The Message

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I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without
laying too much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her
about our first day's journey, and how it had been filled with
recollections of her and of love. And she listened eagerly,
without shedding a tear, leaning her face towards me, as some
zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a patient's
face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to
pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the
first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity,
and told her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told
her how and why it was that he had given me this fatal message.
Then her tears were dried by the fires that burned in the dark
depths within her. She grew even paler. When I drew the letters
from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she took them
mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a
hollow voice:

"And _I_ burned all his letters!--I have nothing of him left!
--Nothing! nothing!"

She struck her hand against her forehead.

"Madame----" I began.

She glanced at me in the convulsion of grief.

"I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair."

And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very
part of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her
burning tears falling on your hands, you would know what
gratitude is, when it follows so closely upon the benefit. Her
eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a faint ray of happiness
gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she grasped my hands in
hers, and said, in a choking voice:

"Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her
whom you love."

She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.

Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a
dream; to make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look
fruitlessly under my pillow for the packet of letters. There is
no need to tell you how the next day went. I spent several hours
of it with the Juliette whom my poor comrade had so praised to
me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all that she did and
said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy of
feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved,
loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this
earth.

In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as
Moulins with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:

"Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very
inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under
obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to
Paris, to remit a sum of money to M. de ---- (I forget the name),
in the Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to
send it as soon as possible."

"Willingly," said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took
charge of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d'or, which paid the
expenses of my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my
arrival, I went to the address indicated to repay the amount to
M. de Montpersan's correspondent, did I understand the ingenious
delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the
genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in
her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?

And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who
clung to you more closely in dread, saying, "Oh, my dear, not you!
_You_ must not die!"