“Félix,” said she, “I may have done you some wrong. I may often have given you pain by leading you to hope for joys I dared not give; but is it not to my courage as a wife and as a mother that I owe the comfort of dying reconciled to you all? So you too will forgive me, you who have so often accused me, and whose injustice was a pleasure to me.”
The Abbé Birotteau put his finger to his lips. At this hint the dying woman bowed her head; weakness was too much for her; she waved her hands to express that the priest, the children, and the servants were to be admitted; then, with a commanding gesture to me, she pointed to the Count, quite crushed, and her children as they entered. The sight of that father, whose insanity none knew save herself and me, the guardian now of these delicate creatures, inspired her with mute entreaties which fell on my soul like sacred fire. Before receiving extreme unction she begged pardon of her servants for being sometimes rough with them, she asked their prayers, and commended each separately to the Count. She nobly confessed that, during the past few months, she had uttered complaints little worthy of a Christian, which might have scandalized her dependants. She had been cold to her children, and had given way to unseemly sentiments; but she ascribed to her intolerable sufferings, this want of submission to the will of God.
Finally, she publicly thanked the Abbé Birotteau, with touching and heartfelt effusiveness, for having shown her the vanity of all earthly things.
When she ceased speaking all began to pray, and the Curé of Saché administered the Viaticum. A few minutes later her breathing became difficult, a cloud dimmed her eyes, though she presently opened them again to give me a last look, and she died in the presence of us all, hearing perhaps the chorus of our sobs.
At the moment when she breathed her last sigh—the last pang of a life that was one long pain, I felt myself struck by a blow which paralyzed all my faculties.
The Count and I remained by the bed of death all night, with the two Abbés and the Curé, watching the dead by the light of the tapers, as she lay on the mattress, calm now, where she had suffered so much.
This was my first personal knowledge of death. I sat the whole night through, my eyes fixed on Henriette, fascinated by the pure expression given by the stilling of every tempest, by the pallor of the face in which I still read numberless affections, which could no longer respond to my love.
What majesty there is in that silence and coldness! How many reflections do they utter! What beauty in that perfect repose, what command in that motionless sleep! All the past is there, and the future has begun. Ah! I loved her as well in death as I had in life.
In the morning the Count went to bed, the three weary priests fell asleep at that hour of exhaustion, so well known to all who have watched through a night. And then, alone with her, I could, unseen, kiss her brow with all the love she had never allowed me to express.
On the next day but one, in a cool autumn morning, we followed the Countess to her last home. She was borne to the grave by the old huntsman, the two Martineaus, and Manette’s husband. We went down the road I had so gleefully come up on the day when I returned to her. We crossed the valley of the Indre to reach the little graveyard of Saché—a humble village cemetery, lying at the back of the church on the brow of a hill, where she had desired to be buried, out of Christian humility, with a plain cross of black wood, like a poor laboring woman, as she had said.
When, from the middle of the valley, I caught sight of the village church and the graveyard, I was seized with a convulsive shudder. Alas! we each have a Golgotha in our life, where we leave our first three-and-thirty years, receiving then a spear-thrust in our heart, and feeling on our head a crown of thorns in the place of the crown of roses: this hill was to me the Mount of Expiation.
We were followed by an immense crowd that had collected to express the regrets of the whole valley, where she had silently buried endless acts of benevolence. We knew from Manette, whom she trusted entirely, that she economized in dress to help the poor when her savings were insufficient. Naked children had been clothed, baby-linen supplied, mothers rescued, sacks of corn bought of the millers in winter for helpless old men, a cow bestowed on a poverty-stricken household; in short, all the good works of a Christian, a mother, a lady bountiful; and sums of money given to help loving couples to marry, or to provide substitutes for young men drawn by the conscription, touching gifts from the loving soul that had said: “The happiness of others becomes the joy of those who can no longer be happy.”
These facts, talked over every evening for the last three days, had brought together a vast throng. I followed the bier with Jacques and the two Abbés. According to custom neither Madeleine nor the Count was present; they remained alone at Clochegourde. Manette insisted on coming.
“Poor madame! poor madame! she is happy now!” I heard many times spoken through sobs.
At the moment when the procession turned off from the road to the mills there was a unanimous groan, mingled with weeping that was enough to make one think that the valley had lost its soul.
The church was full of people. After the service we went to the cemetery where she was to be buried close to the cross. When I heard the stones and gravel rattle on the coffin
