Opening…

I

An old paralytic man, whose snow-white hair fell in long silken waves from under the rim of the black velvet skull-cap he invariably wore, sat in a light invalid chair-carriage at the higher end of the wide, steep street that is the village of Zeiden, in the Canton of Alpenzell, looking at the sunset.

Slowly the rose-red flush was fading behind the glittering green, snow-capped pinnacle of distant Riedi. A segment of the sun’s huge flaming disk remained in view above a shoulder of her colossal neighbor Donatus; molten gold and silver, boiling together as in a crucible, were spilled upon his vast, desolate, icy sides; his towering, snow-crested helmet trailed a panache of dazzling glory, snatched from the sinking forehead of the vanquished Lord of Day, and even the cap of the Kreinenberg, dwarf esquire in attendance on the giant, boasted a golden plume.

The old man blinked a little, oppressed by excess of splendor, and the attendant Sister of Charity, who sometimes relieved the white-capped, blue-cloaked, cotton-gowned German nurse customarily in charge of the patient, observing this, turned the invalid-chair so that its occupant looked down upon the Blau See, the shape of which suggests a sumptuous glove encrusted with turquoises, as, bordered with old-world, walled towns, it lies in the rich green lap of a fertile country, deep girdled with forests of larch and pine and chestnut, enshrining stately ruins of mediæval castles, and the picturesque garden-villas built by wealthy peasants, in their stately shadow; and sheltered by the towering granite ranges of the Paarlberg from raging easterly gales.

The brilliant black eyes that shone almost with the brilliancy of youth in the wasted ivory face of the old man in the wheeled chair, sparkled appreciatively now as they looked out over the Lake. For to the whirring of its working dynamos, and the droning song of its propeller, a monoplane of the Blériot type emerged from its wooden shelter, pitched upon a steep green incline near to the water’s edge; and moving on its three widely-placed cycle-wheels with the gait of a leggy winged beetle or a flurried sheldrake, suddenly rose with its rider into the thin, clear atmosphere, losing all its awkwardness as the insect or the bird would have done, in the launch upon its natural element, and the instinctive act of flight. The old man watched the bird of steel and canvas, soaring and dipping, circling and turning, over the blue liquid plain with the sure ease and swift daring of the swallow, and slowly nodded his head. When the monoplane had completed a series of practice-evolutions, it steered away northwards, the steady tuff-tuff of its Gnome engine thinning away to a mere thread of sound as the machine diminished to the sight. Then said the watcher, breaking his long silence:

“That is a good thing!... A capital--a useful thing!... An invention, see you, my Sister, that will one day prove invaluable in War.”

The Sister, with a shade of hesitation, responded that Monsieur was undoubtedly right. For carrying dispatches, and for the more dreadful purpose of dropping bombs upon an enemy, the aeroplane, guided by a skillful pilot, would no doubt----

“Ah, tschah!... Bah!... br’rr!...” The old man hunched his thin, broad shoulders impatiently, and wrinkled up his mobile ivory face into a hundred puckers of comical disgust as he exploded these verbal rockets, and his bright black eyes snapped and sparkled angrily. “For dropping shell upon the decks of armored cruisers, or into camps, or upon columns of marching men, this marvelous machine that the Twentieth Century has given us might be utilized beyond doubt. But for the preservation of life, rather than its destruction, its supreme use will be in War. For the swift and easy removal of wounded from the field of battle, a fleet of Army Hospital Service Aeroplanes will one day be built and equipped and organized by every civilized Government, under the Rules of the Crimson Cross. Beautiful, beautiful!” The old man was quite excited, nodding his black velvet-capped, white-locked head as though he would have nodded it off, and blinking his bright eyes. “Sapristi!--I see them!” he cried. “They will hover over the Field of Action like huge hawks, from time to time swooping upon the fallen and carrying them off in their talons. Superb! magnificent! colossal! If we had had air-men and air-machines at Balaklava in ’54, or at Magenta, or Solferino, or Gravelotte, or in Paris during the Siege!... Have the kindness, my Sister, to give me a pinch of snuff!”

The Sister fumbled in the pocket of the white flannel jacket--winter and summer, year in and year out, the old man went clothed from head to foot in white--and fed the thin, handsome old eagle-beak with pungent cheap mixture, out of a box that bore the portrait, set in blazing brilliants, of the Imperial Crowned Head whose gift it had been; as was recorded by the elaborate inscription engraved in the Russian character within its golden lid. The old man was particular that no dust of his favorite brown powder should soil the snowy silken mustache, waxed to fine points, that jutted above his long, mobile upper-lip, or the little imperial that was called by a much less elegant name when the birch-broom-bearded Reds heckled the President of the Third Republic for wearing the distinctive chin-tuft. After the pinch of snuff the old man became more placid. He had his chair slewed round to afford him a fresh point of view, and sat absorbed in the contemplation of which he never seemed to weary.

The sweet Spring day was dying. Vast brooding pinions of somber purple cloud already made twilight on the north horizon, where glooming ramparts topped by pallid peaks, and jagged sierras spiring up into slender minarets and aguilles, shone ghostly against the gloom. The horn of the herdsman sounded from the lower Alps, and neck-bells tinkled as the long lines of placid cows moved from the upper pastures in obedience to the call, breathing perfume of scented vetch and honeyed crimson clover, leaving froth of milk from trickling udders on the leaves and grasses as they went.

The sunset-hour being supper-time, the single street of Zeiden seemed deserted. You saw it as a hilly thoroughfare, bordered with detached timber-built houses, solid and quaintly-shaped and gayly-painted, their feet planted in gardens full of lilac and syringa and laburnum, daffodils and narcissi, violets and anemones and tulips; their walls and balconies tapestried with the sweet May rose and the pink and white clematis; the high-pitched roofs of the most ancient structures, green to the ridge-poles with mosses and gilded by lichens, rosetted with houseleek, and tufted with sweet yellow wallflower and flaunting dandelion. And you had just begun to wonder at the silence and apparent emptiness of the place, when, presto! it suddenly sprang into life. Doors opened and shut; footsteps crackled on gravel; gates clicked, releasing avalanches of barking dogs and laughing, racing children; the adult natives and visitors of Zeiden (Swiss for the most part, leavened with Germans and sprinkled with English and French) appeared upon the Promenade.... And the band of the Kursaal, magnificent in their green, white-faced, silver-tagged uniform, marched down the street to the Catholic Church, and being admitted by the verger--a magnificent official carrying a wand, and attired in a scarlet frock-coat, gilt chain, and lace-trimmed cocked hat--presently appeared upon the platform of the tower, and--it being the Feast of The Ascension--played a chorale, and were tremendously applauded when it was over.

“They play well, finely, to-night!” said the old man, nodding and twinkling in his bright pleased way. “Kindly clap my hands for me, my Sister. M. Pédelaborde may take it amiss if I do not join in the applause.” So the chef d’orchestre was gratified by the approval of the paralytic M. Dunoisse, which indeed he would have been sorely chagrined to miss.

* * * * *

“I think that white-haired old man in the black velvet cap has the most noble, spiritual face I ever saw,” said a little English lady to her husband--a tall, lean, prematurely-bald and careworn man, arrayed in a leather cap with goggles, a knicker suit of baggily-cut, loud-patterned tweeds, a shirt of rheumatism-defying Jaeger material, golfing hose, and such prodigiously-clouted nailed boots, with sockets for the insertion of climbing-irons, as London West End and City firms are apt to impose upon customers who do their Swiss mountain-climbing per the zigzag carriage-road, or the cog-wheel railway.

“Ah, yes! quite so!” absently rejoined the husband, who was Liberal Member for a North London Borough, and an Under-Secretary of State; and was mentally engaged in debating whether the six o’clock supper recently partaken of, and consisting of grilled lake-trout with cucumber, followed by curd-fritters crowned with dabs of whortleberry preserve, did not constitute a flagrant breach of the rules of dietary drawn up by the London specialist under whose advice he was trying the Zeiden whey-cure for a dyspepsia induced by Suffragist Demonstrations and the Revised Budget Estimate. “Quite so, yes!”

“You are trying to be cynical,” said the little lady, who was serious and high-minded, and Member of half-a-dozen Committees of Societies for the moral and physical improvement of a world that would infinitely prefer to remain as it is “Skeptics may sneer,” she continued with energy, “and the irreverent scoff, but a holy life does stamp itself upon the countenance in lines there is no mistaking.”

“I did not sneer,” retorted her husband, whose internal system the unfortuitous combination of cucumber with curds was rapidly upsetting. “Nor am I aware that I scoffed. Your saintly-faced old gentleman is certainly a very interesting and remarkable personage. His name is M. Hector Dunoisse.” He added, with an inflection the direct result of the cucumber-curd-whortleberry combination: “He was a natural son of the First Napoleon’s favorite aide-de-camp, a certain Colonel--afterwards Field-Marshal Dunoisse (who did tremendous things at Aboukir and Austerlitz and Borodino)--by--ah!--by a Bavarian lady of exalted rank,--a professed nun, in fact,--who ran away with Dunoisse, or was run away with. M. Pédelaborde, the man who told me the story, doesn’t profess to be quite certain.”

