“Oh! I will go to meet him,” said Jacques, “for as to thinking he will bring him back to me—oh! no; he would have done that before now!—Can you tell me, Audiffret, where Rampal was seen yesterday?”
“Between Tibert’s farm and Icard’s in Crau. Right there, as you know, in the middle of a bog, is a hut you can only get to by a plank walk built on piles and covered by the water—you can only tell where it is, when you know the place, by stakes sticking up at intervals the whole length of the walk. I have an idea he means to go in hiding there, the beggar, like the deserter who went there to pass his time of service——”
“Aha! he has gone to the Conscript’s Hut, has he? Very good; I will go to see him there, never fear!” said Renaud.
Blanchet, having been well rubbed down, was grinding the good lucern between his teeth. Renaud went out of the stable, and with Audiffret sat down beside Livette and the grandmother.
All four kept silence for a long moment. Nothing could be heard but the unceasing, melancholy croaking of the frogs, and beneath it, but indistinguishable, the dull murmuring of the two Rhônes and the sea.
The sky was swarming with innumerable tiny stars, which seemed to answer the various noises of the palpitating moor; and, just as the waters of the Rhône, after it rushes into the blue ocean, pursue their own course for a long while therein, unmingled, without losing their earthy color; so the Milky-Way, made of a dust of stars, pursued its course, easily distinguishable, through the ocean of starry worlds.
Renaud had a feeling of constraint.
When he joined his fiancée, he did not feel all that he ordinarily felt—a joyful impulse to run to meet her, a sort of oppression at the pit of the stomach, a sudden delicious rush of the blood to the throbbing heart!—And Livette, too, so soon, was conscious of a vague inexplicable feeling at the bottom of her heart that something was wrong. There was something between them! Indeed, he had, for the first time, something to conceal from her; and, thinking that it might, that it must be apparent, he suddenly said:
“I am not well to-night.”
“Look out for the fever!” said Audiffret. “I know it is not as frequent or as dangerous as it used to be, but you must be on your guard, all the same! Be on your guard, and take the remedy. Up in the pharmacy of the château are the registers of the time the land was first exploited—the time when the Château d’Avignon people were gaining a little arable land from the swamps every day. Why, men went to the hospital, fifteen, twenty a day. And such doses of quinine, my children! It is all written down in the Livre de Raison up there. In those days, all the farms hereabout had the same kind of a book, called by the same name, just as sailors have a log-book. Those were the days of good order and gallantry. The peasant-women in those days didn’t try to copy Parisian bourgeoises,—eh, grandmamma?—by wearing dresses that didn’t suit them, instead of the old-fashioned gowns that made them attractive because they were so becoming.”