"But," objected Laroque. "I think there is a child, though I'm not certain."
"Makes no difference whatsoever!" declared M. Perissard. "The money goes to the child upon the death of its mother—not before!" He glanced at his watch. "You go back and find out all that you can from the lady and we will wait for you here. You should be able to pump her thoroughly in an hour. That will give you plenty of time to catch the six-thirty train for Paris. You might as well begin on the work right away."
"Mostcertainly!" agreed M. Merivel, with a heavy nod. "Nulla dies sine—H'm!—the Latin, of course!"
"We will wait for you here and give you your final instructions," added M. Perissard, as Laroque rose. "Oh, and try to get a power of attorney from her!" The latter nodded.
"I'll be back in an hour!" he promised, and with a wave of the hand he hurried out.
When the footsteps of the three protectors of society died away down the stairway of the Three Crowns, the woman opened the door of the dressing room and crept out.
"Thank God, they've gone!" she muttered, wearily, "I'd like to be alone always. People bore me to death. What a life! What a life!"
She walked across the room a trifle unsteadily and deposited her empty glass on the little table with the absinthe and sat down at the other one with her face to the door. She fumbled in a dingy hand-bag, slung to her left wrist, and presently produced a small vial, followed by a greasy pack of cheap cards.
None but the eyes of abiding love or undying hate would have seen in the pitiful, drug-ridden, half drunken, fast-sinking wreck any trace of the bewitching, laughing bride of twenty-odd years before. The austere ancient, who virtuously wrote "the descent into hell is easy," might have read in her face a different story of that dark pathway.
She took a swallow of the fluid in the bottle and coughed sharply as she recorked it. The peculiar odor of ether spread through the room. Then she began shuffling the cards as if about to play solitaire. Suddenly she stopped, threw herself across the table, buried her face in her arms and burst into tears....
Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be one memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is full to overflowing. In the calmness of our days it is little noted, but the tempest-lashed waters are swept upon it again and again. It may be but the memory of a moment when a woman looked into our eyes with trust, or it maybe that that trust Was betrayed. But sweet or bitter, its ghost shall come in the hour of woe to whisper hope and solace, or to press more deeply the thorns into the anguished brow and add its weight to the burden of the cross....
Far back over the path of those twenty years Jacqueline had learned to hate her husband, but the memory and love of her boy grew stronger. She had sunk from indifference to degradation and from degradation to despair. She had been a man's joy of a year, his pleasure of a month and his plaything of an hour. But through it all the mother love had lived in the blackened soul and the mother heart—scarred and calloused as it was—yet yearned for her boy. But for this, the years of loathsome vice, of drink and drugs, would have brought at last the numbness of oblivion. She had sought it in vain. She had steeped herself in vice until at times the life within flickered dangerously. But it brought never a moment of forgetfulness. When she was sober, or not under the influence of drugs, she lived in the darkness of black despair. And when she turned to these "to help her forget," she did not know that that was not the reason. They revived and quickened the slowly numbing brain until she could feel again the wild anguish of hopeless loss; and as she sobbed out her agony she vaguely felt that she was again more nearly worthy to press her child to her breast.
In the past few months her enfeebled mind had gloated miserably over one dismal ray of hope—the hope of one moment of joy before she died. She had learned from a half-breed woman in Caracas the art of telling fortunes with cards, and hour after hour she retold her future with the soiled pack that she always carried. They told her that the fleeting second of happiness would be bought at the price of one life, to be followed by the end of her own. To that promise she clung....
The storm of weeping, as is the case with sobs that are due wholly or in part to drunkenness, ended as abruptly as it had begun. She took another swallow of the ether and began laying out the cards in the same weary seven rows. She looked over them quickly and wept again. Always the two deaths!
"Now, then," she straightened up with a snuffle, "I'll try again."
She was spreading them out once more when there came a knock at the door.
"Come in!" she called, without looking up. The maid, Marie, entered with pen and ink and a form that the police require the hotel-keepers to have filled out and filed by every guest.
She advanced, a little timidly, to the table and said.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you, madame, but the police make us go through this business." She held up the blank form.
The woman looked up, puzzled for a moment, and then nodded.
"Oh, yes, well then——Oh, write it yourself!" she snapped irritably, turning again to the cards. She took another drink of ether and looked up at the maid, as if she did not exactly remember the purpose of her visit.
"Monsieur and Madame Laroque," she said at last, listlessly, her eyes on the table. "From Buenos Ayres, on their way to Paris."
Marie filled in the blank.
"To Paris. Thank you, madame," she said. Then she stood looking curiously at the cards.
The woman raised her head.
"Is that all?"
"Yes, thank you. Are you telling fortunes with the cards?" Marie asked, timidly as the woman began studying the table once more.
"Yes."
"Then you really believe in them?"
"They're the only thing I do believe in," was the weary response.
"That's funny!" exclaimed the maid, with a nervous little smile. "I don't believe in them at all!"
"You will!" was the grim comment.
"Oh, it's like palmistry and all that sort of thing. It's all nonsense."
Jacqueline looked up at her pityingly.
"You don't know what you're talking about!" she declared, a little thickly. The ether and absinthe were beginning to work more powerfully.
"What do the cards tell you?" asked Marie, growing interested. Jacqueline gazed over the table again.
