A Book o' Nine Tales Part 19

_Mrs. E._ You don't suppose there is anything the matter with him?

George! George, I say! you don't suppose the reason he sleeps so soundly is because he's sick?

[_To this conundrum Mr. Ellston offers no solution, and equally pa.s.ses in silence queries in regard to the probability of the nurse's being awake, alive, well-disposed, and able to take care of baby in case of emergency. Mrs. Ellston sighs with the desperation of long-suffering anguish, and once more stillness reigns in the chamber. The lady again arouses herself, however, from an apparently sound nap to ask, in penetrating tones,--_]

"George, _do_ you think it will begin all over again?"

(_To which her brutal worser half grumbles out the reply_) "No! and that's where it is more endurable than a woman."

[_At which the radiator gives a chuckle so apt as to suggest the possession of a sinister consciousness on the part of that noisy instrument of torture. Mrs. Ellston groans, with the discouraged conviction that she is but one against two, and upon this theory at length consents to resume her interrupted slumbers._]

Tale the Fifth.

MeRE MARCHETTE.

MeRE MARCHETTE.

I.

It was half-past eleven of a hot July day in Paris. The sunlight lay over the whole city and shone nowhere more strongly than upon the great hospital of the Salpetriere. The hush of noon brooded over all the place. n.o.body was stirring unless forced to activity by some pressing duty. In the long white wards the patients were asleep or lying quiet in exhaustion under the burning fervor of the summer heat.

Down one of the corridors, where it seemed refres.h.i.+ngly cool after the warmth of the outer air from which he had come, a young man was pa.s.sing.

His step, though rapid, had the noiseless quality which bespeaks familiarity with the sick-room and the hospital. His figure was compact and nervous, his glance clear and keen. Dr. Jean Lommel was one of the house physicians of the Salpetriere, although that he was not now making his regular rounds was evident from the fact that entering a certain ward he pa.s.sed quickly to a bed near the middle of it without stopping at any of the others.

On the bed lay an old woman. Her face was one which showed great strength of character. It was of a marked peasant type, and for all its innumerable wrinkles, its sunken temples, the coa.r.s.e texture of its skin, and the shrunken lips which showed the lack of teeth behind them, it was full of a n.o.bility and kindliness which no ravages of time or disease could wholly hide. The hair that straggled in thin locks from beneath the white cap was hardly less snowy than the lawn which covered it; and when the patient opened her sunken eyes, as the doctor stopped beside the bed, they were bright and s.h.i.+ning with a l.u.s.tre which was not all either fever or anxiety. Her glance was one of intense and pitiful inquiry. The young man touched her white hair with the tips of his long, fine fingers in a pitying caress before he took hold of the withered wrist, shrunken and marked with blue veins, that lay outside the coverlid.

"In an hour, Mere Marchette," he said, answering her look--"in an hour he will be here; keep up a good heart. You do not suffer?"

The old woman feebly shook her head. The ghost of a smile, faint but full of happiness, shone on her face. She did not speak, but she thanked him with a look before she closed her eyes and lay motionless as before he had come.

The young man looked at her a moment, an expression of pity in his brown eyes; then with a sigh he turned away and moved softly down the ward again. By the door he encountered one of the nurses, who had risen and come forward to speak with him.

"Will she live, M. Lommel?"

"Yes," the doctor answered. "She has given all her energies for days to keeping alive till her grandson gets here. It is very singular," he went on, in a voice of low distinctness that could have been acquired only in sick-rooms, "how her instinct has taught her to save her strength. She neither moves nor speaks; she simply lives."

"She has been that way," the nurse returned, "ever since we told her that Pierre was coming. Will he be here by twelve?"

"Not till half-past twelve," Dr. Lommel replied. "I will return before then."

And he went out into the hot suns.h.i.+ne.

II.

