CHAPTER XII

"WHO SAVES ANOTHER----"

When the footsteps of the three protectors of society died away down the stairway of the Three Crowns, the woman opened the door of the dressing room and crept out.

"Thank God, they've gone!" she muttered, wearily, "I'd like to be alone always. People bore me to death. What a life! What a life!"

She walked across the room a trifle unsteadily and deposited her empty glass on the little table with the absinthe and sat down at the other one with her face to the door. She fumbled in a dingy hand-bag, slung to her left wrist, and presently produced a small vial, followed by a greasy pack of cheap cards.

None but the eyes of abiding love or undying hate would have seen in the pitiful, drug-ridden, half drunken, fast-sinking wreck any trace of the bewitching, laughing bride of twenty-odd years before. The austere ancient, who virtuously wrote "the descent into hell is easy," might have read in her face a different story of that dark pathway.

She took a swallow of the fluid in the bottle and coughed sharply as she recorked it. The peculiar odor of ether spread through the room. Then she began shuffling the cards as if about to play solitaire. Suddenly she stopped, threw herself across the table, buried her face in her arms and burst into tears....

Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be one memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is full to overflowing. In the calmness of our days it is little noted, but the tempest-lashed waters are swept upon it again and again. It may be but the memory of a moment when a woman looked into our eyes with trust, or it maybe that that trust Was betrayed. But sweet or bitter, its ghost shall come in the hour of woe to whisper hope and solace, or to press more deeply the thorns into the anguished brow and add its weight to the burden of the cross....

Far back over the path of those twenty years Jacqueline had learned to hate her husband, but the memory and love of her boy grew stronger. She had sunk from indifference to degradation and from degradation to despair. She had been a man's joy of a year, his pleasure of a month and his plaything of an hour. But through it all the mother love had lived in the blackened soul and the mother heart--scarred and calloused as it was--yet yearned for her boy. But for this, the years of loathsome vice, of drink and drugs, would have brought at last the numbness of oblivion. She had sought it in vain. She had steeped herself in vice until at times the life within flickered dangerously. But it brought never a moment of forgetfulness. When she was sober, or not under the influence of drugs, she lived in the darkness of black despair. And when she turned to these "to help her forget," she did not know that that was not the reason. They revived and quickened the slowly numbing brain until she could feel again the wild anguish of hopeless loss; and as she sobbed out her agony she vaguely felt that she was again more nearly worthy to press her child to her breast.

In the past few months her enfeebled mind had gloated miserably over one dismal ray of hope--the hope of one moment of joy before she died. She had learned from a half-breed woman in Caracas the art of telling fortunes with cards, and hour after hour she retold her future with the soiled pack that she always carried. They told her that the fleeting second of happiness would be bought at the price of one life, to be followed by the end of her own. To that promise she clung....

The storm of weeping, as is the case with sobs that are due wholly or in part to drunkenness, ended as abruptly as it had begun. She took another swallow of the ether and began laying out the cards in the same weary seven rows. She looked over them quickly and wept again. Always the two deaths!

"Now, then," she straightened up with a snuffle, "I'll try again."

She was spreading them out once more when there came a knock at the door.

"Come in!" she called, without looking up. The maid, Marie, entered with pen and ink and a form that the police require the hotel-keepers to have filled out and filed by every guest.

She advanced, a little timidly, to the table and said.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you, madame, but the police make us go through this business." She held up the blank form.

The woman looked up, puzzled for a moment, and then nodded.

"Oh, yes, well then----Oh, write it yourself!" she snapped irritably, turning again to the cards. She took another drink of ether and looked up at the maid, as if she did not exactly remember the purpose of her visit.

"Monsieur and Madame Laroque," she said at last, listlessly, her eyes on the table. "From Buenos Ayres, on their way to Paris."

Marie filled in the blank.

"To Paris. Thank you, madame," she said. Then she stood looking curiously at the cards.

The woman raised her head.

"Is that all?"

"Yes, thank you. Are you telling fortunes with the cards?" Marie asked, timidly as the woman began studying the table once more.

"Yes."

"Then you really believe in them?"

"They're the only thing I do believe in," was the weary response.

"That's funny!" exclaimed the maid, with a nervous little smile. "I don't believe in them at all!"

"You will!" was the grim comment.

"Oh, it's like palmistry and all that sort of thing. It's all nonsense."

Jacqueline looked up at her pityingly.

"You don't know what you're talking about!" she declared, a little thickly. The ether and absinthe were beginning to work more powerfully.

"What do the cards tell you?" asked Marie, growing interested. Jacqueline gazed over the table again.

"Always the same thing, always the same thing!" she said, with a glassy stare, meant to be impressive. "Death! My own death! And it's coming very soon. That's what the cards tell me!"

The maid's eyes opened wide.

"Really!" she exclaimed breathlessly.

"They never change!" the woman went on in a dull monotone. Dissipation had left little of expression and given much of harshness to her voice. "I can see blood--a great deal of blood! But before I die I shall see the two people that I always see in my dreams, waking or sleeping--the man I love more than anything else in the world and the man I hate more than anything else in the world! The cards have been promising me for the last three months that I shall see them soon and that--I'll die! The cards have never been wrong, and that's why I wanted to get back to France."

"You believe in them as much as that?" asked the maid, wonderingly.

