If she uttered it he did not hear it. Moreover, at this supreme moment there came another interruption--the last!
The door opened again. Down the room, advancing toward the bed, came a priest, a man thin to attenuation, dry and brown as a mummy, with eyes that burned like coals beneath an eyebrowless forehead, yet one who told his beads even as he advanced, his lips quivering and moving while he prayed.
Do the dying know, even as we bend over them, seeking to penetrate beneath that glassy stare which suggests so deep an oblivion, of the last word we would have them speak, the last question we would have answered ere the veil of dense impenetrable darkness falls forever between them and us?
Almost it seemed as if she, this sinking woman who had lived for years a great princess, yet, by her own avowal, was none, did in truth know what her kinsman sought to drag from her--the clew which should lead to the righting of a great wrong, as he had said.
For, as the priest came through the lurking shadows of the room and out of the darkness of the farther end, toward where the small night lamp cast its sickly shadow, the hand which Martin Ashurst held closed tighter upon his own, and with a quivering grasp drew his toward her body, placing it upon a small substance that had lain sheltering 'twixt her arm and side.
And even as thus his hand closed over hers, while that other quivered warm and damp within it, the priest knelt and, over his crucifix, uttered up prayers for the passing soul.
[CHAPTER IV.]
LES ATTROUPÉS.
It was October in the year 1701 when she who had borne the title for so long of Princesse de Rochebazon was laid in the family vault in the Church of St. Sépulcre. It was July of the next year when a gentleman, looking somewhat travel-stained and weary, halted his horse at the foot of the Mont de Lozère, in Languedoc--the same man who had travelled from England eight months ago as Martin Ashurst, to attend his aunt's death-bed, but who since then had been known as Monsieur Martin.
There were more reasons than one why this change of name should be made--primarily because war having been declared by England in conjunction with Austria and Holland against Louis, no subject of Queen Anne was permitted within France, or, being in, would be safe if known and identified as such. But with an assumed name, or rather with part of his own name discarded--Martin being common to both countries--and with his knowledge of the French language perfect, owing to his long residence in the country as a child, the identification of Martin Ashurst with England was, if he held his peace, almost impossible. Also there were other reasons. He believed that at last he had found traces of the missing man, of him to whom by right fell all the vast wealth of the de Rochebazons, accumulated for centuries.