Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/96

76 He was clad in black, with a hood. He wore a wig down to his eyebrows, and held in his hand an iron baton with a crown at each end. This baton was short and massive. Imagine a Medusa thrusting her head between two blossoming branches in paradise.

Ursus, who had heard some one enter, and who had raised his head without loosing his hold of Homo, recognized the terrible personage. He shook from head to foot, and whispered to Gwynplaine: "It's the wapentake."

Gwynplaine recollected. An exclamation of surprise was about to escape him, but he restrained it. The iron staff, with the crown at each end, was called the iron weapon. It was from this iron weapon, upon which the city officers of justice took the oath when they entered upon their duties, that the old wapentakes of the English police derived their name.

Behind the man in the wig, the frightened landlord could be dimly discerned in the shadow. Without saying a word—a personification of the muta Themis of the old charters—the man stretched his right arm over the radiant Dea, and touched Gwynplaine on the shoulder with the iron staff, at the same time pointing with his left thumb to the door of the Green Box behind him. These gestures, all the more imperious for the intruder's silence, meant, Follow me. "Pro signo exeundi, sursum trahe," says the old Norman record. He who was touched by the iron weapon had no right but the right of obedience. To that mute order there was no reply. The harsh penalties of the English law threatened the refractory.

Gwynplaine felt a shock under the rigid touch of the law; then he sat as though petrified. If, instead of having been merely grazed on the shoulder, he had been struck a violent blow on the head with the iron staff, he