"Aline," she said, "she will speak! she will speak!"

"Ah! madame is out of her mind," cried the faithful maid, who was bringing sheets. "Fetch the rector, madame."

"Your mistress must be undressed," said Bianchon to the maid.

"It will be very difficult to do it, monsieur; madame is wrapped in a hair-cloth garment."

"What! in the nineteenth-century can such horrors be revived?" said the great doctor.

"Madame Graslin has never allowed me to touch her stomach," said Roubaud. "I have been able to judge of the progress of the disease only from her face and her pulse, and the little information I could get from her mother and the maid."

Veronique was now placed on a sofa while the bed was being made. The doctors spoke together in a low voice. Madame Sauviat and Aline made the bed. The faces of the two women were full of anguish; their hearts were wrung by the thought, "We are making her bed for the last time--she will die here!"

The consultation was not long. But Bianchon exacted at the outset that Aline should, in spite of the patient's resistance, cut off the hair shirt and put on a night-dress. The doctors returned to the salon while this was being done. When Aline pa.s.sed them carrying the instrument of torture wrapped in a napkin, she said:--

"Madame's body is one great wound."

The doctors returned to the bedroom.

"Your will is stronger than that of Napoleon, madame," said Bianchon, after asking a few questions, to which Veronique replied very clearly.

"You keep your mind and your faculties in the last stages of a disease which robbed the Emperor of his brilliant intellect. From what I know of you I think I ought to tell you the truth."

"I implore you to do so," she said. "You are able to estimate what strength remains to me; and I have need of all my vigor for a few hours."

"Think only of your salvation," replied Bianchon.

"If G.o.d has given me grace to die in possession of all my faculties,"

she said with a celestial smile, "be sure that this favor will be used to the glory of his Church. The possession of my mind and senses is necessary to fulfil a command of G.o.d, whereas Napoleon had accomplished all his destiny."

The doctors looked at each other in astonishment at hearing these words, said with as much ease as though Madame Graslin were still presiding in her salon.

"Ah! here is the doctor who is to cure me," she said presently, when the archbishop, summoned by Roubaud, entered the room.

She collected all her strength and rose to a sitting posture, in order to bow graciously to Monsieur Bianchon, and beg him to accept something else than money for the good news he gave her. She said a few words in her mother's ear, and Madame Sauviat immediately led away the doctors; then Veronique requested the archbishop to postpone their interview till the rector could come to her, expressing a wish to rest for a while.

Aline watched beside her.

At midnight Madame Graslin awoke, and asked for the archbishop and rector, whom Aline silently showed her close at hand, praying for her.

She made a sign dismissing her mother and the maid, and, at another sign, the two priests came to the bedside.

"Monseigneur, and you, my dear rector," she said, "will hear nothing you do not already know. You were the first, Monseigneur, to cast your eyes into my inner self; you read there nearly all my past; and what you read sufficed you. My confessor, that guardian angel whom heaven placed near me, knows more; I have told him all. You, whose minds are enlightened by the spirit of the Church, I wish to consult you as to the manner in which I ought as a true Christian to leave this life. You, austere and saintly spirits, think you that if G.o.d deigns to pardon one whose repentance is the deepest, the most absolute, that ever shook a human soul, think you that even then I have made my full expiation here below?"

"Yes," said the archbishop; "yes, my daughter."

"No, my father, no!" she said rising in her bed, the lightning flashing from her eyes. "Not far from here there is a grave, where an unhappy man is lying beneath the weight of a dreadful crime; here in this sumptuous home is a woman, crowned with the fame of benevolence and virtue. This woman is blessed; that poor young man is cursed. The criminal is covered with obloquy; I receive the respect of all. I had the largest share in the sin; he has a share, a large share in the good which has won for me such glory and such grat.i.tude. Fraud that I am, I have the honor; he, the martyr to his loyalty, has the shame. I shall die in a few hours, and the canton will mourn me; the whole department will ring with my good deeds, my piety, my virtue; but he died covered with insults, in sight of a whole population rushing, with hatred to a murderer, to see him die. You, my judges, you are indulgent to me; yet I hear within myself an imperious voice which will not let me rest. Ah! the hand of G.o.d, less tender than yours, strikes me from day to day, as if to warn me that all is not expiated. My sins cannot be redeemed except by a public confession. He is happy! criminal, he gave his life with ignominy in face of earth and heaven; and I, I cheat the world as I cheated human justice. The homage I receive humiliates me; praise sears my heart. Do you not see, in the very coming of the _procureur-general_, a command from heaven echoing the voice in my own soul which cries to me: Confess!"

