Mlle. Fouchette Part 50

Madeleine looked at the speaker fixedly, as if still waiting for her to begin; stupidly, for her poor muddled brain refused to comprehend.

Mlle. Fouchette continued,--

"I say I wish to go to his place," she said, with great deliberation, "and notify his sister that her brother is injured and is lying at Hotel Dieu. I promised. It is important. Believing you knew the address I have come to you. You will help me, for his sister's sake,--for his sake, Madeleine? You know his sister lives with him----"

"You--you said his sister----"

But the voice choked. The words came huskily, like a death-rattle in her throat.

"Yes, sister," began again Mlle. Fouchette. But she was almost afraid now. The aspect of her listener's face was enough to touch even a harder heart than possessed this not too tender bearer of ill news.

However, Madeleine would have heard nothing more. She gazed vacantly at the opposite wall, a knee between her hands, and swaying slightly to and fro. Her face, bloated with drink, had become almost pale, and was the picture of long-settled grief. It was as if she were in fresh mourning for the long ago.

Presently a solitary tear from the unseen and unseeing eye stole out of its dark retreat and rolled slowly and reluctantly down upon the cheek and stopped and dried there.

Mlle. Fouchette saw it as the weather observer sees the moisture on the gla.s.s and speculated on the character of the coming storm.

She was disappointed. For instead of an explosion Madeleine suddenly rose and began fumbling among the garments on the wall without a word.

She selected the best from her humble wardrobe and laid the pieces out one by one on the bed, then began rapidly to divest herself of what she wore.

When interrogated by the wondering Fouchette she never replied.

Indeed, she no longer appeared to notice that her visitor was there.

She bathed her face, and washed her hands, and scrubbed her white teeth, and carefully rearranged her hair. All of this with a calmness and precision of a perfectly sober woman,--as she now undoubtedly was.

She then resumed her hat.

"How!" exclaimed Mlle. Fouchette, noting this quiet preparation with growing astonishment,--"not going out?"

"Yes," replied the girl.

"But, dear, you have not yet given me the address."

"It is unnecessary."

"But, Madeleine!"

"It is unnecessary, Fouchette. I will go and see his--his sister and lead her to him."

"But, deary!"

"And I will go alone," she added, looking at the other for the first time.

Unmindful of the wheedling voice of remonstrance, without another word, and leaving her door wide open and Mlle. Fouchette to follow or not at her pleasure, the miserable girl gained the street and swiftly sped away through the falling shadows of the night.

CHAPTER XIV

Jean Marot occupied a cell in a "panier a salade" en route for the depot, not so much the worse for his recent exciting experience as at first seemed probable he might be.

There were eight other occupants of the prison-van besides himself, one of whom was a soldier guard. Five narrow cells ranged along either side of a central aisle. Each had a solitary small, closely shuttered breathing-hole opening outside. The guard occupied a seat in the aisle near the rear door, from which he could survey the door of every cell.

By this arrangement prisoners were kept separate from each other, were not subjected to a gaping crowd, and ten persons could be safely escorted by a single guard.

From the half-suppressed murmurs and objurgations that followed every severe jolt of the wagon, Jean rightly judged that most of the prisoners were more or less injured. And as the driver drove furiously, having the fight of way and being pressed with business this particular Sunday afternoon, there were still louder and more exhaustive remarks from those who narrowly escaped being run over by the cellular van.

Jean Marot, however, was too much engrossed with his own miserable reflections to pay any more than mechanical attention to all of this.

Physically resuscitated and momentarily inflating his glad lungs anew, he still felt that terrible vice-like grip upon his throat,--the compression of the fingers of steel that seemed to squeeze the last drop of blood from his heart.

But it was mental suffocation now. For they were the fingers of her brother,--the flesh and sinew of the woman he loved! And it was this love that was being cruelly crushed and strangled.

It was more terrible than the late physical struggle. The latter had invoked the energy, the courage, and the superhuman strength and endurance to meet it,--had roused the fire of conscious manhood. Now the sick soul revolted at its own folly. The props of self-respect had been knocked away, and he lay p.r.o.ne, humiliated, deprived of the initial courage to rise and hope.

The chief cause of this self-degradation lay in the fact that he had grievously wronged the only one in the world he had found worth loving,--the one sweet being for whom he would have willingly sacrificed life. The fact that this wrong was by and in thought alone did not lessen the horrible injustice of it.

The more Jean thought of these things the more sick at heart he was, the more hopeless his love became, the more desperately dark the future appeared. There seemed to be nothing left but misery and death.

This train of bitterness was interrupted by a violent wrangle between the occupants of neighboring cells. A prisoner across the way had shouted "Vive l'armee!" Another responded by the gay chanson,--

"Entre nous, l'armee du salut, Elle n'a jamais eu d'autre but Que d'ama.s.ser d' la bonne galette."

It came from his next-door neighbor, and was the familiar voice of the saturnine George Villeroy.

"Shut your mouth, rascal!" yelled the guard, rapping the cell door with his sword bayonet.

A few minutes later the van was stopped, the rear door opened, and one by one the prisoners, b.l.o.o.d.y, torn, and bedraggled, were handed out and hustled not very gently by two police agents through a heavily grilled doorway into a room already crowded with victims of law and order. All of these were yet to be called before the commissaire and interrogated in turn, and by him either held or discharged. A good many were both hatless and coatless, and altogether they certainly bore a riotous and suspicious look.

In the crowd near the desk where they were led to be registered Jean met his old friend Villeroy.

"Oho!" exclaimed the latter, laughingly.

"Oh, yes; it is I, my friend."

"Pinched this time, hein?"

"So it seems."

"And in what company?"

"Yours, I suppose," retorted Jean.

"Good company!" said Villeroy. "Kill any--any agents?"

"No,--no!" said Jean, who did not relish this subject.

"See Lerouge?"

"N--that is----"