Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/384

356 They looked at each other and burst out laughing, not understanding anything of this reveller's divagations.

The presentiment of a hidden danger that menaced them worried Paridael cruelly, sorrowed, to employ the word of the sublime Saviour, his soul unto death. A train of torments and torture was lying in wait for this adolescent flesh. He would have liked to ransom these poor children at the price of his own blood, from he did not know what vivisectors.

One moment he thought that he had found a means to ward off their destiny.

After having mentally calculated how much he still possessed, he proposed point blank to the whole troop to take them to the country, beyond Austruweel, where he would have regaled them with rice, with "Corinth bread," and with sugared coffee, just as Jesus treats his elect in Paradise.

But, while he was searching his pockets for his last money, he examined himself for bandages, lint and salve. His clothes had been fumigated at the hospital, but an abominable odor of phenol, laudanum and cauterized flesh outraged his nostrils.

Dressed in one of those picaresque rigs to the composition of which he brought a true dandyism, his cheeks sunken, his face ravaged by his illness and made more haggard and more distorted by his present worry, his ridiculous and incoherent vaporing coinciding with the unfavorable impression of his looks, Laurent Paridael was so little the person from whom one could expect liberality that, when they heard him propose such a wonderful treat in the country, the gamins believed themselves to be absolutely in the presence of an insane man, an opium smoker, or a drunkard incapable