and became an unbroken fit of coughing, and then a kind of gasping hiccough.
Forestier was choking, and every time he tried to draw breath the cough seemed to rend his chest. Nothing would soothe or check it. He had to be borne from the carriage to his room, and Duroy, who supported his legs, felt the jerking of his feet at each convulsion of his lungs. The warmth of the bed did not check the attack, which lasted till midnight, when, at length, narcotics lulled its deadly spasm. The sick man remained till morning sitting up in his bed, with his eyes open.
The first words he uttered were to ask for the barber, for he insisted on being shaved every morning. He got up for this operation, but had to be helped back into bed at once, and his breathing grew so short, so hard, and so difficult, that Madame Forestier, in alarm, had Duroy, who had just turned in, roused up again in order to beg him to go for the doctor.
He came back almost immediately with Dr. Gavaut, who prescribed a soothing drink and gave some advice; but when the journalist saw him to the door, in order to ask his real opinion, he said, “It is the end. He will be dead tomorrow morning. Break it to his poor wife, and send for a priest. I, for my part, can do nothing more. I am, however, entirely at your service.”
Duroy sent for Madame Forestier. “He is dying,” said he. “The doctor advises a priest being sent for. What would you like done?”
She hesitated for some time, and then, in slow tones, as though she had calculated everything, replied, “Yes, that will be best — in many respects. I will break it to him — tell him the vicar wants to see him, or something or other; I really don’t know what. You would be very kind if you would go and find a priest for me and pick one out. Choose one who won’t raise too many difficulties over the business. One who will be satisfied with confession, and will let us off with the rest of it all.”
The young fellow returned with a complaisant old ecclesiastic, who accommodated himself to the state of affairs. As soon as he had gone into the dying man’s room, Madame Forestier came out of it, and sat down with Duroy in the one adjoining.
“It has quite upset him,” said she. “When I spoke to him about a priest his face assumed a frightful expression as if he had felt the breath — the breath of — you know. He understood that it was all over at last, and that his hours were numbered.” She was very pale as she continued, “I shall never forget the expression of his face. He certainly saw death face to face at that moment. He saw him.”
They could hear the priest, who spoke in somewhat loud tones, being slightly deaf, and who was saying, “No, no; you are not so bad as all that. You are ill, but in no danger. And the proof is that I have called in as a friend as a neighbor.”
They could not make out Forestier’s reply, but the old man went on, “No, I will not ask you to communicate. We will talk of that when you are better. If you wish to profit by my visit — to confess, for instance — I ask nothing better. I am a shepherd, you know, and seize on every occasion to bring a lamb back to the fold.”
A long silence followed. Forestier must have been speaking in a faint voice. Then all at once the priest uttered in a different tone, the tone of one officiating at the altar. “The mercy of God is infinite. Repeat the Comfiteor, my son. You have perhaps forgotten it; I will help you. Repeat after me: ‘Comfiteor Deo omnipotenti — Beata Maria semper virgini.’”
He paused from time to time to allow the dying man to catch him up. Then he said, “And now confess.”
The young wife and Duroy sat still seized on by a strange uneasiness, stirred by anxious expectation. The invalid had murmured something. The priest repeated, “You have given way to guilty pleasures — of what kind, my son?”
Madeleine rose and said, “Let us go down into the garden for a short time. We must not listen to his secrets.”
And they went and sat down on a bench before the door beneath a rose tree in bloom, and beside a bed of pinks, which shed their soft and powerful perfume abroad in the pure air. Duroy, after a few moments’ silence, inquired, “Shall you be long before you return to Paris?”
“Oh, no,” she replied. “As soon as it is all over I shall go back there.”
“Within ten days?”
“Yes, at the most.”
“He has no relations, then?”
“None except cousins. His father and mother died when he was quite young.”
They both watched a butterfly sipping existence from the pinks, passing from one to another with a soft flutter of his wings, which continued to flap slowly when he alighted on a flower. They remained silent for a considerable time.
The servant came to inform them that “the priest had finished,” and they went upstairs together.
Forestier seemed to have grown still thinner since the day before. The priest held out his hand to him, saying, “Good-day, my son, I shall call in again tomorrow morning,” and took his departure.
As soon as he had left the room the dying man, who was panting for breath, strove to hold out his two hands to his wife, and gasped, “Save me — save me, darling, I don’t want to die — I don’t want to die. Oh! save me — tell me what I had better do; send for the doctor. I will take whatever you like. I won’t die — I won’t die.”
He wept. Big tears streamed from his eyes down his fleshless cheeks, and the corners of his mouth contracted like those of a vexed child. Then his hands, falling back on the bed clothes, began a slow, regular, and continuous movement, as though trying to pick something off the sheet.
His wife, who began to cry too, said: “No, no, it is nothing. It is only a passing attack, you will be better tomorrow, you tired yourself too much going out yesterday.”
Forestier’s breathing was shorter than that of a dog who has been running, so quick that it could not be counted, so faint that it could scarcely be heard.
He kept repeating: “I don’t want to die. Oh! God — God — God; what is to become of me? I shall no longer see anything — anything any more. Oh! God.”
He saw before him some hideous thing invisible to the others, and his staring eyes reflected the terror it inspired. His two hands continued their horrible and wearisome action. All at once he started with a sharp shudder that could be seen to thrill the whole of his body, and jerked out the words, “The graveyard — I — Oh! God.”
He said no more, but lay motionless, haggard and panting.
Time sped on, noon struck by the clock of a neighboring convent. Duroy left the room to eat a mouthful or two. He came back an hour later. Madame Forestier refused to take anything. The invalid had not stirred. He still continued to draw his thin fingers along the sheet as though to pull it up over his face.
His wife was seated in an armchair at the foot of the bed. Duroy took another beside her, and they waited in silence. A nurse had come, sent in by the doctor, and was dozing near the window.
Duroy himself was beginning to doze off when he felt that something was happening. He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his, like two lights dying out. A faint rattle stirred in the throat of the dying man, and two streaks of blood appeared at the corners of his mouth, and then flowed down into his shirt. His hands ceased their hideous motion. He had ceased to breathe.
His
