law.  We become stubborn in a sort of vague fury.  We know not why we are in the place, but we remain there.  That which we have begun actively we continue passively, with an exhausting tenacity from which we emerge overwhelmed.  Ursus, though differing from other men, was, as any other might have been, nailed to his post by that species of conscious reverie into which we are plunged by events all important to us, and in which we are impotent.  He scrutinized by turns those two black walls, now the high one, then the low; sometimes the door near which the ladder to the gibbet stood, then that surmounted by a death’s head.  It was as if he were caught in a vice, composed of a prison and a cemetery.  This shunned and unpopular street was so deserted that he was unobserved.

At length he left the arch under which he had taken shelter, a kind of chance sentry-box, in which he had acted the watchman, and departed with slow steps.  The day was declining, for his guard had been long.  From time to time he turned his head and looked at the fearful wicket through which Gwynplaine had disappeared.  His eyes were glassy and dull.  He reached the end of the alley, entered another, then another, retracing almost unconsciously the road which he had taken some hours before.  At intervals he turned, as if he could still see the door of the prison, though he was no longer in the street in which the jail was situated.  Step by step he was approaching Tarrinzeau Field.  The lanes in the neighbourhood of the fair-ground were deserted pathways between enclosed gardens.  He walked along, his head bent down, by the hedges and ditches.  All at once he halted, and drawing himself up, exclaimed, “So much the better!”

At the same time he struck his fist twice on his head and twice on his thigh, thus proving himself to be a sensible fellow, who saw things in their right light; and then he began to growl inwardly, yet now and then raising his voice.

“It is all right!  Oh, the scoundrel! the thief! the vagabond! the worthless fellow! the seditious scamp!  It is his speeches about the government that have sent him there.  He is a rebel.  I was harbouring a rebel.  I am free of him, and lucky for me; he was compromising us.  Thrust into prison!  Oh, so much the better!  What excellent laws!  Ungrateful boy!  I who brought him up!  To give oneself so much trouble for this!  Why should he want to speak and to reason?  He mixed himself up in politics.  The ass!  As he handled pennies he babbled about the taxes, about the poor, about the people, about what was no business of his.  He permitted himself to make reflections on pennies.  He commented wickedly and maliciously on the copper money of the kingdom.  He insulted the farthings of her Majesty.  A farthing!  Why, ’tis the same as the queen.  A sacred effigy!  Devil take it! a sacred effigy!  Have we a queen—­yes or no?  Then respect her verdigris!  Everything depends on the government; one ought to know that.  I have experience, I have.