Though the door of the chamber was open we were all so plunged in contemplation of the scene, as if to imprint its memories forever on our souls, that we did not notice the family servants who were kneeling as a group and praying fervently. These poor people, living on hope, had believed their mistress might be spared, and this plain warning overcame them. At a sign from the Abbe Birotteau the old huntsman went to fetch the curate of Sache. The doctor, standing by the bed, calm as science, and holding the hand of the still sleeping woman, had made the confessor a sign to say that this sleep was the only hour without pain which remained for the recalled angel. The moment had come to administer the last sacraments of the Church. At nine o’clock she awoke quietly, looked at us with surprised but gentle eyes, and we beheld our idol once more in all the beauty of former days.
“Mother! you are too beautiful to die—life and health are coming back to you!” cried Madeleine.
“Dear daughter, I shall live—in thee,” she answered, smiling.
Then followed heart-rending embraces of the mother and her children. Monsieur de Mortsauf kissed his wife upon her brow. She colored when she saw me.
“Dear Felix,” she said, “this is, I think, the only grief that I shall ever have caused you. Forget all that I may have said,—I, a poor creature much beside myself.” She held out her hand; I took it and kissed it. Then she said, with her chaste and gracious smile, “As in the old days, Felix?”
We all left the room and went into the salon during the last confession. I approached Madeleine. In presence of others she could not escape me without a breach of civility; but, like her mother, she looked at no one, and kept silence without even once turning her eyes in my direction.
“Dear Madeleine,” I said in a low voice, “What have you against me? Why do you show such coldness in the presence of death, which ought to reconcile us all?”
“I hear in my heart what my mother is saying at this moment,” she replied, with a look which Ingres gave to his “Mother of God,”—that virgin, already sorrowful, preparing herself to protect the world for which her son was about to die.
“And you condemn me at the moment when your mother absolves me,—if indeed I am guilty.”
“You, you,” she said, “always your self!”