Ah! that Rue des Orties! with what feverish impatience had Jean been longing to reach it during four interminable hours! It seemed to them like deliverance when they entered it at last. It was black, deserted, and silent, as though a hundred leagues away from the field of fratricidal battle. The house where Maurice lived, an old, narrow, lofty building, where there was no door-porter, was fast asleep, as still as the grave.
'The keys are in my trousers pocket,' stammered Maurice, 'the big one is that of the street-door, the little one opens my room, right at the top of the stairs.'
Then he was overcome, and fainted away in the arms of Jean, whose anxiety and embarrassment were extreme. He was so upset, indeed, that he forgot to shut the street-door after him. And then he had to grope his way up those strange stairs, carrying Maurice in his arms and striving not to stumble for fear lest the noise should bring some of the lodgers to their doors. Then, up above, he lost himself, and had to seat the wounded man on a stair, and search for the door of his room with the help of some matches which he fortunately had about him. And when he had at last found the door and opened it, he came back to fetch Maurice, and carried him off, and laid him on the little iron bedstead, in front of the window, overlooking Paris, which he threw wide open in his need of air and light. The dawn was now breaking, and he dropped upon his knees beside the bed, sobbing, stunned, and strengthless, as the fearful thought awoke within him that he had killed his friend.
Several minutes must have elapsed, and, when he looked up, he hardly felt any surprise at beholding Henriette. After all, it was perfectly natural; her brother was dying, and she had come. He had not even seen her enter the room; for all he knew, she might have been there for hours. And now, sinking upon a chair, he watched her as she distractedly hovered here and there, stricken with mortal grief at sight of her brother lying on that bed, unconscious and covered with blood. Then all at once Jean's memory came back to him and he asked: 'Did you shut the street-door after you?'
She could not speak, her emotion was too great, but she nodded her head affirmatively; and then, as she at last stepped up to him to place her hands in his, in the need she felt of affection and help, he again spoke: 'You know, it was I who killed him.'
She did not understand, did not believe him. He felt her little hands lying calmly in his own.
'Yes, it was I who killed him—Yes, on a barricade over yonder. He was fighting on one side and I on the other.'
The little hands began to tremble.
'We were all mad drunk as it were; we none of us knew what we were doing—and it was I who killed him.'
Then Henriette, quivering and ghastly pale, gazing at him fixedly with eyes of terror, withdrew her hands. O God! was everything to perish, would nothing survive in her crushed heart? Ah! that Jean, she had been thinking of him that very evening, happy in the vague hope that she might perhaps see him again. And it was he who had done that abominable thing; and yet he had again saved Maurice, since it was he who had brought him thither through so many dangers. She could no longer place her hands in his without a revolt of her whole being; but she raised a cry in which rang out the last hope of her warring heart: 'Oh! I will cure him, I must cure him now!'