“Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?” demanded the sick man.
There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart, eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation. In vain had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau had not spared him. It was not the first of the Irishman’s clients whom he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion, and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send the “dealer in cantharides” to retail his drugs on the other side of the Channel.
The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the true issue of the consultation. He abstained, therefore, from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most hopeful things they announced to him. But when Monpavon returned, he summoned him to his bedside, and, confronted by the lie visible even beneath the make-up of the decrepit old man, remarked:
“Oh, you know—no humbug! From you to me, truth. What do they say? I am in a very bad way, eh?”
Monpavon prefaced his reply with a significant silence; then brutally, cynically, for fear of breaking down as he spoke:
“Done for, my poor Augustus!”
The duke received the sentence full in the face without flinching.
“Ah!” he said simply.
He pulled his mustache with a mechanical gesture, but his features remained motionless. And immediately he made up his mind.
That the poor wretch who dies in a hospital, without home or family, without other name than the number of his bed, that he should accept death as a deliverance or bear it as his last trial; that the old peasant who passes away, bent double, worn out, in his dark and smoky cellar, that he should depart without regret, savouring in advance the taste of that fresh earth which he has so many times dug over and over—that is intelligible. And yet how many, even among such, cling to existence despite all their misery! how many there are who cry, holding on to their sordid furniture and to their rags, “I don’t want to die!” and depart with nails broken and bleeding from that supreme wrench. But here there was nothing of the kind.