Part 15 (1/2)
Germain was so shaken that for a moment he had an intention of running for a cabriolet to take him to Paris to intercede with the magistrates in the affair. He was about to follow his impulse when a consideration startled him. He had heard the Prince repeatedly speak with satisfaction of the capture of the highwaymen. To interfere with the arrests, he saw, would shock the robbed family; it would banish him, he thought, from the circle of Cyrene. The question troubled him. In a few moments he decided it: he must stretch out a hand of mercy to this woman.
Following the custom among beggars, she watched his countenance furtively during her appeals, interpreting its changes more accurately than he himself was doing, and at its last expression her eyes flashed with triumph.
”Go; I will help you,” he said to her in an agitated voice, and calling Dominique, added with great courtesy, ”See Madame to the gates, and help her in any way you can.”
But no sooner had she left the chamber than a thought which angered him came like a flash, and stepping to the door, he called them back.
”You say these men are your sons?” he said severely, when she had come into the room; ”let me see your face.”
She shrank from him and hid it more deeply in her hood.
”The man who was a cultivator is forty years of age; you are no more,”
he p.r.o.nounced, ”how can you be his mother?”
A few mumbled words pa.s.sed her lips, but he did not listen to them.
”The three are from three different families, three different ranks, three different Provinces, and yet you have pretended to be the parent of all of them. You are the parent of none of them, but have come here to shamefully impose upon my feelings. What you are is a confederate of the gang. Had you been the woman you have pretended I was ready to make sacrifices for you, the extent of which you cannot know. But if, instead of returning sons to a mother, I am to loose again three most dangerous criminals upon the country, it is a different affair. Be well satisfied that I do not immediately have yourself convicted as their accomplice.”
In his anger he motioned her to be off, and she, dropping the piece of gold which he had given her, crept away with alacrity, not daring to venture a word.
It was only as she pa.s.sed down through the Prince's halls behind Dominique that she allowed her fury full possession of her, and as she glanced about on the evidences of luxury, she gnashed her teeth and hissed half aloud--
”Ah, but I would stick your throats, you fat hogs!”
”What do you say, Madame?” inquired Dominique.
”Nothing at all.”
Germain threw himself again upon his chair and gave himself up to misery.
CHAPTER XVI
BROKEN ON THE WHEEL
The prisoners were condemned to death, in the terrible form of breaking on the wheel. Wife Gougeon and the Admiral returned late on the last night before the execution to the old-iron shop, dismayed and ferocious.
Her vanity was deeply hurt by the failure of her plan. In the back of the shop, among piles of horse-shoes, locks, spikes, and bars, a meeting of the Big Bench of the Galley-on-land was held to decide the course to be taken. The yellow light of the dip threw their shadows into the recesses and shed its flicker on their faces. Gougeon sat picking at the candle-grease in his apathetic way. Hache cheerfully threw himself on a long box. The Admiral stood wrapped in his cloak, melodramatic as usual.
Femme Gougeon pushed into the centre.
”Men, or whatever you call yourselves,” she hissed, throwing her grimy arm into the air, ”will you let la Tour, Bec, and Caron die like dogs?”
and her deep-set eyes scintillated from one to the other.
A sullen silence ensued.
Finding no reply, she rushed to the window-sill at the rear and took down an a.s.sortment of pike-heads and stilletti, with which were a couple of pistols. She thrust a dirk or pike-head into the hand of each, but to the Admiral she gave one of the pistols; the other she kept.
”There,” shrieked she furiously, raising her arm to its full height with the pistol. ”That is what I say about this.”