"What is it?" a mounted gendarme whispered to a comrade. "What! Can the storm, the lightning, have set the city in flames? Yet, surely not in twenty places at once!"
"Nay, nay," the other muttered, his eyes shaded by his hands as he glanced down to where those flaming lights were illuminating all the heavens with their glare as the night grew on, and the fires burnt more fiercely. "Nay; they burn fuel for some reason, they ignite it themselves."
"What! What! What! For what reasons?"
"God knows," muttered the gendarme, becoming pious under this awe-inspiring thing which he did not understand. "They did it once before," the other whispered. "Once! nay, oftener. My grandam was a Marseillaise. I have heard her tell the tale. They feared the pest."
"The pest--my God! Ere we left Paris people whispered that it had broken out in the Levant. The Levant! Marseilles trades much there. What if--if----" he stammered, turning white with fear and apprehension.
"What if," said his comrade, taking him up, "it should be here!"
[CHAPTER XIII]
"MY WIFE! WHAT WIFE? I HAVE NO WIFE."
Two months before the chain-gangs set out for Marseilles from the Prison of St. Martin des Champs, namely at the end of March, Walter Clarges descended from a hackney coach outside the house in which he had lived in the Rue de la Dauphine, and entered its roomy hall, or passage. Then, taking a key from his pocket, he was about to open the door of his own suite of apartments on the right of the hall, when he saw that, attached to the door, was a great padlock which fastened a chain into two staples fixed in the outer and inner framework. He saw, too, something else. A spider's web that had been spun above the chain itself by the insect, which, at the present moment, was reposing in its self-made house.
For a moment, seeing this, he stood there pondering while looking down upon the creature in its web--accepting, acknowledging, the sign of desolation which this thing gave--then, ever so gently, he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that might have brought the tears to the eyes of any woman--nay, of any man--who had observed him.