The False Chevalier Part 54

"Correct," said he to the guard, chuckling, and the guard needed no more. They began to drag the "sheep" away.

The "sheep" was Jude.

"I am yours--you promised me my life," he desperately screamed back. The Admiral smiled contemptuously; his eyes were very bright and hard.

"I promised that Repentigny should die first; you afterwards; I grant you the privilege of going second." The _Sans-culottes_, their noisy laughs resounding through the corridor and echoed by the baying of the mastiffs, dragged the spy away.

La Tour could not move the Admiral to any leniency for Germain. The bandit followed each of his prayers by a sinister silence. At length la Tour was compelled by lack of time to give him up and speed to the revolutionary tribunal itself, in session underneath. He was just in time to make his appeal, for Lecour was already brought before the jury and the five judges.

The strenuous efforts of Hugues were nullified by the persistent refusal of the Canadian to take advantage of the device proposed to him, by his would-be preserver--of declaring himself a non-aristocrat. La Tour vehemently urged him at least to cry--"_Vive la Republique!_" At that Lecour seemed to conceive an idea, and stepping forward cried instead in a voice of decision--

"Long live the King!"

His sentence was signed immediately.

Sanson's death-carts rolled into the courtyard. The hour for the daily public show had arrived. The rest of the prisoners on trial were peremptorily shoved through the mill of condemnation and all were hustled up to the toilette of the executioner. Hands tied, hair cut, feet bared, half a dozen were pushed up into each cart, seated three on a side, and the carts set out. Seven in the line, the roughest, rudest vehicles in the town, they jerked over the uneven cobbles, rumbled across the Pont-Neuf, and crept along the Rue de la Monnaie and then along the Rue Honore, regardless, both they, their carters, their executioner's men, and their Dragoon escorts, of the agony they freighted. The streets themselves wore unfeeling faces. The merchants had closed their shutters and across the facades of many houses were large inscriptions such as, "THE REPUBLIC ONE AND INDIVISIBLE,"

"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, _or Death_." And the sun poured down its untempered rays on the condemned. But more pitiless than carts or streets or sun were the coa.r.s.e Jacobins who ran alongside.

With what fine wit they shouted--

"Long live the razor of the Republic!"

A newsvendor began to sing, and was joined in chorus--

"Doctor Guillotin, That great _medecin_ Love of human kind Preoccupies his mind."

As to the company of the lost in the carts, they consisted of a strange variety. In the first, the princ.i.p.al persons were a majestic woman and her two daughters, sitting erect, with hands tied, costumed freshly and invested still with the old carefulness of manner; but the eyes of the youngest were staring with horror. There was a large dog in the same cart, condemned for carrying despatches. In the next a National a.s.sembly-man, betrayed by Robespierre, tore his hair and raved on his fate. Opposite him two poor sewing-women, falsely accused by a neighbour, sat helplessly, their eyes shut, their lips incessantly repeating prayers; by their side, a boy of eight, with bright, fair features, sobbing, his little hands tied, as the executioner's man showed the crowd with a laugh. His crime was that his father had been a Count. Third came the cart containing Germain, to whom all eyes were directed. On the seat opposite him was Jude, frantically entreating the saints, the driver, the guards, and the crowd to take pity on his soul.

"Buy the bulletin of the revolutionary tribunal; judgements of to-day!

The horrible aristocrat Repentigny brought to justice! Here he is! here is the one who defied the jury!"

"Bodyguard of Capet!"

"Here is the one who killed Bec and Caron!" shrilled Wife Gougeon.

"Long live the Galley-on-Land!"

These cries gradually roused Lecour, and for the first time, putting it all together and recognising faces, he realised the truth of the Admiral's boast that he had been pursued all these years by the crew about him--the organisation of the cave of Fontainebleau. The long-lit hatred of so many eyes stabbed his heart to the quick. Yet of the inward Pa.s.sion of his journey there was no outward appearance. He sat quiet of visage, clinging to the one underlying thought that he had been able to free Cyrene. Alas! how long even yet could it be before she would be riding the same ride?

Suddenly Abbe Jude in front of him lost his frantic gestures and sobbed violently. Germain put aside his own concerns, and bending over whispered gently, "Courage, my brother, for a little."

"Admit even now that you are not an aristocrat," cried Hughes from beside the cart, "and I will move heaven and earth to reprieve you."

But Germain went steadily forward.

The Place de la Revolution, now completely transformed into the Place de la Concorde, that ornament of Paris, was then unpaved and unfinished. In the middle stood a plaster statue of Liberty and near it the gaunt machine of fear--a plank platform reached by a narrow stair having a single handrail, and, pointing out of it towards the sky a pair of tall beams between which, on touching a spring, the knife fell on the neck of the condemned.

From early morning Cyrene had been waiting, racked with fear, at the house of la Tour on one of the small streets not far from the Place. At the sound of the shouts which showed that an execution had begun, she flew there and by despairing force crushed her way through thousands of spectators, towards the guillotine, on whose platform figures could already be seen appearing and falling one by one. She moaned and gasped at each fresh obstacle to her frantic efforts. Her lips were white, her eyes staring.

The patriotesses, who sat knitting on the stand erected near the machine for their daily delectation, agreed that she was an excellent diversion.

All at once her difficulty in pus.h.i.+ng forward ceased and the brutes around her made way.

"Give her a good place," she heard one cry, and many hands impelled her to the foot of the guillotine. Bloated faces, wicked jests, fists grasping pipes and bottles, a tumult of the coa.r.s.e and pa.s.sionate, swayed, about her, organised under one being, the Admiral, jeering in his low power. Never had his head, his face, shown more completely their resemblance to a skull.

As he stretched up his arm with a gesture of ferocious, gleeful malice, the wretches around the scaffold, as one man, broke into intoxicated laughter, joined hands and swayed in and out in the popular dance--

"Hurrah for the sound Of the cannon."

Meanwhile two of his henchmen held Cyrene before him.

"Look!" he cried to her. "See!" and pointed up to the guillotine. Her eyes involuntarily followed.

She saw the flash of the descending blade. Wild and speechless, she hung petrified on the arms of the two men holding her. But now she was oblivious of everything except that another head, another form, far above all else to her, was on the platform. His face was pallid, his bearing sweet, solemn, and brave.

"Death to the aristocrat!" shouted the excited mob. His lips moved with a brief appearance of words. Had she been closer she would have beard him say quietly: "It is just."

The executioner Sanson turned from the last victim and seized him. At the very instant he felt the grasp he caught sight of the face of his beloved, held there in the grasp of the two Jacobins. This was the crowning agony. The immensity of his retribution swept over him in an overwhelming flood.

"Oh G.o.d, does Justice require this too?" he cried.

Sanson's sinewy a.s.sistants thrust him against an upright plank. In the last remnants of her congested, distorted vision, Cyrene saw the bright knife fall like a lightning vengeance.

At night in the Cemetery of the Madeleine near by la Tour, searching anxiously with a lantern, found her lying across the common trench into which the bodies and heads of the executed were indiscriminately thrown and hastily covered. There, her arms stretched across as if to embrace as much of it as she could, her wonderful golden majesty of hair strewn upon them, her white complexion still dazzling in its purity, her blue eyes half closed, lay the _fiancee_ of the false Repentigny. Her soul had flown to be blent with that of him who had suffered his punishment, in the bosom of G.o.d, the place of social justice, where all ambition and all forgiveness melt satisfied and surpa.s.sed in Love Divine.

A wave of the Revolution swept out to India. In Mahe, under the eyes of the new Golden Dog, Philibert killed the Marquis de Repentigny.

THE END.