"Then why the devil are you all standing like mutes at a funeral?" the soldier answered, with an oath. "Leaving madame alone, too. Poison, eh? Oh!" and he whistled softly. "So that is why you are all looking on as if the man had got the plague, is it? A pretty set of curs you are! But here is the doctor. Out of the way now," he added contemptuously, "and let no one leave the room."
He went forward with the physician, and, while the latter knelt and made his examination, the captain muttered a few words of comfort in madame's ear. For all she heard or heeded, however, he might have spared his pains. She had been summoned so abruptly, and the call had so entirely snapped the thread of her thoughts, that she had not yet connected her husband's illness with any act of hers. She had absolutely forgotten the enterprise of the evening, its anticipations and hopes. For the time she was spared that horror. But this illness alone sufficed to overwhelm her, to sink her beyond the reach of present comfort. She no longer remembered her husband's coldness, but only the early days when he had come to her in her country home, a black-bearded, bold-eyed Apollo, and wooed her impetuously and with irresistible will. All his faults, all his unkindnesses, were forgotten now: only his beauty, his vigour, his great passion, his courage were remembered. A dreadful pain seized her heart when she recognised that his had ceased to beat. She peered white-faced into the physician's eyes, she hung on his lips. If she remembered her journey to the Rue Touchet at all, it was only to think how futile her hopes were now. He, whom she would have won back to her, was gone from her for ever!
The doctor shook his head gravely as he rose. He had tried to bleed the patient, without waiting, in this emergency, for a barber to be summoned; but the blood would not flow. "It is useless," he said. "You must have courage, madame. More courage than is commonly required," he continued, in a tone of solemnity, almost of severity. He looked round and met the captain's eyes. He made him a slight sign.
"He is dead?" she muttered.
"He is dead," the physician answered slowly. "More, madame--my task goes farther. It is my duty to say that he has been poisoned."
"Dead!" she muttered, with a dry sob. "Dead!"
"Poisoned, I said, madame," the physician answered almost harshly. "In an older man the symptoms might be taken for those of apoplexy. But in this case not so. M. de Vidoche has been poisoned."
"You are clear on the point?" the captain of the watch said. He was a grey-haired, elderly man, lately transferred from the field to the slums of Paris, and his kindly nature had not been wholly obliterated by contact with villainy.
"Perfectly," the doctor answered. "More, the poison must have been administered within the hour."
Madame rose shivering from the dead man's side. This new terror, so much worse than that of death, seemed to thrust her from him, to raise a barrier between them. The soft white robe she had thrown round her when she ran from her bed was not whiter than her cheeks; the lights were not brighter than her eyes, distended with horror. "Poisoned!" she muttered. "Impossible! Who would poison him?"