The Shoes of Fortune

“I have what amounts almost to a genius for losing the opportunities of which I do not desire to avail myself,” said Father Hamilton with a whimsical smile.

And then he had lain in disgrace with the Jesuits for a number of years until it became manifest (as he confessed with shame) that his experience of leisure, wealth, and travel had enough corrupted him to make the prospect of a second adventure of a similar kind pleasing. At that time Charles, lost to the sight of Europe, and only discovered at brief and tantalising intervals by the Jesuit agents, scarce slept two nights in the same town, but went from country to country incognito, so that ‘twas no trivial task Father Hamilton undertook to run him to earth.

“The difficulty of it – indeed the small likelihood there was of my ever seeing him,” he said, “was what mainly induced me to accept the office, though in truth it was compelled. I was doing very well at Dunkerque,” he went on, “and very happy if I had never heard more of prince or priesthood, when Father Fleuriau sent me a hurried intimation that my victim was due at Versailles on Easter and ordered my instant departure there.”

The name of Fleuriau recalled me to my senses. “Stop, stop, Father Hamilton!” I cried, “I must hear no more.”

“What!” said he, bitterly, “is’t too good a young gentleman to listen to the confession of a happy murderer that has failed at his trade?”

“I have no feeling left but pity,” said I, almost like to weep at this, “but you have been put into this cell along with me for a purpose.”

“And what might that be, M. Greig?” he asked, looking round about him, and seeing for the first time, I swear, the sort of place he was in. “Faith! it is comfort, at any rate; I scarce noticed that, in my pleasure at seeing Paul Greig again.”

“You must not tell me any more of your Jesuit plot, nor name any of those involved in the same, for Buhot has been at me to cock an ear to everything you may say in that direction, and betray you and your friends. It is for that he has put us together into this cell.”

“Pardieu! am not I betrayed enough already?” cried the priest, throwing up his hands. “I’ll never deny my guilt.”

“Yes,” I said, “but they want the names of your fellow conspirators, and Buhot says they never expect them directly from you.”

“He does, does he?” said the priest, smiling. “Faith, M. Buhot has a good memory for his friend’s characteristics. No, M. Greig, if they put this comfortable carcase to the rack itself. And was that all thy concern? Well, as I was saying – let us speak low lest some one be listening – this Father Fleuriau-”

Again I stopped him.

“You put me into a hard position, Father Hamilton,” I said. “My freedom – my life, perhaps – depends on whether I can tell them your secret or not, and here you throw it in my face.”

“And why not?” he asked, simply. “I merely wish to show myself largely the creature of circumstances, and so secure a decent Scot’s most favourable opinion of me before the end.”

“But I might be tempted to betray you.”

The old eagle looked again out at his eyes. He gently slapped my cheek with a curious touch of fondness almost womanly, and gave a low, contented laugh.

“Farceur!” he said. “As if I did not know my Don Dolorous, my merry Andrew’s nephew!” His confidence hugely moved me, and, lest he should think I feared to trust myself with his secrets, I listened to the remainder of his story, which I shall not here set down, as it bears but slightly on my own narrative, and may even yet be revealed only at cost of great distress among good families, not only on the Continent but in London itself.

When he had done, he thanked me for listening so attentively to a matter that was so much on his mind that it gave him relief to share it with some one. “And not only for that, M. Greig,” said he, “are my thanks due, for you saved the life that might have been the prince’s instead of my old gossip, Buhot’s. To take the bullet out of my pistol was the device your uncle himself would have followed in the like circumstances.”

“But I did not do that!” I protested.

He looked incredulous.

“Buhot said as much,” said he; “he let it out unwittingly that I had had my claws clipped by my own household.”

“Then assuredly not by me, Father Hamilton.”

“So!” said he, half incredulous, and a look of speculation came upon his countenance.

CHAPTER XXIV

PHILOSOPHY IN A FELON’S CELL

It seemed for a while as if we were fated to lie forgotten in Bicêtre till the crack of doom; not that we were many days there when all was done, but that in our natural hourly expectation at first of being called forth for trial the hours passed so sluggishly that Time seemed finally to sleep, and a week, to our fancy – to mine at all events – seemed a month at the most modest computation.

