With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.
The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been executed that morning. Where had he heard it—that whisper, that incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the condemned gullet? A thing impracticable—preposterous—he had dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished. Either that way or another—what did it matter? The man had been hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still lived—only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.
Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness, hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped forward, his fingers crooked.
At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:
“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the succour of his enemy.
THE PRIOR OF ST. COME
A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden. He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black, ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte, surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly jewels hung about his neck.
As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what Spurzheim would have called an “affective propensity to acquisitiveness.” He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of the King’s chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis XI.
Presently the latter, pausing beside a pedestal on which stood a statuette, none too unsuggestive, of the Paphian Venus, looked up in an abstracted way.
“Still vacant, still vacant?” he said, lisping a little between his toothless gums. “That was what you remarked, was it not, Père Bonaventure?”