I Will Repay by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

  CHAPTER XVIII

  In the Luxembourg prison.

  Juliette was alone at last--that is to say, comparatively alone, forthere were too many aristocrats, too many criminals and traitors, in theprisons of Paris now, to allow of any seclusion of those who were aboutto be tried, condemned, and guillotined.

  The young girl had been marched through the crowded streets of Paris,followed by a jeering mob, who readily recognised in the gentle,high-bred girl the obvious prey, which the Committee of Public Safetywas wont, from time to time to throw to the hungry hydra-headed dog ofthe Revolution.

  Lately the squalid spectators of the noisome spectacle on the Place dela Guillotine had had few of these very welcome sights: an aristocrat--a real, elegant, refined woman, with white hands and proud, paleface--mounting the steps of the same scaffold on which perished thevilest criminals and most degraded brutes.

  Madame Guillotine was, above all, catholic in her tastes, her gauntarms, painted blood red, were open alike to the murderer and the thief,the aristocrats of ancient lineage, and the proletariat from the gutter.

  But lately the executions had been almost exclusively of a politicalcharacter. The Girondins were fighting their last upon the bloody arenaof the Revolution. One by one they fell still fighting, still preachingmoderation, still foretelling disaster and appealing to that people,whom they had roused from one slavery, in order to throw it headlongunder a tyrannical yoke more brutish, more absolute than before.

  There were twelve prisons in Paris then, and forty thousand in France,and they were all full. An entire army went round the country recruitingprisoners. There was no room for separate cells, no room for privacy, nocause or desire for the most elementary sense of delicacy.

  Women, men, children--all were herded together, for one day, perhapstwo, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the pettyannoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity.

  Death levelled all, erased everything.

  When Marie Antoinette mounted the guillotine she had forgotten that forsix weeks she practically lived day and night in the immediatecompanionship of a set of degraded soldiery.

  Juliette, as she marched through the streets between two men of theNational Guard, and followed by Merlin, was hooted and jeered at,insulted, pelted with mud. One woman tried to push past the soldiers,and to strike her in the face--a woman! not thirty!--and who wasdragging a pale, squalid little boy by the hand.

  "_Crache donc sur l'aristo, voyons!_" the woman said to this poor,miserable little scrap of humanity as the soldiers pushed her roughlyaside. "Spit on the aristocrat!" And the child tortured its own small,parched mouth so that, in obedience to its mother, it might defile andbespatter a beautiful, innocent girl.

  The soldiers laughed, and improved the occasion with another insultingjest. Even Merlin forgot his vexation, delighted at the incident.

  But Juliette had seen nothing of it all.

  She was walking as in a dream. The mob did not exist for her; she heardneither insult nor vituperation. She did not see the evil, dirty facespushed now and then quite close to her; she did not feel the rough handsof the soldiers jostling her through the crowd: she had gone back to herown world of romance, where she dwelt alone now with the man she loved.Instead of the squalid houses of Paris, with their eternal device ofFraternity and Equality, there were beautiful trees and shrubs of laureland of roses around her, making the air fragrant with their soft,intoxicating perfumes; sweet voices from the land of dreams filled theatmosphere with their tender murmur, whilst overhead a cloudless skyillumined this earthly paradise.

  She was happy--supremely, completely happy. She had saved him from theconsequences of her own iniquitous crime, and she was about to give herlife for him, so that his safety might be more completely assured.

  Her love for him he would never know; now he knew only her crime, butpresently, when she would be convicted and condemned, confronted with afew scraps of burned paper and a torn letter-case, then he would knowthat she had stood her trial, self-accused, and meant to die for him.

  Therefore the past few moments were now wholly hers. She had the rightsto dwell on those few happy seconds when she listened to the avowal ofhis love. It was ethereal, and perhaps not altogether human, but it washers. She had been his divinity, his madonna; he had loved in her that,which was her truer, her better self.

  What was base in her was not truly her. That awful oath, sworn sosolemnly, had been her relentless tyrant; and her religion--a religionof superstition and of false ideals--had blinded her, and dragged herinto crime.

  She had arrogated to herself that which was God's alone--"Vengeance!"which is not for man.

  That through it all she should have known love, and learned its tendersecrets, was more than she deserved. That she should have felt hisburning kisses on her hand was heavenly compensation for all she wouldhave to suffer.

  And so she allowed them to drag her through the sansculotte mob ofParis, who would have torn her to pieces then and there, so as not todelay the pleasure of seeing her die.

  They took her to the Luxembourg, once the palace of the Medici, the homeof proud "Monsieur" in the days of the Great Monarch, now a loathsome,overfilled prison.

  It was then six o'clock in the afternoon, drawing towards the close ofthis memorable day. She was handed over to the governor of the prison, ashort, thick-set man in black trousers and black-shag woollen shirt, andwearing a dirty red cap, with tricolour rosette on the side of hisunkempt head.

  He eyed her up and down as she passed under the narrow doorway, thenmurmured one swift query to Merlin:

  "Dangerous?"

  "Yes," replied Merlin laconically.

  "You understand," added the governor; "we are so crowded. We ought toknow if individual attention is required."

  "Certainly," said Merlin, "you will be personally responsible for thisprisoner to the Committee of Public Safety."

  "Any visitors allowed?"

  "Certainly not, without the special permission of the PublicProsecutor."

  Juliette heard this brief exchange of words over her future fate.

  No visitor would be allowed to see her. Well, perhaps that would bebest. She would have been afraid to meet Deroulede again, afraid to readin his eyes that story of his dead love, which alone might havedestroyed her present happiness.

  And she wished to see no one. She had a memory to dwell on--a short,heavenly memory. It consisted of a few words, a kiss--the last one--onher hand, and that passionate murmur which had escaped from his lipswhen he knelt at her feet:

  "Juliette!"