"If this is the case, sir," said Dumais, with tears in his eyes, "I accept your gift."
Let us leave Lochiel busying himself in heaping benefits on Dumais, and let us return to our other friends.
"The good gentleman," now almost a hundred years old, lived but a year after Jules's return. He died surrounded by his friends, having been most lovingly nursed by Blanche and Jules throughout the month of his last illness. A little while before his death he begged Jules to open his bed-room window, and, casting a feeble glance toward the stream which rolled peacefully past his door, he murmured:
"There it is, my friend; there's the walnut tree in whose shadow I told you the story of my misfortunes; it was there I counseled you from my own experience. I die content, for I see that you have profited by my words. When I am gone, take this little candlestick. It will remind you of the vigils it has witnessed and of the advice which I have given you.
"As for you, my dear and faithful André," exclaimed M. d'Egmont, "it grieves me to leave you alone in this world where you have shared my sorrows. You have promised me to pass the rest of your days with the D'Habervilles, who will care for your old age tenderly. You know that after your death the poor are to be our heirs."
"My dear master," said Franc[oe]ur, sobbing, "the poor will not have long to wait for their inheritance."
Having bid farewell to all his friends, "the good gentleman" asked the priest to say the prayers for the dying. Just at the words, "_Partez âme Chrétienne, au nom du Dieu tout-puissant qui vous a créé_," he breathed his last. Sterne would have said:
"The recording angel of the court of heaven shed a tear upon the follies of his youth, and blotted them out forever." The angels are more compassionate than men, who neither forget nor forgive the faults of others!
André Franc[oe]ur was struck with paralysis on the day of his master's burial, and survived him but three weeks.
When Jules had said to his sister: "If I loved an English girl and she would have me, I would marry her as readily as one of my own countrywomen," Blanche had been far from suspecting her brother's real intentions. The truth was that Jules, on his voyage across the Atlantic, had made the acquaintance of a young English girl of great beauty. A second Saint-Preux, Jules had given her lessons in something more than French grammar during a passage that lasted two months. He had shown excellent taste. The young girl, in addition to her beauty, possessed the qualities to inspire a true passion.