d
him.--Sleep anywhere, and under any conditions, [216] seemed just then
a thing one might well exchange the remnants of one's life for.

It must have been about the fifth night, as he afterwards conjectured,
that the soldiers, believing him likely to die, had finally left him
unable to proceed further, under the care of some country people, who
to the extent of their power certainly treated him kindly in his
sickness. He awoke to consciousness after a severe attack of fever,
lying alone on a rough bed, in a kind of hut. It seemed a remote,
mysterious place, as he looked around in the silence; but so
fresh--lying, in fact, in a high pasture-land among the mountains--that
he felt he should recover, if he might but just lie there in quiet long
enough. Even during those nights of delirium he had felt the scent of
the new-mown hay pleasantly, with a dim sense for a moment that he was
lying safe in his old home. The sunlight lay clear beyond the open
door; and the sounds of the cattle reached him softly from the green
places around. Recalling confusedly the torturing hurry of his late
journeys, he dreaded, as his consciousness of the whole situation
returned, the coming of the guards. But the place remained in absolute
stillness. He was, in fact, at liberty, but for his own disabled
condition. And it was certainly a genuine clinging to life that he
felt just then, at the very bottom of his mind. So it had been,
obscurely, even through all the wild fancies of his delirium, from the
moment which followed [217] his decision against himself, in favour of
Cornelius.

The occupants of the place were to be heard presently, coming and going
about him on their business: and it was as if the approach of death
brought out in all their force the merely human sentiments. There is
that in death which certainly makes indifferent persons anxious to
forget the dead: to put them--those aliens--away out of their thoughts
altogether, as soon as may be. Conversely, in the deep isolation of
spirit which was now creeping upon Marius, the faces of these people,
casually visible, took a strange hold on his affections; the link of
general brotherhood, the feeling of human kinship, asserting itself
most strongly when it was about to be severed for ever. At nights he
would find this face or that impressed deeply on his fancy; and, in a
troubled sort of manner, his mind would follow them onwards, on the
ways of their simple, humdrum, everyd