“I dare say not! And who is M. Pédelaborde, if I may be allowed to know?”

Infinite contempt and unbounded incredulity were conveyed in the little English lady’s utterance of the foregoing words.

“Pédelaborde,” explained her husband, sucking a soda-mint lozenge, and avoiding the wifely eye, “is the fat, tremendously-mustached personage who conducts the Kursaal Band.”

“Indeed!”

“He has known M. Hector Dunoisse all his life--Pédelaborde’s life, I mean, of course. His father was a fellow-cadet of your old gentleman’s at a Military Training Institute in Paris, where Dunoisse fought a duel with another boy and killed him, I am given to understand, by an unfair thrust. The French are fond of tricks in fencing, and some of ’em are the very dev----Ahem!”

“I decline to credit such a monstrous statement,” said the little lady, holding her head very high. “Nothing shall convince me that that dear, sweet, placid old man--who is certainly not to blame for the accident of his birth--could ever have been guilty of a dishonorable action, much less a wicked murderous deed, such as you describe! Do you know him? I mean in the sense of having spoken to him, because everybody bows to M. Dunoisse on the Promenade. You have!.... Next time you happen to meet, you might say that if he would allow you to introduce him to your wife, I should be pleased--so very pleased to make his acquaintance----”

“Ah, yes! Quite so! We have had a little chat or two, certainly,” the dyspeptic gentleman of affairs admitted. “And I don’t doubt he would be highly gratified.” The speaker finished his lozenge, and added, with mild malignity: “That you would find him interesting I feel perfectly sure. For he certainly has seen a good deal of life, according to Pédelaborde.... He held a commission in a crack regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, and ran through a great fortune, I am told, with the assistance of his commanding officer’s wife--uncommonly attractive woman, too, Pédelaborde tells me. And he was on the Prince-President’s Staff at the time of the coup d’État, and after the Restoration--Pédelaborde positively takes his oath that this is true!--was shut up in a French frontier fortress for an attempt on the life of the Emperor. But he escaped or was released, when the Allies were pounding away at Sevastopol, in 1854, and Ada Merling--dead now, I believe, like nearly everybody else one has ever heard named in connection with the War in the Crimea--was nursing the wounded English soldiers at Scutari.” The dyspeptic politician added acidly:

“Here comes M. Dunoisse trundling down the Promenade, saintly smile and all the rest of it.... Shall I give him your message now?”

But the speaker’s better-half, at last convinced, indignantly withdrew her previous tender of cordiality, and as the invalid chair, impelled by the white-capped, blue-cloaked nurse, who had now replaced the nun, rolled slowly down the wide garden-bordered, orchard-backed Place of ancient timber houses that is Zeiden, the white-haired wearer of the black velvet cap, nodding and beaming in acknowledgment of the elaborately respectful salutations of the male visitors and the smiling bows of the ladies, received from one little British matron a stare so freezing in its quality that his jaw dropped, and his bright black eyes became circular with astonishment and dismay.

* * * * *

That an old man at whom everybody smiled kindly--an old man who had little else to live upon or for but love should meet a look so cold.... His underlip drooped like a snubbed child’s. Why was it? Did not the little English lady know--surely she must know!--how much, how very much old Hector Dunoisse had done, and given, sacrificed and endured and suffered, to earn the love and gratitude of women and of men? He did not wish to boast--but she might have remembered it!... A tear dropped on the wrinkled ivory hands that lay helplessly upon the rug that covered the sharp bony knees.

“You have been guilty of a piece of confoundedly bad taste, let me tell you!” said the irritated Englishman, addressing his still vibrating wife. “To cut an old man like that! It was brutal!” He added, “And idiotic into the bargain!”

“I simply couldn’t help it,” said his wife, her stiffened facial muscles relaxing into the flabbiness that heralds tears. “When I saw that horrible old creature coming, looking so dreadfully innocent and kind; and remembered how often I have seen the little French and German and Swiss children crowding round his chair listening to a story, or being lifted up to kiss him”--she gulped--“or toddling to his knee to slip their little bunches of violets into those helpless hands of his--I could not help it! I simply had to!”

“Then you simply had to commit a social blunder of a very grave kind,” pronounced her lord, assuming that air of detachment from the person addressed which creates a painful sense of isolation. “For permit me to inform you that M. Hector Dunoisse is not a person, but a Personage--whom the President of the Swiss Confederation and about half the Crowned Heads of Europe congratulate upon his birthday. And who--if he had chosen to accept the crown they offered him half a lifetime back--would have been to-day the ruling Hereditary Prince of an important Bavarian State. As it is----”

“As it is, he would forgive me the hideous thing I have done,” the little lady cried, flushing indignant scarlet to the roots of her hair, “could he know that it was my own husband who deceived me.... Who humbugged me,” she gulped hysterically. “Spoofed me, as our boy Herbert would hideously say,--with a whole string of ridiculous, trumped-up stories----” She hurriedly sought for and applied her handkerchief, and the final syllable was lost in the dolorous blowing of an injured woman’s nose. Her husband entreated pusillanimously:

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t cry!--at least, here on the Promenade, with scores of people staring. What I told you is the simple truth.... Don’t Roman Catholics say that the regular rips make the most thorough-going, out-and-out saints when they do take to religion and good works and all the rest of it? Besides ... good Lord!--it’s Ancient History--happened years and years before our parents saw each other--and the old chap is ninety--or nearly! And--even supposing Dunoisse did what people say he did, only think what Dunoisse has done!”

Curiosity prevailed over injured dignity. The wounded wife emerged from behind a damp wad of cambric to ask: “What has he done?”

“What has he ... why--he has received all sorts of Votes of Thanks from Public Societies, and he has been decorated with heaps of Orders ... the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and the Orders of the Annunziata of Savoy, and the Black Eagle; and he is a Commander of the Legion of Honor and a Knight of the Papal Order of St. Gregory, and Hereditary Prince of Widinitz if he liked, but he doesn’t like ... goodness me! Haven’t I told you all that already?” The M.P. for the North London borough flapped his hands and lapsed into incoherency.

“But surely you can tell me why these honors were bestowed upon M. Dunoisse?” asked his wife. “I am waiting for the answer to my question--what has he done to deserve them?”

The clear, incisive English voice asking the question cut like a knife through the consonantal, sibilant French, and the guttural be-voweled German. And a stranger standing near--recognizable as a French priest of the Catholic Church less by the evidence of his well-worn cloth, and Roman collar, and wide-brimmed, round-crowned silk beaver, with the shabby silk band and black enameled buckle, than by a certain distinctive manner and expression--said upon a sudden impulse, courteously raising his hat:

“Madame will graciously pardon an old man for presuming to answer a question not addressed to him. She asks, if I comprehend aright, what M. Dunoisse has done to deserve the numberless marks of respect and esteem that have been showered on him?... I will have the honor of explaining to Madame if Monsieur kindly consents?”

“Pleasure, I’m sure!” babbled the dyspeptic victim of the Suffragists and the Budget, yawning as only the liverish can. The priest went on, addressing the little lady:

“Madame, the invalid gentleman whose paralyzed hands rest upon his knees as inertly and immovably as the hands of some granite statue of an Egyptian deity, has given with both those helpless hands--gives to this hour!--will give, when we have long been dust, and these pretty infants playing round us are old men and aged women--a colossal gift to suffering Humanity. He has expended wealth, health, all that men hold dear, in founding, endowing, and organizing a vast international, undenominational, neutral Society of Mercy, formed of brave and skilled and noble men and women,--ah!--may Heaven bless those women!--who, being of all nations, creeds, and politics, are bound by one vow; united in one purpose; bent to one end--that end the alleviation of the frightful sufferings of soldiers wounded in War. Madame must have heard of the Convention of Helvetia?... But see there, Madame!... Observe, by a strange coincidence--the Symbol in the sky!”

The hand of the speaker, with a graceful, supple gesture of indication, waved westwards, and the little lady’s eyes, following it, were led to the upper end of the wide, irregular châlet-bordered Promenade of Zeiden, where the wheel-chair of the invalid had again come to a standstill; possibly in obedience to its occupant’s desire to look once more upon the sunset, whose flaming splendors had all vanished now, save where against a gleaming background of milky-pale vapor glowed transverse bars of ardent hue, rich and glowing as pigeon’s blood ruby, or an Emperor’s ancient Burgundy, or that other crimson liquor that courses in the veins of Adam’s sons, and was first spilled upon the shrinking earth by the guilty hand of Cain.

“It is the sign,” the priest repeated earnestly; “the badge of the great international League of love and pity which owes its institution to M. Hector Dunoisse.” He added: “The face of Madame tells me that no further explanation is needed. With other countries that have drunk of War, and its agonies and horrors, Protestant England renders homage to the Crimson Cross.”

