traversed without change, except of horses and pace, all the mire-deep leagues that lay between them and the capital. They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak, and lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly clothed, that they twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched their ragged shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the personal discomfort of being so attended, and apart from such considerations of present danger as arose from one of the patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying his musket very recklessly, Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint that was laid upon him to awaken any serious fears in his breast; for he reasoned with himself that it could have no reference to the merits of an individual case that was not yet stated, and of representations, confirmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were not yet made. which they But when they came to the town of Beauvais did at eventide, when the streets were filled with people - he could not conceal from himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming. An ominous crowd gathered to see him dismount at the posting-yard, and many voices in it called out loudly, "Down with the emigrant!" He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and, resuming it as his safest place, said :— "Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own will?" "You are a cursed emigrant," cried a farrier, making at him in a furious manner through the press, hammer in hand, "and you are a cursed aristocrat!" The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider's bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, "Let him be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris." "Judged!" repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. "Ay! and condemned as a traitor." At this, the crowd roared approval. Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse's head to the yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on, with the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his voice heard: "Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. not a traitor." "He lies!" cried the smith. "He is a traitor since the decree. His life is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!" At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse's flanks, and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but no more was done. "What is this decree that the smith spoke of?" Darnay asked the postmaster, when he had thanked them, and stood beside him in the yard. "Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants." "When passed?" "On the fourteenth." "The day I left England!" "Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be others if there are not already-banishing all emigrants, and condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he said your life was not your own." "But there are no such decrees yet?" "What do I know?" said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders; "there may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?" They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many wild changes observable on familiar things which make this wild ride unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in Beauvais that night to help them out of it, and they passed on once more into solitude and loneliness, jingling through the untimely cold and wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses and by the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads. |