'
'I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.'
'The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a house?'
'Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible, Monsieur,
what you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake.... Indeed you are
in error.... I asked merely for information....'
'When last I saw him,' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the signpost
at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a little
doubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a drizzling
rain that was wetting him through and through....'
Section 5
This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended
deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the approach of winter.
It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent
nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance
existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently
they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the
first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer....
If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to England, it
is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered
householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving
wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they should
die inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had
failed to urge them onward.
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