Jezebel's Daughter Part 47

He lighted a lantern, and led Jack out.

Leaving the courtyard and the waiting-room on their left hand, he advanced along the right-hand side of the pa.s.sage, and opened the door of a bed-chamber, always kept ready for use. A second door in the bed-chamber led to a bath-room. Here, opposite the bath, stood the cabinet in which the restorative applications were kept, under the care of the overseer.

When the two men had gone out, Madame Fontaine ventured into the Watchman's Chamber. Her eyes turned towards the one terrible cell, at the farther end of the row of black curtains. She advanced towards it; and stopped, lifting her hands to her head in the desperate effort to compose herself.

The terror of impending discovery had never left her, since Jack had owned the use to which he had put the contents of the blue-gla.s.s bottle.

Animated by that all-mastering dread, she had thrown away every poison in the medicine-chest--had broken the bottles into fragments--and had taken those fragments out with her, when she left the house to follow Doctor Dormann. On the way to the cemetery, she had scattered the morsels of broken gla.s.s and torn paper on the dark road outside the city gate.

Nothing now remained but the empty medicine-chest, and the writing in cipher, once rolled round the poison called the "Looking-Gla.s.s Drops."

Under these altered circ.u.mstances, she had risked asking Doctor Dormann to interpret the mysterious characters, on the bare chance of their containing some warning by which she might profit, in her present ignorance of the results which Jack's ignorant interference might produce.

Acting under the same vague terror of that possible revival, to which Jack looked forward with such certain hope, she had followed him to the Deadhouse, and had waited, hidden in the cells, to hear what dangerous confidences he might repose in the doctor or in Mr. Keller, and to combat on the spot the suspicion which he might ignorantly rouse in their minds.

Still in the same agony of doubt, she now stood, with her eyes on the cell, trying to summon the resolution to judge for herself. One look at the dead woman, while the solitude in the room gave her the chance--one look might a.s.sure her of the livid pallor of death, or warn her of the terrible possibilities of awakening life. She hurried headlong over the intervening s.p.a.ce, and looked in.

There, grand and still, lay her murderous work! There, ghostly white on the ground of the black robe, were the rigid hands, topped by the hideous machinery which was to betray them, if they trembled under the mysterious return of life!

In the instant when she saw it, the sight overwhelmed her with horror.

She turned distractedly, and fled through the open door. She crossed the courtyard, like a deeper shadow creeping swiftly through the darkness of the winter night. On the threshold of the solitary waiting-room, exhausted nature claimed its rest. She wavered--groped with her hands at the empty air--and sank insensible on the floor.

In the meantime, Schwartz revealed the purpose of his visit to the bath-room.

The gla.s.s doors which protected the upper division of the cabinet were locked; the key being in the possession of the overseer. The cupboard in the lower division, containing towels and flannel wrappers, was left unsecured. Opening the door, the watchman drew out a bottle and an old traveling flask, concealed behind the bath-linen. "I call this my cellar," he explained. "Cheer up, Jacky; we'll have a jolly night of it yet."

"I don't want to see your cellar!" said Jack impatiently. "I want to be of use to Mistress--show me the place where we call for help."

"Call?" repeated Schwartz, with a roar of laughter. "Do you think they can hear us at the overseer's, through a courtyard, and a waiting-room, and a grand hall, and another courtyard, and another waiting-room beyond?

Not if we were twenty men all bawling together till we were hoa.r.s.e! I'll show you how we can make the master hear us--if that miraculous revival of yours happens," he added facetiously in a whisper to himself.

He led the way back into the pa.s.sage, and held up his lantern so as to show the cornice. A row of fire-buckets was suspended there by books.

Midway between them, a stout rope hung through a metal-lined hole in the roof.

"Do you see that?" said Schwartz. "You have only to pull, and there's an iron tongue in the belfry above that will speak loud enough to be heard at the city gate. The overseer will come tumbling in, with his bunch of keys, as if the devil was at his heels, and the two women-servants after him--old and ugly, Jack!--they attend to the bath, you know, when a woman wants it. Wait a bit! Take the light into the bedroom, and get a chair for yourself--we haven't much accommodation for evening visitors. Got it?

that's right. Would you like to see where the mad watchman hung himself?

On the last hook at the end of the row there. We've got a song he made about the Deadhouse. I think it's in the drawer of the table. A gentleman had it printed and sold, for the benefit of the widow and children. Wait till we are well warmed with our liquor, and I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll sing you the mad watchman's song; and Jacky, my man, you shall sing the chorus! Tow-row-rub-a-dub-boom--that's the tune. Pretty, isn't it? Come along back to our snuggery." He led the way to the Watchman's Chamber.

