Mlle. Fouchette Part 82

"Yes; but where's the man?"

"Dame! It is one-eyed Mad!"

"Let her alone,--she's drunk!"

The fallen woman had laboriously regained her feet and turned a torrent of vulgar maledictions upon the jeering crowd.

Then, having regained her equilibrium, she staggered forward in renewed pursuit. The broad-bladed, double-edged knife of the Paris a.s.sa.s.sin gleamed in her right hand.

"Bah! she will never catch her," said a man whose attention had been called to this.

"Let them fight it out," a.s.sented his companion.

"Hold! She is down again."

Madeleine had reached the Rue Soufflot, and, in turning the corner sharply, had fallen against the irregular curb.

The stragglers from the wine-shops hooted. The drunken women fairly screamed with delight. It was so amusing.

But Madeleine did not get up this time.

This was more amusing still; for the crowd, now considerably augmented by the refuse from the neighboring tenements, launched all sorts of humorous suggestions at the prostrate figure, laughing uproariously at individual wit.

A few ran to where the dark figure lay, and a merry ruffian playfully kicked the prostrate woman.

Still the woman stirred not.

The ruffian who had just administered the kick slipped and fell upon her, whereat the crowd fairly split with laughter. It was so droll!

But the man did not join in this, for he saw that he had slipped in a thin red stream that flowed sluggishly towards the gutter, and that his hands were covered with warm blood.

"Pardieu! she's dead," he whispered.

And they gently turned her over, and found that it was so.

Madeleine had fallen upon her arm, and the terrible knife was yet embedded in her heart.

Meanwhile, unconscious of this pursuit and its fatal consequences, Mlle. Fouchette had swiftly pa.s.sed from the narrow Rue St. Jacques into Rue Soufflot, and was flying across the broad Place du Pantheon.

Blind to the glare of the wine-shops, deaf to the gay chanson of a group of students and grisettes swinging by from the Cafe du Henri Murger,--indeed, dead to all the world,--the grief-stricken girl still ran at the top of her speed--towards----

The river?

Her poor little overtaxed brain was in a whirl. She had no definite idea of anything beyond getting away. As a patient domestic beast of burden suddenly resumes his savage state and rushes blindly, pell-mell, he knows not where, so Mlle. Fouchette now plunged into the oblivion of the night.

Unconsciously, too, she had taken the road to the river,--the broad and well-travelled route of the Parisian unfortunate.

Ah! the river!

For the first time it occurred to her now,--how many unbearable griefs the river had swallowed up.

There were so many things worse than death. One of these was to live as Madeleine had lived. Never that! Never! Not now,--once, perhaps; but not now. Oh, no; not now!

The river seemed to beckon to her,--to call upon her, reproachfully, to come back to it,--to open its slimy arms and invite her to the palpitating bosom that had soothed the sorrows of so many thousands of the children of civilization.

And Fouchette was the offspring of the river. Why had she been spared, then? Had it proved worth while?

She recalled every incident of that eventful period. She remembered the precise spot where she had been pulled out that gray morning, years before.

This idea had flitted through her mind, at first vaguely, then, still unsought, began to a.s.sume definite shape.

Eh, bien,--soit! From the river to the river!

Mlle. Fouchette, as we have seen, had all the spontaneity of her race, accentuated by a life of caprice and reckless abandon. To conceive was to execute. Consequences were an after-consideration, if at all worthy of such a thing as consideration.

She stopped. But this hesitation was not in the execution of her suddenly formed purpose. It was necessary to recover breath, and to decide whether to go by the way of the Rue Clovis, or to turn down by the steep of Rue de la Mont Ste. Genevieve to the Boulevard St.

Germain.

It was but for a few panting moments.

The clock of the ancient campanile of the Lycee Henri IV. struck the hour of eleven. The hoa.r.s.e, low, booming sound went sullenly rumbling and roaring up and down the stone-ribbed plaza of the Pantheon, and rolled and reverberated from the great dome that sheltered the ill.u.s.trious dead of France.

The curious old church of St. etienne du Mont rose immediately in front of the girl, and the sound of the bells startled her,--shook her ideas together,--and, with the sight of the church, restored, in a measure, her presence of mind.

Her thoughts flew instantly back to the happy scene she had recently left behind. The bells of the old tower,--ah! how often she and Jean had regulated their menage by their music!

And she looked up at the grimly mixed pile of four centuries, with its absurd little round tower, its grotesque gargouilles, and gra.s.s-grown walls,--St. etienne du Mont.

Doubtless they would be married here.

To be married where reposed the blessed bones of Ste. Genevieve, or at St. Denis amid the relics of royalty, was the dream of every youthful Parisienne. And Ste. Genevieve was the patronne of the virgins as well as of the city of Paris.

Mlle. Fouchette had witnessed a wedding at good old St. etienne du Mont,--indeed, any one might see a wedding here upon any day of the week, and at almost any hour of the day, in season,--and she now recalled the pretty scene. Yes, of course Jean and Andree would be married here.

Obeying a curious impulse, the girl, still breathing heavily, ascended the broad stone steps and peeped into the little vestibule. The dark baize door within stood ajar, and she could see the faint twinkle of distant lights and smell the escaping odors from the last ma.s.s.

She would go in--just for a moment--to see again where they would stand before the altar. It would do no harm. Her last thoughts should be of those she loved,--loved dearer--yes, a great deal more dearly than life.

Entering, she mechanically followed her training at Le Bon Pasteur, and, bending a knee, dipped the tips of her fingers in the font and crossed her heaving breast.

The great wax tapers were still burning about the ancient altar, and here and there pairs and bunches of expiatory candles flickered in the little chapels.

As no other light relieved the sombre blackness of the vaulted edifice, an indefinite ghostliness prevailed, from out of which the numerous gilded forms of the Virgin and the saints appeared half intangible, as if hovering about with no fixed support or substance.

The church might have been deserted, so far as any living indications were visible, though two or three darker splotches on the darkness could have been taken for as many penitents seeking the peace which pa.s.seth understanding.

Gliding softly down the right, outside of the pews and row of stately columns, Mlle. Fouchette stopped only at the last pillar, from which she had a near view of the pretty white altar. She remained there, leaning against the pillar, her eyes bent upon the altar, motionless, for a long time.