But she had evidently forgotten some particular, for Sister Hyacinthe, a glance from whom had foreshadowed the doctor’s jest, now softly prompted her “And what was it you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ward, Sophie?”
“Ah! yes. I hadn’t brought many bandages for my foot with me, and I said to her, ‘It was very kind of the Blessed Virgin to cure me the first day, as I should have run out of linen on the morrow.’”
This provoked a fresh outburst of delight. They all thought her so nice, to have been cured like that! And in reply to a question from Madame de Jonquiere, she also had to tell the story of her boots, a pair of beautiful new boots which Madame la Comtesse had given her, and in which she had run, jumped, and danced about, full of childish delight. Boots! think of it, she who for three years had not even been able to wear a slipper.
Pierre, who had become grave, waxing pale with the secret uneasiness which was penetrating him, continued to look at her. And he also asked her other questions. She was certainly not lying, and he merely suspected a slow distortion of the actual truth, an easily explained embellishment of the real facts amidst all the joy she felt at being cured and becoming an important little personage. Who now knew if the cicatrisation of her injuries, effected, so it was asserted, completely, instantaneously, in a few seconds, had not in reality been the work of days? Where were the witnesses?
Just then Madame de Jonquiere began to relate that she had been at the hospital at the time referred to. “Sophie was not in my ward,” said she, “but I had met her walking lame that very morning—”
Pierre hastily interrupted the lady-hospitaller. “Ah! you saw her foot before and after the immersion?”
“No, no! I don’t think that anybody was able to see it, for it was bound round with bandages. She told you that the bandages had fallen into the piscina.” And, turning towards the child, Madame de Jonquiere added, “But she will show you her foot—won’t you, Sophie? Undo your shoe.”
The girl took off her shoe, and pulled down her stocking, with a promptness and ease of manner which showed how thoroughly accustomed she had become to it all. And she not only stretched out her foot, which was very clean and very white, carefully tended indeed, with well-cut, pink nails, but complacently turned it so that the young priest might examine it at his ease. Just below the ankle there was a long scar, whose whity seam, plainly defined, testified to the gravity of the complaint from which the girl had suffered.
“Oh! take hold of the heel, Monsieur l’Abbe,” said she. “Press it as hard as you like. I no longer feel any pain at all.”
Pierre made a gesture from which it might have been thought that he was delighted with the power exercised by the Blessed Virgin. But he was still tortured by doubt. What unknown force had acted in this case? Or rather what faulty medical diagnosis, what assemblage of errors and exaggerations, had ended in this fine tale?