"Fair lady," said Lacour, "if such you be indeed, you must permit me to request you to remove that envious mask."
"It may not be," replied the stranger, with a laugh. "Ask that, or presume to remove this shield, and I vanish like a fairy or a phantom. But if you promise to be very obedient, I may give you hopes of disclosing my face—perhaps my name—at our next interview. But in reward for your submission to my behest, I will allow you, like a benignant sovereign, to do homage to my ungloved hand."
She withdrew her kid glove, and presented, playfully, a hand so white, so delicately veined, and small, that Lacour could no longer doubt that he was addressing a lady. He raised the hand respectfully to his lips. But he felt now that his suspicions were groundless, and that he did wrong in deceiving a person, who, however romantic and unjustifiable her behavior might seem, was still one entitled to respect and honor. But as he was framing an apology for taking advantage of her mistaking him, the stranger suddenly sprang upon him like a tigress. The delicate hand he had just kissed now compressed his throat like an iron vice; the other suddenly brandished in the air a small silver hammer, while a fierce voice hissed in his ear, "Lassalle! your hour has come! Belleville, Descartes, and Monval, have gone before you to answer for their crimes. You are the fourth, and last. Die, villain!"
But Lacour struggled free, and shouted for help. The door fell with a crash; the soldiers poured in, and the female assassin was secured and disarmed. Eager to unravel the mystery, the police officer tore the mask from the face of the unknown, and recognized in the wild and inflamed features of the assassin of the Rue La Harpe, the Rue Richelieu, and the Boulevard des Italiens, his sister, Maria Lacour!
But Maria Lacour died not on the scaffold. She was saved from that doom by unquestionable proofs of insanity. Her sad story was learned afterwards from various sources, and corroborated, in the most important particulars, by Captain Lassalle, who was arrested for a criminal offence shortly after the above incident, and made a full confession of his guilt. It appeared, then, that the house of the widow Lacour, a short time before the opening of our story, had been broken into by four villains, named Belleville, Descartes, Monval, and Lassalle. They were all men of bad habits, and urgently necessitous, but yet of decent education and family. Hearing a noise in the kitchen, Maria descended only in time to witness the death pangs of the mother. The three first-named ruffians, demons who had murdered to rob, wished to destroy this witness of their guilt, but the fourth interceded, and her life was spared. But the horror of the deed overthrew her reason. She fled from the house that night a maniac; whither she wandered, how she was cared for, for a long time was and must ever remain a mystery. She finally, it seems, became in a degree tranquillized, found her way to Paris, and there she supported herself by her extraordinary skill as an embroideress.
But it was conjectured that her memory of early events had gone. The casual sight of one of the assassins, all of whom had prospered and risen in the world, revived the recollection of that one fearful night of horror, and with it came to her disordered brain the thirst of vengeance. It did not appear that for a moment she had dreamed of appealing to the interposition of the law. To execute a summary vengeance, personally, was her terrible resolve. With a cunning that often supplies the loss of reason with the insane, she contrived snares, into which three of the assassins fell, and, with the singular implement her fancy had suggested, was the means of their death. Chance led to the failure of her plan for punishing the last of the assassins, Lassalle, and to her discovery by her brother.
Immediately after her arrest and examination, on proof of the condition of her mind, she was conveyed to a private asylum, and carefully attended to. Fortunately, her madness here assumed a happier phase. She took great pleasure in seeing her brother, and appeared to have forgotten that her mother was no more, asking him every day how soon their mother would come and take her back to the country. But the trials she had undergone had undermined her health. She sank very rapidly, and soon breathed her last.
Lacour only remained long enough in the service of the police to effect the arrest, and witness the condemnation of Lassalle, the last of the four assassins, who escaped the silver hammer of the maniac girl, to die by the hand of the executioner.
The sorrows he had experienced would have blighted the heart and sapped the life of Pierre Lacour, but for the love of one who had proved true to him through all his trials. Some months after the death of his sister, he married his faithful Estelle, and retired to a small and well-stocked farm, for which he was indebted to the generosity of the emperor; and he lived long enough, if not to forget his sorrows, at least to find consolation in the bosom of his family.