And so it was this terrible woman who closed the poor dead musician’s eyes.
With a business-like dexterity acquired in ten years of experience, she stripped and straightened the body, laid the arms by the sides, and covered the face with the bedclothes, exactly as a shopman wraps a parcel.
“A sheet will be wanted to lay him out.—Where is there a sheet?” she demanded, turning on the terror-stricken Schmucke.
He had watched the religious ritual with its deep reverence for the creature made for such high destinies in heaven; and now he saw his dead friend treated simply as a thing in this packing process—saw with the sharp pain that dissolves the very elements of thought.
“Do as you vill——” he answered mechanically. The innocent creature for the first time in his life had seen a man die, and that man was Pons, his only friend, the one human being who understood him and loved him.
“I will go and ask Mme. Cibot where the sheets are kept,” said La Sauvage.
“A truckle-bed will be wanted for the person to sleep upon,” Mme. Cantinet came to tell Schmucke.
Schmucke nodded and broke out into weeping. Mme. Cantinet left the unhappy man in peace; but an hour later she came back to say:
“Have you any money, sir, to pay for the things?”
The look that Schmucke gave Mme. Cantinet would have disarmed the fiercest hate; it was the white, blank, peaked face of death that he turned upon her, as an explanation that met everything.