Melchior's Dream and Other TalesEwing, Juliana Horatia
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Melchior's Dream and Other Tales
Ewing, Juliana Horatia
Children's stories, English; Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
The young man held it to the other and spoke. "It was 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 tricolour 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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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