Part 25

She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it down.

"What a silly slut! you're in a burning fever! And you keep it to yourself!"

"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I think it's nothing but a bad cold. I went to sleep the other evening with my kitchen window open."

"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle; "you might be dying and you'd never as much as say: 'Ouf!' Wait."

She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her arm-chair to a small table by the fireplace, she wrote a few lines in her bold hand.

"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do me the favor to give this to your friend Adele and have her send the concierge with it. And now to bed you go!"

But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth while. She would not tire herself. She would sit down all day. Besides, the worst of her sickness was over; she was getting better already. And then it always killed her to stay in bed.

The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came in the evening. He examined Germinie, and ordered the application of croton oil. The trouble in the chest was of such a nature that he could say nothing about it until he had observed the effect of his remedies.

He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed and sounded her chest for a long while.

"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle, when he went downstairs; "she has had pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name? Oh! the energy of some women! How old is she?"

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure? She looks fully fifty."

"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please. What can you expect? Never in good health,--always sick, disappointment, sorrow,--and a disposition that can't help tormenting itself."

"Forty-one years old! it's amazing!" the physician repeated.

After a moment's reflection, he continued:

"So far as you know, is there any hereditary lung trouble in her family? Has she had any relatives who have died young?"

"She lost a sister by pleurisy; but she was older. She was forty-eight, I think."

The doctor had become very grave. "However, the lung is getting freer," he said, in an encouraging tone. "But it is absolutely necessary that she should have rest. And send her to me once a week. Let her come and see me. And let her take a pleasant day for it,--a bright, sunny day."

LIX

Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and scolded to no purpose: she could not induce Germinie to lay aside her work for a few days. Germinie would not even listen to the suggestion that she should have an assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that it was useless, impossible; that she could never endure the thought of another woman approaching her, waiting upon her, attending to her wants; that it would give her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in bed; that she was not dead yet; and she begged that she might be allowed to go on as usual, so long as she could put one foot before the other. She said it in such an affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble voice was so humble and so passionate in making the request, that mademoiselle had not the courage to force her to accept an assistant. She simply called her a "blockhead," who believed, like all country-people, that a few days in bed means death.

Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement due to the physician's energetic treatment, Germinie continued to make mademoiselle's bed, accepting her assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful task to her.

When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast and dinner, she felt as if she should die in her kitchen, one of the wretched little kitchens common in great cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble in women. The embers that she kindled, and from which a thread of suffocating smoke slowly arose, began to stir her stomach to revolt; soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door, strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled. In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back and forth through the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to the window and draw a few breaths of the icy outside air.

She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for keeping constantly about her work despite her increasing weakness, than the repugnance of country-people to take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous determination that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which might accompany the installation of a new servant. It was absolutely necessary that she should be there, to keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should show herself, that the quarter should see her, and that she should not appear to her creditors with the aspect of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of being strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she must impart confidence to the whole street with the doctor's studied words, with a hopeful air, and with the promise not to die. She must appear at her best in order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions on the subject of money from ascending the stairs and applying to mademoiselle.

She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie,--in drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before going out in order to bring back the color of blood to them; in covering the pallor of her disease and her death-mask with rouge.

Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless nights, despite her stomach's loathing for food, she passed the whole winter conquering and overcoming her own weakness and struggling with the ups and downs of her disease.

At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle that he was unable to find that any of her maid's vital organs were seriously diseased. The lungs were a little ulcerated near the top; but people recovered from that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn out," he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an almost embarrassed manner that impressed mademoiselle. And he always had something to say, at the end of his visit, about a change of air--about the country.

When August arrived, the doctor had nothing but that to advise or prescribe--the country. Notwithstanding the repugnance of elderly people to move, to change their abode and the habits and regular hours of their life; despite her domestic nature and the sort of pang that she felt at being torn from her hearthstone, mademoiselle decided to take Germinie into the country. She wrote to the chick's daughter, who lived, with a brood of children, on a small estate in a village of Brie, and who had been, for many years, begging her to pay her a long visit. She requested her hospitality for a month or six weeks for herself and her sick maid.

They set out. Germinie was delighted. On their arrival she felt decidedly better. For some days her disease seemed to be diverted by the change. But the weather that summer was very uncertain, with much rain, sudden changes, and high winds. Germinie had a chill, and mademoiselle soon heard again, overhead, just above the room in which she slept, the frightful cough that had been so painful and hard to bear at Paris. There were hurried paroxysms of coughing that seemed almost to strangle her; spasms that would break off for a moment, then begin again; and the pauses caused the ear and the heart to experience a nervous, anxious anticipation of what was certain to come next, and always did come,--racking and tearing, dying away again, but still vibrating in the ear, even when it had ceased: never silent, never willing to have done.