The following night Marthe had a dreadful attack. She had been present in the morning at a long religious ceremony, the whole of which Olympe had insisted upon seeing. When Rose and the lodgers ran into the room upon hearing her piercing screams, they found her lying at the foot of the bed with her forehead gashed open. Mouret was kneeling in the midst of the bed-clothes, trembling all over.
'He has killed her this time!' cried the cook.
She seized Mouret in her arms, although he was in his night-dress, pushed him out of the room and into his office—the door of which was on the other side of the landing—then she went back to get a mattress and some blankets, which she threw to him. Trouche had set off at a run for Doctor Porquier. When the doctor arrived he dressed Marthe's wound. If the cut had been a trifle lower down, he said, it would have been fatal. Downstairs in the hall, he declared in the presence of them all that it was necessary to take some active steps, and that Madame Mouret's life could no longer be left at the mercy of a violent madman.
The next morning Marthe was obliged to keep her bed. She was still slightly delirious, and fancied that she saw an iron hand driving a flaming sword into her skull. Rose absolutely declined to allow Mouret to enter the room. She served him his lunch on a dusty table in his own office. He was still gazing at his plate with a look of stupefaction when Rose ushered into the room three men dressed in black.
'Are you the doctors?' he asked. 'How is she getting on?'
'She is better than she was,' replied one of the men.
Mouret began to cut his bread mechanically as though he were going to eat it.
'I wish the children were here,' he said. 'They would look after her, and we should be more lively. It is since the children went away that she has been ill. I am no longer good for anything.'
He raised a piece of bread to his mouth, and heavy tears trickled down his face. The man who had already spoken to him now said, casting at the same time a glance at his companions:
'Shall we go and fetch your children?'