ody. A man had shot himself, they said.
Pierre told me who that man was."

CHAPTER IX.

After a pause, I ventured to ask what became of Madame de Crequy,
Clement's mother.

"She never made any inquiry about him," said my lady. "She must have
known that he was dead; though how, we never could tell. Medlicott
remembered afterwards that it was about, if not on--Medlicott to this day
declares that it was on the very Monday, June the nineteenth, when her
son was executed, that Madame de Crequy left off her rouge and took to
her bed, as one bereaved and hopeless. It certainly was about that time;
and Medlicott--who was deeply impressed by that dream of Madame de
Crequy's (the relation of which I told you had had such an effect on my
lord), in which she had seen the figure of Virginie--as the only light
object amid much surrounding darkness as of night, smiling and beckoning
Clement on--on--till at length the bright phantom stopped, motionless,
and Madame de Crequy's eyes began to penetrate the murky darkness, and to
see closing around her the gloomy dripping walls which she had once seen
and never forgotten--the walls of the vault of the chapel of the De
Crequys in Saint Germain l'Auxerrois; and there the two last of the
Crequys laid them down among their forefathers, and Madame de Crequy had
wakened to the sound of the great door, which led to the open air, being
locked upon her--I say Medlicott, who was predisposed by this dream to
look out for the supernatural, always declared that Madame de Crequy was
made conscious in some mysterious way, of her son's death, on the very
day and hour when it occurred, and that after that she had no more
anxiety, but was only conscious of a kind of stupefying despair."

"And what became of her, my lady?" I again asked.

"What could become of her?" replied Lady Ludlow. "She never could be
induced to rise again, though she lived more than a year after her son's
departure. She kept her bed; her room darkened, her face turned towards
the wall, whenever any one besides Medlicott was in the room. She hardly
ever spoke, and would have died of starvation but for Medlicott's tender
care, in putting a morsel to her lips every now and then, feeding her, in
fact, just as an old bird feeds her young ones. In the height of summer
my lord and I left London. We would fain have taken her with us into
Scotland, but the doctor (we had the old doctor from Leicester Square)
forbade her re