He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin. He wanted to make it good. The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad. And then, it was no longer the tilbury. The cart was very heavy, and in addition, there were many ascents.
He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for five leagues.
At Saint-Pol he had the horse unharnessed at the first inn he came to and led to the stable; as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stood beside the manger while the horse was eating; he thought of sad and confusing things.
The inn-keeper’s wife came to the stable.
“Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?”
“Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite.”
He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.
“Make haste!” said he; “I must start again; I am in a hurry.”
A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.
“That is what ailed me,” he thought; “I had not breakfasted.”
His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.
A carter was eating at another table; he said to this man:—
“Why is their bread so bitter here?”
The carter was a German and did not understand him.
He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.
An hour later he had quitted Saint-Pol and was directing his course towards Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.
What did he do during this journey? Of what was he thinking? As in the morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse; we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing; each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.
Twilight was falling when the children who were coming out of school beheld this traveller enter Tinques; it is true that the days were still short; he did not halt at Tinques; as he emerged from the village, a laborer, who was mending the road with stones, raised his head and said to him:— “That horse is very much fatigued.”
The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.
“Are you going to Arras?” added the road-mender.
“Yes.”
“If you go on at that rate you will not arrive very early.”
He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:—
“How far is it from here to Arras?”
“Nearly seven good leagues.”
“How is that? the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter.”
“Ah!” returned the road-mender, “so you don’t know that the road is under repair? You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on; there is no way to proceed further.”
“Really?”
“You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is the road to Mont-Saint-Eloy which leads to Arras.”
“But it is night, and I shall lose my way.”
“You do not belong in these parts?”
“No.”
“And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop! sir,” resumed the road-mender; “shall I give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired; return to Tinques; there is a good inn there; sleep there; you can reach Arras to-morrow.”
“I must be there this evening.”
“That is different; but go to the inn all the same, and get an extra horse; the stable-boy will guide you through the cross-roads.”
He followed the road-mender’s advice, retraced his steps, and, half an hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed, with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion, was seated on the shaft of the cariole.
Still, he felt that he had lost time.
Night had fully come.
They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:— “Keep at a trot, and you shall have a double fee.”
In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.
“There’s the whiffle-tree broken, sir,” said the postilion; “I don’t know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early to-morrow morning.”
He replied, “Have you a bit of rope and a knife?”
“Yes, sir.”
He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.
This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a gallop.
The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture; everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror. How many things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!
He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before; he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in the neighborhood of D——, eight years previously, and it seemed but yesterday.
The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:—
“What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three leagues still to go.”
At that moment, he for the first time indulged in this reflection, thinking it odd the while that it had not occurred to him sooner: that all this trouble which he was taking was, perhaps, useless; that he did not know so much as the hour of the trial; that he should, at least, have informed himself of that; that he was foolish to go thus straight ahead without knowing whether he would be of any service or not; then he sketched out some calculations in his mind: that, ordinarily, the sittings of the Court of Assizes began at nine o’clock in the morning; that it could not be a long affair; that the theft of the apples would be very brief; that there would then remain only a question of identity, four or five depositions, and very little for the lawyers to say; that he should arrive after all was over.
The postilion whipped up the horses; they had crossed the river and left Mont-Saint-Eloy behind them.
The night grew more profound.
CHAPTER