A strange thrill of very novel feeling ran through Sir Godfrey as he pressed nearer, and looked. He almost shrank back with an emotion of awe, the sight was so unexpected, in such extreme contrast to that mean abode, from beside the unmeaning vacancy of the elder woman’s pleasure, the infant’s crowing sounds and motions, the repugnance he felt for the others, and his own engrossing thoughts: otherwise, on Willoughby’s single-minded, straightforward, unimpassioned character, with a very dormant fancy and but tardy movement of association, it might have struck with slight impress. Immense and startling from that height, indeed, was the prospect; nor the less so, that here and there some huge pile of neighbouring chimneys, some tower-top, or a wreath of lazy smoke, broke it up close at hand with a vividness of light and shade, or a distinctness of detail, that was thrust on the eye. Here a sunny perspective of roof, garretwindow, and chimney, ruddy at the top against blue air, with basking cats, and blooming pots, and garments hung to dry, that fluttered cheerfully, where the population of the upper world of Paris, the boulevards of its canaille and its unknown, showed their faces in the sun,—there a vast surging sea of slates, tossed hither and thither into tower, steeple, and shadowy dome, pierced by dusky gulfs and glooms—while midway ran out a dull thread of the Seine into a bridge, and broke forth beyond in dazzling splendour, where the reflection of the houses blended with the substance, so that all there seemed shattered and dripping in silver and gem-like radiance—with visionary structures lifted farther off among unsubstantial bowers, up to the sun’s viewless glory where he stood high in a blaze of light, as if clothed with a great mantle of indistinctness, and contemplated the vast city. Far beneath him floated the Hospital’s golden dome: the softened roar and clamour of Paris rose clear to the open attic casement, with sharper noises from close below it; one saw straight through an uninterrupted space, down upon streets and openings, quays, square, and garden-terrace, in a distinct bird’s-eye view, alive with the motion of minute citizens; scarce could it have been thought that the regal whiteness of the rich Louvre was so near, and the tilted pavilion-roofs of the great, gaunt, high-chimneyed Tuileries. The various stages and storeys of inhabitants descended beyond sight, as to abysses that were bottomless. The air felt clearer than elsewhere, and the sky seemed nearer in its blue purity. It was all such a spectacle as might have absorbed the faculties of a prophet; indeed the thought could not but have struck a mind used to interpret its own consciousness, of how slightly human distinctions might weigh, and in what trivial account they would result, could magnificence so beyond the furniture of palaces be familiar, or often accessible. With the English baronet, it was rather the sudden perception of what vast concerns were going on the while, under necessity to be sustained, round about the particular affairs of his own business or experience: added to which came emphatically enough that strange sense, sometimes resembling the superstitious, of time gigantically pressing on to destiny—when with a hurtling, heaving sound before it, and a crash that made all the chimneys vibrate, the hard walls clang, the roofs rattle, and the windows tingle and ring, the clock of Notre Dame, hard by, sent out its first stroke of the hour. The elder woman let the child sink in her lap, gravely crossing herself at every stroke; here and there, outside, a face could be seen turned to it involuntarily. The bootmaker, setting down the writing-materials he had procured after a somewhat long absence, appeared to hear with a savage grin and gleam of satisfaction, whether still caused by the money or by later news; he nodded his head to each long, artillery-like stroke, rolling and reverberating away among the piles of the Cité and St Louis, and made a whistling noise of pleasure as he looked, till it was done.
“And now, my good woman,” said Sir Godfrey, when he had written the required paper, with an order for the money, “let me bid you farewell.” He took Suzanne’s shrivelled hand, and she made a motion to rise up, with decorous gravity. There was a confused murmur of gratitude, as if appealing to her daughter for fuller explanation; but he saw her eyes moisten again, silently, when he said he would cause the means to be taken for at least enabling her son to communicate with and assist her. Suzanne Deroux shook her head, she seemed almost to groan; while the same wavering feebleness of mind again turned her to the window and the child. It appeared doubtful whether she really had a distinct notion who Sir Godfrey was, or what relation he bore to her former master.
