The gendarmes lifted the silent form and laid it upon a couch, and there Idris knelt, sobbing bitterly and calling upon his mother to speak.
"My poor boy," said the governor, after a brief inspection of the body, "she will never speak again.—We ought," he added, turning to address his men, "we ought to send for a doctor, though he can do no good, for she is stone dead."
There was but one doctor in Quilaix, and he, Idris explained amid his tears, had gone with the procession to the Pardon.
"We must have some woman to attend to the body," continued Duclair. "We can't return to Valàgenêt leaving the boy alone with a corpse. Surely all the women folk haven't gone to this cursed Pardon?"
Idris, as well as his grief would let him, explained where a woman was likely to be found, and a gendarme was at once despatched to fetch her.
The man who had done the deed offered now no resistance to his captors. His desire for liberty had fled. Overwhelmed by the awful result of his own act he had sunk into a stupor, staring with glassy eyes at that which but a few minutes before had been a living woman.
Touched by the spectacle of his grief they allowed him to sit beside her; and, as he showed a desire to clasp her hand, the governor made a sign to one of the party to remove the manacles.
This done, he sat holding the limp fingers within his own, pressing them as if expecting the pressure to be returned.
The gendarmes stood aloof in pitying silence. Not even the governor spoke, feeling the emptiness of any attempt at consolation.
As for Idris, he shrank, not unnaturally, from the man who had killed his mother. Once he addressed to him a piteous reproach:—"Oh, why did you come here?—Oh, mother, mother, speak to me!"