ENRICHED WITH THE COMMENTS OF TOUSSAINT.
In the garden, near the railings looking out on the street, there was a stone bench, protected from the gaze of passers-by by a hedge, but it would have been an easy task to reach it by thrusting an arm through the railings and the hedge. One evening in this same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out, and Cosette, after sunset, was seated on this bench. The wind was freshening in the trees, and Cosette was reflecting; an objectless sorrow was gradually gaining on her, the invincible sorrow which night produces, and which comes perhaps—for who knows?—from the mystery of the tomb which is yawning at the moment. Possibly Fantine was in that shadow.
Cosette rose, and slowly went round the garden, walking on the dew-laden grass and saying to herself through the sort of melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "I ought to have wooden shoes to walk in the garden at this hour; I shall catch cold." She returned to the bench; but at the moment when she was going to sit down, she noticed at the place she had left a rather large stone, which had evidently not been there a moment before. Cosette looked at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once the idea that the stone had not reached the bench of itself, that some one had placed it there, and that an arm had been passed through the grating, occurred to her and frightened her. This time it was a real fear, for there was the stone. No doubt was possible. She did not touch it, but fled without daring to look behind her, sought refuge in the house, and at once shuttered, barred, and bolted the French window opening on the steps. Then she asked Toussaint,—
"Has my father come in?"
"No, Miss."
(We have indicated once for all Toussaint's stammering, and we ask leave no longer to accentuate it, as we feel a musical notation of an infirmity to be repulsive.)
Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and stroller by night, often did not return till a late hour.
"Toussaint," Cosette continued, "be careful to put up the bars to the shutters looking on the garden, and to place the little iron things in the rings that close them."
"Oh, I am sure I will, Miss."
Toussaint did not fail, and Cosette was well aware of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding,—
"For it is so desolate here."
"Well, that's true," said Toussaint; "we might be murdered before we had the time to say, Ouf! and then, too, master does not sleep in the house. But don't be frightened, Miss. I fasten up the windows like Bastilles. Lone women! I should think that is enough to make a body shudder. Only think! to see men coming into your bedroom and hear them say, 'Be quiet, you!' and then they begin to cut your throat. It is not so much the dying, for everybody dies, and we know that we must do so; but it is the abomination of feeling those fellows touch you; and then their knives are not sharp, perhaps; oh, Lord!"
"Hold your tongue," said Cosette, "and fasten up everything securely."
Cosette, terrified by the drama improvised by Toussaint, and perhaps too by the apparitions of the last week, which returned to her mind, did not even dare to say to her, "Just go and look at the stone laid on the bench;" for fear of having to open the garden gate again, and the men might walk in. She had all the doors and windows carefully closed, made Toussaint examine the whole house from cellar to attic, locked herself in her bedroom, looked under the bed, and slept badly. The whole night through, she saw the stone as large as a mountain and full of caverns. At sunrise—the peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laughter is always proportioned to the fear we have felt—at sunrise, Cosette, on waking, saw her terror like a nightmare, and said to herself: "What could I be thinking about! It was like the steps which I fancied I heard last week in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the chimney-pot. Am I going to turn coward now?" The sun, which poured through the crevices of her shutters and made the damask curtains one mass of purple, re-assured her so fully that all faded away in her mind, even to the stone.
"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round hat in the garden. I dreamed of the stone like the rest."
She dressed herself, went down into the garden, and felt a cold perspiration all over her,—the stone was there. But this only lasted for a moment, for what is terror by night is curiosity by day.
"Nonsense!" she said, "I'll see."
She raised the stone, which was of some size, and there was something under it that resembled a letter; it was an envelope of white paper. Cosette seized it; there was no address on it, and it was not sealed up. Still, the envelope, though open, was not empty, for papers could be seen inside. Cosette no longer suffered from terror, nor was it curiosity; it was a commencement of anxiety. Cosette took out a small quire of paper, each page of which was numbered, and bore several lines written in a very nice and delicate hand, so Cosette thought. She looked for a name, but there was none; for a signature, but there was none either. For whom was the packet intended? Probably for herself, as a hand had laid it on the bench. From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination seized upon her; she tried to turn her eyes away from these pages, which trembled in her hand. She looked at the sky, the street, the acacias all bathed in light, the pigeons circling round an adjoining roof, and then her eye settled on the manuscript, and she said to herself that she must know what was inside it. This is what she read.