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Presently there came heavy footsteps, and two of those dreaded officers of the Convention, men whose hours were occupied in spreading terror and in feeding the guillotine, stood before him. "Jailer Mathon?" "Yes." "You have in your charge an emigré, Jeanne St. Clair. She is to be removed forthwith to the Conciergerie. There is the order."
For a bribe the jailer had furnished liquor to some of the prisoners; singing of ribald songs, fighting, shouting, and carousing was the natural consequence. At last, a while after midnight, a man attacked a woman and nearly killed her by beating her over the head with his manacles before the jailer could come to the rescue.
Carelessly as Lomaque looked at the shocking scene before him, his quick eyes contrived to take note of every prisoner's face, and to descry in a few minutes Trudaine and his sister standing together at the back of the group. "Now then, Apollo!" cried the head jailer, addressing his subordinate by a facetious prison nickname, "don't be all day starting that trumpery batch of yours.
Emile saw the jailer, and a woman with a child. His eye flashed bright, his heart leaped to his throat. The woman's face grew paler, and tottering forward she fell upon the prisoner's bosom, and gasped, "My husband!" He said, "Thank God. My wife! my wife! my child!" IT were impossible to chronicle the half that transpired in the eventful days of those eventful years.
And now again a faithful servant, speaking for him whose coming was God's supreme expression of good-will towards men, had brought a like merciful message to another poor soul that had taken counsel of despair. Ida Mayhew might learn, as did the jailer of Philippi, that God has a better remedy than death for seemingly irretrievable disasters.
The jailer was reading the names of the prisoners who were to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal the next day. That evening, when Dolores re-entered her cell, eagerly longing for the morrow which would bring Philip once more to her side, she was followed by Aubry, who was carrying a small iron bedstead which he placed near the one occupied by Dolores.
I forgive you; and if the wine should kill me, I promise you that my ghost shall not haunt so worshipful a penitent. Enough of this. Conduct me to the chamber of Isabel di Pisani; you have no further need of her. The death of the jailer opens the cell of the captive. Be quick, I would be gone."
The stranger, without lifting her veil, had seated herself upon her bed in an attitude which indicated intense fatigue or despondency. Aubry gave her a few directions to which she listened abstractedly, without replying or even looking at the jailer, who then withdrew.
As the Inquisition rarely allowed its victims to be seen with their limbs distorted and their flesh lacerated by torture, so madness is always concealed in its cell, from whence, should it depart, it is conveyed to some gloomy hospital, where the doctor has no thought for man or mind in the mutilated being the jailer delivers to him.
"Well, Bob Long, the sheriff, has got all his deputies out except just the jailer there ain't anybody much in jail now, anyway an' all the other men he could pin a star on, lookin' for a gang that held up the stage from Sunshine yesterday mornin', shot the stage driver dead, an' made off with an express package full of money. There's a big reward out for the man that's leadin' the gang.
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