She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it is the moment that has come!”
Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and flung itself upon the fallen man.
* * * * * * * *
Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little bloody arena. A woman—her foot upon the neck of something, some bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her—looked stupidly down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed.
“Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.”
CHAPTER XII.
From the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when—a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood—he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him. Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase.
And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his own—absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed, in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong wind.
Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot, until—puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto.
The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud—“a ragged bastion fringed with fire”—sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting; the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that—sated, perhaps, with her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre—she was inclining to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in his mind.