She walked to the Place Massena, and there accepted the beseeching offers of one of the numerous flymen, and took her seat in a light victoria behind a horse which looked a little better fed than his neighbours. She told the man to drive along the west bank of the Paillon, on the road to St. André.
Would not Madame go to St. André, and see the wonderful grotto, and the petrifactions?
No, Madame did not wish to go so far as St. André. She would tell the driver where to stop.
The horse rattled off at a brisk pace. They are no crawlers, those flys of the South. They drove past the smart shops and hotels on the quay; past the shabby old inn where the diligences put up, a hostelry with suggestions of the past, when the old Italian town was not a winter rendezvous for all the nations, the beaten track of Yankee and Cockney, calicot and counter-jumper, Russian prince and Hebrew capitalist, millionaire and adventurer. They drove past the shabby purlieus of the town, workmen’s lodging-houses, sordid-looking shops, then an orange-garden here and there within crumbling plaster walls, and here and there a tavern in a shabby garden. To the left of the river, on a sharp pinnacle of hill, stood the Monastery of Cimies, with dome and tower dominating the landscape. Further away, on the other side of the stony torrent-bed, rose the rugged chain of hills stretching away to Mentone and the Italian frontier, and high up against the blue sky glimmered the white domes of the Observatory. They came by and by to a spot where, by the side of the broad high-road, there was a wall enclosing a white dusty yard, and behind it a long white house with many windows, bare and barren, staring blankly at the dry bed of the torrent and the rugged brown hills beyond. At each end of the long white building there was a colonnade with iron bars, open to the sun and the air, and as Mrs. Greswold’s carriage drew near a man’s voice rolled out the opening bars of “Ah, che la morte!” in a tremendous baritone. A cluster of idlers had congregated about the open gate, to stare and listen; for the great white house was a madhouse, and the grated colonnades right and left of the long façade were the recreation-grounds of the insane—of those worst patients who could not be trusted to wander at their ease in the garden, or to dig and delve upon the breezy hills towards St. André.
The singer was a fine-looking man, dressed in loose garments of some white material, and with long white gloves. He flung himself on to an upper bar of the grating with the air of an athlete, and hung upon the bars with his gloved hands, facing that cluster of loafers as if they had been an audience in a theatre, and singing with all the power of a herculean physique. Mildred told her driver to stop at the gate, and she sat listening while the madman sang, in fitful snatches of a few bars at a time, but with never a false note.
That cage, and the patients pacing up and down, or hanging on to the bars, or standing staring at the little crowd round the gate, moved her to deepest pity, touched her with keenest pain. He had been here, her beloved, in that brief interval of darkest night. She recalled how in one of his awakenings from that torturing dream he had spoken words of strange meaning—or of no meaning, as they had seemed to her then.
“The cage—the cage again!” he had cried in an agonised voice; “iron bars—like a wild beast!”
These words had been an enigma to her then. She saw the answer to the riddle here.
She sat for some time watching that sad spectacle, hearing those broken snatches of song, with intervals of silence, or sometimes a wild peal of laughter.
The loiterers were full of speculations and assertions. The porter at the gate answered some questions, turned a deaf ear to others.