No matter how hard Valjean strained to see through the darkness and the snow, he could not spot the figure again.
Must've been a shadow from the street lantern, he thought, rising from his knees with a cringe. If he were not to sleep, then a fire was in order before he lost the feeling in his extremities -and the extremities themselves to frostbite. His joints crunching audibly, Valjean moved to the hearth.
For a few minutes, Valjean remained crouched down, arranging firewood and stacking resin-tipped kindling sticks in a pyramid over it. Something kept scratching at his attention; something at the very edge of his mind's eye, like a faint star that becomes visible in the night sky only when one looks away from it but disappears when observed full on. Even as he struck fire from his third promethean match (the other two refusing to light for some unknown reason) and set the kindling aglow, the sensation grew in him that someone had been to the house while he was asleep.
And moreover, he suddenly knew beyond all shadow of doubt that they were still there.
Valjean paused with the smoldering match in his hand. The house was perfectly quiet. Even the wayward plank in the attic had ceased its lamentations. The only sounds to be heard were the howl of the wind, which had brewed up into a fierce storm since he'd woken up, and the crackling of the fire, the two sounds harmonizing together into a cozy symphony.
Valjean frowned and listened hard. Over the crackling and the wind, another sound could now be faintly discerned.
Footsteps.
A sudden biting pain in his hand startled Valjean: the match in his hand had burned down to his fingertips. He stood up as soundlessly as his clothes allowed and, without making a step towards the half-open door, leaned towards it.
There was no mistaking it. Soft, heavy footfalls coming up the stairs.
Valjean trembled.
Before his heart failed him, he decided that a known intruder was preferable to an unknown one. Steeling himself, Valjean reached out his hand, grasped the brass doorknob, took a fortifying breath and jerked the door open all the way, all-but leaping into the corridor with the blackened matchstick still clutched in his hand.
The staircase was empty.
I am imagining things, thought Valjean, who was becoming thoroughly flummoxed. Who would possibly come here? Cosette? abandoning her new husband and her wedding feast? Toussaint, leaving her mistress on such a day as this? Javert, rising from the dead to make the arrest due to him?
An ugly image suddenly arose in his mind of Javert's bloated corpse making its way cautiously up the stairs, its bulging, sodden coat covered in foul river weeds, the lead-headed cane feeling the steps cautiously before unseeing gray eyes.
Valjean shuddered and retreated back into his room, throwing a final glance downstairs towards the door. The key is not in the lock, reasoned Valjean, because it is in my pocket. He gripped his pocket and felt the satisfying weight of the key in his palm. If the key is with me, no one can enter without forcing the door or breaking the window, or at very least laboring their way through the chimney, which is full of hot smoke by now. This I cannot have slept through, since I wake from the slightest noise. Ergo, I am alone.
Having so calmed himself, Valjean lit a candle with a piece of kindling and, after some deliberation, plucked the dog-eared copy of the Voyages of Captain Cook from the bookshelf. Seating himself into the wicker-back chair, he leaned his head on his elbows, opened the book to where he had left off last time and engrossed himself once more in the search for the southern continent.
Some time passed. The fire had diminished from a violent orange flame to a cozy red glow and in the process had heated up the room most pleasantly. The storm outside was beginning to die down.
Valjean had just anchored with the crew of Resolution in the Dusky Bay when someone gave an audible cough right above his ear.
As if blown out of his chair by a fierce gale, Valjean rushed out of the room into the corridor. There was no one out on the stairs. Neither was there anyone in Cosette's room, nor in Toussaint's garret, nor in the drawing room, nor in the kitchen, nor the produce cellar.
Shaking his head at his own weak nerves, Valjean ascended the stairs once more, purposefully making noise with his boots as if to scare his own fears away. In the doorway of his room, he froze.
Behind his desk and in his chair sat the now-defunct Inspector Javert. He was clothed in his eternal greatcoat; his battered gray hat sat on the bed and his lead-tipped cane was leaned against the desk. Javert was flipping through Valjean's Voyages with a disdainful sneer.
"Cook is rubbish," he declared in a tone that allowed for no disputations, tossing the book finally back onto the table. "It's Humboldt you ought to be reading. Cook's New Zealand has nothing on Humboldt's New Andalusia."
It was all that Valjean's nerves could handle. The poor old man collapsed.