The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de MaupassantЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 wife understood this, and uttering a kind of shriek, she fell on her knees sobbing, with her face buried in the bedclothes. 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.”
What luck the dead man had had to meet such an intelligent and charming companion! How had they become acquainted? How ever had she agreed on her part to marry that poor and commonplace young fellow? How had she succeeded in making someone of him? Then he thought of all the hidden mysteries of people’s lives. He remembered what had been whispered about the Count de Vaudrec, who had dowered and married her off it was said.
What would she do now? Whom would she marry? A deputy, as Madame de Marelle fancied, or some young fellow with a future before him, a higher class Forestier? Had she any projects, any plans, any settled ideas? How he would