XII
How long I had been sleeping there I do not know. But suddenly a curious, though well-known sensation drew me from my slumber—the sense of a strange presence near me, and of a gaze fixed upon me. I was lying on one side, with my forehead resting on my bent arm. Evidently then I could not see; but the emanation of that presence and the weight of that gaze impressed me at one and the same time, as a veritable blow striking me on the back of the head. The experience was not new to me. Often in a sound sleep have I thus divined the approach of a living being—though never with such intensity as this. I had the consciousness that the person who was thus powerfully exerting his influence upon me could be like no other human being I had ever seen. And I, who at that time—how unutterably distant in the past it seems!—was a young, a vigorous, a courageous man, instead of sitting up at once, and facing my visitant, lay there as I was, for some moments, with my forehead resting on my arm, pretending not to be awake, and listening, listening.
Through my half-opened eyelids, I could see perhaps a square foot of earth and moss in the area encircled by my arm. That earth and that moss were lighted by a pale, trembling, yellowish glow. I understood that someone was waving a light above my head.
At last I did sit up and with a start, as though I had just awakened. And I rose to my feet, drawing back a step in bewilderment.
A man was standing before me, a very very aged man; as I remarked from the long, broad, glistening, snow-white beard that covered his chest and abdomen. That much I could see in spite of the glare from a dark lantern which he was holding with the spotlight up-turned into my face. However, his voice had no huskiness when he addressed me. It was deep and solemn, but without a sign of trembling or of faintness—on the contrary, it seemed resonant with virility and vigor. I was somewhat taken aback, besides, with the curt abruptness with which he questioned me:
“What are you doing here, Monsieur?”
That was not the greeting I had been expecting; and in view of the obvious plight I was in, I found it quite discourteous. But the man was at least three times my age, I judged, and I answered as politely as I could:
“As you see, Sir, I am off the road and quite lost, I fear.”
He kept the spotlight playing on my features, and I observed that his two piercing, extraordinarily luminous eyes were studying me critically.
“Lost, eh? And here! How did you get here, Sir? And where were you going?”
I was now frankly irritated at these irrelevancies; so much so, indeed, that I failed to note the incongruity of such formal and correct language in the mouth of what must apparently have been a charcoal-burner of the mountains.
Drily I exclaimed:
“I came from Toulon by way of Solliès-Pont headed for the battery on the Grand Cap. I missed the trail somewhere near the Col de la Mort de Gauthier. There my horse fell and broke his leg; and I got lost trying to reach the paths up the Cap, cross-country.”
This version of my experiences seemed moderately to satisfy the old man. He took the light away from my eyes and swept the bushes and rocks about us with it. It was, in truth, an appallingly wild locality. In my mad race through the darkness I had reached a jumbled region of rocks and ravines where my presence might well astonish anybody. But I had just as good a right to wonder. How should he happen to be there, too?
“And you, Sir, what were you doing away off here?”
He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the top of an escarpment that towered on my left.
“I saw you from up there!” he said.
And he fell silent, as did I.
No longer pestered with the glare in my eyes, I could examine my strange companion at more advantage. He was an old man, no doubt of that, an extremely old man, as his snow-white beard, his wrinkled, withered skin, his lean, tenuous hands attested. But he was a marvellously robust and wiry old fellow. There was no droop to his shoulders. He held his head erect. His arms were well knit at the joints and he seemed lithe and agile on his legs. In view of his whole bearing, which suggested strength, energy, initiative, I gathered that the cane on which he was leaning he carried not for support but as a weapon.
I, a soldier in my early thirties, felt helpless in the presence of that powerful octogenarian. Instinctively my hand went to the automatic in my hip-pocket, where only one of the eight bullets was dead—the one that had put poor Siegfried out of his agony. However, I felt ashamed, almost at once, of such stupid and unreasonable fear of the man. I again addressed him, and this time with a deferential and somewhat effusive politeness:
“I have not thanked you, Sir, as yet. Do, please, excuse such rudeness. I appreciate your generous kindness in going to so much trouble in my behalf. I am sure you have saved my life by coming to my rescue down that perilous cliff. Please accept my deepest thanks. I am Captain André Narcy, of the staff of Vice-Admiral de Fierce ...!”
I stopped, expecting that a name would be volunteered in exchange for mine. But the old man did not introduce himself, though he did listen to what I was saying with the closest attention. I began again:
“I was, I am, the bearer of a dispatch to the corporal on guard at the Grand Cap battery. It was in an effort to execute that mission, unfortunately still unperformed, that I lost my way, wandered aimlessly about for a time, and finally lay down here to sleep when I was quite all in. And now, Sir, might I impose upon your kindness further? Could you not direct me to the Grand Cap trail, the good one, the one I was looking for and could not manage to find myself?”
