Her hair!—that haunted mademoiselle more persistently than all the rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily, of things that had come to her ears when she was a child, of superstitions of the common people stored away in the background of her memory; she asked herself if she had not been told that dead people whose hair is like that carry a crime with them to the grave. And at times it was such hair as that that she saw upon that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror and stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven, like the hair of the condemned man before the scaffold in La Grève!
On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed. On Monday she tried to rise and dress, in order to attend the funeral; but she was attacked with faintness, and was obliged to return to her bed.
LXVIII
"Well! is it all over?" said mademoiselle from her bed, as the concierge entered her room about eleven o'clock, on his return from the cemetery, with the black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to the occasion.
"Mon Dieu, yes, mademoiselle. Thank God! the poor girl is out of pain."
"Stay! I have no head to-day. Put the receipts and the rest of the money on my table. We will settle our accounts some other day."
The concierge stood before her without moving or evincing any purpose to go, shifting from one hand to the other a blue velvet cap made from the dress of one of his daughters. After a moment's reflection, he decided to speak.
"This burying is an expensive business, mademoiselle. In the first place, there's——"
"Who asked you to give the figures?" Mademoiselle de Varandeuil interrupted, with the haughty air of superb charity.