So they bore her, stunned, and with her temple bleeding, to the home of Madame Deschwanden.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
For a fortnight Madame Berthier remained delirious with brain fever. At the end of that time she began to recover, but her memory was impaired. She remembered nothing of her confinement in the Bastille, nothing of her pursuit of Berthier and of the subsequent events. Only hazily did the form of her husband present itself to her mind; it was a note which cyphered, and therefore disturbed, the harmony of memory.
Her former freakish predilections for the colour yellow had suddenly changed into aversion. It was somehow connected with an event which had disappeared from the range of her thoughts; and, as a thread leading nowhere, it irritated her without her being able to account for it.
The cat also was forgotten. She did not allude to him once. But she distinctly knew Gabrielle. Perhaps if the yellow Gabriel had been brought to her she would have recognised him. She did not know when she had made the girl's acquaintance, or where she had first met her; but she knew her face and her name.
Her great delight, on her recovery, was to listen to the corporal and Nicholas conversing about their native land. She paid the greatest attention to their words, laughed childishly, and smiled at Gabrielle.
But especially was she gratified with the song, 'Heart, my heart, why art thou weary?' Nicholas played it to her on his flageolet, and the corporal sang it, till the poor woman knew it by heart.