Everyone knew! He could never return here, nor to Paris. If he found his child, if he saved her, then--then he must go away somewhere, or--or, perhaps, then the third stroke would fall. Well, so best. He would be better dead. He could not live long; he understood by the doctor's manner that his doom was pronounced, assured. Better dead!
Upon the night air, up from the street below, he could hear the rumble of the berceuse on the stones as it approached the door of the house where he lodged; he could also hear the horses shaking their harness, and the mutterings of the coachman and the footman at being thus dragged forth from their beds at night.
It was time to go--time for Lolive and the footman to come up with the carrying chair, which he used now when stairs had to be either ascended or descended, not so much because he could not walk as because he did not care to do so. He could have got down those stairs to-night, he knew, even after this second shock, this further and last warning of his impending end--only he would not. These menials, these dogs of his, would have heard from Lolive of that stroke--they would be peering curiously at him out of their low, cunning eyes to see whether he were worse or not.
Therefore, he let them carry him down and place him on his bed in the sleeping carriage, while all the time but one thought occupied his mind.
That thought--what he would find at the end of his journey, and whether he would find his child alive or dead?
[CHAPTER XXI]
A NIGHT RIDE
The berceuse had passed through Aix and was nearing Gardanne-le-Pin, leaving to its right the dead lake known as l'Etang de Berre, while, rising up on its left, were the last and most southern spurs of the Lower Alps.
It was drawing very near to Marseilles. Inside that travelling carriage, which comprised, as has been said, a sleeping apartment and sitting-room combined, as well as a cooking place and a bed for the servant, all was very quiet now except for the snores of the knavish valet, Lolive, which occasionally reached the ears of the white-faced, stricken man in the inner compartment; the man who, in spite of the softness of the couch on which he lay, never closed his eyes, but instead, whispered, muttered, continually to himself: "If I should be too late. God! if the transports should have sailed!"
Behind, and just above where his head lay upon the pillow of that couch, there was let into the panel of the carriage a small glass window covered by a little curtain, or pad of leather, a convenience as common in those days as in far later ones, and, through this, Desparre, lifting himself at frequent intervals upon one elbow, would glance now and again as a man might do who was desirous of noting--by the objects which he passed on the road--how far he had got upon his journey. Yet, hardly could this be the case with him now, since the route the berceuse was following was one over which he had never travelled before. In the many journeys he had made, either with the regiment in which he had served so long or when riding swiftly to rejoin it after leave of absence, this road had, by chance, never been previously used by him. What, therefore, could this terror-haunted man be in dread of seeing, when, lifting the leather pad, he placed his white face against the glass and peered out; what did he see but the foliage of the warm southern land lying steeped in the rays of the moon, while no breeze rustled the leaves that hung lifelessly on the branches in the unstirred, murky heat of an almost tropical summer's night; or the white, gleaming, dusty road that stretched behind him like a thread as far as his eyes could follow it?