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II

Old Hector Dunoisse could not sleep that night. Sharp pains racked his worn bones; his paralyzed muscles were as though transfixed by surgical needles of finely-tempered steel. He would not permit the nurse to sit up, despite the physician’s orders, therefore the medical Head of the Institution suffered the patient to have his way. So he lay alone in the large, light, airy room, furnished with all the appliances that modern surgical skill can devise for the aid of helplessness, and the alleviation of suffering, and yet a place of pain....

He would not suffer the nurse to lower the green Venetian blinds of the high, clear windows that fronted to the south-east and south-west; the moonbeams could not do him any harm, he declared. On the contrary! The mild, bright planet shining above the lonely kulms and terrible crevasses, shedding her radiant light upon the peasant’s Alpine hut and the shepherd’s hillside cave, as upon the huge hotel-caravanserais, glittering with windows and crowded with wealthy tourists, and the stately mediæval castles, ruined and inhabited by owls and bats and foxes, or lovingly preserved and dwelt in by the descendants of the great robber knights who reared their Cyclopean towers--was she not his well-loved friend?

* * * * *

So, as one waits for a friend, old Hector lay waiting for the moonrise; the white-haired, handsome, vivacious old face, with the bright black eyes, propped high upon the pillow, the wasted, half-dead body of him barely raising the light warm bed-coverings, the helpless arms and stiff white hands stretched rigidly along its sides.

* * * * *

And not only the man waited; the heavens seemed also waiting. The ghostly white ice-peaks and snowy mountain-ranges, crowded on the horizon as though they waited too. Corvus burned bright, low down on the south horizon; Spica blazed at the maidenly-pure feet of Virgo. Bootes looked down from the zenith, a pale emerald radiance, dimmed by the fierce red fires of the Dog Star.... The purple-dark spaces beyond these splendors were full of the palely glimmering presences of other stars. But the old man wanted none of these. He had forgotten to look at the almanac. He began to fear there would be no moon that night.

Old, sick and helpless as he was, this was a great grief to him. Useless the presence of others when we lack the one we need. And a little crack in a dam-wall is enough to liberate the pent-up waters; the thin, bright trickle is soon followed by the roaring turbid flood. Then, look and see what fetid slime, what ugly writhing creatures bred of it, the shining placid surface masked and covered.... The purest women, the noblest men, no less than we who know ourselves inwardly corrupt and evil, have such depths, where things like these are hidden from the light of day....

* * * * *

The pain was intolerable to-night,--almost too bad to bear without shrieking. Dunoisse set his old face into an ivory mask of stern resistance, and his white mustache and arched and still jet-black eyebrows bristled fiercely, and the cold drops of anguish gathered upon the sunken purple-veined temples upon which the silky silver hair was growing sparse and thin. Ouf!... what unutterable relief it would have been to clench his fists, even!... But the poor hands, helpless as a wax doll’s or a wooden puppet’s, refused to obey his will.

He lay rigid and silent, but his brain worked with vivid, feverish activity, and his glance roved restlessly round the white-papered walls of the airy, cleanly room. Shabby frames containing spotted daguerreotypes and faded old cartes-de-visite of friends long dead; some water-color portraits and engravings of battle-scenes, hung there; with some illuminated addresses, a few more modern photographs, a glazed case of Orders and Crosses, a cheap carved rack of well-smoked pipes, and--drawn up against the painted wainscot--an imposing array of boots of all nationalities, kinds and descriptions, in various stages of wear. His small library of classics filled a hanging shelf, while a pair of plain deal bookcases were stuffed with publications in half-a-dozen European languages, chiefly well-known reference-works upon Anatomy and Physiology, Surgery and Medicine; whilst a row of paper-bound, officially-stamped Government publications--one or two of these from his own painstaking, laborious pen--dealt with the organization, equipment and sanitation of Military Field Hospitals, Hospital Ships and Hospital Trains, the clothing, diet and care of sick and wounded, and, in relation to these, the Laws and Customs of grim and ghastly War. And a traveling chest of drawers, a bath, and a portable secretary, battered and ink-stained by half a century of honorable use; with the scanty stock of antique garments hanging in the white-pine press; a meager store of fine, exquisitely darned and mended old-world linen; an assortment of neckties, wonderfully out of date; some old felt wideawakes, and three black velvet caps, with a camel’s hair bournous, that had served for many years as a dressing-gown; and the bust of a woman, in marble supported on a slender ebony pedestal set between the windows, completed the inventory of the worldly possessions of old Hector Dunoisse.

All that he owned on earth, these few shabby chattels, these dimmed insignia, with their faded ribbons--this man who had once been greatly rich, and prodigally generous, subsisted now in his helpless age upon a small annuity, purchased when he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. What bitter tears had been wrung from the bright black eyes when he was compelled to accept this charity! But it had to be; the burden of his great humanitarian labors had exhausted his last energies and his remaining funds; and Want had risen up beside his bed of sickness, and laid upon him, who had cheered away her specter from so many pallets, her chill and meager hand.

Ah, how he loved the glaring daguerreotypes, the spotty photographs, the old cheap prints! Far, far more dearly than the Rembrandts and Raphaels, the Watteaus and the three superb portraits by Velasquez that he had sold to the Council of the Louvre, and the Austrian Government and the Trustees of the National Gallery. The cabinets of rare and antique medals, the collection of Oriental porcelain and Royal Sèvres that had been bequeathed to him with the immense private fortune of Luitpold, the long-deceased Prince-Regent of Widinitz, that had also been disposed of under the hammer to supply his needs for funds,--always more funds,--had never possessed one-tenth of the preciousness of these poor trifles. For everything was a memento or token of something done or borne, given or achieved towards the fulfillment of the one great end.

The chibuk with the bowl of gilded red clay, the cherry-stick stem and the fine amber mouthpiece, an officer of the English Guards had forced upon Dunoisse at Balaklava. The inkstand, a weighty sphere of metal mounted on three grape-shot, with a detached fourth for the lid--that was a nine-pound shell from the Sandbag Battery. And the helmet-plate with a silver-plated Austrian Eagle and the brass device like a bomb, with a tuft of green metal oak-leaves growing out of the top, that was a souvenir of the bloody field of Magenta. It had been pressed upon Dunoisse by a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Ensign of Austrian Infantry, whom he had rescued from under a hecatomb of dead men and horses, still living, but blackened from asphyxia, the colors of his regiment yet clutched in his cramped and blackened hands.

Even the bournous, the voluminous long-sleeved, hooded garment of gray-white camel’s hair, bordered with delicate embroideries of silver and orange-red floss silk--that had its touching history; that had been also the legacy of one who had nothing else to give.

“He was an Arab of pure blood, a pious Moslem, Sergeant-Major in the First Regiment of Spahis, a chief in his own right. He fell in the assault upon the Hill of Cypres. Towards the end of the day, when the sun had set upon Solferino’s field of carnage, and the pale moon was reflected in the ponds of blood that had accumulated in every depression of the ravaged ground, we found him, riddled with bullets, pierced with wounds, leaning with his back against a little tree, his bleeding Arab stallion standing by him as he prayed in the words of the Prophet: ‘Lord, grant me pardon, and join me to the companionship on high!...’ He died two nights later upon a heap of bloody straw in the Church of Santa Rosalia at Castiglione. This had been strapped in the roll behind his saddle--his young bride had embroidered the gold and silken ornaments; in the field it had served him as a covering, and until the dead-cart came to remove the corpse,--as a pall.”

More relics yet. The broken lock of a Garibaldian musket from Calatifimi. The guard of a Papal soldier’s saber from Castel Fidardo, brown with Sardinian blood.

More still.... The gilded ornament from the staff-top of a Prussian Eagle--a souvenir of Liebenau, or was it Hühnerwasser? A Uhlan lance-head from Hochhausen. An exploded cartridge gathered on the field of Alcolea, where the Spanish Royalists were beaten in 1868. And a French chassepot and a Prussian needle-gun, recalling the grim tragedy of 1870 and the unspeakable disaster of Sedan. While a fantastically chased cross of Abyssinian gold, and a Bersagliere’s plume of cocks’ feathers, their glossy dark green marred with dried blood, were eloquent of the massacre of the Italian troops at Dagoli, in ’87.

What memories were this old man’s!

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III

Old Hector could have told you that such crowded, thronging memories aggravate the dull, throbbing ache of loneliness to torment. To re-read letters written in faded ink by beloved hands that lie moldering under-ground, or are very far removed from us; or to brood upon the soulless image of a soulful face that, dead or living, we may never see with our earthly eyes again, does but exquisitely intensify the agony of loss. We who are old and wise should know better than to seek to quench the heart’s thirst at such bitter Desert wells. Nevertheless, our eyes turn to the faded portrait, our hands touch the spring of the tarnished locket half-a-hundred times a day.

