Page 144 - les-miserables

Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace,
when all of a sudden, and without transition, he made a
strange movement, which would have frozen the two saint-
ed women with horror, had they witnessed it. Even at this
day it is difficult for us to explain what inspired him at that
moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to throw
out a menace? Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive
impulse which was obscure even to himself? He turned
abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and bending upon
his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:—
‘Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself
like this?’
He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there
lurked something monstrous:—
‘Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I
have not been an assassin?’
The Bishop replied:—
‘That is the concern of the good God.’
Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying
or talking to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand
and bestowed his benediction on the man, who did not bow,
and without turning his head or looking behind him, he re-
turned to his bedroom.
When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn
from wall to wall concealed the altar. The Bishop knelt be-
fore this curtain as he passed and said a brief prayer. A
moment later he was in his garden, walking, meditating,
contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed in those
grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to

144 Les Miserables