"Always the same thing, always the same thing!" she said, with a glassy stare, meant to be impressive. "Death! My own death! And it's coming very soon. That's what the cards tell me!"
The maid's eyes opened wide.
"Really!" she exclaimed breathlessly.
"They never change!" the woman went on in a dull monotone. Dissipation had left little of expression and given much of harshness to her voice. "I can see blood—a great deal of blood! But before I die I shall see the two people that I always see in my dreams, waking or sleeping—the man I love more than anything else in the world and the man I hate more than anything else in the world! The cards have been promising me for the last three months that I shall see them soon and that—I'll die! The cards have never been wrong, and that's why I wanted to get back to France."
"You believe in them as much as that?" asked the maid, wonderingly.
"Yes!"
She watched her rearranging the cards for some moments in silence.
"Won't you tell my fortune?" she asked at last with a little hesitation.
"What's the good if you don't believe?" retorted the woman, without looking up.
"Oh, I don't be—I don't believe in it," she stammered with a slight blush, "but I—I—do believe in it!"
Jacqueline glanced at her with the dispassionate, rolling gaze of a drunkard.
"Sit down!" she commanded. While Marie was settling herself on the edge of the bed she took another drink of the ether.
"Is that ether you're drinking?" asked the girl.
"Ye—yes!" coughed the woman, slipping in the cork.
"It smells horribly strong! What does it do to you?" she inquired, with shuddering curiosity.
"It changes my ideas and that's a good deal," was the grim reply. "But it gets on my nerves sometimes and then I cry or smash the furniture." Marie started.
"But that doesn't matter! What do you want to know?"
"Oh, but if I tell you that," smiled the maid, cunningly, "there'll be nothing in your telling my fortune, will there?"
"Don't tell me anything!" mumbled Jacqueline, shuffling the cards and spreading them out once more. She studied them in dead silence for a minute or more. Then:
"You're married!" she announced.
"Oh, there's nothing in that!" sniffed Marie; "You saw my ring."
"You have a child."
"Yes, the darling! Seven months old."
"You're in love."
The maids cheeks flushed with excitement.
"Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed.
"But not with your husband."
She straightened up.
'Death! My own death! That's what the cards tell me...
'Death! My own death! That's what the cards tell me...
'Death! My own death! That's what the cards tell me...
"No, I should think not!" she exclaimed, almost indignantly.
"You are going to leave your husband!" went on the dull, even voice. Marie's cheeks paled and she gasped but did not reply. Jacqueline looked up slowly.
"Is it true?"
"Yes! it's quite true!" was the low reply in an awed tone. Then she added by way of justification: "My husband is Victor, the boots, who brought up your luggage."
"He seems to be a good fellow," remarked the woman, indifferently.
"Yes," the girl sniffed contemptuously, "but he's such a common sort of man!"
"And the other?" There was awakening interest in the stupid eyes and dull voice.
"Oh, the other is a gentleman! A real gentleman!" cried Marie, clasping her hands joyously. "He's a commercial traveler—in soap! He dresses beautifully and he smells—ah—m-m! I am to meet him to-night at the Grand Café, opposite the theater, and to-morrow we shall be fa-a-r-away!"
"And your baby?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders indifferently.
"He's out to nurse," she replied, "and I know his father will not let him want for anything!"
Jacqueline consulted the bottle again.
"Look here, my girl! You're going to make a fool of yourself!" she declared with drunken bluntness. "Take my tip and stay with your husband! Be false to him if you must, but stay with him!"
"No, no! I love no one in the world but Anatole!" cried the girl, melodramatically. "And I'm going away with him to-night!"
"Well, you'll suffer in the long run!" was the other's grim assurance, with something of a return of her usual indifference.
"No, I shan't! Anatole loves the very ground I walk on!" declared Marie, proudly.
"H'mph! He may now, but it won't last," retorted the woman. "Your lover will leave and you'll take another—and then a third and fourth, and you'll see what sort of a life that means. Iknow!"
The girl opened her pretty eyes wide.
"Do you?" she asked, with a little shiver of awe.
"Yes! I was about your age when I left my husband and my child. I hate my husband God! How I hate him!" she burst out, her eyes blazing with insane fury, he clenched fists above her head. Marie half started toward the door, fearing that one of the furniture-breaking moods was coming on. But as suddenly the voice dropped back to its toneless level and the eyes dulled. "But I'm dying because my child is not with me. Child! Why, he must be a man of twenty-four now, and I'm sure he's a tall, handsome fellow that everybody loves and admires. Just think of it! I might be walking down the street—now—on his arm! Wouldn't I be proud! And I don't even know him. I think of him night and day—all the time I think of him. And if he came into this room now I wouldn't know him. But I shall see him again!" she cried, excitedly, clutching the cards. "I'm sure of that! I know it! But—but I shall not—be able to—kiss him—and press him to my heart. He'll never know who I am!"
Jacqueline shook her head with a solemnity born of the stimulants, and went on thickly:
"I'd be ashamed! He might despise me or reproach me, and I couldn't stand that. He—he—thinks I died years ago and—and I'm glad of it Oh, Raymond! My boy, my laddie!" And again there was a quick burst of tears.
Marie sprang up hastily and hurried over to the table, touching the sobbing woman gently on the arm.
