The Son of Clemenceau. Александр Дюма-сын
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ago abased in its pride. Here he peered, not without anxiety.
By the exact programme carried out in cities by the divisions of its population, a new contingent were coming from their resting-places to substitute themselves for the honest toilers on the thoroughfares; each cellar and attic in the rookeries were exuding the horrible vermin which shun the wholesome light of day.
The spruce trees, stuck in tubs of sand at a beer-house beyond the bridge, shuddered as though in disgust at this horde of Hans hastening to invade the district of hotels, supper-houses and gaming clubs, to beg or steal the means to survive yet another day.
For ten or fifteen minutes the stranger watched the beggars stream individually out of the mazes and, to his horror, form like soldiers for a review, along the street before him, up to the end of the bridge at one extremity and far along at the other end of the line. Some certainly spied him, for these wretches could see as lucidly as the felines in the night—their day from society having reversed their conditions. But, though these whispered the warning to one another, and he was the object of scrutiny, no one left his place, and soon as their backs were turned to him, he had no immediate uneasiness as regarded an attack, or even a challenge upon his business there.
Probably the good citizens were not ignorant that this meeting of the vagrants took place each evening, for not only were all store-doors closed hermetically, but the upper windows no longer emitted a scintillation of lamplight. The spy by accident concluded that he would raise his voice for help all in vain as far as the tradesmen were concerned. But he was brave, and he let increasing curiosity enchain him continuously.
From time out of mind the sage in velvet has serenely contemplated Diogenes in his tub; not that our philosopher seemed the treasurer of an Alexander!
Ranged at length in a long row, cripples, the blind, the young, the aged, it was a company of mendicants which eccentric painters would have given five years of life to have seen. Except for consumptive coughs, the misstep of a wooden leg of which the clumsy ferule slipped on a cobblestone, and the querulous whimper of a child, half-starved and imperfectly swaddled in a tattered shawl, on a flaccid bosom, the mob were silent in an expectation as intense as the lookers-on. The wind brought the whistle of the railway locomotives and the clanking of a steam-dredger in the river, like a giant toiling in massive chains.
For this platoon of vice and misery, crime and disorder, laziness and rapine, the stranger confidently expected to see a commander appear whose flashing, fearless eye, and upright, powerful frame, would account for the awe in which all were held.
What was his amazement, therefore, to perceive—while a tremor of emotion thrilled the line and announced the commander whom all awaited—a bent-up, scarcely human-shaped form, hardly to be acknowledged a woman's. It was enveloped in a heavily furred pelisse fitted for a man.
This singular object appeared up the trap of a cellarway, much like the opening of a sewer, on the opposite side of the street. She proceeded to review the vagabonds and put questions and issue orders to each, which were received like mandates from Cæsar by his legions. The voice was fine and shrill, the movements betokened vigor, but the whole impression was that the female captain-general of the beggars of Munich was far from young.
In the obscurity, and keeping in the background as he did, it was not possible for the stranger to scan her features; besides, they were veiled by the long hair of a Polish hunter's cap, with earflaps and a drooping foxtail, worn as the pompon but half-loosened in time. The eyes that inspected the file of vagrants, shone with undiminished force, and when they fell on the burliest and most impudent, these became quiet and submissive. In a word, the cohort of beggary yielded utter subserviency to this remarkable leader.
Questions and answers were uttered in a thieve's jargon which were sealed letters to the eavesdropper, but it seemed to him that they all addressed her as Baboushka! This struck him as more odd from its being a Slavonic title, meaning "grandmother." Was it possible that he had before him one of those prolific centenarians, truly a mother of the tribe, a gypsy queen to whom allegiance went undisputed and who rules the subterranean strata of society with fewer revolts against them than their sister rulers know, who sit on thrones in the fierce white light?
In any case, he was given no leisure for deciding the question, for an active urchin had whispered a word of caution which led the feminine general to direct a piercing glance toward him, and hasten to conclude her arrangements. The line broke up into little groups, though most of the men went singly, and all tramped over the little foot-bridge, which swung under the unusual mass.
Left alone, the vagrants' queen, placing her yellow and skinny hand on a weapon, perhaps, among her rags, resolutely moved toward the spy. He expected to be interrogated, for an attack was unlikely from a lone old woman; but he grasped his cane firmly.
Luckily, a noise of steps at the other end of the street checked the hag; she thrust back out of sight what had momentarily gleamed like the steel of a knife or brass of a pistol-barrel; listened again and stared; then, muttering what was probably no prayer for the stranger's welfare, she crossed the street with amazing rapidity. The student, hearing a heavy military tread at the mouth of the street, expected to see her vanish down her burrow, but, to his astonishment, she proceeded toward the new-comer.
"The Schutzmaun," muttered he, as there loomed into sight a decidedly soldier-like man in a long cloak, thrown back to show the scarlet lining, and dragging a clanking sabre.
Relying on her good angel, apparently, the witch boldly passed him, and it seemed to the watcher that a sign of understanding was rapidly exchanged between them. Baboushka seemed to enjoin caution for the stranger hooked up his trailing sabre, wrapped his cloak around him and came on less noisily. Certainly the old hag did not beg of him, but hastened to leave the street.
If the new-comer had been the night guardian coming on duty, the student might have lost any misgiving about the vagrants or their ruler; but he was not sure that in him was a friend.
This was an officer, not a gendarme or military policeman. Cloak and uniform were dark blue and fine. He bore himself with the swagger of a personage of no inconsiderable rank, and also of some degree in the nobility. Tall, burly, overbearing, the stranger took a dislike to him from this one glance, and would have hesitated to appeal to him for assistance had he felt in danger.
But the beggars had flocked into the rich quarter, and their chieftainess vanished. He allowed the military gentleman to pass, and was not sorry to see him cross the bridge with a steady, haughty step, which made his heel ring on each plank. But, on reaching the farther end, to the surprise of the watcher, his carriage immediately altered; his step became cautious and, like the other whom he had not noticed, he skulked in a doorway. He might have been thought a visitor there, but, at the next moment, his red whiskers reappeared between the turned-up collar of his mantle as he showed his head under the cornice of oak.
For what motive had the officer and nobleman stooped to skulking and prying. One alone would amply exonerate the son of Mars—devotion to Venus. And the architectural student, not fearing to pass the soldier in his excusable ambush for a sweetheart, since his route over the bridge into the new city, and not wishful to spoil the lover's sport, since he was of the age to sympathize, prepared to leave his nook.
But it was fated that continual impediments were to be thrown in his path on this eventful night. He had hardly taken two steps out of his covert, which kept him hidden from the officer but revealed him to any one approaching in the street, before a third individual of singular mien caught his view and transfixed him with a thrill so sharp, poignant and profound that a stroke of lightning would not have more dreadfully affected him.
And yet, it was a woman—young by her step, light and quick as the antelope's, graceful by her movements, charming by her outlines which a poor, thin woolen wrapper imperfectly shrouded. She enchanted by the mere contour; it was her weird burden which appalled the watcher. In one hand, suspended horizontally, lengthwise parallel to her course, she held what seemed by shape and somber hue to be an infant's coffin.
Her dark and brilliant eyes had descried him from the distance, but, in an instant recognizing that he was neither one of the usual nocturnal denizens nor another sort of whom she