Lucretia | Page 4

down his neck and shoulders. His features, seen in profile, were delicately and almost femininely proportioned; health glowed on his cheek, and his form, slight though it was, gave promise of singular activity and vigour. His dress was fantastic, and betrayed the taste of some fondly foolish mother; but the fine linen, trimmed with lace, was rumpled and stained, the velvet jacket unbrushed, the shoes soiled with dust,--slight tokens these of neglect, but serving to show that the foolish fondness which had invented the dress had not of late presided over the toilet.
"Child," said the man, first in French; and observing that the boy heeded him not,--"child," he repeated in English, which he spoke well, though with a foreign accent, "child!"
The boy turned quickly.
"Has the great spider devoured the small one?"
"No, sir," said the boy, colouring; "the small one has had the best of it."
The tone and heightened complexion of the child seemed to give meaning to his words,--at least, so the man thought, for a slight frown passed over his high, thoughtful brow.
"Spiders, then," he said, after a short pause, "are different from men; with us, the small do not get the better of the great. Hum! do you still miss your mother?"
"Oh, yes!" and the boy advanced eagerly to the table.
"Well, you will see her once again."
"When?"
The man looked towards a clock on the mantelpiece,--"Before that clock strikes. Now, go back to your spiders." The child looked irresolute and disinclined to obey; but a stern and terrible expression gathered slowly over the man's face, and the boy, growing pale as he remarked it, crept back to the window.
The father--for such was the relation the owner of the room bore to the child--drew paper and ink towards him, and wrote for some minutes rapidly. Then starting up, he glanced at the clock, took his hat and cloak, which lay on a chair beside, drew up the collar of the mantle till it almost concealed his countenance, and said, "Now, boy, come with me; I have promised to show you an execution: I am going to keep my promise. Come!"
The boy clapped his hands with joy; and you might see then, child as he was, that those fair features were capable of a cruel and ferocious expression. The character of the whole face changed. He caught up his gay cap and plume, and followed his father into the streets.
Silently the two took their way towards the Barriere du Trone. At a distance they saw the crowd growing thick and dense as throng after throng hurried past them, and the dreadful guillotine rose high in the light blue air. As they came into the skirts of the mob, the father, for the first time, took his child's hand. "I must get you a good place for the show," he said, with a quiet smile.
There was something in the grave, staid, courteous, yet haughty bearing of the man that made the crowd give way as he passed. They got near the dismal scene, and obtained entrance into a wagon already crowded with eager spectators.
And now they heard at a distance the harsh and lumbering roll of the tumbril that bore the victims, and the tramp of the horses which guarded the procession of death. The boy's whole attention was absorbed in expectation of the spectacle, and his ear was perhaps less accustomed to French, though born and reared in France, than to the language of his mother's lips,--and she was English; thus he did not hear or heed certain observations of the bystanders, which made his father's pale cheek grow paler.
"What is the batch to-day?" quoth a butcher in the wagon. "Scarce worth the baking,--only two; but one, they say, is an aristocrat,--a ci-devant marquis," answered a carpenter. "Ah, a marquis! Bon! And the other?"
"Only a dancer, but a pretty one, it is true; I could pity her, but she is English." And as he pronounced the last word, with a tone of inexpressible contempt, the butcher spat, as if in nausea.
"Mort diable! a spy of Pitt's, no doubt. What did they discover?"
A man, better dressed than the rest, turned round with a smile, and answered: "Nothing worse than a lover, I believe; but that lover was a proscrit. The ci-devant marquis was caught disguised in her apartment. She betrayed for him a good, easy friend of the people who had long loved her, and revenge is sweet."
The man whom we have accompanied, nervously twitched up the collar of his cloak, and his compressed lips told that he felt the anguish of the laugh that circled round him.
"They are coming! There they are!" cried the boy, in ecstatic excitement.
"That's the way to bring up citizens," said the butcher, patting the child's shoulder, and opening a still better view for him at the