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."
La Cibot crawled downstairs, clinging to the banisters, and writhing and groaning so piteously that the tenants, in alarm, came out upon their landings. Schmucke supported the suffering creature, and told the story of La Cibot's devotion, the tears running down his cheeks as he spoke. Before very long the whole house, the whole neighborhood indeed, had heard of Mme. Cibot's heroism; she had given herself a dangerous strain, it was said, with lifting one of the "nutcrackers."
Schmucke meanwhile went to Pons' bedside with the tale. Their factotum was in a frightful state. "What shall we do without her?" they said, as they looked at each other; but Pons was so plainly the worse for his escapade, that Schmucke did not dare to scold him.
"Gonfounded pric-a-prac! I would sooner purn dem dan loose mein friend!" he cried, when Pons told him of the cause of the accident. "To suspect Montame Zipod, dot lend us her safings! It is not goot; but it is der illness—"
"Ah! what an illness! I am not the same man, I can feel it," said Pons. "My dear Schmucke, if only you did not suffer through me!"
"Scold me," Schmucke answered, "und leaf Montame Zipod in beace."