'The duel first—of course, the duel first!' he exclaimed. 'The wedding can wait, but the other, you know, is an affair of honour.'
'Hadn't you better let me know something about the quarrel? We may be able to arrange it.'
'Not likely,' said O'Hoolohan drily. 'I must be fairly bothered,' he added. 'Now that I recollect, it was to tell you all about the quarrel I came here expressly, but one thing has driven the other clean out of my mind.'
'Sit down,' said O'Hara, 'and go ahead.'
CHAPTER X.
'LA JEUNE FRANCE.'
IF this were not a veracious history, in the customary order of events as they occur in the construction of fiction, the reader should have gone straight from the quick and gracious acceptance of O'Hoolohan's proposal of marriage to the old-fashioned formula of ringing the wedding-bells, and leaving the united pair to the enjoyment of the honeymoon, with the tag: 'If they don't live happy, may we!' That would be the artistic conclusion. But we are copying from nature, and have no pretensions to art. And O'Hoolohan's nature was one of surprises. That phenomenally-constituted being had been very busy secretly prosecuting researches into the manner in which the girl he had recognised in the Morgue had come by her death, and the mode in which her body had been disposed of.
A great city like Paris, with its never-ending rush of activities, is like to a whirlpool. It is always in surging motion; the figures that rise to the surface for awhile and attract a passing notice as they circle giddily round are thought no more of, when they sink from view, than the flotsam and jetsam sucked into the oblivion of the Maelström.
Marguerite (for it was she) had run her course, and nine days after she had disappeared from the haunts that knew her she was forgotten. How she had died was never ascertained; but there was narrow scope for conjecture. It was only too evident that she had committed suicide. In the multitude of her facile acquaintances she had met one for whom she had conceived a real attachment. He pretended to reciprocate it, and he did, seemingly, until his student's career was finished, and he had received his doctor's degree, and was summoned to his home in the provinces to begin his dull professional life. The consecrated preliminary to that in France is to marry a neighbour's daughter with a snug dowry, who has been provided of long date by the prudence of family councils, tenacious of tradition. The youthful doctor duly led his destined help-meet to the altar, and by the same act consigned her erring sister in Paris, whose very existence she had never suspected, to the cold Seine and the nameless burial-pit.
That is no novelty in the Latin Quarter, nor will ever be while woman, degraded soever though she be, is not utterly heartless.
The deserted Marguerite had committed suicide. She had sallied out in the blackness of midnight, when the quays were silent and lonely, and, watching her opportunity till the policemen and roysterers and rag-pickers were distant, she had stealthily clambered the parapet of a bridge and dropped into the river. That must have been the end. So it had been settled over pipes and cards and Strasburg beer in the brasseries of the Boulevard St. Michel; and so, truly, it might—nay, must have been.