"Woe upon me!" cried the old woman suddenly. "Do not desert me. What, Monsieur l'Abbe, do you think I shall be called to account for my daughter's soul?"The Abbe spoke too low, and the partition was too thick for Francoise to hear the reply.
"Alas!" sobbed the woman, "the wretch has left me nothing that I can bequeath. When he robbed me of my dear Caroline, he parted us, and only allowed me three thousand francs a year, of which the capital belongs to my daughter.""Madame has a daughter, and nothing to live on but an annuity,"shrieked Francoise, bursting into the drawing-room.
The three old crones looked at each other in dismay. One of them, whose nose and chin nearly met with an expression that betrayed a superior type of hypocrisy and cunning, winked her eyes; and as soon as Francoise's back was turned, she gave her friends a nod, as much as to say, "That slut is too knowing by half; her name has figured in three wills already."So the three old dames sat on.
However, the Abbe presently came out, and at a word from him the witches scuttered down the stairs at his heels, leaving Francoise alone with her mistress. Madame Crochard, whose sufferings increased in severity, rang, but in vain, for this woman, who only called out, "Coming, coming--in a minute!" The doors of cupboards and wardrobes were slamming as though Francoise were hunting high and low for a lost lottery ticket.
Just as this crisis was at a climax, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille came to stand by her mother's bed, lavishing tender words on her.
"Oh my dear mother, how criminal I have been! You are ill, and I did not know it; my heart did not warn me. However, here I am--""Caroline--"
"What is it?"
"They fetched a priest--"
"But send for a doctor, bless me!" cried Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille.
"Francoise, a doctor! How is it that these ladies never sent for a doctor?""They sent for a priest----" repeated the old woman with a gasp.
"She is so ill--and no soothing draught, nothing on her table!"The mother made a vague sign, which Caroline's watchful eye understood, for she was silent to let her mother speak.
"They brought a priest--to hear my confession, as they said.--Beware, Caroline!" cried the old woman with an effort, "the priest made me tell him your benefactor's name.""But who can have told you, poor mother?"The old woman died, trying to look knowingly cunning. If Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille had noted her mother's face she might have seen what no one ever will see--Death laughing.
To enter into the interests that lay beneath this introduction to my tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned with the death of Madame Crochard. The two parts will then form a whole--a story which, by a law peculiar to life in Paris, was made up of two distinct sets of actions.
Towards the close of the month of November 1805, a young barrister, aged about six-and-twenty, was going down the stairs of the hotel where the High Chancellor of the Empire resided, at about three o'clock one morning. Having reached the courtyard in full evening dress, under a keen frost, he could not help giving vent to an exclamation of dismay--qualified, however, by the spirit which rarely deserts a Frenchman--at seeing no hackney coach waiting outside the gates, and hearing no noises such as arise from the wooden shoes or harsh voices of the hackney-coachmen of Paris. The occasional pawing of the horses of the Chief Justice's carriage--the young man having left him still playing /bouillote/ with Cambaceres--alone rang out in the paved court, which was scarcely lighted by the carriage lamps.
Suddenly the young lawyer felt a friendly hand on his shoulder, and turning round, found himself face to face with the Judge, to whom he bowed. As the footman let down the steps of his carriage, the old gentleman, who had served the Convention, suspected the junior's dilemma.
"All cats are gray in the dark," said he good-humoredly. "The Chief Justice cannot compromise himself by putting a pleader in the right way! Especially," he went on, "when the pleader is the nephew of an old colleague, one of the lights of the grand Council of State which gave France the Napoleonic Code."At a gesture from the chief magistrate of France under the Empire, the foot-passenger got into the carriage.
"Where do you live?" asked the great man, before the footman who awaited his orders had closed the door.
"Quai des Augustins, monseigneur."
The horses started, and the young man found himself alone with the Minister, to whom he had vainly tried to speak before and after the sumptuous dinner given by Cambaceres; in fact, the great man had evidently avoided him throughout the evening.