"It is my mother's," he said, with an appealing glance of violet eyes;
"I would not part with it, but that I am starving. Will you get me
food?"
"You are hiding?" said he of the red cap.
"Is that a crime in these days?" said the other, with a smile that would
in other days have been irresistible.
The man took the watch, shaded the donor's beautiful face with a rough
red cap and tricolor ribbon, and bade him follow him. He, who had but
lately come to Paris, dragged his exhausted body after his conductor,
hardly noticed the crowds in the streets, the signs by which the man got
free passage for them both, or their entrance by a little side-door into
a large dark building, and never knew till he was delivered to one of
the gaolers that he had been led into the prison of the Abbaye. Then
the wretch tore the cap of liberty from his victim's head, and pointed
to him with a fierce laugh.
"He wants food, this aristocrat. He shall not wait long--there is a
feast in the court below, which he shall join presently. See to it,
Antoine! and you _Monsieur_, _Mons-ieur_! listen to the banqueters."
He ceased, and in the silence yells and cries from a court below came up
like some horrid answer to imprecation.
The man continued---
"He has paid for his admission, this Monsieur. It belonged to Madame his
mother. Behold!"
He held the watch above his head, and dashed it with insane fury on the
ground, and bidding the gaoler see to his prisoner, rushed away to the
court below.
The prisoner needed some attention. Weakness and fasting and horror had
overpowered a delicate body and a sensitive mind, and he lay senseless
by the shattered relic of happier times. Antoine the gaoler (a
weak-minded man, whom circumstances had made cruel), looked at him with
indifference while the Jacobin remained in the place, and with
half-suppressed pity when he had gone. The place where he lay was a hall
or passage in the prison, into which several cells opened, and a number
of the prisoners were gathered together at one end of it. One of them
had watched the proceedings of the Jacobin and his victim with profound
interest, and now advanced to where the poor youth lay. He was a priest,
and though thirteen years had passed over his head since we saw him in
the chateau, and though toil and suffering and anxiety had added the
traces of as many more: yet it would not have been difficult to
recognize the towering height, the candid face, and finally the large
thumb in the little book of ----, Monsieur the Preceptor, who had years
ago exchanged his old position for a parochial cure. He strode up to the
gaoler (whose head came a little above the priest's elbow), and drawing
him aside, asked with his old abruptness, "Who is this?"
"It is the Vicomte de B----. I know his face. He has escaped the
commissaires for some days."
"I thought so. Is his name on the registers?"
"No. He escaped arrest, and has just been brought in as you saw."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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