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'Let the desolated plain, the blood-soddened valley, the burnt farm-house, blackening in the sun, the sacked village, and the ravaged town, answer; let the whitening bones of the butchered farmer, strewn along the fields of his homestead, answer; let the starving mother, with the babe clinging to the withered breast, that can afford no sustenance, let her answer; with the death-rattle mingling with the murmuring tones that mark the last struggle for life let the dying mother and her babe answer!
"So mother is dying," I muttered to myself, and I stood at gaze, foreseeing myself taken into her room by a nurse and given a chair by the bedside, foreseeing a hand lying outside the bed which I should have to hold until I heard the death-rattle and saw her face become quiet for ever. This was my first vision, but in the midst of my packing, I remembered that mother might linger for days.
The sobs came up the stairs to our door, and women's voices, Sister Gabrielle's voice, speaking Flemish, then another voice, sounding like a death-rattle, trying in vain to pronounce words through choking sobs. How horrible that monotonous, inconsolable, continual wail was! It went on for a short time, and then doors were opened and shut, the voices died away, and suddenly the noise ceased.
And boldly the strange man plunged into the dark room; and almost instantly the noise of breaking glass was heard. A moment later, and the air in the room had become once more fit for breathing, and everybody rushed in. Alas! it was the death-rattle which M. Ravinet had heard.
It shines meeting of these two redoubtable words in which human existence is summed up: enjoy and suffer. Alas! And how can we prevent this cry from escaping us? For these hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love.
I have sometimes, by means of sitting up in bed, holding the book high, and using great concentration, devoured a whole chapter between the first sputtering sound of the candle's death-rattle and the moment of its actual demise. Indeed, I have more than once finished a chapter, when within half a page of it, by matchlight. But that, of course, was gross extravagance.
Just then they heard the low death-rattle of a creature whose throat was suddenly cut, and the countess, with her fears redoubled, fled so quickly that Blondet could scarcely follow her. She ran like a will-o'-the-wisp, and did not listen to Blondet who called to her, "You are mistaken."
One vision disturbed him greatly; it was of his old grandmother, walking quickly along a road, with a heartrending look of alarm; from low-lying funereal clouds above her, fell the drizzling rain; she was on her way to Paimpol, summoned thither to be informed of his death. He was struggling now, with the death-rattle in his throat.
"Mother of God!" exclaimed the woman, who was still holding the bandage to the wound. The bleeding, which had nearly ceased, had recommenced with redoubled violence, and a crimson stream was flowing over the bed. The death-rattle was in Don Manuel's throat, but his eyes were still fixed upon his son, and he seemed to make an effort to extend his arms towards him.
The impression left on their minds was that the spirit-form of Ida had vanished in the blinding flood of gas-light through which they had groped their way to the cabinet on hearing the death-rattle of the medium. But now in the remotest corner of the room, towards which they had last seen the form of the spirit drifting, there stood a young girl.
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