Denounced: A Romance

by John Bloundelle-Burton

All day he watched the roof of the opposite tower, hoping against hope, for he knew the guard would only be changed, and not removed. He watched still as the shadows of the winter evening deepened into night, and still also he watched until the night itself had come and both tower and sentry were obscured in darkness. And as he kept his dreary vigil all through the day, he saw Falmy's face at his own window, staring at him with sad and melancholy glances, but without any sign being made by him, so that he knew that a guard had been placed above the roof of his tower as well.

"On any other day it would have mattered nothing," he moaned to himself. "Oh, why to-day of all days should these towers have been selected!"

It was so absolute a chance, such a coincidence, that the guard should happen to have been placed at this part of the Bastille on this particular occasion that his misery and mental anxiety were not strange. Of all the days he had been in the calotte, there was scarce one that could have been worse for him and his prospects.

The restless night passed, the dawn broke, cold, grey, and miserable, and springing from his bed he rushed to the window--only to see above the opposite tower a sentry still there. The twenty-four hours' guard was not yet finished, would not be until the great clock over the gate should clang out nine. And it was not yet eight o'clock on this dreary February morning! But at last the hour arrived. The sentry presented arms to the King's Lieutenant who came to dismiss him from his post. As the clock struck, the roof was deserted, and a few minutes later Falmy's face appeared at the window. But he shook his head mournfully, and then, with his board and piece of charcoal, he communicated the melancholy words, "The prisoner went forth at eight o'clock."

And now, indeed, Bertie gave himself up to despair--black despair that grew deeper and deeper as the weeks crept by one after the other; as slowly the cruel, griping Paris winter passed, and gradually they knew that spring was coming. Yet to him who had once welcomed the birth of new summers with such eagerness, the one now on its way to gladden the earth brought no comfort. The swallows came back and circled round and round the towers of the prison, and began, with countless chirps and squeaks, to build their nests below the gloomy eaves, yet he only found himself wondering vaguely why, when they were free, they should choose so foul a place. Also, over in the garret windows of the Rue St. Antoine he saw daily a girl tending some flowers in a box, even saw the tint of the flowers themselves as they burst into bloom, and wondered, too, if she, who had her liberty, ever cast one thought to the poor prisoners confined so near to her.

As for his companions, De Chevagny and Fordingbridge, they seemed, from opposite reasons, to be indifferent to any changes that the season might bring, though sometimes the former would stand at the window and hold out his hands and let the warm May sun--for May had come--stream down upon them and his face, and whisper sadly that for those who could be out in the woods and fields it was good, very good. Then, when he was tired of standing or sitting thus, he would cast himself on his bed and sigh, and so sleep away the hours.

With Fordingbridge, both he and Elphinston had ceased to hold any converse at all; nor, indeed, had they been willing to talk with him, was it possible that he could either have understood or replied to them. His madness seemed to grow upon him daily, and, while he became more taciturn, also he became more imbecile. Once he woke Bertie in the early morning by crawling to his bedside, and, holding out a piece of string which he had found imbedded in the filth of the floor, asked him to hang him ere they could lead him to the wheel; and one night he raved and moaned so through the dark hours--and on this occasion the other heard him beyond all doubt mutter the name of Archibald--that the prison doctor was sent for the next day.

This official, who was addressed diversely by Bluet as Monsieur le Docteur Herment and Monsieur l'Abbé Herment when he brought him in, seemed to be in about the same state of semi-drunkenness as the turnkey generally was, and to be also an inordinately vain creature. He had on his head a golden-haired wig which, while he was examining the unhappy wretch Fordingbridge, he was engaged in telling Bertie had been made from the hair of one of his chères amies who loved him truly; and he also remarked that some silver buckles on his shoes had been given him by a grande dame who had recently been released from the Bastille.

"What of the patient?" asked the latter sternly, such observations being unwelcome to him. "Will his lunacy increase, think you?"

"Ma foi!" exclaimed the abbé, or doctor, "so much so that it is my duty to warn the Society of Jesuits to be expeditious with what they have to do. Otherwise they will miss their victim, and our good Parisians will lose a spectacle. The wheel furnishes many a fête in the Place de Grève."