The Shoes of Fortune
“Rope!” I cried, in a tremendous chagrin at my stupidity. “Lord! if I have not quite forgot it. We have none.”
“Ah!” he said, “perhaps it is not necessary. Perhaps my heart is so light at parting with my croque-mort that I can drop upon the tiles like a pigeon.”
“Parting,” I repeated, eyeing him suspiciously, for I thought perhaps he had changed his mind again. “Who thinks of parting?”
“Not I indeed,” says he, “unless the rope do when thou hast got it.”
There was no rope, however, and I cursed my own folly that I had not asked one from the sous-officer whose complaisance might have gone the length of a fathom or two, though it did not, as the priest suggested, go so far as an armed convoy and a brace of trumpeters. It was too late now to repair the overlook, and to the making of rope the two of us had there and then to apply ourselves, finding the sheets and blankets-of our beds scanty enough for our purpose, and by no means of an assuring elegance or strength when finished. But we had thirty feet of some sort of cord at the last, and whether it was elegant or not it had to do for our purpose.
Luckily the night was dark as pitch and a high wind roared in the chimneys, and in the numerous corners of the prison. There was a sting in the air that drew many of the sentinels round the braziers flaming in the larger yard between the main entrance and the buildings, and that further helped our prospects; so that it was with some hope, in spite of a heart that beat like a flail in my breast, I unlocked the door and crept out into the dimly-lighted corridor with the priest close behind me.
Midway down this gallery there was a stair of which our plan apprised us, leading to another gallery – the highest of the block – from which a few steps led to a cock-loft where the sous-officer told us there was one chance in a score of finding a blind window leading to the roof.
No one, luckily, appeared as we hurried down the long gallery. I darted like a fawn up the stair to the next flat, Father Hamilton grievously puffing behind me, and we had just got into the shadow of the steps leading to the cock-loft when a warder’s step and the clank of his chained keys came sounding down the corridor. He passed within three feet of us and I felt the blood of all my body chill with fear!
“I told thee, lad,” whispered the priest, mopping the sweat from his face, “I told thee ‘twas an error to burden thyself with such a useless carcase. Another moment or two – a gasp for the wind that seems so cursed ill to come by at my years, and I had brought thee into trouble.”
I paid no heed to him, but crept up the steps and into the cock-loft that smelt villainously of bats.
The window was unfastened! I stuck out my head upon the tiles and sniffed the fine fresh air of freedom as it had been a rare perfume.
Luckily the window was scarcely any height, and it proved easy to aid his reverence into the open air. Luckily, further, it was too dark for him to realise the jeopardies of his situation for whether his precarious gropings along the tiles were ten feet or thirty from the yard below was indiscoverable in the darkness. He slid his weighty body along with an honest effort that was wholly due to his regard for my interests, because ‘twas done with groans and whispered protestations that ‘twas the maddest thing for a man to leave a place where he was happy and risk his neck in an effort to discover misery. A rime of frost was on the tiles, and they were bitter cold to the touch. One fell, too, below me as I slid along, and rattled loudly over its fellows and plunged into the yard.
Naturally we stopped dead and listened breathless, a foolish action for one reason because in any case we had been moving silently at a great height above the place where the tile should fall so that there was no risk of our being heard or seen, but our listening discovered so great an interval between the loosening of the tile and its dull shattering on the stones below that the height on which we were perched in the darkness was made more plain – more dreadful to the instincts than if we could actually measure it with the eye. I confess I felt a touch of nausea, but nothing compared with the priest, whose teeth began to chitter in an ague of horror.
“Good Lord, Paul!” he whispered to me, clutching my leg as I moved in front of him, “it is the bottomless pit.”
“Not unless we drop,” said I. And to cheer him up I made some foolish joke.
If the falling tile attracted any attention in the yard it was not apparent to us, and five minutes later we had to brace ourselves to a matter that sent the tile out of our minds.
For we were come to the end of the high building, and twenty feet below us, at right angles, we could plainly see the glow of several skylights in the long prison to which it was attached. It was now the moment for our descent on the extemporised rope.
