Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [312]
At last she summoned up all her courage and resolutely turned round.
There was nobody there.
She looked upon the ground. The shadow had disappeared.
She returned into the shrubbery, boldly hunted through the corners, went as far as the gate, and found nothing.
She felt her blood run cold. Was this also a hallucination? What! two days in succession? One hallucination may pass, but two hallucinations? What made her most anxious was that the shadow was certainly not a phantom. Phantoms never wear round hats.
The next day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette narrated to him what she thought she had heard and seen. She expected to be reassured, and that her father would shrug his shoulders and say: “You are a foolish little girl.”
Jean Valjean became anxious.
“It may be nothing,” said he to her.
He left her under some pretext and went into the garden, and she saw him examining the gate very closely.
In the night she awoke; now she was certain, and she distinctly heard somebody walking very near the steps under her window. She ran to her slide and opened it. There was in fact a man in the garden with a big club in his hand. Just as she was about to cry out, the moon lighted up the man’s face. It was her father!
She went back to bed, saying: “So he is really anxious!”
Jean Valjean passed that night in the garden and the two nights following. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.
The third night the moon was smaller and rose later, it might have been one o‘clock in the morning, she heard a loud burst of laughter and her father’s voice calling her:
“Cosette!”
She sprang out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her window.
Her father was below on the grass-plot.
“I woke you up to show you,” said he. “Look, here is your shadow in a round hat.” And he pointed to a shadow on the sward made by the moon, and which really bore a close resemblance to the appearance of a man in a round hat. It was a figure produced by a sheet-iron stove-pipe with a cap, which rose above a neighbouring roof.
Cosette also began to laugh, all her gloomy suppositions fell to the ground, and the next day, while breakfasting with her father, she made merry over the mysterious garden haunted by shadows of stove-pipes.
Jean Valjean became entirely calm again; as to Cosette, she did not notice very carefully whether the stove-pipe was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she saw, and whether the moon was in the same part of the sky. She made no question about the oddity of a stove-pipe which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when you look at its shadow, for the shadow had disappeared when Cosette turned round, and Cosette had really believed that she was certain of that. Cosette was fully reassured. The demonstration appeared to her complete, and the idea that there could have been anybody walking in the garden that evening, or that night, no longer entered her head.
A few days afterwards, however, a new incident occurred.
2 (3)
ENRICHED BY THE COMMENTARIES OF TOUSSAINT
IN THE GARDEN, near the grated gate, on the street, there was a stone bench protected from the gaze of the curious by a hedge, but which, nevertheless, by an effort, the arm of a passer-by could reach through the grating and the hedge.
One evening in this same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out; Cosette, after sunset, had sat down on this bench. The wind was freshening in the trees, Cosette was musing; a vague sadness was coming over her little by little, that invincible sadness which evening gives and which comes perhaps, who knows? from the mystery of the tomb half-opened at that hour.
Fantine was perhaps in that shadow.
Cosette rose, slowly made the round of the garden, walking in the grass which was wet with dew, and saying to herself through the kind of melancholy somnambulism in which she was enveloped: “One really needs wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. I shall catch cold.”
She returned to the bench.
Just as she was