"Do you hear me?" he whispered thickly, "Do you hear?"
"I hear," answered Fontenelle, speaking with difficulty, "You have
hated me, you say--hate me no more!--for hate is done with--and love
also!--I am--dying!"
He grasped the rank grass with both hands in sudden agony, and his
face grew livid. Miraudin turned himself on one arm.
"Dying! You, too! By Heaven! Then the Marquisate must perish! I
should have fired in the air--but--but the sins of the
fathers . . . what is it?" Here a ghastly smile passed over his
features, "The sins of the fathers--are visited on the children!
What a merciful Deity it is, to make such an arrangement!--and the
excellent fathers!--when all the children meet them--I wonder what
they will have to say to each other I wonder . . ." A frightful shudder
convulsed his body and he threw up his arms.
"'Un peu d'amour,
Et puis--bon soir!'
C'est ca! Bon soir, Marquis!"
A great sigh broke from his lips, through which the discoloured
blood began to ooze slowly--he was dead. And Fontenelle, whose wound
bled inwardly, turned himself wearily round to gaze on the rigid
face upturned to the moon. His brother's face! So like his own! He
was not conscious himself of any great pain--he felt a dizzy languor
and a drowsiness as of dreams--but he knew what the dreaming meant,-
-he knew that he would soon sleep to wake again--but where? He did
not see that the woman who had professed to love Miraudin had
already rushed away from his corpse in terror, and was entreating
the cabman to drive her quickly from the scene of combat,--he
realised nothing save the white moonbeams on the still face of the
man who in God's sight had been his brother.
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