Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [313]
Cosette reflected upon this stone, asking herself what it meant. Suddenly, the idea that this stone did not come upon the bench of itself, that somebody had put it there, that an arm had passed through that grating, this idea came to her and made her afraid. It was a genuine fear this time; there was the stone. No doubt was possible, she did not touch it, fled without daring to look behind her, took refuge in the house, and immediately shut the glass-door of the stairs with shutter, bar, and bolt. She asked Toussaint:
“Has my father come in?”
“Not yet, mademoiselle.”
(We have noted once for all Toussaint’s stammering. Let us be permitted to indicate it no longer. We dislike the musical notation of an infirmity.)
Jean Valjean, a man given to thought and a night-walker, frequently did not return till quite late.
“Toussaint,” resumed Cosette, “you are careful in the evening to bar the shutters well, upon the garden at least, and to really put the little iron things into the little rings which fasten?”
“Oh! never fear, mademoiselle.”
Toussaint did not fail, and Cosette well knew it, but she could not help adding:
“Because it is so solitary about here!”
“For that matter,” said Toussaint, “that is true. We would be assassinated before we would have time to say Boo! And then, monsieur doesn’t sleep in the house. But don’t be afraid, mademoiselle, I fasten the windows like Bastilles. Lone women! I am sure it is enough to make us shudder! Just imagine it! to see men come into the room at night and say to you: Hush! and set themselves to cutting your throat. It isn’t so much the dying, people die, that is all right, we know very well that we must die, but it is the horror of having such people touch you. And then their knives, they must cut badly! O God!”
“Be still,” said Cosette. “Fasten everything well.”
Cosette, dismayed by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and perhaps also by the memory of the apparitions of the previous week which came back to her, did not even dare to say to her: “Go and look at the stone which somebody has laid on the bench!” for fear of opening the garden door again, and lest “the men” would come in. She had all the doors and windows carefully closed, made Toussaint go over the whole house from cellar to garret, shut herself up in her room, drew her bolts, looked under her bed, lay down, and slept badly. All night she saw the stone big as a mountain and full of caves.
At sunrise—the peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had—at sunrise Cosette, on waking, looked upon her fright as upon a nightmare, and said to herself: “What have I been dreaming about? This is like those steps which I thought I heard at night last week in the garden! It is like the shadow of the stove-pipe! And am I going to be a coward now!”
The sun, which shone through the cracks of her shutters, and made the damask curtains purple, reassured her to such an extent that it all vanished from her thoughts, even the stone.
“There was no stone on the bench, any more than there was a man with a round hat in the garden; I dreamed the stone as I did the rest.”
She dressed herself, went down to the garden, ran to the bench, and felt a cold sweat. The stone was there.
But this was only for a moment. What is fright by night is curiosity by day.
“Pshaw!” said she, “now let us see.”
She raised the stone, which was pretty large. There was something underneath which resembled a letter.
It was a white paper envelope. Cosette seized it; there was no address on the one side, no seal on the other. Still the envelope, although open, was not empty. Papers could be seen in it.
Cosette examined it. There was no more fright, there was curiosity no more; there was a beginning of anxious interest.
Cosette took out of the envelope what it contained, a quire of paper, each page of which was numbered and contained a few