She had passed the end of the Rue des Morts, when she fancied that she could hear the firm, heavy tread of a man walking behind her. Then it seemed to her that she had heard that sound before, and dismayed by the idea of being followed, she tried to walk faster toward a brightly lit shop window, in the hope of verifying the suspicions which had taken hold of her mind.
So soon as she stood in the shaft of light that streamed out across the road, she turned her head suddenly, and caught sight of a human figure looming through the fog. The dim vision was enough for her. For one moment she reeled beneath an overpowering weight of dread, for she could not doubt any longer that the man had followed her the whole way from her own door; then the desire to escape from the spy gave her strength. Unable to think clearly, she walked twice as fast as before, as if it were possible to escape from a man who of course could move much faster; and for some minutes she fled on, till, reaching a pastry-cook’s shop, she entered and sank rather than sat down upon a chair by the counter.
A young woman busy with embroidery looked up from her work at the rattling of the door-latch, and looked out through the square window-panes. She seemed to recognize the old-fashioned violet silk mantle, for she went at once to a drawer as if in search of something put aside for the newcomer. Not only did this movement and the expression of the woman’s face show a very evident desire to be rid as soon as possible of an unwelcome visitor, but she even permitted herself an impatient exclamation when the drawer proved to be empty. Without looking at the lady, she hurried from her desk into the back shop and called to her husband, who appeared at once.
“Wherever have you put? — — ” she began mysteriously, glancing at the customer by way of finishing her question.
The pastry-cook could only see the old lady’s head-dress, a huge black silk bonnet with knots of violet ribbon round it, but he looked at his wife as if to say, “Did you think I should leave such a thing as that lying about in your drawer?” and then vanished.
The old lady kept so still and silent that the shopkeeper’s wife was surprised. She went back to her, and on a nearer view a sudden impulse of pity, blended perhaps with curiosity, got the better of her. The old lady’s face was naturally pale; she looked as though she secretly practised austerities; but it was easy to see that she was paler than usual from recent agitation of some kind. Her head-dress was so arranged as to almost hide hair that was white, no doubt with age, for there was not a trace of powder on the collar of her dress. The extreme plainness of her dress lent an air of austerity to her face, and her features were proud and grave. The manners and habits of people of condition were so different from those of other classes in former times that a noble was easily known, and the shopkeeper’s wife felt persuaded that her customer was a ci-devant, and that she had been about the Court.
“Madame,” she began with involuntary respect, forgetting that the title was proscribed.
But the old lady made no answer. She was staring fixedly at the shop windows as though some dreadful thing had taken shape against the panes. The pastry-cook came back at that moment, and drew the lady from her musings, by holding out a little cardboard box wrapped in blue paper.
“What is the matter, citoyenne?” he asked.
“Nothing, nothing, my friends,” she answered, in a gentle voice. She looked up at the man as she spoke, as if to thank him by a glance; but she saw the red cap on his head, and a cry broke from her. “Ah! You have betrayed me!”
The man and his young wife replied by an indignant gesture, that brought the color to the old lady’s face; perhaps she felt relief, perhaps she blushed for her suspicions.
“Forgive me!” she said, with a childlike sweetness in her tones. Then, drawing a gold louis from her pocket, she held it out to the pastry-cook. “That is the price agreed upon,” she added.
There is a kind of want that is felt instinctively by those who know want. The man and his wife looked at one another, then at the elderly woman before them, and read the same thoughts in each other’s eyes. That bit of gold was so plainly the last. Her hands shook a little as she held it out, looking at it sadly but ungrudgingly, as one who knows the full extent of the sacrifice. Hunger and penury had carved lines as easy to read in her face as the traces of asceticism and fear. There were vestiges of bygone splendor in her clothes. She was dressed in threadbare silk, a neat but well-worn mantle, and daintily mended lace, — in the rags of former grandeur, in short. The shopkeeper and his wife, drawn two ways by pity and self-interest, began by lulling their consciences with words.
“You seem very poorly, citoyenne — — ”
“Perhaps madame might like to take something,” the wife broke in.
“We have some very nice broth,” added the pastry-cook.
“And it is so cold,” continued his wife; “perhaps you have caught a chill, madame, on your way here. But you can rest and warm yourself a bit.”
“We are not so black as the devil!” cried the man.
The kindly intention in the words and tones of the charitable couple won the old lady’s confidence. She said that a strange man had been following her, and she was afraid to go home alone.
“Is that all!” returned he of the red bonnet; “wait for me, citoyenne.”
He handed the gold coin to his wife, and then went out to put on his National Guard’s uniform, impelled thereto by the idea of making some adequate return for the money; an idea that sometimes slips into a tradesman’s head when he has been prodigiously overpaid for goods of no great value. He took up his cap, buckled on his sabre, and came out in full dress. But his wife had had time to reflect, and reflection, as not unfrequently happens, closed the hand that kindly intentions had opened. Feeling frightened and uneasy lest her husband might be drawn into something unpleasant, she tried to catch at the skirt of his coat, to hold him back, but he, good soul, obeying his charitable first thought, brought out his offer to see the lady home, before his wife could stop him.
