She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.

"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going out?"

"I am going to lie in----It took me during the day. There was a great dinner-party here----Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I told you never to come; I don't want you to!"

"Because----I'll tell you----because just now I absolutely must have forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must."

"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"

"That's hard luck----look out! What do you want to do?" And he offered his arm to a.s.sist her. "_Cristi!_ I'm going to have hard work to get 'em all the same."

He had opened the carriage door.

"Where do you want him to take you?"

"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his hand.

"No, no," said Jupillon.

"Oh! nonsense----there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs left."

The cab started away.

Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and said to Germinie through the window:

"At least, I can go with you?"

"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing on the cushions of the cab.

After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to such medical students as happened to pa.s.s through the street that there was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternite.

The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, a.s.sisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the _salle d'accouchement_. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were drying.

Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having created. Suddenly a loud cry: "I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw her arms around the neck of one of the a.s.sistant nurses, fall back almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young a.s.sistant, with desperate gestures; the a.s.sistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell in a dead faint upon the floor.

Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and the half-dead a.s.sistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell that hung beside each bed to call for help.

Thereafter La Maternite was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all before it and s.n.a.t.c.hes up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie, at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws, agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn from the body. The very disease a.s.sumed a ghastly shape and monstrous aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.

For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energy was exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold wave flowed into her heart.

She said to herself that it was all over. The hand that death lays upon one's shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching her. She felt the first breath of the epidemic, the belief that she was its destined victim, and the impression that she was already half-possessed by it. Although unresigned, she succ.u.mbed. Her life, vanquished beforehand, hardly made an effort to struggle. At that crisis a head bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.

It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-a.s.sistants, a fair head, with long golden locks and blue eyes so soft and sweet that the dying saw heaven opening its gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women said: "Look! the Blessed Virgin!"

"My child," she said to Germinie, "you must ask for your discharge at once. You must go away from here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap up well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must take a hot draught of something or other. You must try to take a sweat. Then, it won't do you any harm. But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for you here to-night," she said, glancing around at the beds. "Don't say that I told you to go: you would get me discharged if you should."

XXI

Germinie recovered in a few days. The joy and pride of having given birth to a tiny creature in whom her flesh was mingled with the flesh of the man she loved, the bliss of being a mother, saved her from the natural results of a confinement in which she did not receive proper care. She was restored to health and had an apparent pleasure in living that her mistress had never before seen her manifest.

Every Sunday, no matter what the weather might be, she left the house about eleven o'clock; mademoiselle believed that she went to see a friend in the country, and was delighted that her maid derived so much benefit from these days pa.s.sed in the open air. Germinie would capture Jupillon, who allowed himself to be taken in tow without too much resistance, and they would start for Pommeuse where the child was, and where a good breakfast ordered by the mother awaited them. Once in the carriage on the Mulhouse railway, Germinie would not speak or reply when spoken to. She would lean out of the window, and all her thoughts seemed to be upon what lay before her. She gazed, as if her longing were striving to outrun the steam. The train would hardly have stopped before she had leaped out, tossed her ticket to the ticket-taker, and started at a run on the Pommeuse road, leaving Jupillon behind. She drew nearer and nearer, she could see the house, she was there: yes, there was the child! She would pounce upon her, s.n.a.t.c.h her from the nurse's arms with jealous hands--a mother's hands!--hug her, strain her to her heart, kiss her, devour her with kisses and looks and smiles! She would gaze admiringly at her for an instant and then, distraught with joy, mad with love, would cover her with kisses to the tips of her little bare toes.

Breakfast would be served. She would sit at the table with the child on her knees and eat nothing: she had kissed her so much that she had not yet looked at her, and she would begin to seek out points of resemblance to themselves in the little one. One feature was his, another hers:--"She has your nose and my eyes. Her hair will be like yours in time. It will curl! Look, those are your hands--she is all you." And for hours she would continue the inexhaustible and charming prattle of a woman who is determined to give a man his share of their daughter.

Jupillon submitted to it all with reasonably good grace, thanks to divers three-sou cigars Germinie always produced from her pocket and gave to him one by one. Then he had found a means of diversion; the Morin flowed at the foot of the garden. Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line.

