“I sink!” he cried; “hold out to me something, and thou shalt have the treaty.”

“Give it me, and I will reach thee this musket,” said the judge.

“There it is,” replied the ruffian, “since the Devil is for Richelieu!” and taking one hand from the hold of his slippery support, he threw a roll of wood into the cabin.  Laubardemont rushed back upon the treaty like a wolf on his prey.  Jacques in vain held out his arm; he slowly glided away with the enormous thawing block turned upon him, and was silently buried in the snow.

“Ah, villain,” were his last words, “thou hast deceived me! but thou didst not take the treaty from me.  I gave it thee, Father!” and he disappeared wholly under the thick white bed of snow.  Nothing was seen in his place but the glittering flakes which the lightning had ploughed up, as it became extinguished in them; nothing was—­heard but the rolling of the thunder and the dash of the water against the rocks, for the men in the half-ruined cabin, grouped round a corpse and a villain, were silent, tongue-tied with horror, and fearing lest God himself should send a thunderbolt upon them.

CHAPTER XXIII

ABSENCE

L’absence est le plus grand des maux,
Non pas pour vous, cruelle!

La Fontaine.

Who has not found a charm in watching the clouds of heaven as they float along?  Who has not envied them the freedom of their journeyings through the air, whether rolled in great masses by the wind, and colored by the sun, they advance peacefully, like fleets of dark ships with gilt prows, or sprinkled in light groups, they glide quickly on, airy and elongated, like birds of passage, transparent as vast opals detached from the treasury of the heavens, or glittering with whiteness, like snows from the mountains carried on the wings of the winds?  Man is a slow traveller who envies those rapid journeyers; less rapid than his imagination, they have yet seen in a single day all the places he loves, in remembrance or in hope,—­those that have witnessed his happiness or his misery, and those so beautiful countries unknown to us, where we expect to find everything at once.  Doubtless there is not a spot on the whole earth, a wild rock, an arid plain, over which we pass with indifference, that has not been consecrated in the life of some man, and is not painted in his remembrance; for, like battered vessels, before meeting inevitable wreck, we leave some fragment of ourselves on every rock.

Whither go the dark-blue clouds of that storm of the Pyrenees?  It is the wind of Africa which drives them before it with a fiery breath.  They fly; they roll over one another, growlingly throwing out lightning before them, as their torches, and leaving suspended behind them a long train of rain, like a vaporous robe.  Freed by an effort from the rocky defiles that for a moment had arrested their course, they irrigate, in Bearn, the picturesque patrimony of Henri IV; in Guienne, the conquests of Charles VII; in Saintogne, Poitou, and Touraine, those of Charles V and of Philip Augustus; and at last, slackening their pace above the old domain of Hugh Capet, halt murmuring on the towers of St. Germain.