"I have good news—not very good, but still better than nothing. The body is five degrees warmer than the air of the room. If it were only the same temperature it would be a serious matter, but for it to be higher is a very good sign."
"Oh God, I thank Thee for this small mercy," said Renée, folding her hands and bowing her head devoutly. She hurriedly left the room, and a few minutes afterwards Riche heard the music of her violin.
He opened the door and listened. He heard the opening notes of Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata."
"My God," he said to himself, "what feeling, what execution! surely the professor's spirit must have entered the child." He listened enraptured. Stealing out of the room with Céleste and Marcel, he found Villebois and Madame Villebois standing at the half-opened door of the library not daring to enter lest they should break the spell.
Then the air changed, and the "Ave Maria of Schubert" caught his enraptured ear.
After a pause she laid her violin down, and with closed eyes like a blind child she walked across to the organ. The fearful strain of the last few days on her nerves had exhausted her feeble frame, and she was evidently in a somnambulistic state.
Villebois with his medical training observed it immediately, and not daring to break the spell, worked the bellows for her.
She played a few chords, and then caught up that magnificent air of Handel's Messiah—"I know that my Redeemer liveth."
Riche had never felt so devout before. He had always regarded God merely as a convenient substantive when suitably qualified, to express his feelings with. Since he was a child he had never entered a church unless it were with an opera glass and a Baedecker in his hand, and now for the first time he felt a sort of consciousness of some unknown influence, some faint divine inspiration filling his soul. Accustomed as he had been in Morocco and Algiers to witness terrible scenes of cruelty and oppression unmoved, and to mingle in camp life with brutal soldiers, Turcos, and men who had been transferred to the frightful discipline of the Algerian foreign legion, the sweet almost angelic pathos of this girl in her exultation at the faint signs of life in her lover which Riche had revealed to her, exercised a subtle influence over his soul, which was something weird and strange to him. He felt his tears beginning to flow, and ashamed of his weakness he wiped them away and struggled to suppress them, but in spite of all his efforts they continued to dim his eyes. He looked up half ashamed of himself, but discovered the others completely overcome.
Even Marcel, the gay and frivolous cynic, usually all laughter and jokes, remained standing behind the others in a deep reverie, while Madame Villebois was sobbing convulsively.