Orphans of the Storm Part 13

"I don't know any such person," the hag lies, with ready effrontery.

"You must be mistaken!"

But Henriette's eyes are gazing at the Frochard's neck, sensing something or other vaguely familiar. The old woman, who has been drinking, has unloosened her nondescript rig. The girl's gaze sees a well-remembered object.

"My sister's shawl!"

The blue eyes are gleaming now in astonishment--with a hint of coming fury. She s.n.a.t.c.hes the shawl from La Frochard's shoulders, fondles and caresses it. Then like a small tigress robbed of whelp she advances on the beggar, shaking her in paroxysmal rage.

It would have been a comical sight if not so very serious a one; the tiny Henrietta shaking a woman twice her size, pummeling her, brow-beating her till La Frochard sinks to her knees and begs for mercy.

"You have been lying, and that shawl proves it," cries Henriette.

"Where is she?"

The old woman gets up. She changes her tone to a whine, and tries to pat Henriette in pretended sympathy. "Well, if you must know the truth--"

"Yes, yes," cries Henriette, "go on!"

"--she _was_ with us, but alas!--poor thing--with the hard life we have to lead--she--she died!"

The searcher for Louise reels as if about to faint.

She collects herself with difficulty, and stares at La Frochard. A distraught look is on the girl's face.

It is a look of utter misery, compounded with mistrustfulness of the deceiving hag.

She leaves the cellar, fully resolved to invoke the Law--if Law--in this wild time--there can be found...

A bundle of rags, on which Henrietta has almost stepped in pa.s.sing, moves very slightly.

CHAPTER XVIII

"THERE IS NO LAW--"

The wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole.

This was a dance that seized whole mult.i.tudes in its rhythmic, swaying clutch. The tune was "Ca Ira!" that mad measure of the sansculottes, meaning roughly--

"Here it goes--

"And there it goes!"

--and go forever it did till all the world of Paris seemed a heaving, throbbing vortex of werewolves and witches, things lower than animals in their topsyturvydom, drunken frenzy and frequent obscenity.

The throng through which Henriette now directed her steps was verging on this madness, though not yet at the pitch of it.

Henriette managed to find her way to two sansculotte troopers stationed in the centre of the Place, to whom she told her story.

Reasonable fellows they seemed, offering to conduct her presently to the new authorities and get a search warrant for the Frochard clan.

But the madder swirl of the Carmagnole came along, and presto!

swallowed them up. It happened on this wise:

As the locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, a.s.saulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward from our story. Little Henriette dived to a place of safety, the side wall of the nearest building. Straightening herself after the unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before her.

Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting pa.s.sers-by like a cyclone;--arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the very brink of Dante's Inferno!

Strange little dramas of l.u.s.t and conquest punctuated the cyclonic panorama. Here, a girl's snapping black eyes, winking devilishly, and pursed-up Cupid mouth invited a new swain to master her. There, a short-skirted beauty, whose sways and kicks revealed bare thighs, was dancing wildly a solo intended to infatuate further two rival admirers. Again, a half-crazed sansculotte had won a girl and in token of triumph was spinning her body horizontally around like a top, upheld by the open palm of his huge right arm.

But what might be this comic figure, quite unpartnered--knocked and shoved from human pillar to human post--winning the deep curses of the dancers, and their hearty wallops when not o'er-busied with Terpsich.o.r.e?

Picard, the ex-valet of aristocracy, finally let out from the Salpetriere mock-court, had stumbled into this bedlam of sansculotte craziness, the rhythm and procedure of which were as foreign to him as a proposition in Euclid.

But the Jolly Baker, from the Ile de Paris, was his match. The bare-armed, lean-legged pleasurer had equipped himself (by way of disguise) with a large false moustache, and evading the close watch of his hatchet-faced, middle-aged spouse, had come forth to celebrate.

Neither dancer nor vocalist, the Jolly Baker had other little entertaining ways all his own.

As the foolscap-crowned, white-and-red-trousered Picard b.u.mped the pave, he saw squatting opposite him a figure whose gleaming eyes, ferocious whiskerage and lean-wiry frame suggested the canine rather than the human species. The Jolly Baker was a b.u.m werewolf, but a "hot dog."

The gleaming eyes never left Picard's face, the dog-like body jumped whichever way he did, Picard half expected the dog-man to bite or snap the next instant and take a chunk out of him. Both had got to their feet now; the stranger still silent and nosey, Picard looking out of the corner of his eye for a way of escape. But just then the Baker spied a maenad with a drum.

One could beat drum in celebration, if naught else. Lo and behold, the posterior of the foolscapped one would serve for a drum very nicely!

The Jolly Baker twisted Picard around, bending him half double as he did so.

With a rear thrust and firm shoulder grip, the Jolly Baker leaped upon Picard's back. Emulating the young woman's beating of the drum, he rained a shower of blows on the valet's hind quarters.

The new "drum"-beater was now quite the cynosure of admiring attention. He had captured the centre of the stage. He gloried in it. With a more elaborate, fanciful and complexive "rat-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat--"

He suddenly lost his grip of the "human drum," Picard wriggled out from under, and the drummer b.u.mped his own posterior on the pave.

Calmly, quite undisturbed, the foolish Baker continued to "rat-tat-tat"

with a stick on the curb, then as the "Ca Ira" beats resounded above him, his own squatting body began to sway with the music in a heightened absurdity. Picard had run off. He was convinced these people were crazier than any of those in the mad cells of Salpetriere....

[Ill.u.s.tration: JACQUES FORGET-NOT, SWEARS VENGEANCE ON THE FAMILY OF THE DE VAUDREYS. THE COUNT DE LINIERES AND THE CHEVALIER DE VAUDREY HEAR HIS THREATS.]

Long since Henriette had evaded the worse sights and sounds by creeping as best she could along the side walls of the buildings, watching her chance to get away from the revelers. Again, at the street corner, another swirl pa.s.sed over her, knocking her down.

Ruefully she picked herself up again.

The throng had pa.s.sed by completely, leaving but a drunken fool prancing here and there, or a scant winrow of half-prostrate figures.

Henriette ran with all her might to the only refuge she knew--her old faubourg lodgings.

The middle-aged landlady who in days agone had fetched the guard to subdue Danton's would-be a.s.sa.s.sins, and who likewise had resented Robespierre's prying as to the ident.i.ty of Henriette's visitor, studied the girl at first a bit quizzically. Released from Salpetriere, eh? Was she the same sweet, pure Henriette she knew? Yes, the little Girard--la pet.i.te Girard--looked to be the same hard-working, respectable seamstress person of yore, only that she seemed very weak and about to collapse!

The landlady folded Henriette within one stout arm.

She pointed with her free hand to the bedchamber immediately above.

"Your old room up there awaits you," she remarked kindly. "As soon as you have recovered strength a bit, I have no doubt the old sewing job will be yours too!"