With a leap, like whalebone released, the figure was on its feet and screaming: “Help! help! à moi, Loustalot! The prisoner—he’s escaped—Help!”
A cry as useless as desperate. He himself had paralysed the drunkard’s hand—had closed his ears. Even as he uttered it, he was down—doomed—saw the blade whisked up—last in whose heart! A mortal shudder seized him—and then all of a sudden he remembered. He tore something from his breast. Even as the knife descended, a shock and spatter of fire leapt from his hand, and Cartouche reeled and fell.
Not too late, perhaps, yet! Dropping the reeking pistol, he tried to pluck the rat’s tooth from his throat. It held like a vice. Fumbling with it feebly, and ever more feebly, his fingers relaxed, half rose again to grip the agony, and so, poised mid-way, crooked and stiffened slowly.
For a minute silence reigned on the fallen echoes of that tragedy. Then the ex-Prefect stirred. He was bleeding horribly. The wound in him was numb; only his every limb seemed faint with sickness. He crawled to the dead thing, and with shaking hands searched it, and quickly came upon what he sought. Rising, by a superhuman effort, and supporting himself against the forge, he found her name and put his stiff lips to it. They left a crimson wafer—his sign manual—“this is my act and deed.” Some ashes yet smouldered on the hearth. He blew them into a glow—the blood pumping from him, regularly, to each beat of the bellows—and thrust the paper in, and saw it go in flame. Then, tottering for the open door, he sunk down upon its threshold.
The lights of Di Rocco twinkled on the hill-side. They found him, sunk against the lintel, with his dead eyes fixed upon them.
AFTERWARD
These shadows pass; yet to what possible redemption through that blood? Had it not been said that “whoso sheddeth man’s, by man’s shall his be shed.” It was not for that poor sinner to usurp the divine prerogative. Those for whom he suffered must still expiate as they had wrought.
Far on I see them moving—the devoted woman still shadowing the weak man. The old order has passed away, and they with it. The Kingdom of retaliation has risen on the Kingdom of despotism. Savoy is bound with a red ribbon to the republic; its people shout for France; its rulers are betrayed to her. One day these two go to the scaffold.
It is a last mercy that they are permitted to go together. So her life’s purpose shall find its consummation. What sorrows, what disenchantments have been hers in these years of her fading beauty, of her hopelessness for herself, only God may know. They have never affected her steadfast resolve. She has given herself to save her saint for heaven.
Up to the very last her patient lips are shut to him on all that she has done and suffered for his sake. His passage shall be bright and confident. She kisses him and sends him to die before her.