The bed-covering billows as if stirred by some strong agitation of the form beneath.
All is quiet again.
Now a stifled sound as of sobbing comes from under the blankets. They are forcibly flung back, and a pale face, one feverish flush on each cheek, emerges. The eyes flash with a sharp fitful light amid the quick-darting big tears, and the breast heaves with convulsive sobs. At length amid the sobs rise broken words:
'Too proud to beg, and not paid for working. Must I die, then? A hound is fed; 'tis only man is let perish by his fellow-beings!'
Silence again; and suddenly and startlingly on the air to the silence succeeds a mocking, hysterical laugh. The form springs from its recumbent position on to the bare floor, and approaches a small mirror fixed against the wall.
That laugh again.
'Ha, ha! Manus, my boy, die game!' and with the expression of this advice, or rather intention, calm seems to come to the troubled spirit of our poor friend. He takes his clothes off the chair and dresses himself, keeping up a jeering comment of self-ridicule, as he puts on each shabby article of attire.
'Ha! my pretty paper collar, I must turn you. You'll never die a heretic. By Jove! paper collars were a great invention: they emancipate the lord of creation from the thraldom of the washerwoman. Better to face the free sky than to pine in this stuffy cell. Your toilette is finished, Manus, my friend, and now to pass under the Caudine forks.'
The Caudine forks was the term he applied to the passage leading by the concierge's narrow office to the open street—a humiliating passage enough, it is made, to any man of proud spirit and slim purse by the voluble Parisian concierge, the warder of the entrance to the lodging-house. The concierge is a perennial fountain of gossip, the demon of grasp personified, and is popularly supposed always to have a daughter at the Conservatory of Music. Watching his opportunity, crouched at the bottom of the dark stairs, O'Hara bolted at a mad rush through the hall, and never ceased running until he had gained the Boulevard St. Michel, after traversing the intervening Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine.
He stopped a minute, laughed, tightened the belt which supported his trousers, cried in a light voice, 'Blockade safely run!' and resumed his way rapidly along the boulevard till he came to the quay, then turned to the right, past Notre Dame, until he reached the Pont d'Archevêche, whereat he stopped. The Morgue was near—gloomy receptacle of the unclaimed dead, sent to their God before their time by crime, starvation, or despair, or by some of the accidents which often-times cut short the span of the happiest human life. He looked at it with a desperate, desponding, forlorn look for a little time, and then broke out as if in sequence of some train of thought: