KNIFE DUEL AND ESCAPE
The bundle on the cellar floor of the Frochards den stirred again,
this time more actively.
The crippled knife-grinder Pierre had entered. His mother was again
busied with her potations. Under the half-lifted rags showed the
tear-stained face of Louise. The heavy fatigue of street mendicancy
had wrapped her in deep sleep, from which she woke with a start to her
wretched surroundings. The misery of it all overwhelmed her. She
sobbed, and the big tears descended from her blind eyes.
"Don't cry, Louise!" begged the almost equally wretched Pierre. "There
may yet be escape and the finding of your sister. Oh!" he said to
himself. "If I had but the courage to lay down my life that I might
make her happy!"
* * * * *
The ruffian Jacques Frochard was exhibiting a sinister interest in the
blind girl. He had forbidden Pierre to speak to her or come near her,
and now as he entered, the crippled brother shrank away. "Get up and
go to work!" said Mother Frochard to the girl roughly, yanking her to
her feet.
"I'll find a way to make her work!" laughed Jacques with fiendish
coarseness. "You'll slave for me, eh, my pretty? Yes, for you, no one
but Jacques!"
He leered at her as he appropriated the coins of her singing.
Huddled in the corner, the silent cripple bit his finger knuckles
until they bled....
* * * * *
Inflamed with liquor and lust, Jacques soon decided to carry out his
purpose.
"Come with me, my little beauty!"
Mother Frochard chuckled at the sight of him mastering her. Struggle
wildly as the poor blind creature would to avoid his grip, he was
dragging her slowly to the stair while her screams were stifled by one
rough hand over her mouth.
But as he was doing this, the huddled figure rose. "I have been a
coward long enough," said Pierre. "Don't touch her!" laying a
restraining hand on Jacques' arm.
Astonished, Jacques turned. "Who'll stop me?" He flung his brother
prostrate half way across the room.
The cripple had risen again. A dirk gleamed in his extended hand. His
eyes blazed like coals. Fury distorted his features which were craned
forward in hideous ugliness parallel with the knife.
"I will!"
"You misbegotten hunchback!" roared Jacques, letting loose of the girl
and drawing his own knife. "She is mine. I tell you I will kill anyone
who interferes with me!"
La Frochard tried to throw herself between the brothers. Louise groped
away, and as by instinct found refuge behind Pierre. Jacques pushed
the hag aside, saying savagely: "Let me look after this!"
Each brother stripped off his coat, holding it as a buckler whilst the
right hand gripped a knife.
"You are right, Jacques," said the frenzied cripple. "We Frochards
come of a race that kills!"
The adversaries feinted around each other in circles, in the Latin
mode of fighting that was their heritage. Coats or sidesteps parried
or evaded blows. The knives gleamed, but did not go quickly home.
If Jacques had the superior strength, Pierre was the more cat-like.
His frail body was a slight target, so that the other's great lunges
missed. Then, leaping like a puma, he was behind and under Jacques'
guard, and stabbed him in the back.
The great hulk of a man fell back into La Frochard's arms, the blood
oozing from a cut that was not mortal though fearsome. The hag-mother
wailed and crooned as if he were in death agony.
"Quick!" cried the hunchback to Louise, "the road to liberty is open."
Taking Louise by the hand, he ran with her up the steps out of the
cellar....
But Henriette did not meet--not until one fateful hour--the itinerant
grinder and her loved sister whom he protected. They were in many of
the scenes of the later Revolution. Louise ate off the de Vaudrey
plate, and Pierre perforce sharpened the knives of the September
Massacre. Tramps of the boiling, tempestuous City, spectators but not
participants of the great events, they looked ceaselessly for her.
Nor did the wicked Frochards abide in the den of Louise's imprisonment
and sufferings. They too were swallowed up in the vast maelstrom--to
reappear at one ludicrous moment of tragic times.