Henriette listened, struck with horror. Good Lord! So she would not even have the consolation of recovering and burying her dear husband, whose ashes would be swept away by the wind! Maurice had again pressed her to his heart, and in a caressing voice was calling her his poor Cinderella, and beseeching her not to give way to so much grief, she who was so brave.
After an interval of silence, during which Delaherche stood at the window observing the brightening of the light, he hastily turned and said to the two soldiers: 'By the way, I was forgetting, but I came to tell you that downstairs, in the coach-house, where the treasury-chest is deposited, there is an officer distributing the money among the men, so that the Prussians may not get it. You ought to go down, for money may be useful if we are not all of us dead to-night.'
The advice was good, and Maurice and Jean went down, as soon as Henriette had consented to take her brother's place on the sofa. Delaherche, meantime, passed into the adjoining room, where he found Gilberte, still with her face quite calm, and sleeping as peacefully as a child; neither the loud talking nor the sobs having caused so much as a change in her position. And thence he peeped into the room where his mother was watching over M. de Vineuil, and found that she had dozed off in her armchair, whilst the colonel, whose eyes were closed, had not stirred, being utterly prostrated by fever. All at once, however, he opened his eyes widely, and asked: 'Well, it is finished, isn't it?'
Vexed by this question, which detained him just when he wished to take himself off, Delaherche made an angry gesture, whilst deadening his voice to answer: 'Ah, yes, finished, till it begins again! Nothing has been signed.'
A prey to incipient delirium, the colonel continued in faint tones: 'My God, may I die before the finish! I don't hear the guns. Why are they no longer firing? Up at St. Menges and Fleigneux we command all the roads; we will fling the Prussians into the Meuse should they venture to turn Sedan, to attack us. The town is at our feet between them and us, like an obstacle which strengthens our position. March! the Seventh Corps will take the lead, the Twelfth will cover the retreat——'
His hands jogged up and down on the sheet as though in unison with the trot of the horse, which, in his dream, was carrying him along. Little by little, however, as his words fell more heavily from his lips and he sank asleep, their movement became slower, till at last it altogether ceased, and he lay there, without a breath, overwhelmed.
'Rest yourself,' Delaherche had whispered, 'I will come back as soon as I have some news.' Then, after making sure that he had not awakened his mother, he slipped out of the room and disappeared.
Seated on a kitchen chair in the coach-house down below, Jean and Maurice had found a paymaster who was distributing fortunes there, screened merely by a little deal table placed in front of him, and without having recourse to pens, receipt forms, or papers of any kind. He simply dipped his hand into the bags overflowing with gold coins, and without even taking the trouble to count them, rapidly dropped a handful into the cap of each sergeant of the Seventh Corps who defiled before him. It was understood that the sergeants were to divide the sums given them among the men of their half-section. They all received the money with an awkward air, as though it had been some ration of meat or coffee, and then went off in embarrassment, emptying their képis into their pockets, so that they might not find themselves in the streets with all that gold displayed to view. And not a word was spoken. The only sound was the crystalline chinking of the coins amid the stupefaction which these poor devils experienced at finding themselves laden with all this wealth when there was no longer a loaf of bread or a quart of wine to be purchased in the whole town.
When Jean and Maurice stepped forward, the paymaster at first withdrew the handful of gold which he had ready, and exclaimed: 'Neither of you is a sergeant. Only the sergeants have a right to receive——' Then, tired already, and anxious to have done with it, he added: 'Here, corporal, you can take some all the same. Quick there, whose turn next?'
He had let the coins drop into the képi which Jean held out to him; and the corporal, stirred at sight of the amount, nearly six hundred francs, immediately desired Maurice to take half of it. There was no telling, said he; it was quite possible that they might be suddenly separated from one another. They accordingly divided the money in the garden in front of the ambulance, which they afterwards entered, having noticed their company's drummer, a gay, fat fellow named Bastian, lying on the straw near the entry. At about five o'clock on the previous evening, when the battle was over, he had been unluckily wounded in the groin by a stray bullet.