* * * * *

Upon the pillow beside the worn white head there invariably lay a stained and shabby Russia-leather letter-case, white at the edges with wear. It was fastened by a little lock of dainty mechanism, and the fine thin chain of bright steel links that was attached to it went round the old man’s neck. He turned his head that his cheek might rest against the letter-case, and a slow tear over-brimmed an underlid, and fell and sparkled on the dull brownish leather that had once been bright and red. A silver plate, very worn and thin, bore an engraved date and a brief direction:

=BURY THIS WITH ME=

It would be done by-and-by, he knew; for who would rob a dead old man of his dearest treasure? Moreover, the contents of the leather case were valueless in ordinary eyes.

Just a package of letters penned in a fine, delicate, pointed, old-fashioned gentlewoman’s handwriting to the address of M. Hector Dunoisse in half-a-dozen European capitals, and several cities and posting-towns of Turkey and Asiatic Russia; their condition ranging from the yellowed antiquity of more than fifty years back to the comparative newness of the envelope that bore the London postmark of the previous 22nd of December, and the Zeiden stamp of three days later. For once a year, at Christmas-tide, was celebrated old Hector Dunoisse’s joy-festival--when such a letter came to add its bulk to the number in the leather case.

He would be fastidiously particular about his toilet upon that day of days, he who was always so scrupulously neat. His silken white hair would be arranged after the most becoming fashion, his cheeks and chin would be shaved to polished marble smoothness, his venerable mustache waxed with elaborate care. He would be attired in his best white flannel suit, crowned with his newest velvet cap, and adorned with all his Orders; while pastilles would be set burning about the room, fresh flowers would be placed, not only on the tiny altar with its twinkling waxlights and colored plaster presentment of the Stable at Bethlehem, but before a photograph in a tortoise-shell-and-silver frame that always stood upon a little table, beside his chair or bed. About the ebony pedestal of the marble bust that stood in the shallow bay of the southeast window a garland would be twined of red-berried holly and black-berried ivy, and delicately-tinted, sweet-scented hyacinths, grown under glass.... And then the hands of a nursing Sister or of a mere hireling would open the letter, and hold the feebly-written sheet before Dunoisse’s burning eyes, and they would weep as they read, until their bright black flame was quenched in scalding tears.

Do you laugh at the old lover with his heart of youthful fire, burning in the body that is all but dead? You will if you who read are young. Should you be at your full-orbed, splendid prime of womanhood or manhood, you will smile as you pity. But those who have passed the meridian of life will sigh; for they are beginning to understand; and those who are very old will smile and sigh together, and look wise--so wise! Because they have found out that Love is eternally young.

Oh, foolish Youth!--that deems the divine passion to be a matter of red lips meeting red lips, bright eyes beaming into bright eyes, young heart beating against young heart. Intolerant, splendid Prime, that leaps to the imperious call of passion and revels in the delirious pleasures of the senses. For you love is the plucking of the ripe, fragrant, juicy fruit; the rose-tinted foam upon the sparkling wine that brims the crystal goblet; the crown of rapture; the night of jeweled stars and burning kisses that crowns the fierce day of Desire.

And ah! wise Age, experienced and deep, where Youth is all untaught, and Prime but a little more scholar-wise, and Middle Age but a beginner at the book.... For you Love is the jewel in the matrix of the stone; the sacred lamp that burns unquenched within the sealed-up sepulcher; the flame that glows in the heart’s core the more hotly that snows of years lie on the head, and the icy blood creeps sluggishly through the clogged arteries; the sustenance and provender and nourishment of Life no less than the hope that smiles dauntlessly in the face of Death. For to die is to follow whither she has gone,--to meet with him again. Can those who seek to disprove the Being of their Creator with the subtle brain He forged be in the truest sense of the word--lovers? I say No! For Love is an attribute of the Divine.

Those written sheets in the locked case of dulled crimson leather, attached to the fine steel chain, told no tale of love....

Ah! the womanly, gracious letters, breathing warm friendship and kindly interest in the long-unseen, how diligently the old man had tried to read between their fine clear lines the one thing that he never found for all his searching. How devoutly they had been kept and cherished, how delicately and reverently handled.... But for seven long years now they had lain undisturbed in their receptacle, only seeing light when it was opened with the little key that hung upon the steel chain, so that the newest letter of all might be added to the treasured store.

Of late years, how brief they had become! From the three crowded sheets of more than fifty years back, to the single sheet of ten years--the quarter-sheet of five years ago--a mere message of kind remembrance, ending with the beloved name. It had been tragedy to Dunoisse, this slow, gradual shortening of his allowance of what was to him the bread of life. He could not understand it. Had he offended her in some way? He dared to write to her and ask, by aid of the paid secretary who typed from his painstaking dictation in a language which she did not understand. And the reply came in the caligraphy of a stranger. He realized then what he had never before dreamed possible, that his worshiped lady had grown old.... A photograph accompanied the letter. He recognized, with a joyful leap of the heart, that the sweet, placid, aged face with the delicate folds of a fine lace shawl framing it, was beautiful and gracious still. Thenceforward, in a tortoiseshell-and-silver frame, it stood upon the little table beside the bed.

But in another year or two heavy news reached him. She had grown feeble, barely able to trace with the gently-guided pen the well-loved initials at the foot of the written page! The shock of this unlooked-for, appalling revelation made him very ill. He was not himself for months,--never quite again what he had been.... A day was coming when ... the letters might come no more. Her initials were so faintly traced upon the last one that--that----

No, no! God was too kind to let her die before him. He clenched his toothless gums as he would have liked to clench his paralyzed hands, and clung desperately to his belief in the Divine Love.

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IV

To lie, helpless and lonely and old, and racked by pain, and to keep on believing in the Divine goodness, requires a caliber of mental strength proportionately equal to the weakness of the sufferer. But it was too late in the day for Dunoisse to doubt.

And here was his dear Moon swimming into view, rising from the translucent depths of a bottomless lagoon of sapphire ether, red Mars glowing at her pearly knee. A childlike content softened the lines that pain and bitterness had graven on the old ivory face. He nodded, well pleased.

“There you are! I see you! You have come as punctually as you always do, making my pain the easier to bear,” he murmured brokenly to the planet. “You shine and look at me and understand; unlike men and women who talk, and talk, and comprehend nothing! And you are old, like my love; and changeless, like my love; while yet my love, unlike you, is eternal; it will endure when you have passed away with Time. Dear Moon! is she looking at you too? Does she ever think of me? But that is a great question you never answer. I can only lie and wait, and hope and long ... in vain? Ah, God! If I could but know for certain that it has not been in vain!...”

Then, with a rush of furious crimson to the drawn cheeks and the knitted forehead, the barrier of his great and dauntless patience broke down before his pent-up passion’s flood. His features were transfigured; the venerable saint became an aged, rebellious Lucifer. Words crowded from his writhing lips, despair and fury blazed in his great black eyes.

“How long, O God, implacable in Thy judgments,” he cried, “must I lie here, a living soul immured in a dead body, and wait, and yearn, and long? ‘Give thanks,’ say the priests, ‘that you have your Purgatory in this world.’ Can there be any torture in Purgatory to vie with this I am enduring? Has Hell worse pains than these? None! for Despair and Desolation sit on either side of me. I rebel against the appointments of the Divine Will. I doubt the Love of God.”

Rigor seized him, his racked nerves vibrated like smitten harp-strings, sweat streamed upon his clammy skin, the beating of his heart shook him and shook the bed, a crushing weight oppressed his panting lungs.

“It is so long, so very long!--sixteen years that I have lain here,” he moaned. “I was content at first, or could seem so. ‘Let me but live while she lives and die when she dies!--’ had always been my prayer. I pray so still--yes, yes! but the long waiting is so terrible. When I had health and strength to labor incessantly, unrestingly, then I could bear my banishment. Through the din and shock of charging squadrons, the rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery, the ceaseless roll of the ambulances and the shrieks of mangled men, one cannot hear the selfish crying of the heart that starves for love. Even in times of peace there was no pause, no slackening. To organize, administer, plan, devise, perfect,--what work, what work was always to be done! Now the work goes on. I lie here. They defer to me, appeal to me, consult me--oh, yes, they consult me! They are very considerate to the old man who is now upon the shelf.”

He laughed and the strange sound woke an echo that appalled him. It sounded so like the crazy laugh of a delirious fever-patient, or of some poor peasant wretch driven beyond his scanty wits by the horror and the hideousness of War. He shook with nervous terror now, and closed his eyes tightly that he might shut out all the familiar things that had suddenly grown strange.

“Let me die, my God! I cannot bear Life longer!” he said more calmly. “Let her find me crouching upon the threshold of Paradise like a faithful hound, when she comes, borne by Thy rejoicing Angels to claim her glorious reward. I am not as courageous as I boasted myself; the silence and the emptiness appal me. Let me die!--but what then of my letter that comes once a year?” he added in alarm. “No, no! I beseech Thee, do not listen to me, a sinful, rebellious old grumbler. I am content--or I would be if the time were not so long.”

Something like a cool, light finger seemed as if drawn across his burning eyelids. He opened them and smiled. For a long broad ray of pure silvery moonshine, falling through the high southeast window upon the white marble bust that stood upon the ebony pedestal against its background of mountain-peaks and sky, reached to the foot of his bed, and rising higher still, had flowed in impalpable waves of brightness over the helpless feet, and covered the stiff white hands, and now reached his face.

This was the moment for which he nightly waited in secret fear, and breathless expectation and desire. Would the miracle happen, this night of all the nights? Would it visit him to bless or leave him uncomforted? He trembled with the desperate eagerness that might defeat its end.

The moon was full and rode high in the translucent heavens. To the lonely watcher the celestial orb suggested the likeness of a crystal Lamp, burning with a light of inconceivable brilliance in a woman’s white uplifted hand. He knew whose hand. His black eyes softened into lustrous, dreamy tenderness, a smile of welcome curved about his lips, as the moon-rays illuminated the marble features of the bust that stood in the bay.

The face of the bust was the same as the old, beautiful face of the photographic portrait that stood in its tortoise-shell-and-silver frame upon the little table by his bed. You saw it as the sculptured presentment of a woman still young, yet past youth. Slenderly framed, yet not fragile, the slight shoulders broad, the long rounded throat a fitting pedestal for the high-domed, exquisitely proportioned head. Upon her rich, thick waving hair was set a little cap: close-fitting, sober, with a double-plaited border enclosing the clear, fine, oval face, a little thin, a shade worn, as by anxiety and watching.

The face--her face!--was not turned towards the bed. It bent a little aside as though its owner pondered. And that the fruit of such reflection would be Action, swift, unflinching, prompt, direct--no one could doubt who observed the purpose in the wide arching brows; the salient, energetic jut of the rather prominent, slightly-aquiline nose, with its high-bred, finely-cut nostrils; the severity and sweetness that sat throned upon the lips; the rounded, decisive chin that completed the womanly-fair image. A little shawl or cape was pinned about her shoulders; to the base of the pure column of the throat she was virginally veiled and covered.

* * * * *

And if the chief impression she conveyed was Purity, the dominant note of her was Reflection. For the eyes beneath the thick white eyelids were observant; the brain behind the broad brows pondered, reviewed, decided, planned.... It seemed as though in another moment she must speak; and the utterance would solve a difficulty; reduce confusion into sanest order, throw light upon darkness; clear away some barrier; devise an expedient, formulate a rule....

There was not a line of voluptuous tenderness, not one amorous dimple wherein Cupid might play at hiding, in all the stern, sweet face. She thought, and dreamed, and planned. And yet, ...

And yet the full-orbed eyes, gray-blue under their heavy, white, darkly-lashed eyelids as the waters of her own English Channel, could melt, could glad, for he had seen!... The sensitive, determined mouth could quiver into exquisite tenderness. The most cherished memory of this old man was that it had once kissed him.

Ah! if you are ignorant how the memory of one kiss can tinge and permeate life, as the single drop of priceless Ghazipur attar could impart its fragrance to the limpid waters in the huge crystal block skilled Eastern artificers hollowed out for Nur Mahal to bathe in,--you are fortunate; for such knowledge is the flower of sorrow, that has been reared in loneliness and watered with tears. This one red rose made summer amidst the snows of a nonagenarian’s closing years. He felt it warm upon his mouth; he heard his own voice across the arid steppes of Time crying to her passionately:

“Oh, my beloved! when we meet again I shall have deserved so much of God, that when I ask Him for my wages He will give me even you!”

What had he not done since then, what had he not suffered, how much had he not sacrificed, to keep this great vow? Had he not earned his wages full forty years ago? Yet God made no sign, and she had gone her ways and forgotten.

It was only in pity,--only in recognition of his being, like herself, the survivor of a vanished generation, almost the only human link remaining to bind this restless Twentieth Century with the strenuous, splendid days of the early Victorian era, that she had written to him once a year.

Only in pity, only in kindness was it, after all?

This one thing is certain, that at rare, irregular intervals, he reaped the fruit of his long devotion--his unswerving, fanatical fidelity--in the renewal of that lost, vanished, unforgettable moment of exquisite joy.

As he sat in his wheeled-chair upon the Promenade of Zeiden, as he lay upon his bed, he would feel, drawing nearer, nearer, the almost bodily presence of a Thought that came from afar. A delicate thrilling ecstasy would penetrate and vivify the paralyzed nerves of his half-dead body, the blood would course in the frozen veins with the ardent vigor of his prime. He would see her, his beloved lady, in a halo of pale moonlight, bending to comfort--descending to bless. Once more he would kneel before her; yet again he would take the beloved hands in his, and draw them upwards to his heart. And their lips would meet, and their looks would mingle, and then.... Oh! then the waking to loneliness, and silence, and pain.

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V

He was prone, when the visitations of her almost tangible Thought of him were interrupted by periods of unconsoled waiting, to doubt the actuality of his own experience. That was the worst agony of all, to which the sharpest physical torments were preferable, when in the long, dreary, miserable nights a mocking voice would whisper in his reluctant ear:

“You have been deceived. She never thinks of you. Driveling old dotard! she has long forgotten that night at Scutari. Why in the name of Folly do you cling to your absurd conviction that she loved you then, that she loves you still? You have been deceived, I say. Curse her, blaspheme God, and die!”

“Be silent, be silent!” Dunoisse would say to the invisible owner of the mocking, jeering voice. “If I had the use of this dead right hand to make the sign of the Cross, you would soon be disposed of. For I know who and what you are, very well!”

And he would clamp his lean jaws sternly together, and look up to the carved walnut Crucifix with the Emblems of the Passion, that hung upon the wall beside his bed. And the thin, nagging voice would die away in a titter, and another Voice would whisper in the innermost shrine of his deep heart:

“My son, had I the use of My Arms when I hung upon the cross of Calvary? Yet, nailed thereon beyond the possibility of human movement, did I not pluck the sting from Death, and rise victorious over the Grave, and tread down Satan under My wounded Feet? Answer, My little son?”

And Dunoisse would whisper, falteringly:

“Lord, it is true! But Thou wert the Son of God most High, and I am only a helpless, suffering, desolate old man, worn out and worthless and forgotten!”

The Voice would answer:

“Thou art greater than a thousand Kings. Thou art more glorious than an Archangel, of more value than all the stars that shine in the firmament--being a man for whom Christ died! Be of good courage. This trial will not last long. Believe, endure, pray!... Hast thou forgotten thy compact with Me?”

Dunoisse would cry out of the depths with a rending sob:

“No! but it is a sin of presumption to seek to make bargains with God. The compact was impious.”

The Voice would say:

“Perhaps, yet thou didst make it: and thou hast kept it. Shall I be less faithful than thou?”

Dunoisse would falter:

“I should have loved Thee for Thyself above any creature Thou hast made. To serve Thee for the love of even a perfect woman, was not this wrong?”

“It may be so!” the Voice would answer, “and therefore I have visited thee with My rods and scourgings. Yet, if I choose woman for My Means of Grace, what is that to thee?”

Dunoisse would not be able to answer for weeping. The Voice would continue:

“Moreover, it may be that in loving this woman, My servant, thou hast loved Me. For she is pure, and I am the Fountain of Purity; she is charitable, and I am Charity itself. She is beautiful of soul, beloved and loving, and I am unspeakable Beauty, and boundless, measureless Love. Be courageous, little son of Mine! Believe, and hope, and pray!...”

Dunoisse would stammer with quivering lips:

“I believe!... I hope!... Lord, grant me strength to go on believing and hoping!”

Then he would fall peacefully asleep upon a pillow wet with tears. Or he would lie awake and let his memory range over the prairies of dead years that stretched away so far behind....

* * * * *

Will you hear some of the things that this old man remembered? Listen, then, if it be only for an hour. That is a little space of time, you say, and truly. Yet I gave my youth and most of the things that men and women cherish, to buy this hour, dear, unknown friend!--of you.

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VI

At sixteen years of age Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse fought his first duel, with a fellow-student of the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, Rue de la Vallée Ste. Gabrielle.

The quarrel occurred after one of the weekly inspections by the General-Commandant, when Hector, accoutered with the black shiny sword-belt and cartridge-belt; armed with the sword, bayonet, and the heavy little brass-mounted, muzzle-loading musket, commonly displayed, when not in use, with two hundred and ninety-nine similar weapons in the long gallery running above the class-rooms--when Hector with his fellow-pupils of the First Division had performed a series of military evolutions in the presence of Miss Harriet Smithwick, admitted with other persons standing in the parental and protective relation to the young neophytes of the School, to the dusty patch of tree-shaded grass at the lower end of the smaller exercise-ground, where Messieurs the hundred-and-fifty pupils of the two companies of the Junior Corps--the great boys of the Senior possessing a parade-ground to themselves--commonly mustered for drill.

