reached, unharmed, the high rock of Trébéron which the floodtide had already encroached upon, and he ran to the place where he had left Geneviève. She was there no longer. Astonished that she should not have awaited his return, he rapidly mounted the foot-path, reached his door, and called aloud. There was no reply. The darkness did not allow him to distinguish anything. He groped his way to the hearth, and threw around him the trembling light of a lamp hurriedly lighted. Attracted to the alcove, his glance soon made out, beside the white form of the dead sewed up in its shroud, the outline of another and a larger form, extended without moving. Mathieu approached in agony. It was Geneviève in a swoon. IV. Thanks to the Surgeon's skill, Ropars' wife at length regained her senses; but it was to fall into convulsive spasms, followed by the annihilation of all her faculties. The whole day passed without her shaking off the torpor that belonged at once to sleep and to death. One might have said that so many shocks had snapped asunder her existence, and that the quiverings of life, still flitting across her state of languor, were but the movements of a machine on the point of stopping. However, towards evening, the fever declared itself. The patient passed insensibly from lethargy to delirious agitation; she did but recognize Mathieu at intervals; and falling back, with her senses, upon her sorrows, she soon fell again into wandering. None of these symptoms seemed to belong to the malady that ravaged the lazaretto; and the Surgeon, disconcerted, let Mathieu divine his inability to make it out. Accustomed to the coarse medicines required by the robust patients of our ships, he was perforce a stranger, as are all like him, to the ailments of more delicate natures. Thus did he stand baffled before this woman, dying of a disorder such as he vainly sought to trace in his experiences. He could not conceal his doubts, and his need of more enlightened advice. Science, to which these mysterious and redoubtable symptoms were familiarized, might find there an index, where he perceived only confusion, and point out a remedy, which he dared but essay at hap-hazard. This avowal, wrung from his loyal truth, was for Mathieu a new source of torture. Shut up within prescribed limits which forbid strangers to approach Trébéron, he could not invoke that experience to which Geneviève might perchance owe her safety. In vain did he see, at his feet, boats for transporting him across the sea, and on the horizon a town whence aid might be brought to him; an obstacle invincible and insurmountable linked him to his source of trouble. Two whole days passed away for him, as one long agony, in alternations of mute dejection and of furious despair. After sitting for several hours at 

 Prev. P 32/143 next