The Shoes of Fortune

“Oh, poor Paul!” said the priest in a prostration at this divulgence of our error. “I’m the millstone on your neck, for had I not parleyed at the other end of the cord when you had descended, the necessity for it would never have escaped your mind. I gave you fair warning, lad, ‘twas a quixotic imbecility to burden yourself with me. And are we really at a stand? God! look at Paris. Had I not seen these lights I had not cared for myself a straw, but, oh lord! lad, they are so pleasant and so close! Why will the world sleep when two unhappy wretches die for want of a little bit of hemp?”

“You are not to blame,” said I, “one rope was little use to us in any case. But anyhow I do not desire to die of a little bit of hemp if I can arrange it better.” And I began hurriedly to scour up and down the palisade like a trapped mouse. It extended for about a hundred yards, ending at one side against the walls of a gate-house or lodge; on the other side it concluded at the wall of the chapel. It had no break in all its expanse, and so there was nothing left for us to do but to go back the way we had come, obliterate the signs of our attempt and find our cells again. We went, be sure, with heavy hearts, again ventured into the chapel, climbed the stairs, went through the ceiling, and stopped a little among the rafters to rest his reverence who was finding these manoeuvres too much for his weighty body. While he sat regaining sufficient strength to resume his crawling on rimey tiles I made a search of the loft we were in and found it extended to the gable end of the chapel, but nothing more for my trouble beyond part of a hanging chain that came through the roof and passed through the ceiling. I had almost missed it in the darkness, and even when I touched it my first thought was to leave it alone. But I took a second thought and tried the lower end, which came up as I hauled, yard upon yard, until I had the end of it, finished with a bell-ringer’s hempen grip, in my hands. Here was a discovery if bell-pulls had been made of rope throughout in Bicêtre prison! But a chain with an end to a bell was not a thing to be easily borrowed.

I went back to where Father Hamilton was seated on the rafters, and told him my discovery.

“A bell,” said he. “Faith! I never liked them. Pestilent inventions of the enemy, that suggested duties to be done and the fleeting hours. But a bell-rope implies a belfry on the roof and a bell in it, and the chain that may reach the ground within the building may reach the same desirable place without the same.”

“That’s very true,” said I, struck with the thing. And straight got through the trap and out upon the roof again. Father Hamilton puffed after me and in a little we came upon a structure like a dovecot at the very gable-end. “The right time to harry a nest is at night,” said I, “for then you get all that’s in it.” And I started to pull up the chain that was fastened to the bell.

I lowered behemoth with infinite exertion till he reached the ground outside the prison grounds in safety, wrapped the clapper of the bell in my waistcoat, and descended hand over hand after him.

We were on the side of a broad road that dipped down the hill into a little village. Between us and the village street, across which hung a swinging lamp, there mounted slowly a carriage with a pair of horses.

“Bernard!” I cried, running up to it, and found it was the Swiss in the very article of waiting for us, and he speedily drove us into Paris.

CHAPTER XXVII

WE ENTER PARIS AND FIND A SANCTUARY THERE

Of the town of Paris that is so lamentably notable in these days I have but the recollection that one takes away from a new scene witnessed under stress of mind due to matters more immediately affecting him than the colour, shape, and properties of things seen, and the thought I had in certain parts of it is more clear to me to-day than the vision of the place itself. It is, in my mind, like a fog that the bridges thundered as our coach drove over them with our wretched fortunes on that early morning of our escape from Bicêtre, but as clear as when it sprung to me from the uproar of the wheels comes back the dread that the whole of this community would be at their windows looking out to see what folks untimeously disturbed their rest. We were delayed briefly at a gate upon the walls; I can scarcely mind what manner of men they were that stopped us and thrust a lantern in our faces, and what they asked eludes me altogether, but I mind distinctly how I gasped relief when we were permitted to roll on. Blurred, too – no better than the surplusage of dreams, is my first picture of the river and its isles in the dawn, but, like a favourite song, I mind the gluck of waters on the quays and that they made me think of Earn and Cart and Clyde.

We stopped in the place of the Notre Dame at the corner of a street; the coach drove off to a remise whence it had come, and we went to an hospital called the Hôtel Dieu, in the neighbourhood, where Hamilton had a Jesuit friend in one of the heads, and where we were accommodated in a room that was generally set aside for clergymen. It was a place of the most wonderful surroundings, this Hôtel Dieu, choked, as it were, among towers, the greatest of them those of Our Lady itself that were in the Gothic taste, regarding which Father Hamilton used to say, “Dire gothique, c’est dire mauvais gout,” though, to tell the truth, I thought the building pretty braw myself. Alleys and wynds were round about us, and so narrow that the sky one saw between them was but a ribbon by day, while at night they seemed no better than ravines.

