by Eugène Sue
Frederick started imperceptibly.
Then he replied, immediately:
“I am at your service, M. David.”
And turning to Madame Bastien, he said:
“Good-bye, mother!” and embraced the young woman.
It is impossible to describe what Madame Bastien felt when she heard the words, “Good-bye, mother.”
These words which, the night before, whether illusion or reality, had filled her heart with such gloomy forebodings!
Marie thought, too, that her son, so to speak, made his kisses linger longer than was his habit, and that his hand that she held trembled in her own.
The emotion of the young mother was so intense that her face became deadly pale, and she exclaimed, in spite of herself, with an accent of fright:
“My God, Frederick, where are you going?”
David’s eyes did not leave Madame Bastien a moment; he understood all, and said to her, with the most natural air in the world, at the same time placing intentional stress on certain words:
“Why, madame, Frederick has said good-bye to you because he is going to take a walk with me.”
“Of course, mother,” added the young man, struck with the emotion of Madame Bastien, and secretly throwing on her an anxious and penetrating glance.
David surprised this glance, and he made an expressive sign to Madame Bastien, as much as to say:
“What have you to fear? Am I not there?”
“That is true; my fears are foolish,” thought Madame Bastien. “Is not M. David with Frederick?”
All this passed in much less time than it takes to write it. The preceptor, taking Frederick by the arm, said to Madame Bastien, smiling:
“It is probable, madame, that our class in the open field will last until breakfast. You see that I am without pity for my pupil. I wish to bring him back to you weary with fatigue.”
Madame Bastien opened the glass door which led into the study hall under the grove.
David and Frederick went out.
The youth evaded his mother’s glance a second time.
For a long time the young woman remained sad and thoughtful on the threshold of the door, her eyes fixed on the road that her son and David had taken.
“I leave the choice of our walk to you, my dear child,” said David to Frederick, when they had reached the edge of the forest.
“Oh, my God, M. David, it matters little to me,” replied Frederick, honestly, “but since you leave the choice to me, I am going to take you to a part of the wood that you perhaps are not acquainted with, — look, — near that clump of fir-trees that you see down there on the top of the hill.”
“True, my child, I have never been on that side of the forest,” said David, walking with his pupil toward the designated spot.
More and more surprised at the strange coincidence between his hopes and the sudden alteration in the son of Madame Bastien, David observed him attentively and remarked that almost always he held his head down, although, as they crossed the forest, he had two or three times turned involuntarily to look at his mother, whom he could see through the vista of tall trees, standing in the door.
After examining him for some minutes, David discovered that this calmness of Frederick was feigned. Once out of the presence of his mother, the young man not only did not control himself long at a time, but became anxious and abstracted, his features contracting sometimes in pain, and again assuming an expression of painful serenity, if such a thing can be said, which alarmed David no little.
Not to frighten Madame Bastien, he had tried to persuade her that the apparition of Frederick, on the preceding night, was only a dream. But David did not so believe; he regarded Frederick’s farewells to his sleeping mother a reality. This circumstance, with what he had just observed in the lad, made him fear that his pupil’s sudden change was a piece of acting, and might conceal some sinister motive.
“But, fortunately,” thought David, “I am here with him.”
When they had left the forest, Frederick took a road covered with turf, across the fallow ground, which, leaving the wood around Pont Brillant to the right, conducted him to the crest of a little hill where stood five or six isolated fir-trees.
“My dear child,” said David, at the end of a few minutes, “I am so pleased with the words of affectionate confidence you addressed to me this morning, because they could not have come at a better time.”
“Why is that, M. David?”
“Because, secure in this confidence and affection that I have tried to inspire in you up to this time, I will now be able to undertake a task which at first seemed very difficult.”
“And what is this task?”
“To make you as happy as you were formerly.”
“I!” exclaimed Frederick, involuntarily.
“Yes.”
“But,” replied Frederick, with self-repression, “I am no longer unhappy, I said so this morning to my mother; the malady that I suffered from, and which has embittered my feelings, has disappeared almost entirely. Besides, M. Dufour has told my mother that it is at an end.”
“Truly, my child, you are no longer unhappy? All your sorrows are at an end? Your heart is free, contented, and joyous, as it used to be?”
“Monsieur—”
“Alas! my dear Frederick, the integrity of your heart will prevent your dissimulating a long time. Yes, although you have told your mother this morning she need have no fear, you are suffering this very hour, and perhaps more than in the past.”
Frederick’s features contracted. David’s penetration crushed him, and, to avoid his glances, he looked downward.
David watched him closely, and continued:
“Even your silence, my dear child, proves to me that the task which I have undertaken, to render you as happy as you have been in the past, is still to be fulfilled. No doubt you are astonished that I have not tried to undertake it before. The reason for it is simple enough. I did not wish to venture without absolute certainty, and it was only yesterday that I arrived at a certainty of conviction concerning the malady which oppresses you, indeed, which is killing you. Now I know the cause.”
Frederick trembled with dismay. This dismay, mingled with surprise, was painted in every look he cast upon David.