Everybody connected with the ward of the Salpetriere wherein she was had a kindly feeling for poor old Mere Marchette. The doctors and the nurses could not have been more kind or more tender had she been of their own blood. She was one of those who always win affection. She was so patient, so simple, so kindly. She was a peasant woman from Normandy, who had in her old age drifted to Paris with her grandson Pierre, a lad of sixteen years. All the rest of the family were dead. Pierre's father had been a soldier, and it was with the hope of securing a pension for the son that Mere Marchette had left her home and the life in Normandy she loved, to throw herself into Paris as into the sea. The dead soldier, however, had been mustered out before the malarial fever, contracted in the swamps of the Landes, had developed itself, and the pension could not be obtained. The disappointment was a bitter one, made worse by the fact that Mere Marchette had been told by one and another that the claim would have been granted had the case been properly managed. The poor old creature could not escape a feeling of self-blame in thinking that it was her want of keenness which had deprived Pierre of his pension. Her grandson for her represented the world, and to him she devoted all her energies. She toiled for him, and watched and suffered with that unselfish egotism possible only to the old and lonely.

Fortunately Pierre was a good lad, who returned his grandmother's love with a devotion hardly less complete than her own. They lived together in two attic rooms, where they pa.s.sed the evenings sitting in the dark and talking of their Normandy home. They recalled the past and built endless air castles of the time when they should be able to return. They had grand plans of repurchasing the old cot where both of them had been born, and which had been lost by the foreclosure of a mortgage after the long illness of Pierre's father had ended. They were never tired of talking of what they would do then, and of devising little ways in which the worn-out old farm might be made more profitable. They remained as truly children of the soil as if they had been still in Normandy instead of in their attic in the midst of Paris.

In the daytime Mere Marchette went out to do work as charwoman, while Pierre had been fortunate enough to obtain a place as a.s.sistant in a little grocery in Rue M. le Prince. It was in connection with this that Pierre gave his grandmother the only real grief he ever caused her while they were together. Suddenly the boy began to stay away in the evening, and when Mere Marchette sought to know the reason he put her questions aside. One evening as she was making her way home she saw her grandson chatting with a girl at the door of a milliner's dingy shop. The heart of poor old Mere Marchette sunk within her. The castles in the air, from whose glittering towers had shone delusive lights to strengthen and encourage her, fell in ruins before her eyes. In a moment the burden of her age, her poverty, her weariness, seemed increased tenfold. Feebly she climbed the long stairs and sat down to wait, heartbroken. She had all the peasant's instinctive distrust of Paris: she had not been able to live in the Latin Quarter without comprehending something of the evil about her, although, happily for her, the worst features of Parisian life would have been so unintelligible that she might have seen them unmoved. She thought no evil now of Pierre, but she was seized with a terrible fear lest he might fall a victim to one of the sirens of the Latin Quarter, who, to Mere Marchette's thinking, destroyed soul and body alike.

Mere Marchette did not tell Pierre of the discovery she had made.

She was only more gentle with him, while in secret she prayed more fervently. For some days longer the lad's mysterious absence continued, the sad hours of the evening stretching like long deserts of agony, over which the soul of Mere Marchette walked painfully with bleeding feet. And then one night Pierre came home with eyes aglow, and all was explained. He put into his grandmother's hand a little pile of francs, a sum pitiful enough in itself but large to them, and told how a milliner in the street beyond had employed him in moving boxes and clearing out the attics of her house, which were to be remodelled into lodgings. This had been his secret, and in his thought of the joyful surprise he was to give his grandmother he had forgotten the pain she might endure by misunderstanding his absence.

It was such trifles as this that were the great events in the life of Mere Marchette and Pierre. There was a tenderness, an unselfishness, an idyllic devotion in their love which no amount of wealth, or culture, or rank could have heightened; but in the lad's veins was the blood of a soldier, that stirred hot with the currents of a vigorous youth. Of the army he had dreamed from his cradle, and strong as was his love for Mere Marchette the force of destiny was stronger. It was the old tragedy of youth and age, of the absorption of maternal love and the restless impulses of the boy's heart. Pierre justified his desire to himself with the excuse that he could earn more money in the ranks; but his grandmother knew, only too well, the force of the instinct he had inherited. She had seen the same struggle in the life of his father.

