Part 21

“Very well,” said Petit-Claud, his zeal stirred by the prospect of such a career, “very well, be in the Place du Mûrier to-morrow at half-past four; I will see old Séchard in the meantime; we will have a deed of partnership drawn up, and the father and the son shall be bound thereby, and delivered to the third person of the trinity--Cointet, to wit.”

To return to Lucien in Paris. On the morrow of the loss announced in his letter, he obtained a visa for his passport, bought a stout holly stick, and went to the Rue d’Enfer to take a place in the little market van, which took him as far as Longjumeau for half a franc. He was going home to Angoulême. At the end of the first day’s tramp he slept in a cowshed, two leagues from Arpajon. He had come no farther than Orléans before he was very weary, and almost ready to break down, but there he found a boatman willing to bring him as far as Tours for three francs, and food during the journey cost him but forty sous. Five days of walking brought him from Tours to Poitiers, and left him with but five francs in his pockets, but he summoned up all his remaining strength for the journey before him.

He was overtaken by night in the open country, and had made up his mind to sleep out of doors, when a traveling carriage passed by, slowly climbing the hillside, and, all unknown to the postilion, the occupants, and the servant, he managed to slip in among the luggage, crouching in between two trunks lest he should be shaken off by the jolting of the carriage--and so he slept.

He awoke with the sun shining into his eyes, and the sound of voices in his ears. The carriage had come to a standstill. Looking about him, he knew that he was at Mansle, the little town where he had waited for Mme. de Bargeton eighteen months before, when his heart was full of hope and love and joy. A group of post-boys eyed him curiously and suspiciously, covered with dust as he was, wedged in among the luggage. Lucien jumped down, but before he could speak two travelers stepped out of the calèche, and the words died away on his lips; for there stood the new Prefect of the Charente, Sixte du Châtelet, and his wife, Louise de Nègrepelisse.

“Chance gave us a traveling-companion, if we had but known!” said the Countess. “Come in with us, monsieur.”

Lucien gave the couple a distant bow and a half-humbled half-defiant glance; then he turned away into a cross-country road in search of some farmhouse, where he might make a breakfast on milk and bread, and rest awhile, and think quietly over the future. He still had three francs left. On and on he walked with the hurrying pace of fever, noticing as he went, down by the riverside, that the country grew more and more picturesque. It was near mid-day when he came upon a sheet of water with willows growing about the margin, and stopped for awhile to rest his eyes on the cool, thick-growing leaves; and something of the grace of the fields entered into his soul.

In among the crests of the willows, he caught a glimpse of a mill near-by on a branch stream, and of the thatched roof of the mill-house where the house-leeks were growing. For all ornament, the quaint cottage was covered with jessamine and honeysuckle and climbing hops, and the garden about it was gay with phloxes and tall, juicy-leaved plants. Nets lay drying in the sun along a paved causeway raised above the highest flood level, and secured by massive piles. Ducks were swimming in the clear mill-pond below the currents of water roaring over the wheel. As the poet came nearer he heard the clack of the mill, and saw the good-natured, homely woman of the house knitting on a garden bench, and keeping an eye upon a little one who was chasing the hens about.

Lucien came forward. “My good woman,” he said, “I am tired out; I have a fever on me, and I have only three francs; will you undertake to give me brown bread and milk, and let me sleep in the barn for a week? I shall have time to write to my people, and they will either come to fetch me or send me money.”

“I am quite willing, always supposing that my husband has no objection.--Hey! little man!”

The miller came up, gave Lucien a look over, and took his pipe out of his mouth to remark, “Three francs for a week’s board? You might as well pay nothing at all.”

“Perhaps I shall end as a miller’s man,” thought the poet, as his eyes wandered over the lovely country. Then the miller’s wife made a bed ready for him, and Lucien lay down and slept so long that his hostess was frightened.

“Courtois,” she said, next day at noon, “just go in and see whether that young man is dead or alive; he has been lying there these fourteen hours.”

The miller was busy spreading out his fishing-nets and lines. “It is my belief,” he said, “that the pretty fellow yonder is some starveling play-actor without a brass farthing to bless himself with.”

“What makes you think that, little man?” asked the mistress of the mill.

“Lord, he is not a prince, nor a lord, nor a member of parliament, nor a bishop; why are his hands as white as if he did nothing?”

“Then it is very strange that he does not feel hungry and wake up,” retorted the miller’s wife; she had just prepared breakfast for yesterday’s chance guest. “A play-actor, is he?” she continued. “Where will he be going? It is too early yet for the fair at Angoulême.”

But neither the miller nor his wife suspected that (actors, princes, and bishops apart) there is a kind of being who is both prince and actor, and invested besides with a magnificent order of priesthood--that the Poet seems to do nothing, yet reigns over all humanity when he can paint humanity.

“What can he be?” Courtois asked of his wife.

“Suppose it should be dangerous to take him in?” queried she.

“Pooh! thieves look more alive than that; we should have been robbed by this time,” returned her spouse.

“I am neither a prince nor a thief, nor a bishop nor an actor,” Lucien said wearily; he must have overheard the colloquy through the window, and now he suddenly appeared. “I am poor, I am tired out, I have come on foot from Paris. My name is Lucien de Rubempré, and my father was M. Chardon, who used to have Postel’s business in L’Houmeau. My sister married David Séchard, the printer in the Place du Mûrier at Angoulême.”

“Stop a bit,” said the miller, “that printer is the son of the old skinflint who farms his own land at Marsac, isn’t he?”

“The very same,” said Lucien.

“He is a queer kind of father, he is!” Courtois continued. “He is worth two hundred thousand francs and more, without counting his money-box, and he has sold his son up, they say.”

When body and soul have been broken by a prolonged painful struggle, there comes a crisis when a strong nature braces itself for greater effort; but those who give way under the strain either die or sink into unconsciousness like death. That hour of crisis had struck for Lucien; at the vague rumor of the catastrophe that had befallen David he seemed almost ready to succumb. “Oh! my sister!” he cried. “Oh, God! what have I done? Base wretch that I am!”

He dropped down on the wooden bench, looking white and powerless as a dying man; the miller’s wife brought out a bowl of milk and made him drink, but he begged the miller to help him back to his bed, and asked to be forgiven for bringing a dying man into their house. He thought his last hour had come. With the shadow of death, thoughts of religion crossed a brain so quick to conceive picturesque fancies; he would see the curé, he would confess and receive the last sacraments. The moan, uttered in the faint voice by a young man with such a comely face and figure, went to Mme. Courtois’ heart.

“I say, little man, just take the horse and go to Marsac and ask Dr. Marron to come and see this young man; he is in a very bad way, it seems to me, and you might bring the curé as well. Perhaps they may know more about that printer in the Place du Mûrier than you do, for Postel married M. Marron’s daughter.”

Courtois departed. The miller’s wife tried to make Lucien take food; like all country-bred folk, she was full of the idea that sick folk must be made to eat. He took no notice of her, but gave way to a violent storm of remorseful grief, a kind of mental process of counter-irritation, which relieved him.