Chapter 60 - Page 2

M. le Comte de la Fere.”

“And so,” thought d’Artagnan, “I shall follow thy funeral, my dear boy,- already old; I, who am of no value on earth,- and I shall scatter the dust upon that brow which I kissed but two months since. God has willed it to be so,- thou hast willed it to be so thyself; I have no longer the right even to weep. Thou hast chosen death; it hath seemed to thee preferable to life.”
At length arrived the moment when the cold remains of these two gentlemen were to be returned to the earth. There was such an affluence of military and other people that up to the place of sepulcher, which was a chapel in the plain, the road from the city was filled with horsemen and pedestrians in mourning habits. Athos had chosen for his resting-place the little enclosure of a chapel erected by himself near the boundary of his estates. He had had the stones, cut in 1550, brought from an old Gothic manor-house in Berry, which had sheltered his early youth. The chapel, thus rebuilt, thus transported, was pleasantly placed under the foliage of poplars and sycamores. Services were held in it every Sunday by the curd of the neighboring village, to whom Athos paid an allowance of two hundred livres for this purpose; and all the vassals of his domain, to the number of about forty,- the laborers and the farmers, with their families,- came hither to hear Mass, without need of going to the city.

Behind the chapel extended, surrounded by two high hedges of nut-trees, elders, whitethorns, and a deep ditch, the little enclosure,- uncultivated, it is true, but gay in its wildness; because the mosses there were high; because the wild heliotropes and wall-flowers there mixed their perfumes; because beneath the tall chestnuts issued a large spring, a prisoner in a cistern of marble; and upon the thyme all around alighted thousands of bees from the neighboring plains, while chaffinches and redthroats sang cheerfully among the flowers of the hedge. It was to this place the two coffins were brought, attended by a silent and respectful crowd. The office of the dead being celebrated, the last adieux paid to the noble departed, the assembly dispersed, talking, along the roads, of the virtues and mild death of the father, of the hopes the son had given, and of his melancholy end upon the coast of Africa.

Gradually all noises were extinguished, as were the lamps illumining the humble nave. The minister bowed for a last time to the altar and the still fresh graves; then, followed by his assistant, who rang a hoarse bell, he slowly took the road back to the presbytery. D’Artagnan, left alone, perceived that night was coming on. He had forgotten the hour while thinking of the dead. He arose from the oaken bench on which he was seated in the chapel, and wished, as the priest had done, to go and bid a last adieu to the double grave which contained his two lost friends.

A woman was