CHAPTER XXVI
A RIMEY NIGHT ON ROOF-TOPS, AND A NEW USE FOR AN OLD KIRK BELL
I fastened the rope about a chimney-head with some misgivings that by the width and breadth of the same I was reducing our chance of ever getting down to the lower building, as the knotted sheets from the outset had been dubious measure for the thirty feet of which my sous-officer had given the estimate. But I said never a word to the priest of my fears on that score, and determined for once to let what was left of honesty go before well-fattened age and test the matter first myself. If the cord was too brief for its purpose, or (what was just as likely) on the frail side, I could pull myself back in the one case as the priest was certainly unfit to do, and in the other my weight would put less strain upon it than that of Father Hamilton.
I can hear him yet in my imagination after forty years, as he clung to the ridge of the roof like a seal on a rock, chittering in the cold night wind, enviously eyeing some fires that blazed in another yard and groaning melancholiously.
“A garden,” said he, “and six beehives – no, ‘faith! ‘twas seven last summer, and a roomful of books. Oh, Paul, Paul! Now I know how God cast out Satan. He took him from his warm fireside, and his books before they were all read, and his pantoufles, and set him straddling upon a frozen house-top to ponder through eternal night upon the happy past. Alas, poor being! How could he know what joys were in the simplicity of a room of books half-read and a pair of warm old slippers?”
He was fair rambling in his fears, my poor priest, and I declare scarcely knew the half of what he uttered, indeed he spoke out so loudly that I had to check him lest he should attract attention from below.
“Father Hamilton,” said I, when my cord was fastened, “with your permission I’ll try it first. I want to make it sure that my seamanship on the sloop Sarah, of Ayr, has not deserted me to the extent that I cannot come down a rope without a ratline or tie a bowling knot.”
“Certainly, Paul, certainly,” said he, quite eagerly, so that I was tempted for a second to think he gladly postponed his own descent from sheer terror.
I threw over the free end of the cord and crouched upon the beak of the gable to lower myself.
“Well, Paul,” said his reverence in a broken voice. “Let us say ‘good-bye’ in case aught should happen ere we are on the same level again.”
“Oh!” said I, impatient, “that’s the true croque-mort spirit indeed! Why, Father, it isn’t – it isn’t – ” I was going to say it was not a gallows I was venturing on, but the word stuck in my throat, for a certain thought that sprung to me of how nearly in my own case it had been to the very gallows, and his reverence doubtless saw some delicacy, for he came promptly to my help.
“Not a priest’s promise – made to be broken, you would say, good Paul,” said he. “I promised the merriest of jaunts over Europe in a coach, and here my scrivener is hanging in the reins! Pardon, dear Scotland, milles pardons and good-bye and good luck.” And at that he made to embrace me.
“Here’s a French ceremony just about nothing at all,” I thought, and began my descent. The priest lay on his stomach upon the ridge. As I sank, with my eyes turned upwards, I could see his hair blown by the wind against a little patch of stars, that was the only break in the Ethiopia of the sky. He seemed to follow my progress breathlessly, and when I gained the other roof and shook the cord to tell him so he responded by a faint clapping of his hands.
“Art all right, lad?” he whispered down to me, and I bade him follow.
“Good-night, Paul, good-bye, and God bless you!” he whispered. “Get out of this as quick as you can; ‘tis more than behemoth could do in a month of dark nights, and so I cut my share of the adventure. One will do’t when two (and one of them a hogshead) will die in trying to do’t.”
Here was a pretty pickle! The man’s ridiculous regard for my safety outweighed his natural inclinations, though his prospects in the prison of Bicêtre were blacker than my own, having nothing less dreadful than an execution at the end of them. He had been merely humouring me so far – and such a brave humouring in one whose flesh was in a quaking of alarms all the time he slid along the roof!
“Are you not coming?” I whispered.
“On the contrary, I’m going, dear Paul,” said he with a pretence at levity. “Going back to my comfortable cell and my uniformed servant and M. Buhot, the charmingest of hostellers, and I declare my feet are like ice.”
“Then,” said I firmly, “I go back too. I’ll be eternally cursed if I give up my situation as scrivener at this point. I must e’en climb up again.” And with that I prepared to start the ascent.
“Stop! stop!” said he without a second’s pause, “stop where you are and I’ll go down. Though ‘tis the most stupendous folly,” he added with a sigh, and in a moment later I saw his vast bulk laboriously heaving over the side of the roof. Fortunately the knots in the cord where the fragments of sheet and blanket were joined made his task not so difficult as it had otherwise been, and almost as speedily as I had done it myself he reached the roof of the lower building, though in such a state he quivered like a jelly, and was dumb with fear or with exertion when the thing was done.
