The Second Class Passenger Part 22

"Take care of it, then," said Rufin. "You have a great trust. And the painter--have you got him, too?"

She stared at him, bewildered. "The painter? The painter of the picture?"

"Of course," said Rufin. "Who else?"

"But----" she looked from him to the benign official, who had the air of presiding at a ceremony. "Then you don't know? You haven't heard?"

Comprehension lit in her face; she uttered a wretched little laugh.

"Ah, v'la de la comedie!" she cried. "No, I haven't got him. They have taken him from me. They have taken him, and in there"--her forefinger shot out and pointed to the wall and beyond it--"in there, in a room full of people who stare and listen, they are making him into a murderer."

"Then--parbleu!" The little official was seized by comprehension as by a fit. "Then there is an artist--the artist of whom you talk--who is one of the apaches! It is unbelievable!"

At the word apaches the girl turned on him with teeth bared as though in a snarl. But at the sound of Rufin's voice she subsided.

"What is his name--quickly?" he demanded.

"Giaconi," she answered.

Rufin looked his question at the little official, who turned to the girl.

"Peter the Lucky?" he queried.

She nodded dejectedly.

The little official made a grimace. "It was he," he said, "who did the throat-cutting. Tiens! this begins to be a drama."

The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and misery. Rufin signed the little man to be silent. The truth, if he had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the first. All he had heard of the man, Papa Musard's slanderous-sounding complaints of him, the fat concierge's reports of his violence, had gathered towards this culmination. He had insisted upon thinking of him as a full-blooded man of genius, riotously making little of conventions, a creature abounding in life, tinctured a little, perhaps, with the madness that may spice the mind of a visionary and enrage his appet.i.tes. It was a figure ha had created to satisfy himself.

"It was false art," he reflected. "That is me--false art!"

Still, whatever he had seen wrongly, there was still the picture.

Apache, murderer, and all the rest--the fellow had painted the picture. No one verdict can account for both art and morals, and there was reason to fear, it seemed, that the law which executed a murderer would murder a painter at the same time--and such a painter!

"No," said Rufin, unconsciously speaking aloud--"no; they must not kill him."

"Ah, M'sieur!" It was a cry from the girl, whose composure had broken utterly at his words. "You are also an artist--you know!"

In a hysteria of supplication she flung herself forward and was on her knees at his feet. She lifted clasped hands and blinded eyes; she was like a child saying its prayers but for the writhen torture of her face, where wild hopes and lunatic terrors played alternately.

"M'sieur, you can save him! You have the grand air, M'sieur; there is G.o.d in your face; you make men hear you! For mercy--for blessed charity--ah, M'sieur, M'sieur, I will carry your sins for you; I will go to h.e.l.l in your place! You are great--one sees it; and he is great, too! M'sieur, I am your chattel, your beast--only save him, save him!"

It tore the barren atmosphere of the office to rags; it made the place august and awful. Rufin bent to her and took her clasped hands in one of his to raise her.

"I will do all that I can," he said earnestly. "All! I dare not do less, my child."

She gulped and shivered; she had poured her soul and her force forth, and she was weak and empty. She strained to find further expression, but could not. Rufin supported her to the chair.

"We must see what is happening in this trial," he said to the little official. "We have lost time as it is."

"I will guide you," replied the other happily. "It!-is a situation, is it not? Ah, the creva.s.ses, the abysses of life! Come, my friend."

From the Salle des Pas Perdus a murmur reached them. They entered it to find the crowd sundered, leaving empty a broad alley.

"Qu'est ce qu'y a?" The little official was jumping on tiptoe to see over the heads in front of him. "Is it possible that the case is finished?"

A huissier came at his gesture and found means to get them through to the front of the crowd, which waited with a hungry expectation.

"The case is certainly finished," murmured the little man.

A double door opened at the head of the alley of people, and half a dozen men in uniform came out quickly. Others followed, and they came down toward the entrance. In the midst of them, their shabby civilian clothes contrasting abruptly with the uniforms of their guards, slouched four men, handcuffed and bareheaded.

"It is they," whispered the official to Rufin, and half turned his head to ask a question of the huissier behind them.

Three of them were lean young men, with hardy, debased, animal countenances. They were referable at a glance to the dregs of civilization. They had the stooped shoulders, the dragging gait, the half-servile, half-threatening expression that hallmarks the apache.

It was to the fourth that Rufin turned with an overdue thrill of excitement. A young man--not more than twenty-five--built like a bull for force and wrath. His was that colossal physique that develops in the South; his shoulders were mighty under his mean coat, and his chained wrists were square and knotty. He held his head up with a sort of truculence in its poise; it was the head, ma.s.sive, sensuous- lipped, slow-eyed, of a whimsical Nero. It was weariness, perhaps, that give him his look of satiety, of appet.i.tes full fed and dormant, of l.u.s.ts grossly slaked. A murmur ran through the hall as he pa.s.sed; it was as though the wretched men and women who knew him uttered an involuntary applause.

"There is Peter," said some one near Rufin. "Lucky Peter; Quel homme!"

The Huissier was memorizing for the little official the closing scene of the trial. Rufin heard words here and there in his narrative.

"Called the judges a set of old . . . Laughed aloud when they asked him if . . . Yes, roared with laughter--roared." And then for the final phrase: "Cond.a.m.nes a la mort!"

"You hear?" inquired the little official, nudging him. "It is too late. They are condemned to death, all of them. They have their affair!"

Rufin shrugged and led the way back to the office. But it was empty; the girl had gone.

"Tiens!" said the official. "No doubt she heard of the sentence and knew that there was no more to be done."

"Or else," said Rufin thoughtfully, frowning at the floor--"or else she reposes her trust in me."

"Ah, doubtless," agreed the little man. "But say, then! It has been an experience, hein? Piquant, picturesque, moving, too. For I am not like you; I do not see these dramas every day."

"And you fancy I do?" cried Rufin. "Man, I am terrified to find what goes on in the world. And I thought I knew life!" With a gesture of hopelessness and impotence he turned on his heel and went forth.

The business preserved its character of a series of accidents to the end; accidents are the forced effects of truth. Rufin, having organized supports of a kind not to be ignored in a republican state, even by blind Justice herself, threw his case at the wise grey head of the Minister of Justice--a wily politician who knew the uses of advertis.e.m.e.nt. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine would have but three necks to subdue. France at large would only shrug, for France is the husband of Paris and permits her her caprices. It rested with Paris, then.

But, as though they insisted upon a martyr, the apaches themselves intervened with a brisk series of murders and outrages, the last of which they effected on the very fringe of the show-Paris. It was not a sergent de ville this time, but a shopkeeper, and the city frothed at the mouth and shrieked for revenge.

"After that," said the Minister, "there is nothing to do. See for yourself--here are the papers! We shall be fortunate if four executions suffice."

Rufin was seated facing him across a great desk littered with doc.u.ments.

"Why not try if three will serve?" he suggested.

The minister smiled and shook his head. He looked at Rufin half humorously.

"These Parisians," he said, "have the guillotine habit. If they take to crying for more, what old man can be sure of dying in his bed? My grandfather was an old man, and his head fell in the Revolution."

"But this," said Rufin, rustling the newspapers before him--"this is clamor. It is panic. It is not serious."