Part 45

“You are always talking about this Trognon--”

“Oh! he or another, it is all one to me, for anything you will leave me.”

She tossed her head to signify that she despised riches. There was silence in the room.

A moment later Schmucke came in. He had slept for six hours, hunger awakened him, and now he stood at Pons’ bedside watching his friend without saying a word, for Mme. Cibot had laid a finger on her lips.

“Hush!” she whispered. Then she rose and went up to add under her breath, “He is going off to sleep at last, thank Heaven! He is as cross as a red donkey!--What can you expect, he is struggling with his illness----”

“No, on the contrary, I am very patient,” said the victim in a weary voice that told of a dreadful exhaustion; “but, oh! Schmucke, my dear friend, she has been to the theatre to turn me out of my place.”

There was a pause. Pons was too weak to say more. La Cibot took the opportunity and tapped her head significantly. “Do not contradict him,” she said to Schmucke; “it would kill him.”

Pons gazed into Schmucke’s honest face. “And she says that you sent her--” he continued.

“Yes,” Schmucke affirmed heroically. “It had to pe. Hush!--let us safe your life. It is absurd to vork and train your sdrength gif you haf a dreasure. Get better; ve vill sell some prick-a-prack und end our tays kvietly in a corner somveres, mit kind Montame Zipod.”

“She has perverted you,” moaned Pons.

Mme. Cibot had taken up her station behind the bed to make signals unobserved. Pons thought that she had left the room. “She is murdering me,” he added.

“What is that? I am murdering you, am I?” cried La Cibot, suddenly appearing, hand on hips and eyes aflame. “I am as faithful as a dog, and this is all I get! God Almighty!--”

She burst into tears and dropped down into the great chair, a tragical movement which wrought a most disastrous revulsion in Pons.

“Very good,” she said, rising to her feet. The woman’s malignant eyes looked poison and bullets at the two friends. “Very good. Nothing that I can do is right here, and I am tired of slaving my life out. You shall take a nurse.”

Pons and Schmucke exchanged glances in dismay.

“Oh! you may look at each other like actors. I mean it. I shall ask Dr. Poulain to find a nurse for you. And now we will settle accounts. You shall pay me back the money that I have spent on you, and that I would never have asked you for, I that have gone to M. Pillerault to borrow another five hundred francs of him--”

“It ees his illness!” cried Schmucke--he sprang to Mme. Cibot and put an arm round her waist--“haf batience.”

“As for you, you are an angel, I could kiss the ground you tread upon,” said she. “But M. Pons never liked me, he always hated me. Besides, he thinks perhaps that I want to be mentioned in his will--”

“Hush! you vill kill him!” cried Schmucke.

“Good-bye, sir,” said La Cibot, with a withering look at Pons. “You may keep well for all the harm I wish you. When you can speak to me pleasantly, when you can believe that what I do is done for the best, I will come back again. Till then I shall stay in my own room. You were like my own child to me; did anybody ever see a child revolt against its mother?... No, no, M. Schmucke, I do not want to hear more. I will bring you your dinner and wait upon you, but you must take a nurse. Ask M. Poulain about it.”

And she went out, slamming the door after her so violently that the precious, fragile objects in the room trembled. To Pons in his torture, the rattle of china was like the final blow dealt by the executioner to a victim broken on the wheel.

An hour later La Cibot called to Schmucke through the door, telling him that his dinner was waiting for him in the dining-room. She would not cross the threshold. Poor Schmucke went out to her with a haggard, tear-stained face.

“Mein boor Bons in vandering,” said he; “he says dat you are ein pad voman. It ees his illness,” he added hastily, to soften La Cibot and excuse his friend.

“Oh, I have had enough of his illness! Look here, he is neither father, nor husband, nor brother, nor child of mine. He has taken a dislike to me; well and good, that is enough! As for you, you see, I would follow you to the end of the world; but when a woman gives her life, her heart, and all her savings, and neglects her husband (for here has Cibot fallen ill), and then hears that she is a bad woman--it is coming it rather too strong, it is.”

“Too shtrong?”

“Too strong, yes. Never mind idle words. Let us come to the facts. As to that, you owe me for three months at a hundred and ninety francs--that is five hundred seventy francs; then there is the rent that I have paid twice (here are the receipts), six hundred more, including rates and the sou in the franc for the porter--something under twelve hundred francs altogether, and with the two thousand francs besides--without interest, mind you--the total amounts to three thousand one hundred and ninety-two francs. And remember that you will want at least two thousand francs before long for the doctor, and the nurse, and the medicine, and the nurse’s board. That was why I borrowed a thousand francs of M. Pillerault,” and with that she held up Gaudissart’s bank-note.

It may readily be conceived that Schmucke listened to this reckoning with amazement, for he knew about as much of business as a cat knows of music.

“Montame Zipod,” he expostulated, “Bons haf lost his head. Bardon him, and nurse him as before, und pe our profidence; I peg it of you on mine knees,” and he knelt before La Cibot and kissed the tormentor’s hands.