Lucretia | Page 4

hand, he continued to contemplate the
child. That child might have furnished to an artist a fitting subject for
fair and blooming infancy. His light hair, tinged deeply, it is true, with
red, hung in sleek and glittering abundance 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