“Taisez-vous, donc!” roared a jailer. He was answered by a shriek of laughter. In the midst of the noise I heard the door of my neighbouring cell flung open and Marino summoned forth. As the party retreated: “M. le Président, M. le Président!” shouted a voice—“Art thou going without a word? But do not, I beseech thee, in the pride of thy promotion neglect to nominate thy successor!”
“Lamarelle, then,” answered the poor fellow, in a voice that he tried vainly to control.
He was led away. The babble boiled over and simmered down. In a very few moments a tense quiet had succeeded the uproar. This—due partly to the reaction from excitement, partly to the fact that jailers were loitering at hand—wrought in me presently a mood of overbearing depression. I durst give no rein to my hopes or to my apprehensions, lest, getting the bit between their teeth, they should fairly run away with my reason. The prospect of another four hours of this mindless inaction—hours of which every second seemed to be marked off by the tick of a nerve—was a deplorable one, indeed.
I tramped ceaselessly to and fro in my cage, humming to myself and assuming the habit of a philosophy that fitted me about as well as Danton’s breeches would have done. I grimaced to my own reflections like a coquette to her mirror. I suffered from my affectation of self-containment as severely as though I were a tight-laced femme à la mode weeping to hear a tale of pity. The convent clock, moving somewhere with a thunderous click as if it were the very doyen of death-watches, chimed the dusk upon me in reluctant quarters. Ghostly emanations seemed to rise from the stones of my cell, sorrowful shapes of the lost and the hopeless to lean sobbing in its corners. Sometimes I could have fancied I heard a thin scratching on the walls about me, as if the returned spectres of despair were blindly tracing with a finger the characters they had themselves engraved thereon; sometimes, as I wheeled to view of the dull square of the window, a formless shadow, set against it, would appear to drop hurriedly and fold upon itself like a bat. By the time, at last, that, despite my resolves, I was worked up to a state of agitation quite pitiful, some little relief of distraction was afforded me by the entrance into my cell of a stranger turnkey, with some coarse food on a plate in his one hand, and, in the other, a great can of water, from which he replenished my pitcher. During the half minute he was with me a shag beast of a dog kept guard at the door.
“Fall to, then,” growled the man; “if thou hast the stomach for anything less dainty than fat pullets and butter.”
In effect, I had none for anything; yet I thought it the sensible policy to take up the plate, when the fellow was withdrawn, and munch away the drawling minutes lest I should spend them in eating out my heart.
Other than this rascal no soul came near me. I had had, it seemed, my full warning—my complete instructions. Yet, lacking reassurance during this long trial of suspense, I came to feel as if all affecting my escape must be a chimera—a fancy bred of the delirium that precedes death.
Well, as my friendly huissier might have said, Time flies, however strong the head-wind; and at length the quarters clanged themselves into that one of them that was the prelude to my most momentous adventure. And immediately thereon (God absolve me for the inconsistency!) a frantic revulsion of feeling set in, so that I would have given all but my chance of escape to postpone the act of it indefinite hours. Now I heard the throb of the seconds with a terror that was like an acute accent to my agony of suspense. It grew—it waxed monstrous and intolerable. I must lose myself in some physical exertion if I would preserve my reason.
Suddenly a nightmare thought faced me. What if, when the time came, the cut bars should remain stubborn to my efforts to bend them! What if I had neglected to completely sever either or both, and that, while I madly wrought to remedy my error, the moment should pass and with it the means to my deliverance!
Sweating, panting, in a new reaction to the frenzy for liberty, I sprang to the window, gripped the bars, and, with all my force, dragged them towards me. They parted at the cuts and yielded readily. A sideway push to each, and there would freedom gape at me.