Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/232

222 it eagerly. Then half-a-dozen hands were extended, and as many voices spoke to him—"Take my biscuit, and give me in exchange your next cup of snow-water."

Henri ate a little, moistening his biscuit with the snow-water; but bitter experience had taught him moderation. Then, forgetting that he was no longer a famished fugitive fighting for the necessaries of life, he began, from habit, to conceal the remainder about his person.

A harsh, bitter laugh, from the man who brought in the snow, made him look up. "No need to hide what nobody wants," said he. "Biscuit is the only thing we have in plenty here—except death."

"Can this indeed be Vilna?" Henri asked with a bewildered look.

His informant nodded.

"Then where is the army—the Emperor? How comes it that we are prisoners?"

"The army?—gone like the snow I brought in just now. The Emperor?—safe in Paris by this time. If it will be a comfort to you in your dying moments to know that his Imperial Majesty 'never was better in all his life,' I have the satisfaction of affording it. He announced the fact in his last bulletin."

Henri stirred uneasily, and cast a mournful glance around him. All that met his senses was foul and loathsome in the extreme. The atmosphere of the place was "at once icy and pestilential;" and the whole, the sick, the dying, and the dead, lay heaped together promiscuously. Dead bodies, or mutilated portions of them, were piled together in the windows, a ghastly defence against the bitter wintry wind; while every noxious odour, every hideous and revolting sight that accompanies disease and death, filled the vaults and corridors of the spacious building, making it one vast and dreary charnel-house.