Then, regretting the betrayal of his feelings, the young man relapsed into gloomy silence.
“What I have told you, my child, astonishes you, and it ought to do so,” replied David, “but,” added he, in a tone of tender reproach, “why are you frightened at my penetration? When our friend, Doctor Dufour, healed you of a mortal ailment, was he not obliged, in order to combat your disease, to know the cause of it?”
Frederick said nothing.
During several minutes, as the two were approaching the hill upon which stood the lonely fir-trees, the son of Madame Bastien had from time to time glanced slyly and uneasily at his companion. He seemed to fear the miscarriage of some project which he had been contemplating since he had left his mother’s house.
Just as they finished talking, David observed that the road bordering on the crest of the hill changed into a narrow path which skirted the clump of fir-trees, and that Frederick, in an attitude of apparent deference, had stopped a moment, as if he did not wish to step in advance of his preceptor. David, attaching no importance to so natural and trivial an incident, passed on before the youth.
At the end of a few moments, not hearing Frederick’s step behind him, he turned around.
The son of Madame Bastien had disappeared.
CHAPTER XXV.
DAVID, BEWILDERED WITH astonishment, continued to look around him.
At his right extended the fallow ground, across which meandered the road which, with Frederick, he had just followed to arrive at the crest of the hill, and he discovered then for the first time, as he took several steps to the left, that on this side this bend of the ground was cut almost perpendicular, in a length of three or four hundred feet, and hung over a great wood, the highest s
ummits of which reached only to a third of the escarpment.
From the culminating point where he stood, David, commanding the plain a long distance, satisfied himself that Frederick was neither before nor behind him, nor was he on his right; he must then have disappeared suddenly by the escarpment on the left.
David’s anguish was insupportable when he thought of Madame Bastien’s despair if he should return to her alone. But this inactive terror did not last long. A man of great coolness and of a determination often put to the test in perilous journeys, he had acquired a rapidity of decision which is the only hope of safety in extreme danger.
In a second he made the following argument, acting, so to speak, as he thought:
“Frederick has escaped from me only on the side of the escarpment; he has not thrown himself down this precipice, I would have heard the sound of his falling body as it broke the branches of the great trees I see there below me; he has then descended by some place known to himself; the ground is muddy, I ought to discover his tracks; where he has passed I will pass, he cannot be more than five minutes in advance of me.”
David had travelled on foot with Indian tribes in North America, and, more than once in the chase, separated from the main body of his companions in the virgin forests of the New World, he had learned from the Indians with whom he hunted how, by means of rare sagacity and observation, to find those who had disappeared from his sight.
Returning then to the spot where he had first perceived that Frederick had disappeared, David saw in the length of five or six metres, no other than that made by his own steps; but suddenly he recognised Frederick’s tracks turning abruptly toward the edge of the escarpment, which they coasted for a little, then disappeared.
David looked down below.
At a distance of about fifteen feet the top of an elm extended its immense arms so far as to touch the steep declivity of the escarpment. Between the thick foliage of this tree-top and the spot where he was standing, David observed a large cluster of broom, which one could reach by crawling along a wide gap in the clayey soil; there he discovered fresh footprints.
“Frederick succeeded in reaching this tuft of brushwood,” said David, taking the same road with as much agility as daring, “and afterward,” thought he, “suspending himself by the hands, he placed his foot on one of the largest branches at the top of the elm, and from there descended from branch to branch until he reached the foot of the tree.”
In David the action accompanied the thought always. In a few minutes he had glided to the top of the tree; a few little branches broken recently, and the erosion of the bark in several spots where Frederick had placed his feet, indicated his passage.
When David had slowly descended to the foot of the tree, the thick bed of leaves, detached by the autumn and heaped upon the soil, rendered the exploration of Frederick’s path more difficult; but the slight depression of this foliage where he had stepped, and the broken or separated underbrush, very thick in spots he had just crossed, having been carefully noted by David, served to guide him across a vast circumference. When he came out of this ground he heard a hollow sound, not far distant, but quite startling, which he had not noticed before in the midst of the rustling of branches and dry leaves.
This startling noise was the sound of many waters.
The practised ear of David left him no doubt upon the subject. A horrible idea entered his mind, but his activity and resolution, suspended a moment by fright, received a new and vigorous impulse. The enclosure from which he had just issued bordered on a winding walk where the moist soil still showed the tracks of Frederick’s feet. David followed it in great haste, because he perceived by the intervals and position of these tracks that in this spot the young man had been running.
But soon a hard, dry soil, as it was sandy and more elevated, succeeded the soft lowlands, and no more tracks could be seen.
David then found himself in a sort of cross-roads where he could hear distinctly the sound of the Loire, whose waters, swollen to an unusual degree in a few days, roared with fury.
David at once resolved to run straight to the river, guiding himself by its sound, since it was impossible any longer to follow Frederick by his tracks. Full of anguish and concern for the boy’s mother, — an anguish all the more intense from the recollection of the farewells addressed to her by Frederick, — he darted across the wood in an easterly direction according to the roar of the river.
