Gilbert regarded it with that fixed gaze which suspends the fleeing soul in the dying and seems in the dead, able to recall the fled one.
"Cold and rigid; he is dead, and really dead," he said at last.
Charny uttered a hoarse groan and pressing the corpse in his arms, emitted so heart-rending a sob that the physician shuddered and Billet went off a little to hide his head in a corner of the quadrangle. Suddenly the mourner raised the body, set it against the wall in a sitting posture and slowly came away, but looking to see if it would not revive and follow him.
Gilbert remained on one knee, resting his chin on his hand thoughtfully, appalled and motionless.
Then Billet quitted the nook and came to him, saying, as he no longer heard the wails of the count which had made his heart ache:
"Alas, Dr. Gilbert, this is really civil war, and what you foretold is coming to pass. Only, the trouble comes sooner than I believed and perhaps sooner then you calculated. I have seen villains slaughter wicked men: I have trembled in all my limbs and felt a horror for such monsters. But yet the men who were killed so far were worthless. Now, as you predicted, they are killing honest folk. They have killed Viscount Charny; I do not shudder but I grieve; I do not feel so much horror for the murderers as fear for myself. The young gentleman has been fouly done to death, for he was only a soldier and fought; he ought not to have been butchered."
He uttered a sigh from his vitals.
"To think that I knew him when a child," he continued: "I can see him now, riding along on his little grey pony, carrying bread round to the poor on behalf of his mother. He was a fine pink and white-faced child, with big blue eyes, who was always laughing.
"Well, it is queer! since I have seen him laying there, bleeding and disfigured, it is no longer as a corpse that I think of him, but as the pretty boy with the basket on his left arm and a purse in his right hand. Really, Dr. Gilbert, I believe that I have had enough of this kind of thing, and I do not care to see any more of it, for as all you foretold is a-coming true, I shall be seeing you die, and then——"
"Be calm, Billet," said the physician, shaking his head gently, "my hour has not struck."