“The man of whom the citoyenne is afraid is still prowling about the shop, it seems,” she said sharply.
“I am afraid so,” said the lady innocently.
“How if it is a spy?... a plot?... Don’t go. And take the box away from her — — ”
The words whispered in the pastry-cook’s ear cooled his hot fit of courage down to zero.
“Oh! I will just go out and say a word or two. I will rid you of him soon enough,” he exclaimed, as he bounced out of the shop.
The old lady meanwhile, passive as a child and almost dazed, sat down on her chair again. But the honest pastry-cook came back directly. A countenance red enough to begin with, and further flushed by the bake-house fire, was suddenly blanched; such terror perturbed him that he reeled as he walked, and stared about him like a drunken man.
“Miserable aristocrat! Do you want to have our heads cut off?” he shouted furiously. “You just take to your heels and never show yourself here again. Don’t come to me for materials for your plots.”
He tried, as he spoke, to take away the little box which she had slipped into one of her pockets. But at the touch of a profane hand on her clothes, the stranger recovered youth and activity for a moment, preferring to face the dangers of the street with no protector save God, to the loss of the thing she had just paid for. She sprang to the door, flung it open, and disappeared, leaving the husband and wife dumfounded and quaking with fright.
Once outside in the street, she started away at a quick walk; but her strength soon failed her. She heard the sound of the snow crunching under a heavy step, and knew that the pitiless spy was on her track. She was obliged to stop. He stopped likewise. From sheer terror, or lack of intelligence, she did not dare to speak or to look at him. She went slowly on; the man slackened his pace and fell behind so that he could still keep her in sight. He might have been her very shadow.
Nine o’clock struck as the silent man and woman passed again by the Church of Saint Laurent. It is in the nature of things that calm must succeed to viole
nt agitation, even in the weakest soul; for if feeling is infinite, our capacity to feel is limited. So, as the stranger lady met with no harm from her supposed persecutor, she tried to look upon him as an unknown friend anxious to protect her. She thought of all the circumstances in which the stranger had appeared, and put them together, as if to find some ground for this comforting theory, and felt inclined to credit him with good intentions rather than bad.
Forgetting the fright that he had given the pastry-cook, she walked on with a firmer step through the upper end of the Faubourg Saint Martin; and another half-hour’s walk brought her to a house at the corner where the road to the Barriere de Pantin turns off from the main thoroughfare. Even at this day, the place is one of the least frequented parts of Paris. The north wind sweeps over the Buttes-Chaumont and Belleville, and whistles through the houses (the Hovels rather), scattered over an almost uninhabited low-lying waste, Where the fences are heaps of earth and bones. It was a desolate-looking place, a fitting refuge for despair and misery.
The sight of it appeared to make an impression upon the relentless pursuer of a poor creature so daring as to walk alone at night through the silent streets. He stood in thought, and seemed by his attitude to hesitate. She could see him dimly now, under the street lamp that sent a faint, flickering light through the fog. Fear gave her eyes. She saw, or thought she saw, something sinister about the stranger’s features. Her old terrors awoke; she took advantage of a kind of hesitation on his part, slipped through the shadows to the door of the solitary house, pressed a spring, and vanished swiftly as a phantom.
For awhile the stranger stood motionless, gazing up at the house. It was in some sort a type of the wretched dwellings in the suburb; a tumble-down hovel, built of rough stones, daubed over with a coat of yellowish stucco, and so riven with great cracks that there seemed to be danger lest the slightest puff of wind might blow it down. The roof, covered with brown moss-grown tiles, had given way in several places, and looked as though it might break down altogether under the weight of the snow. The frames of the three windows on each story were rotten with damp and warped by the sun; evidently the cold must find its way inside. The house standing thus quite by itself looked like some old tower that Time had forgotten to destroy. A faint light shone from the attic windows pierced at irregular distances in the roof; otherwise the whole building was in total darkness.
Meanwhile the old lady climbed not without difficulty up the rough, clumsily built staircase, with a rope by way of a hand-rail. At the door of the lodging in the attic she stopped and tapped mysteriously; an old man brought forward a chair for her. She dropped into it at once.
“Hide! hide!” she exclaimed, looking up at him. “Seldom as we leave the house, everything that we do is known, and every step is watched — — ”
“What is it now?” asked another elderly woman, sitting by the fire.
“The man that has been prowling about the house yesterday and to-day, followed me to-night — — ”
At those words all three dwellers in the wretched den looked in each other’s faces and did not try to dissimulate the profound dread that they felt. The old priest was the least overcome, probably because he ran the greatest danger. If a brave man is weighed down by great calamities or the yoke of persecution, he begins, as it were, by making the sacrifice of himself; and thereafter every day of his life becomes one more victory snatched from fate. But from the way in which the women looked at him it was easy to see that their intense anxiety was on his account.
“Why should our faith in God fail us, my sisters?” he said, in low but fervent tones. “We sang His praises through the shrieks of murderers and their victims at the Carmelites. If it was His will that I should come alive out of that butchery, it was, no doubt, because I was reserved for some fate which I am bound to endure without murmuring. God will protect His own; He can do with them according to His will. It is for you, not for me that we must think.”
