“Call him a magistrate!” cried the post master.
Ursula meanwhile was sitting on her little sofa in a half-fainting condition, her head thrown back, her braids unfastened, while every now and then her sobs broke forth. Her eyes were dim and their lids swollen; she was, in fact, in a state of moral and physical prostration which might have softened the hardest hearts—except those of the heirs.
“Ah! Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy birthday comes death and mourning,” she said, with the poetry natural to her. “You know, you, what he was. In twenty years he never said an impatient word to me. I believed he would live a hundred years. He has been my mother,” she cried, “my good, kind mother.”
These simple thoughts brought torrents of tears from her eyes, interrupted by sobs; then she fell back exhausted.
“My child,” said the justice of peace, hearing the heirs on the staircase. “You have a lifetime before you in which to weep, but you have now only a moment to attend to your interests. Gather everything that belongs to you in this house and put it into your own room at once. The heirs insist on my affixing the seals.”
“Ah! his heirs may take everything if they choose,” cried Ursula, sitting upright under an impulse of savage indignation. “I have something here,” she added, striking her breast, “which is far more precious—”
“What is it?” said the post master, who with Massin at his heels now showed his brutal face.
“The remembrances of his virtues, of his life, of his words—an image of his celestial soul,” she said, her eyes and face glowing as she raised her hand with a glorious gesture.
“And a key!” cried Massin, creeping up to her like a cat and seizing a key which fell from the bosom of her dress in her sudden movement.
“Yes,” she said, blushing, “that is the key of his study; he sent me there at the moment he was dying.”