Part 14 (2/2)
Until then bear your disco that you have brought it entirely upon yourself by your uncharitableness If you spend the night considering that, the lesson should not be lost upon you By rown so charitable as not to knoho it was that tied you up Good-night”
He stepped out and closed the door
To unlock the ferry, and pull hi waters, on which the faint ed not more than six or sevensedges that fringed the southern bank of the strea ashore, andthe footpath in the dark, he struck out across a sodden meadow in quest of the road
BOOK II: THE BUSKIN
CHAPTER I THE TRESPassERS
Co instinct rather than reason, turned his face to the south, and plodded wearily and oing, or of whither he should go All that ireat a distance as possible between Gavrillac and hi to Nantes; and there, by e the newly found weapon of his oratory, excite the people into sheltering him as the first victiainst which he had sworn them to take up arms But the idea was one which he entertained merely as an indefinite possibility upon which he felt no real iht of Fresnel as he had last seen hi eyeballs ”For one as anything but a man of action,” he writes, ”I felt that I had acquitted myself none so badly” It is a phrase that recurs at intervals in his sketchy ”Confessions” Constantly is he re you that he is awhen dire necessity drives him into acts of violence I suspect this insistence upon his philosophic detachh--to betray his besetting vanity
With increasing fatigue came depression and self-criticis M de Lesdiguieres
”It is much better,” he says somewhere, ”to be wicked than to be stupid
Most of this world's misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity” And we know that of all stupidities he considered anger the ry with a creature like M de Lesdiguieres--a lackey, a fribble, a nothing, despite his potentialities for evil He could perfectly have discharged his self-i the vindictive resentuely launched upon life with the riding-suit in which he stood, a single louis d'or and a few pieces of silver for all capital, and a knowledge of lahich had been inadequate to preserve hi it
He had, in addition--but these things that were to be the real salvation of hihter, sadly repressed of late, and the philosophic outlook and mercurial temperaes
Meanwhile he traht, until he felt that he could tramp no more He had skirted the little townshi+p of Guichen, and noithin a half-ood seven s refused to carry him any farther
He was nen when he came to a halt He had left the road, and taken heedlessly to the footpath that struck across the waste of indifferent pasture interspersed with cluht the coe Beyond this loo on the edge of a long stretch of meadowland That dark, silent shadow itshelter to his subconsciousness
A moment he hesitated; then he struck across towards a spot where a gap in the hedge was closed by a five-barred gate He pushed the gate open, went through the gap, and stood now before the barn It was as big as a house, yet consisted of no more than a roof carried upon half a dozen tall, brick pillars But densely packed under that roof was a great stack of hay that proht Stout ti ends to serve as ladders by which the labourer th remained him, Andre-Louis climbed by one of these and landed safely at the top, where he was forced to kneel, for lack of rooht Arrived there, he res Next he cleared a trough for his body, and lying down in it, covered himself to the neck with the hay he had removed Within five minutes he was lost to all worldly cares and soundly asleep
When next he awakened, the sun was already high in the heavens, fro ell advanced; and this before he realized quite where he was or how he ca senses came a drone of voices close at hand, to which at first he paid little heed He was deliciously refreshed, luxuriously drowsy and luxuriously warrew ht free both ears to listen, his pulses faintly quickened by the nascent fear that those voicesaccents of a woh laden with alarm
”Ah, mon Dieu, Leandre, let us separate at once If it should be my father”
And upon this a :
”No, no, Cli We are quite safe Why do you start at shadows?”
”Ah, Leandre, if he should find us here together! I treht”
More was not needed to reassure Andre-Louis He had overheard enough to know that this was but the case of a pair of lovers ith less to fear of life, were yet--after the manner of their kind--more tih to the edge of the hay Lying prone, he advanced his head and peered down
In the space of cropped e stood aThe man was a well-set-up, comely felloith a fine head of chestnut hair tied in a queue by a broad bow of black satin He was dressed with certain tawdry attempts at ostentatious elance in his favour His coat of a fashi+onable cut was of faded plu since departed He affected ruffles, but for want of starch they hung like weeping s over hands that were fine and delicate His breeches were of plain black cloth, and his black stockings were of cotton--nificent coat His shoes, stout and serviceable, were decked with buckles of cheap, lack-lustre paste But for his engaging and ingenuous countenance, Andre-Louis ht of that order which lives dishonestly by its wits As it was, he suspended judgation further by a study of the girl At the outset, be it confessed that it was a study that attracted hi the fact that, bookish and studious as were his ways, and in despite of his years, it was far from his habit to waste consideration on femininity