“All the better,” said her husband, drawing a long breath. “Mind you turn him off from it if he begins; but let me hear what he says. You’re the only person that can understand the gibberish.”
(“That is one bit of luck,” he added, under his breath.)
“Oh, he is getting on,” she called after him, consolingly. Charles inquired daily, but M. de Cadanet never made allusion to Poissy. To lie and watch the flies on the ceiling, the sunshine travelling round from shadow to shadow; to frown with pain or impatience; to listen to the ticking of the gilt clock on the mantel-piece, or the muffled rattle of a carriage; stung by these new prickings to try to move the leg and arm to which force was slowly, slowly creeping back—this was M. de Cadanet’s daily life. No one could understand him except Mme. Lemaire; they pretended to sometimes, in order not to annoy him; but the pretence only irritated him the more. By little and little, however, words shaped themselves more rightly.
By—and—by he was lifted into a great chair, and wheeled from one part of the room to the other; and this move accomplished, Mme. Lemaire thought that she might return home. Charles had agreed to her remaining in the Rue du Bac with an amiability which she considered remarkable. He did not care for her enough to miss her, and preferred having some one on the spot to report upon anything out of the usual course. He would therefore willingly have consented to her absence, but the Orphanage had an outbreak of measles, and her placid good sense told her that she was no longer absolutely necessary to M. de Cadanet. The nurse, therefore, had full charge by night, and Mme. Lemaire and the concierge André, a quiet man, whom the count said he preferred to women about him, shared the day between them.
Unperceptive as she was, Amélie could not but allow that her husband was in a very bad temper. He showed it chiefly by silence, which she had the discretion not to break, and by absence from the house, which, he said, was owing to business. He had not the audacity to tell her, and she was the last woman to whom it would have occurred—simply, perhaps, because ideas did not seem ever to spring spontaneously in her unimaginative mind, but required to be planted there—that it was M. de Cadanet’s recovery, to which undoubtedly her excellent nursing had contributed, which had brought about the gloom. He took care to inform the world that the recovery was very partial, and that the seizure had seriously affected the old count’s mind; but, in point of fact, M. de Cadanet’s intellect was as keen as ever—painfully so, indeed, because it kept him perfectly conscious of his sad condition, and caused miserable fits of depression.
These fits of depression were treated indifferently by the nurse, but they always distressed Mme. Lemaire, who would not have realised a silent trouble, but felt great compassion for one of which she saw the outward signs. She did her best to produce a cheerful atmosphere, and when he complained of the desolation of old age, cast about for something comforting.
“Is there not any one, now, dear uncle, that you would like to come and see you?”
“My friends are where I ought to be—in the grave.”
“Oh, don’t say that. Your time isn’t come. Why, you’re getting better every day. Next week we shall move into the other room—think of that for an event!”