“What is it, papa, what is it?” she cried.
And in reply Paichoux read aloud the notice of the death of Madame la veuve d’Hautreve, née d’Orgenois; and directly underneath: “Died at the Charity Hospital, Madame Pauline Jozain, née Bergeron.”
CHAPTER XXIX
TANTE MODESTE FINDS LADY JANE
When Paichoux read of the death of Madame Jozain in the Charity Hospital, he said decidedly: “Modeste, that woman never left the city. She never went to Texas. She has been hidden here all the time, and I must find that child.”
“And if you find her, papa, bring her right here to me,” said the kind-hearted woman. “We have a good many children, it’s true; but there’s always room for Lady Jane, and I love the little thing as well as if she were mine.”
Paichoux was gone nearly all day, and, much to the disappointment of the whole family, did not find Lady Jane.
His first visit had been to the Charity Hospital, where he learned that Madame Jozain had been brought there a few days before by the charity wagon. It had been called to a miserable little cabin back of the city, where they had found the woman very ill, with no one to care for her, and destitute of every necessity. There was no child with her—she was quite alone; and in the few lucid intervals that preceded her death she had never spoken of any child. Paichoux then obtained the directions from the driver of the charity wagon, and after some search he found the wretched neighborhood. There all they could tell him was that the woman had come a few weeks before; that she had brought very little with her, and appeared to be suffering. There was no child with her then, and none of the neighbors had ever seen one visit her, or, for that matter, a grown person either. When she became worse they were afraid she might die alone, and had called the charity wagon to take her to the hospital. The Public Administrator had taken charge of what little she left, and that was all they could tell.
Did any one know where she lived before she came there? No one knew; an old negro had brought her and her few things, and they had not noticed the number of his wagon. The landlord of the squalid place said that the same old man who brought her had engaged her room; he did not know the negro. Madame had paid a month’s rent in advance, and just when the month was up she had been carried to the hospital.
There the information stopped, and, in spite of every effort, Paichoux could learn no more. The wretched woman had indeed obliterated, as it were, every trace of the child. In her fear of detection, after Lady Jane’s escape from her, she had moved from place to place, hunted and pursued by a guilty conscience that would never allow her to rest, and gradually going from bad to worse until she had died in that last refuge for the miserable, the Charity Hospital.
“And here I am, just where I started!” said Paichoux dejectedly, after he had told Tante Modeste of his day’s adventure. “However,” said he, “I sha’n’t give it up. I’m bound to find out what she did with that child; the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that she never went to Texas, and that the child is still here. Now I’ve a mind to visit every orphan asylum in the city, and see if I can’t find her in one of them.”