“Take him to the infirmary; I will go there myself, as soon as the doctor arrives.”
At that very moment a bell tinkled in the Governor’s study; it was the house-porter ’phoning M. Chaigniste that Doctor Du Marvier was come for his daily visit. The Governor and the practitioner found Juve in the waiting room, sitting on a stool, holding his head between his hands and puzzling over his wound, which struck him as, after all, hard to account for. The doctor tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He was a little round man, with a merry face, a smile for ever on his lips, the very spirit of gaiety, a man to heal his patients by the mere sight of his beaming face! “My standing panacea,” he was in the habit of saying, “is a funny story.”
Accordingly it was with a pleasantry he greeted the ex-police-officer, with whom he had already come in contact previously to his imprisonment.
“Well, what’s the matter now? We’re not satisfied with the Governor’s treatment of us, eh? so we go and try to kill ourselves, is that it?”
“Doctor,” Juve replied in the same vein; “I could very readily dispense with the privilege of being Monsieur Chaigniste’s guest, but all the same I can assure you I have not the smallest wish in the world to escape his hospitality by committing suicide. I am just as much surprised as anybody else at the wound in my arm. I can only account for it by the supposition that in my sleep I knocked up against a corner of my iron bedstead.” While speaking, Juve had removed his jacket and turned up his shirt sleeve. The wound was plainly visible, a clear cut an inch or a trifle over in length on the upper part of the arm pointing downwards. The trifling nature of the hurt indeed made the doctor’s whimsical suggestion seem utterly absurd—a man wanting to kill himself would set about the job in quite another fashion.
But was Juve’s own hypothesis any more probable? Was it against the corner of his bed the police-officer had hurt himself while asleep? Evidently such was not the view taken by the doctor, who after a rapid examination, turned to the Governor, saying:
“The wound is quite superficial, the skin is only slightly broken, and if the hurt has bled rather copiously, that is only because one or two small veins have been divided. With every confidence I can assure you the prisoner’s bed has nothing whatever to do with the accident. It is a cut is in question, and a cut that cannot have been made by anything except an implement with a cutting edge. A blow, as violent as is assumed, would have produced a bruise, a swelling, the blood would have collected under the epidermis, might indeed have spurted out, but we should never have seen an incision so clean-cut as that.”
But whilst the doctor was speaking, Juve had turned as pale as death; he seemed to have lost all power in his limbs and sank down exhausted on a stool. Doctor Du Marvier was quick to notice the prisoner’s condition; taking his hand he felt his pulse carefully.
“Tell me,” he said, “is your pulse so slow usually?”
“No, doctor, I have always supposed myself to have a normally rapid pulse, but to-day I don’t feel quite well, I slept very badly last night and I have a violent headache.”