第 22 页

brought the town no nearer; and the man was yet hungrier, and thirstier,

and wearier, when his feet were on its jagged pavement, and he stood

looking about him.

There was the hotel with its gateway, and its savoury smell of cooking;

there was the cafe with its bright windows, and its rattling of

dominoes; there was the dyer's with its strips of red cloth on the

doorposts; there was the silversmith's with its earrings, and its

offerings for altars; there was the tobacco dealer's with its lively

group of soldier customers coming out pipe in mouth; there were the bad

odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels, and

the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence, and its

mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails tied up,

getting under weigh at the coach office. But no small cabaret for a

straitened traveller being within sight, he had to seek one round the

dark corner, where the cabbage leaves lay thickest, trodden about the

public cistern at which women had not yet left off drawing water. There,

in the back street he found one, the Break of Day. The curtained windows

clouded the Break of Day, but it seemed light and warm, and it announced

in legible inscriptions with appropriate pictorial embellishment

of billiard cue and ball, that at the Break of Day one could play

billiards; that there one could find meat, drink, and lodgings, whether

one came on horseback, or came on foot; and that it kept good wines,

liqueurs, and brandy. The man turned the handle of the Break of Day

door, and limped in.

He touched his discoloured slouched hat, as he came in at the door, to

a few men who occupied the room. Two were playing dominoes at one of the

little tables; three or four were seated round the stove, conversing

as they smoked; the billiard-table in the centre was left alone for the

time; the landlady of the Daybreak sat behind her little counter among

her cloudy bottles of syrups, baskets of cakes, and leaden drainage for

glasses, working at her needle.

Making his way to an empty little table in a corner of the room behind

the stove, he put down his knapsack and his cloak upon the ground. As

he raised his head from stooping to do so, he found the landlady beside

him.

'One can lodge here to-night, madame?'

'Perfectly!' said the landlady in a high, sing-song, cheery voice.

'Good. One can dine--sup--what you please to call it?'

'Ah, perfectly!' cried the landlady as before. 'Dispatch then, madame,

if you please. Something to eat, as quickly as you can; and some wine at

once. I am exhausted.'

'It is very bad weather, monsieur,' said the landlady.

'Cursed weather.'

'And a very long road.'

'A cursed road.'

His hoarse voice failed him, and he rested his head upon his hands until

a bottle of wine was brought from the counter. Having filled and emptied

his little tumbler twice, and having broken off an end from the great

loaf that was set before him with his cloth and napkin, soup-plate,

salt, pepper, and oil, he rested his back against the corner of the

wall, made a couch of the bench on which he sat, and began to chew

crust, until such time as his repast should be ready. There had been

that momentary interruption of the talk about the stove, and that

temporary inattention to and distraction from one another, which is

usually inseparable in such a company from the arrival of a stranger. It

had passed over by this time; and the men had done glancing at him, and

were talking again.

'That's the true reason,' said one of them, bringing a story he had

been telling, to a close, 'that's the true reason why they said that the

devil was let loose.' The speaker was the tall Swiss belonging to the

church, and he brought something of the authority of the church into the

discussion--especially as the devil was in question.

The landlady having given her directions for the new guest's

entertainment to her husband, who acted as cook to the Break of Day, had

resumed her needlework behind her counter. She was a smart, neat, bright

little woman, with a good deal of cap and a good deal of stocking, and

she struck into the conversation with several laughing nods of her head,

but without looking up from her work.

'Ah Heaven, then,' said she. 'When the boat came up from Lyons, and

brought the news that the devil was actually let loose at Marseilles,

some fly-catchers swallowed it. But I? No, not I.'

'Madame, you are always right,' returned the tall Swiss. 'Doubtless you

were enraged against that man, madame?'

'Ay, yes, then!' cried the landlady, raising her eyes from her work,

opening them very wide, and tossing her head on one side. 'Naturally,

yes.'

'He was a bad subject.'

'He was a wicked wretch,' said the landlady, 'and well merited what he

had the good fortune to escape. So much the worse.'

'Stay, madame! Let us see,' returned the Swiss, argumentatively turning

his cigar between his lips. 'It may have been his unfortunate destiny.

He may have been the child of circumstances. It is always possible that

he had, and has, good in him if one did but know how to find it out.

Philosophical philanthropy teaches--'

The rest of the little knot about the stove murmured an objection to

the introduction of that threatening expression. Even the two players

at dominoes glanced up from their game, as if to protest against

philosophical philanthropy being brought by name into the Break of Day.

'Hold there, you and your philanthropy,' cried the smiling landlady,

nodding her head more than ever. 'Listen then. I am a woman, I. I know

nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and

what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself.

And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women

both, unfortunately) who have no good in them--none. That there are

people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are

people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there

are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage

beasts and cleared out of the way. They are but few, I hope; but I have

seen (in this world here where I find myself, and even at the little

Break of Day) that there are such people. And I do not doubt that this

man--whatever they call him, I forget his name--is one of them.'

The landlady's lively speech was received with greater favour at

the Break of Day, than it would have elicited from certain amiable

whitewashers of the class she so unreasonably objected to, nearer Great

Britain.

'My faith! If your philosophical philanthropy,' said the landlady,

putting down her work, and rising to take the stranger's soup from her

husband, who appeared with it at a side door, 'puts anybody at the mercy

of such people by holding terms with them at all, in words or deeds, or

both, take it away from the Break of Day, for it isn't worth a sou.'

As she placed the soup before the guest, who changed his attitude to a

sitting one, he looked her full in the face, and his moustache went up

under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.