And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream. On pleasant days, the sun poured down upon the broad sparkling current, from which beams of light arose as from a mirror. It was like a display of fireworks from the sky and the stream, amid which Germinie would hold the little girl upon her feet and let her trample upon her with her little bare pink legs, in her short baby dress, her skin shimmering in spots in the sunlight, her flesh mottled with sunbeams like the flesh of angels Germinie had seen in pictures. She had a divinely sweet sensation when the little one, with the active hands of children that cannot talk, touched her chin and mouth and cheeks, persisted in putting her fingers in her eyes, rested them playfully on the lids, and kept them moving over her whole face, tickling and tormenting her with the dear little digits that seem to grope in the dark for a mother's features: it was as if her child's life and warmth were wandering over her face. From time to time she would bestow half of her smile on Jupillon over the little one's head, and would call to him: "Do look at her!"

Then the child would fall asleep with the open mouth that laughs in sleep. Germinie would lean over her and listen to her breathing in repose. And, soothed by the peaceful respiration, she would gradually forget herself as she gazed dreamily at the poor abode of her happiness, the rustic garden, the apple-trees with their leaves covered with little yellow snails and the red-cheeked apples on the southern limbs, the poles, at whose feet the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning to climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the little circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside her, on the edge of the stream, the patches of gra.s.s covered with dog's mercury, the white heads of the nettles against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the bottles of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the antics of a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and dreamed. She thought of the past, having her future on her knees. With the gra.s.s and the trees and the river that were before her eyes, she reconstructed, in memory, the rustic garden of her rustic childhood. She saw again the two stones reaching down to the water, from which her mother, when she was a little child, used to wash her feet before putting her to bed in summertime.

"Look you, Pere Remalard," said Jupillon from his board, on one of the hottest days in August, to the peasant who was watching him,--"do you know they won't bite at the red worm worth a sou?"

"You must try the gentle," rejoined the peasant sententiously.

"All right, I'll have my revenge with the gentle! Pere Remalard, you must get some calf's lights Thursday. You hang 'em up in that tree, and Sunday we'll see."

On the Sunday Jupillon had miraculous success with his fishing, and Germinie heard the first syllable issue from her daughter's mouth.

XXII

On Wednesday morning, when she came downstairs, Germinie found a letter for herself. In that letter, written on the back of a laundry receipt, the Remalard woman informed her that her child had fallen sick almost immediately after her departure; that she had grown steadily worse; that she had consulted the doctor; that he said some insect had stung the child; that she had been to him a second time; that she did not know what more to do; that she had had pilgrimages made for her. The letter concluded thus: "If you could see how troubled I am for your little one--if you could see how good she is when she isn't suffering!"

This letter produced upon Germinie the effect of a push from behind. She went out and instinctively walked toward the railroad that would take her to her little one. Her hair was uncombed and she was in her slippers, but she did not think of that. She must see her child, she must see her instantly. Then she would come back. She thought of mademoiselle's breakfast for a moment, then forgot it. Suddenly, half-way to the station, she saw a clock at a cab office and noticed the hour: she remembered that there was no train at that time. She retraced her steps, saying to herself that she would hurry the breakfast and then make some excuse to be given her liberty for the rest of the day. But when the breakfast was served she could find none: her mind was so full of her child that she could not invent a falsehood; her imagination was benumbed. And then, if she had spoken, if she had made the request, she would have betrayed herself; she could feel the words upon her lips: "I want to go and see my child!" At night she dared not make her escape; mademoiselle had been a little indisposed the night before; she was afraid that she might need her.

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 to-day, 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 pa.s.sed 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 heart-rending 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 superst.i.tions 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 Sat.u.r.day, in the morning, when she entered Mere Jupillon's shop, she found her weeping hot tears over a lump of b.u.t.ter that she was covering with a moist cloth.

"Ah! it's you, is it?" said Mere 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 b.u.t.ter. 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 b.u.t.ter right away--for the good G.o.d.'"

And Mere Jupillon began to sob.