“Yes,” said I, eagerly; “what does Mr. Pitt say?—what reply does he make me?”
“Oh, you 'll hear all that time enough. Just try now if you could n't come along with me as far as the road; I 've a carriage there a-waiting.”
I did my best to rise, but weakness again overcame me, and I could only stammer out a few faint words of excuse.
“Don't you see that the man is dying?” said some one, half indignantly; but the constable—for such he was—made some rough answer, and then, stooping down, he passed his arm round me, and lifted me to my feet at once. As he half carried, half pushed me along, I tried to obtain an answer to my former question, “What reply had the minister made me?”
“You 'll know all that time enough, my good friend,” was all the answer I could obtain, as, assisting me into the carriage, he took his place at my side, and gave the word to proceed “to town.”
Not a word passed between us as we went along; for my part, I was too indifferent to life itself to care whither he was conducting me, or with what object. As well as utter listlessness would permit me to think, I surmised that I had been arrested. Is it not a strange confession, that I felt a sense of pleasure in the thought that I had not been utterly forgotten by the world, and that my existence was recognized, even at the cost of an accusation. I conclude that to understand this feeling on my part, one must have been as forlorn and desolate as I was. I experienced neither fear nor curiosity as to what might be the charge against me; nor was my indifference that of conscious innocence,—it was pure carelessness!
I slept that night in a prison, and ate of prison fare,—ravenously and eagerly too; so much so that the turnkey, compassionating me, fetched me some of his own supper to satisfy my cravings. I awoke the next day with a gnawing sense of hunger, intensely painful, far more so than my former suffering from want. That day, and I believe the two following ones, I spent in durance, and at last was conveyed in the prison-cart to the office of a magistrate.
The court was densely crowded, but the cases called seemed commonplace and uninteresting,—at least so they appeared to me, as I tried in vain to follow them. At length the crier called out the name of Paul Gervois, and it was less the words than the directed looks of the vast assembly, as they all turned towards me, showed that I was the representative of that designation.
My sense of shame at this moment prevented my observing accurately what went forward; but I soon rallied, and perceived that my case was then before the court, and my accuser it was who then addressed the bench.
The effort to follow the speaker, to keep up with the narrative that fell from his lips, was indescribably painful to me. I can compare my struggle to nothing save the endeavor of one with a shattered limb to keep pace with the step of his unwounded comrades. The very murmurs of indignation that at times stirred the auditory, increased this feeling to a kind of agony. I knew that it was all-important I should hear and clearly understand what was said, and yet my faculties were unequal to the effort.