Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/380

352 He stopped them with the nervousness of a rescuer who jumps into the water or throws himself at the bridle of a runaway horse, and asked them what the installations were.

"Those? But that's the Béjard Cartridge Plant," they answered him, looking at him as if he had fallen from the moon.

At this answer he must have had an even more bewildered look. How was it that he had not foreseen this correlation? An establishment with such a repulsive expression and such a malignant exterior could serve only Béjard.

Laurent Paridael remembered that someone had told him of this last operation of the former slaver. Without becoming reconciled to Bergmans, he had applauded the vehement campaign which the tribune had conducted against the threatening works of the dealer in human flesh, and if he had not been more actively concerned in this opposition, it was only because he thought the Council incapable of tolerating such manipulations in the interior of the city. And now Paridael was finding that his anticipations had been given the lie, and that the public safety had been imperilled despite Bergmans' phillipics, adjurations, and cries of alarm.

Béjard, the evil alchemist, had succeeded in establishing his laboratory where it best suited him.

It was in these dangerous workshops, almost open to all the winds, built rather to attract bats than to shelter human beings, that his dreadful operations were taking place!

It was in close proximity to the most combustible materials that the presence of the most withering producers of fire was tolerated!