In the meantime, the long, trying scene had exhausted Daniel; and he lay
there, panting, on his bed. The surgeon and the lawyer withdrew, to let
him have some rest.
He certainly needed it; but how could he sleep with the fearful idea
of his Henrietta--she whom he loved with his whole heart--being in the
hands of this Justin Chevassat, a forger, a former galley-slave, the
accomplice and friend of Crochard, surnamed Bagnolet?
“And I myself handed her over to him!” he repeated for the thousandth
time,--“I, her only friend upon earth! And her confidence in me was
so great, that, if she had any presentiment, she suppressed it for my
sake.”
Daniel had, to be sure, a certain assurance now, that Maxime de Brevan
would not be able to escape from justice. But what did it profit him to
be avenged, when it was too late, long after Henrietta should have been
forced to seek in suicide the only refuge from Brevan’s persecution? Now
it seemed to him as if the magistrate was far more anxiously concerned
for the punishment of the guilty than for the safety of the victims.
Blinded by passion, so as to ask for impossibilities, Daniel would have
had this lawyer, who was so clever in unearthing crimes committed in
Saigon, find means rather to prevent the atrocious crime which was now
going on in France. On his part, he had done the only thing that could
be done.
At the first glimpse of reason that had appeared after his terrible
sufferings, he had hastened to write to Henrietta, begging her to take
courage, and promising her that he would soon be near her. In this
letter he had enclosed the sum of four thousand francs.
This letter was gone. But how long would it take before it could reach
her? Three or four months, perhaps even more.
Would it reach her in time? Might it not be intercepted, like the
others? All these anxieties made a bed of burning coals of the couch
of the poor wounded man. He twisted and turned restlessly from side to
side, and felt as if he were once more going to lose his senses. And
still, by a prodigious effort of his will, his convalescence pursued its
normal, steady way in spite of so many contrary influences.
A fortnight after Crochard’s confession, Daniel could get up; he spent
the afternoon in an arm-chair, and was even able to take a few steps in
his chamber. The next week he was able to get down into the garden
of the hospital, and to walk about there, leaning on the arm of his
faithful Lefloch. And with his strength and his health, hope, also,
began to come back; when, all of a sudden, two letters from Henrietta
rekindled the fever.
In one the poor _girl_ told him how she had lived so far on the money
obtained from the sale of the little jewelry she had taken with her, but
added that she was shamefully cheated, and would soon be compelled to
seek employment of some sort in order to support herself.
“I am quite sure,” she said, with a kind of heartrending cheerfulness,
“that I can earn my forty cents a day; and with that, my friend, I shall
be as happy as a queen, and wait for your return, free from want.”