CHAPTER XIX

Jack looked eagerly into the cell again. There was no change--not a sign of that happy waking in which he so firmly believed.

Schwartz opened the drawer of the table. Tobacco and pipes; two or three small drinking-gla.s.ses; a dirty pack of playing-cards; the mad watchman's song, with a woodcut ill.u.s.tration of the suicide--all lay huddled together. He took from the drawer the song, and two of the drinking-gla.s.ses, and called to his little guest to come out of the cell.

"There;" he said, filling the gla.s.ses, "you never tasted such wine as that in all your life. Off with it!"

Jack turned away with a look of disgust. "What did you say of wine, when I drank with you the other night?" he asked reproachfully. "You said it would warm my heart, and make a man of me. And what did it do? I couldn't stand on my legs. I couldn't hold up my head--I was so sleepy and stupid that Joseph had to take me upstairs to bed. I hate your wine! Your wine's a liar, who promises and doesn't perform! I'm weary enough, and wretched enough in my mind, as it is. No more wine for me!"

"Wrong!" remarked Schwartz, emptying his gla.s.s, and smacking his lips after it.

"You made a serious mistake the other night--you didn't drink half enough. Give the good liquor a fair chance, my son. No, you won't? Must I try a little gentle persuasion before you will come back to your chair?"

Suiting the action to the word, he put his arm round Jack. "What's this I feel under my hand?" he asked. "A bottle?" He took it out of Jack's breast-pocket. "Lord help us!" he exclaimed; "it looks like physic!"

Jack s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from him, with a cry of delight. "The very thing for me--and I never thought of it!"

It was the phial which Madame Fontaine had repentantly kept to herself, after having expressly filled it for him with the fatal dose of "Alexander's Wine"--the phial which he had found, when he first opened the "Pink-Room Cupboard." In the astonishment and delight of finding the blue-gla.s.s bottle immediately afterwards, he had entirely forgotten it.

Nothing had since happened to remind him that it was in his pocket, until Schwartz had stumbled on the discovery.

"It cures you when you are tired or troubled in your mind," Jack announced in his grandest manner, repeating Madame Fontaine's own words.

"Is there any water here?"

"Not a drop, thank Heaven!" said Schwartz, devoutly.

"Give me my gla.s.s, then. I once tried the remedy by itself, and it stung me as it went down. The wine won't hurt me, with this splendid stuff in it. I'll take it in the wine."

"Who told you to take it?" Schwartz asked, holding back the gla.s.s.

"Mrs. Housekeeper told me."

"A woman!" growled Schwartz, in a tone of sovereign contempt. "How dare you let a woman physic you, when you've got me for a doctor? Jack! I'm ashamed of you."

Jack defended his manhood. "Oh, I don't care what she says! I despise her--she's mad. You don't suppose she made this? I wouldn't touch it, if she had. No, no; her husband made it--a wonderful man! the greatest man in Germany!"

He reached across the table and secured his gla.s.s of wine. Before it was possible to interfere, he had emptied the contents of the phial into it, and had raised it to his lips. At that moment, Schwartz's restraining hand found its way to his wrist. The deputy watchman had far too sincere a regard for good wine to permit it to be drunk, in combination with physic, at his own table.

"Put it down!" he said gruffly. "You're my visitor, ain't you? Do you think I'm going to let housekeeper's cat-lap be drunk at my table? Look here!"

He held up his traveling-flask, with the metal drinking-cup taken off, so as to show the liquor through the gla.s.s. The rich amber color of it fascinated Jack. He put his wine-gla.s.s back on the table. "What is it?"

he asked eagerly.

"Drinkable gold, Jack! _My_ physic. Brandy!"

He poured out a dram into the metal cup. "Try that," he said, "and don't let me hear any more about the housekeeper's physic."

Jack tasted it. The water came into his eyes--he put his hands on his throat. "Fire!" he gasped faintly.

"Wait!" said Schwartz.

Jack waited. The fiery grip of the brandy relaxed; the genial warmth of it was wafted through him persuasively from head to foot. He took another sip. His eyes began to glitter. "What divine being made this?" he asked.

Without waiting to be answered, he tried it again, and emptied the cup.

"More!" he cried. "I never felt so big, I never felt so strong, I never felt so clever, as I feel now!"

Schwartz, drinking freely from his own bottle, recovered, and more than recovered, his Baccha.n.a.lian good humor. He clapped Jack on the shoulder.

"Who's the right doctor now?" he asked cheerfully. "A drab of a housekeeper? or Father Schwartz? Your health, my jolly boy! When the bottle's empty, I'll help you to finish the flask. Drink away! and the devil take all heel-taps!"