When Pierre was eighteen he shouldered his musket and marched away, leaving poor old Mere Marchette as much a stranger in Paris as when she had come to it two years before to weep and pray alone. It would hardly be within the power of words to paint the anguish which lay between Pierre's departure and that hot July noon when Mere Marchette lay dying at the Salpetriere. Always in Paris she had been like a wild thing, caged and bewildered, confused by the life that swirled about her in the great city, even when she had been sustained by the presence of Pierre.

When he was gone the gentle old soul began to die of homesickness and heartbreak. For two years she fought death stolidly but persistently, refusing to acknowledge to herself that she was breaking down under the stress of loneliness and sorrow. She came of a race that died hard, and although she was past eighty she looked forward hopefully to the time when Pierre should leave the army and come back to live with her again.

But the struggle for existence in Paris was hard, even when the joy of working for Pierre sustained her; when he was gone it became intolerable. At the end of two years the strength and courage even of the st.u.r.dy Norman peasant woman were exhausted; and then a dreadful disease, which had before shown itself in her family, seemed to take advantage of her weakness to spring upon her. She had been a charwoman in the family of Jean Lommel's mother, and so it came about that through the influence of the young doctor she had been admitted to the Salpetriere when she was already dying from cancer in the stomach.

There was no patient in the ward who was not of better birth than Mere Marchette. She was of all most deficient in education, in knowledge of the world, in the graces of life; and yet of them all it was only the poor old peasant woman who awakened in the minds of the attendants a glow of genuine affection. There are some people who are born to be loved, and when these rare beings remain worthy of it, neither age, nor poverty, nor sickness can destroy their power of awaking affection.

The hired nurses touched their lips to her forehead in kisses given furtively, as if they were surprised, and prepared to be ashamed of the emotion which called from them this unwonted display. The doctors spoke to her in tones unprofessionally soft, while Dr. Lommel, who had charge of the ward, treated her with an affectionate courtesy scarcely less warm than that he would have shown to his own grandmother. They all knew that Mere Marchette must die, and from counting the time in weeks they had dropped to days, and then to hours. Indeed it seemed only the old woman's will which kept her alive now until Pierre should come. She had borne all her sufferings without a murmur, but she had not been able wholly to repress the cry of her heart. The young soldier's regiment was in Algiers, and there had been difficulties about his furlough. Had it been any other death-bed in the hospital to which he had been summoned these difficulties would hardly have been surmounted; but in behalf of Mere Marchette the physicians had worked so zealously that all obstacles were removed and Pierre's leave of absence granted. From the moment she had been told that her grandson was on his way she had been perfectly quiet, and, as the doctor said, had devoted her whole being to keeping alive until Pierre should come.

And on this hot July noon the train which was bringing Pierre was drawing nearer to Paris, and Mere Marchette lay so still that she seemed scarcely to breathe,--so still that one might fancy she would not even think, lest in so doing she exhaust some precious grain of strength and so should die without the blessing of that last embrace.

III.

Whoever keeps himself informed of the course of modern scientific investigations is likely to be aware that during the last decade especial attention has been given at the Salpetriere to that strange physical or psychical force known as hypnotism. M. Charcot, chief of the school of the Salpetriere, has particularly distinguished himself by his researches. Attacked at first by his professional brethren, it has been his good fortune to live to see the scientific value of hypnotism acknowledged, and to be triumphantly readmitted to the Academy of Sciences, which had at first stigmatized his investigations as mere charlatanism. Charles Fere, an a.s.sistant physician at the Salpetriere, with Richer, Bourneville, and nearly a score other distinguished men, have pursued their investigations with great zeal and thoroughness, and have produced a valuable literature devoted to this intricate subject.

It will be easily understood that all the physicians at the Salpetriere, and especially the younger men, could not fail to be deeply interested in this new and fascinating branch of science. The facts upon which had been founded the theories of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and other shadowy systems were reduced to order and scientifically tested. M.

