That terrible magistrate was, in fact, alone with the countess, who waited, trembling, till it should please him to depart.
"Citoyenne," he said, after a long silence in which there was something terrifying, "I am here to enforce the laws of the Republic."
Madame de Dey shuddered.
"Have you nothing to reveal to me?" he demanded.
"Nothing," she replied, astonished.
"Ah! madame," cried the prosecutor, changing his tone and seating himself beside her, "at this moment, for want of a word between us, you and I may be risking our heads on the scaffold. I have too long observed your character, your soul, your manners, to share the error into which you have persuaded your friends this evening. You are, I cannot doubt, expecting your son."
The countess made a gesture of denial; but she had turned pale, the muscles of her face contracted from the effort that she made to exhibit firmness, and the implacable eye of the public prosecutor lost none of her movements.
"Well, receive him," continued the functionary of the Revolution, "but do not keep him under your roof later than seven o'clock in the morning. To-morrow, at eight, I shall be at your door with a denunciation."
She looked at him with a stupid air that might have made a tiger pitiful.
"I will prove," he continued in a kindly voice, "the falsity of the denunciation, by making a careful search of the premises; and the nature of my report will protect you in future from all suspicions. I will speak of your patriotic gifts, your civic virtues, and that will save you."
Madame de Dey feared a trap, and she stood motionless; but her face was on fire, and her tongue stiff in her mouth. A rap sounded on the door.
"Oh!" cried the mother, falling on her knees, "save him! save him!"
"Yes, we will save him," said the official, giving her a look of passion; "if it costs us our life, we will save him."
"I am lost!" she murmured, as the prosecutor raised her courteously.
"Madame," he said, with an oratorical movement, "I will owe you only-- to yourself."
"Madame, he has come," cried Brigitte, rushing in and thinking her mistress was alone.
At sight of the public prosecutor, the old woman, flushed and joyous as she was, became motionless and livid.
"Who has come?" asked the prosecutor.
"A recruit, whom the mayor has sent to lodge here," replied Brigitte, showing the billet.
"True," said the prosecutor, reading the paper. "We expect a detachment to-night."
And he went away.
The countess had too much need at this moment to believe in the sincerity of her former attorney, to distrust his promise. She mounted the stairs rapidly, though her strength seemed failing her; then she opened the door, saw her son, and fell into his arms half dead,--
"Oh! my child! my child!" she cried, sobbing, and covering him with kisses in a sort of frenzy.
"Madame!" said an unknown man.
"Ah! it is not he!" she cried, recoiling in terror, and standing erect before the recruit, at whom she gazed with a haggard eye.
"Holy Father! what a likeness!" said Brigitte.
There was silence for a moment. The recruit himself shuddered at the aspect of Madame de Dey.
"Ah! monsieur," she said, leaning on Brigitte's husband, who had entered the room, and feeling to its fullest extent an agony the fear of which had already nearly killed her. "Monsieur, I cannot stay with you longer. Allow my people to attend upon you."
She returned to her own room, half carried by Brigitte and her old servant.
"Oh! madame," said Brigitte, as she undressed her mistress, "must that man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and put on Monsieur Auguste's slippers, and eat the pate I made for Monsieur Auguste? They may guillotine me if I--"
"Brigitte!" cried Madame de Dey.
Brigitte was mute.
"Hush!" said her husband in her ear, "do you want to kill madame?"
At that moment the recruit made a noise in the room above by sitting down to his supper.
"I cannot stay here!" cried Madame de Dey. "I will go into the greenhouse; there I can hear what happens outside during the night."
She still floated between the fear of having lost her son and the hope of his suddenly appearing.
The night was horribly silent. There was one dreadful moment for the countess, when the battalion of recruits passed through the town, and went to their several billets. Every step, every sound, was a hope,-- and a lost hope. After that the stillness continued. Towards morning the countess was obliged to return to her room. Brigitte, who watched her movements, was uneasy when she did not reappear, and entering the room she found her dead.
"She must have heard that recruit walking about Monsieur Auguste's room, and singing their damned Marseillaise, as if he were in a stable," cried Brigitte. "That was enough to kill her!"
The death of the countess had a far more solemn cause; it resulted, no doubt, from an awful vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey died at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact may be added to many recorded observations on sympathies that are known to ignore the laws of space: records which men of solitude are collecting with far-seeing curiosity, and which will some day serve as the basis of a new science for which, up to the present time, a man of genius has been lacking.