pitiful inquiry. The young man touched her white hair with the tips of his long, fine fingers in a pitying caress before he took hold of the withered wrist, shrunken and marked with blue veins, that lay outside the coverlid. “In an hour, Mère Marchette,” he said, answering her look—“in an hour he will be[167] here; keep up a good heart. You do not suffer?” [167] The old woman feebly shook her head. The ghost of a smile, faint but full of happiness, shone on her face. She did not speak, but she thanked him with a look before she closed her eyes and lay motionless as before he had come. The young man looked at her a moment, an expression of pity in his brown eyes; then with a sigh he turned away and moved softly down the ward again. By the door he encountered one of the nurses, who had risen and come forward to speak with him. “Will she live, M. Lommel?” “Yes,” the doctor answered. “She has given all her energies for days to keeping alive till her grandson gets here. It is very singular,” he went on, in a voice of low distinctness that could have been acquired only in sick-rooms, “how her instinct has taught her to save her strength. She neither moves nor speaks; she simply lives.” “She has been that way,” the nurse returned, “ever since we told her that Pierre was coming. Will he be here by twelve?” “Not till half-past twelve,” Dr. Lommel replied. “I will return before then.” And he went out into the hot sunshine. [168] [168] II. Everybody connected with the ward of the Salpêtrière wherein she was had a kindly feeling for poor old Mère Marchette. The doctors and the nurses could not have been more kind or more tender had she been of their own blood. She was one of those who always win affection. She was so patient, so simple, so kindly. She was a peasant woman from Normandy, who had in her old age drifted to Paris with her grandson Pierre, a lad of sixteen years. All the rest of the family were dead. Pierre’s father had been a soldier, and it was with the hope of securing a pension for the son that Mère Marchette
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