"Oh, madame! Don't cry, don't cry!" she pleaded, with clumsy sympathy.
"Better be warned by my case!" wept the woman, in a high, queer voice. "You're a pretty girl—now—but you—won't be long! Your lover'll leave you as mine left me! Men—soon get tired. I used to be pretty, too!"
The girl began to cry at the sight of the other's distress.
"I'm sure Anatole will never leave me!" she whimpered.
Jacqueline's tears stopped as suddenly as if they had been turned off at a spigot and she sat up, rigid.
"Then you're a d——d fool!" she snapped
Marie wept more bitterly.
And then—God knows how!—as she stared at the sobbing girl, somewhere in her warped! soul the ether found a spark of womanly pity and fanned it to a little flame of weak resolve. ... "He saved others. Himself he could not save.
"Sit down!" she commanded, harshly. "And let me tell you a story, and maybe it will save you some of the suffering that I went through."
Jacqueline brushed the cards to one side, coughed over the ether bottle again and lit another cigarette. The girl settled herself, snuffling on the edge of the bed and wiped her eyes. When she looked up the woman was leering at her contemptuously.
"S'pose you think you're beautiful, don't you?" she demanded scornfully, slurring huskily over the words. "S'pose you think you see why anybody'd grow tired of me, but you're different, eh? Let me tell you, m'girl, when I was your age, if anybody'd put us side by side, there's no man in the world would ha' looked at you twice!"
And she glared at her as if daring her to deny it.
"Not a man in the world!" she repeated, proudly, fixing her bleared eyes on the girl's fresh, young face. "Why, my lovers used to tell that——But that's not what I wanted to tell you! Let me see! What was it?" her eyes wandered and she frowned. The ether was sweeping over her in waves. "Oh, yes! I wanted to tell you that's it's all right 'bout your husband. Don't pay any attention to this rot about being true to him. Nobody cares anything 'bout husbands! Husbands are no good! No good! I could have a dozen husbands!" Her head sank and she waved her hand feebly as if dismissing the whole tribe of married men. The mumbled words died away in incoherencies.
The girl watched her a little frightened.
"You were going to tell me a story," she reminded her timidly.
Jacqueline sat bolt upright, her eyes blazing with senseless anger.
"Of course, I am!" she snapped. "You shut up and le' me tell it my own way an' maybe it'll do you some good!" Marie shrank back and glanced nervously at the door.
"But that's all light!" the woman assured her generously. "You didn't mean anything wrong. I'm going t' tell you why you better not go'way and leave your boy like I did...."
She bowed her head again for a moment and, spurred by the drug, her memory slowly unfolded the panorama of her past. All its happiness, all its sorrow, misery and despair came back to her. As she told the tale her voice was sometimes harsh and indifferent and sometimes only a drunken mumble. Again it was faintly vibrant with the ghost of a lost emotion, or the knife-thrust of reawakened grief cut off the words in her throat. And the simple girl on the bed leaned forward and listened with glistening eyes and hectic cheeks....
"Twenty-five—twenty-six—I don't know how many years ago—I lived in a big house not many miles from this place," she began, slowly. "I was the only child and I don't remember much about my father and mother. They died young. It was a small place and I didn't know much about life—but I learned plenty afterwards.
"You're a peasant," she went on with harsh contempt. "You don't know anything about how girls like I was, are brought up. When I was sixteen I knew only two young men more than to bow to when I met them. One was named Noel—I'd known him all my life—and the other's name was—Louis!" The liquid word came gratingly off her tongue.
"He was older than Noel and he was one of these grave, dignified young men, all wrapped up in his work. He was a lawyer and I guess he was a pretty good one. Everybody seemed to think so. Well, anyway, we fell in love with each other, and I married him before I was nineteen. Maybe the other one loved me, too," she added, carelessly "He tried to kill himself a little while after I married his friend.
"After our honeymoon we took a house in Paris, where his work was. He was ambitious and wanted to be a Deputy Attorney. I didn't see much of him after we settled down, because he was giving so much time to his work, but I didn't care much—then. I loved him so and—I had something else to think about. And whenhecame I was the happiest girl in Paris. He was the prettiest, little, dark-eyed——" The sentence ended in a choke and she put out her hand for the ether bottle....
"For a while the baby was everything to me, but he couldn't be always. I wanted my husband. I liked fun and a gay time, but he was always too busy—too busy!—until I grew angry at him. He thought that the baby and the little that I saw of him in the evening occasionally were all that I needed.
"Sometimes when he was working in his study I used to go in and try to talk to him and get him to tell me what he was doing. I wanted to be more in his life. He always laughed and said that I wouldn't understand and—then he'd turn me out.
"I begged him to take me to the theater, to the carnival, to the country—anywhere for life and amusement—but he never had time. I used to cry myself to sleep at night.
"One evening he brought home a young man to dinner with him. They were very happy. My husband had saved the young man in some case or other—he never took the trouble to tell me, or I forget what it was. He was a witty, handsome fellow, and that was the merriest dinner I ever had.
"The young man—his name was Albert—seemed to have a pretty good time himself, for he came often after that. I suppose my fool of a husband," she grated the word viciously, "thought that he was coming all the time to show his gratitude! One afternoon while he was there, I wanted to go driving and he asked Albert to take me—so he could go on with his d——d work!