At the end of ten minutes, leaving the undergrowth, David ran across a prairie which ended with the bluff of the river. This bluff he cleared in a few bounds.
At his feet he saw an immense sheet of water, yellow, rapid, and foaming, the waves of which broke and died upon the sand.
As far as his view extended, David, panting from his precipitate run, could discover nothing.
Nothing but the other shore of the river drowned in mist.
Nothing but a gray and sullen sky, from which a beating rain began to fall.
Nothing but this muddy stream muttering like distant thunder, and forming toward the west a great curve, above which rose the solid mass of the forest of Pont Brillant dominated by its immense castle.
Suddenly reduced to enforced inaction, David felt his strong and valiant soul bow beneath the weight of a great despair.
Against this despair he vainly struggled, hoping that perhaps Frederick had not resolved upon this terrible step. He even went so far as to attribute the disappearance of the young man to a schoolboy’s trick.
Alas! David did not keep this illusion long; a sudden blast of wind which blew violently along the current of the river brought almost to David’s feet, as it rolled and tossed it upon the sand, a cap of blue cloth bound with a little Scotch border, which Frederick had worn that morning.
“Unhappy child!” exclaimed David, his eyes full of tears, “and his mother, his mother! oh, this is terrible!”
Suddenly he heard, above the roar of the waters, and brought by the wind, a long cry of distress.
Remounting at once the bank opposite the wind which brought this cry to his ears, David ran with all his might in the direction of the call.
Suddenly he stopped.
These words, uttered with a heartrending cry, reached his ear:
“My mother! oh, my mother!”
A hundred steps before him, David perceived, almost at the same time, in the middle of the surging waters, the head of Frederick, livid! frightful! his long hair matted on his temples, his eyes horribly dilated, while his arms, in a last struggle, moved convulsively above the abyss.
Then the preceptor saw no more, save a wider, deeper bubbling in the spot where he had discovered the body.
A light of hope, nevertheless, illumined David’s manly face, but feeling the imminence of the peril and the danger of a blind precipitation, — for he had need of all his skill and all his strength, and, too, of all possible freedom from restraint, — he had the self-possession, after having thrown off his coat and vest, to take off his cravat, his stockings, and even his suspenders.
All this was executed with a sort of deliberate quickness which permitted David, while he was removing his garments, to follow with an attentive eye the current of the river, and coolly to calculate how far Frederick would be carried by the current. He calculated correctly. He saw soon, at a little distance, and toward the middle of the river, Frederick’s long hair lifted by the waves, and the skirt of his hunting jacket floating on the water.
Then all disappeared again.
The moment had come.
Then David with a firm and sure gaze measured the distance, threw himself in the stream, and began to swim straight to the opposite shore, estimating, and with reason, that in cutting the breadth of the river, keeping count of the drift, he ought to reach the middle of the Loire a little before the current would carry Frederick’s body there.
David’s foresight made no mistake; he had already gained the middle of the stream when he saw at his left, drifting between two waves, the bod
y of Madame Bastien’s son, entirely unconscious.
Seizing Frederick’s long hair with one hand, he began to swim with the other hand, and reached the shore by means of the most heroic efforts, tortured every moment with the thought that perhaps, after all, he had rescued only a corpse.
At last he trod upon the shore. Robust and agile, he took the young man in his arms and laid him on the turf, about a hundred steps from the spot where he had left his garments.
Then, kneeling down by Frederick, he put his hand upon the poor boy’s heart. It was not beating, his extremities were stiff and cold, his lips blue and convulsively closed, nor did one breath escape from them.
David, terrified, lifted the half-closed eyelid of the youth: his eye was immovable, dull and glassy.
The rain continued to flow in torrents over this inanimate body. David could no longer restrain his sobs. Alone, on this solitary shore, with no help near, when help was so much needed, — powerful and immediate help, even if one spark of life still remained in the body before him!
David was looking around him, in desperate need, when at a little distance he saw a thick column of smoke rising from behind a projecting angle of the embankment, which, no doubt, hid some inhabited house from his sight.
To carry Frederick in his arms, and, in spite of his heavy burden, to run to this hidden habitation, was David’s spontaneous act. When he had passed this angle, he perceived at a little distance one of the brick-kilns so numerous on the borders of the Loire, as brickmakers find in this latitude all the necessary materials of clay, sand, water, and wood.
Making use of his reminiscences of travel, David recalled the fact that the Indians inhabiting the borders of the great lakes, often restore their half-drowned companions to life, and awaken heat and circulation of the blood, by means of large stones which are made hot, — a sort of drying-place, upon which they place the body while they rub the limbs with spirits.
The brickmakers came eagerly to David’s assistance. Frederick, enveloped in a thick covering, was extended on a bed of warm bricks, and exposed to the penetrating heat which issued from the mouth of the oven. A bottle of brandy, offered by the head workman, was used in rubbing. For some time David doubted the success of his efforts. Nevertheless some little symptoms of sensibility made his heart bound with hope and joy.