‘Twas at night I saw most of the city, for only in the darkness did I dare to venture out of the Hôtel Dieu. Daundering my lone along the cobbles, I took a pleasure in the exercise of tenanting these towering lands with people having histories little different from the histories of the folks far off in my Scottish home – their daughters marrying, their sons going throughither (as we say), their bairns wakening and crying in their naked beds, and grannies sitting by the ingle-neuk cheerfully cracking upon ancient days. Many a time in the by-going I looked up their pend closes seeking the eternal lovers of our own burgh towns and never finding them, for I take it that in love the foreign character is coyer than our own. But no matter how eagerly I went forth upon my nightly airing in a roquelaure borrowed from Father Hamilton’s friend, the adventure always ended, for me, in a sort of eerie terror of those close-hemming walls, those tangled lanes where slouched the outcast and the ne’er-do-weel, and not even the glitter of the moon upon the river between its laden isles would comfort me.

“La! la! la!” would Father Hamilton cry at me when I got home with a face like a fiddle. “Art the most ridiculous rustic ever ate a cabbage or set foot in Arcady. Why, man! the woman must be wooed – this Mademoiselle Lutetia. Must take her front and rear, walk round her, ogling bravely. Call her dull! call her dreadful! Ciel! Has the child never an eye in his mutton head? I avow she is the queen of the earth this Paris. If I were young and wealthy I’d buy the glittering stars in constellations and turn them into necklets for her. With thy plaguey gift of the sonnet I’d deave her with ecstasies and spill oceans of ink upon leagues of paper to tell her about her eyes. Go to! Scotland, go to! Ghosts! ghosts! devil the thing else but ghosts in thy rustic skull, for to take a fear of Lutetia when her black hair is down of an evening and thou canst not get a glimpse of that beautiful neck that is rounded like the same in the Psyche of Praxiteles. Could I pare off a portion of this rotundity and go out in a masque as Apollo I’d show thee things.”

And all he saw of Paris himself was from the windows of the hospital, where he and I would stand by the hour looking out into the square. For the air itself he had to take it in a little garden at the back, surrounded by a high wall, and affording a seclusion that even the priest could avail himself of without the hazard of discovery. He used to sit in an arbour there in the warmth of the day, and it was there I saw another trait of his character that helped me much to forget his shortcomings.

Over his head, within the doorway of the bower, he hung a box and placed therein the beginnings of a bird’s nest. The thing was not many hours done when a pair of birds came boldly into his presence as he sat silent and motionless in the bower, and began to avail themselves of so excellent a start in householding. In a few days there were eggs in the nest, and ‘twas the most marvellous of spectacles to witness the hen sit content upon them over the head of the fat man underneath, and the cock, without concern, fly in and out attentive on his mate.

But, indeed, the man was the friend of all helpless things, and few of the same came his way without an instinct that told them it was so. Not the birds in the nest alone were at ease in his society; he had but to walk along the garden paths whistling and chirping, and there came flights of birds about his head and shoulders, and some would even perch upon his hand. I have never seen him more like his office than when he talked with the creatures of the air, unless it was on another occasion when two bairns, the offspring of an inmate in the hospital, ventured into the garden, finding there another child, though monstrous, who had not lost the key to the fields where blossom the flowers of infancy, and frolic is a prayer.

But he dare not set a foot outside the walls of our retreat, for it was as useless to hide Ballageich under a Kilmarnock bonnet as to seek a disguise for his reverence in any suit of clothes. Bernard would come to us rarely under cover of night, but alas! there were no letters for me now, and mine that were sent through him were fewer than before. And there was once an odd thing happened that put an end to these intromissions; a thing that baffled me to understand at the time, and indeed for many a day thereafter, but was made plain to me later on in a manner that proved how contrary in his character was this mad priest, that was at once assassin and the noblest friend.

Father Hamilton was not without money, though all had been taken from him at Bicêtre. It was an evidence of the width and power of the Jesuit movement that even in the Hôtel Dieu he could command what sums he needed, and Bernard was habituated to come to him for moneys that might pay for himself and the coachman and the horses at the remise. On the last of these occasions I took the chance to slip a letter for Miss Walkinshaw into his hand. Instead of putting it in his pocket he laid it down a moment on a table, and he and I were busy packing linen for the wash when a curious cry from Father Hamilton made us turn to see him with the letter in his hand.

He was gazing with astonishment on the direction.

“Ah!” said he, “and so my Achilles is not consoling himself exclusively with the Haemonian lyre, but has taken to that far more dangerous instrument the pen. The pen, my child, is the curse of youth. When we are young we use it for our undoing, and for the facture of regrets for after years – even if it be no more than the reading of our wives’ letters that I’m told are a bitter revelation to the married man. And so – and so, Monsieur Croque-mort keeps up a correspondence with the lady. H’m!” He looked so curiously and inquiringly at me that I felt compelled to make an explanation.

