She was silent for a long while, she seemed to be drawing strength from God, and to be measuring her words by the life that remained in her.
“Listen,” she began. “Those twelve thousand francs are all that you have in the world. You must keep the money upon you, because when I am dead the lawyers will come and seal everything up. Nothing will be yours then, not even your mother. All that remains for you to do will be to go out, poor orphan children, God knows where. I have made Annette’s future secure. She will have an annuity of a hundred crowns, and she will stay at Tours no doubt. But what will you do for yourself and your brother?”
She raised herself, and looked at the brave child, standing by her bedside. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead, he was pale with emotion, and his eyes were dim with tears.
“I have thought it over, mother,” he answered in a deep voice. “I will take Marie to the school here in Tours. I will give ten thousand francs to our old Annette, and ask her to take care of them, and to look after Marie. Then, with the remaining two thousand francs, I will go to Brest, and go to sea as an apprentice. While Marie is at school, I will rise to be a lieutenant on board a man-of-war. There, after all, die in peace, my mother; I shall come back again a rich man, and our little one shall go to the Ecole polytechnique, and I will find a career to suit his bent.”
A gleam of joy shone in the dying woman’s eyes. Two tears brimmed over, and fell over her fevered cheeks; then a deep sigh escaped between her lips. The sudden joy of finding the father’s spirit in the son, who had grown all at once to be a man, almost killed her.
“Angel of heaven,” she cried, weeping, “by one word you have effaced all my sorrows. Ah! I can bear them.—This is my son,” she said, “I bore, I reared this man,” and she raised her hands above her, and clasped them as if in ecstasy, then she lay back on the pillow.
“Mother, your face is growing pale!” cried the lad.
“Some one must go for a priest,” she answered, with a dying voice.
Louis wakened Annette, and the terrified old woman hurried to the parsonage at Saint-Cyr.
When morning came, Mme. Willemsens received the sacrament amid the most touching surroundings. Her children were kneeling in the room, with Annette and the vinedresser’s family, simple folk, who had already become part of the household. The silver crucifix, carried by a chorister, a peasant child from the village, was lifted up, and the dying mother received the Viaticum from an aged priest. The Viaticum! sublime word, containing an idea yet more sublime, an idea only possessed by the apostolic religion of the Roman church.