The Shoes of Fortune

“The tool of others, certainly, that much I am prepared to tell you, but that you know already. And certainly no genius of mischief himself; man! he has not got the energy to kick a dog.”

“And – and – ” said Buhot softly, fancying he had me in the key of revelation.

“And that’s all, M. Buhot,” said I, with a carriage he could not mistake.

He shrugged his shoulders again, wrote something in a book on the desk before him with great deliberation and then asked me how I liked my quarters in Bicêtre.

“Tolerably well,” I said. “I’ve been in better, but I might be in waur.”

He laughed a little at the Scotticism that seemed to recall something – perhaps a pleasantry of my uncle’s – to him, and then said he, “I’m sorry they cannot be yours very much longer, M. Greig. We calculated that a week or two of this priest’s company would have been enough to inspire a distaste and secure his confession, but apparently we were mistaken. You shall be taken to other quarters on Saturday.”

“I hope, M. Buhot,” said I, “they are to be no worse than those I occupy now.”

His face reddened a little at this – I felt always there was some vein of special kindness to me in this man’s nature – and he said hesitatingly, “Well, the truth is, ‘tis Galbanon.”

“Before a trial?” I asked, incredulous.

“The trial will come in good time,” he said, rising to conclude the parley, and he turned his back on me as I was conducted out of the room and back to the cell, where Father Hamilton waited with unwonted agitation for my tidings.

“Well, lad,” he cried, whenever we were alone, “what stirs? I warrant they have not a jot of evidence against thee,” but in a second he saw from my face the news was not so happy, and his own face fell.

“We are to be separated on Saturday,” I told him.

Tears came to his eyes at that – a most feeling old rogue!

“And where is’t for thee, Paul?” he asked.

“Where is’t for yourself ought to be of more importance to you, Father Hamilton.”

“No, no,” he cried, “it matters little about me, but surely for you it cannot be Galbanon?”

“Indeed, and it is no less.”

“Then, Paul,” he said firmly, “we must break out, and that without loss of time.”

“Is it in the plural this time?” I asked him.

He affected an indifference, but at the last consented to share the whole of the enterprise.

CHAPTER XXV

WE ATTEMPT AN ESCAPE

Father Hamilton was not aware of the extent of it, but he knew I was in a correspondence with the sous-officer. More than once he had seen us in the salle dépreuve in a manifest understanding of each other, though he had no suspicion that the gentleman was a Mercury for Miss Walkinshaw, whose name seldom, if ever, entered into our conversation in the cell. From her I had got but one other letter – a brief acknowledgment of some of my fullest budgets, but ‘twas enough to keep me at my diurnal on every occasion almost on which the priest slept. I sent her (with the strictest injunction to secrecy upon so important a matter) a great deal of the tale the priest had told me – not so much for her entertainment as for the purpose of moving in the poor man’s interests. Especially was I anxious that she should use her influence to have some one communicate to Father Fleuriau, who was at the time in Bruges, how hazardous was the position of his unhappy cat’s-paw, whose state I pictured in the most moving colours I could command. There was, it must be allowed, a risk in entrusting a document so damnatory to any one in Bicêtre, but that the packet was duly forwarded to its destination I had every satisfaction of from the sous-officer, who brought me an acknowledgment to that effect from Bernard the Swiss.

The priest knew, then, as I say, that I was on certain terms with this sous-officer, and so it was with no hesitation I informed him that, through the favour of the latter, I had a very fair conception of the character and plan of this building of Bicêtre in which we were interned. What I had learned of most importance to us was that the block of which our cell was a part had a face to the main road of Paris, from which thoroughfare it was separated by a spacious court and a long range of iron palisades. If ever we were to make our way out of the place it must be in this direction, for on two sides of our building we were overlooked by buildings vastly more throng than our own, and bordered by yards in which were constant sentinels. Our block jutted out at an angle from one very much longer, but lower by two storeys, and the disposition of both made it clear that to enter into this larger edifice, and towards the gable end of it that overlooked the palisades of the Paris road, was our most feasible method of essay.

