There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.
An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a sort of lugubrious life.
The bushes shook their thin little arms with incredible fury.
One would have said that they were threatening and pursuing some one.
He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to hear,
“Little Gervais!
Little Gervais!”
Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and would have taken good care not to show himself.
But the child was no doubt already far away.
He encountered a priest on horseback.
He stepped up to him and said:—
“Monsieur le Cure, have you seen a child pass?”
“No,” said the priest.
“One named Little Gervais?”
“I have seen no one.”
He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the priest.
“Monsieur le Cure, this is for your poor people.
Monsieur le Cure, he was a little lad, about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a hurdy-gurdy.
One of those Savoyards, you know?”
“I have not seen him.”
“Little Gervais?
There are no villages here?
Can you tell me?”
“If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger.
Such persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them.”
Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence, and gave them to the priest.
“For your poor,” he said.
Then he added, wildly:—
“Monsieur l’Abbe, have me arrested.
I am a thief.”
The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.
Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first taken.
In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling, shouting, but he met no one.
Two or three times he ran across the plain towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth.
At length, at a spot where three paths intersected each other, he stopped.
The moon had risen.
He sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time,
“Little Gervais!
Little Gervais!
Little Gervais!”
His shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo.
He murmured yet once more,
“Little Gervais!” but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice.
It was his last effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried,
“I am a wretch!”
Then his heart burst, and he began to cry.
It was the first time that he had wept in nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean left the Bishop’s house, he was, as we have seen, quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto.
He could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him.
He hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the old man.