Peter Ibbetson Part 26

[Greek: Anagkae]!

What an exit for "Gogo--gentil pet.i.t Gogo!"

Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a King Cophetua!

What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.

Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.

Thank Heaven for that!

What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.

But meanwhile!

The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!

They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for _you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!

"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"

"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.

Mais ca va ma couter cher!"

Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!

Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!

Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!

After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been, had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!

And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating circ.u.mstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift penalty of death.

"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"

By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless, recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at the Old Bailey.

It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth recording--even hard to remember.

But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before another twenty-four hours could possibly pa.s.s over me.

The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....

And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that ever was.

I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb, resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.

I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when, overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.

I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved d.u.c.h.ess to succor me, as they ran me in, each b.u.t.ting at me sideways, and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful d.u.c.h.ess of Towers to wave the horror away.

It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.

The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."

Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is duly recorded in the reports of the trial.

The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day, without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and uncontrollable pa.s.sions to so deplorable an end.

Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.

Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.

I resolved to write the whole true story to the d.u.c.h.ess of Towers, with an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow, and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner life began.

Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the avenue gate.

The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance, and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.

I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_

La Mere Francois sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre menage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MeNAGE."]