Practically, too, it seemed almost. He fell back on his bed in a death-sickness, and lay there without movement, without conscious thought, for hours.
Cartouche, returning, very quiet and sombre, from his interview with a great lady in the Palace, heard him moaning to himself, as he passed his door, and went softly in. The room was in darkness; only a faint light from the lamps outside fell spectrally across the figure stretched on the bed. He crossed hurriedly to it and bent over.
“What is it, brother? Are you so ill?”
Saint-Péray uttered a little weak cry between terror and rapture.
“Gaston! is it you? I believe I am dying.”
“No, no.”
“I have so waited for you, sinking and struggling to keep above. This load! I can endure it no longer. You are so strong—I seem always to have clung to you—my brother—and you will take some of the burden? Yet how can I ask you! O, my God, my God! to what can I appeal!”
“Why not to my love, Louis?”
“Ah! your love!—there were older claims to it. You don’t know—you know nothing of it all—of what I am and have been—of what I am capable, even, when tempted. Or do you? are your eyes opened a little since—but what does it matter! I will confess everything; I—O, my Yolande! my Yolande!”
“Now hush! and listen—do you attend? I am but this moment come from her.”