The Shoes of Fortune

CHAPTER XXVI

A RIMEY NIGHT ON ROOF-TOPS, AND A NEW USE FOR AN OLD KIRK BELL

I fastened the rope about a chimney-head with some misgivings that by the width and breadth of the same I was reducing our chance of ever getting down to the lower building, as the knotted sheets from the outset had been dubious measure for the thirty feet of which my sous-officer had given the estimate. But I said never a word to the priest of my fears on that score, and determined for once to let what was left of honesty go before well-fattened age and test the matter first myself. If the cord was too brief for its purpose, or (what was just as likely) on the frail side, I could pull myself back in the one case as the priest was certainly unfit to do, and in the other my weight would put less strain upon it than that of Father Hamilton.

I can hear him yet in my imagination after forty years, as he clung to the ridge of the roof like a seal on a rock, chittering in the cold night wind, enviously eyeing some fires that blazed in another yard and groaning melancholiously.

“A garden,” said he, “and six beehives – no, ‘faith! ‘twas seven last summer, and a roomful of books. Oh, Paul, Paul! Now I know how God cast out Satan. He took him from his warm fireside, and his books before they were all read, and his pantoufles, and set him straddling upon a frozen house-top to ponder through eternal night upon the happy past. Alas, poor being! How could he know what joys were in the simplicity of a room of books half-read and a pair of warm old slippers?”

He was fair rambling in his fears, my poor priest, and I declare scarcely knew the half of what he uttered, indeed he spoke out so loudly that I had to check him lest he should attract attention from below.

“Father Hamilton,” said I, when my cord was fastened, “with your permission I’ll try it first. I want to make it sure that my seamanship on the sloop Sarah, of Ayr, has not deserted me to the extent that I cannot come down a rope without a ratline or tie a bowling knot.”

“Certainly, Paul, certainly,” said he, quite eagerly, so that I was tempted for a second to think he gladly postponed his own descent from sheer terror.

I threw over the free end of the cord and crouched upon the beak of the gable to lower myself.

“Well, Paul,” said his reverence in a broken voice. “Let us say ‘good-bye’ in case aught should happen ere we are on the same level again.”

“Oh!” said I, impatient, “that’s the true croque-mort spirit indeed! Why, Father, it isn’t – it isn’t – ” I was going to say it was not a gallows I was venturing on, but the word stuck in my throat, for a certain thought that sprung to me of how nearly in my own case it had been to the very gallows, and his reverence doubtless saw some delicacy, for he came promptly to my help.

“Not a priest’s promise – made to be broken, you would say, good Paul,” said he. “I promised the merriest of jaunts over Europe in a coach, and here my scrivener is hanging in the reins! Pardon, dear Scotland, milles pardons and good-bye and good luck.” And at that he made to embrace me.

“Here’s a French ceremony just about nothing at all,” I thought, and began my descent. The priest lay on his stomach upon the ridge. As I sank, with my eyes turned upwards, I could see his hair blown by the wind against a little patch of stars, that was the only break in the Ethiopia of the sky. He seemed to follow my progress breathlessly, and when I gained the other roof and shook the cord to tell him so he responded by a faint clapping of his hands.

“Art all right, lad?” he whispered down to me, and I bade him follow.

“Good-night, Paul, good-bye, and God bless you!” he whispered. “Get out of this as quick as you can; ‘tis more than behemoth could do in a month of dark nights, and so I cut my share of the adventure. One will do’t when two (and one of them a hogshead) will die in trying to do’t.”

Here was a pretty pickle! The man’s ridiculous regard for my safety outweighed his natural inclinations, though his prospects in the prison of Bicêtre were blacker than my own, having nothing less dreadful than an execution at the end of them. He had been merely humouring me so far – and such a brave humouring in one whose flesh was in a quaking of alarms all the time he slid along the roof!

“Are you not coming?” I whispered.

“On the contrary, I’m going, dear Paul,” said he with a pretence at levity. “Going back to my comfortable cell and my uniformed servant and M. Buhot, the charmingest of hostellers, and I declare my feet are like ice.”

“Then,” said I firmly, “I go back too. I’ll be eternally cursed if I give up my situation as scrivener at this point. I must e’en climb up again.” And with that I prepared to start the ascent.

“Stop! stop!” said he without a second’s pause, “stop where you are and I’ll go down. Though ‘tis the most stupendous folly,” he added with a sigh, and in a moment later I saw his vast bulk laboriously heaving over the side of the roof. Fortunately the knots in the cord where the fragments of sheet and blanket were joined made his task not so difficult as it had otherwise been, and almost as speedily as I had done it myself he reached the roof of the lower building, though in such a state he quivered like a jelly, and was dumb with fear or with exertion when the thing was done.

“Ah!” he said at last, when he had recovered himself. “Art a fool to be so particular about an old carcase accursed of easy humours and accused of regicide. Take another thought on’t, Paul. What have you to do with this wretch of a priest that brought about the whole trouble in your ignorance? And think of Galbanon!”

“Think of the devil! Father Hamilton,” I snapped at him, “every minute we waste havering away here adds to the chances against any of us getting free, and I am sure that is not your desire. The long and the short of it is that I’ll not stir a step out of Bicêtre – no, not if the doors themselves were open – unless you consent to come with me.”

“Ventre Dieu!” said he, “‘tis just such a mulish folly as I might have looked for from the nephew of Andrew Greig. But lead on, good imbecile, lead on, and blame not poor Father Hamilton if the thing ends in a fiasco!”

We now crawled along a roof no whit more easily traversed than that we had already commanded. Again and again I had to stop to permit my companion to come up on me, for the pitch of the tiles was steep, and he in a peril from his own lubricity, and it was necessary even to put a hand under his arm at times when he suffered a vertigo through seeing the lights in the yard deep down as points of flame.

“Egad! boy,” he said, and his perspiring hand clutching mine at one of our pauses, “I thrill at the very entrails. I’d liefer have my nose in the sawdust any day than thrash through thin air on to a paving-stone.”

“A minute or two more and we are there,” I answered him.

“Where?” said he, starting; “in purgatory?”

“Look up, man!” I told him. “There’s a window beaming ten yards off.” And again I pushed on.

In very truth there was no window, though I prayed as fervently for one as it had been a glimpse of paradise, but I was bound to cozen the old man into effort for his own life and for mine. What I had from the higher building taken for the glow of skylights had been really the light of windows on the top flat of the other prison block, and its roof was wholly unbroken. At least I had made up my mind to that with a despair benumbing when I touched wood. My fingers went over it in the dark with frantic eagerness. It was a trap such as we had come out of at the other block, but it was shut. Before the priest could come up to me and suffer the fresh horror of disappointment I put my weight upon it, and had the good fortune to throw it in. The flap fell with a shriek of hinges and showed gaping darkness. We stretched upon the tiles as close as limpets and as silent. Nothing stirred within.

“A garden,” said he in a little, “as sweet as ever bean grew in, with the rarest plum-tree; and now I am so cold.”

“I could be doing with some of your complaint,” said I; “as for me, I’m on fire. Please heaven, you’ll be back in the garden again.”

I lowered myself within, followed by the priest, and found we were upon the rafters. A good bit off there was a beam of light that led us, groping, and in an imminent danger of going through the plaster, to an air-hole over a little gallery whose floor was within stretch as I lowered myself again.

Father Hamilton squeezed after me; we both looked over the edge of the gallery, and found it was a chapel we were in!

“Sacré nom!” said the priest and crossed himself, with a genuflexion to the side of the altar.

“Oh, Lord! Paul,” he said, whispering, “if ‘twere the Middle Ages, and this were indeed a sanctuary, how happy was a poor undeserving son of Mother Church! Even Dagobert’s hounds drew back from the stag in St. Denys.”

