All remained silent.
Hexe-Baizel soon brought some soup, and the party formed a circle around the great smoking pot.
Chapter XXIV.
Catherine Lefevre came forth from the ruin at about seven o'clock in the morning. Louise and Hexe-Baizel were yet sleeping; but day—the brilliant day of the mountains—already flooded the valleys. Far below, through the blue depths, forests, gorges, rocks, were outlined like the mosses and pebbles of a lake beneath its crystal waters. Not a breath stirred the air, and Catherine, as she surveyed the grandeur of the scene, felt a sense of peaceful calm—of repose, greater even than that of sleep, steal over her. "Our miseries, our unrest, and our sufferings are but of a day," she thought. "Why disturb heaven with our groans? Why dread the future? All these things endure but a moment. Our plaints are as those of a butterfly when the leaves fall; they do not keep winter away. Time must end for all; we must die that we may be born again."
Thus mused the old woman, and she no longer feared what might happen. Suddenly a murmur of voices filled her ears; she turned and saw Hullin with the three smugglers, all earnestly talking, on the opposite side of the plateau. They had not seen her, so deeply did the subject of their conversation interest them.
Old Brenn, at the edge of the rock, with a short, black pipe between his teeth, his cheeks wrinkled like a withered leaf, short nose, grey moustache, bleared eye-lids, half-closed over reddish-brown eyes, and long great-coat sleeves hanging by his sides, gazed at the different points Hullin was showing them among the mountains; and the other two, wrapped in their gray cloaks, stepped forward or backward, shading their eyes with their hands, in deep attention.
Catherine walked toward them, and soon she heard:
"Then you do not think it possible to reach the foot of the mountain?"
"No, Jean-Claude; there is no way of doing so," answered Brenn; "those villains know the country thoroughly, and all the paths are guarded. Look! there is the meadow of Chevreuils along that lake; no one ever even thought of watching it; but see, they are there. And yonder, the pass of Rothstein—a mere goat-path, where a man is scarcely seen once in ten years—you see a bayonet glisten behind the rock, do you not? And there, where I have climbed for eight years with my sacks without ever meeting a gendarme, they hold that too. Some fiend must have shown them the defiles."