Then his voice came to him, though it seemed to her as though it was the voice of one whom she had never known. At last he spoke.
"He is dead," he said, "Half an hour ago. Slain by my orders. Dead. My wrong, my humiliation is avenged."
With a cry she sprang at him, frenzied, maddened at his words; her hands at his throat, as though she would throttle him.
"Murderer!" she shrieked. "Murderer! By your orders--By your orders--By----"
Yet, even as she spoke, the shaking assassin before her seemed to vanish from her sight, the room swam before her and became darkened; with a moan she sank swooning to the floor, forgetting, oblivious of, all.
"Come in," said Monsieur le Duc a moment later, as he opened the door and showed a white face to those waiting without. "Come in. She is quite harmless. Now is your time."
[CHAPTER X]
THE PRISON OF ST MARTIN DES CHAMPS
The agreeable ceremony of marrying the prisoners to one another, ere despatching them to Louisiana as convicts, was going on rapidly in the yard of the Prison of St. Martin des Champs on a sunny morning of the May which followed the ruin of Law's system; the paternal government being under the impression that it was far better for moral purposes--always matters of great importance in France!--that the new tillers of the soil should go out as married couples.
Moreover, the Government were a little embarrassed as to what they should do with all the convicts with which the numerous prisons of Paris were stuffed, since, at this period, there was no opportunity of drafting the men off into regiments, nor of utilising the services of the women. France was ruined--consequently she was not at war just now with any Power--while she had no money with which to keep her convicts hard at work. But (the idea having entered Law's fertile brain ere he prepared to flee) it was thought that Louisiana might still be made of some service to the Mother Country if her soil could be utilised, and, since there were no capitalists left of the original order and, if there had been, none who would embark their capital in that region, the Government had decided on peopling the place with fresh batches of convicts. Thus they attained a double object; they emptied their prisons and they provided a population for New France--a population which, since it was free and absolved from all further punishment of its past crimes, might, on reaching the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, flourish and do well, or, since both the Indians and the neighbouring English colonists were very troublesome, might be swept off the face of the earth. But, even in the event of such a lamentable catastrophe as this, they would, after all, be only ex-convicts whose loss could be supplied by fresh relays.