"That's the way he discovered how to keep me amused and without interfering with his own plans. Albert was always my escort after that, and the more my husband neglected me the angrier I grew. He didn't have brains enough to know that no man devotes his time to a married woman out of gratitude to her husband.
"Albert was always respectful—oh, yes, always respectful! But he could tell a lot with his eyes, and the more enraged I was with my husband the more I listened to what his eyes were saying. Once, in a carriage, he picked up my gloves and kissed them again and again. But he never spoke a word of love or put a disrespectful finger on me. Oh, he knew women, he did! He knew women!" she chuckled, tipsily.
"I had one of the first editions of every new book. There were flowers every day. He had me in a box at the opening of every new play. Once I mentioned that I would like to have some real white heather to make birthday favors. I didn't see him for four days and then he came out to the house with a trunk-load, nearly. He had gone to Scotland for it. D'you ever have a lover'd do that for you?" she demanded, with a fierce frown.
"You bet you didn't!" she went on proudly, while Marie was trying to imagine Anatole en route for Scotland. "That's the kind of lovers I had!
"Well, one Sunday I wanted my husband to go to Fontainebleau with me and he wouldn't do it. That was the finish! Albert saw something—for he began to make love to me. When I felt his first kiss on my hand, I started! I was about to jerk it away, when I remembered how my husband had treated me and I let him go on. Ah! he knew how to make love!" she declared, with the admiration of a savant.
"When I returned to my husband that night, I was frightened! I knew that I cared for Albert more than I should and I wanted him to protect me. When I tried to talk to him he told me to run along and play with Albert! And I did! I went! I went! I went! I——" The voice trailed off into a sob. She buried her face in her arms for a few moments and the table shook. The girl on the bed was in a semi-hypnotic trance and did not stir. When Jacqueline raised her head her face was set in its usual stony mask.
"When I came back that night," her voice was hard and high, "I was no longer a pure woman. I crept into bed and wept, afraid that my husband would question me when he came to say good-night. He didn't come. He was thinking about one of his problems and forgot it. All my remorse was gone in a moment. I didn't think of him or my boy. I was mad—crazy! I gave myself up to Albert without a thought of the future!
"But it didn't last long!" she wagged her head solemnly. "My husband came home too early one night and found us in my room. Never should ha' been there! Never! Never, never! But I thought I hated him so much that I wanted to be untrue to him in his own house. Well, when he opened the door he just stood there and looked at us for a minute and didn't say a word. Then he went off down the hall toward his study. We ran down-stairs and out of the house and——" She stopped, her eyes wavering and her face wrinkling, as the absinthe or the ether apparently sketched a humorous picture on her mind.
"Hee! Hee!" she cackled hysterically. "I'll bet he was surprised when he came back! Hee, hee, hee! I never thought of that! Hee, hee, hee! Ha, ha, ha! I never—ha, ha, ha!" And she rocked back and forth in uncanny mirth until the laughter changed to sobs. Then she stiffened suddenly and tried to glare at Marie with watery eyes.
"What you laughing at? S'there anything funny?" she demanded, belligerently. The frightened girl, who had not made a sound, began a stammering protest. She was too much fascinated by the evil story and its creepy narrator to think of rushing out of the room.
"'S all right! All right! But don't do it again," Jacqueline warned her. "Now, le' me see! Oh, yes! Well, Albert and I went down South and bought a little place in the country and lived there for a long time. Happy? No, I wasn't happy! I wanted my boy. My boy! My boy!" And again she burst into tears.
"I hadn't been there but a little more than a year," she went on, snuffling and wiping her eyes, "when I told him I couldn't live without my baby and I was going to ask my husband to forgive me. He begged me not to do it, and for months I was afraid to try. At last, he took pneumonia and died.
"I wrote three letters to my husband, asking Aim to see me, and he never answered. That made me all the more afraid to meet him, and I don't think I would ever have had the courage if I had not overheard a conversation between two men in a café one evening. They had just come from Paris. They were lawyers, and one of them was wondering at my husband's strength. He said that my boy had been dangerously ill, and that my husband was beside his bed all night, but in Court every day as usual.
"When I heard that my baby might be dying I nearly swooned; and, before I had recovered, the two men were gone. I called a cab and drove to the railway station as fast as I could, and within a few hours I was in Paris. Nearly all of my fear of my husband was gone in my grief about my baby and I hurried to the house where we had lived as fast as a horse could go. When I got there I found that he had moved to Passy shortly after I—I left him. It was late in the evening when I found the place."
Jacqueline paused and her head sank slowly on to the table. After a few moments she sat up and reached feverishly for the ether bottle.
"The—hugh!—maid knew—hugh! hugh—knew, me," she coughed, "but I begged her to tell my husband that a woman wanted to see him, without giving him my name. When he came in he tried to put me out of the house without listening to me. I groveled at his feet and begged him to let me see my boy! I told him how I had suffered and how bitterly I had repented the wrong I had done him, and for a time I thought he would yield and forgive me. But when I told him that my lover was dead he thought that was the only reason that I had returned to him and he went mad with rage. In spite of my tears and struggles he pushed me out of the house and—and—and—I had lost—my boy—forever!..."
