L'homme qui rit. English

  CHAPTER IV.

  MOENIBUS SURDIS CAMPANA MUTA.

  Ursus smoothed the felt of the hat, touched the cloth of the cloak, theserge of the coat, the leather of the esclavine, and no longer able todoubt whose garments they were, with a gesture at once brief andimperative, and without saying a word, pointed to the door of the inn.

  Master Nicless opened it.

  Ursus rushed out of the tavern.

  Master Nicless looked after him, and saw Ursus run, as fast as his oldlegs would allow, in the direction taken that morning by the wapentakewho carried off Gwynplaine.

  A quarter of an hour afterwards, Ursus, out of breath, reached thelittle street in which stood the back wicket of the Southwark jail,which he had already watched so many hours. This alley was lonely enoughat all hours; but if dreary during the day, it was portentous in thenight. No one ventured through it after a certain hour. It seemed asthough people feared that the walls should close in, and that if theprison or the cemetery took a fancy to embrace, they should be crushedin their clasp. Such are the effects of darkness. The pollard willows ofthe Ruelle Vauvert in Paris were thus ill-famed. It was said thatduring the night the stumps of those trees changed into great hands, andcaught hold of the passers-by.

  By instinct the Southwark folks shunned, as we have already mentioned,this alley between a prison and a churchyard. Formerly it had beenbarricaded during the night by an iron chain. Very uselessly; becausethe strongest chain which guarded the street was the terror it inspired.

  Ursus entered it resolutely.

  What intention possessed him? None.

  He came into the alley to seek intelligence.

  Was he going to knock at the gate of the jail? Certainly not. Such anexpedient, at once fearful and vain, had no place in his brain. Toattempt to introduce himself to demand an explanation. What folly!Prisons do not open to those who wish to enter, any more than to thosewho desire to get out. Their hinges never turn except by law. Ursus knewthis. Why, then, had he come there? To see. To see what? Nothing. Whocan tell? Even to be opposite the gate through which Gwynplaine haddisappeared was something.

  Sometimes the blackest and most rugged of walls whispers, and some lightescapes through a cranny. A vague glimmering is now and then to beperceived through solid and sombre piles of building. Even to examinethe envelope of a fact may be to some purpose. The instinct of us all isto leave between the fact which interests us and ourselves but thethinnest possible cover. Therefore it was that Ursus returned to thealley in which the lower entrance to the prison was situated.

  Just as he entered it he heard one stroke of the clock, then a second.

  "Hold," thought he; "can it be midnight already?"

  Mechanically he set himself to count.

  "Three, four, five."

  He mused.

  "At what long intervals this clock strikes! how slowly! Six; seven!"

  Then he remarked,--

  "What a melancholy sound! Eight, nine! Ah! nothing can be more natural;it's dull work for a clock to live in a prison. Ten! Besides, there isthe cemetery. This clock sounds the hour to the living, and eternity tothe dead. Eleven! Alas! to strike the hour to him who is not free isalso to chronicle an eternity. Twelve!"

  He paused.

  "Yes, it is midnight."

  The clock struck a thirteenth stroke.

  Ursus shuddered.

  "Thirteen!"

  Then followed a fourteenth; then a fifteenth.

  "What can this mean?"

  The strokes continued at long intervals. Ursus listened.

  "It is not the striking of a clock; it is the bell Muta. No wonder Isaid, 'How long it takes to strike midnight!' This clock does notstrike; it tolls. What fearful thing is about to take place?"

  Formerly all prisons and all monasteries had a bell called Muta,reserved for melancholy occasions. La Muta (the mute) was a bell whichstruck very low, as if doing its best not to be heard.

  Ursus had reached the corner which he had found so convenient for hiswatch, and whence he had been able, during a great part of the day, tokeep his eye on the prison.

  The strokes followed each other at lugubrious intervals.

  A knell makes an ugly punctuation in space. It breaks the preoccupationof the mind into funereal paragraphs. A knell, like a man'sdeath-rattle, notifies an agony. If in the houses about theneighbourhood where a knell is tolled there are reveries straying indoubt, its sound cuts them into rigid fragments. A vague reverie is asort of refuge. Some indefinable diffuseness in anguish allows now andthen a ray of hope to pierce through it. A knell is precise anddesolating. It concentrates this diffusion of thought, and precipitatesthe vapours in which anxiety seeks to remain in suspense. A knell speaksto each one in the sense of his own grief or of his own fear. Tragicbell! it concerns you. It is a warning to you.

  There is nothing so dreary as a monologue on which its cadence falls.The even returns of sound seem to show a purpose.

