He paused a minute, and then went on pleadingly:—
'Think of all the stories I have told you, remember the nuts and the apples.—Eh! wake up, little lad, and come back to poor, ugly John Paqualin, to whom his fellow men have shown such scant mercy.'
But the child lay quite still; his long, black eyelashes resting on his pale cheeks, and his pretty, round mouth a wee bit open as he sighed softly in that strange stupor of sleep.
Tears dimmed the charcoal-burner's eyes. He bent his wild shock head and rested it down on the white coverlet.
'Ah, great God!' he murmured, 'Thou who art all powerful, listen to me. See here, can't we make an exchange?—Take my poor, battered, weary, old soul instead of his fresh, innocent, white one. Let me give him my life for his mother's sake, the sweetest and most compassionate of women. She will grieve if she loses him, her darling, her baby; and kind as she is, she won't miss me very much. Why should she?—an outcast of nature, a shameful, misshapen mistake; one sorry sight the less in the world when I'm gone, that's all.—Death's dreadful, they say—yes, I know I am afraid of it. But, after all, it can't be so very much worse than life—at least for some of us.'
He threw back his head, and clasped his hard hands together.
'Here, take me,' he cried. 'I will come. A trifle of suffering, more or less, what does it matter? Spare the little lamb, O Lord, and take me, John Paqualin, as ransom.'
Now the charcoal-burner was not quite right in his head, you see, and that accounts for his eccentric prayer and very original behaviour. You had better bear this in mind. I won't tell you why; you will probably find out for yourselves when you have seen more of the world and grown rather older.
Paqualin knelt on there for some time, looking up as though he expected a direct and visible answer to his singular petition. But nothing happened save that Eliza came upstairs on the tips of her toes—a way of stepping which she intended to be particularly quiet, but which was, in fact, particularly noisy—and peeped into the room. Seeing the charcoal-burner kneeling by the bed-side, she gave a fearful gasp, and sank down into the nearest chair.