Part 32 (1/2)
”I cannot have myself drawn about in a cart, or punt a boat? Answer, if you please.”
”Yes, my son.”
”Then what further do I need for the management of a farm? Labourers I can hire. A wife?”
His father dared not say Yes.
”I will bring one!” Mathurin had reached the corner of the table and was now leaning upon it, the upper part of his body swaying and struggling to maintain its equilibrium. ”One who has more heart than all of you put together! She knows that I shall get well. She has almost given me her promise to marry me as I am ... when I shall have persuaded her.”
”Do not trust to what the girls tell you, my poor lad. It is only fathers and mothers who love and cherish those afflicted as you are.... You are ill this evening. See, your limbs are failing you.
Come to bed, I will help you.”
The cripple did not try to answer. His eyes closed, his head sank on to his shoulder; the crutches slipped from under the arms that stretched out as those of a drowning man seeking help. He would have fallen to the ground had not the farmer rushed forward to support him.
The giddiness did not last long. It was a sharp but short attack.
Hardly had his father got him into a rec.u.mbent position on the chest at the foot his bed than Mathurin opened his eyes. He looked at his father, raised himself unaided, and putting hand to the back of his neck, said:
”You see, it is nothing. The pain you caused did it.... I am not ill.”
All trace of anger had disappeared, but the misery in his face was the same, mingled with that kind of horror men experience when they have been at the very verge of death.
”Would you like me to help you?” asked his father.
With a shrug of the shoulders the cripple began to undress himself, and taking off his coat, folded it, and laid it on the chest.
”No. I will get to bed by myself. I want to be left in peace.” His voice trembled as much as his hands. ”You had better go to meet Rousille. She will have her news to tell you--and, moreover, it is pitch dark, the roads are not too safe----”
Toussaint Lumineau, who knew the danger of opposing his son in such an attack, made no demur.
”I will go as far as the road, Mathurin, and will tell the man to be at hand in the bakery in case you need him.”
He did not go even as far as the road. He was too uneasy. He went some hundred yards along the wall of La Fromentiere in the rain, turned back, and then not wis.h.i.+ng to go in too soon as to allow Mathurin time to calm down, he went into the stables to look to the animals, and see that none had broken loose.
But, all unsuspected, Mathurin had slipped out after him. The farmer had not gone ten paces beyond the gate ere the cripple had come out into the courtyard, cautiously shut the outer door, and was making his way towards the thres.h.i.+ng-floor in order to reach the meadow by the short cut.
His marvellous energy, and the diseased state of nervous excitability he was in, sustained him. A mad fancy, born of all his misery and all his dreams, forced him out on that cruel night to his doom. He would seek his lost love; would appeal by all the slights, all the suffering, all the affronts he had endured, to her who had been and still was the arbitress of his life; would say to her: ”All forsake me; I have only you. Tell me that you love me, and they will scorn me no more. Save me, Felicite Gauvrit!”
Despite the dark night, the slippery ground, the two fences he had to climb, he went quickly along the track which bordered the park. Like a naughty child fearing pursuit, he turned his head every now and then to listen. Many a sound came to him, but it was only the whistling of the wind among the elms; the rain cras.h.i.+ng down upon the slates; the roll of a distant train, probably on the way to Chalons. Mathurin descended the sloping meadow; the darkness was so dense that he had to turn back twice before he found the landing-stage. Feeling for a punt with his crutch he threw himself into the first one, and with a stroke of the pole pushed it out, not into the ca.n.a.l which led direct to Le Perrier and La Seuliere, but to the left into a d.y.k.e rarely made use of by the occupants of the farm.
The bottom of the boat was full of water; at each movement it washed over the limbs of the cowering man, but he heeded it not. What mattered the wet boat, the icy rain that was falling, the pitch darkness, the weeds that checked his progress many a time, the length of the way, the fatigue. He must reach her, did he strain his last nerve and die in the effort.
The darkness was so great that Mathurin could scarce see the bow of his boat. Since sundown the wind had been driving the fog into the Marais; in its length and breadth it was full of it, covering whole s.p.a.ces with its swaying ma.s.s; it lay over the inundated meadows, the embankments, and islets, shrouding them all in its malarial folds. It dripped in poisonous drops down poplars and willows, from the thatched roofs of hovels on the edge of the great sea sh.o.r.e where men, condemned to live in them, drank in fever without the power of struggling against it.
On such a deadly night was it that Mathurin, already a prey to the malady hanging over him, the blood surging to his head, found his strength ebbing away. In vain he threw himself from side to side of the punt, unable to distinguish which way to go. Sometimes his breath failed, he grew unconscious, and the puntsman would sit leaning forward motionless in the boat; then the cold would restore him, and with a shake he would continue his course.
As he went on further into the wildest part of the Marais, the shades of night grew peopled with forms. Birds, more and more numerous, rose as he brushed past the quivering willows. It was the time of their flight. Plovers, wild duck, bernacles, snipe, flew up, uttering their shrill or plaintive cry, soaring in invisible flocks, now high up in the icy fog, now close down to the sides of the boat. At each flight the cripple shuddered: ”Why do you cry thus at me, ye birds of ill-omen?” he thought. ”Leave me in peace, I am going to Felicite--she will consent--we shall make preparation again for our wedding--we will live at La Fromentiere.”
But his strength was exhausted. Little by little the torpor increased.
His efforts relaxed; his sight failed. He continued touching the banks with the punt pole but fitfully, and not knowing where it struck. All suddenly the boat, which drifted across an embankment into the middle of a submerged meadow, stopped. Water was all around. Mathurin's hands relaxed their hold of the pole, his eyes opened wide with terror; he felt Death creeping up from limbs to brain. Raising himself, he cried out into the night with a loud voice: ”Felicite! Father!” Then his body swayed backwards and forwards, his hand made the sign of the cross, and with mouth still open he sank lifeless to the bottom of the boat.
Through the labyrinth of d.y.k.es another punt was being rapidly propelled; at its bow a lantern was slung, just clearing the water, its tiny flame swaying with a rapid movement, and shaken by the wind.