Cousin Betty

“Show him in,” repeated the master.

The old man came in. Victorin’s keen eye examined this so-called pilgrim hermit, and he saw a fine specimen of the Neapolitan friars, whose frocks are akin to the rags of the lazzaroni, whose sandals are tatters of leather, as the friars are tatters of humanity. The get-up was so perfect that the lawyer, though still on his guard, was vexed with himself for having believed it to be one of Madame Nourrisson’s tricks.

“How much to you want of me?”

“Whatever you feel that you ought to give me.”

Victorin took a five-franc piece from a little pile on his table, and handed it to the stranger.

“That is not much on account of fifty thousand francs,” said the pilgrim of the desert.

This speech removed all Victorin’s doubts.

“And has Heaven kept its word?” he said, with a frown.

“The question is an offence, my son,” said the hermit. “If you do not choose to pay till after the funeral, you are in your rights. I will return in a week’s time.”

“The funeral!” cried the lawyer, starting up.

“The world moves on,” said the old man, as he withdrew, “and the dead move quickly in Paris!”

When Hulot, who stood looking down, was about to reply, the stalwart old man had vanished.

“I don’t understand one word of all this,” said Victorin to himself. “But at the end of the week I will ask him again about my father, if we have not yet found him. Where does Madame Nourrisson – yes, that was her name – pick up such actors?”

On the following day, Doctor Bianchon allowed the Baroness to go down into the garden, after examining Lisbeth, who had been obliged to keep to her room for a month by a slight bronchial attack. The learned doctor, who dared not pronounce a definite opinion on Lisbeth’s case till he had seen some decisive symptoms, went into the garden with Adeline to observe the effect of the fresh air on her nervous trembling after two months of seclusion. He was interested and allured by the hope of curing this nervous complaint. On seeing the great physician sitting with them and sparing them a few minutes, the Baroness and her family conversed with him on general subjects.

“You life is a very full and a very sad one,” said Madame Hulot. “I know what it is to spend one’s days in seeing poverty and physical suffering.”

“I know, madame,” replied the doctor, “all the scenes of which charity compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate, the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live at all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to face with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? And every soldier that has been under fire is kind-hearted. We medical men have the pleasure now and again of a successful cure, as you have that of saving a family from the horrors of hunger, depravity, or misery, and of restoring it to social respectability. But what comfort can the magistrate find, the police agent, or the attorney, who spend their lives in investigating the basest schemes of self-interest, the social monster whose only regret is when it fails, but on whom repentance never dawns?

“One-half of society spends its life in watching the other half. A very old friend of mine is an attorney, now retired, who told me that for fifteen years past notaries and lawyers have distrusted their clients quite as much as their adversaries. Your son is a pleader; has he never found himself compromised by the client for whom he held a brief?”

“Very often,” said Victorin, with a smile.

“And what is the cause of this deep-seated evil?” asked the Baroness.

“The decay of religion,” said Bianchon, “and the pre-eminence of finance, which is simply solidified selfishness. Money used not to be everything; there were some kinds of superiority that ranked above it – nobility, genius, service done to the State. But nowadays the law takes wealth as the universal standard, and regards it as the measure of public capacity. Certain magistrates are ineligible to the Chamber; Jean-Jacques Rousseau would be ineligible! The perpetual subdivision of estate compels every man to take care of himself from the age of twenty.

“Well, then, between the necessity for making a fortune and the depravity of speculation there is no check or hindrance; for the religious sense is wholly lacking in France, in spite of the laudable endeavors of those who are working for a Catholic revival. And this is the opinion of every man who, like me, studies society at the core.”

“And you have few pleasures?” said Hortense.

“The true physician, madame, is in love with his science,” replied the doctor. “He is sustained by that passion as much as by the sense of his usefulness to society.

“At this very time you see in me a sort of scientific rapture, and many superficial judges would regard me as a man devoid of feeling. I have to announce a discovery to-morrow to the College of Medicine, for I am studying a disease that had disappeared – a mortal disease for which no cure is known in temperate climates, though it is curable in the West Indies – a malady known here in the Middle Ages. A noble fight is that of the physician against such a disease. For the last ten days I have thought of nothing but these cases – for there are two, a husband and wife. – Are they not connections of yours? For you, madame, are surely Monsieur Crevel’s daughter?” said he, addressing Celestine.

“What, is my father your patient?” asked Celestine. “Living in the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy?”

“Precisely so,” said Bianchon.

“And the disease is inevitably fatal?” said Victorin in dismay.

“I will go to see him,” said Celestine, rising.

“I positively forbid it, madame,” Bianchon quietly said. “The disease is contagious.”

“But you go there, monsieur,” replied the young woman. “Do you think that a daughter’s duty is less binding than a doctor’s?”

“Madame, a physician knows how to protect himself against infection, and the rashness of your devotion proves to me that you would probably be less prudent than I.”

Celestine, however, got up and went to her room, where she dressed to go out.

“Monsieur,” said Victorin to Bianchon, “have you any hope of saving Monsieur and Madame Crevel?”

“I hope, but I do not believe that I may,” said Bianchon. “The case is to me quite inexplicable. The disease is peculiar to negroes and the American tribes, whose skin is differently constituted to that of the white races. Now I can trace no connection with the copper-colored tribes, with negroes or half-castes, in Monsieur or Madame Crevel.

“And though it is a very interesting disease to us, it is a terrible thing for the sufferers. The poor woman, who is said to have been very pretty, is punished for her sins, for she is now squalidly hideous if she is still anything at all. She is losing her hair and teeth, her skin is like a leper’s, she is a horror to herself; her hands are horrible, covered with greenish pustules, her nails are loose, and the flesh is eaten away by the poisoned humors.”

“And the cause of such a disease?” asked the lawyer.

“Oh!” said the doctor, “the cause lies in a form of rapid blood-poisoning; it degenerates with terrific rapidity. I hope to act on the blood; I am having it analyzed; and I am now going home to ascertain the result of the labors of my friend Professor Duval, the famous chemist, with a view to trying one of those desperate measures by which we sometimes attempt to defeat death.”

“The hand of God is there!” said Adeline, in a voice husky with emotion. “Though that woman has brought sorrows on me which have led me in moments of madness to invoke the vengeance of Heaven, I hope – God knows I hope – you may succeed, doctor.”

Victorin felt dizzy. He looked at his mother, his sister, and the physician by turns, quaking lest they should read his thoughts. He felt himself a murderer.

Hortense, for her part, thought God was just.

Celestine came back to beg her husband to accompany her.

“If you insist on going, madame, and you too, monsieur, keep at least a foot between you and the bed of the sufferer, that is the chief precaution. Neither you nor your wife must dream of kissing the dying man. And, indeed, you ought to go with your wife, Monsieur Hulot, to hinder her from disobeying my injunctions.”

Adeline and Hortense, when they were left alone, went to sit with Lisbeth. Hortense had such a virulent hatred of Valerie that she could not contain the expression of it.

“Cousin Lisbeth,” she exclaimed, “my mother and I are avenged! that venomous snake is herself bitten – she is rotting in her bed!”

“Hortense, at this moment you are not a Christian. You ought to pray to God to vouchsafe repentance to this wretched woman.”

“What are you talking about?” said Betty, rising from her couch. “Are you speaking of Valerie?”

“Yes,” replied Adeline; “she is past hope – dying of some horrible disease of which the mere description makes one shudder – ”

Lisbeth’s teeth chattered, a cold sweat broke out all over her; the violence of the shock showed how passionate her attachment to Valerie had been.

“I must go there,” said she.

“But the doctor forbids your going out.”