“It broke his heart,” said the priest briefly.
“My lady was spared much,” murmured Mlle Magny. She passed a shaking hand over her eyes. “So much blood . . . and Mirabel deserted. . . . Are the candles going out, mon père, or is it my eyes? N’importe—you can still find the parchment . . . that little closed frame by the mirror yonder. If you open it you will know the face.”
He did. It was a little pastel drawing of the Duchesse Eléonore, his patroness, wearing the widow’s weeds in which he best recalled her. He came back to the bed holding it.
“It was to have been buried with me, that little picture . . . it still shall be. Clotilde knew how fond I was of it—but she would never have guessed anything else, poor fool . . . I took a lesson from my forbear . . . Tear off the paper at the back, mon père.”
M. Chassin obeyed, and as he peeled off the pinkish, speckly paper recently pasted there, a piece of yellow parchment doubled up against the real back of the picture was disclosed. It was folded in four, and on it was written in brownish ink the single word, “Mirabel.”
“Open it!” said the voice from the bed, grown very weak now.
The priest obeyed. As he unfolded the parchment with no very steady hands, his eyes were greeted with a sort of rough sketch-map of some complexity, underneath which was written, in a crabbed seventeenth century hand:
“Plan de l’endroit dans mon chasteau de Mirabel où j’ay fait enterrer plusieurs milliers de pistoles et divers parements de pierreries de feu ma femme, à cause des troubles sévissant en ce royaume.” And he caught sight of “Item, 10 sacs contenant chascun 2,500 pistoles . . . Item, un collier de rubis des Indes fort bien travaillé . . . Item, une coupe en or ciselé dite de la reyne Margueritte” . . .
The whole was inscribed “Pour mon fils hault et puissant seigneur Gui de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de la Ganache, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans,” and signed, “Fait par moy a mon dit chasteau de Mirabel ce six avril de l’an mil six cent cinquante-deux, Antoine-Louis de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Treslan.”
“This is indeed——” began the priest as soon as he could find voice, when, glancing off the parchment, he saw the change which, in the brief space of his study of the document, had come over the face on the pillow. Mlle Magny had used her last reserve of strength over this matter; it was gone now, and she was going too.