雙語·邦斯舅舅 三十六、看門老婆子的嘮叨與手段

XXXVI

Mme. Fontaine's prophecy had frightened La Cibot; she vowed to herself that she would gain her ends by kindness. She would sleep secure on M. Pons' legacy, but her rascality should keep within the limits of the law. For ten years she had not suspected the value of Pons' collection; she had a clear record behind her of ten years of devotion, honesty, and disinterestedness; it was a magnificent investment, and now she proposed to realize. In one day, Remonencq's hint of money had hatched the serpent's egg, the craving for riches that had lain dormant within her for twenty years. Since she had cherished that craving, it had grown in force with the ferment of all the evil that lurks in the corners of the heart. How she acted upon the counsels whispered by the serpent will presently be seen.

Well? she asked of Schmucke, "has this cherub of ours had plenty to drink? Is he better?"

He is not doing fery vell, tear Montame Zipod, not fery vell, said poor Schmucke, brushing away the tears from his eyes.

Pooh! you make too much of it, my dear M. Schmucke; we must take things as we find them; Cibot might be at death's door, and I should not take it to heart as you do. Come! the cherub has a good constitution. And he has been steady, it seems, you see; you have no idea what an age sober people live. He is very ill, it is true, but with all the care I take of him, I shall bring him round. Be easy, look after your affairs, I will keep him company and see that he drinks his pints of barley water.

Gif you vere not here, I should die of anxiety— said Schmucke, squeezing his kind housekeeper's hand in both his own to express his confidence in her.

La Cibot wiped her eyes as she went back to the invalid's room.

What is the matter, Mme. Cibot? asked Pons.

It is M. Schmucke that has upset me; he is crying as if you were dead, said she. "If you are not well, you are not so bad yet that nobody need cry over you; but it has given me such a turn! Oh dear! oh dear! how silly it is of me to get so fond of people, and to think more of you than of Cibot! For, after all, you aren't nothing to me, you are only my brother by Adam's side; and yet, whenever you are in the question, it puts me in such a taking, upon my word it does! I would cut off my hand—my left hand, of course—to see you coming and going, eating your meals, and screwing bargains out of dealers as usual. If I had had a child of my own, I think I should have loved it as I love you, eh! There, take a drink, dearie; come now, empty the glass. Drink it off, monsieur, I tell you! The first thing Dr. Poulain said was, 'If M. Pons has no mind to go to Pere Lachaise, he ought to drink as many buckets full of water in a day as an Auvergnat will sell.' So, come now, drink—"

But I do drink, Cibot, my good woman; I drink and drink till I am deluged—

That is right, said the portress, as she took away the empty glass. "That is the way to get better. Dr. Poulain had another patient ill of your complaint; but he had nobody to look after him, his children left him to himself, and he died because he didn't drink enough—so you must drink, honey, you see—he died and they buried him two months ago. And if you were to die, you know, you would drag down old M. Schmucke with you, sir. He is like a child. Ah! he loves you, he does, the dear lamb of a man; no woman never loved a man like that! He doesn't care for meat nor drink; he has grown as thin as you are in the last fortnight, and you are nothing but skin and bones.—It makes me jealous to see it, for I am very fond of you; but not to that degree; I haven't lost my appetite, quite the other way; always going up and down stairs, till my legs are so tired that I drop down of an evening like a lump of lead. Here am I neglecting my poor Cibot for you; Mlle. Remonencq cooks his victuals for him, and he goes on about it and says that nothing is right! At that I tell him that one ought to put up with something for the sake of other people, and that you are so ill that I cannot leave you. In the first place, you can't afford a nurse. And before I would have a nurse here!—I have done for you these ten years; they want wine and sugar, and foot-warmers, and all sorts of comforts. And they rob their patients unless the patients leave them something in their wills. Have a nurse in here to-day, and to-morrow we should find a picture or something or other gone—"

Oh! Mme. Cibot! cried Pons, quite beside himself, "do not leave me! No one must touch anything—"

I am here, said La Cibot; "so long as I have the strength I shall be here.—Be easy. There was Dr. Poulain wanting to get a nurse for you; perhaps he has his eye on your treasures. I just snubbed him, I did. 'The gentleman won't have any one but me,' I told him. 'He is used to me, and I am used to him.' So he said no more. A nurse, indeed! They are all thieves; I hate that sort of woman, I do. Here is a tale that will show you how sly they are. There was once an old gentleman—it was Dr. Poulain himself, mind you, who told me this—well, a Mme. Sabatier, a woman of thirty-six that used to sell slippers at the Palais Royal—you remember the Galerie at the Palais that they pulled down?"

Pons nodded.

Well, at that time she had not done very well; her husband used to drink, and died of spontaneous imbustion; but she had been a fine woman in her time, truth to tell, not that it did her any good, though she had friends among the lawyers. So, being hard up, she became a monthly nurse, and lived in the Rue Barre-du-Bec. Well, she went out to nurse an old gentleman that had a disease of the lurinary guts (saving your presence); they used to tap him like an artesian well, and he needed such care that she used to sleep on a truckle-bed in the same room with him. You would hardly believe such a thing!—'Men respect nothing,' you'll tell me, 'so selfish as they are.' Well, she used to talk with him, you understand; she never left him, she amused him, she told him stories, she drew him on to talk (just as we are chatting away together now, you and I, eh?), and she found out that his nephews—the old gentleman had nephews—that his nephews were wretches; they had worried him, and final end of it, they had brought on this illness. Well, my dear sir, she saved his life, he married her, and they have a fine child; Ma'am Bordevin, the butcher's wife in the Rue Charlot, a relative of hers, stood godmother.There is luck for you! As for me, I am married; and if I have no children, I don't mind saying that it is Cibot's fault; he is too fond of me, but if I cared—never mind. What would have become of me and my Cibot if we had had a family, when we have not a penny to bless ourselves with after thirty years' of faithful service? I have not a farthing belonging to nobody else, that is what comforts me. I have never wronged nobody.—Look here, suppose now (there is no harm in supposing when you will be out and about again in six weeks' time, and sauntering along the boulevard); well, suppose that you had put me down in your will; very good, I shouldn't never rest till I had found your heirs and given the money back. Such is my horror of anything that is not earned by the sweat of my brow. You will say to me, 'Why, Mme. Cibot, why should you worry yourself like that? You have fairly earned the money; you looked after your two gentlemen as if they had been your children; you saved them a thousand francs a year—' (for there are plenty, sir, you know, that would have had their ten thousand francs put out to interest by now if they had been in my place)—'so if the worthy gentleman leaves you a trifle of an annuity, it is only right.'—Suppose they told me that. Well, now; I am not thinking of myself.—I cannot think how some women can do a kindness thinking of themselves all the time. It is not doing good, sir, is it? I do not go to church myself, I haven't the time; but my conscience tells me what is right.... Don't you fidget like that, my lamb!—Don't scratch yourself!... Dear me, how yellow you grow! So yellow you are—quite brown. How funny it is that one can come to look like a lemon in three weeks!... Honesty is all that poor folk have, and one must surely have something! Suppose that you were just at death's door, I should be the first to tell you that you ought to leave all that you have to M. Schmucke. It is your duty, for he is all the family you have. He loves you, he does, as a dog loves his master.

Ah! yes, said Pons; "nobody else has ever loved me all my life long—"