“Ah!” he said at last, when he had recovered himself. “Art a fool to be so particular about an old carcase accursed of easy humours and accused of regicide. Take another thought on’t, Paul. What have you to do with this wretch of a priest that brought about the whole trouble in your ignorance? And think of Galbanon!”
“Think of the devil! Father Hamilton,” I snapped at him, “every minute we waste havering away here adds to the chances against any of us getting free, and I am sure that is not your desire. The long and the short of it is that I’ll not stir a step out of Bicêtre – no, not if the doors themselves were open – unless you consent to come with me.”
“Ventre Dieu!” said he, “‘tis just such a mulish folly as I might have looked for from the nephew of Andrew Greig. But lead on, good imbecile, lead on, and blame not poor Father Hamilton if the thing ends in a fiasco!”
We now crawled along a roof no whit more easily traversed than that we had already commanded. Again and again I had to stop to permit my companion to come up on me, for the pitch of the tiles was steep, and he in a peril from his own lubricity, and it was necessary even to put a hand under his arm at times when he suffered a vertigo through seeing the lights in the yard deep down as points of flame.
“Egad! boy,” he said, and his perspiring hand clutching mine at one of our pauses, “I thrill at the very entrails. I’d liefer have my nose in the sawdust any day than thrash through thin air on to a paving-stone.”
“A minute or two more and we are there,” I answered him.
“Where?” said he, starting; “in purgatory?”
“Look up, man!” I told him. “There’s a window beaming ten yards off.” And again I pushed on.
In very truth there was no window, though I prayed as fervently for one as it had been a glimpse of paradise, but I was bound to cozen the old man into effort for his own life and for mine. What I had from the higher building taken for the glow of skylights had been really the light of windows on the top flat of the other prison block, and its roof was wholly unbroken. At least I had made up my mind to that with a despair benumbing when I touched wood. My fingers went over it in the dark with frantic eagerness. It was a trap such as we had come out of at the other block, but it was shut. Before the priest could come up to me and suffer the fresh horror of disappointment I put my weight upon it, and had the good fortune to throw it in. The flap fell with a shriek of hinges and showed gaping darkness. We stretched upon the tiles as close as limpets and as silent. Nothing stirred within.
“A garden,” said he in a little, “as sweet as ever bean grew in, with the rarest plum-tree; and now I am so cold.”
“I could be doing with some of your complaint,” said I; “as for me, I’m on fire. Please heaven, you’ll be back in the garden again.”
I lowered myself within, followed by the priest, and found we were upon the rafters. A good bit off there was a beam of light that led us, groping, and in an imminent danger of going through the plaster, to an air-hole over a little gallery whose floor was within stretch as I lowered myself again.
Father Hamilton squeezed after me; we both looked over the edge of the gallery, and found it was a chapel we were in!
“Sacré nom!” said the priest and crossed himself, with a genuflexion to the side of the altar.
“Oh, Lord! Paul,” he said, whispering, “if ‘twere the Middle Ages, and this were indeed a sanctuary, how happy was a poor undeserving son of Mother Church! Even Dagobert’s hounds drew back from the stag in St. Denys.”
It was a mean interior, as befitted the worship of the misérables who at times would meet there. A solemn quiet held the place, that seemed wholly deserted; the dim light that had shown through the air-hole and guided us came from some candles dripping before a shrine.
“Heaven help us!” said the priest. “I know just such another.”
There was nobody in the church so far as we could observe from the little gallery in which we found ourselves, but when we had gone down a flight of steps into the body of the same, and made to cross towards the door, we were suddenly confronted by a priest in a white cope. My heart jumped to my mouth; I felt a prinkling in the roots of my hair, and stopped dumb, with all my faculties basely deserted from me. Luckily Father Hamilton kept his presence of mind. As he told me later, he remembered of a sudden the Latin proverb that in battles the eye is first overcome, and he fixed the man in the stole with a glance that was bold and disconcerting. As it happened, however, the other priest was almost as blind as a bat, and saw but two civil worshippers in his chapel. He did not even notice that it was a soutane; he passed peeringly, with a bow to our inclinations, and it was almost incredulous of our good fortune I darted out of the chapel into the darkness of a courtyard of equal extent with that I had crossed on the night of my first arrival at Bicêtre. At its distant end there were the same flaming braziers with figures around them, and the same glitter of arms.
