The crowd laughed and jeered at this grave and sarcastic advice, and it seemed to madden her. Raising her closed sunshade and hissing, "I'll settle this!" she rushed towards Harcout, struck at him fiercely, following up the attack with quick and terrific blows, which completely demolished the parasol and drove him nimbly from place to place in his efforts to avoid the effects of her wrath.
For the next few moments there was a small whirlwind in Lyon's offices. The railing was too high for Mrs. Winslow to leap, or she certainly would have scaled it. Harcout could not retreat but a certain distance, or he certainly would have sought safety in flight. So the whirlwind was created by rapid and savage leaps of Mrs. Winslow, as if to jump the railing and fall bodily upon her victim, and at every bound the woman made, the shattered parasol waved aloft and came down with keen certainty and stinging swiftness, upon such portions of the gilt-edged gentleman as could be most conveniently reached.
It is difficult to realize what the woman would have done in her mad passion, had not a lucky circumstance occurred. She and Harcout had never met since the time when, in the face of her robbery of him, she had unblushingly compelled him to wed her to the credulous Dick Hosford at the Michigan Exchange Hotel in Detroit; and had she now recognized him as the villain who had made her what she was, it is a question whether she would not have made a finish of him there and then. But some one in the crowd raised the cry of "Police!" which sobered her at once, and, giving the tattered remnant of her sunshade a wicked pitch into Harcout's face, she turned quickly, shot into the Arcade as the crowd made way for her and quickened her speed by wild jibes and taunts, until she had reached the street, where, in a dazed, hunted sort of way, she hailed a passing cab, sprang into it, and was driven rapidly away.
CHAPTER XXI.
Mrs. Winslow, under the Influence of "Spirits" of an earthly Order, becomes romantic, religious, and poetical.—A Trance.—Detective Bristol also proves a Poet.—A Drama to be written.
WHEN the evening came and Mrs. Winslow came with it, she was observed to be in a high state of nervous and vinous excitement, and at such times she contrived to inaugurate a series of actions which proved not only interesting, but illustrative of her strange character.
She declared to Bristol and Fox that the Lord was hardening Lyon's heart as in the olden times the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, so that he should rush upon his fated disgrace as the Egyptian king rushed upon his fate while forcing the children of Israel into deliverance, and destruction upon himself; and like the unrelenting Mrs. Clennam in "Little Dorrit," had at command any number of scriptural parallels to prove the righteousness of her sin. This sort of blasphemy is the most pitiable imaginable, and to hear the woman in her semi-intoxicated, semi-crazed condition, mingling her vile catch-words with scraps of spiritualistic sayings, snatches of holy songs, couplets of roystering ballads, and crowning the hideousness of the whole with countless Bible quotations, was to be in the presence of supreme garrulousness, temperamental religious frenzy, and superstitious vileness.
It appeared that after she had escaped from the excitement she had created in the Arcade, she had been driven to the apartments of every clairvoyant of note in the city and had a "sitting" with each. In her excited condition, and being noted for having plenty of money, it was both easy to rob her and secure what was uppermost in her mind. Consequently, it was revealed to her by every medium that Lyon would settle with her for a large sum of money.
One medium averred that in her vision Lyon was seen, as it were, bending a suppliant at her feet, and, at the last moment, admiring her character as much as fearing the nature of the testimony he knew she could bring against him, he declared his love for her and begged that they might be married in open court.