"A lawyer?" cried Remonencq; "you know more about it than all the lawyers put together—"
Just at that moment a sound echoed in the great staircase, a sound as if some heavy body had fallen in the dining-room.
"Oh, goodness me!" exclaimed La Cibot; "it seems to me that monsieur has just taken a ticket for the ground floor."
She pushed her fellow-conspirators out at the door, and while the pair descended the stairs with remarkable agility, she ran to the dining-room, and there beheld Pons, in his shirt, stretched out upon the tiles. He had fainted. She lifted him as if he had been a feather, carried him back to his room, laid him in bed, burned feathers under his nose, bathed his temples with eau-de-cologne, and at last brought him to consciousness. When she saw his eyes unclose and life return, she stood over him, hands on hips.
"No slippers! In your shirt! That is the way to kill yourself! Why do you suspect me?—If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day, sir. Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke, crying like a child on the stairs—and this is my reward! You have been spying on me. God has punished you! It serves you right! Here I am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a mischief that I shall feel all my days. Oh dear, oh dear! and the door left open too—"
"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.