"You remember that, d'you hear?" she demanded. "You can kill a man, and if you've any sort of reason everybody may forgive. But if you're untrue to your husband—it doesn't make any difference how much reason you have—every-body'll kick you...."
Jacqueline fumbled in the box for another cigarette and held it, unlighted, in her hand as she went on.
"I don't remember much what happened for the next few hours after that. I must have found my way back to Paris somehow, because while it was still dark I was standing at the edge of an embankment looking into the Seine.
"It was raining and my clothes were wet through and through. I didn't know what I was doing or how I got there. A light on the other side threw a reflection across, almost to my feet; and, as I looked down, I saw my baby in the water!"
Her voice had dropped until it was barely audible across the room, and she leaned toward Marie, her eyes shining with an insane light.
"I s'pose you think I'm crazy, eh? Couldn't have seen? Well, you don't know all about babies, my girl!
"D'you ever see your baby in the river?" she demanded, with hoarse fierceness. The girl's only reply was a dry sob and a shudder.
"Well, you will if you run away with that d——d soap peddler of yours," she grumbled, settling back in her chair....
"I was just going to get into the river and take him in my arms when someone caught hold of my wrist and I heard a man's voice asking, 'Are you ill, madame?'
"I don't know what I said, but he put his arm through mine, led me into a little café where he made me drink some brandy before he would let me say a word. Then he called a cab and asked me where I lived.
"In the light of the café I had a chance to look at him when the brandy made me feel a little warmer. I knew by his accent that he was an Englishman. He had curly brown hair and a pink and white skin—altogether a nice-looking young man! He seemed to be less than thirty, and he talked and acted toward me as he would have if I had been his sister.
"When the cab came he wanted to take me home in it. I told him that I had no place to go and begged him to go away and leave me. He sat down again and I don't remember how much of my story I told him.
"He told me afterward that I fainted in the cab; but when I could understand things clearly once more, I was lying in a big soft bed in a beautifully furnished room. There were pictures and statues and heavy draperies everywhere. Foils and arms and books were scattered about. There was a little table covered with bottles beside my bed and a nurse sitting near by. When she saw that I was awake she told me that I was in the Englishman's apartment and that I had been delirious for three weeks.
"In a little while he came in and told me how he had brought me home and had sent for a doctor and nurse. The doctor said that I had narrowly escaped brain fever. I went to sleep again in a little while and did not wake until the next day. The nurse stayed less than a week after that and he came into my room and read and talked to me by the hour. He told me all about himself. He was the son of a wealthy English family and had developed a love for painting which he had ample money to cultivate.
"He was a bright, cheerful young fellow, and in his company and through his care I grew strong rapidly. He never asked me to tell him one word about my past or my plans for the future. When I was able to sit up comfortably in bed he brought his easel into the room and painted me. He was given honorable mention for it.
"All this time I was worrying about what I was to do when I grew strong enough to leave his rooms. I made up my mind that I would try to find work of some sort in the millinery shops. One day I mentioned to him that I would be leaving in a short time, and he looked very grave and asked me what I intended doing. I told him and he approved of the plan. In all this time he had not as much as given me a passionate glance.
"He insisted, when I was able to go out, that I should make my home there, until I was established in a place where I could make a living, and loaned me the money to get clothes that I needed. I did not love him, but I worshipped him for his goodness.
"It was disappointing work—trying to find employment, and I could not make enough to live on decently. I had never had to be very careful of money before, and I did not know how. He advised me, and helped me, cheered me all he could, and we ate supper together every night.
"I was making a few francs a week trimming hats, and when we began telling our experiences of the day those little suppers were almost merry. I was learning to hate my husband with a hate that will be with me till I die," and the glow of her dark eyes put the seal of truth on the words, "and when John—my Englishman—told his jokes and blunders, the pain of the longing for my boy did not hurt so much.
"Then I lost my miserable position, and it was days before I got another, although it was a better one when I did find it. During that time he was even more thoughtful and attentive and did not give me a chance to feel hopeless very long.
"The night, after I went to work again, we were sitting in the room where I had lain ill and he was telling me, with many laughs, about a picture that a fellow student was painting. As I watched his clean, handsome face and listened to his cheery talk I thought of all that he had done for me—that he had asked for nothing and received nothing but my empty words of gratitude—and my eyes filled with tears. The next moment I was kneeling before his chair, kissing his hands....
"His story stopped with a gasp, and I felt him tremble. Then he drew his hands away and raised me up to him and I kissed his lips and eyes and hair again and again. And ... that night ... I gave him ... all I had ... to give!...
"He never really loved me, but he was happy with me for a long time, and when he went back to England he took me with him. His home was only a few hours' ride from London, where he found apartments for me, and he was with me more than he was at home.
"Finally his visits were not so frequent and regular and they kept falling off, until once I did not see him for nearly three weeks. When he came he told me he had to tell me something that he was sure would hurt me, but he couldn't help it. He had fallen in love with an English girl, whom he had known all his life, and hoped to marry her; so he would have to break with me. He was always very liberal in money matters, and he wanted to keep on sending me the same allowance that he had given me when I settled in London. But I was too proud—then—to take it. I gathered together what money I had saved, packed my clothes and left that day.