On other days, visitors and friends were received in a small entrance-yard, dank and moist in wet weather, baking and gritty in hot; inhospitable and uninviting at all times; in which enclosure M. and Madame Cornu were permitted by the authorities to purvey fruit and sweets, and a greasy kind of galette, with ices of dubious complexion in June and July; and syrups of groseille and grenadine, served hot--and rendered, if possible, even stickier and more vapidly cloying beverages by being thus served,--in the bitter winter months.

The good Smithwick would have enjoyed herself better if permitted to ascend to the department on the floor above the Infirmary, where Madame Gaubert presided, in an atmosphere strongly flavored with soft-soap, over long rows of shelves divided into regulation pigeon-holes, containing within an officially-appointed space of one foot ten inches square the linen of young Hector and his companions. It would have satisfied a burning curiosity from which the poor little lady had long suffered, had she been permitted to observe for herself the process of lavation that deprived her ex-pupil’s shirts of every button, while leaving the dirt untouched; and to gauge with her own eyes the holes of the rats and mice that ate such prodigious mouthfuls, not only in the garments named, but in the sheets and bolster-covers, towels and napkins, which, by the amiable dispensation of a paternal Government, the boy was permitted to bring from home.

Instead, the poor fluttered spinster occupied a small share of one of the green benches set beneath the shade of the semicircle of lime-trees at the lower end of the exercise-ground; her neighbors on the right and left being the venerable Duchesse de Moulny of the Faubourg St-Honoré and Mademoiselle Pasbas of the Grand Opera Ballet. Pédelaborde, inventor of an Elixir for the preservation of the teeth to extreme old age, who in fact enjoyed a Government contract for attending to the dental requirements of the young gentlemen of the School, weighed down the bench at its farther end; and M. Bougon, principal physician of the body to His Majesty King Louis-Philippe, balanced his meager and wizened anatomy upon the other extremity. Nor was there the lack of sympathy between the occupants of the bench that might have been expected. The Duchesse had a grandson--Bougon a son--Pédelaborde a nephew--the opera-dancer a young protégé (in whom, for the sake of an early friend, an officer of Cuirassiers, Mademoiselle took a tender interest)--little Miss Smithwick the adored offspring of a revered employer, to observe blandly, and discreetly manifest interest in, and secretly throb and glow and tremble for; so simple and common and ordinary is Nature beneath all the mass of pretenses we pile upon her, so homespun are the cords of love, and sympathy, and interest, that move the human heart.

When the General-Commandant--for this was an ordinary informal inspection of young gentlemen in the School undress of belted blouse and brass-badged, numbered képi, not the terrific bi-monthly review en grande tenue of the entire strength of the establishment, when General, Colonel, Captains, Adjutants, the four Sergeants-Major, the six drummers, and all the pupils of the Junior and Senior Corps, wearing the little cocked hat with the white plume and gold lace trimming; the black leather stock, the blue frocked coat faced with red, trimmed and adorned with gilt buttons and gold braid, must pass under the awful eye of a Field-Marshal, assisted by a Colonel of the Staff, a Major of Artillery, and a fearful array of Civil Professors--when the General, addressing Alai-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny, briefly remarked:

“Pupil No. 127, you have the neck of a pig and the finger-nails of a gorilla! Another offense against that cleanliness which should adorn the person of a Soldier of France, and the galon of Corporal, which you disgrace, will be transferred to the sleeve of one more worthy to wear it.”

You beheld the immense bonnet of the venerable aristocrat, its great circular sweep of frontage filled with quillings of costly lace and chastely tinted cambric blossoms, its crown adorned with nodding plumes, awful as those upon the helmet of the Statue of the Commendatore, condescendingly bending towards the flamboyant headgear of the Pasbas--as the Duchesse begged to be informed, her lamentable infirmity of deafness depriving her of the happiness of hearing the commendations bestowed by his Chief upon her young relative,--what Monsieur the General had actually said?

* * * * *

“I myself, Madame, failed to catch the expression of approval actually employed. But,” explained Mademoiselle Pasbas, as she lowered her lorgnette and turned a candid look of angelic sweetness upon the dignified old lady, “Madame may rely upon it that they were thoroughly merited by the young gentleman upon whom they were bestowed.”

“I thank you, Mademoiselle.” The bonnet of the Duchesse bent in gracious acknowledgment. “It is incumbent upon the members of my family to set an example. Nor do we fail of our duty, as a rule.”

Perhaps the roguish dimples of Mademoiselle Pasbas were a trifle more in evidence; possibly the humorous creases of enjoyment deepened in the stout Pédelaborde’s triple chin; it may be that the sardonic twinkle behind the narrow gold-rimmed spectacles of M. Bougon took on extra significance; but all three were as demure as pussycats, not even exchanging a glance behind the overwhelming patrician headgear with the stupendous feathers;--to see one another over it would have been impossible without standing on the bench. This is the simple truth, without a particle of exaggeration. My Aunt Julietta at this date purchased from a fashionable milliner in the West End of London----But my Aunt Julietta has no business on the Calais side of the English Channel!--let her and her bonnets wait!

The General’s salute closed the review. The pupils presented arms, a superb effect of a hundred and fifty muskets, not infrequently thrilling parents to the bestowal of five-franc pieces; the six drummers beat the disperse as one overgrown hobbledehoy; the orderly ranks broke up. Discipline gave place to disorder. Boys ran, chasing one another and yelling, boys skylarked, punching and wrestling, boys argued in gesticulatory groups, or whispered in knots of two or three together.... The spectators on the painted benches behind the railing had risen. Now they filed out by a door in the high-spiked wall behind the dusty lime-trees, in whose yellow-green blossoms the brown bees had been humming and droning all through the hot, bright day of June. The bees were also dusty, and the spectators were liberally powdered with dust, for the clumping, wooden-heeled, iron toe-capped School regulation shoes of the young gentlemen had raised clouds which would have done credit to the evolutions of a battery of horse. And the yearning desires of Hector Dunoisse were turning in the direction of a cooling draught of Madame Cornu’s grenadine, or of the thin, vinegary, red ration-wine; when to him says Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny:

“Tell me, Redskin, didst thou twig my respected grand-mamma perched in the front row between a variegated she-cockatoo and a molting old female fowl, who held her head on one side, and cried into a clean starched pocket-hand-kerchief?”

“She did not cry!” warmly contradicted the young gentleman thus assailed. “It is her cold-in-the-head that never gets well until she goes back to England for her holiday once a year; and then she has migraine instead. All the Smithwick family are like that, Miss Smithwick says; it is an inherited delicacy of the constitution.”

“‘Smizzique ... Mees Smeezveek.’ ... There’s a name to go to bed with!...” pursued de Moulny, his thick lips, that were nearly always chapped, curling back and upwards in his good-natured schoolboy’s grin. “And how old is she?--your Sm----. I cannot say it again!... And why does she wear a bonnet that was raked off the top of an ash-barrel, and a shawl that came off a hook at the Morgue?”

* * * * *

Young Hector had been conscious of the antiquated silk bonnet, in hue the faded maroon of pickling-cabbage, sadly bent as to its supporting framework of stiffened gauze and whalebone, by the repeated tumbles of the bonnet-box containing it off the high top-corner of the walnut wardrobe in Miss Smithwick’s fourth-floor sleeping-apartment at home in the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. It had been eating into him like a blister all through the General’s inspection, that venerable wintry headgear, with its limp veil like a sooty cellar-cobweb, depending from its lopsided rim. To say nothing of the shawl, a venerable yellow cashmere atrocity, with long straggling white fringes, missing here and there, where the tooth of Time had nibbled them away. But though these articles of apparel made good Smithwick’s ex-pupil feel sick and hot with shame, they were not to be held up to ridicule. That was perfectly clear....

Hector could not have told you why the thing was so clear; even as he thrust a challenging elbow into the big de Moulny’s fleshy ribs, turning pale under the red Egyptian granite tint of skin that had earned him his nickname from these boys, his comrades--who like other boys all the world over, had recently fallen under Fenimore Cooper’s spell--and said, with a dangerous glitter in his black-diamond eyes:

“I do not know how old she is--it is not possible for a gentleman to ask a lady her age. But she is a lady!” he added, neatly intercepting the contradiction before it could be uttered. “Une femme de bon ton, une femme comme il faut. Also she dresses as a lady should ... appropriately, gracefully, elegantly....” He added grandiloquently, tapping the brass hilt of his little School hanger: “I will teach you with this, M. de Moulny, to admire that bonnet and that shawl!”

“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!” spluttered the astonished de Moulny. But there was no relenting in Hector’s hard young face, though he was secretly sick at the pit of his stomach and cold at heart.

“I will fight you!” he repeated.

De Moulny, always slow to wrath, began to lose his temper. The outspoken compliments of Monsieur the General had stung, and here was a more insufferable smart. Also, it was a bosom friend who challenged. One may be angry with an enemy; it is the friend become foe who drives us to frenzied rage.

