Cousin Pons Part 17

She found Magus standing motionless before the four pictures. His immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the _Antiope_--Correggio's masterpiece--before Leonardo's _Gioconda_, t.i.tian's _Mistress_, Andrea del Sarto's _Holy Family_, Domenichino's _Children Among the Flowers_, Raphael's little cameo, or his _Portrait of an Old Man_--Art's greatest masterpieces.

"Be quick and go, and make no noise," said La Cibot.

The Jew walked slowly backwards, giving the pictures such a farewell gaze as a lover gives his love. Outside on the landing, La Cibot tapped his bony arm. His rapt contemplations had put an idea into her head.

"Make it _four_ thousand francs for each picture," said she, "or I do nothing."

"I am so poor!..." began Magus. "I want the pictures simply for their own sake, simply and solely for the love of art, my dear lady."

"I can understand that love, sonny, you are so dried up. But if you do not promise me sixteen thousand francs now, before Remonencq here, I shall want twenty to-morrow."

"Sixteen; I promise," returned the Jew, frightened by the woman's rapacity.

La Cibot turned to Remonencq.

"What oath can a Jew swear?" she inquired.

"You may trust him," replied the marine store-dealer. "He is as honest as I am."

"Very well; and you?" asked she, "if I get him to sell them to you, what will you give me?"

"Half-share of profits," Remonencq answered briskly.

"I would rather have a lump sum," returned La Cibot; "I am not in business myself."

"You understand business uncommonly well!" put in Elie Magus, smiling; "a famous saleswoman you would make!"

"I want her to take me into partners.h.i.+p, me and my goods," said the Auvergnat, as he took La Cibot's plump arm and gave it playful taps like hammer-strokes. "I don't ask her to bring anything into the firm but her good looks! You are making a mistake when your stick to your Turk of a Cibot and his needle. Is a little bit of a porter the man to make a woman rich--a fine woman like you? Ah, what a figure you would make in a shop on the boulevard, all among the curiosities, gossiping with amateurs and twisting them round your fingers! Just you leave your lodge as soon as you have lined your purse here, and you shall see what will become of us both."

"Lined my purse!" cried Cibot. "I am incapable of taking the worth of a single pin; you mind that, Remonencq! I am known in the neighborhood for an honest woman, I am."

La Cibot's eyes flashed fire.

"There, never mind," said Elie Magus; "this Auvergnat seems to be too fond of you to mean to insult you."

"How she would draw on the customers!" cried the Auvergnat.

Mme. Cibot softened at this.

"Be fair, sonnies," quoth she, "and judge for yourselves how I am placed. These ten years past I have been wearing my life out for these two old bachelors yonder, and neither or them has given me anything but words. Remonencq will tell you that I feed them by contract, and lose twenty or thirty sous a day; all my savings have gone that way, by the soul of my mother (the only author of my days that I ever knew), this is as true as that I live, and that this is the light of day, and may my coffee poison me if I lie about a farthing. Well, there is one up there that will die soon, eh? and he the richer of the two that I have treated like my own children. Would you believe it, my dear sir, I have told him over and over again for days past that he is at death's door (for Dr.

Poulain has given him up), he could not say less about putting my name down in his will. We shall only get our due by taking it, upon my word, as an honest woman, for as for trusting to the next-of-kin!--No fear!

There! look you here, words don't stink; it is a bad world!"

"That is true," Elie Magus answered cunningly, "that is true; and it is just the like of us that are among the best," he added, looking at Remonencq.

"Just let me be," returned La Cibot; "I am not speaking of you.

'Pressing company is always accepted,' as the old actor said. I swear to you that the two gentlemen already owe me nearly three thousand francs; the little I have is gone by now in medicine and things on their account; and now suppose they refuse to recognize my advances? I am so stupidly honest that I did not dare to say nothing to them about it.

Now, you that are in business, my dear sir, do you advise me to got to a lawyer?"

"A lawyer?" cried Remonencq; "you know more about it than all the lawyers put together--"

Just at that moment a sound echoed in the great staircase, a sound as if some heavy body had fallen in the dining-room.

"Oh, goodness me!" exclaimed La Cibot; "it seems to me that monsieur has just taken a ticket for the ground floor."

She pushed her fellow-conspirators out at the door, and while the pair descended the stairs with remarkable agility, she ran to the dining-room, and there beheld Pons, in his s.h.i.+rt, stretched out upon the tiles. He had fainted. She lifted him as if he had been a feather, carried him back to his room, laid him in bed, burned feathers under his nose, bathed his temples with eau-de-cologne, and at last brought him to consciousness. When she saw his eyes unclose and life return, she stood over him, hands on hips.

"No slippers! In your s.h.i.+rt! That is the way to kill yourself! Why do you suspect me?--If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day, sir. Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke, crying like a child on the stairs--and _this_ is my reward! You have been spying on me. G.o.d has punished you! It serves you right! Here I am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a mischief that I shall feel all my days. Oh dear, oh dear! and the door left open too--"

"You were talking with some one. Who was it?"

"Here are notions!" cried La Cibot. "What next! Am I your bond-slave?

Am I to give account of myself to you? Do you know that if you bother me like this, I shall clear out! You shall take a nurse."

Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.

"It is my illness!" he pleaded piteously.

"It is as you please," La Cibot answered roughly.

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."

As for Mme. Cibot, she soon recovered in Dr. Poulain's hands; and her restoration, bordering on the miraculous, shed additional l.u.s.tre on her name and fame in the Marais. Pons attributed the success to the excellent const.i.tution of the patient, who resumed her ministrations seven days later to the great satisfaction of her two gentlemen.

Her influence in their household and her tyranny was increased a hundred-fold by the accident. In the course of a week, the two nutcrackers ran into debt; Mme. Cibot paid the outstanding amounts, and took the opportunity to obtain from Schmucke (how easily!) a receipt for two thousand francs, which she had lent, she said, to the friends.

"Oh, what a doctor M. Poulain is!" cried La Cibot, for Pons' benefit.

"He will bring you through, my dear sir, for he pulled me out of my coffin! Cibot, poor man, thought I was dead.... Well, Dr. Poulain will have told you that while I was in bed I thought of nothing but you. 'G.o.d above,' said I, 'take me, and let my dear Mr. Pons live--'"