Still he wandered on—in cold, in hunger, in weariness. Hope was gone, memory had almost left him; nothing remained but that desperate clinging to life, which is scarcely more than the instinct of an animal. The path he had to follow was strewn with the dead bodies of his comrades; and upon these he sometimes found a little bread, or a small quantity of wine or spirits. On more than one occasion he warmed his freezing limbs by crouching beneath the corpse of a fellow-sufferer in whom the vital spark was only just extinct. He could not have survived at all but for the sugar and the chocolate that he had obtained for Guido. These, though he knew it not, afforded precisely the kind of nutriment best adapted to sustain life under intense cold.[43]
He was seldom conscious of any sensations but those of the body. He was always cold, always hungry, always in pain; only sometimes this never-ceasing, never-ending sense of pain was lightened by a kind of dull satisfaction, as when he found food, or slept, or felt a little warmer than usual. Occasionally a comrade would hail him, and inquire his name and whither he was going. Henri hardly knew what he answered. Sometimes he would talk incoherently; at other times he would reply correctly enough—say he was going to Vilna—and in his turn ask questions about the road. He noticed that some of those whom he met stared at him vacantly, or with the fierce glare of insanity; when he spoke they would give him wild and wandering answers, or perhaps even threaten him with violence. Once a miserable being, looking like a spectre, stood and gazed at him in silence, until he asked him what he wanted. “Nothing,” answered he, with a strange, sad smile,—“nothing; I am a dead man.”[44]
There were moments, perhaps hours, when Henri’s crushed intelligence seemed to revive, and he regained the power of thought and feeling. But these seasons were the most terrible of all. His soul was fast bound in misery and iron. It was hard with despair as the ground beneath his feet with the frost of winter. If he thought of his mother—he “would never see her again; and what did it matter? She had never forgiven—never would forgive him now.” Of Clémence—“she was so good! She would be very happy in her religion, in her pious books, in her good works. No doubt she was happy enough even now, though her one brother was dying miserably of cold and hunger by the side of a Polish road. Clémence would only say, ‘It is the will of God.’”
The will of God! That was the bitterest thought of all. His will was inexorable. There was no use in prayer. Henri had tried prayer, and had not been heard. God did not care for him. He sat on his throne, far above yonder cold, gray, pitiless wintry sky,—as cold, and yet more pitiless. This was his hand, his vengeance; by his inscrutable decree half a million of men were dying in torture, because he was angry with Napoleon Buonaparte.
Sometimes he thought it was not his will, but only a terrible chance. Sometimes it seemed easier to believe, with most of his comrades, that there was no God, no Being who shaped the destinies of the human race. Practically, at least, there was none for him; none to whom it mattered whether he lived or died. Then the whole subject would pass from him and be forgotten in the absorbing interest of his quest for food. Something to allay the pangs of hunger had to be sought for, very much as the wild beast seeks for its prey.
How long this dreary life in death continued Henri never knew. But it had an end at last, like all suffering on this side of the grave. One day he found himself in what was evidently the melancholy and abandoned ruin of a once beautiful pleasure-ground. The pitiless frost had done its part to blight and to destroy; but the yet more pitiless hand of man had left its deeper traces. A castle, once fit for a royal residence, but now dismantled and partly burned, completed the picture of desolation.
All at once, as revealed by a lightning flash, Henri recalled the past. Could this indeed be Zakret—the splendid summer residence, with beautiful gardens, which the Czar had purchased just before the war? Only six months had passed since Henri wandered with genuine pleasure amidst its shady walks, and admired its magnificent conservatories filled with rare exotics, its terraces gay with the bloom of a thousand summer flowers. He even remembered the exasperation he had felt at the conduct of his fellow-soldiers, who wasted all that wealth of beauty with reckless, malicious hands, because it belonged to their enemy the Czar. “He is well avenged,” thought Henri. “We did not dream that he would have proved himself so strong.”
Another thought came then. Zakret was close to Vilna, the goal for the present of his weary wanderings. The idea lent his worn frame a momentary strength; he would get up, and go there immediately. He had thrown himself upon a seat—some broken masonry belonging to what had once been a beautiful fountain—but now he rose quickly, and tried to walk. But the effort proved too much for him; he tottered, slipped upon the frozen ground, fell, and utterly lost consciousness.
When he recovered from his long and death-like swoon, he found everything changed around him. Instead of the wintry sky, he saw above him a lofty vaulted roof. The light was dim, but sufficient to reveal the scene. The floor was covered, or rather crowded with prostrate forms; in some places they lay in heaps. He stretched out his hand, and touched the form nearest him; it was cold as ice, and in his horror at the thought that he was surrounded by the dead, he uttered a weak, agonized cry.
Several heads were raised at this, and eyes, bright with fever or dim with the mists of approaching death, gazed at him in a kind of dull surprise.