He said, pouting his fleshy lips, sticking out his obstinate chin, staring at the changed unfriendly face, with eyes grown hard as blue stones:

“I do not know that I can oblige you by giving you the opportunity of learning how quickly boasters are cured of brag. For one thing, I have my stripe,” he added, holding up his head and looking arrogantly down his nose.

“Since yesterday,” agreed Hector, pointedly. “And after to-day you will not have it. The squad-paper will hang beside another fellow’s bed,--M. the Commandant will have reduced you to the ranks for uncleanliness on parade. So we will fight to-morrow.”

“Possibly!” acquiesced de Moulny, his heavy cheeks quivering with anger, his thick hands opening and shutting over the tucked-in thumbs. “Possibly!” he repeated. His sluggish temperament once fairly set alight, burned with the fierce roaring flame and the incandescent heat of a fire of cocoanut-shell. And it was in his power to be so well revenged! He went on, speaking through his nose:

“As it is only since yesterday that you became legitimately entitled to carry the name you bear, you may be admitted to know something of what happened yesterday.” He added: “But of what will happen to-morrow, do not make too sure, for I may decline to do you the honor of correcting you. It is possible, that!” he added, as Hector stared at him aghast. “A gentleman may be a bastard--I have no objection to a bar-sinister.... But you are not only your father’s son--you are also your mother’s! We de Moulnys are ultra-Catholic----” This was excellent from Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules, whose chaplet of beads lay rolling in the dust at the bottom of the kitlocker at his bed-foot, and who was scourged to Communion by the family Chaplain at Christmas and Easter, and at the Fête-Dieu. “Ultra-Catholic. And your mother was a Carmelite nun!”

“My mother assumed the Veil of Profession when I was eight years old. With my father’s consent and the approval of her Director,” said Hector, narrowing his eyelids and speaking between his small white teeth. “Therefore I may be pardoned for saying that the permission of the family of de Moulny was not indispensable, or required.”

Retorted de Moulny--and it was strange how the rough, uncultured intonations, the slipshod grammar, the slang of the exercise-yard and the schoolroom, had been instinctively replaced in the mouths of these boys by the phraseology of the outer world of men:

“You are accurate, M. Hector Dunoisse, in saying that your mother was received into the Carmel when you were eight years old. What you do not admit, or do not know, is that she was a professed Carmelite when you were born.” He added, with a pout of disgust: “It is an infamy, a thing like that!”

“The infamy is yours who slander her!” cried out Hector in the quavering staccato squeak of fury. “You lie!--do you hear?--You lie!” And struck de Moulny in the face.

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VII

Followed upon the blow a sputtering oath from de Moulny, succeeded by a buzzing as of swarming hornets, as the various groups scattered over the exercise-ground broke up and consolidated into a crowd. Hector and de Moulny, as the nucleus of the said crowd, were deafened by interrogations, suffocated by the smell of red and blue dye, perspiration and pomatum, choked by the dense dust kicked up by thick, wooden-heeled, iron toe-capped shoes (each pupil blacked his own, not neglecting the soles--at cockcrow every morning)--jostled, squeezed, hustled and mobbed by immature personalities destined to be potential by-and-by in the remolding of a New France,--the said personalities being contained in baggy red breeches and coarse blue, black-belted blouses. All the eyes belonging to all the faces under the high-crowned, shiny-peaked caps of undress-wear, faces thin, faces fleshy, faces pimply, faces high-colored or pale--were round and staring with curiosity. The Redskin had challenged de Moulny! But de Moulny was his superior officer! The quarrel was about a woman. Sacred name of a pipe! Where was the affair to come off? In the Salle de Danse?--empty save at the State-appointed periods of agility occurring on two days in the week. In the yard behind the Department of Chemistry? That was a good place!

Meanwhile a duologue took place between the challenged and the challenger, unheard in the general hubbub. Said de Moulny, blotchily pale excepting for the crimson patch upon one well-padded cheekbone, for his madness was dying out in him, and he was beginning to realize the thing that he had done:

“What I have said is true: upon my honor! I heard it from my father. Or, to be more correct, I heard my father tell the story to M. de Beyras, the Minister of Finance, and General d’Arville at the dinner-table only last night.” He added: “My grandmother and the other ladies had withdrawn. I had dined with them--it being Wednesday. Perhaps they forgot me, or thought I was too deep in the dessert to care what they said. But if my mouth was stuffed with strawberries and cream, and peaches and bonbons, my ears were empty, and I heard all I wanted to hear.”

The crowd was listening now with all its ears. That image of de Moulny gormandizing tickled its sense of fun. There was a general giggle, and the corners of the mouths went up as though pulled by one string. De Moulny, sickening more and more at his task of explanation, went on, fumbling at his belt:

“As to remembering, that is very easy. Read me a page of a book, or a column of a newspaper twice--I will recite it you without an error, as you are very well aware. I will repeat you this that I heard in private, if you prefer it?”

Hector, between his small square teeth, said--the opposite of what he longed to say.... “There can be no privacy in a place like this. I prefer that you should speak out, openly, before all here!”

There was a silence about the boys, broken only by a horse-laugh or two, a whinnying giggle. The piled-up faces all about, save one or two, were grave and attentive, the hands, clean or dirty, generally dirty, by which the listeners upon the outer circle of the interested crowd supported themselves upon the shoulders of those who stood in front of them, unconsciously tightened their grip as de Moulny went on, slowly and laboriously, as though repeating an imposition, while the red mark upon his cheek deepened to blackish blue:

“How Marshal Dunoisse originally prevailed upon Sister Térèse de Saint François, of the Carmelite Convent of Widinitz in Southern Bavaria, to break her vows for him, I have no idea. I am only repeating what I have heard, and I did not hear that. He went through a kind of ceremony with her before a Protestant pastor in Switzerland; and three years subsequently to the birth of their son, induced a French Catholic priest, ignorant, of course, that the lady was a Religious,--to administer the Sacrament of Marriage.” De Moulny stopped to lick his dry lips, and pursued: “By that ceremony you were made legitimate, per subsequens matrimonium, according to Canon Law.” He syllabled the Latin as conscientiously as a sacristan’s parrot might have done. “There is no doubt of the truth of all this; my father said it to M. de Beyras and the General, and what my father says is so--he never speaks without being sure!”

Hector knew a pang of envy of this boy who owned a father capable of inspiring a confidence so immense. But he never took his eyes from those slowly moving lips of de Moulny’s, as the words came dropping out....

“Having made Madame his wife, and legitimatized her son by the marriage, Monsieur the Marshal instituted legal proceedings to recover the dowry paid by Madame’s father, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, to the Mother Prioress of the Carmelite Convent when his daughter took the Veil. Monsieur the Marshal did not think it necessary to tell Madame what he was doing.... Her determination some years later, to resume the habit of the Carmelite Order--provided the Church she had outraged would receive her--was violently opposed by him. But eventually”--de Moulny’s eyes flickered between their thick eyelids, and he licked his lips again as though Hector’s hot stare scorched them--“eventually he permitted it to be clearly understood; he stated in terms, the plainness of which there was no mistaking, that, if the Church would repay the dowry of the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz to the husband of Madame Dunoisse, Sœur Térèse de Saint François might return to the Carmel whenever she felt disposed.”

Hector was sick at the pit of his stomach with loathing of the picture of a father evoked. He blinked his stiff eyelids, clenched and unclenched his hot hands, opened and shut his mouth without bringing any words out of it. The Catholics among the listeners understood why very well. The Freethinkers yawned or smiled, the Atheists sneered or tittered, the Protestants wondered what all the rumpus was about? And de Moulny went on:

“Here M. de Beyras broke in. He said: ‘The Swiss innkeeper spoke there!’ I do not know what he meant by that. The General answered, sniffing the bouquet of the Burgundy in his glass: ‘Rather than the Brigand of the Grand Army!’ Of course, I understood that allusion perfectly well!”

The prolonged effort of memory had taxed de Moulny. He puffed. Hector made yet another effort, and got out in a strangling croak:

“The--the dowry. He did not succeed in----?”

De Moulny wrinkled his nose as though a nasty smell had offended the organ.

“Unfortunately he did, although the money had been expended by the Prioress in clearing off a building-debt and endowing a House of Mercy for the incurable sick poor. I do not know how the Prioress managed to repay it. Probably some wealthy Catholic nobleman came to her aid. But what I do know is that the reply of the Reverend Mother to Monsieur the Marshal, conveyed to him through Madame Dunoisse’s Director, ran like this: ‘We concede to you this money, the price of a soul. Sister Térèse de Saint François will return to the Convent forthwith.’”

Hector groaned.

“It was a great sum, this dowry?”

