There was no light of its own in the cell, but it borrowed wanly a little of the radiance of the corridor, and I could see that it was bare to the penury of a mausoleum, with a stone floor, a wooden palliasse, and no window other than a barred hole above the door. There was not even a stool to sit on. But I did not quail.
“I have been in more comfortable quarters, M. Buhot,” I said, “but in none that I could occupy with a better conscience.” Assuming with that a sort of bravado, I stepped in before he asked me.
“Very good,” he cried; “but I cannot make you my felicitations on your decision, M. Greig,” and without more ado he had the door shut on me.
I sat on the woollen palliasse for a while, with my head on my hands, surrendered all to melancholy; and then, though the thing may seem beyond belief, I stretched myself and slept till morning. It was not the most refreshing of sleep, but still 'twas wonderful that I should sleep at all in such circumstances, and I take it that a moorland life had been a proper preparation for just such trials.
When I wakened in the morning the prison seemed full of eerie noises—of distant shrieks as in a bedlam, and commanding voices, and of ringing metals, the clank of fetters, or the thud of musket-butts upon the stones. A great beating of feet was in the yard, as if soldiers were manoeuvring, and it mastered me to guess what all this might mean, until a warder opened my door and ordered me out for an airing.
I mind always of a parrot at a window.
This window was one that looked into the yard from some official's dwelling in that dreadful place, and the bird occupied a great cage that was suspended from a nail outside.
The bird, high above the rabble of rogues in livery, seemed to have a devilish joy in the spectacle of the misery tramping round and round beneath, for it clung upon the bars and thrust out its head to whistle, as if in irony, or taunt us with a foul song. There was one air it had, expressed so clearly that I picked up air and words with little difficulty, and the latter ran something like this:
Ah! ah! Pierrot, Pierrot!
Fais ta toilette,
Voila le barbier! oh! oh!
Et sa charrette—
all in the most lugubrious key.