The two priests, the prince of the Church as well as the humble rector, these two great lights, each in his own way, stood with their eyes lowered and were silent. Deeply moved by the grandeur and the resignation of the guilty woman, the judges could not p.r.o.nounce her sentence.

"My child," said the archbishop at last, raising his n.o.ble head, macerated by the customs of his austere life, "you are going beyond the commandments of the Church. The glory of the Church is to make her dogma conform to the habits and manners of each age; for the Church goes on from age to age in company with humanity. According to her present decision secret confession has taken the place of public confession.

This subst.i.tution has made the new law. The sufferings you have endured suffice. Die in peace: G.o.d has heard you."

"But is not this desire of a guilty woman in conformity with the law of the first Church, which has enriched heaven with as many saints and martyrs and confessing souls as there are stars in the firmament?"

persisted Veronique, vehemently. "Who said: _Confess yourselves to one another_? Was it not the disciples, who lived with the Saviour? Let me confess my shame publicly on my knees. It will redeem my sin to the world, to that family exiled and almost extinct through me. The world ought to know that my benefactions are not an offering, but the payment of a debt. Suppose that later, after my death, something tore from my memory the lying veil which covers me. Ah! that idea is more than I can bear, it is death indeed!"

"I see in this too much of calculation, my child," said the archbishop, gravely. "Pa.s.sions are still too strong in you; the one I thought extinct is--"

"Oh! I swear to you, Monseigneur," she said, interrupting the prelate and fixing her eyes, full of horror, upon him, "my heart is as purified as that of a guilty and repentant woman can be; there is nothing now within me but the thought of G.o.d."

"Monseigneur," said the rector in a tender voice, "let us leave celestial justice to take its course. It is now four years since I have strongly opposed this wish; it is the only difference that has ever come between my penitent and myself. I have seen to the depths of that soul, and I know this earth has no longer any hold there. Though the tears, the remorse, the contrition of fifteen years relate to the mutual sin of those two persons, believe me there are no remains of earthly pa.s.sion in this long and terrible bewailing. Memory no longer mingles its flames with those of an ardent penitence. Yes, tears have at last extinguished that great fire. I guarantee," he said, stretching his hand over Madame Graslin's head, and letting his moistened eyes be seen, "I guarantee the purity of that angelic soul. And also I see in this desire the thought of reparation to an absent family, a member of which G.o.d has brought back here by one of those events which reveal His providence."

Veronique took the trembling hand of the rector and kissed it.

"You have often been very stern to me, dear pastor, but at this moment I see where you keep your apostolic gentleness. You," she said, looking at the archbishop, "you, the supreme head of this corner of G.o.d's kingdom, be to me, in this moment of ignominy, a support. I must bow down as the lowest of women, but you will lift me up pardoned and--possibly--the equal of those who never sinned."

The archbishop was silent, weighing no doubt all the considerations his practised eye perceived.

"Monseigneur," said the rector, "religion has had some heavy blows. This return to ancient customs, brought about by the greatness of the sin and its repentance, may it not be a triumph we have no right to refuse?"

"But they will say we are fanatics! They will declare we have exacted this cruel scene!"

And again the archbishop was silent and thoughtful.

At this moment Horace Bianchon and Roubaud entered the room, after knocking. As the door opened Veronique saw her mother, her son, and all the servants of the household on their knees praying. The rectors of the two adjacent parishes had come to a.s.sist Monsieur Bonnet, and also, perhaps, to pay their respects to the great prelate, for whom the French clergy now desired the honors of the cardinalate, hoping that the clearness of his intellect, which was thoroughly Gallican, would enlighten the Sacred College.

Horace Bianchon returned to Paris; before departing, he came to bid farewell to the dying woman and thank her for her munificence. Slowly he approached, perceiving from the faces of the priests that the wounds of the soul had been the determining cause of those of the body. He took Madame Graslin's hand, laid it on the bed and felt the pulse. The deep silence, that of a summer night in a country solitude, gave additional solemnity to the scene. The great salon, seen through the double doors, was lighted up for the little company of persons who were praying there; all were on their knees except the two priests who were seated and reading their brevaries. On either side of the grand state bed were the prelate in his violet robes, the rector, and the two physicians.

