"My God, have you no feelings?" she reproved her father. "The lad has hurt his foot. Must you torture him? Will that cure it?"
"Hurt his foot!" said Binet. "I can see nothing the matter with his foot--nothing to justify all this uproar. He has bruised it, maybe..."
"A man with a bruised foot doesn't scream like that," said Madame over Climene's shoulder. "Perhaps he has dislocated it."
"That is what I fear," whimpered Scaramouche.
Binet heaved himself up in disgust.
"Take him to bed," he bade them, "and fetch a doctor to see him."
It was done, and the doctor came. Having seen the patient, he reported that nothing very serious had happened, but that in falling he had evidently sprained his foot a little. A few days' rest and all would be well.
"A few days!" cried Binet. "God of God! Do you mean that he can't walk?"
"It would be unwise, indeed impossible for more than a few steps."
M. Binet paid the doctor's fee, and sat down to think. He filled himself a glass of Burgundy, tossed it off without a word, and sat thereafter staring into the empty glass.
"It is of course the sort of thing that must always be happening to me," he grumbled to no one in particular. The members of the company were all standing in silence before him, sharing his dismay. "I might have known that this--or something like it--would occur to spoil the first vein of luck that I have found in years. Ah, well, it is finished. To-morrow we pack and depart. The best day of the fair, on the crest of the wave of our success--a good fifteen louis to be taken, and this happens! God of God!"
"Do you mean to abandon to-morrow's performance?"
All turned to stare with Binet at Andre-Louis.
"Are we to play 'Figaro-Scaramouche' without Scaramouche?" asked Binet, sneering.
"Of course not." Andre-Louis came forward. "But surely some rearrangement of the parts is possible. For instance, there is a fine actor in Polichinelle."
Polichinelle swept him a bow. "Overwhelmed," said he, ever sardonic.
"But he has a part of his own," objected Binet.
"A small part, which Pasquariel could play."
"And who will play Pasquariel?"
"Nobody. We delete it. The play need not suffer."
"He thinks of everything," sneered Polichinelle. "What a man!"