“No,” answered one of the women. “What is our life compared to a priest’s life?”
“Once outside the Abbaye de Chelles, I look upon myself as dead,” added the nun who had not left the house, while the Sister that had just returned held out the little box to the priest.
“Here are the wafers... but I can hear some one coming up the stairs.”
At this, the three began to listen. The sound ceased.
“Do not be alarmed if somebody tries to come in,” said the priest. “Somebody on whom we could depend was to make all necessary arrangements for crossing the frontier. He is to come for the letters that I have written to the Duc de Langeais and the Marquis de Beauseant, asking them to find some way of taking you out of this dreadful country, and away from the death or the misery that waits for you here.”
“But are you not going to follow us?” the nuns cried under their breath, almost despairingly.
“My post is here where the sufferers are,” the priest said simply, and the women said no more, but looked at their guest in reverent admiration. He turned to the nun with the wafers.
“Sister Marthe,” he said, “the messenger will say Fiat Voluntas in answer to the word Hosanna.”
“There is some one on the stairs!” cried the other nun, opening a hiding-place contrived in the roof.
This time it was easy to hear, amid the deepest silence, a sound echoing up the staircase; it was a man’s tread on the steps covered with dried lumps of mud. With some difficulty the priest slipped into a kind of cupboard, and the nun flung some clothes over him.
“You can shut the door, Sister Agathe,” he said in a muffled voice.
He was scarcely hidden before three raps sounded on the door. The holy women looked into each other’s eyes for counsel, and dared not say a single word.
They seemed both to be about sixty years of age. They had lived out of the world for forty years, and had grown so accustomed to the life of the convent that they could scarcely imagine any other. To them, as to plants kept in a hot-house, a change of air meant death. And so, when the grating was broken down one morning, they knew with a shudder that they were free. The effect produced by the Revolution upon their simple souls is easy to imagine; it produced a temporary imbecility not natural to them. They could not bring the ideas learned in the convent into harmony with life and its difficulties; they could not even understand their own position. They were like children whom mothers have always cared for, deserted by their maternal providence. And as a child cries, they betook themselves to prayer. Now, in the presence of imminent danger, they were mute and passive, knowing no defence save Christian resignation.
The man at the door, taking silence for consent, presented himself, and the women shuddered. This was the prowler that had been making inquiries about them for some time past. But they looked at him with frightened curiosity, much as shy children stare silently at a stranger; and neither of them moved.
The newcomer was a tall, burly man. Nothing in his behavior, bearing, or expression suggested malignity as, following the example set by the nuns, he stood motionless, while his eyes traveled round the room.
Two straw mats laid upon planks did duty as beds. On the one table, placed in the middle of the room, stood a brass candlestick, several plates, three knives, and a round loaf. A small fire burned in the grate. A few bits of wood in a heap in a corner bore further witness to the poverty of the recluses. You had only to look at the coating of paint on the walls to discover the bad condition of the roof, and the ceiling was a perfect network of brown stains made by rain-water. A relic, saved no doubt from the wreck of the Abbaye de Chelles, stood like an ornament on the chimney-piece. Three chairs, two boxes, and a rickety chest of drawers completed the list of the furniture, but a door beside the fireplace suggested an inner room beyond.
The brief inventory was soon made by the personage introduced into their midst under such terrible auspices. It was with a compassionate expression that he turned to the two women; he looked benevolently at them, and seemed, at least, as m
uch embarrassed as they. But the strange silence did not last long, for presently the stranger began to understand. He saw how inexperienced, how helpless (mentally speaking), the two poor creatures were, and he tried to speak gently.
“I am far from coming as an enemy, citoyennes — — ” he began. Then he suddenly broke off and went on, “Sisters, if anything should happen to you, believe me, I shall have no share in it. I have come to ask a favor of you.”
Still the women were silent.
“If I am annoying you — if — if I am intruding, speak freely, and I will go; but you must understand that I am entirely at your service; that if I can do anything for you, you need not fear to make use of me. I, and I only, perhaps, am above the law, since there is no King now.”
There was such a ring of sincerity in the words that Sister Agathe hastily pointed to a chair as if to bid their guest be seated. Sister Agathe came of the house of Langeais; her manner seemed to indicate that once she had been familiar with brilliant scenes, and had breathed the air of courts. The stranger seemed half pleased, half distressed when he understood her invitation; he waited to sit down until the women were seated.
“You are giving shelter to a reverend father who refused to take the oath, and escaped the massacres at the Carmelites by a miracle — — ”
“Hosanna!” Sister Agathe exclaimed eagerly, interrupting the stranger, while she watched him with curious eyes.
“That is not the name, I think,” he said.
“But, monsieur,” Sister Marthe broke in quickly, “we have no priest here, and — — ”
“In that case you should be more careful and on your guard,” he answered gently, stretching out his hand for a breviary that lay on the table. “I do not think that you know Latin, and — — ”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 872