Part 82 (1/2)

”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.