I drew a plan of the prison and grounds on paper, estimating as best I might all the possible checks we were like to meet with, and leaving a balance of chances in our favour that we could effect our purpose in a night.

The priest leaned his chin upon his arms as he lolled over the table on which I eagerly explained my diagram, and sighed at one or two of the feats of agility it assumed. There was, for example, a roof to walk upon – the roof of the building we occupied – though how we were to get there in the first place was still to be decided. Also there was a descent from that roof on to the lower building at right angles, though where the ladder or rope for this was to come from I must meanwhile airily leave to fortune. Finally, there was – assuming we got into the larger building, and in some unforeseeable way along its roof and clear to the gable end – a part of the yard to cross, and the palisade to escalade.

“Oh, lad! thou takest me for a bird,” cried his reverence, aghast at all this. “Is thy poor fellow prisoner a sparrow? A little after this I might do’t with my own wings – the saints guide me! – but figure you that at present I am not Philetas, the dwarf, who had to wear leaden shoes lest the wind should blow him away. ‘Twould take a wind indeed to stir this amplitude of good humours, this sepulchre of twenty thousand good dinners and incomputible tuns of liquid merriment. Pray, Paul, make an account of my physical infirmities, and mitigate thy transport of vaultings and soarings and leapings and divings, unless, indeed, thou meditatest sewing me up in a sheet, and dragging me through the realms of space.”

“We shall manage! we shall manage!” I insisted, now quite uplifted in a fanciful occupation that was all to my tastes, even if nothing came of it, and I plunged more boldly into my plans. They were favoured by several circumstances – the first, namely, that we were not in the uniform of the prison, and, once outside the prison, could mingle with the world without attracting attention. Furthermore, by postponing the attempt till the morrow night I could communicate with the Swiss, and secure his cooperation outside in the matter of a horse or a vehicle, if the same were called for. I did not, however, say so much as that to his reverence, whom I did not wish as yet to know of my correspondence with Bernard. Finally, we had an auspicious fact at the outset of our attempt, inasmuch as the cell we were in was in the corridor next to that of which the sous-officer had some surveillance, and I knew his mind well enough now to feel sure he would help in anything that did not directly involve his own position and duties. In other words, he was to procure a copy of the key of our cell, and find a means of leaving it unlocked when the occasion arose.

“A copy of the key, Paul!” said Father Hamilton; “sure there are no bounds to thy cheerful mad expectancy! But go on! go on! art sure he could not be prevailed on – this fairy godfather – to give us an escort of cavalry and trumpeters?”

“This is not much of a backing-up, Father Hamilton,” I said, annoyed at his skeptic comments upon an affair that involved so much and agitated myself so profoundly.

“Pardon! Paul,” he said hastily, confused and vexed himself at the reproof. “Art quite right, I’m no more than a croaker, and for penance I shall compel myself to do the wildest feat thou proposest.”

We determined to put off the attempt at escape till I had communicated with the sous-officer (in truth, though Father Hamilton did not know it, till I had communicated with Bernard the Swiss), and it was the following afternoon I had not only an assurance of the unlocked door, but in my hand a more trustworthy plan of the prison than my own, and the promise that the Swiss would be waiting with a carriage outside the palisades when we broke through, any time between midnight and five in the morning.

Next day, then, we were in a considerable agitation; to that extent indeed that I clean forgot that we had no aid to our descent of twenty or thirty feet (as the sous-sergeant’s diagram made it) from the roof of our block on to that of the one adjoining. We had had our minds so much on bolted doors and armed sentinels that this detail had quite escaped us until almost on the eve of setting out at midnight, the priest began again to sigh about his bulk and swear no rope short of a ship’s cable would serve to bear him.

“Rope!” I cried, in a tremendous chagrin at my stupidity. “Lord! if I have not quite forgot it. We have none.”

