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.
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