Peter Ruff put the card upon the fire and went out for a morning’s rabbit shooting with his keeper. When he returned luncheon was ready, but Violet was absent. He rang the bell.
“Where is your mistress, Jane?” he asked the parlor-maid.
The girl had no idea. Mrs. Ruff had left for the village several hours before; since then she had not been seen. Peter Ruff ate his luncheon alone, and understood. The afternoon wore on, and at night he traveled up to London. He knew better than to waste time by purposeless inquiries. Instead he took the nine o’clock train the next morning to Paris.
It was a chamber of death into which he was ushered, dismal—yet, of its sort, unique, marvelous. The room itself might have been the sleeping apartment of an empress—lofty, with white paneled walls, adorned simply with gilded lines; with high windows, closely curtained now, so that neither sound nor the light of day might penetrate into the room. In the middle of the apartment upon a canopy bedside, which had once adorned a king’s palace, lay Madame de Maupassim. Her face was already touched with the finger of death, yet her eyes were undimmed and her lips unquivering. Her hands, covered with rings, lay out before her upon the lace coverlid. Supported by many pillows, she was issuing her last instructions with the cold precision of the man of affairs who makes the necessary arrangements for a few days, absence from his business.
Peter Ruff, who had not even been allowed sufficient time to change his traveling clothes, was brought without hesitation to her bedside. She looked at him in silence for a moment, with a cold glitter in her eyes.
“You are four days late, Monsieur Peter Ruff,” she remarked. “Why did you not obey your first summons?
“Madame,” he answered, “I thought there must be a misunderstanding. Four years ago, I gave notice to the council that I had married and retired into private life. A country farmer is of no further use to the world.”
The woman’s thin lip curled.
“From death and the Double Four,” she said, “there is no resignation which counts. You are as much our creature to-day, as I am the creature of the disease which is carrying me across the threshold of death.”
Peter Ruff remained silent. The woman’s words seemed full of dread significance. Besides, how was it possible to contradict the dying?