The next morning when she entered mademoiselle’s room with a fable she had invented during the night, all ready to ask for leave of absence, mademoiselle said to her, looking up from a letter that had just been sent up to her from the lodge: “Ah! my old friend De Belleuse wants you for the whole day today, to help her with her preserves. Come, give me my two eggs, post-haste, and off with you. Eh? what! doesn’t that suit you? What’s the matter?”
“With me? why nothing at all!” Germinie found strength to say.
All that endless day she passed standing over hot stewpans and sealing up jars, in the torture known only to those whom the chances of life detain at a distance from the sick bed of those dear to them. She suffered such heartrending agony as those unhappy creatures suffer who cannot go where their anxiety calls them, and who, in the extremity of despair caused by separation and uncertainty, constantly imagine that death will come in their absence.
As she received no letter Thursday evening and none Friday morning, she took courage. If the little one were growing worse the nurse would have written her. The little one was better: she imagined her saved, cured. Children are forever coming near dying, and they get well so quickly! And then hers was strong. She decided to wait, to be patient until Sunday, which was only forty-eight hours away, deceiving the remainder of her fears with the superstitions that say yes to hope, persuading herself that her daughter had “escaped,” because the first person she met in the morning was a man, because she had seen a red horse in the street, because she had guessed that a certain person would turn into a certain street, because she had ascended a flight of stairs in so many strides.
On Saturday, in the morning, when she entered Mère Jupillon’s shop, she found her weeping hot tears over a lump of butter that she was covering with a moist cloth.
“Ah! it’s you, is it?” said Mère Jupillon. “That poor charcoal woman! See, I’m actually crying over her! She just went away from here. You don’t know—they can’t get their faces clean in their trade with anything but butter. And here’s her love of a daughter—she’s at death’s door, you know, the dear child. That’s the way it is with us! Ah! mon Dieu, yes!—Well, as I was saying, she said to her just now like this: ‘Mamma, I want you to wash my face in butter right away—for the good God.’ ”
And Mère Jupillon began to sob.
Germinie had fled. All that day she was unable to keep still. Again and again she went up to her chamber to prepare the few things she proposed to take to her little one the next day, to dress her cleanly, to make a little special toilet for her in honor of her recovery. As she went down in the evening to put Mademoiselle to bed, Adèle handed her a letter that she had found for her below.
XXIII
Mademoiselle had begun to undress, when Germinie entered her bedroom, walked a few steps, dropped upon a chair, and almost immediately, after two or three long-drawn, deep, heartbreaking sighs, mademoiselle saw her throw herself backward, wringing her hands, and at last roll from the chair to the floor. She tried to lift her up, but Germinie was shaken by such violent convulsions that the old woman was obliged to let the frantic body fall again upon the floor; for all the limbs, which were for a moment contracted and rigid, lashed out to right and left, at random, with the sharp report of the trigger of a rifle, and threw down whatever they came in contact with. At mademoiselle’s shrieks on the landing, a maid ran to a doctor’s office near by but did not find him; four other women employed in the house assisted mademoiselle to lift Germinie up and carry her to the bed in her mistress’s room, on which they laid her after cutting her corset lacings.
The terrible convulsions, the nervous contortions of the limbs, the snapping of the tendons had ceased; but her neck and her breast, which was uncovered where her dress was unbuttoned, moved up and down as if waves were rising and falling under the skin, and the rustling of the skirts showed that the movement extended to her feet. Her head thrown back, her face flushed, her eyes full of melancholy tenderness, of the patient agony we see in the eyes of the wounded, the great veins clearly marked under her chin, Germinie, breathing hard and paying no heed to questions, raised her hands to her neck and throat and clawed at them; she seemed to be trying to tear out the sensation of something rising and falling within her. In vain did they make her inhale ether and drink orange-flower water; the waves of grief that flowed through her body did not cease their action; and her face continued to wear the same expression of gentle melancholy and sentimental anxiety, which seemed to place the suffering of the heart above the suffering of the flesh in every feature. For a long time everything seemed to wound her senses and to produce a painful effect upon them—the bright light, the sound of voices, the odor of the things about her. At last, after an hour or more, a deluge of tears suddenly poured from her eyes and put an end to the terrible