I should have lost my reason but for the company of the priest, who, for considerations best known to others and to me monstrously inadequate, was permitted all the time to share my cell. In his singular society there was a recreation that kept me from too feverishly brooding on my wrongs, and his character every day presented fresh features of interest and admiration. He had become quite cheerful again, and as content in the confine of his cell as he had been when the glass coach was jolting over the early stages of what had been intended for a gay procession round the courts of Europe. Once more he affected the Roman manner that was due to his devotion to Shakespeare and L’Estrange’s Seneca, and “Clarissa Harlowe,” a knowledge of which, next to the Scriptures, he counted the first essentials for a polite education. I protest he grew fatter every day, and for ease his corpulence was at last saved the restraint of buttons, which was an indolent indulgence so much to his liking that of itself it would have reconciled him to spend the remainder of his time in prison.

“Tiens! Paul,” he would say, “here’s an old fool has blundered through the greater part of his life without guessing till now how easy a thing content is to come by. Why, ‘tis no more than a loose waistcoat and a chemise unbuttoned at the neck. I dared not be happy thus in Dixmunde, where the folks were plaguily particular that their priest should be point-devise, as if mortal man had time to tend his soul and keep a constant eye on the lace of his fall.”

And he would stretch himself – a very mountain of sloth – in his chair.

With me ‘twas different. Even in a gaol I felt sure a day begun untidily was a day ill-done by. If I had no engagements with the fastidious fashionable world I had engagements with myself; moreover, I shared my father’s sentiment, that a good day’s darg of work with any thinking in it was never done in a pair of slippers down at the heel. Thus I was as peijink (as we say) in Bicêtre as I would have been at large in the genteel world.

“Not,” he would admit, “but that I love to see thee in a decent habit, and so constant plucking at thy hose, for I have been young myself, and had some right foppish follies, too. But now, my good man Dandiprat, my petit-maître, I am old – oh, so old! – and know so much of wisdom, and have seen such a confusion of matters, that I count comfort the greatest of blessings. The devil fly away with buttons and laces! say I, that have been parish priest of Dixmunde – and happily have not killed a man nor harmed a flea, though like enough to get killed myself.”

The weather was genial, yet he sat constantly hugging the fire, and I at the window, which happily gave a prospect of the yard between our building and that of Galbanon. I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom, while he went prating on upon the scurviest philosophy surely ever man gave air to.

“Behold, my scrivener, how little man wants for happiness! My constant fear in Dixmunde was that I would become so useless for all but eating and sleeping, when I was old, that no one would guarantee me either; poverty took that place at my table the skull took among the Romans – the thought on’t kept me in a perpetual apprehension. Nom de chien! and this was what I feared – this, a hard lodging, coarse viands, and sour wine! What was the fellow’s name? – Demetrius, upon the taking of Megara, asked Monsieur Un-tel the Philosopher what he had lost. ‘Nothing at all,’ said he, ‘for I have all that I could call my own about me,’ and yet ‘twas no more than the skin he stood in. A cell in Bicêtre would have been paradise to such a gallant fellow. Oh, Paul, I fear thou may’st be ungrateful – I would be looking out there, and perhaps pining for freedom,” he went prating on, “to this good Buhot, who has given us such a fine lodging, and saved us the care of providing for ourselves.”

“‘Tis all very well, father,” I said, leaning on the sill of the window, and looking at a gang of prisoners being removed from one part of Galbanon to another – “‘tis all very well, but I mind a priest that thought jaunting round the country in a chariot the pinnacle of bliss. And that was no further gone than a fortnight ago.”

“Bah!” said he, and stretched his fat fingers to the fire; “he that cannot live happily anywhere will live happily nowhere at all. What avails travel, if Care waits like a hostler to unyoke the horses at every stage? I tell thee, my boy, I never know what a fine fellow is Father Hamilton till I have him by himself at a fireside; ‘tis by firesides all the wisest notions come to one.”

“I wish there came a better dinner than to-day’s,” said I, for we had agreed an hour ago that smoked soup was not very palatable.

“La! la! la! there goes Sir Gourmet!” cried his reverence. “Have I infected this poor Scot that ate naught but oats ere he saw France, with mine own fever for fine feeding from which, praise le bon Dieu! I have recovered? ‘Tis a brutal entertainment, and unworthy of man, to place his felicity in the service of his senses. I maintain that even smoked soup is pleasant enough on the palate of a man with an easy conscience, and a mind purged of vulgar cares.”

“And you can be happy here, Father Hamilton?”

I asked, astonished at such sentiments from a man before so ill to please.

