Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v1.djvu/72

52 he submitted. There was no complaint; the irreproachable does not reproach. His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort of internal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow of fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun; he received the thunderstroke standing. It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his astonishment unmixed with dejection, that, in the group which abandoned him, there was no one who loved him, and no one whom he loved.

Brooding, the child forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet,—the tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair,—the north wind was rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder of awakening. He glanced about him. He was alone. Up to this time there had never existed for him any other men than those who were now in the hooker,—those men who had just stolen away. Strange to say, those men, the only ones he knew, were really strangers to him. He could not have told who they were. His childhood had been passed among them, without his having the consciousness of being one of them. He was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more. He had just been forgotten by them. He had no money about him, no shoes on his feet, scarcely a garment on his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket. It was winter; it was night. It would be necessary to walk several miles before a human habitation could be reached. He did not know where he was. He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the brink of the sea had gone away without him. He felt himself put outside the pale of life. He felt that man had failed him. He was ten years old.

The child was in a desert, between heights from which he saw the night descending, and depths where