CHAPTER III.

ALONE.

The child remained motionless on the rock, with his eyes fixed—­no calling out, no appeal.  Though this was unexpected by him, he spoke not a word.  The same silence reigned in the vessel.  No cry from the child to the men—­no farewell from the men to the child.  There was on both sides a mute acceptance of the widening distance between them.  It was like a separation of ghosts on the banks of the Styx.  The child, as if nailed to the rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched the departing bark.  It seemed as if he realized his position.  What did he realize?  Darkness.

A moment later the hooker gained the neck of the crook and entered it.  Against the clear sky the masthead was visible, rising above the split blocks between which the strait wound as between two walls.  The truck wandered to the summit of the rocks, and appeared to run into them.  Then it was seen no more—­all was over—­the bark had gained the sea.

The child watched its disappearance—­he was astounded but dreamy.  His stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of existence.  It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being.  Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment?  Experience coming too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child’s mind, some dangerous balance—­we know not what—­in which the poor little soul weighs God.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded.  There was no complaint—­the irreproachable does not reproach.

His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort of internal stiffening.  The child did not bow under this sudden blow of fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun; he received the thunderstroke standing.

It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his astonishment unmixed with dejection, that in the group which abandoned him there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.

Brooding, he forgot the cold.  Suddenly the wave wetted his feet—­the tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair—­the north wind was rising.  He shivered.  There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder of awakening.

He cast his eyes about him.

He was alone.

Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than those who were now in the hooker.  Those men had just stolen away.

Let us add what seems a strange thing to state.  Those men, the only ones he knew, were unknown to him.

He could not have said who they were.  His childhood had been passed among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them.  He was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.

He had just been—­forgotten—­by them.

He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment to his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.