His aunts came, testing with their withered noses the smell of decaying wood and paregoric, whispering that “he never used to get like this.”
Raising their ample shoulders to ease the little black velvet straps that sunk into their flesh, they sat on either side of his bed.
They looked at each other in a pitifully surprised way. They had never seen illness, and death but once—a suicide, and this they understood: one has impulses, but not maladies.
They were afraid of meeting Vera Sovna. Their position was a difficult one; having been on friendly terms while Louis-Georges’ mother lived, they had nevertheless to maintain a certain dignity and reserve when the very townsfolk had turned against her. Therefore they left her an hour in the evening to herself. She would come creeping in, saying:
“Oh, my dear,” telling him long unheard stories about a week she had spent in London. A curious week, full of near adventure, with amusing tales of hotel keepers, nobility. And sometimes leaning close to him, that he might hear, he saw that she was weeping.
But in spite of this and of his illness and the new quality in the air, Vera Sovna was strangely gay.
During this illness the two girls served as nurses, changing the sheets, turning him over, rubbing him with alcohol, bringing him his soup, crossing themselves.
Vanka stood long hours by the bedside coughing. Sometimes he would fall off into sleep, at others he would try to talk of the revolution.
Vera Sovna had taken to dining in the kitchen, a long bare room that pleased her. From the window one could see the orchards and the pump and the long slope down to the edge of the meadow. And the room was pleasant to look upon. The table, like the earth itself, was simple and abundant. It might have been a meadow that Leah and Berthe browsed in, red-cheeked, gaining health, strength.
Great hams, smoked fowl with oddly taut legs hung from the beams, and under these the girls moved as if there were some bond between them.