"'Is the beast dead?' exclaimed Laurence, springing up with a red glow of joy over her face.
"'And the dwarf is also dead,' I added.
"'Monsieur Turlutu?' cried Laurence, also with joy. But this joy gradually died from her face, and in a milder, almost melancholy tone, she added, 'Poor Turlutu!'
"When I told her, without any concealment, that the dwarf had complained of her very bitterly on his death-bed, she became passionately disturbed, and assured me, with many protestations, that she had had the foresight to care for him as well as possible, that she had offered him a pension if he would go and live quietly somewhere in the country. 'But ambitious as he was,' Laurence pursued, "he wished to stay in Paris, and even to live at my house; he could then, he thought, through my interposition, renew his connections in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and again take his former brilliant position in society. When I flatly refused him this, he told me that I was a cursed ghost, a vampyre, a death-child."
"Laurence suddenly stopped, shuddered violently, and said at last, with a deep sigh, 'Ah, I wish they had left me in the grave with my mother!' As I pressed her to explain these mysterious words, a stream of tears flowed from her eyes, and, trembling and sobbing, she confessed to me that the black woman with the drum, who gave herself out as her mother, had once herself told her that the rumour which went about concerning her birth was no mere story. 'For in the town where we lived,' pursued Laurence, 'they always called me the death-child! The old woman maintained that I was the daughter of a Count who lived there, and who constantly ill-treated his wife, and when she died buried her very magnificently; she was, however, near her confinement, and only apparently dead, and when some churchyard thieves opened the grave to strip the richly-adorned corpse, they found the countess alive and in child-birth; and as she expired immediately after delivery, the thieves placed her again quietly in her grave, took away the child, and gave it to the receiver of the stolen goods, the great ventriloquist's sweetheart, to be brought up. This poor child, who had been buried before it was born, was everywhere called the death-child. Ah! you cannot understand how much sorrow I felt even as a little girl when anyone called me by that name. While the great ventriloquist was alive, whenever he was discontented with me, he always called out, 'Cursed death-child, I wish you had never been taken out of the grave!' He was a skilful ventriloquist, and could so modulate his voice that it seemed to come up out of the earth, and he told me that that was the voice of my dead mother telling me her fate. He might well know that horrible fate, for he had been a valet of the Count's. He took a cruel pleasure in the horrible fright which I, poor little girl, received from the words which seemed to ascend from the earth. These words, which seemed to ascend from the earth, mingled together fearful tales—tales which I never understood in their connection, and which later on I gradually forgot; but when I danced they would again come into my mind with living power. Yes, when I danced a singular remembrance seized me; I forgot myself, and I seemed to be quite another person, and as if all the sorrows and secrets of this person were poisoning me, and as soon as I left off dancing it was all extinguished in my memory.'
"While Laurence said this, slowly and as if questioning, she stood before me at the fireplace, where the fire was burning pleasanter than ever; and I sat in the easy-chair, which was apparently the seat of her husband, where he told her his battles before going to bed of an evening. Laurence looked at me with her large eyes as if she was asking my advice; she moved her head to and fro in such a melancholy, reflective way; she filled me with such a sweet compassion; she was so slender, so young, so lovely, this lily that had sprung out of the grave, this daughter of death, this ghost with the face of an angel and the body of a bayadere! I do not know how it came to pass; perhaps it was the influence of the easy-chair on which I was sitting, but it suddenly came into my mind that I was the old general who had described the battle of Jena yesterday from this place, and as if I must go on with my narrative, and I said, 'After the battle of Jena all the Prussian fortresses yielded themselves up within a few weeks, almost without drawing a sword. First Magdeburg yielded; it was the strongest fortress, and had three hundred cannon. Was not that disgraceful?'
"But Mademoiselle Laurence allowed me to say no more; the troubled mood had vanished from her face; she laughed like a child, and cried, 'Yes, that was disgraceful, more than disgraceful! If I was a fortress and had three hundred guns, I would never yield myself!'
"But as Mademoiselle Laurence was not a fortress, and had not three hundred guns——"
At these words Maximilian suddenly stopped in his story, and, after a short pause, asked gently, "Are you asleep, Maria?"
"I'm asleep," answered Maria.