There were eight other occupants of the prison-van besides himself, one of whom was a soldier guard. Five narrow cells ranged along either side of a central aisle. Each had a solitary small, closely shuttered breathing-hole opening outside. The guard occupied a seat in the aisle near the rear door, from which he could survey the door of every cell. By this arrangement prisoners were kept separate from each other, were not subjected to a gaping crowd, and ten persons could be safely escorted by a single guard.
From the half-suppressed murmurs and objurgations that followed every severe jolt of the wagon, Jean rightly judged that most of the prisoners were more or less injured. And as the driver drove furiously, having the fight of way and being pressed with business this particular Sunday afternoon, there were still louder and more exhaustive remarks from those who narrowly escaped being run over by the cellular van.
Jean Marot, however, was too much engrossed with his own miserable reflections to pay any more than mechanical attention to all of this. Physically resuscitated and momentarily inflating his glad lungs anew, he still felt that terrible vice-like grip upon his throat,—the compression of the fingers of steel that seemed to squeeze the last drop of blood from his heart.
But it was mental suffocation now. For they were the fingers of her brother,—the flesh and sinew of the woman he loved! And it was this love that was being cruelly crushed and strangled.
It was more terrible than the late physical struggle. The latter had invoked the energy, the courage, and the superhuman strength and endurance to meet it,—had roused the fire of conscious manhood. Now the sick soul revolted at its own folly. The props of self-respect had been knocked away, and he lay prone, humiliated, deprived of the initial courage to rise and hope.
The chief cause of this self-degradation lay in the fact that he had grievously wronged the only one in the world he had found worth loving,—the one sweet being for whom he would have willingly sacrificed life. The fact that this wrong was by and in thought alone did not lessen the horrible injustice of it.
The more Jean thought of these things the more sick at heart he was, the more hopeless his love became, the more desperately dark the future appeared. There seemed to be nothing left but misery and death.
This train of bitterness was interrupted by a violent wrangle between the occupants of neighboring cells. A prisoner across the way had shouted "Vive l'armée!" Another responded by the gay chanson,—
"Entre nous, l'armée du salut,
Elle n'a jamais eu d'autre but
Que d'amasser d' la bonne galette."
It came from his next-door neighbor, and was the familiar voice of the saturnine George Villeroy.