“Are you aware,” he added apart, to the daughter, ere turning to the staircase, “whether your mother ever expressed any idea as to the cause of the fire in the house—if it was accidental or otherwise?” The answer was in the negative.
“Or on what floor—her master’s apartments, or some other?” No. Her mother was talkative enough, sometimes, and she believed she knew little of it, and remembered yet less.
“There was no other circumstance, then, of any importance, in the matter, which they were acquainted with?” None, she reluctantly said, after a minute’s reflection; and it was evident that, if it had been otherwise, she would have been eager enough to make the most of it: even the touch of English gold might have no power to make such a woman as Jeannette Deroux feel any sort of genial emotion, but it had at all events given the light of unsatisfied cupidity to her hard grey Normandy eye. Sir Godfrey descended alone, to find the urchins beginning rather to dread the impatience of their charge.
The recent interview, making known little of any additional importance, at least convinced Sir Godfrey of the judiciousness of a step he had hitherto disliked, so long as it seemed possible that unexpected facts might appear from it—an examination for himself, namely, of the original record by the police, whose reputation for exactitude and acuteness was so proverbial. It now, indeed, assumed the air of a somewhat superfluous measure, when through all he had heard from these people, with no motive or means for deception, there did not show the slightest trace of anything unlike other disasters of the kind—of anything equivocal, anything suspicious. It was chiefly, therefore, with the wish for complete reassurance, and final dismissal of the unwelcome subject, that he turned again, on his way homeward, to the chief bureau of police which he had previously passed. He found prompt attendance there, on producing his passport, and the required volume, from under the head of “Conflagrations Domestiques,” soon lay open on a high desk before him at the point he was in search of, while the inspector turned the leaves slowly, reading aloud the passages he indicated, and which the peculiar style of French calligraphy did not tend to render lucid.
The record of nineteen years ago had been made under a different monarch, according to the laboriously prolix system of M. de Sartines, especially when any foreign subject was concerned; and it extended over many of the large pages, betraying by its faint-brown ink how considerable an interval had elapsed. It set out with the alarm being brought past midnight to the residence of the commissary in the Quartier faubourg St Germain, that a house on the Quai d’Orcay was in flames, and the endeavours made to arrest them, as well as to succour the inhabitants, who had been driven to the garret windows, and were attempting to pass to the contiguous roofs; it stated the narrow escape of a maidservant from a front window of the first floor, where the whole of the apartments were full of smoke, by the aid of a gendarme with a ladder too short to allow him to enter—and of a woman in her night-dress, whose shrieks had first given the alarm, but who had disappeared; till she returned to a corner window with a child in her arms, actually pursued by a bursting flame, but rescued by a man on the top of a wall which abutted there on a manufactory canal flowing at a right angle into the Seine—also of the English gentleman, the tenant of the first floor, who had at first made his way from the street into the basement, out of a fiacre which had brought him from the theatre, but who reappeared half drenched, and panting for breath, amidst the play of the fire-engines. The state of the February night was described as being very dark before the occurrence, with a high wind blowing up the river, where, from the tide, and a period of unusual rain, the water of the Seine made the canal overflow, rising almost to a level with its bridges, yet affording the greater facilities for the jets from the fire-engines, which succeeded ultimately in saving the adjoining structures, and the sheds of the tobacco-manufactory adjacent, with the lower part of the house itself. The situation of the house was also minutely given, to the very contiguity of the two poplar trees growing outside the wall, up from the canal, but by which the pompeurs had found it impossible to climb in their heavy accoutrements—the height of the wall on that side, and the manner in which the end of the house rose like a continuation of it towards the quay, rendering it apparently impossible, even when one had gained the top of the wall, to reach at all near the solitary first-floor window, in the middle, and higher up. Then followed a detail of the various occupants of the three floors and garrets—on the basement, the proprietor, a widower, elderly and of avaricious habits, whose warehouse of furniture filled three apartments, his sleeping chamber being a closet attached—his clerk, an old man who lived in a fourth apartment with his wife, both acting as porters: above, the family of Monsieur Vilby, the Englishman, consisting at that time of himself, his wife, and infant son, a young female attendant, a child’s nurse, and the man-servant or butler of M. Vilby: on the third storey and in the attics, a banker’s head-clerk, with his wife, her maid, and three young children—a journalist, a painter, and an actor, living together—a single young man, of no profession, (though calling himself a poet), supposed subject to harmless fits of lunacy, inhabiting an attic where he was known frequently to lock himself in. Of these there had perished—the old proprietor himself, M. Canrobert, in whose apartment the fire was supposed to have originated, since he warmed himself only in bed, while supping alone, by candle-light—and the portress, whose husband, luckily for him, had chanced to be absent on business of his master’s,—the remains of both being still distinguishable if only from the place of their discovery: the English lady, Madame Vilby—her infant, at first supposed to have been the one saved by the nurse, but found afterwards to have perished in her embrace, although the charred and mingled debris of the whole upper storeys fallen from above rendered it difficult to distinguish one mass of human substance from another: the man-servant of the English gentleman, at one time imagined identical with the person so active on the wall;—also others, above, who were enumerated. Then succeeded the depositions of the various individuals in evidence.
