“Mother, you are too beautiful to die, life and health are coming back to you!” cried Madeleine.
“My dear daughter, I shall live—but in you,” said she, with a smile.
Then came heartrending farewells from the mother to the children, and from the children to the mother. Monsieur de Mortsauf kissed his wife piously on the brow. The Countess flushed as she saw me.
“Dear Félix,” said she, “this is, I believe, the only grief I shall ever have given you! But forget all I may have said to you, poor crazed thing as I was!” She held out her hand; I took it to kiss, and she said with a smile of virtue—“As of old, Félix?”
We all left the room, and remained in the drawing-room while the sick woman made her last confession. I sat down next to Madeleine. In the presence of them all, she could not avoid me without being rude; but, as her mother used, she looked at no one, and kept silence without once raising her eyes to mine.
“Dear Madeleine,” said I in a low voice, “what grievance have you against me? Why such coldness when, in the presence of death, we ought to be friends?”
“I fancy I can hear what my mother is saying at this moment,” replied she, putting on the expression that Ingres had given to his “Mother of God,” the mourning Virgin preparing to protect the World in which her Son is about to perish.
“Then you condemn me at the moment when your mother is absolving me, supposing me to be guilty.”
“You, and always you!” She spoke with unreasoning hatred, like that of a Corsican, as implacable as all judgments are that are pronounced by those who, not knowing life, admit no extenuation of the sins committed against the laws of the heart.
An hour passed in utter silence. The Abbé Birotteau came in after hearing the Comtesse de Mortsauf’s general confession, and we all went into her room again. Henriette, in obedience to one of the ideas that occur to noble souls, all sisters in purpose, had been robed in a long garment that was to serve as her winding sheet. We found her sitting up in bed, beautiful with expiation and hope: I saw in the fireplace the black ashes of my letters which had just been burnt; a sacrifice she would not make, the confessor told me, till she was at the point of death. She smiled at us all—her old smile. Her eyes, moist with tears, were, we saw, finally unsealed; she already saw the celestial joys of the promised land.
“Dear Félix,” she said, holding out her hand and pressing mine. “Stay. You must be present at one of the closing scenes of my life, which will not be one of the least painful of all, but in which you are intimately concerned.”
She made a sign, and the door was shut. By her desire the Count sat down; the Abbé Birotteau and I remained standing. With Manette’s assistance the Countess got up and knelt down before the astonished Count, insisting on remaining there. Then, when Manette had left the room, she raised her head, which she had bent, resting it on his knees.
“Though I have always been a faithful wife to you,” said she in a broken voice, “I have perhaps, monsieur, failed in my duties. I have prayed to God to give me strength to ask your forgiveness of my faults. I have perhaps devoted to the cares of a friendship outside my home, attentions more affectionate than I owed even to you. Perhaps I have annoyed you by the comparisons you may have drawn between those cares, those thoughts, and such as I have given to you. I have known,” she said in a very low voice, “a great friendship, which no one, not even he who was its object, ever wholly knew. Though I have been virtuous by all human law, a blameless wife to you, thoughts—voluntary or involuntary—have found their way into my mind, and I fear I may have cherished them too gladly. But as I have always loved you truly, and have been your obedient wife, as the clouds passing across the sky have never darkened its clearness, you behold me craving your blessing with an unsullied brow. I can die without a bitter pang if I may hear from your lips one loving word for your Blanche, the mother of your children, and if you will forgive all these things, which she did not forgive herself till she had received the absolution of the tribunal to which we all bow.”
“Blanche, Blanche,” cried the old man, suddenly bursting into tears over his wife’s head, “do you want to kill me?”
He raised her in his arms with unwonted strength, and clasping her to him, “Have I no forgiveness to ask?” he went on. “Have I not often been harsh? Are you not magnifying a child’s scruples?”
“Perhaps,” said she. “But be tender, my dear, to the weakness of the dying; soothe my soul. When you are in the hour of death you will remember that I blessed you as we parted.”
“Will you allow me to leave to our friend here this pledge of deep regard?” said she, pointing to a letter on the chimney-shelf. “He is now my adopted son, nothing more. The heart, my dear Count, has its bequests to make; my last words are to impress on our dear Félix certain duties to be carried out; I do not think I have expected too much of him—grant that I may not have expected too much of you in allowing myself to bequeath to him a few thoughts. I am still a woman,” she said, bowing her head with sweet melancholy; “after being forgiven, I ask a favor.—Read it, but not till after my death,” she added, handing me the mysterious manuscript.
The Count saw his wife turn paler; he lifted her, and himself carried her to the