It was a mean interior, as befitted the worship of the misérables who at times would meet there. A solemn quiet held the place, that seemed wholly deserted; the dim light that had shown through the air-hole and guided us came from some candles dripping before a shrine.

“Heaven help us!” said the priest. “I know just such another.”

There was nobody in the church so far as we could observe from the little gallery in which we found ourselves, but when we had gone down a flight of steps into the body of the same, and made to cross towards the door, we were suddenly confronted by a priest in a white cope. My heart jumped to my mouth; I felt a prinkling in the roots of my hair, and stopped dumb, with all my faculties basely deserted from me. Luckily Father Hamilton kept his presence of mind. As he told me later, he remembered of a sudden the Latin proverb that in battles the eye is first overcome, and he fixed the man in the stole with a glance that was bold and disconcerting. As it happened, however, the other priest was almost as blind as a bat, and saw but two civil worshippers in his chapel. He did not even notice that it was a soutane; he passed peeringly, with a bow to our inclinations, and it was almost incredulous of our good fortune I darted out of the chapel into the darkness of a courtyard of equal extent with that I had crossed on the night of my first arrival at Bicêtre. At its distant end there were the same flaming braziers with figures around them, and the same glitter of arms.

Now this Bicêtre is set upon a hill and commands a prospect of the city of Paris, of the Seine and its environs. For that reason we could see to our right the innumerable lights of a great plain twinkling in the darkness, and it seemed as if we had only to proceed in that direction to secure freedom by the mere effort of walking. As we stood in the shadow of the chapel, Father Hamilton eyed the distant prospect of the lighted town with a singular rapture.

“Paris!” said he. “Oh, Dieu! and I thought never to clap an eye on’t again. Paris, my Paul! Behold the lights of it —la ville lumière that is so fine I could spend eternity in it. Hearts are there, lad, kind and jocund-”

“And meditating a descent on unhappy Britain,” said I.

“Good neighbourly hearts, or I’m a gourd else,” he went on, unheeding my interruption. “The stars in heaven are not so good, are no more notably the expression of a glowing and fraternal spirit. There is laughter in the streets of her.”

“Not at this hour, Father Hamilton,” said I, and the both of us always whispering. “I’ve never seen the place by day nor put a foot in it, but it will be droll indeed if there is laughter in its streets at two o’clock in the morning.”

“Ah, Paul, shall we ever get there?” said he longingly. “We can but try, anyway. I certainly did not come all this way, Father Hamilton, just to look on the lowe of Paris.”

What had kept us shrinking in the shadow of the chapel wall had been the sound of footsteps between us and the palisades that were to be distinguished a great deal higher than I had expected, on our right. On the other side of the rails was freedom, as well as Paris that so greatly interested my companion, but the getting clear of them seemed like to be a more difficult task than any we had yet overcome, and all the more hazardous because the footsteps obviously suggested a sentinel. Whether it was the rawness of the night that tempted him to a relaxation, or whether he was not strictly on duty, I know not, but, while we stood in the most wretched of quandaries, the man who was in our path very soon ceased his perambulation along the palisades, and went over to one of the distant fires, passing within a few yards of us as we crouched in the darkness. When he had gone sufficiently out of the way we ran for it. So plain were the lights of the valley, so flimsy a thing had seemed to part us from the high-road there, that never a doubt intruded on my mind that now we were as good as free, and when I came to the rails I beat my head with my hands when the nature of our folly dawned upon me.

“We may just go back,” I said to the priest in a stricken voice.

“Comment?” said he, wiping his brow and gloating on the spectacle of the lighted town.

“Look,” I said, indicating the railings that were nearly three times my own height, “there are no convenient trap-doors here.”

“But the cord – ” said he simply.

“Exactly,” I said; “the cord’s where we left it snugly tied with a bowling knot to the chimney of our block, and I’m an ass.”