Now this Bicêtre is set upon a hill and commands a prospect of the city of Paris, of the Seine and its environs. For that reason we could see to our right the innumerable lights of a great plain twinkling in the darkness, and it seemed as if we had only to proceed in that direction to secure freedom by the mere effort of walking. As we stood in the shadow of the chapel, Father Hamilton eyed the distant prospect of the lighted town with a singular rapture.
“Paris!” said he. “Oh, Dieu! and I thought never to clap an eye on’t again. Paris, my Paul! Behold the lights of it —la ville lumière that is so fine I could spend eternity in it. Hearts are there, lad, kind and jocund-”
“And meditating a descent on unhappy Britain,” said I.
“Good neighbourly hearts, or I’m a gourd else,” he went on, unheeding my interruption. “The stars in heaven are not so good, are no more notably the expression of a glowing and fraternal spirit. There is laughter in the streets of her.”
“Not at this hour, Father Hamilton,” said I, and the both of us always whispering. “I’ve never seen the place by day nor put a foot in it, but it will be droll indeed if there is laughter in its streets at two o’clock in the morning.”
“Ah, Paul, shall we ever get there?” said he longingly. “We can but try, anyway. I certainly did not come all this way, Father Hamilton, just to look on the lowe of Paris.”
What had kept us shrinking in the shadow of the chapel wall had been the sound of footsteps between us and the palisades that were to be distinguished a great deal higher than I had expected, on our right. On the other side of the rails was freedom, as well as Paris that so greatly interested my companion, but the getting clear of them seemed like to be a more difficult task than any we had yet overcome, and all the more hazardous because the footsteps obviously suggested a sentinel. Whether it was the rawness of the night that tempted him to a relaxation, or whether he was not strictly on duty, I know not, but, while we stood in the most wretched of quandaries, the man who was in our path very soon ceased his perambulation along the palisades, and went over to one of the distant fires, passing within a few yards of us as we crouched in the darkness. When he had gone sufficiently out of the way we ran for it. So plain were the lights of the valley, so flimsy a thing had seemed to part us from the high-road there, that never a doubt intruded on my mind that now we were as good as free, and when I came to the rails I beat my head with my hands when the nature of our folly dawned upon me.
“We may just go back,” I said to the priest in a stricken voice.
“Comment?” said he, wiping his brow and gloating on the spectacle of the lighted town.
“Look,” I said, indicating the railings that were nearly three times my own height, “there are no convenient trap-doors here.”
“But the cord – ” said he simply.
“Exactly,” I said; “the cord’s where we left it snugly tied with a bowling knot to the chimney of our block, and I’m an ass.”
“Oh, poor Paul!” said the priest in a prostration at this divulgence of our error. “I’m the millstone on your neck, for had I not parleyed at the other end of the cord when you had descended, the necessity for it would never have escaped your mind. I gave you fair warning, lad, ‘twas a quixotic imbecility to burden yourself with me. And are we really at a stand? God! look at Paris. Had I not seen these lights I had not cared for myself a straw, but, oh lord! lad, they are so pleasant and so close! Why will the world sleep when two unhappy wretches die for want of a little bit of hemp?”
“You are not to blame,” said I, “one rope was little use to us in any case. But anyhow I do not desire to die of a little bit of hemp if I can arrange it better.” And I began hurriedly to scour up and down the palisade like a trapped mouse. It extended for about a hundred yards, ending at one side against the walls of a gate-house or lodge; on the other side it concluded at the wall of the chapel. It had no break in all its expanse, and so there was nothing left for us to do but to go back the way we had come, obliterate the signs of our attempt and find our cells again. We went, be sure, with heavy hearts, again ventured into the chapel, climbed the stairs, went through the ceiling, and stopped a little among the rafters to rest his reverence who was finding these manoeuvres too much for his weighty body. While he sat regaining sufficient strength to resume his crawling on rimey tiles I made a search of the loft we were in and found it extended to the gable end of the chapel, but nothing more for my trouble beyond part of a hanging chain that came through the roof and passed through the ceiling. I had almost missed it in the darkness, and even when I touched it my first thought was to leave it alone. But I took a second thought and tried the lower end, which came up as I hauled, yard upon yard, until I had the end of it, finished with a bell-ringer’s hempen grip, in my hands. Here was a discovery if bell-pulls had been made of rope throughout in Bicêtre prison! But a chain with an end to a bell was not a thing to be easily borrowed.
