‘Die—sweetheart!’ cried the mountebank cheeringly, as he turned towards her, and raised her chin with his hand. ‘Die!—St. Benoit, who rules my fete day, prevent it! You must not die this half-century. Besides, although the doctors can’t yet find poisons in the stomach, like witches’ nails and pins, yet the stones can whisper, in Paris, all they hear. And what should we get—I and my master—for thus serving you?’
‘All that I possess in the world,’ answered the girl.
‘Ay—that would come first, without doubt; and next, a short shrift, a long cord, and a dry faggot, on the Place de Grêve. No, no, sweetheart: if you brought as much gold as my mules could drag home, we could not do it.’
‘Then you will not let me have it?’
‘Why, you silly pigeon, I have told you so. With that pretty face and those dark eyes be sure you have much yet in store to live for. Or if you must die, don’t make any one your murderer. The Seine is wide and deep enough for all; and, besides, will cost you nothing.’
He spoke these words less in a spirit of levity than the wish to cheer the poor applicant by his good-humoured tones. But the girl clasped her hands together, and looked round with a shudder towards the quays.
‘The river!’ she exclaimed. ‘I have gazed upon it often, but my heart failed me. I shrank from the cold black water as it tore and struggled through those dark arches: I could not bear to think that its foul polluted current would be my only winding-sheet. I would sooner die in my little room; and then in the morning the sun would fall upon me as it does now, but it would not awaken me to another day of weeping—the same sun that shines in Languedoc, only there it is brighter.’
‘Are you from Languedoc, then?’ inquired the man.
‘I was born near Béziers,’ she replied sadly.
‘Mass! why that is my own country. What is your name?’