He followed, sobbing and piping, down the stairs. The rush passed from him; the door slammed back in his face.
“Mon Dieu!” he wailed to himself, “he will ruin all!”
Ned tore upon his way. To see—to gain speech with her, if only at the foot of the scaffold—“Oh, merciful Christ! not so to make this agony everlasting!”
He sobbed and panted as he ran: “You didn’t kill him! You didn’t kill him!” He kept crying it, as if he thought his hurrying voice might reach her before ever his feet could cover the distance. Once he pictured her—the soft sinning child that had whispered to him, kissing his hand that night in the hot still secrecy of the room—under the hands of the callous ruffian who had spoken with him from the guillotine, and his wild prayers swung into frightful blasphemies. Some of the few he met in his headlong rush shrunk from him, leaving him the road. Others, who appeared likely to obstruct his passage, he cursed as he fled by. They were all ghosts to him, glimmering, impalpable—flashing past in a white foam of flakes.
At length he broke into the place of the guillotine, and, without pausing in his mad race, beat the snow from his eyes—and saw.
Here at least, by reason of the bitter cold, was no gala-day, and the crowd stood not so thick about the scaffold but that he might charge into and penetrate it.
He had reached at last—so his whirling brain interpreted it—the very congress of all the spectres that had haunted him of late. The silent dull air was thick with silent threads—busy stitches in a shroud whose hem was the enceinte of the city. Here a silent white pack stood looking up at a white yoke. There was no terror in all the scene, save where, on the platform itself, the boots of the executioners slipped in a red thaw.
Then, in a moment, he was aware of her. She rose from the cloud of white shapes—herself a statue of whiteness—pure at last—and other white shapes stooped and lifted her.
He burst through the intervening whiteness—tore his way into the shroud.
“Nicette!” he screamed.