The Sacrificial Altar

“Oh, Monsieur! But O God!” She was about to squeeze a tear from her aged ducts and rock her body, when the gossip in her lively old mind gave a sniff of disdain and quenched the attempt at retrospective grief. “I—I—stupid old woman that I am—I had forgotten that you knew nothing—”

“Knew nothing?” Louis set down his cup. “Nothing has happened to M. Cesar? Tell me at once!”

“Oh, not M. Cesar, grace a Dieu! But Mademoiselle! Oh, Monsieur! Quelle horreur!”

“Did she die, that charming young lady? She seemed a marvel of health.” Louis loosened the soft collar of his night-gown, but his tones merely betrayed a proper concern.

“Dieu! Dieu! If that were all! She was assassinated, that beautiful young girl, just from Paris, and of an innocence, an excellence, a respectability! And by a miserable villain who had seen her take money from the bank that day and got in by the window that old fool of a Jean-Marie had dared to neglect. And with a pillow!” The voluble details convinced Louis that suspicion had not brushed him in passing.

“And the assassin?” he demanded when Seraphine paused for breath. “Whom do they suspect?”

“Suspect? But they caught him red-handed, the foul fiend. For that we thank the good God.”

“Caught him! Do you mean as he was in the act of smothering poor Mademoiselle Berthe?”

“But no, Monsieur. He already had made his way down the stairs and out of the house, enfin! But a policeman was in the garden waiting for him. He had been told by some one who had seen the wretch sneak up the covered way. But not too soon, alas! The assassin denied all, of a certainty. He vowed he had been so terrified at the sight of the young lady murdered in her bed that he ran away at once. But, oh! of a great certainty, no one believed him. No, not one!”

“But it well could have been. Remember that I have written stories to prove the criminal folly of condemning on circumstantial evidence alone.”

“Ah, yes, Monsieur, that is all very well in stories. But you see this was life, and the man was caught by a real policeman.”

“When is the man to be tried?”

“Tried? The man has been tried and hanged, Monsieur.”

“What!”

“But yes, Monsieur. Sometimes a murderer is hanged in San Francisco, and this was a miserable, a tramp, with no money or friends to make delay—grace a Dieu! But you are white as death, Monsieur. Who am I to tell you this horrible story when you have just come back from the dead, as it were—”

“It is true that I am overcome. But arrange my bath. I will dress and go to M. Cesar. Oh, my God!”

“But yes, Monsieur.”