“You will not see him—your son?”
“What is the good, what is the good? I can do nothing. See here, what a palpitation you have given me. Let me pass! I will go back to Tours at once. Let me pass! I shall be a dead man if I stay in the house with a fever.”
Her wrath blazed out. “Coward!” she said, standing between him and the door, and holding him immovable with a look of supreme scorn. “Coward! And while you stand there trembling, shaking, do you know who it is who is there by his side, nursing and tending him until I am driven mad? That girl. Do you know that while I hate her, it is all I can do sometimes not to fall on my knees before her and tell her all? Do you know that he cares for her more than for me,—me, his mother?”
“Zénobie, Zénobie, have patience! You will ruin us with your impetuosity.”
“Listen, then. You who have not so much as the bravery of a woman in your miserable little heart—it is your child whom that girl is nursing night and day. You have no courage—have you no pity? Do you, remembering who she is, and what she is doing,—do you refuse to let her know that this man, her lover, is alive,—that you could lay your hand upon him, and bring him back to her? Do you refuse that? She may die, remember, die of nursing your child!”
“Not so loud, not so loud,” said the little man uneasily. “If she were to die, we should lose the money, it is true, but it might be the safest. There would be fewer complications.”
She turned from him with a look of unutterable horror. In his cowardice, and in his cruelty, he had fallen far below even her measure of wrongdoing. With a pale scared face, he was watching the door with the hope of escape, but she, like an avenging fury, stood between it and him.
“Let us go into the street,” he said feebly. “I have always heard there is less danger in the open air. You will not? N’importe. Do not let me keep you, my Zénobie. Can I convey any message to your mother?”
She faced him again. “If he dies!”
“He will not die—no, no, he will not die, believe me. You are a little nervous, that is all. Oh, he will not die; he has an excellent constitution—Holy Virgin, what is that!”