“My father!” again cried Elise, and this time she rushed at the door and tore it widely open. Her father lay stretched before her on the floor, having evidently fallen in his efforts to answer her summons.
It was midnight, two hours after the fatal event recorded in the above lines. Around the bedside of M. Lepage were grouped a physician, a priest, the concierge, Jean Picard, and his daughter. Camille was already far away.
The physician had given them no hope. In an hour or less the poor musician’s soul would be far away. He was sensible of it himself. Upon his first return to consciousness he had said:
“This is death.”
Elise, overwhelmed as she was, could not weep. Her one thought seemed to be: “Supposing I had listened to Camille’s entreaties, and had been flying from Paris in this terrible hour!”
Jean Picard, on the contrary, shed more than one tear. Perhaps the restraint he had put upon himself in the tragic scene which had preceded this catastrophe was having its revenge upon him now, or perhaps the look of peace with which the old man surveyed him and his daughter, standing, as they were, side by side, struck him by its contrast to the sad reality. It was midnight, as I have said, and the clock was striking. As it ceased, the dying man spoke:
“May I not see your two hands joined?” he asked, gazing tenderly at Jean and Elise.
As though a thunderbolt had fallen at her feet, Elise started and fell back. Jean hastily cleared the room and then leading her gently up to the bedside, he said solemnly: