“Why your brother?” asked Clemence.
But Jules had already left the room.
WHERE GO
TO DIE?
For the first time in five years Madame Jules slept
alone in her bed, and was compelled to admit a physician
into that sacred chamber. These in themselves
were two keen pangs. Desplein found Madame Jules
very ill. Never was a violent emotion more untimely.
He would say nothing definite, and postponed till
the morrow giving any opinion, after leaving a few
directions, which were not executed, the emotions of
the heart causing all bodily cares to be forgotten.
When morning dawned, Clemence had not yet slept.
Her mind was absorbed in the low murmur of a conversation
which lasted several hours between the brothers; but
the thickness of the walls allowed no word which could
betray the object of this long conference to reach
her ears. Monsieur Desmarets, the notary, went
away at last. The stillness of the night, and
the singular activity of the senses given by powerful
emotion, enabled Clemence to distinguish the scratching
of a pen and the involuntary movements of a person
engaged in writing. Those who are habitually
up at night, and who observe the different acoustic
effects produced in absolute silence, know that a slight
echo can be readily perceived in the very places where
louder but more equable and continued murmurs are
not distinct. At four o’clock the sound
ceased. Clemence rose, anxious and trembling.
Then, with bare feet and without a wrapper, forgetting
her illness and her moist condition, the poor woman
opened the door softly without noise and looked into
the next room. She saw her husband sitting, with
a pen in his hand, asleep in his arm-chair. The
candles had burned to the sockets. She slowly
advanced and read on an envelope, already sealed, the
words, “This is my will.”
She knelt down as if before an open grave and kissed
her husband’s hand. He woke instantly.
“Jules, my friend, they grant some days to criminals
condemned to death,” she said, looking at him
with eyes that blazed with fever and with love.
“Your innocent wife asks only two. Leave
me free for two days, and—wait! After
that, I shall die happy—at least, you will
regret me.”
“Clemence, I grant them.”
Then, as she kissed her husband’s hands in the
tender transport of her heart, Jules, under the spell
of that cry of innocence, took her in his arms and
kissed her forehead, though ashamed to feel himself
still under subjection to the power of that noble
beauty.
On the morrow, after taking a few hours’ rest,
Jules entered his wife’s room, obeying mechanically
his invariable custom of not leaving the house without
a word to her. Clemence was sleeping. A ray
of light passing through a chink in the upper blind
of a window fell across the face of the dejected woman.
Already suffering had impaired her forehead and the
freshness of her lips. A lover’s eye could
not fail to notice the appearance of dark blotches,
and a sickly pallor in place of the uniform tone of
the cheeks and the pure ivory whiteness of the skin,—two
points at which the sentiments of her noble soul were
artlessly wont to show themselves.
