Diphtheria, terrible diphtheria that suffocates unhappy creatures, had
made its appearance at poor Martinet's farm.
Both the father and son, had died at the beginning of the week. The
mother and daughter, were now in their turn dying.
A neighbour who attended to them, feeling suddenly unwell, had taken
flight the day before, leaving the door wide open, and abandoning
the two sick people on their straw pallets, alone, without anything
to drink, choking, suffocating, dying; alone, for the last twenty
four-hours!
The doctor had cleaned out the mother's throat and made her swallow;
but the child, maddened by pain and the anguish of suffocation, had
buried and hidden its head in the straw bedding, absolutely refusing to
allow itself to be touched.
The doctor accustomed to such scenes, repeated in a sad and resigned
voice:
"I cannot really spend all day with these patients. By Jove, these
do give one a heart ache. When you think that they have remained
twenty-four hours without drinking. The wind blew the rain in on to
their very beds. All the hens had taken shelter in the fire-place."
[Illustration 037]
We had reached the farm. The doctor fastened his horse, to the bough
of an apple-tree before the door, and we went in. A strong smell of
sickness and damp, of fever and mouldiness, of hospital and cellar
greeted our nostrils as we entered. In this grey and dismal house,
fireless and without sign of life, it was bitterly cold; the swampy
chill of a marsh. The clock had stopped; the rain fell down into the
great fire-place, where the hens had scattered the ashes, and we heard
in a dark corner the noise of a pair of bellows, husky and rapid. It
was the breathing of the child. The mother, stretched out in a kind of
large wooden box, the peasant's bed, and covered with old rags and old
clothes, seemed to rest quietly. She slightly turned her head towards
us.
The doctor inquired:
"Have you got a candle?"
She answered in a low depressed tone:
"In the cupboard."
He took the light, and led me to the further end of the room towards
the little girl's crib.
She lay panting, with emaciated cheeks, glistening eyes, and tangled
hair, a pitiable sight. At each breath, deep hollows could be seen in
her thin strained neck. Stretched out on her back, she convulsively
clutched with both hands the rags that covered her, and directly she
caught sight of us, she turned her face away, and hid herself in the
straw.
I took hold of her shoulders, and the doctor, forcing her to open her
mouth, pulled out of her throat a long white strip of skin, which
seemed to me as dry as a bit of leather.
Her breathing immediately became easier, and she drank a little. The
mother raising herself on her elbow watched us. She stammered out:
"Is it done?"
"Yes, it's done."
"Are we going to be left all alone?"
A terror, a terrible terror shook her voice, the terror of solitude, of
loneliness, of darkness, and of death that she felt so near to her.