Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/107

Rh Thus did Ursus. He shuddered as he thought: "Things are indeed going wrong. I should have found it out soon enough. What business had I to follow Gwynplaine?" Having made this reflection, man being but self-contradiction, he increased his pace, and hastened to get nearer the cortége, so as not to lose sight of Gwynplaine in the labyrinth of small streets.

The cortége of police could not move quickly on account of its solemnity. The wapentake led it. The justice of the quorum closed it. This order compelled a certain deliberation of movement. All the majesty possible in an official shone in the justice of the quorum. His costume held a middle place between the splendid robe of a doctor of music of Oxford, and the sober black habiliments of a doctor of divinity of Cambridge. He wore the dress of a gentleman under a long godebert, which is a mantle trimmed with the fur of the Norwegian hare. He was half Goth and half fop in his attire, wearing a wig like Lamoignon, and sleeves like Tristan l'Hermite. His great round eye watched Gwynplaine with the fixity of an owl's. He walked with measured tread. Never did honest man look fiercer.

Ursus, who had lost his way for a moment in the tangled skein of streets, overtook, close to Saint Mary Overy, the cortége, which had fortunately been retarded in the churchyard by a fight between children and dogs,—a common incident in the streets in those days. "Dogs and boys," says the old registers of police, placing the dogs before the boys. A man being taken before a magistrate by the police was, after all, an everyday affair, and each one having his own business to attend to, the few followers soon dispersed. There remained but Ursus on the track of Gwynplaine.

They passed two chapels opposite each other, belonging the one to the Recreative Religionists, the other to