Charcot and his a.s.sociates worked with much care and thoroughness, and, without being able to solve the mystery of the force with which they dealt, they proved its value as a therapeutic agent. In the cure of nervous diseases, and in dealing with hysterical patients, they obtained remarkable and satisfactory results. They were even able to alleviate suffering by simply a.s.suring the patient, while in a hypnotic sleep, that he would be free from pain on waking.

To the outside observer no feature of this strange power is more remarkable than the influence the hypnotist may exert over his subject after the trance is broken. A hypnotized person may be told to perform any act on awaking, and, when seemingly restored to his normal condition, bears the impress of that command so strongly that he is urged to obey it by an irresistible impulse. It is quite as easy, moreover, to foist upon the patients the most extraordinary delusions.

The subject is told that upon awaking a bottle will seem to be a lamp, a blank card a picture, or any other deception which comes into the mind of the hypnotist; and so perfect is the working of this mysterious and terrible law that the delusion is accomplished to its minutest details.

Dr. Lommel, like all his young confreres, had become intensely interested in all these researches, so like a scientific realization of the fairy tales of the Orient. He had even tried some experiments on his own account; and when the sufferings of Mere Marchette became pitifully intense he had ventured to attempt the subst.i.tution of hypnotism for opiates in relieving her distress. The old woman had not easily yielded to this influence. Susceptibility to hypnotism is more apt to be found in hysterical or nervously sensitive subjects than in such st.u.r.dy characters. By degrees, however, Dr. Lommel established control over her. In the end, to throw her into a hypnotic sleep he had only to hold his forefinger an inch or two from her forehead, so that her eyes in looking at it turned upward and inward a little. He did not experiment with Mere Marchette; he felt too tenderly toward the old woman to make her the subject of scientific investigation outside of the direct line of treatment. He simply said, "When you awaken you will be free from pain, Mere Marchette;" then he would breathe lightly on her forehead and the sick woman would awaken, to lie as peaceful and painless as if no terrible disease was gnawing like a tiger at her vitals.

The case had attracted a good deal of attention at the Salpetriere, and although Mere Marchette was utterly ignorant of it, her sick-bed was a point of interest toward which were turned the thoughts of physicians over half of Europe. The unlearned peasant, to whom the simplest terms of science would have been unintelligible, was furnis.h.i.+ng data for future scientific treatises; and people of whose very existence she was unaware read the daily bulletins of her condition with closest eagerness.

IV.

It was a few minutes after twelve o'clock when Dr. Lommel reentered the ward. Mere Marchette lay apparently sleeping, but as he approached her bedside the old eyes opened with a piercing and eager question. The young man shook his head, smiling tenderly.

"Not quite yet, Mere Marchette," he said; "there are still some minutes to wait."

He sat down beside the bed and laid his fingers on her wrist. The pulse was so faint that he could scarcely feel it, but it was steady. For some minutes he remained quiet, with his eyes fixed on the poor old face before him. There came into his mind the thought of what this woman's life had been: her childhood and youth in the hut of a Norman peasant; of what her own home might have been when she became a wife and mother; of the desolation which had come upon her in the death of all her family save only Pierre; of the strange fate that had brought her to Paris; of the terrible wrench which her old heart must have felt when her grandson was taken from her; and of the pathetic patience with which she had borne privation, loneliness, and suffering.

He knew only the outlines of her history, since Mere Marchette had spoken little of herself. What her feelings might have been he could only imagine: the old woman could not have told her mental experiences; she had never even a.n.a.lyzed them. Unless he had been a peasant and a mother himself, Lommel could not have divined Mere Marchette's emotions; he could only reflect what he should have felt in her place. He said to himself at last that, after all, the circ.u.mstances which made Mere Marchette's lot so pathetic must also have deadened her sensibilities and so have softened her suffering.

He sighed and looked at his watch. His a.s.sistant had gone to the railway station to meet Pierre, and the time he had fixed for their return was already past by five minutes. He felt again of his patient's pulse, with a terrible dread lest after all the young soldier should arrive too late. The artery throbbed more feebly, but still steadily; and at his touch the sick woman opened her eyes with the old questioning look.