said to her son: "We have nothing
more to live on; but, then, is it so necessary to live?" She uttered
these words with an angelic smile about her lips. Abel set out for
California. He undertook the most menial services; he swept the streets,
acted as porter; what cared he, so long as his mother did not die of
hunger? All that he earned he sent to her, enduring himself the most
terrible privations, making her think that he denied himself nothing.
In the course of time Fortune favoured him; he had acquired a certain
competency. The countess came to rejoin him in San Francisco; but angels
cannot live in the rude, exciting atmosphere of the gold-seekers; they
suffer, spread their wings, and fly away. Some weeks after having lost
his mother--it was in 1863--Count Abel learned from a journal that fell
into his hands that Poland had risen again. He was twenty-one years of
age. He thought he heard a voice calling him, and another voice from the
skies whispered: "She calls thee. Go; it is thy duty." And he went. Two
months later he crossed the frontier of Galicia to join the bands of
Langiewicz.
Othello spoke to Desdemona of caverns, deserts, quarries, rocks, and
hills whose heads touch heaven; of cannibals, the anthropophagi, and men
whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Count Abel spoke to Mlle.
Moriaz of the fortunes and vicissitudes of partisan warfare, of vain
exploits, of obscure glories, of bloody encounters that never are
decisive, of defeats from which survive hope, hunger, thirst, cold,
snow stained with blood, and long captivities in forests, tracked by the
enemy; then disasters, discouragements, the vanishing of the last hope,
punishment, the gallows, and finally a mute, feverish resignation,
swallowed up in that vast solitude with which silence surrounds
misfortune. After the dispersion of the band whose destinies he had
followed, he had gone over to Roumania.
This narration, exact and precise, bore the impress of truth. Count Abel
made it in a simple, modest tone, keeping himself as much as possible
in the background, and growing persuasive without apparent effort. There
were moments when his face would flame up with enthusiasm, when his
voice would become husky and broken, when he would seek for a word,
become impatient because he could not find it, find it at last, and this
effort added to the energy of his spasmodic and disjointed eloquence.
In conclusion, he said: "In his youth man believes himself b
|