He heaved like a mountain in travail, and brought forth a peal of laughter out of all keeping with our melancholy situation. “Happy!” said he, “I have never been happy for twenty years till Buhot clapped claw upon my wrist. Thou may’st have seen a sort of mask of happiness, a false face of jollity in Dunkerque parlours, and heard a well-simulated laughter now and then as we drank by wayside inns, but may I be called coxcomb if the miserable wretch who playacted then was half so light of heart as this that sits here at ease, and has only one regret – that he should have dragged Andrew Greig’s nephew into trouble with him. What man can be perfectly happy that runs the risk of disappointment – which is the case of every man that fears or hopes for anything? Here am I, too old for the flame of love or the ardour of ambition; all that knew me and understood me best and liked me most are dead long since. I have a state palace prepared for me free; a domestic in livery to serve my meals; parishioners do not vex me with their trifling little hackneyed sins, and my conclusion seems like to come some morning after an omelet and a glass of wine.”

I could not withhold a shudder.

“But to die that way, Father!” I said.

“C’est égal!” said he, and crossed himself. “We must all die somehow, and I had ever a dread of a stone. Come, come, M. Croque-mort, enough of thy confounded dolours! I’ll be hanged if thou did’st not steal these shoes, and art after all but an impersonator of a Greig. The lusty spirit thou call’st thine uncle would have used his teeth ere now to gnaw his way through the walls of Bicêtre, and here thou must stop to converse cursedly on death to the fatted ox that smells the blood of the abattoir – oh lad, give’s thy snuff-box, sawdust again!”

Thus by the hour went on the poor wretch, resigned most obviously to whatever was in store for him, not so much from a native courage, I fear, as from a plethora of flesh that smothered every instinct of self-preservation. As for me I kept up hope for three days that Buhot would surely come to test my constancy again, and when that seemed unlikely, when day after day brought the same routine, the same cell with Hamilton, the same brief exercise in the yard, the same vulgar struggle at the gamelle in the salle d’épreuve– I could have welcomed Galbanon itself as a change, even if it meant all the horror that had been associated with it by Buhot and my friend the sous-officer.

Galbanon! I hope it has long been levelled with the dust, and even then I know the ghosts of those there tortured in their lives will habitate the same in whirling eddies, for a constant cry for generations has gone up to heaven from that foul spot. It must have been a devilish ingenuity, an invention of all the impish courts below, that placed me at a window where Galbanon faced me every hour of the day or night, its horror all revealed. I have seen in the pool of Earn in autumn weather, when the river was in spate, dead leaves and broken branches borne down dizzily upon the water to toss madly in the linn at the foot of the fall; no less helpless, no less seared by sin and sorrow, or broken by the storms of circumstance, were the wretches that came in droves to Galbanon. The stream of crime or tyranny bore them down (some from very high places), cast them into this boiling pool, and there they eddied in a circle of degraded tasks from which it seemed the fate of many of them never to escape, though their luckier fellows went in twos or threes every other day in a cart to their doom appointed.

Be sure it was not pleasant each day for me to hear the hiss of the lash and the moans of the bastinadoed wretch, to see the blood spurt, and witness the anguish of the men who dragged enormous bilboes on their galled ankles.

At last I felt I could stand it no longer, and one day intimated to Father Hamilton that I was determined on an escape.

“Good lad!” he cried, his eye brightening. “The most sensible thing thou hast said in twenty-four hours. ‘Twill be a recreation for myself to help,” and he buttoned his waistcoat.

“We can surely devise some means of breaking out if – ”

“We!” he repeated, shaking his head. “No, no, Paul, thou hast too risky a task before thee to burden thyself with behemoth. Shalt escape by thyself and a blessing with thee, but as for Father Hamilton he knows when he is well-off, and he shall not stir a step out of Buhot’s charming and commodious inn until the bill is presented.”

In vain I protested that I should not dream of leaving him there while I took flight; he would listen to none of my reasoning, and for that day at least I abandoned the project.

Next day Buhot helped me to a different conclusion, for I was summoned before him.

“Well, Monsieur,” he said, “is it that we have here a more discerning young gentleman than I had the honour to meet last time?”

“Just the very same, M. Buhot,” said I bluntly. He chewed the stump of his pen and shrugged his shoulders.

“Come, come, M. Greig,” he went on, “this is a bêtise of the most ridiculous. We have given you every opportunity of convincing yourself whether this Hamilton is a good man or a bad one, whether he is the tool of others or himself a genius of mischief.”

“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.