双语·邦斯舅舅 三十八、初步的暗示

XXXVIII

In vain Pons tried to put in a word; La Cibot talked as the wind blows. Means of arresting steam-engines have been invented, but it would tax a mechanician's genius to discover any plan for stopping a portress' tongue.

I know what you mean, continued she. "But it does not kill you, my dear gentleman, to make a will when you are out of health; and in your place I might not leave that poor dear alone, for fear that something might happen; he is like God Almighty's lamb, he knows nothing about nothing, and I should not like him to be at the mercy of those sharks of lawyers and a wretched pack of relations. Let us see now, has one of them come here to see you in twenty years? And would you leave your property to them? Do you know, they say that all these things here are worth something."

Why, yes, said Pons.

Remonencq, who deals in pictures, and knows that you are an amateur, says that he would be quite ready to pay you an annuity of thirty thousand francs so long as you live, to have the pictures afterwards.... There is a change! If I were you, I should take it. Why, I thought he said it for a joke when he told me that. You ought to let M. Schmucke know the value of all those things, for he is a man that could be cheated like a child. He has not the slightest idea of the value of these fine things that you have! He so little suspects it, that he would give them away for a morsel of bread if he did not keep them all his life for love of you, always supposing that he lives after you, for he will die of your death. But I am here; I will take his part against anybody and everybody!... I and Cibot will defend him.

Dear Mme. Cibot! said Pons, "what would have become of me if it had not been for you and Schmucke?" He felt touched by this horrible prattle; the feeling in it seemed to be ingenuous, as it usually is in the speech of the people.

Ah! we really are your only friends on earth, that is very true, that is. But two good hearts are worth all the families in the world.—Don't talk of families to me! A family, as the old actor said of the tongue, is the best and the worst of all things.... Where are those relations of yours now? Have you any? I have never seen them—

They have brought me to lie here, said Pons, with intense bitterness.

So you have relations!... cried La Cibot, springing up as if her easy-chair had been heated red-hot. "Oh, well, they are a nice lot, are your relations! What! these three weeks—for this is the twentieth day, to-day, that you have been ill and like to die—in these three weeks they have not come once to ask for news of you? That's a trifle too strong, that is!... Why, in your place, I would leave all I had to the Foundling Hospital sooner than give them one farthing!"

Well, my dear Mme. Cibot, I meant to leave all that I had to a cousin once removed, the daughter of my first cousin, President Camusot, you know, who came here one morning nearly two months ago.

Oh! a little stout man who sent his servants to beg your pardon—for his wife's blunder?—The housemaid came asking me questions about you, an affected old creature she is, my fingers itched to give her velvet tippet a dusting with my broom handle! A servant wearing a velvet tippet! did anybody ever see the like? No, upon my word, the world is turned upside down; what is the use of making a Revolution? Dine twice a day if you can afford it, you scamps of rich folk! But laws are no good, I tell you, and nothing will be safe if Louis-Philippe does not keep people in their places; for, after all, if we are all equal, eh, sir? a housemaid didn't ought to have a velvet tippet, while I, Mme. Cibot, haven't one, after thirty years of honest work.—There is a pretty thing for you! People ought to be able to tell who you are. A housemaid is a housemaid, just as I myself am a portress. Why do they have silk epaulettes in the army? Let everybody keep their place. Look here, do you want me to tell you what all this comes to? Very well, France is going to the dogs.... If the Emperor had been here, things would have been very different, wouldn't they, sir?... So I said to Cibot, I said, 'See here, Cibot, a house where the servants wear velvet tippets belongs to people that have no heart in them—'

No heart in them, that is just it, repeated Pons.

And with that he began to tell Mme. Cibot about his troubles and mortifications, she pouring out abuse of the relations the while and showing exceeding tenderness on every fresh sentence in the sad history. She fairly wept at last.

To understand the sudden intimacy between the old musician and Mme. Cibot, you have only to imagine the position of an old bachelor lying on his bed of pain, seriously ill for the first time in his life. Pons felt that he was alone in the world; the days that he spent by himself were all the longer because he was struggling with the indefinable nausea of a liver complaint which blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all his many interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia; he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris.

The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,—all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the bachelor patient's character is as weak as his nature is sensitive and incredulous. Pons was charmed to hear La Cibot's tittle-tattle. Schmucke, Mme. Cibot, and Dr. Poulain meant all humanity to him now, when his sickroom became the universe. If invalid's thoughts, as a rule, never travel beyond in the little space over which his eyes can wander; if their selfishness, in its narrow sphere, subordinates all creatures and all things to itself, you can imagine the lengths to which an old bachelor may go. Before three weeks were out he had even gone so far as to regret, once and again, that he had not married Madeleine Vivet! Mme. Cibot, too, had made immense progress in his esteem in those three weeks; without her he felt that he should have been utterly lost; for as for Schmucke, the poor invalid looked upon him as a second Pons. La Cibot's prodigious art consisted in expressing Pons' own ideas, and this she did quite unconsciously.

Ah! here comes the doctor! she exclaimed, as the bell rang, and away she went, knowing very well that Remonencq had come with the Jew.

Make no noise, gentlemen, said she, "he must not know anything. He is all on the fidget when his precious treasures are concerned."

A walk round will be enough, said the Hebrew, armed with a magnifying-glass and a lorgnette.