“You would not have had the heart to question him, George. He was sadly changed before he died, and so nervous that a word would make him tremble. Sometimes the very sound of my mother’s voice would set him to shaking all over.”
“My poor father! Did he suffer so much?” inquired George, shading his eyes to conceal the tears that sprung into them.
“More than I can remember without pain,” answered Louis. “He took a terrible dislike to Madame toward the last, and I had great difficulty in protecting him from her temper and cupidity. You cannot know how difficult it was, in health, for his iron will to keep down her parsimony in our household; when he lay sick and helpless, I found it almost impossible to obtain necessary comforts for him.”
“Poor man! so rich—so proud, and brought to that! He must indeed have been miserable.”
“Yes, both in body and mind,” was the answer; “I am sure that something preyed on him at the last. But Madame never left him at this period, and though he seemed anxious to converse with me, her presence always prevented it.”
“Strange what could have troubled him so! Possibly it might have been that he repented of that strange will.”
“Not altogether that, I think. It was some persons he wished to see,—an old man and woman. Madame spoke of them impatiently in that way, but promised to send for them.”
“And did she?”
“No, there was no effort made to send for any one. Another night, when he was growing worse and worse, I heard him pleading with her; some person was to be sent for whom he wished to speak with before he died—must speak with if she was on the face of the earth. Madame became furiously angry then. She no longer attempted to pacify him with promises, but filled the sick-room with her angry revilings, while he lay trembling under her violence till the bed shook beneath him. At last, urged on by rage, such as I had never seen even in her before, she darted toward the bed, and would have seized him by the shoulders, but I flung my arms around her, and prevented the sacrilege by taking her almost by force from the room. When I came back to the bed, our father was stricken with paralysis.
“Oh, George! it would have broken your heart, could you have seen his beseeching eyes follow me around the room after that. I knew that he would have spoken to me then, had the power been left him. Once, when Madame was out for a moment, he made a desperate effort to speak, but his voice came forth in a broken moan; and I saw two great tears roll from the pleading eyes, wrung from some want which he had no power to express.”