“Ah!” he said, “perhaps it is not necessary. Perhaps my heart is so light at parting with my croque-mort that I can drop upon the tiles like a pigeon.”

“Parting,” I repeated, eyeing him suspiciously, for I thought perhaps he had changed his mind again. “Who thinks of parting?”

“Not I indeed,” says he, “unless the rope do when thou hast got it.”

There was no rope, however, and I cursed my own folly that I had not asked one from the sous-officer whose complaisance might have gone the length of a fathom or two, though it did not, as the priest suggested, go so far as an armed convoy and a brace of trumpeters. It was too late now to repair the overlook, and to the making of rope the two of us had there and then to apply ourselves, finding the sheets and blankets-of our beds scanty enough for our purpose, and by no means of an assuring elegance or strength when finished. But we had thirty feet of some sort of cord at the last, and whether it was elegant or not it had to do for our purpose.

Luckily the night was dark as pitch and a high wind roared in the chimneys, and in the numerous corners of the prison. There was a sting in the air that drew many of the sentinels round the braziers flaming in the larger yard between the main entrance and the buildings, and that further helped our prospects; so that it was with some hope, in spite of a heart that beat like a flail in my breast, I unlocked the door and crept out into the dimly-lighted corridor with the priest close behind me.

Midway down this gallery there was a stair of which our plan apprised us, leading to another gallery – the highest of the block – from which a few steps led to a cock-loft where the sous-officer told us there was one chance in a score of finding a blind window leading to the roof.

No one, luckily, appeared as we hurried down the long gallery. I darted like a fawn up the stair to the next flat, Father Hamilton grievously puffing behind me, and we had just got into the shadow of the steps leading to the cock-loft when a warder’s step and the clank of his chained keys came sounding down the corridor. He passed within three feet of us and I felt the blood of all my body chill with fear!

“I told thee, lad,” whispered the priest, mopping the sweat from his face, “I told thee ‘twas an error to burden thyself with such a useless carcase. Another moment or two – a gasp for the wind that seems so cursed ill to come by at my years, and I had brought thee into trouble.”

I paid no heed to him, but crept up the steps and into the cock-loft that smelt villainously of bats.

The window was unfastened! I stuck out my head upon the tiles and sniffed the fine fresh air of freedom as it had been a rare perfume.

Luckily the window was scarcely any height, and it proved easy to aid his reverence into the open air. Luckily, further, it was too dark for him to realise the jeopardies of his situation for whether his precarious gropings along the tiles were ten feet or thirty from the yard below was indiscoverable in the darkness. He slid his weighty body along with an honest effort that was wholly due to his regard for my interests, because ‘twas done with groans and whispered protestations that ‘twas the maddest thing for a man to leave a place where he was happy and risk his neck in an effort to discover misery. A rime of frost was on the tiles, and they were bitter cold to the touch. One fell, too, below me as I slid along, and rattled loudly over its fellows and plunged into the yard.

Naturally we stopped dead and listened breathless, a foolish action for one reason because in any case we had been moving silently at a great height above the place where the tile should fall so that there was no risk of our being heard or seen, but our listening discovered so great an interval between the loosening of the tile and its dull shattering on the stones below that the height on which we were perched in the darkness was made more plain – more dreadful to the instincts than if we could actually measure it with the eye. I confess I felt a touch of nausea, but nothing compared with the priest, whose teeth began to chitter in an ague of horror.

“Good Lord, Paul!” he whispered to me, clutching my leg as I moved in front of him, “it is the bottomless pit.”

“Not unless we drop,” said I. And to cheer him up I made some foolish joke.

If the falling tile attracted any attention in the yard it was not apparent to us, and five minutes later we had to brace ourselves to a matter that sent the tile out of our minds.

For we were come to the end of the high building, and twenty feet below us, at right angles, we could plainly see the glow of several skylights in the long prison to which it was attached. It was now the moment for our descent on the extemporised rope.