Kabanata Kabanata 117 · THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS

The child had laid her head on a stone and fallen asleep.

He sat down beside her and began to think. Little by little, as he

gazed at her, he grew calm and regained possession of his freedom of

mind.

He clearly perceived this truth, the foundation of his life henceforth,

that so long as she was there, so long as he had her near him, he

should need nothing except for her, he should fear nothing except for

her. He was not even conscious that he was very cold, since he had

taken off his coat to cover her.

Nevertheless, athwart this reverie into which he had fallen he had

heard for some time a peculiar noise. It was like the tinkling of a

bell. This sound proceeded from the garden. It could be heard

distinctly though faintly. It resembled the faint, vague music produced

by the bells of cattle at night in the pastures.

This noise made Valjean turn round.

He looked and saw that there was some one in the garden.

A being resembling a man was walking amid the bell-glasses of the melon

beds, rising, stooping, halting, with regular movements, as though he

were dragging or spreading out something on the ground. This person

appeared to limp.

Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy. For

them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day

because it enables people to see them, and the night because it aids in

surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the

garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one

there.

He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to

himself that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their

departure; that they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the

street; that if this man should discover him in the garden, he would

cry out for help against thieves and deliver him up. He took the

sleeping Cosette gently in his arms and carried her behind a heap of

old furniture, which was out of use, in the most remote corner of the

shed. Cosette did not stir.

From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the melon

patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell

followed each of this man’s movements. When the man approached, the

sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he

made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he

halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was

attached to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who

had a bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?

As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette’s hands. They

were icy cold.

“Ah! good God!” he cried.

He spoke to her in a low voice:—

“Cosette!”

She did not open her eyes.

He shook her vigorously.

She did not wake.

“Is she dead?” he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering

from head to foot.

The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There

are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies,

and violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love

are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He

remembered that sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.

Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his

feet, without a movement.

He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a

respiration which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.

How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that

was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed

wildly from the ruin.

It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a

fire in less than a quarter of an hour.