Arthur Sherburne Hardy

“ No one is more suspicious or more difficult to convince than the commissary of police. It was with increased satisfaction that, after reaching his hut, he saw in the bundle gently deposited on his bed renewed evidences of life. Stimulated by a few drops from a black bottle, by the warmth of a ragged covering heated before a quickly improvised fire, the child's eyes opened. It did not occur to him that the image of sudden death, so recently present, was the cause of their terror. Had he not himself always been a cause of terror to every child in Freyr? ”

“ A man must have had a father, a mother. Who were they? There must be a beginning to everything. What was the beginning of this existence which, like a comet without antecedents, had silently installed itself in the orderly system of Freyr? The social astronomers of the basse-ville had in vain calculated its orbit. Some fault even had been found with the Countess Anne for permitting the intruder to occupy the ruined hut which vaguely recalled to the oldest inhabitant the ferry existing before the stone bridge connected Freyr with the opposite shore. ”

“ To descend upon a community without social passports, from nowhere, to have no sponsor, no visible means of existence, to possess nothing, even a name, is to set curiosity in motion and justify suspicion. ”

“ Meanwhile Le Vieux, as he was commonly designated by mothers in Freyr, who utilized him for disciplinary purposes when children were refractory, indifferent to the interest he had excited, having placed his sou on the counter of the bakery in the Rue de la Cite and possessed himself of the black loaf for which he had come, was shuffling back through the deserted streets to the lane which wound between the vineyard walls to the river.
A man without human attachments is an enigma. To be comprehended, one must have a past, either respectable or disreputable. ”

“ The hands of the commissary were tied. It was inconceivable that the man who had seized him so roughly before the Café de la Régence should ever again lay his hand on the shoulder of the savior of his child. This also was illogical. But it proved that the sewer-rat of M. Surbeck had a heart, since of the stoicism of Brutus he had no conception.
He had not chosen the hour of four o'clock without due premeditation. It was the hour when the countess, accompanied by the gardener, was in town. He chose the daytime because the great Danes on the terrace knew him well. ”

“ There was no terror in the voice that addressed him. The same astonishment he had experienced at the fearlessness of the little Surbeck possessed him again. He stood irresolute.
"Come in, Monsieur Garat; I have something to say to you."
Garat! his name. He felt the clutch of the commissary on his shoulder.
"You were born at Rheims on the 5th of February, 1847,—here is your birth certificate. On the 24th of December, 1876, in the village of Vigny, you murdered the agent of M. de Sèze, who came to collect the rent. There were extenuating circumstances. ”

“ Le Vieux was "an original." The Abbé d'Arlot, on the other hand, saw in this conduct a proof of his contention that in every soul there existed a seed planted by God. In all Freyr M. Surbeck was the only person who was not astonished. Enemies do not accept favors from each other. To be under obligations to such a man annoyed him. Should occasion arise, the occasion always present to his mind, he would no longer be free. ”

“ That a personal obligation should interfere with an official duty was inconceivable.
Hardly a week elapsed, however, before the inconceivable confronted him. It arrived in the mail from Paris. Every employee in the prefecture observed that morning that the commissary, always so methodical, so impassive, appeared agitated. At ten o'clock he closed his desk and left the prefecture without explanation—an unheard-of proceeding. The bonne of the Abbé d'Arlot was no less surprised, on answering the bell at the garden gate, to see the commissary before her. ”

“ The only footprints left behind him are those on the pages of the criminal records. To interrogate too closely is dangerous. He therefore disappears beneath the surface of society as a drowning man disappears. Thereafter he is a dead man, alive only to his own consciousness. ”

“ THE THREE EXPERIENCES OF LE VIEUX
THERE frequently exists in a community some individual who, justly or unjustly, is the object of suspicion and aversion, of whom children are instinctively afraid, and about whose life gathers a legend of mystery and evil. ”

“ On account of the cliff he was obliged to make the circuit of the château through the forest. As he proceeded he felt with satisfaction the beating of a heart beneath the blouse—with satisfaction, because it would be difficult to explain what he was doing with a dead child in his arms. ”