Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/30

 some odds and ends remained in the apartment, and he was not minded to leave them behind.

A happiness so great it almost hurt suffused him like the afterglow of a drink of fine old sherry. Susette—Susette, his heart seemed beating to the rhythm of her name. This was almost too good to be true, it was like something dreamed or read in a romance, too wonderful, too sweet, too utterly heart-satisfying to have happened to anyone like him. A singing heart needs singing lips to complement it, and instinctively he raised his lusty baritone in Master Isaac Watts' Farina:

"M'sieur, M'sieur Mardochée"—high, cracked, hysterical, old Marjotte's voice broke his rendition of the hymn—"pour l'amour de Dieu, come; oh, come at once!"

She was clawing at him blindly. Her gnarled old hands were so deformed with age and labor and rheumatism that they looked like malformed, dying branches on a dwarfed pine tree; her eyes were glazed and filmed with grief and terror; little flecks of bubble-froth hung in the corners of her convulsed mouth.

"Come, come, M'sieur," she gabbled, "it is la petite—the little Susette" Her thin, shrill, brittle voice cracked like a shattering glass and she dropped down to the settle, hugging both hands to her stomach, rocking to and fro in an excess of agony too acute for words.

"Good heavens, what is it, Marjotte?" Mordecai took her shoulders in his hands and shook her gently. "What has happened"

"Ohé, M'sieur, they've taken her, and she is dead!"

"What? You mean Susette's arrested"

"She is dead, M'sieur. Oui-da, I myself have seen her corpse!"

Mordecai dropped on the bed, eyes staring, mouth a little open. "Dead?" he echoed unbelievingly.

"Vraiment. But yes, M'sieur. I saw her lying there all cold with the guardsmen round her"

"When—how did it happen?"

"She went to the shop of Mère Duval to make some little purchases before the sun went down. I begged her not to go out in the twilight unattended, but she laughed at me. Had we not been safe from molestation since you took us under your protection? But certainly. I was preparing dinner, and when lamp-lighting time had come and she had not returned, I had concern. It was a dinner fit for our farewell to France, M'sieur—oysters, sole, caneton au four"

"Yes, yes; of course. I'm sure the dinner was a work of art, Marjotte, but what of Mademoiselle Susette?"

"B'en, M'sieur. When she came not I had the anxiety, and went to seek for her. Less than a hundred meters from the house I came upon her lying in the street with a ring of guardsmen round her. I am old, but when I wish to be I am of the silent foot, M'sieur. I crept up to them as noiselessly as any mouse. There lay my little one, my lamb, my baby, dead upon her back, and they were standing by and looking at her. There was Macrin Henriot—may Satan snatch him to hell with his eyes wide open!—and with him were his so vile myrmidons. Me, I heard them