Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/126



T was at the extremity of a village: a window was hurriedly thrown open, and a man appeared at it, his features livid, his eyes haggard, his lips agitated by a convulsive tremor; his right hand grasped a knife from which blood was dripping, drop by drop. He cast a look into the silent country, then sprang to the ground, and set off running away through the fields.

At the end of a quarter of an hour he stopped exhausted, breathless, at the edge of a wood, twenty paces from a highway. He searched for the most closely grown, the most impenetrable spot to be found, and pressed his way into it, regardless of the thorns that were tearing him; then he began to dig up the earth with his knife. When he had made a hole a foot deep, he placed the weapon in it, and covered it with the soil he had dug out, re-covered it with a grass sod, which he trampled down solidly, after which he sat down upon the wet grass.

He listened, and appeared terrified by the silence which hung upon the country.

It was the hour when the darkness of night is replaced by that grey and uniform tint which is neither day nor night, and through which objects look like phantoms.

It seemed to him that he was alone in this funereal immensity, in the midst of this dumb and dim nature. Suddenly a sound made him start; it was the axle of a waggon creaking on the road, a league away perhaps; but in the silence this strange and discordant noise made itself heard with singular distinctness.

Then Nature awoke little by little. The lark took flight towards the blue sky, pouring out his notes, at once timid and charming, overflowing with life and happiness; a winged tribe began to sing and flutter amid the leaves glittering with dew; on all sides—in the moss on which the golden insect was crawling, to the branch of the highest oak, where the bird voluptuously plumed herself in the ether—arose a morning concert, so harmonious in its confusion, so potent in its