"I took a cheap room and started out to find work again. I was given a place as clerk in a millinery store and by living as carefully as I could I did not have to draw often on my savings. But I had to draw on them a little and I was beginning to feel reckless, when an American theatrical man, who was spending part of the summer in England, came into the store one day o buy some ladies' gloves. I waited on him, and—well, in a few days I left my cheap room, and that fall I went back to New York with him.
"He wasn't as careful of my feelings as the Englishman was——You'll find that out, too, my girl," she broke off, with a grin of drunken cynicism. "After the first two or three, your lovers don't think much about your feelings. He left me destitute in less than a month after we got to New York!
"I tried to get work but I couldn't. The woman where I roomed took all of my clothes, except those had on, to pay for my room, and turned me out. I walked the streets all that night and the next day without anything to eat, and the next night stopped a well-dressed man and asked him if he could give me enough money to get some food. He walked on as if he had not heard me, and then next instant a man stepped out of a doorway and told me I was under arrest!
"He took me to a police station where I spent the rest of the night in cell, and the next morning I was taken to court. The detective who had arrested me told the judge that he had seen me speak to a strange man on the street, and the judge gave me my choice of paying a fine of twenty-five francs or going to prison for a month. I tried to explain that I had had nothing to eat for two days and that I had only asked the man for a little money, but they would not listen to me. Just as they were about to take me away to prison, as I had seen them take three or four other girls before me, a young man, very stylishly dressed, came forward and said that he would pay my fine. The clerk took his money and he led me out of the courtroom.
"When we were outside I tried to thank him, but I was so weak with hunger and weariness that I could hardly speak or stand. He took me to a little restaurant a few steps away and made me eat until I felt that I would never be hungry again. During breakfast he learned that I was alone, friendless and penniless, and he said he would help me. I went with him and he took me to his room where ... we stayed all day!
"That night he took me out, saying that he would get me a room of my own. We went to a nice-looking house not far from one of the main streets of the city where a pleasant woman met us at the door. He asked me to sit down while he explained about me to the woman and when she came in to show me to my room she was very kind. The next morning my clothes were gone from my room and there was nothing in their place but a low-cut wrapper that I couldn't wear on the street. I was a prisoner....
"I was in that house for more than a year and I made sometimes seventy-five—a hundred—a hundred and fifty francs in a day and a night, but I was never allowed to keep any of the money. The woman took part of it and the man who brought me there got the rest. I was on the point of trying to run away two or three times, but the girls in the house told me that I would be arrested and sent to prison and would have to come back to him in the end. Several of them had tried when they were first made slaves...."
The voice that had been dispassionate, almost impersonal through the latter part of the story, suddenly ceased. Jacqueline gulped at the ether bottle again and lit the cigarette she had been holding in her fingers. She was silent so long that Marie looked up at her, with something between a sob and a shudder.
"Is that all?" she half whispered.
The woman once more burst into a harsh, eerie laugh.
"All! All!" she repeated with drunken scorn. "Oh, hell! That's only the beginning! Where d'you s'pose I've been for the last fifteen years?—Well, I've been where you'll be if you run off with your soap peddler!" and she glared wickedly.
"I was sent all over the country," she went on, "always living the same life, and always with a different master. At last I got back to New York and had to go on the streets to make a living for myself and money for the man that owned me. One night, when my feet were wet with rain and I was cold all through, a girl showed me that an opium pill would make me feel better.
"After that I was never without some sort of drug, but I found out that ether is the best. Ether is the best!" And her eyes rested lovingly on the little bottle.
"I don't know how many years I was in the 'land of the free.' I'd have been about as well off there as anywhere else if it hadn't been for a lot of fool-women who were always trying to save me. There's a lot of women over there that have plenty of money and nothing to do, and instead of doing nothing they keep sticking their noses into other people's business. I'd like to choke some of 'em!" she blazed out viciously.
"Save me!" she sneered with her mirthless laugh. "They got hold of me once when I was arrested and gave me a place where I could make twenty-five or thirty francs a week if I worked hard. All the time they looked at me and acted as if I was some new sort of a wild beast. When they put me in that work-shop they all called and said, 'Now, you're all right!'
"'All right!' I could hardly help laughing in their faces. They couldn't put my boy in my arms nor clean the stain from my body or drive the hell out of my soul, but they thought that twenty-five francs a week ought to be a good substitute for all three. It wouldn't much more than buy my food and whiskey and drugs. And because I left I was, 'incorrigible' and they sent me to prison——!
"When I was released the man that was collecting my money at that time told me that I wouldn't be of any more use to him in New York and he sold me to a man who was taking some women to South America. It isn't hard to get a lover in South America, and I had been there only a little while when I was free. Then I roamed around from one city to another, sometimes with one man, sometimes with another, until I met—this"—she nodded toward the door—"in Buenos Ayres. A woman in a dance-hall at Caracas taught me how to tell fortunes with cards, and when I learned that I had not long to live and would see my boy before I died I wanted to get back to France. He brought me."
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Marie's soft weeping. Jacqueline looked at her reflectively.
"Now, you're going to go the same way I did," she went on with a solemn air, born of the stimulants. "Remember what I tell you, m'girl. When you run away with that man you're through with being a decent, happy woman! I was an aristocratic prostitute once. You'll never be anything but a common one! Nobody'll try to stop you. Women'll be a sight harder on you than men. The men'll amuse themselves with you and push you a little farther down, but the women'll push you down and swear at you while they're doing it!—--Well?"
