She took off her shawl in that slow way peculiar to invalids, so slow
that it seems painful. Her trembling fingers felt about for the buttons
that she had to unfasten, her mother helped her to take off the flannel
and cotton-wool in which she was wrapped, leaving her poor thin neck and
arms bare.
She looked at her father, at the lighted candle, the twisted paper and
the wine-glasses, with that dread that one feels on seeing the hot irons
or fire being prepared for torturing one's flesh.
"Am I right like this?" she asked, trying to smile.
"No, you want to be in this position," answered M. Mauperin, showing her
how to sit.
She turned round on her arm-chair, put her two hands on the back of it
and her cheek down on her hand, pulled her legs up, crossed her feet,
and, half-kneeling and half-crouching, only showed the profile of her
frightened face and her bare shoulders. She looked ready for the coffin
with her bony angles. Her hair, which was very loose, glided with the
shadow down the hollow of her back. Her shoulder-blades projected, the
joints of her spine could be counted, and the point of a poor thin
little elbow appeared through the sleeves of her under-linen, which had
fallen to the bend of her arm.
"Well, father?"
He was standing there, riveted to the spot, and he did not even know of
what he was thinking. At the sound of his daughter's voice he picked up
a glass, which he remembered belonged to a set he had bought for a
dinner-party in honour of Renée's baptism. He lighted a piece of paper,
threw it into the glass, and closed his eyes as he turned the glass
over. Renée gave a little hiss of pain, a shudder ran through all the
bones down her back, and then she said:
"Oh, well; I thought it would hurt me much more than that."
M. Mauperin took his hand from the glass and it fell to the ground; the
cupping had not succeeded.
"Give me another," he said to his wife.
Mme. Mauperin handed it to him in a leisurely way.
"Give it me," he said, almost snatching it from her. His forehead was
wet with perspiration, but he no longer trembled. This time the vacuum
was made: the skin puckered up all round the glass and rose inside as
though it were being drawn by the scrap of blackened paper.
"Oh, father! don't bear on so," said Renée, who had been holding her
lips tightly together; "take your hand off."
"Why, I'm not touching it--look," said M. Mauperin, showing her his
hands.
Renée's delicate white skin rose higher and higher in the glass, turning
red, patchy, and violet. When once the cupping was done the glass had to
be taken away again, the skin drawn to the edge on one side of the
glass, and then the glass swayed backward and forward from the other
side. M. Mauperin was obliged to begin again, two or three times over,
and to press firmly on the skin, near as it was to the bones.
L
Disease does its work silently and makes secret ravages in the
constitution. Then come those terrible outward changes which gradually
destroy the beauty, efface the personality, and, with the first touches
of death, transform those we love into living corpses.
Every day M. Mauperin sought for something in his daughter which he
could not find--something which was no longer there. Her eyes, her
smile, her gestures, her footstep, her very dress which used proudly to
tell of her twenty years, the girlish vivacity which seemed to hover
round her and light on others as it passed--everything about her was
changing and life itself gradually leaving her. She no longer seemed to
animate all that she touched. Her clothes fell loosely round her in
folds as they do on old people. Her step dragged along, and the sound of
her little heels was no longer heard. When she put her arms round her
father's neck, she joined her hands awkwardly, her caresses had lost
their pretty gracefulness. All her gestures were stiff, she moved about
like a person who feels cold or who is afraid of taking up too much
space. Her arms, which were generally hanging down, now looked like the
wet wings of a bird. She scarcely even resembled her old self. And when
she was walking in front of her father, with her bent back, her shrunken
figure, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, and her dress almost
falling off her, it seemed to M. Mauperin that this could not be his
daughter, and as he looked at her he thought of the Renée of former
days.
There was a shadow round her mouth that seemed to go inside when she
smiled. The beauty spot on her hand, just by her little finger, had
grown larger, and was as black as though mortification had set in.