“‘Victorine Tronchet, fille-de-chambre to the late Madame Vilby, declared, that before ten o’clock her mistress signified an intention to sit up for monsieur, who had gone to a theatre at some distance, and that she might retire. Retired to bed, accordingly, in a closet adjoining the nurse’s room—saw the nurse, as she thought, carry out the child as usual to her mistress—imagined, while half asleep, or dreamt, that her mistress herself afterwards passed through the room, stooped over the bed with the child in her arms, and disappeared. But knew nothing further until awoke by the suffocating vapours. Could read—but did not sit up in bed with a candle, perusing romances. There was a lamp always burning on the floor of the nurse’s room. Was not aware, that night, of the nurse having her own child in the house. Believed her mistress to be ignorant of it. Could not tell why her mistress did not herself suckle the child—knew nothing of such affairs. Did not know that Madame’s voice had been brilliant—had heard her mistress sing to a musical instrument, when M. Vilby was at home. M. Vilby had returned home that day, unexpectedly, from England. He went to the theatre, accompanied only by M. Adolphe, his servant—perhaps because Madame had a headache. They used frequently to go to the theatre. Had heard that a new actress of celebrity would perform. The man-servant, M. Adolphe, returned early with some message to Madame, and retired up the outside stairs to his attic at the top of the house.’”
“‘The examination of the stranger who had been so active was made through an interpreter. Stated his name to be Guillaume Greefeeze. Was not a native of England, but of Wales. Knew nothing of the fire, except that having followed M. Vilby’s hackney-coach from the theatre, he smelt smoke, and saw immediately the fire lick out (se lécher) through the front-windows, when the doors below were burst open—heard shrieks at the further end—leapt down by the canal, to climb the wall,—saw suddenly, by the light of the fire, a woman in white at the window a little above—thought she had fallen down inside, till she came back, holding out a child and calling to him. Succeeded in getting to the window by help of the barred outside shutter on that side, which swung with him, however—found it impossible to get either of them down to the wall, which did not come near enough towards being under the window—without firmly fastening the outer edge of the shutter to a staple already there. Refused to leave the woman as she seemed to wish—signed to her to hold the child fast—tore down one end of the window-curtain, which held firm—made her slip herself down after him in the fold of the curtain, while he held the end firm with one hand, catching the shutter by the other. On the top of the wall, which was luckily broad enough to hold them, the woman seemed to faint away, so as nearly to drag them off, when they would have fallen into the canal—shouted for assistance then—before that, all the firemen and the crowd were in front, making a noise—with the pumping, the sound of the fire and wind, and the falling of the roof, it was useless. They were seen by chance, when the woman and child were carried to the hospital. Afterwards assisted at the pumps till the end.’
“The evidence of this witness was extracted with difficulty, by fragments, in spite of a somewhat sullen and cynical air, almost cunning. He frequently used the eccentric phrase ‘for reasons of his own.’ It was thought proper, from these and other suspicious circumstances, to detain him in the meanwhile.