Orphans of the Storm Part 9

He summoned the Chevalier. The autocratic Count brooked no words; he commanded marriage with the State heiress--or exile!

His nephew refusing, the guards were summoned, the young man gave up his sword, and under their escort he was presently on his way to Caen prison.

Then, summoning a detail of military police, the Count moved to carry out the other part of his plan.

"You are Mademoiselle Henriette Girard?" inquired the Countess kindly on entering the girl's lodgings.

Henriette greeted the distinguished and aristocratic lady with due respect. Making her comfortable in a guest chair, she resumed her sewing and listened.

"I am the aunt of the Chevalier Maurice de Vaudrey." The girl, startled, looked up from her work. "Marriage between you and the Chevalier is impossible."

"I love him, Madame," replied Henriette, simply.

"Then it is your duty to give him up, since it is the will of the King that he marry Princesse de Acquitaine--"

Henriette paled. For an instant the blue eyes looked near-tigerish, with green and yellow lights. Yet she must save Maurice from the King's wrath.

"If you will make this sacrifice," continued the Countess, "I shall not prove ungrateful with any reward that is in my power."

"Oh, yes, there is!" replied Henriette earnestly. She showed the Countess her sampler, on which she was working the word--

LOUISE

"Louise--that name is very dear to me," replied the Lady softly. She visioned a scene of long ago when an infant Louise had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from her young arms--the arms of a mother deprived of her offspring.

"She is my sister," resumed Henriette--"lost, wandering and alone, on the streets of Paris. Oh, help me find her, and I--I will do anything you say!" The poor creature sobbed in her double misery.

She pointed to her own eyes in gesture to portray Louise's misfortune: "Blind--so helpless--it was just like taking care of a baby." She told the story of her abduction and the loss of her sister, then of Chevalier de Vaudrey's vain efforts and hers to trace her.

The Countess de Linieres leaned forward in intense sympathy conjoined with a certain weird premonition.

"She isn't really my sister," went on Henriette, "but I owe her the love of a mother and sister combined. She saved us from want and death. My father found her on the steps of Notre Dame--"

A low cry escaped the Countess.

"--where he was about to put me as a foundling, there not being a morsel of food in our wretched home. This other baby was half buried under the snow. He warmed the little bundle against his body and mine--and, rather than let us perish there of the cold, returned homeward with both infants in his arms. Suspended from the other baby's neck were a bag of gold and this locket--"

The Countess gasped. She put a hand to her heart and seemed about to faint before recovering strength to examine the locket that Henriette handed to her.

It was a miniature that the Prefect's wife recognized as her own!

Opened, it disclosed an aged and yellowed bit of paper, on which the writing was still visible:

HER NAME IS LOUISE SAVE HER

"My child! My own Louise!" she cried, "--lost, wandering and blind in Paris. Tell me, tell me--" She had almost fainted. The floodgate of tears relieved her pent heart.

Henriette was bending over her now, her arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort.

But the girl herself was near the breaking point. The voice of the loved and absent one seemed to sound in her ears.

Was it an hallucination?

"Singing,--don't you hear?" said Henriette, softly, to the Mother.

The girl brushed a hand across her eyes and tapped her temple.

"In my dreams oft I hear it, my sister's voice. I must be losing my reason!"

Again swelled the notes of the Norman melody, and this time the Mother heard too.

The two sprang to their feet.

Henriette dashed to balcony window. At the end of the street she saw a figure clad in beggar's rags that she thought she knew.

"LOUISE!"

Henriette's cry echoed down the street and impinged on the blind beggar's brain. The outcast ran groping and stumbling forward, no longer singing, but calling "Henriette!" Her keeper, Widow Frochard, was not in sight.

The blind girl came nearer. Frochard emerged from a ginshop and tried to head her off. The Mother followed Henriette to the window. The latter encouraged Louise with little cries:

"Don't get excited!"

"It's all right!"

"Wait there!"

"I'll be down in one instant!"

She rushed past the Countess across the room and flung wide the door, on the very brink of happiness.

But a troop of guards stood there to her astonished gaze. The Count de Linieres, standing at their head, p.r.o.nounced her name as if reading a warrant: "Henrietta Girard!"

The girl drew back, then charged like a little fury on the gunstocks and bosoms of the troopers, pounding them with her fists.

Unable to move this granite-like wall, she dashed back to the balcony eyrie, imploring Louise with both hands.

"Arrest her!" said de Linieres to the soldiers.

Brawny troopers pulled her back as she would have jumped out of the window to the flagging below--and her Louise. Vainly the Countess de Linieres entreated for mercy. They dragged the girl downstairs.

Here again she made a frantic appeal and wild effort to join her blind charge, who was being hurried away in the vise-like grip of La Frochard.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, have pity--let me go to my sister, or I shall lose her again!"

Deaf to her entreaties, they took her to La Salpetriere, this loveliest of virgins, to be immured among the foul characters there!