Though she removed neither her hat nor her gloves, she installed herself in an armchair, where she sat waiting, with her eyes wide open and staring straight before her—those brown eyes flecked with gold, whose living light was all that she had retained of her massacred beauty. At sixty-two she looked like a centenarian; her bold, insolent face was ravined, as it were, by her stormy life, and the glow of her sun-like hair had been extinguished by a shower of ashes. And time went on, midnight approached, and she was still there, near that death-bed of which she seemed to be ignorant, in that quivering chamber where she forgot herself, similar to a mere thing, apparently no longer even knowing why she had been brought thither.
Mathieu and Boutan had been unwilling to retire. Since Monsieur was at Nice in the company of those ladies, the aunt and the niece, they decided to spend the night there in order that Constance might not be left alone with the old servant. And towards midnight, while they were chatting together in undertones, they were suddenly stupefied at hearing Séraphine raise her voice, after preserving silence for three hours.
"He is dead, you know," said she.
Who was dead? At last they understood that she referred to Dr. Gaude. The celebrated surgeon, had, indeed, been found in his consulting-room struck down by sudden death, the cause of which was not clearly known. In fact, the strangest, the most horrible and tragical stories were current on the subject. According to one of them a patient had wreaked vengeance on the doctor; and Mathieu, full of emotion, recalled that one day, long ago, Séraphine herself had suggested that all Gaude's unhappy patients ought to band themselves together and put an end to him.
When Séraphine perceived that Mathieu was gazing at her, as in a nightmare, moved by the shuddering silence of that death-watch, she once more grinned like a lunatic, and said: "He is dead, we were all there!"
It was insane, improbable, impossible; and yet was it true or was it false? A cold, terrifying quiver swept by, the icy quiver of mystery, of that which one knows not, which one will never know.
Boutan leant towards Mathieu and whispered in his ear: "She will be raving mad and shut up in a padded cell before a week is over." And, indeed, a week later the Baroness de Lowicz was wearing a straight waistcoat. In her case Dr. Gaude's treatment had led to absolute insanity.
Mathieu and Boutan watched beside Constance until daybreak. She never opened her lips, nor raised her eyelids. As the sun rose up, she turned towards the wall, and then she died.
[XXII]
STILL more years passed, and Mathieu was already sixty-eight and Marianne sixty-five, when amid the increasing good fortune which they owed to their faith in life, and their long courageous hopefulness, a last battle, the most dolorous of their existence, almost struck them down and sent them to the grave, despairing and inconsolable.