“Yes, lady, the Intendant sent me to conduct you to St. Valier, to hide you there in a sure retreat until the search be over,” replied La Corriveau, calmly eyeing her from head to foot.
“It is like him! He is not unkind when left to himself. It is so like the François Bigot I once knew! But tell me, woman, what said he further? Did you see him, did you hear him? Tell me all he said to you.”
“I saw him, lady, and heard him,” replied La Corriveau, taking the bouquet in her fingers, “but he said little more than I have told you. The Intendant is a stern man, and gives few words save commands to those of my condition. But he bade me convey to you a token of his love; you would know its meaning, he said. I have it safe, lady, in this basket,—shall I give it to you?”
“A token of his love, of François Bigot's love to me! Are you a woman and could delay giving it so long? Why gave you it not at first? I should not have doubted you then. Oh, give it to me, and be blessed as the welcomest messenger that ever came to Beaumanoir!”
La Corriveau held her hand a moment more in the basket. Her dark features turned a shade paler, although not a nerve quivered as she plucked out a parcel carefully wrapped in silver tissue. She slipped off the cover, and held at arm's length towards the eager, expectant girl, the fatal bouquet of roses, beautiful to see as the fairest that ever filled the lap of Flora.
Caroline clasped it with both hands, exclaiming in a voice of exultation, while every feature radiated with joy, “It is the gift of God, and the return of François's love! All will yet be well!”
She pressed the glowing flowers to her lips with passionate kisses, breathed once or twice their mortal poison, and suddenly throwing back her head with her dark eyes fixed on vacancy, but holding the fatal bouquet fast in her hands, fell dead at the feet of La Corriveau.
A weird laugh, terrible and unsuppressed, rang around the walls of the secret chamber, where the lamps burned bright as ever; but the glowing pictures of the tapestry never changed a feature. Was it not strange that even those painted men should not have cried out at the sight of so pitiless a murder?
Caroline lay amid them all, the flush of joy still on her cheek, the smile not yet vanished from her lips. A pity for all the world, could it have seen her; but in that lonely chamber no eye pitied her.
But now a more cruel thing supervened. The sight of Caroline's lifeless form, instead of pity or remorse, roused all the innate furies that belonged to the execrable race of La Corriveau. The blood of generations of poisoners and assassins boiled and rioted in her veins. The spirits of Beatrice Spara and of La Voisin inspired her with new fury. She was at this moment like a pantheress that has brought down her prey and stands over it to rend it in pieces.