The Clique of Gold | Page 3

almost
all left their rooms, and followed the others.
So that Master Chevassat had nearly a dozen curious persons behind
him, when he stopped on the fifth floor to take breath.
The door to Miss Henrietta's room was the first on the left in the
passage. He knocked at first gently, then harder, and at last with all his
energy, till his heavy fists shook the thin partition-walls of all the
rooms.
Between each blow he cried,--

"Miss Henrietta, Miss Henrietta, they want you!"
No reply came.
"Well!" he said triumphantly, "you see!"
But, whilst the man was knocking at the door, M. Ravinet had knelt
down, and tried to open the door a little, putting now his eye, and now
his ear, to the keyhole and to the slight opening between the door and
the frame.
Suddenly he rose deadly pale.
"It is all over; we are too late!"
And, as the neighbors expressed some doubts, he cried furiously,--
"Have you no noses? Don't you smell that abominable charcoal?"
Everybody tried to perceive the odor; and soon all agreed that he was
right. As the door had given way a little, the passage had gradually
become filled with a sickening vapor.
The people shuddered; and a woman's voice exclaimed,--
"She has killed herself!"
As it happens strangely enough, but too frequently, in such cases, all
hesitated.
"I am going for the police," said at last Master Chevassat.
"That's right!" replied the merchant. "Now there is, perhaps, a chance
yet to save the poor girl; and, when you come back, it will of course be
too late."
"What's to be done, then?"
"Break in the door."
"I dare not."
"Well, I will."
The kind-hearted man put his shoulder to the worm-eaten door, and in a
moment the lock gave way. The bystanders shrank instinctively back;
they were frightened. The door was wide open, and masses of vapors
rolled out. Soon, however, curiosity triumphed over fear. No one
doubted any longer that the poor girl was lying in there dead; and each
one tried his best to see where she was.
In vain. The feeble light of the lamp had gone out in the foul air; and
the darkness was frightful.
Nothing could be seen but the reddish glow of the charcoal, which was
slowly going out under a little heap of white ashes in two small stoves.
No one ventured to enter.

But Papa Ravinet had not gone so far to stop now, and remain in the
passage.
"Where is the window?" he asked the concierge.
"On the right there."
"Very well; I'll open it."
And boldly the strange man plunged into the dark room; and almost
instantly the noise of breaking glass was heard. A moment later, and
the air in the room had become once more fit for breathing, and
everybody rushed in.
Alas! it was the death-rattle which M. Ravinet had heard.
On the bed, on a thin mattress, without blankets or bedclothes, lay a
young girl about twenty years old, dressed in a wretched black merino
dress, stretched out at full-length, stiff, lifeless.
The women sobbed aloud.
"To die so young!" they said over and over again, "and to die thus."
In the meantime the merchant had gone up to the bed, and examined
the poor girl.
"She is not dead yet!" he cried. "No, she cannot be dead! Come, ladies,
come here and help the poor child, till the doctor comes."
And then, with strange self-possession, he told them what to do for the
purpose of recalling her to life.
"Give her air," he said, "plenty of air; try to get some air into her lungs.
Cut open her dress; pour some vinegar on her face; rub her with some
woollen stuff."
He issued his orders, and they obeyed him readily, although they had
no hope of success.
"Poor child!" said one of the women. "No doubt she was crossed in
love."
"Or she was starving," whispered another.
There was no doubt that poverty, extreme poverty, had ruled in that
miserable chamber: the traces were easily seen all around. The whole
furniture consisted of a bed, a chest of drawers, and two chairs. There
were no curtains at the window, no dresses in the trunk, not a ribbon in
the drawers. Evidently everything that could be sold had been sold,
piece by piece, little by little. The mattresses had followed the
dresses,--first the wool, handful by handful, then the covering.
Too proud to complain, and cut off from society by bashfulness, the

poor girl who was lying there had evidently gone through all the stages
of suffering which the shipwrecked mariner endures, who floats, resting
on a stray spar in the great ocean.
Papa Ravinet was thinking of all this, when a paper lying on the bureau
attracted