'Well!' said the previous speaker, 'let us come back to our subject.

Leaving all that aside, gentlemen, it was because the man was acquitted

on his trial that people said at Marseilles that the devil was let

loose. That was how the phrase began to circulate, and what it meant;

nothing more.'

'How do they call him?' said the landlady. 'Biraud, is it not?'

'Rigaud, madame,' returned the tall Swiss.

'Rigaud! To be sure.'

The traveller's soup was succeeded by a dish of meat, and that by a dish

of vegetables. He ate all that was placed before him, emptied his bottle

of wine, called for a glass of rum, and smoked his cigarette with

his cup of coffee. As he became refreshed, he became overbearing; and

patronised the company at the Daybreak in certain small talk at which he

assisted, as if his condition were far above his appearance.

The company might have had other engagements, or they might have felt

their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees, and not

being replaced by other company, left their new patron in possession of

the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in his kitchen; the

landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed traveller sat smoking

by the stove, warming his ragged feet.

'Pardon me, madame--that Biraud.'

'Rigaud, monsieur.'

'Rigaud. Pardon me again--has contracted your displeasure, how?'

The landlady, who had been at one moment thinking within herself that

this was a handsome man, at another moment that this was an ill-looking

man, observed the nose coming down and the moustache going up, and

strongly inclined to the latter decision. Rigaud was a criminal, she

said, who had killed his wife.

'Ay, ay? Death of my life, that's a criminal indeed. But how do you know

it?'

'All the world knows it.'

'Hah! And yet he escaped justice?'

'Monsieur, the law could not prove it against him to its satisfaction.

So the law says. Nevertheless, all the world knows he did it. The people

knew it so well, that they tried to tear him to pieces.'

'Being all in perfect accord with their own wives?' said the guest.

'Haha!'

The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt almost

confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though, and he

turned it with a great show. She began once more to think that he was

not ill-looking after all.

'Did you mention, madame--or was it mentioned among the gentlemen--what

became of him?' The landlady shook her head; it being the first

conversational stage at which her vivacious earnestness had ceased to

nod it, keeping time to what she said. It had been mentioned at the

Daybreak, she remarked, on the authority of the journals, that he had

been kept in prison for his own safety. However that might be, he had

escaped his deserts; so much the worse.

The guest sat looking at her as he smoked out his final cigarette, and

as she sat with her head bent over her work, with an expression that

might have resolved her doubts, and brought her to a lasting conclusion

on the subject of his good or bad looks if she had seen it. When she did

look up, the expression was not there. The hand was smoothing his shaggy

moustache. 'May one ask to be shown to bed, madame?'

Very willingly, monsieur. Hola, my husband! My husband would conduct him

up-stairs. There was one traveller there, asleep, who had gone to bed

very early indeed, being overpowered by fatigue; but it was a large

chamber with two beds in it, and space enough for twenty. This the

landlady of the Break of Day chirpingly explained, calling between

whiles, 'Hola, my husband!' out at the side door.

My husband answered at length, 'It is I, my wife!' and presenting

himself in his cook's cap, lighted the traveller up a steep and narrow

staircase; the traveller carrying his own cloak and knapsack, and

bidding the landlady good night with a complimentary reference to the

pleasure of seeing her again to-morrow. It was a large room, with a

rough splintery floor, unplastered rafters overhead, and two bedsteads

on opposite sides. Here 'my husband' put down the candle he carried, and

with a sidelong look at his guest stooping over his knapsack, gruffly

gave him the instruction, 'The bed to the right!' and left him to his

repose. The landlord, whether he was a good or a bad physiognomist, had

fully made up his mind that the guest was an ill-looking fellow.

The guest looked contemptuously at the clean coarse bedding prepared for

him, and, sitting down on the rush chair at the bedside, drew his money

out of his pocket, and told it over in his hand. 'One must eat,' he

muttered to himself, 'but by Heaven I must eat at the cost of some other

man to-morrow!'

As he sat pondering, and mechanically weighing his money in his palm,

the deep breathing of the traveller in the other bed fell so regularly

upon his hearing that it attracted his eyes in that direction. The man

was covered up warm, and had drawn the white curtain at his head, so

that he could be only heard, not seen. But the deep regular breathing,

still going on while the other was taking off his worn shoes and

gaiters, and still continuing when he had laid aside his coat and

cravat, became at length a strong provocative to curiosity, and

incentive to get a glimpse of the sleeper's face.

The waking traveller, therefore, stole a little nearer, and yet a little

nearer, and a little nearer to the sleeping traveller's bed, until he

stood close beside it. Even then he could not see his face, for he had

drawn the sheet over it. The regular breathing still continuing, he put

his smooth white hand (such a treacherous hand it looked, as it went

creeping from him!) to the sheet, and gently lifted it away.

'Death of my soul!' he whispered, falling back, 'here's Cavalletto!'

The little Italian, previously influenced in his sleep, perhaps, by the

stealthy presence at his bedside, stopped in his regular breathing, and

with a long deep respiration opened his eyes. At first they were not

awake, though open. He lay for some seconds looking placidly at his

old prison companion, and then, all at once, with a cry of surprise and

alarm, sprang out of bed.

'Hush! What's the matter? Keep quiet! It's I. You know me?' cried the

other, in a suppressed voice.

But John Baptist, widely staring, muttering a number of invocations

and ejaculations, tremblingly backing into a corner, slipping on

his trousers, and tying his coat by the two sleeves round his neck,