The next day Ramin sent a neighboring medical man, and heard it was his opinion that if Bonelle held on for three months longer, it would be a miracle. Delightful news!
Several days elapsed, and although very anxious, Ramin assumed a careless air, and did not call upon his landlord, or take any notice of him. At the end of the week old Marguerite entered the shop to make a trifling purchase.
“And how are we getting on up-stairs?” negligently asked Monsieur Ramin.
“Worse and worse, my good Sir,” she sighed. “We have rheumatic pains, which make us often use expressions the reverse of Christian-like, and yet nothing can induce us to see either the lawyer or the priest; the gout is getting nearer to our stomach every day, and still we go on talking about the strength of our constitution. Oh, Sir, if you have any influence with us, do, pray do, tell us how wicked it is to die without making one’s will or confessing one’s sins.”
“I shall go up this very evening,” ambiguously replied Monsieur Ramin.
He kept his promise, and found Monsieur Bonelle in bed, groaning with pain, and in the worst of tempers.
“What poisoning doctor did you send?” he asked, with an ireful glance; “I want no doctor, I am not ill; I will not follow his prescription; he forbade me to eat; I will eat.”
“He is a very clever man,” said the visitor. “He told me that never in the whole course of his experience has he met with what he called so much ‘resisting power’ as exists in your frame. He asked me if you were not of a long-lived race.”
“That is as people may judge,” replied Monsieur Bonelle. “All I can say is, that my grandfather died at ninety, and my father at eighty-six.”
“The doctor owned that you had a wonderfully strong constitution.”