"I won't stir from this bed till it's all over and Gerald comes back!"
She dozed, under the sheet, and was awakened by a tremendous shrieking, growling, and yelling: a phenomenon of human bestiality that far surpassed Sophia's narrow experiences.
Shut up though she was in a room, perfectly secure, the mad fury of that crowd, balked at the inlets to the square, thrilled and intimidated her.
It sounded as if they would be capable of tearing the very horses to pieces.
"I must stay where I am," she murmured.
And even while saying it she rose and went to the window again and peeped out.
The torture involved was extreme, but she had not sufficient force within her to resist the fascination.
She stared greedily into the bright square.
The first thing she saw was Gerald coming out of a house opposite, followed after a few seconds by the girl with whom he had previously been talking.
Gerald glanced hastily up at the facade of the hotel, and then approached as near as he could to the red columns, in front of which were now drawn a line of gendarmes with naked swords.
A second and larger waggon, with two horses, waited by the side of the other one.
The racket beyond the square continued and even grew louder.
But the couple of hundred persons within the cordons, and all the inhabitants of the windows, drunk and sober, gazed in a fixed and sinister enchantment at the region of the guillotine, as Sophia gazed.
"I cannot stand this!" she told herself in horror, but she could not move; she could not move even her eyes.
At intervals the crowd would burst out in a violent staccato-- "Le voila!
Nicholas!
Ah!
Ah!
Ah!"
And the final
'Ah' was devilish.
Then a gigantic passionate roar, the culmination of the mob's fierce savagery, crashed against the skies.
The line of maddened horses swerved and reared, and seemed to fall on the furious multitude while the statue-like gendarmes rocked over them.
It was a last effort to break the cordon, and it failed.
From the little street at the rear of the guillotine appeared a priest, walking backwards, and holding a crucifix high in his right hand, and behind him came the handsome hero, his body all crossed with cords, between two warders, who pressed against him and supported him on either side.
He was certainly very young.
He lifted his chin gallantly, but his face was incredibly white.
Sophia discerned that the priest was trying to hide the sight of the guillotine from the prisoner with his body, just as in the story which she had heard at dinner.
Except the voice of the priest, indistinctly rising and falling in the prayer for the dying, there was no sound in the square or its environs.
The windows were now occupied by groups turned to stone with distended eyes fixed on the little procession.
Sophia had a tightening of the throat, and the hand trembled by which she held the curtain.
The central figure did not seem to her to be alive; but rather a doll, a marionette wound up to imitate the action of a tragedy.
She saw the priest offer the crucifix to the mouth of the marionette, which with a clumsy unhuman shoving of its corded shoulders butted the thing away.
And as the procession turned and stopped she could plainly see that the marionette's nape and shoulders were bare, his shirt having been slit.
It was horrible.
"Why do I stay here?" she asked herself hysterically. But she did not stir.
The victim had disappeared now in the midst of a group of men.
Then she perceived him prone under the red column, between the grooves.
The silence was now broken only by the tinkling of the horses' bits in the corners of the square.
The line of gendarmes in front of the scaffold held their swords tightly and looked over their noses, ignoring the privileged groups that peered almost between their shoulders.
And Sophia waited, horror-struck.
She saw nothing but the gleaming triangle of metal that was suspended high above the prone, attendant victim.
She felt like a lost soul, torn too soon from shelter, and exposed for ever to the worst hazards of destiny.
Why was she in this strange, incomprehensible town, foreign and inimical to her, watching with agonized glance this cruel, obscene spectacle?
Her sensibilities were all a bleeding mass of wounds.
Why?
Only yesterday, and she had been, an innocent, timid creature in Bursley, in Axe, a foolish creature who deemed the concealment of letters a supreme excitement.
Either that day or this day was not real.
Why was she imprisoned alone in that odious, indescribably odious hotel, with no one to soothe and comfort her, and carry her away?
The distant bell boomed once.