The Prison Yard

The great gates of the prison yard rolled back to admit the carriage in which Alban had been driven from the hotel, and a cordon of straight-backed officials immediately surrounded it. Early as the hour was, the meanest servant whom Zaniloff commanded had work to do and well understood the urgency of his task. The night had been one long story of plot and counterplot; of Revolutionaries fleeing from street to street, Cossacks galloping upon their heels, houses awakened and doors beaten down, the screams and cries of women, the savage anger of men. And all this, not upon the famous avenues which knew little of the new émeute, but down in the narrow alleys of the old city where bulging gables hid the sight from a clear heaven of stars and the crazy eaves had husbanded the cries.

There had been a civil battle fought and many were the prisoners. Not a cell about that great yard but had not its batch of ragged, shivering wretches whose backs were still bloody, whose wounds were still unbound. The quadrangle itself served, as a Cossack jocularly remarked, for the overflow meeting. Here you might perceive many types of men-students, still defiant, sage lawyers given to the parley, ragged vermin of the slums gathering their rags close about their shoulders as though to protect them from the lash; timid apostles of the gospel of humanity cowering before human fiends--thus the yard and its environment. For Alban, however, the place might not have existed. His eyes knew nothing of this grim spectacle. He followed the Chief to the upper rooms, remembering only that Lois was here.