“He has been here—oh, I really don’t know what he gave me to take, but I am as stiff as a stick. We were talking about you. He asked me all kinds of questions; whether you were generally sad, and whether your look was always the same. Oh, he’s such a good man!”
Her words came more slowly, and she seemed to be waiting to see by the expression of Hélène’s face what effect her remarks might have on her, with that wheedling, anxious air of the poor who are desirous of pleasing people. No doubt she fancied she could detect a flush of displeasure mounting to her benefactress’s brow, for her huge, puffed-up face, all eagerness and excitement, suddenly clouded over; and she resumed, in stammering accents:
“I am always asleep. Perhaps I have been poisoned. A woman in the Rue de l’Annonciation was killed by a drug which the chemist gave her in mistake for another.”
That day Hélène lingered for nearly half an hour in Mother Fétu’s room, hearing her talk of Normandy, where she had been born, and where the milk was so good. During a silence she asked the old woman carelessly: “Have you known the doctor a long time?”
Mother Fétu, lying on her back, half-opened her eyes and again closed them.
“Oh, yes!” she answered, almost in a whisper. “For instance, his father attended to me before ’48, and he accompanied him then.”
“I have been told the father was a very good man.”
“Yes, but a little cracked. The son is much his superior. When he touches you you would think his hands were of velvet.”
Silence again fell.
“I advise you to do everything he tells you,” at last said Hélène. “He is very clever; he saved my daughter.”