“It is quite true, Father Hamilton,” said I. “After all, you gave me so little clerkly work that I was bound to employ my pen somehow, and how better than with my countrywoman?”

“‘Tis none of my affair – perhaps,” he said, laying down the letter. “And yet I have a curiosity. Have we here the essential Mercury?” and he indicated Bernard who seemed to me to have a greater confusion than the discovery gave a cause for.

“Bernard has been good enough,” said I. “You discover two Scots, Father Hamilton, in a somewhat sentimental situation. The lady did me the honour to be interested in my little travels, and I did my best to keep her informed.”

He turned away as he had been shot, hiding his face, but I saw from his neck that he had grown as white as parchment.

“What in the world have I done?” thinks I, and concluded that he was angry for my taking the liberty to use the dismissed servant as a go-between. In a moment or two he turned about again, eying me closely, and at last he put his hand upon my shoulder as a schoolmaster might do upon a boy’s.

“My good Paul,” said he, “how old are you?”

“Twenty-one come Martinmas,” I said.

“Expiscate! elucidate! ‘Come Martinmas,’” says he, “and what does that mean? But no matter – twenty-one says my barbarian; sure ‘tis a right young age, a very baby of an age, an age in frocks if one that has it has lived the best of his life with sheep and bullocks.”

“Sir,” I said, indignant, “I was in very honest company among the same sheep and bullocks.”

“Hush!” said he, and put up his hand, eying me with compassion and kindness. “If thou only knew it, lad, thou art due me a civil attention at the very least. Sure there is no harm in my mentioning that thou art mighty ingenuous for thy years. ‘Tis the quality I would be the last to find fault with, but sometimes it has its inconveniences. And Bernard” – he turned to the Swiss who was still greatly disturbed – “Bernard is a somewhat older gentleman. Perhaps he will say – our good Bernard – if he was the person I have to thank for taking the sting out of the wasp, for extracting the bullet from my pistol? Ah! I see he is the veritable person. Adorable Bernard, let that stand to his credit!”

Then Bernard fell trembling like a saugh tree, and protested he did but what he was told.

“And a good thing, too,” said the priest, still very pale but with no displeasure. “And a good thing too, else poor Buhot, that I have seen an infinity of headachy dawns with, had been beyond any interest in cards or prisoners. For that I shall forgive you the rest that I can guess at. Take Monsieur Grog’s letter where you have taken the rest, and be gone.”

The Swiss went out much crestfallen from an interview that was beyond my comprehension.

When he was gone Father Hamilton fell into a profound meditation, walking up and down his room muttering to himself.

“Faith, I never had such a problem presented to me before,” said he, stopping his walk; “I know not whether to laugh or swear. I feel that I have been made a fool of, and yet nothing better could have happened. And so my Croque-mort, my good Monsieur Propriety, has been writing the lady? I should not wonder if he thought she loved him.”

“Nothing so bold,” I cried. “You might without impropriety have seen every one of my letters, and seen in them no more than a seaman’s log.”

“A seaman’s log!” said he, smiling faintly and rubbing his massive chin; “nothing would give the lady more delight, I am sure. A seaman’s log! And I might have seen them without impropriety, might I? That I’ll swear was what her ladyship took very good care to obviate. Come now, did she not caution thee against telling me of this correspondence?”

I confessed it was so; that the lady naturally feared she might be made the subject of light talk, and I had promised that in that respect she should suffer nothing for her kindly interest in a countryman.

The priest laughed consumedly at this.

“Interest in her countryman!” said he. “Oh, lad, wilt be the death of me for thy unexpected spots of innocence.”

“And as to that,” I said, “you must have had a sort of correspondence with her yourself.”

“I!” said he. “Comment!”

“To be quite frank with you,” said I, “it has been the cause of some vexatious thoughts to me that the letter I carried to the Prince was directed in Miss Walkinshaw’s hand of write, and as Buhot informed me, it was the same letter that was to wile his Royal Highness to his fate in the Rue des Reservoirs.” Father Hamilton groaned, as he did at any time the terrible affair was mentioned.

“It is true, Paul, quite true,” said he, “but the letter was a forgery. I’ll give the lady the credit to say she never had a hand in it.”

“I am glad to hear that, for it removes some perplexities that have troubled me for a while back.”

“Ah,” said he, “and your perplexities and mine are not over even now, poor Paul. This Bernard is like to be the ruin of me yet. For you, however, I have no fear, but it is another matter with the poor old fool from Dixmunde.”

His voice broke, he displayed thus and otherwise so troubled a mind and so great a reluctance to let me know the cause of it that I thought it well to leave him for a while and let him recover his old manner.

To that end I put on my coat and hat and went out rather earlier than usual for my evening walk.

CHAPTER XXVIII