One half of the company was already nearly drunk, and the other half at the height of its revelry, when a sound of many feet marching in step and close at hand silenced each and all in an instant. The lights were suddenly extinguished, pistols cocked—for most of the young miscreants were armed; then came a rush from the outside, a struggle, several shots, smothered groans, oaths, and all was over. Law had conquered, and the whole band was in the power of a posse of gendarmes under the command of an officer.
To handcuff the young ruffians and lead them one by one out of their den was soon accomplished; and it was then that Marcel, emerging into the tranquil night, was struck by the contrast. Within, drunkenness and crime, false, feverish merriment ending in bloody strife; without, the cool, fresh air of early morn, the first streak of breaking day in the far east, the market-carts wending their plodding way to the great metropolis—all telling of peace, all so quiet! Beautiful nature and humble toil!
Poor Marcel! he could not understand his feelings, for his intelligence was warped and dwarfed with his conscience; but his young heart ached with vague aspirations and regrets, and he wept bitterly.
Chapter VIII.
"We travel through a desert, and our feet
Have measured a fair space, have left behind
A thousand dangers and a thousand snares.
…
… The past temptations
No more shall vex us."
Watts.
"'Tis beauty all, and grateful song around,
Joined to the low of kine, and numerous bleat
Of flocks thick-nibbling through the clovered vale."
Thomson.
A few weeks after this catastrophe, the whole band was tried and condemned to various degrees of punishment and correction. Nothing had been proven against Marcel and Polycarpe further than that they had been found among recognized thieves, and were by that fact alone suspicious characters in the eyes of the law. The answers elicited from Marcel on his examination had excited the compassion of the tribunal, and the president declared his intention of giving him the opportunity of redeeming the past and of becoming an honest man. Polycarpe Poquet, also, had been judged leniently; his frank, generous nature had been discovered amidst all the vice that overshadowed it.
Very beautiful and touching were the words in which the worthy president announced to the two boys that he acquitted them because he believed that they had acted without discernment, but that, fearing for their future, he should send them to a house of correction where they would be detained until they had each reached the age of twenty-one. He reminded them that at least six years lay before them to reform and elevate themselves. He promised them that every means should be given to them to improve, and that they should be taught a trade or profession, and thus enabled by their own labor to gain their living and become respectable citizens. Obedience and industry would be expected from them, he said; and he entreated them to have pity on themselves, and to aid by their own exertions the efforts of those who sincerely desired their welfare, both temporal and eternal.
Marcel's tears flowed plentifully while the good magistrate thus addressed them; he had never before heard such things, and he wept as much from gratitude as from fear.
Imprisonment for six years seemed terrible; but if those six years were to give him the very thing for which he yearned—a different life from that he had hitherto led, in which all was fear and pain!
As for Polycarpe, he was more silent than usual, but he seemed neither afraid nor sorry. He felt the influence of virtue and truth, however, and the president's discourse made more impression on him than he cared to confess even to Marcel; for in minds rendered obtuse by vicious habits a good feeling or impulse is generally considered as a weakness, and resisted or concealed.