"I'm sure—Anatole—will never—leave me!" sobbed the girl. Jacqueline gazed at her as if trying to decide whether it were worth while to continue the argument. Then the ether moved her to impatient anger.
"All right, you d——d fool!" she snapped, "Get out of here!"
Marie rose, weeping more loudly and bitterly.
"Isn't there—something—I can do for you?"
"No! Get out!"
As the door closed behind the girl Jacqueline's head fell on the table with a long convulsive sob. She was silent for a long time and then, sitting up, she turned once more to the cards.
Laroque almost skipped with delight as he hurried back to the Three Crowns. The prospect of making plenty of money without working for it acted like champagne on his restless, reckless mind. Before he had walked a hundred steps he was building air-castles to be inhabited four or five years hence. He had no intention of remaining long as an employé of Messrs. Perissard and Merivel. The pay was good and the percentage of the two "missions" that had already been unfolded to him would be larger. He told himself that the first really big sum of money that he collected he would brazenly put in his pocket and whistle at the partners. Then he would buy out a small café somewhere in a paying neighborhood and settle down to a life of ease.
And if the woman at the hotel had really brought her husband a dower of considerable size, as Perissard's logic seemed to prove, here was the chance made right to his hand. He would get the money, abandon the woman, and the rest of his years would be a pathway of ease.
So he sprang up the stairs, three at a time and threw open the door of the room, singing a song of the dance-halls. Jacqueline glanced up as he came in and then went on with her reading of the future.
He tossed his hat on to the bed, kicked a chair up to the table and dropped into it with a cheery:
"Do you know, old girl, this man Perissard is a wonderful old chap?"
"Is he?" she asked, absent-mindedly, without raising her head.
"I should think he was!" was the enthusiastic response. "Brimful of ideas!"
"Has he got anything for you?"
"Rather! He's offered me a place in his office?"
"What does he do in his office?"
"Oh—business!"
At the evasive reply, Jacqueline raised her head curiously.
"What kind of business?" she asked, with a trace of interest in the thick voice.
"Oh, business of all kinds! He really is an extraordinary man! Do you know, the moment he set eyes on you he saw that you were a woman of good family?"
These were the first words that she seemed to hear clearly, and her face displayed a foolish smile of gratified vanity.
"Did he really?"
"Yes! 'There's blood in her,' he said," went on Laroque, impressively. "Those were the very words he used."
Jacqueline raised the ether bottle.
"Here's his health!" she cried, taking another drink.
"I told him he could go and bet on it!" continued Laroque.
"You—you didn't tell him—who I was!" exclaimed Jacqueline, a dawning fright in her bleared eyes. She had forgotten for the moment that Laroque did not really know.
"Not much!" was the emphatic reply. "No," he laughed. "I told him, after making him promise to keep it secret, that you were the daughter of a general—that your father and mother were very rich—that your husband was a marquis and you had brought him 300,000 francs on your marriage!"
Jacqueline's hysterical cackle was added to his laugh.
"That's good! Veree good!" she chuckled. "And he b'lieved it, did he?"
"Every word of it! What do you think of that? Three hundred thousand francs! Ha, ha! And I suppose you didn't bring him a son, did you?"
Jacqueline fell into the trap without a thought. She stiffened with drunken dignity.
"I beg your pardon!" she said, with a haughtiness somewhat impaired by her difficulty of enunciation. "I did not bring my husband 300,000 francs on my marriage, certainly! But I did bring him 125,000!"
Laroque hid the gleam in his eyes.
"Oh, nonsense! You're joking!" he laughed, "125,000 francs!"
"I 'sure you it's true!" declared Jacqueline, solemnly.
"Tut, tut! You're stretching it some!"
"Not a sou—more nor less!"
"Truth and honor?" he cried, laughing and raising his hand in the gesture of the oath.
"Truthan' honor!"
"A hundred and twenty-five thousand francs?"
"A hundred and twenty-five thousand francs!" And she nodded her head with heavy importance.
"Then where's the money?" he suddenly demanded. Jacqueline stared at him in mild surprise.
"Wha'd'you mean?"
"Did your husband give the money back to you?" His voice had changed from a bantering tone to excited harshness.
"No, of course not!" she replied roughly.
Laroque sprang up, pretended anger in his face.
"I can't believe you were such a fool as that! Do you mean to tell me that when your husband turned you out you didn't ask him for the money?"
"The money's not mine!" she mumbled, her eyes wandering.
"Whose is it, then?"
"My son's!" The words were barely audible.
"But you're alive still!" he protested angrily. "Your son will get it when you die!"
"My son thinks I'm dead," she replied, wearily. "His father told him I was. And when he was twenty-one he probably came into my fortune."
Laroque half-turned away with a quick gesture of impatience.
"What a fool you are!" he cried, disgustedly. "I don't suppose he saw a sou of it!" He was racking his mind for some lure that would draw her husband's name from her. But this last lead was fatal. Jacqueline glared at him suddenly, her eyes wild.
"What the hell's it to you?" she blazed out fiercely. "You've got nothing to do with it, have you? What business is it o' yours, anyway?"
"But you ought to clear it up!" protested Laroque, in a milder tone, as he saw that he had erred. "That's what Perissard thinks, and Perissard knows what he's talking about."
