For she understood now! She knew that the little helpless mass of human life which had lain so warm and snug within her arms for two or three months was to be torn away from her for ever.
"No! No! No!" she moaned, ceasing at last to shriek. "No! No! No. Ah, monsieur, see how small, how helpless it is. My child! My child! My little child! And--monsieur--it is not well--it--it--oh--oh! God, how I have watched over it; cared for it. I have prayed to Him--I, who never prayed before; I, who scarce knew how to form a prayer. It is not well. It cannot live without me. It cannot; it cannot. It is death to part us; death to it and me. And it is so--so helpless--and--so--innocent."
The governor had turned his back upon her. Perhaps her pleading had wrung even his heart! Then the nurse spoke. The nurse, who, because she was a gentle woman, wept.
"Fear not, poor girl," she whispered, even as she strove to take the child from the arms which clasped it so tightly. "Fear not. It shall be well attended to. And, see, here is a number," whereon she gave the unhappy mother a piece of paper, on which she hastily scrawled some figures. "If you ever return you may find it thus--when it grows up--it--what is your name?"
"Le Blanc. I shall never return. Never." Then she moaned again. "My child! My little child! And," she sobbed forth, "see, I had made a sling wherewith to carry it--so--that--it should lie more easily upon my breast. Oh! God--that I--that it--were dead."
Many women had watched this scene, amongst them the two other newly-made mothers, who saw in it what was to be their own fate and the fate of their babes. So, too, had Laure Vauxcelles, herself bearing a collar now around her beautiful neck--a light one, it is true, since the warder whose duty it was to attend to these matters, among other things, had observed that she was young and handsome, and, being himself young, or, at least, not old, had spared her as much as possible. On her left wrist there was fastened a great iron loop--great for so small a wrist!--through which was to run the chain that would attach her to those before and those behind her. To her right wrist was an iron bracelet with a short chain hanging to it, which, a few moments later, would couple her to the woman who would march by her side from Paris to Marseilles--if she ever reached the latter place, which she prayed fervently she might never do.
The chain composed of men was already gone by now; out into the street, beyond the prison gate, it had already passed; out into the bright, warm sun, so cheering to those who had lain in that prison for months--cheering now, but, ere long, to become an awful torture as the days grew hotter and the south was neared. The chain composed of women was about to follow. Of women, amongst whom, perhaps, were others as innocent of guilt as Laure herself; women whom a relentless rival, a rejected lover possessed of power, a suspicious, jealous husband also possessed of power or--which was the same thing--of money, may have consigned to this hellish doom. Women, too, who, although they were the guilty things that Roger, the chaplain, had described them as being, had possibly never walked three consecutive leagues in their lives. Women who, instead, had in many cases ridden in carriages and sedan chairs and coaches provided by their admirers. Yet now--now they set forth to march to Marseilles, nearly 350 miles away by road; to Marseilles, where, in the summer, the sun burned like a flaming furnace, and to which the breeze of the southern sea came hot and sultry as the breath from out of the mouth of a panting dog.
The trumpets of the gendarmerie pealed louder, the mob outside was screaming frantically, people were hanging half-way out of the windows; some boys who had climbed a tree which grew in the dusty place beyond the prison gates, were waving their ragged caps and chattering and grimacing. "The female cord" was passing forth. Ahead, went four mounted gendarmes, then, next, four waggons, destined to occasionally give a lift to those women who fell by the wayside, yet did not die at once. They who did so were left behind for the Communes to bury! Now, in the waggons, were seated the galley sergeants. There was no reason why they should walk; they were neither criminals nor women.
Then la Châim issued from the gates, the two leading couples of the double string, as the mob and the boys in the trees called them, passed out. Amidst further roars, hurrahs, encouragements, low jeers and fingerpointings, they came forth; amidst, too, exclamations from some who recognised them. With, also, a woman's shriek issuing now and again from out the mob's tight-packed density--a mother's heartbroken cry perhaps, perhaps a sister's, perhaps a daughter's. Yet, with no sign of sympathy from one set of beings who were witnessing the spectacle; who had paid, and paid well, to thus witness it. Beings--fashionable, well-dressed men and women, who had hired windows at which to sit and see the chains go by, and who drank chocolate and ate chipped bread and cakes and dainty butter brought from the cool north; and laughed and chatted, and made appointments for the Gardens of the Tuileries that night, or for boating parties on the Seine when the evening air was cooling the atmosphere.
Laure passed out, too, at last, manacled, shackled to the dark southern woman who had married the literary man. Passed out with her head bent down, her feet dragging like lead beneath her, her heart beating as though it must burst.