"She is agitated almost unto death," said Horace Bianchon, who, like all men of great talent, sometimes used speech as grand as the occasion that called it forth.

The archbishop rose as if some inward impulse drove him; he called to Monsieur Bonnet, and together they crossed the room, pa.s.sed through the salon, and went out upon the terrace, where they walked up and down for some moments. When they returned, after discussing this case of ecclesiastical discipline, Roubaud met them.

XXI. CONFESSION AT THE GATES OF THE TOMB

At ten o'clock in the morning the archbishop, wearing his pontifical robes, came into Madame Graslin's chamber. The prelate, as well as the rector, had such confidence in this woman that they gave her no advice or instructions as to the limits within which she ought to make her confession.

Veronique now saw an a.s.semblage of clergy from all the neighboring districts. Monseigneur was a.s.sisted by four vicars. The magnificent vessels she had bestowed upon her dear parish church were brought to the house and gave splendor to the ceremony. Eight choristers in their white and red surplices stood in two rows from the bed to the door of the salon, each holding one of the large bronze-gilt candelabra which Veronique had ordered from Paris. The cross and the church banner were held on either side of the bed by white-haired sacristans. Thanks to the devotion of her servants, a wooden altar brought from the sacristy had been erected close to the door of the salon, and so prepared and decorated that Monseigneur could say ma.s.s upon it.

Madame Graslin was deeply touched by these attentions, which the Church, as a general thing, grants only to royal personages. The folding doors between the salon and the dining-room were open, and she could see a vista of the ground-floor rooms filled with the village population. Her friends had thought of everything; the salon was occupied exclusively by themselves and the servants of the household. In the front rank and grouped before the door of the bedroom were her nearest friends, those on whose discretion reliance could be placed. MM. Grossetete, de Grandville, Roubaud, Gerard, Clousier, Ruffin, took the first places.

They had arranged among themselves that they should rise and stand in a group, thus preventing the words of the repentant woman from being heard in the farther rooms; but their tears and sobs would, in any case, have drowned her voice.

At this moment and before all else in that audience, two persons presented, to an observer, a powerfully affecting sight. One was Denise Tascheron. Her foreign garments, of Quaker simplicity, made her unrecognizable by her former village acquaintance. The other was quite another personage, an acquaintance not to be forgotten, and his apparition there was like a streak of lurid light. The _procureur-general_ came suddenly to a perception of the truth; the part that he had played to Madame Graslin unrolled itself before him; he divined it to its fullest extent. Less influenced, as a son of the nineteenth century, by the religious aspect of the matter, Monsieur de Grandville's heart was filled with an awful dread; for he saw before him, he contemplated the drama of that woman's hidden self at the hotel Graslin during the trial of Jean-Francois Tascheron. That tragic period came back distinctly to his memory,--lighted even now by the mother's eyes, shining with hatred, which fell upon him where he stood, like drops of molten lead. That old woman, standing ten feet from him, forgave nothing. That man, representing human justice, trembled. Pale, struck to the heart, he dared not cast his eyes upon the bed where lay the woman he had loved so well, now livid beneath the hand of death, gathering strength to conquer agony from the greatness of her sin and its repentance. The mere sight of Veronique's thin profile, sharply defined in white upon the crimson damask, caused him a vertigo.

At eleven o'clock the ma.s.s began. After the epistle had been read by the rector of Vizay the archbishop removed his dalmatic and advanced to the threshold of the bedroom door.

"Christians, gather here to a.s.sist in the ceremony of extreme unction which we are about to administer to the mistress of this house," he said, "you who join your prayers to those of the Church and intercede with G.o.d to obtain from Him her eternal salvation, you are now to learn that she does not feel herself worthy, in this, her last hour, to receive the holy viatic.u.m without having made, for the edification of her fellows, a public confession of the greatest of her sins. We have resisted her pious wish, although this act of contrition was long in use during the early ages of Christianity. But, as this poor woman tells us that her confession may serve to rehabilitate an unfortunate son of this parish, we leave her free to follow the inspirations of her repentance."

After these words, said with pastoral unction and dignity, the archbishop turned aside to give place to Veronique. The dying woman came forward, supported by her old mother and the rector,--the mother from whom she derived her body, the Church, the spiritual mother of her soul.