PAGE 15
A Family Affair
by
The door was opened and Dr. Chenet appeared. For a moment he seemed bewildered, but regaining his usual smirking expression of countenance, he jauntily approached the old woman and said: “Aha! mamma; you are better to-day. Oh! I never had any doubt but you would come round again; in fact, I said to myself as I was mounting the staircase, ‘I have an idea that I shall find the old lady on her feet once more’;” and as he patted her gently on the back: “Ah! she is as solid as the Pont-Neuf, she will bury us all; see if she does not.”
He sat down, accepted the coffee that was offered him, and soon began to join in the conversation of the two men, backing up Braux, for he himself had been mixed up in the Commune.
The old woman, now feeling herself fatigued, wished to retire. Caravan rushed forward. She looked him steadily in the eye and said: “You, you must carry my clock and chest of drawers upstairs again without a moment’s delay.” “Yes, mamma,” he replied, gasping; “yes, I will do so.” The old woman then took the arm of her daughter and withdrew from the room. The two Caravans remained astounded, silent, plunged in the deepest despair, while Braux rubbed his hands and sipped his coffee gleefully.
Suddenly Madame Caravan, consumed with rage, rushed at him, exclaiming: “You are a thief, a footpad, a cur! I would spit in your face! I–I– would—-” She could find nothing further to say, suffocating as she was with rage, while he went on sipping his coffee with a smile.
His wife returning just then, Madame Caravan attacked her sister-in-law, and the two women–the one with her enormous bulk, the other epileptic and spare, with changed voices and trembling hands flew at one another with words of abuse.
Chenet and Braux now interposed, and the latter, taking his better half by the shoulders, pushed her out of the door before him, shouting: “Go on, you slut; you talk too much”; and the two were heard in the street quarrelling until they disappeared from sight.
M. Chenet also took his departure, leaving the Caravans alone, face to face. The husband fell back on his chair, and with the cold sweat standing out in beads on his temples, murmured: “What shall I say to my chief to-morrow?”