Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/129

 able to look behind him without seeing a dead body, beside him without dreading to find a gendarme at his elbow, before him without seeing a vision of the scaffold. Yes, he is happy, that old mendicant, and I may well envy him his lot."

Suddenly he turned pale, a nervous trembling agitated all his limbs, and his features were drawn up like those of an epileptic.

"There they are!" he stammered, his eyes fixed upon a point on the road.

With haggard eye, bewildered, mad with terror, he looked on all sides, seeking to find a place of concealment; but so strangely was he overcome by fear that his eyes saw nothing, and his mind was incapable of thought.

During this time the gendarmes approached rapidly.

The gallop of the horses and the clanking of arms suddenly brought back to him his presence of mind, and, seeing before him an elm, the foliage of which was dense enough to hide him from sight, he climbed up it with the agility of a squirrel.

He was in safety when the two gendarmes halted on the road a few paces from him.

He listened, motionless, terrified, a prey to emotion so violent that he could hear the beating of the heart within him.

"What if we search this wood!" said one of the gendarmes.

"It's too small," said the other; "it's not there that our man would take refuge—rather in a forest."

"Anyhow, it will be prudent to beat it up."

"No," replied his comrade, "it would be time lost, and the assassin has already a ten hours' start of us."

And they went on at a trot.

The murderer breathed again; he felt a renewed life. But, this agony passed, a suffering, for a moment forgotten, made itself felt anew, and he cried:

"My God, how hungry I am!"

He had not eaten for forty-eight hours.

His legs gave way under him; he was seized with giddiness and a humming in the ears. And yet, he no more thought of going to the village for bread. The gendarmes! the scaffold! Those two phantoms ceaselessly rose before him, and over-mastered even the pangs of famine.

While his restless ears were on the watch for all sounds in the country, the dreary tolling of a bell made him start: it was the bell of the village church sounding the funeral knell. The murderer listened, pale, downcast, shuddering at every stroke, as if the clapper of the bell had struck upon his heart. Then big tears fell slowly from his eyes, and streamed down his cheeks unobserved by him, without his making any attempt to stop their flow.

It was because these funeral sounds evoked in his imagination a picture at once terrible and heartrending. At that same hour the bell of another village church was tolling like this for another death.

"Oh, wretch, wretch that I am!" sighed the murderer, covering his face with both his hands.

He listened again to the strokes of the church bell, which sounded to him like the sobs of the poor victim, and he murmured:

"Oh, idleness! it led me to the tavern—and the tavern, this is what has come of it!—three orphans, a poor wife in the ground, and I—a monster, hateful to all, hunted like a wild beast, pursued without rest or truce, until the hour when they shall have driven me to the scaffold. Horrible, horrible destiny!—and yet too mild a punishment."

He remained in the tree until night had come. When he saw the stars shine in the sky, when, in the vast solitude around him, he heard nothing but that vague breathing which seems like the respiration of the sleeping earth, then only he ventured to descend to rest himself.

He stretch himself at the foot of the tree, and closed his eyes; but fear which would not quit him, hunger which gnawed at his vitals, kept him constantly awake, and he rose at the first sign of dawn, overwhelmed, bowed down at once by alarm, fatigue, and the fasting of nearly three days.

At the end of a few hours his hunger, sharpened by the exciting air of the wood, ended by overcoming all his terror; and, feeling that his reason was beginning to reel in his brain, he decided to go into the village in search of bread.

He shook off the blades of grass which hung to his clothes, retied his neckerchief, passed his fingers through his tangled hair, then resolutely went out into the plain. Five minutes afterwards he entered the village, walking slowly, his head bent down, like a man overcome by fatigue, but casting a furtive and suspicious glance right and left, and ready to take flight at the first appearance of danger.