"Yes!"

She watched her rearranging the cards for some moments in silence.

"Won't you tell my fortune?" she asked at last with a little hesitation.

"What's the good if you don't believe?" retorted the woman, without looking up.

"Oh, I don't be--I don't believe in it," she stammered with a slight blush, "but I--I--do believe in it!"

Jacqueline glanced at her with the dispassionate, rolling gaze of a drunkard.

"Sit down!" she commanded. While Marie was settling herself on the edge of the bed she took another drink of the ether.

"Is that ether you're drinking?" asked the girl.

"Ye--yes!" coughed the woman, slipping in the cork.

"It smells horribly strong! What does it do to you?" she inquired, with shuddering curiosity.

"It changes my ideas and that's a good deal," was the grim reply. "But it gets on my nerves sometimes and then I cry or smash the furniture." Marie started.

"But that doesn't matter! What do you want to know?"

"Oh, but if I tell you that," smiled the maid, cunningly, "there'll be nothing in your telling my fortune, will there?"

"Don't tell me anything!" mumbled Jacqueline, shuffling the cards and spreading them out once more. She studied them in dead silence for a minute or more. Then:

"You're married!" she announced.

"Oh, there's nothing in that!" sniffed Marie; "You saw my ring."

"You have a child."

"Yes, the darling! Seven months old."

"You're in love."

The maids cheeks flushed with excitement.

"Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed.

"But not with your husband."

She straightened up.

"No, I should think not!" she exclaimed, almost indignantly.

"You are going to leave your husband!" went on the dull, even voice. Marie's cheeks paled and she gasped but did not reply. Jacqueline looked up slowly.

"Is it true?"

"Yes! it's quite true!" was the low reply in an awed tone. Then she added by way of justification: "My husband is Victor, the boots, who brought up your luggage."

"He seems to be a good fellow," remarked the woman, indifferently.

"Yes," the girl sniffed contemptuously, "but he's such a common sort of man!"

"And the other?" There was awakening interest in the stupid eyes and dull voice.

"Oh, the other is a gentleman! A real gentleman!" cried Marie, clasping her hands joyously. "He's a commercial traveler--in soap! He dresses beautifully and he smells--ah--m-m! I am to meet him to-night at the Grand Café, opposite the theater, and to-morrow we shall be fa-a-r-away!"

"And your baby?"

The girl shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

"He's out to nurse," she replied, "and I know his father will not let him want for anything!"

Jacqueline consulted the bottle again.

"Look here, my girl! You're going to make a fool of yourself!" she declared with drunken bluntness. "Take my tip and stay with your husband! Be false to him if you must, but stay with him!"

"No, no! I love no one in the world but Anatole!" cried the girl, melodramatically. "And I'm going away with him to-night!"

"Well, you'll suffer in the long run!" was the other's grim assurance, with something of a return of her usual indifference.

"No, I shan't! Anatole loves the very ground I walk on!" declared Marie, proudly.

"H'mph! He may now, but it won't last," retorted the woman. "Your lover will leave and you'll take another--and then a third and fourth, and you'll see what sort of a life that means. I _know_!"

The girl opened her pretty eyes wide.

"Do you?" she asked, with a little shiver of awe.

"Yes! I was about your age when I left my husband and my child. I hate my husband God! How I hate him!" she burst out, her eyes blazing with insane fury, he clenched fists above her head. Marie half started toward the door, fearing that one of the furniture-breaking moods was coming on. But as suddenly the voice dropped back to its toneless level and the eyes dulled. "But I'm dying because my child is not with me. Child! Why, he must be a man of twenty-four now, and I'm sure he's a tall, handsome fellow that everybody loves and admires. Just think of it! I might be walking down the street--now--on his arm! Wouldn't I be proud! And I don't even know him. I think of him night and day--all the time I think of him. And if he came into this room now I wouldn't know him. But I shall see him again!" she cried, excitedly, clutching the cards. "I'm sure of that! I know it! But--but I shall not--be able to--kiss him--and press him to my heart. He'll never know who I am!"

Jacqueline shook her head with a solemnity born of the stimulants, and went on thickly:

"I'd be ashamed! He might despise me or reproach me, and I couldn't stand that. He--he--thinks I died years ago and--and I'm glad of it Oh, Raymond! My boy, my laddie!" And again there was a quick burst of tears.

Marie sprang up hastily and hurried over to the table, touching the sobbing woman gently on the arm.

"Oh, madame! Don't cry, don't cry!" she pleaded, with clumsy sympathy.

"Better be warned by my case!" wept the woman, in a high, queer voice. "You're a pretty girl--now--but you--won't be long! Your lover'll leave you as mine left me! Men--soon get tired. I used to be pretty, too!"

The girl began to cry at the sight of the other's distress.

"I'm sure Anatole will never leave me!" she whimpered.

Jacqueline's tears stopped as suddenly as if they had been turned off at a spigot and she sat up, rigid.

"Then you're a d----d fool!" she snapped

Marie wept more bitterly.

And then--God knows how!--as she stared at the sobbing girl, somewhere in her warped! soul the ether found a spark of womanly pity and fanned it to a little flame of weak resolve. ... "He saved others. Himself he could not save.

"Sit down!" she commanded, harshly. "And let me tell you a story, and maybe it will save you some of the suffering that I went through."