I went back to where Father Hamilton was seated on the rafters, and told him my discovery.
“A bell,” said he. “Faith! I never liked them. Pestilent inventions of the enemy, that suggested duties to be done and the fleeting hours. But a bell-rope implies a belfry on the roof and a bell in it, and the chain that may reach the ground within the building may reach the same desirable place without the same.”
“That’s very true,” said I, struck with the thing. And straight got through the trap and out upon the roof again. Father Hamilton puffed after me and in a little we came upon a structure like a dovecot at the very gable-end. “The right time to harry a nest is at night,” said I, “for then you get all that’s in it.” And I started to pull up the chain that was fastened to the bell.
I lowered behemoth with infinite exertion till he reached the ground outside the prison grounds in safety, wrapped the clapper of the bell in my waistcoat, and descended hand over hand after him.
We were on the side of a broad road that dipped down the hill into a little village. Between us and the village street, across which hung a swinging lamp, there mounted slowly a carriage with a pair of horses.
“Bernard!” I cried, running up to it, and found it was the Swiss in the very article of waiting for us, and he speedily drove us into Paris.
CHAPTER XXVII
WE ENTER PARIS AND FIND A SANCTUARY THERE
Of the town of Paris that is so lamentably notable in these days I have but the recollection that one takes away from a new scene witnessed under stress of mind due to matters more immediately affecting him than the colour, shape, and properties of things seen, and the thought I had in certain parts of it is more clear to me to-day than the vision of the place itself. It is, in my mind, like a fog that the bridges thundered as our coach drove over them with our wretched fortunes on that early morning of our escape from Bicêtre, but as clear as when it sprung to me from the uproar of the wheels comes back the dread that the whole of this community would be at their windows looking out to see what folks untimeously disturbed their rest. We were delayed briefly at a gate upon the walls; I can scarcely mind what manner of men they were that stopped us and thrust a lantern in our faces, and what they asked eludes me altogether, but I mind distinctly how I gasped relief when we were permitted to roll on. Blurred, too – no better than the surplusage of dreams, is my first picture of the river and its isles in the dawn, but, like a favourite song, I mind the gluck of waters on the quays and that they made me think of Earn and Cart and Clyde.
We stopped in the place of the Notre Dame at the corner of a street; the coach drove off to a remise whence it had come, and we went to an hospital called the Hôtel Dieu, in the neighbourhood, where Hamilton had a Jesuit friend in one of the heads, and where we were accommodated in a room that was generally set aside for clergymen. It was a place of the most wonderful surroundings, this Hôtel Dieu, choked, as it were, among towers, the greatest of them those of Our Lady itself that were in the Gothic taste, regarding which Father Hamilton used to say, “Dire gothique, c’est dire mauvais gout,” though, to tell the truth, I thought the building pretty braw myself. Alleys and wynds were round about us, and so narrow that the sky one saw between them was but a ribbon by day, while at night they seemed no better than ravines.
‘Twas at night I saw most of the city, for only in the darkness did I dare to venture out of the Hôtel Dieu. Daundering my lone along the cobbles, I took a pleasure in the exercise of tenanting these towering lands with people having histories little different from the histories of the folks far off in my Scottish home – their daughters marrying, their sons going throughither (as we say), their bairns wakening and crying in their naked beds, and grannies sitting by the ingle-neuk cheerfully cracking upon ancient days. Many a time in the by-going I looked up their pend closes seeking the eternal lovers of our own burgh towns and never finding them, for I take it that in love the foreign character is coyer than our own. But no matter how eagerly I went forth upon my nightly airing in a roquelaure borrowed from Father Hamilton’s friend, the adventure always ended, for me, in a sort of eerie terror of those close-hemming walls, those tangled lanes where slouched the outcast and the ne’er-do-weel, and not even the glitter of the moon upon the river between its laden isles would comfort me.
