“You were talking with some one. Who was it?”
“Here are notions!” cried La Cibot. “What next! Am I your bond-slave? Am I to give account of myself to you? Do you know that if you bother me like this, I shall clear out! You shall take a nurse.”
Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.
“It is my illness!” he pleaded piteously.
“It is as you please,” La Cibot answered roughly.
She went. Pons, confused, remorseful, admiring his nurse’s scalding devotion, reproached himself for his behavior. The fall on the paved floor of the dining-room had shaken and bruised him, and aggravated his illness, but Pons was scarcely conscious of his physical sufferings.
La Cibot met Schmucke on the staircase.
“Come here, sir,” she said. “There is bad news, that there is! M. Pons is going off his head! Just think of it! he got up with nothing on, he came after me—and down he came full-length. Ask him why—he knows nothing about it. He is in a bad way. I did nothing to provoke such violence, unless, perhaps, I waked up ideas by talking to him of his early amours. Who knows men? Old libertines that they are. I ought not to have shown him my arms when his eyes were glittering like carbuckles.”
Schmucke listened. Mme. Cibot might have been talking Hebrew for anything that he understood.
“I have given myself a wrench that I shall feel all my days,” added she, making as though she were in great pain. (Her arms did, as a matter of fact, ache a little, and the muscular fatigue suggested an idea, which she proceeded to turn to profit.) “So stupid I am. When I saw him lying there on the floor, I just took him up in my arms as if he had been a child, and carried him back to bed, I did. And I strained myself, I can feel it now. Ah! how it hurts!—I am going downstairs. Look after our patient. I will send Cibot for Dr. Poulain. I had rather die outright than be crippled.”