“You have had no pity, Blanche. You have deprived me of all hope in the life to come. God will punish you. You, too, shall die like a dog; alone, without a word of Christian counsel or encouragement. I curse you!”
And she died just as the clock was striking two.
The time when Blanche would have given almost anything to know that Aunt Medea was beneath the sod, had long since passed.
Now, the death of the poor old woman affected her deeply.
She had lost an accomplice who had often consoled her, and she had gained nothing, since one of her maids was now acquainted with the secret of the crime at the Borderie.
Everyone who was intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Sairmeuse, noticed her dejection, and was astonished by it.
“Is it not strange,” remarked her friends, “that the duchess—such a very superior woman—should grieve so much for that absurd relative of hers?”
But the dejection of Mme. Blanche was due in great measure to the sinister prophecies of the accomplice to whom she had denied the last consolations of religion.
And as her mind reviewed the past she shuddered, as the peasants at Sairmeuse had done, when she thought of the fatality which had pursued the shedders of innocent blood.
What misfortune had attended them all—from the sons of Chupin, the miserable traitor, up to her father, the Marquis de Courtornieu, whose mind had not been illumined by the least gleam of reason for ten long years before his death.