"What business is it of Perissard's?" she shouted. Laroque extended his hands soothingly.
"He only spoke in your interests!" he hastily explained. "When I told him you had brought your husband 300,000 francs, he asked me whether you had got them back again. I said I didn't know, and he declared that you had a perfect right to the money."
"Well, I shan't claim it!" declared Jacqueline, sullenly sinking back into her chair.
"Why not?" he persisted.
"Because I don't—want to!"
"But why?"
Jacqueline burst into tears again.
"I'd rather beg in the streets!" she wept in a high whine. "I'd rather starve in the gutter man ask that man for a son!"
"Yes! yes! Of course, I understand that!" he agreed, eagerly. "That's natural pride, that is! But you might get somebody else to get your money for you. You might give somebody the power of attorney."
The sobs stopped abruptly and she stared at him in drunken scorn.
"Signed with my name and address, eh? No, thanks!"
"Well, a letter then," he suggested. "I should think a letter would do just as well. Look here! Give me a letter and I'll go and get your money for you!"
"I'd rather die than let my son know I'm alive!" she cried, her voice hoarse with passion and weeping. "He's not to know at any price! I'd rather kill myself! Yes, I would! Kill myself!"
"But he'll never know!" protested Laroque. He was fairly dancing with excitement. But Jacqueline apparently did not hear him.
"If he ever thinks of me," she went on between raging and sobbing, "I want him to regret me and I want him to feel sorry now and then because I'm not with him. He never knew me! I want him to respect my memory and love me!"
"Now, don't get excited!" interrupted Laroque soothingly.
"I don't want him to know what kind of a woman his mother is. And he shan't know it!" she shouted with sudden fury. "He shall never know it, I tell you!Never! I tell you!Never!"
"All right! Don't lose your temper! Who on earth is going to tell him? I certainly won't, and It isn't likely his father will."
Jacqueline sank back into her chair and glowered at him.
"I don't want to talk about it any more!"
"But the money's worth the trouble!" he insisted, trying to hide his exasperation.
"D——n the money!"
"A hundred and twenty-five thousand francs! Think what a difference they'd make to us!"
"Oh, shut your d——d mouth!" she growled. "I don't want to talk about the money, I tell you!" Laroque's eyes sparkled.
"Look here, my girl!" he cried, threateningly. "You keep a civil tongue in your head or I'll teach you who you're talking to!"
Jacqueline measured him with that boundless contempt that is given only the very drunk to feel.
"You can't teach me any more than I know about you!" she retorted with unmistakably insulting meaning.
Laroque elected to ignore this last thrust and ostentatiously looked at his watch.
"Will you write me a letter so I can get the money?" he demanded with an air of finality.
"No!" she screamed. He took off his coat and vest and went into the dressing-room with the remark that "he could do without the letter."
Jacqueline did not at first catch its significance but an idea slowly worked into her brain.
"What do you mean?" she demanded.
"Oh, there's no trouble about finding a Deputy Attorney!" was the cheerful reply, accompanied by noise of splashing. She rose unsteadily.
"What are you doing in there?"
"Dressing."
"Are you going out?"
"Yes, my girl, I'm going out."
"Where are you going?" she demanded.
"To Paris," he replied, calmly, through the open door.
"This evening?"
"Right away!"
"Then I'll come with you!" she declared, determinedly.
"No, you won't!" he replied, coolly, returning into the room. "Perissard objects."
Jacqueline faced him with dilated eyes.
"You're not to try and find my husband!" she cried, between anger and dread. She swayed on her feet. The thick slur had disappeared from her voice in the instant.
"Mind your own business!" snapped Laroque, picking up his hat and coat, "and I'll mind mine!"
"You are not to ask him for that money!" she cried, her voice rising shrilly.
"I'll do just as I like!" he sneered. Jacqueline clutched the lapel of his coat with both hands and glared into his face with blazing eyes.
"You shall not go!" she screamed furiously.
"What kind of a fool do you think I am?" he cried, roughly, trying to break away from her grip. "Who'll stop me?"
Jacqueline, with clenched teeth, clung grimly to his coat.
"Take care, my girl!" he cried, threateningly, as he tried to wrench his coat out of her hands. "Take care or you'll regret it!"
"You shall not go, I tell you! You shan't go into that house and see my child. I won't let you go!"
Laroque jerked his coat out of her grip and in the same motion threw her violently against the bed.
"Let me alone!" he snarled, and stalked into the dressing-room to get his traveling bag.
Jacqueline lurched to her feet and staggered over toward the hall door.... The room was reeling around her in crimson streaks. He must not pass that door! At the price of her life, he must not pass that door! ... There was no key! ... He would go and tell her husband of her shame!... Her boy would blush now for the mother, for whose memory he had wept.... Crazed with rage and horror and drugs she put her back to the door and stared helplessly around the room. The dresser was at her right, and there within easy reach was his revolver! With a gasp she clutched it as Macbeth might have reached for the phantom dagger.... What was his life compared with the thought that her boy would know his mother's shame?... She heard him coming and hid the revolver in the folds of her skirt.
Bag in hand, he walked briskly up to the door and attempted to push her to one side.
"No! You shan't go! you shan't go!" she panted, struggling.
"We'll see!" he laughed, derisively, getting his hand on the knob.