  What is it that this hammer, the bell, forges on the anvil of thought?

  Ursus counted, vaguely and without motive, the tolling of the knell.Feeling that his thoughts were sliding from him, he made an effort notto let them slip into conjecture. Conjecture is an inclined plane, onwhich we slip too far to be to our own advantage. Still, what was themeaning of the bell?

  He looked through the darkness in the direction in which he knew thegate of the prison to be.

  Suddenly, in that very spot which looked like a dark hole, a rednessshowed. The redness grew larger, and became a light.

  There was no uncertainty about it. It soon took a form and angles. Thegate of the jail had just turned on its hinges. The glow painted thearch and the jambs of the door. It was a yawning rather than an opening.A prison does not open; it yawns--perhaps from ennui. Through the gatepassed a man with a torch in his hand.

  The bell rang on. Ursus felt his attention fascinated by two objects. Hewatched--his ear the knell, his eye the torch. Behind the first man thegate, which had been ajar, enlarged the opening suddenly, and allowedegress to two other men; then to a fourth. This fourth was thewapentake, clearly visible in the light of the torch. In his grasp washis iron staff.

  Following the wapentake, there filed and opened out below the gateway inorder, two by two, with the rigidity of a series of walking posts, ranksof silent men.

  This nocturnal procession stepped through the wicket in file, like aprocession of penitents, without any solution of continuity, with afunereal care to make no noise--gravely, almost gently. A serpent issuesfrom its hole with similar precautions.

  The torch threw out their profiles and attitudes into relief. Fiercelooks, sullen attitudes.

  Ursus recognized the faces of the police who had that morning carriedoff Gwynplaine.

  There was no doubt about it. They were the same. They were reappearing.

  Of course, Gwynplaine would also reappear. They had led him to thatplace; they would bring him back.

  It was all quite clear.

  Ursus strained his eyes to the utmost. Would they set Gwynplaine atliberty?

  The files of police flowed from the low arch very slowly, and, as itwere, drop by drop. The toll of the bell was uninterrupted, and seemedto mark their steps. On leaving the prison, the procession turned theirbacks on Ursus, went to the right, into the bend of the street oppositeto that in which he was posted.

  A second torch shone under the gateway, announcing the end of theprocession.

  Ursus was now about to see what they were bringing with them. Theprisoner--the man.

  Ursus was soon, he thought, to see Gwynplaine.

  That which they carried appeared.

  It was a bier.

  Four men carried a bier, covered with black cloth.

  Behind them came a man, with a shovel on his shoulder.

  A third lighted torch, held by a man reading a book, probably thechaplain, closed the procession.

  The bier followed the ranks of the police, who had turned to the right.

&
nbsp; Just at that moment the head of the procession stopped.

  Ursus heard the grating of a key.

  Opposite the prison, in the low wall which ran along the other side ofthe street, another opening was illuminated by a torch passing beneathit.

  This gate, over which a death's-head was placed, was that of thecemetery.

  The wapentake passed through it, then the men, then the second torch.The procession decreased therein, like a reptile entering his retreat.

  The files of police penetrated into that other darkness which was beyondthe gate; then the bier; then the man with the spade; then the chaplainwith his torch and his book, and the gate closed.

  There was nothing left but a haze of light above the wall.

  A muttering was heard; then some dull sounds. Doubtless the chaplain andthe gravedigger--the one throwing on the coffin some verses ofScripture, the other some clods of earth.

  The muttering ceased; the heavy sounds ceased. A movement was made. Thetorches shone. The wapentake reappeared, holding high his weapon, underthe reopened gate of the cemetery; then the chaplain with his book, andthe gravedigger with his spade. The _cortege_ reappeared without thecoffin.

  The files of men crossed over in the same order, with the sametaciturnity, and in the opposite direction. The gate of the cemeteryclosed. That of the prison opened. Its sepulchral architecture stood outagainst the light. The obscurity of the passage became vaguely visible.The solid and deep night of the jail was revealed to sight; then thewhole vision disappeared in the depths of shadow.

  The knell ceased. All was locked in silence. A sinister incarceration ofshadows.

  A vanished vision; nothing more.

  A passage of spectres, which had disappeared.

  The logical arrangement of surmises builds up something which at leastresembles evidence. To the arrest of Gwynplaine, to the secret mode ofhis capture, to the return of his garments by the police officer, to thedeath bell of the prison to which he had been conducted, was now added,or rather adjusted--portentous circumstance--a coffin carried to thegrave.

  "He is dead!" cried Ursus.

  He sank down upon a stone.

  "Dead! They have killed him! Gwynplaine! My child! My son!"

  And he burst into passionate sobs.