen, perhaps you will tell me there is one mouth less to feed, and that I am lucky to get rid of one, – you think so, don't you?"

The unfortunate man's reason was fast giving way under the many shocks he had received.

"Morel," cried Madeleine, "give me my child! I will have her!"

"To be sure," replied the lapidary; "that is only fair. Everybody ought to secure their own happiness!" So saying, he laid the child in its mother's arms, and uttering a groan, such as comes only from a breaking heart, he covered his face with his hands; while Madeleine, almost as frenzied as her husband, placed the body of her child amid the straw of her wretched bed, watching it with frantic jealousy, while the other children, kneeling around her, filled the air with their wailings.

The bailiffs, who had experienced a temporary feeling of compassion at the death of the child, soon fell back into their accustomed brutality.

"I say, friend," said Malicorne to the lapidary, "your child is dead, and there's an end of it! I dare say you think it a misfortune; but then, you see, we are all mortal, and neither we nor you can bring it back to life. So come along with us; for, to tell you the truth, we're upon the scent of a spicy one we must nab to-day. So don't delay us, that's a trump!"

But Morel heard not a word he said. Entirely preoccupied with his own sad thoughts, the bewildered man kept up a kind of wandering delivery of his own afflicting ideas.

"My poor Adèle!" murmured he; "we must now see about laying you in the grave, and watching by her little corpse till the people come to carry it to its last home, – to lay it in the ground. But how are we to do that without a coffin, – and where shall we get one? Who will give me credit for one? Oh, a very small coffin will do, – only for a little creature of four years of age! And we shall want no bearers! Oh, no, I can carry it under my arm. Ha! ha! ha!" added he, with a burst of frightful mirth; "what a good thing it is she did not live to be as old as Louise! I never could have persuaded anybody to trust me for a coffin large enough for a girl of eighteen years of age."

"I say, just look at that chap!" said Bourdin to Malicorne. "I'll be dashed if I don't think as he's a-going mad, like the old woman there! Only see how he rolls his eyes about, – enough to frighten one! Come, I say, let's make haste and be off. Only hark, how that idiot creature is a-roaring for something to eat! Well, they are rum customers, from beginning to end!"

"We must get done with them as soon as we can. Although the law only allows us seventy-six francs, seventy-five centièmes, for arresting this beggar, yet, in justice to ourselves, we must swell the costs to two hundred and forty or two hundred and fifty francs. You know the sufferer (the creditor) pays us!"

"You mean, advances the cash. Old Gaffer there will have to pay the piper, since he must dance to the music."

"Well, by the time he has paid his creditor 2,500 francs for debt, interest, and expenses, etc., he'll find it pretty warm work."

"A devilish sight more than we do our job up here! I'm a'most frost-bitten!" cried the bailiff, blowing the ends of his fingers. "Come, old fellow, make haste, will you! Just look sharp! You can snivel, you know, as we go along. Why, how the devil can we help it, if your brat has kicked the bucket?"

"These beggars always have such a lot of children, if they have nothing else!"

"Yes, so they have," responded Malicorne. Then, slapping Morel on the shoulder, he called out in a loud voice, "I tell you what it is, my friend, we're not going to be kept dawdling here all day, – our time is precious. So either out with the stumpy, or march off to prison, without any more bother!"

"Prison!" exclaimed a clear, youthful voice; "take M. Morel to prison!" and a bright, beaming face appeared at the door.

"Ah, Mlle. Rigolette," cried the weeping children, as they recognised the happy, healthful countenance of their young protectress and friend, "these wicked men are going to take our poor father away, and put him in prison! And sister Adèle is just dead!"

"Dead!" cried the kind-hearted girl, her dark eyes filling with compassionating tears; "poor little thing! But it cannot be true that your father is in danger of a prison;" and, almost stupefied with surprise, she gazed alternately from the children to Morel, and from him to the bailiffs.

"I say, my girl," said Bourdin, approaching Rigolette, "as you do seem to have the use of your senses, just make this good man hear reason, will you? His child has just died. Well, that can't be helped now; but, you see, he is a-keeping of us, because we're a-waiting to take him to the debtors' prison, being sheriffs' officers, duly sworn in and appointed. Tell him so!"

"Then it is true!" exclaimed the feeling girl.

"True? I should say it was and no mistake! Now, don't you see, while the mother is busy with the dead babby – and, bless you! she's got it there, hugging it up in bed, and won't part with it! – she won't notice us? So I want the father to be off while she isn't thinking nothing about it!"

"Good God! Good God!" replied Rigolette, in deep distress; "what is to be done?"

"Done? Why, pay the money, or go to prison! There is nothing between them two ways. If you happen to have two or three thousand francs by you you can oblige him with, why, shell out, and we'll be off, and glad enough to be gone!"

"How can you," cried Rigolette, "be so barbarous as to make a jest of such distress as this?"

"Well, then," rejoined the other man, "all joking apart, if you really do wish to be useful, try to prevent the woman from seeing us take her husband away. You will spare them both a very disagreeable ten minutes!"

Coarse as was this counsel, it was not destitute of good sense; and Rigolette, feeling she could do nothing else, approached the bedside of Madeleine, who, distracted by her grief, appeared unconscious of the presence of Rigolette, as, gathering the children together, she knelt with them beside their afflicted mother.

Meanwhile Morel, upon recovering from his temporary wildness, had sunk into a state of deep and bitter reflections upon his present position, which, now that his mind saw things through a calmer medium, only increased the poignancy of his sufferings. Since the notary had proceeded to such extremities, any hope from his mercy was vain. He felt there was nothing left but to submit to his fate, and let the law take its course.

"Are we ever to get off?" inquired Bourdin. "I tell you what, my man, if you are not for marching, we must make you, that's all."

"I cannot leave these diamonds about in this manner, – my wife is half distracted," cried Morel, pointing to the stones lying on his work-table. "The person for whom I am polishing them will come to fetch them away either this morning or during the day. They are of considerable value."

"Capital!" whispered Tortillard, who was still peeping in at the half closed door; "capital, capital! What will Mother Chouette say when I tell her this bit of luck?"

"Only give me till to-morrow," said Morel, beseechingly; "only till I can return these diamonds to my employer."

"I tell you, the thing can't be done. So let's have no more to say about it."

"But it is impossible for me to leave diamonds of such value as these exposed, to be lost or even stolen in my absence."