The maid went to get it.  While she was gone the notary asked the butcher, then the baker, and then the candlestick-maker, if they could speak and understand English, and where they resided.  Their answers were satisfactory.  Then he sat down, bent low to the desk, and wrote on a blank form the preamble of a nuncupative will.  By the time he had finished, the maid had got back and the hot bottle had been properly placed.  The notary turned his goggles upon the reclining figure and asked in English, with a strong Creole accent: 

“What is your name?”

The words of the man in the bed were an inaudible gasp.  But Attalie bent her ear quickly, caught them, and turning repeated: 

“More brandy.”

The black girl brought a decanter from the floor behind the bureau, and a wine-glass from the washstand.  Attalie poured, the patient drank, and the maid replaced glass and decanter.  The eyes of the butcher and the baker followed the sparkling vessel till it disappeared, and the maker of candlesticks made a dry swallow and faintly licked his lips.  The notary remarked that there must be no intervention of speakers between himself and the person making the will, nor any turning aside to other matters; but that merely stopping a moment to satisfy thirst without leaving the room was not a vitiative turning aside and would not be, even if done by others besides the party making the will.  But here the patient moaned and said audibly, “Let us go on.”  And they went on.  The notary asked the patient’s name, the place and date of his birth, etc., and the patient’s answers were in every case whatever the Englishman’s would have been.  Presently the point was reached where the patient should express his wishes unprompted by suggestion or inquiry.  He said faintly, “I will and bequeath”—­

The servant girl, seeing her mistress bury her face in her handkerchief, did the same.  The patient gasped audibly and said again, but more faintly: 

“I will and bequeath—­some more brandy.”

The decanter was brought.  He drank again.  He let Attalie hand it back to the maid and the maid get nearly to the bureau when he said in a low tone of distinct reproof: 

“Pass it ’round.”  The four visitors drank.

Then the patient resumed with stronger voice.  “I will and bequeath to my friend Camille Ducour”—­

Attalie started from her chair with a half-uttered cry of amazement and protest, but dropped back again at the notary’s gesture for silence, and the patient spoke straight on without hesitation—­“to my friend Camille Ducour, the sum of fifteen hundred dollars in cash.”

Attalie and her handmaiden looked at each other with a dumb show of lamentation; but her butcher and her baker turned slowly upon her candlestick-maker, and he upon them, a look of quiet but profound approval.  The notary wrote, and the patient spoke again: 

“I will everything else which I may leave at my death, both real and personal property, to Madame Attalie Brouillard.”