Buhot leaped back in a fear that I was to attack him, and cried his men from the stair foot.
“This force is not needed at all,” I said. “I am innocent enough to be prepared to go quietly.”
CHAPTER XXII
OF A NIGHT JOURNEY AND BLACK BICETRE AT THE END OF IT
Twas a long journey to the prison of Bicêtre, which is two miles to the south of the city of Paris, a great building that had once (they say) been a palace, but now in the time of my experience was little better than a vestibule of hell. I was driven to it through a black loud night of rain, a plunging troop of horse on either hand the coach as if I were a traveller of state, and Buhot in front of me as silent as the priest had been the day we left Dunkerque, though wakeful, and the tip of his scabbard leaning on my boot to make sure that in the darkness no movement of mine should go unobserved.
The trees swung and roared in the wind; the glass lozens of the carriage pattered to the pelting showers; sometimes we lurched horribly in the ruts of the highway, and were released but after monstrous efforts on the part of the cavaliers. Once, as we came close upon a loop of a brawling river, I wished with all fervency that we might fall in, and so end for ever this pitiful coil of trials whereto fate had obviously condemned poor Paul Greig. To die among strangers (as is widely known) is counted the saddest of deaths by our country people, and so, nowadays, it would seem to myself, but there and then it appeared an enviable conclusion to the Spoiled Horn that had blundered from folly to folly. To die there and then would be to leave no more than a regret and an everlasting wonder in the folks at home; to die otherwise, as seemed my weird, upon a block or gallows, would be to foul the name of my family for generations, and I realised in my own person the agony of my father when he got the news, and I bowed my shoulders in the coach below the shame that he would feel as in solemn blacks he walked through the Sabbath kirkyard in summers to come in Mearns, with the knowledge that though neighbours looked not at him but with kindness, their inmost thoughts were on the crimson chapter of his son.
Well, we came at the long last to Bicêtre, and I was bade alight in the flare of torches. A strange, a memorable scene; it will never leave me. Often I remit me there in dreams. When I came out of the conveyance the lights dazzled me, and Buhot put his hands upon my shoulders and turned me without a word in the direction he wished me to take. It was through a vast and frowning doorway that led into a courtyard so great that the windows on the other side seemed to be the distance of a field. The windows were innumerable, and though the hour was late they were lit in stretching corridors. Fires flamed in corners of the yard—great leaping fires round which warders (as I guessed them) gathered to dry themselves or get warmth against the chill of the early April morning. Their scabbards or their muskets glittered now and then in the light of the flames; their voices—restrained by the presence of Buhot—sounded deep and dreadful to me that knew not the sum of his iniquity yet could shudder at the sense of what portended.