The Clique of Gold | Page 3

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 his eye. He took it up. It was the last will of the poor girl, and ran thus:--
"Let no one be accused; I die voluntarily. I beg Mrs. Chevassat will carry the two letters which I enclose to their addresses. She will be paid whatever I may owe her. Henrietta."
There were the two letters. On the first he read,--
Count Ville-Handry, Rue de Varennest 115. And, on the other,--
M. Maxime de Brevan, 62 Rue Laffitte.
A sudden light seemed to brighten up the small yellowish eye of the dealer in old clothes; a wicked