He persisted, repeating, "Oh, I am much better. I feel it."
They pa.s.sed at first along some of those shady roads, bordered by gardens, which cause Cannes to resemble a kind of English Park, and then reached the highway to Antibes, running along the seash.o.r.e. Forestier acted as guide. He had already pointed out the villa of the Court de Paris, and now indicated others. He was lively, with the forced and feeble gayety of a doomed man. He lifted his finger, no longer having strength to stretch out his arm, and said, "There is the Ile Sainte Marguerite, and the chateau from which Bazaine escaped. How they did humbug us over that matter!"
Then regimental recollections recurred to him, and he mentioned various officers whose names recalled incidents to them. But all at once, the road making a turn, they caught sight of the whole of the Golfe Juan, with the white village in the curve of the bay, and the point of Antibes at the further side of it. Forestier, suddenly seized upon by childish glee, exclaimed, "Ah! the squadron, you will see the squadron."
Indeed they could perceive, in the middle of the broad bay, half-a-dozen large ships resembling rocks covered with leafless trees. They were huge, strange, mis-shapen, with excrescences, turrets, rams, burying themselves in the water as though to take root beneath the waves. One could scarcely imagine how they could stir or move about, they seemed so heavy and so firmly fixed to the bottom. A floating battery, circular and high out of water, resembling the light-houses that are built on shoals. A tall three-master pa.s.sed near them, with all its white sails set. It looked graceful and pretty beside these iron war monsters squatted on the water. Forestier tried to make them out. He pointed out the Colbert, the Suffren, the Admiral Duperre, the Redoubtable, the Devastation, and then checking himself, added, "No I made a mistake; that one is the Devastation."
They arrived opposite a species of large pavilion, on the front of which was the inscription, "Art Pottery of the Golfe Juan," and the carriage, driving up the sweep, stopped before the door. Forestier wanted to buy a couple of vases for his study. As he felt unequal to getting out of the carriage, specimens were brought out to him one after the other. He was a long time in making a choice, and consulted his wife and Duroy.
"You know," he said, "it is for the cabinet at the end of the study.
Sitting in my chair, I have it before my eyes all the time. I want an antique form, a Greek outline." He examined the specimens, had others brought, and then turned again to the first ones. At length he made up his mind, and having paid, insisted upon the articles being sent on at once. "I shall be going back to Paris in a few days," he said.
They drove home, but as they skirted the bay a rush of cold air from one of the valleys suddenly met them, and the invalid began to cough. It was nothing at first, but it augmented 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 to-morrow 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 b.u.t.terfly sipping existence from the pinks, pa.s.sing 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 to-morrow 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 pa.s.sing attack, you will be better to-morrow, 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! G.o.d--G.o.d--G.o.d; what is to become of me? I shall no longer see anything--anything any more. Oh!
G.o.d."
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! G.o.d."
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 wife understood this, and uttering a kind of shriek, she fell on her knees sobbing, with her face buried in the bed-clothes. George, surprised and scared, mechanically made the sign of the cross. The nurse awakened, drew near the bed. "It is all over," said she.
Duroy, who was recovering his self-possession, murmured, with a sigh of relief: "It was sooner over than I thought for."
When the first shock was over and the first tears shed, they had to busy themselves with all the cares and all the necessary steps a dead man exacts. Duroy was running about till nightfall. He was very hungry when he got back. Madame Forestier ate a little, and then they both installed themselves in the chamber of death to watch the body. Two candles burned on the night-table beside a plate filled with holy water, in which lay a sprig of mimosa, for they had not been able to get the necessary twig of consecrated box.
They were alone, the young man and the young wife, beside him who was no more. They sat without speaking, thinking and watching.
George, whom the darkness rendered uneasy in presence of the corpse, kept his eyes on this persistently. His eye and his mind were both attracted and fascinated by this fleshless visage, which the vacillating light caused to appear yet more hollow. That was his friend Charles Forestier, who was chatting with him only the day before! What a strange and fearful thing was this end of a human being! Oh! how he recalled the words of Norbert de Varenne haunted by the fear of death: "No one ever comes back." Millions on millions would be born almost identical, with eyes, a nose, a mouth, a skull and a mind within it, without he who lay there on the bed ever reappearing again.
For some years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped like all the world. And it was all over for him all over for ever. Life; a few days, and then nothing. One is born, one grows up, one is happy, one waits, and then one dies. Farewell, man or woman, you will not return again to earth. Plants, beast, men, stars, worlds, all spring to life, and then die to be transformed anew. But never one of them comes back--insect, man, nor planet.
A huge, confused, and crushing sense of terror weighed down the soul of Duroy, the terror of that boundless and inevitable annihilation destroying all existence. He already bowed his head before its menace.
He thought of the flies who live a few hours, the beasts who live a few days, the men who live a few years, the worlds which live a few centuries. What was the difference between one and the other? A few more days" dawn that was all.
He turned away his eyes in order no longer to have the corpse before them. Madame Forestier, with bent head, seemed also absorbed in painful thoughts. Her fair hair showed so prettily with her pale face, that a feeling, sweet as the touch of hope flitted through the young fellow"s breast. Why grieve when he had still so many years before him? And he began to observe her. Lost in thought she did not notice him. He said to himself, "That, though, is the only good thing in life, to love, to hold the woman one loves in one"s arms. That is the limit of human happiness."