MEN WANT WINE AND HORSES WATER.
Four new travellers arrived. Cosette was sorrowfully reflecting; for though only eight years of age she had already suffered so much that she thought with the mournful air of an old woman. Her eye-lid was blackened by a blow which the woman had given her, which made Madame say now and then, "How ugly she is with her black eye!" Cosette was thinking then that it was late, very late; that she had been suddenly obliged to fill the jugs and bottles in the rooms of the travellers who had just arrived, and that there was no water in the cistern. What reassured her most was the fact that but little water was drunk at the "Sergeant of Waterloo." There was no lack of thirsty souls, but it was that sort of thirst which applies more readily to the wine-jar than to the water-bottle. Any one who asked for a glass of water among the glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. At one moment, however, the child trembled; her mistress raised the cover of a stew-pan bubbling on a stove, then took a glass and hurried to the cistern. The child had turned, and was watching all the movements. A thin stream of water ran from the tap and filled the glass. "Hilloh!" she add, "there is no water," Then she was silent for a moment, during which the child did not breathe.
"Well," Madame Thénardier continued, as she examined the half-filled glass, "this will be enough."
Cosette returned to her work, but for more than a quarter of an hour she felt her heart beating in her chest. She counted the minutes that passed thus, and wished that it were next morning. From time to time one of the topers looked out into the street and said, "It's as black as pitch," or "A man would have to be a cat to go into the street at this hour without a lantern," and Cosette shivered. All at once one of the pedlers lodging at the inn came in and said in a harsh voice,—
"My horse has had no water."
"Oh yes, it has," said Madame Thénardier.
"I tell you it has not, mother," the pedler went on.
Cosette had crept out from under the table.
"Oh yes, sir," she said, "your horse drank a bucketful, and I gave it the water and talked to it."
This was not true.
"There's a girl no bigger than one's fist who tells a lie as big as a house," the pedler exclaimed. "I tell you it has not had any water, you little devil; it has a way of breathing which I know well when it has not drunk."
Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse by agony, and which was scarce audible,—
"Oh, indeed, the horse drank a lot."
"Enough of this," the pedler said savagely; "give my horse water."
Cosette went back under the table.
"Well, that is but fair," said Madame; "if the brute has not drunk it ought to drink." Then she looked around her. "Why, where is the little devil?"
She stooped down, and discovered Cosette hidden at the other end of the table, almost under the feet of the topers.
"Come out of that!" her mistress shouted.
Cosette came out of the hole in which she had hidden herself, and the landlady continued,—
"Miss What's-your-name, give the horse water."
"There is no water, Madame," Cosette said faintly.
Her mistress threw the street door wide open.
"Well, go and fetch some."
Cosette hung her head, and fetched an empty bucket standing in a corner near the chimney; it was larger than herself, and she could have sat down in it comfortably. Madame Thénardier returned to her stove and tasted the contents of a stew-pan with a wooden spoon, while growling,—
"There's plenty at the spring. I believe it would have been better to sift the onions."
Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained halfpence, pepper, and shalots.
"Here, Miss Toad," she added, "as you come back, you will fetch a loaf from the baker's. Here's a fifteen-sous piece."
Cosette had a small pocket in her apron, in which she placed the coin; then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, and with the door open before her. She seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her help.
"Be off!" her mistress shouted.
Cosette went out and shut the door after her.
CHAPTER IV.
A DOLL COMES ON THE STAGE.
The file of open-air shops, it will be remembered, ran as far as Thénardier's inn. These stalls, owing to the approaching passage of persons going to midnight mass, were all lit up with candles in paper funnels, which, as the schoolmaster, who was seated at this moment in Thénardier's tap-room, declared, produced a "magical effect." To make up for this, not a star glittered in the sky. The last of these shops, exactly facing Thénardier's door, was a child's toy establishment, all flashing with tinsel, glass beads, and magnificent things in block-tin. Right in front the dealer had placed upon a white napkin an enormous doll, nearly two feet high, which was dressed in a pink crape gown, with golden wheat-ears in her hair,—which was real hair,—and had enamel eyes. The whole day had this marvel been displayed, to the amazement of all passers-by under ten years of age; but not a mother in Montfermeil had been rich enough or extravagant enough to give it to her child, Éponine and Azelma had spent hours in contemplating it, and even Cosette had ventured to take a furtive look at it.
At the moment when Cosette went out, bucket in hand, though she felt so sad and desolate, she could not refrain from raising her eyes to the prodigious doll, the "lady" as she called it. The poor child stopped petrified, for she had not seen this doll so close before. The whole stall seemed to her a palace, and this doll was not a doll, but a vision. Joy, splendor, wealth, and happiness appeared in a sort of chimerical radiance to the unhappy little creature who was deeply buried in mournful and cold wretchedness. Cosette measured with the simple and sad sagacity of childhood the abyss which separated her from this doll. She said to herself that a person must be a queen or a princess to have a "thing" like that. She looked at the fine dress, the long smooth hair, and thought, "How happy that doll must be!" She could not take her eyes off this fantastic shop, and the more she looked the more dazzled she became, and she fancied she saw Paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which appeared to her fairies and genii. The tradesman, who walked about at the back of the shop, seemed to her something more than mortal. In this adoration she forgot everything, even the task on which she was sent; but suddenly the rough voice of her mistress recalled her to the reality. "What, you little devil, you have not gone! Just wait till I come to you, you little viper!" Madame Thénardier had taken a look out into the street, and noticed Cosette in ecstasy. The child ran off with her bucket, taking enormous strides.