I repeat the profound words she has just uttered. She speaks to me again with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. I look again. I learn myself again, word by word.
It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken—ragged wounds, much blood lost, a lot of fever, and enormous fatigue.
"You'll get up soon," she says.
I get up?—I, the prostrate being? I am astonished and afraid.
Marie goes away. She increases my solitude, step by step, and for a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.
In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the sick man in the brown vest. He is curled up, and breathes humbly. They say, very low:
"He's going to die—in one hour from now, or two. He's in such a state that to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on the moment."
At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and go away. I can see nothing more but him. There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him. He pants and trickles. He shines as though it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair is plastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray.
In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets.
And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned have disappeared.