THE MAN Ilf THE IRON" MASK. 433 i/ould not answer, he recollected that M. de Beaufort's secretary had written more than he, D'Artagnan, had had the courage to read. Taking up the recital of the affair which had cost Kaoul his life, he found these words, which terminated the last paragraph of the letter: "Monsieur le Due has ordered that the body of Monsieur le Vicomte should be embalmed, after the manner practiced by the Arabs when they wish their bodies to be carried to their native land; and Monsieur le Due has appointed re- lays, so that a confidential servant who brought up the young man might take back his remains to Monsieur le Comte de la Fere. '*And so," thought D'Artagnan, **I shall follow thy funeral, my dear boy — I, 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 sepulture, 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 inclosure 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 re- edified, thus transported, was pleasant beneath its wood of poplars and sycamores. It was administered every Sunday by the cure of the neighboring bourg, to whom Athos paid an allowance of two hundred francs for this service; and all the vassals of his domain, to the number of about forty, the laborers, and the farmers, with their families, came thither to hear mass, without having any occasion to go to the city. Behind the chapel extended, surrounded by two high hedges of nut-trees, elders, white thorns, and a deep ditch, the little inclosure — uncultivated, it is true, but gay in its sterility; because the mosses there were high, because the wild heliotropes and ravenelles there mixed their perfumes, because beneath the tall chestnuts issued a large spring, a
prisoner in a cistern of marble, and that upon the thyme all
