Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/235

 began dictating again, beginning where she had left off the night before. She then read over the whole carefully, made some corrections, and, raising herself in bed, signed the document. Later she distributed some small souvenirs, one to everyone present, accompanying each with a word of gratitude and affection.

At ten o'clock in the evening there was another attack of suffocation, much more prolonged than the last. After an hour's struggle her eyes closed, an extreme pallor overspread her face, that intense suffering had suffused with colour for a moment. Sarah, frightened, called "Rachel!" and implored her sister to answer; but in vain. She felt her heart, her pulse; there was only the slightest flutter perceptible, vibrations of the life that was ebbing away. Rose, her attached and devoted servant, burst into tears and fell on her knees at the foot of her mistress's bed. A smile hovered on the lips of the dying woman. Some Israelite priests, whom Sarah had sent for to Nice, chanted the service for the dead:—

"Ascend to God, daughter of Israel. Behold, Lord, the sufferings of thy servant. Take pity on her; shorten her anguish, O God, and may those she has undergone make amends for her sins."

Rachel turned with a smile of ineffable tenderness to Sarah, murmuring indistinctly the words of Corneille in Les Horaces, "Albe, mon cher patriepays [sic] et mon premier amour," and then the name of her sister Rebecca. Thus she passed to her rest.

It was not before the morning of the 5th January that the great actress's death was known at the Théâtre Français. Chatterton and the Voyage à Dieppe were to have been given that evening; the bills were already up, but were immediately replaced by others