Meanwhile I was studying the old man carefully. There was nothing unusual about his dress. His clothes were, to a button approximately, those one might expect to find in such weather on a shepherd, a hunter, a wood-chopper of those mountain regions; heavy hobnailed shoes and thick leggings, corduroy trousers and coat, a plain flannel shirt. But it was just at this point that the contrast between his costume and the cultivated intonation of his language first impressed me. The observation caused me another thrill of fear. In my confusion I caught his reply but indistinctly:
“The good road, Monsieur? In truth, you are on the bad road, the worst road, I might even say!”
I suppressed my uneasiness as best I could:
“Where am I, exactly? Am I far from the battery?”
“Very, very far!”
“Well, but ... what do you call this place?”
“I doubt if it has a name! At any rate, you will not find it on your chart!”
“Oh, you must be joking. I can’t be so very far off the road! I must be somewhere between the Mort de Gauthier and the Grand Cap! Call it eight miles to the fort ... and you will be putting it high!”
The fist that was clenched about the cane rose and fell in a gesture of ironic helplessness:
“Well, call it eight miles, Monsieur. How could you do eight miles in a dark like this?”
Again he swept the spotlight around that chaotic devil’s dump of boulders. To tell the truth, I cringed with involuntary terror, though I did manage to pull myself together again:
“Do them I must, in any event. The dispatch of which I have the honor to be bearer is of the first importance. You will be so kind, Sir, as to suggest the direction of the battery—and I will be infinitely obliged.”
The point of the cane swung upward from the ground toward the steepest of the precipices, the upper brink of which projected out into the chasm in a menacing overhang.
“It’s off in that direction,” said the old man.
I bowed with some ceremony, determined to waste no further time:
“Thank you, and good night, Sir!”
Resolutely I advanced to the foot of the cliff, and climbed up to the first indentation in the virtually perpendicular wall. But a sullen rage came over me as I realized the impossibility of making the ascent:
“Off in this direction, eh? But there are night hawks that seem to get around all right—and with little loss of time!”
I grumbled the words between my clenched teeth, addressing them to my own angry self alone. The man was fully fifty feet away and could not possibly have heard. Yet I suddenly felt the same pressure on the back of my head and between my shoulders which had been the cause of my awakening. The man was looking at me! That impact was the shock from his piercing eyes! I turned sharply about, almost expecting an attack from him.
But he was standing just where I had left him, his eyes fixed upon me with an expression in no sense hostile. Rather I seemed to catch a smile of kindliness playing about his withered, wrinkly features. When he now spoke, the same note of kindly benevolence was sensible in his voice, and the abruptness noticeable in his first questions had also softened measurably:
“Monsieur,” said he, “I was loathe to venture a suggestion which you had failed to invite and which, doubtless, you would be quite unwilling to accept. Nevertheless ... I should be grievously at fault, were I to let you run to certain death. I will give you an hour to break a leg, or an arm, or your neck, in tumbling into one of these gorges. Suppose you lay with a fractured skull at the foot of a wall of rock—your message would not be delivered any the sooner, would it? Don’t be impatient! Wait till daylight comes! And an early morning start will bring you to the fort and, perhaps, in time. Try to get there now and your dispatch, I assure you, will never reach its destination!”
He stood there thinking for a moment and then he concluded pensively: “A mountaineer as experienced as I am might possibly venture such a thing. But at night, over rock that is forever breaking off under your feet ...!”
I don’t know why, at just that moment, my thoughts reverted to the other encounter I had had a few hours earlier in that self-same neighborhood. I closed my eyes to reconstruct in my mind the image of Madeleine, deaf, mute, unconscious apparently, running that heath like a somnambulist.... And for the third time, but on this occasion full in the face, I felt the impact of the fluid energy which seemed to spurt from the eyes that were fixed upon me. When I looked up again, the same uncontrollable terror was in possession of me: the man was in truth gazing at me—and that was all. An extravagant suspicion flitted across my mind: that man, that curious old man—could he be listening to the sound of my thoughts, as I could hear the sound of his words?
At last he seemed willing to come to the point:
“Consider, Monsieur! I live not far from here! Would you not accept my hospitality until dawn? The rain is beginning again. It will be wet and cold on the mountains, and it is hardly midnight.”
I looked around in astonishment into the wall of darkness about us. He lived near-by? A house, in that appalling solitude?
He understood my perplexity.
“Quite so!” he said, answering my unexpressed thought. “Quite so! Just a step or two! This way, Monsieur, if you please!”
His voice had now a soft, caressing gentleness; though I sensed an imperious order in his words—a command I could only obey.
When he turned to go, I followed him.