So the month sped by—its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon the city,—and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of the general tragedy.
Ned, aimlessly strolling through the Faubourg of St Marcel in the south-east quarter of the city, had turned, on the evening of this day, into the boulevard that ran straight northward, by the ancient city wall, from the Place Mouffetard to the Seine. His way took him past the horse-market, and—inevitably, therefore, to the context—past an adjacent house of correction for blacklegs. This ironically named hospital—an iron-cased lazaretto, in truth, the prison of the Salpétrière—was situate upon a dismal wedge of waste land between the new and old enceintes of the city. It was a brutal, gloomy pile, its walls exuding, one might have thought, the ichor of a thousand diseases, moral and physical. Sooty, unlovely as a factory—as indeed it was, of the devil’s wares—its noisome towers, blotted on the sky, decharmed the soft reflected burning of the sunset, and made a vulgarity of their whole leafy neighbourhood. From its grated windows, high up in the foul air of its own exhaling, behind which the gallows-tree birds built their nests, caws and screams issuing were evidences of a very swarming rookery. Here and there, the white, hair-draggled face of a strumpet stared from behind bars; here and there an inward light—like a wandering fen candle—could be seen travelling from story to story.
Ned, as he approached the building, quickened in his walk; for he was aware of a batch of fresh prisoners, under escort, being driven across the boulevard towards the central gate; and with the instinct to spare misfortune the impertinence of unofficial inquest, he would hurry to put himself beyond suspicion of prying. In this good motive, however, he was baulked; for a subsequent party—a solitary culprit walking between guards—issued from the same direction, and cut across and encountered him just as he approached the entrance.
He started, and strangled an immediate inclination to exclaim aloud. For in the lonely malefactor, going by him with bent head and lowering, preoccupied face, he recognised—he was sure of it—Basile de St Denys.
Degraded, vitiated—a shameful, ravaged personality, as unlike, in his existing condition, the bright soul who had served, unconsciously to them both, for his scapegoat—here was, without question, the unlicensed once-lord of Méricourt. And the woman, his victim, had erred only, it seemed, as to the direction of his presence in the city—had erred, perhaps, because she could not realise that, consistent to his nature, he must be sought, after all these years, along the lower levels of existence.
The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream. On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was faced by a turnkey.
“What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine porter!”
“I thought I saw one I knew pass in.”
“It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”—and he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and produced his “tip.”
“That is another question,” said the man.