“My father says,” answered de Moulny, “the amount in silver thalers of Germany, comes to one million, one hundred-and-twenty-five thousand of our francs. That will be forty-five thousand of your English sovereigns,” he added with a side-thrust at Hector’s weakness of claiming, on the strength of a bare month’s holiday spent in the foggy island, an authoritative acquaintance with its coinage, customs, scenery, people and vernacular. “The money,” he went on, “was bequeathed to the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz by her mother, whose dowry it had been. My father did not say so; possibly that may not be true.”

Hector’s brows knitted. He mumbled, between burning anger and cold disgust:

“What can he have wanted with all that money? He had enough before!”

“Some men never have enough,” said de Moulny, in his cold, heavy, contemptuous way. “What did he want it for? Perhaps to gamble away on the green cloth or on the Bourse! Perhaps to spend upon his mistresses! Perhaps to make provision for you....”

“I will not have it!” snarled Hector.

“Nor would I in your place,” said de Moulny with one of his slow nods. “I like money well enough, but money with that taint upon it!... Robbed from the dying poor, to--bah!” He spat upon the trodden dust. “Now have you heard enough?” He added with an inflection that plucked at Hector’s heartstrings: “It did not give me pleasure listening to the story, I assure you.”

Hector said:

“Thank you!”

The utterance was like a sob. De Moulny jumped at the sound, looked about him at the staring faces, back at the face of the boy who had been his friend, and to whom he had done an injury that could never be undone, and cried out wildly:

“Why did you challenge me just now for a gaffe--a mere piece of stupid joking--about the bonnet of an old woman who snivels in a pocket-handkerchief? Do you not know that when once I get angry I am as mad as all Bicêtre? I swear to you that when I listened to that story it was with the determination never to repeat it!--to bury it!--to compel myself to forget it! Yet in a few hours....” He choked and boggled, and the shamed blood that dyed his solid, ordinarily dough-colored countenance, obliterated that deepening bruise upon the cheekbone. “I apologize!” he at last managed to get out. “I have been guilty of an unpardonable meanness! I ask you, before all here, to forget it! I beg you to forgive me!”

Hector said, in pain for the pain that was written in de Moulny’s face:

“De Moulny, I shall willingly accept your apology--after we have fought. You must understand that the lady of whose bonnet you spoke offensively is my old English governess, once my mother’s dame de compagnie.... If she dried her eyes when she looked at me it must have been because she was thinking of my mother, whom she loved; and--I must have satisfaction for your contempt of those tears.... And--you have refused to fight me because of my birth, you have told me of my mother’s sin, and of the sacrilege committed by my father. Do you not understand that this duel must take place? There can be no one who thinks otherwise here?”

Hector looked about him. There was a sudden buzz from the crowd that said “No one!”

De Moulny said, with his eyes upon the ground: “I understand that I have been a brute and a savage. The meeting shall be where you please. I name my cousin Albert de Moulny for my second, unless he is ashamed to appear for one who has disgraced his name?”

It was so terrible, the bumptious, arrogant de Moulny’s self-abasement, that Hector turned his eyes elsewhere, and even the most callous among the gazers winced at the sight. Albert de Moulny, red and lowering, butted his way to the side of his principal, savagely kicking the shins of those boys who would not move. Hector, catching the alert eye of Pédelaborde, a fat, vivacious, brown-skinned, button-eyed youth who had the School Code of Honor at his stumpy finger-ends, and was known as the best fencer of the Junior Corps, gave him a beckoning nod.

“Sapristi!” panted the nephew of the man of teeth, as he emerged, smiling but rather squeezed, from the press of bodies, “so you are going to give the fat one rhubarb for senna? Ten times I thought you on the point of falling into each other’s arms! I held on to my ears from pure fright!--there has not been an affair of honor amongst the Juniors for three months; we were getting moldy! By-the-way, which of us is to prig the skewers from the Fencing Theater? De Moulny Younger or me? I suggest we toss up. As for de Moulny Elder--he is a bad swordsman--you are better than decent! I say so!... It rests with you to cut his claws and his tail. He is stronger than you.... Saperlipopette! he has the arms of a blacksmith, but there are certain ruses to be employed in such a case--I said ruses, not tricks!--to gain time and tire a long-winded opponent. For example--saisissez-vous--you could stamp upon one of your opponent’s feet during a corps à corps, thus creating a diversion----”

“I am no blackguard ... whatever else I may be!” said his principal sulkily.

“--Or if you felt in need of a rest,” pursued the enthusiast Pédelaborde, “you could catch your point against the edge of de Moulny’s guard, so as to bend it. Then a halt is called for straightening the steel, and meanwhile--you get your second wind. It is very simple! Or--you could permit your sword to fall when his blade beats yours.... De Moulny would never do a thing like that, you say? not so dishonorable! Oh! que si! And I said these devices might be practiced in ease of need--not that they were in good form. For example! You could, if he lunges--and de Moulny’s lunge is a nasty thing!--you could slip and overbalance. Fall to the ground, I mean, point up, so that he gets hit in that big belly of his. It’s an Italian mountebank-trick, I don’t recommend it, French fencing keeps to the high lines. But--tiens, mon œil!--to skewer him like a cockchafer, that would be a lark!”

“Your idea of a lark makes me sick!” broke out Hector, so savagely that Pédelaborde’s jaw dropped and his eyebrows shot towards his hair. Then:

“Messieurs The Pupils! RETURN TO YOUR STUDIES!” bellowed the most bull-voiced of the three Sergeants of the Line, appointed to assist the Captain-Commandant in the drilling and disciplining of the young gentlemen of the Junior Corps.

The deafening gallop of three hundred regulation shoes followed as Messieurs the Pupils surged across the parade-ground, mobbed a moment at the wide pillared entrance to the Hall of the Class-Rooms, then foamed, a roaring torrent of boyhood, up the iron-shod staircase into the gallery where the accouterments were racked, the brass-mounted muskets piled with a clattering that woke the echoes in every stone-flagged passage and every high-ceilinged room of the big, raw, draughty building.

Hector had prophesied correctly. Before evening roll-call a further, deliberate, purposefully-flagrant breach of propriety on the part of de Moulny had caused him to be relieved of the responsibilities, with the galon of Corporal. The duel was fought before reveille of the following day.

Perhaps half-a-dozen cadets were present beside the principals and their seconds. Deft Pédelaborde had purloined a pair of foils from one of the wall-cases of the School of Fence. The combat took place according to the most approved conditions of etiquette, at the rear of the Department of Chemistry, whose thick-walled, high-windowed rows of laboratories harbored no possible observers at that hour. Everybody wore an expression of solemnity worthy of the occasion.... Pédelaborde was on his best behavior. As he himself said afterwards, “As good as bread.”

The buttons were ceremoniously broken off the foils. The opponents, stripped to their drawers, were placed: ... Hector looked at the big fleshy white body of de Moulny, the deep chest and barreled ribs heaving gently with the even breathing, and a shudder went through him. He was remembering something that Pédelaborde had said. And his blade, when measured against that of his antagonist, shook so that Pédelaborde could barely restrain a whistle of dismay.

“My man has got the venette!” he thought, as de Moulny Younger gave the word, and the duelists threw themselves on guard. Yet palpably the advantage was with his man. If not like Hamlet, fat and scant of breath, de Moulny Elder was too much addicted to the consumption of pastry, sweets, and fruit to be in hard condition. The contrast between his sallow impassive bulk, its blonde whiteness intensified by the vivid green of a vine whose foliage richly clothed the wall that was his background, and the lithe slimness of Dunoisse, the slender boyish framework of bone covered with tough young muscle and lean flesh, the unblemished skin colored like the red Egyptian granite, was curious to see.

A cat glared and humped and spat upon the wall behind de Moulny, brandishing a hugely-magnificent tail. Another cat growled and cursed hideously, below upon the grass-fringed flagstones. The rankness of their hate tainted the cool clean air. De Moulny, who loathed vile smells, and was qualmishly sensible of his empty stomach, sniffed and grimaced.... And a pale rose-and-golden sunrise illuminated the lower edges of long fleets of pearl-white, pearl-gray-mottled clouds, traveling north-westwards at the bidding of the morning breeze. The square tower of St. Étienne and the magnificent towering dome-crowned dome of the Pantheon beyond, shone out in vivid delicate aquarelle-tints of slate-blue and olive-green, of umber and warm brown.... The squat laboratory annexe, bristling with furnace-shafts, that made one side of the oblong, walled enclosure where the boys had met to fight; the big barrack-like buildings of the School, were touched to a certain beauty by the exquisite pure light, the clear freshness of the new day. And as the sparrows of Paris began to chirp and flutter, her cocks to crow, her pigeons to preen and coo-coo, and her milk-carts to clatter over her historic paving-stones--not yet replaced by the invention of Macadam--the horrible thing befell.

You cannot fence even with the buttoned foil, either for play or practice, without being conscious that the primitive murderer has his part in you. These boys, coming to the encounter half-heartedly, yielded ere long to the fascination of the deadliest game of all. The strangeness of the unmasked face, and the bare body opposed to the point, wore off. Hector and de Moulny, at first secretly conscious of their immaturity, painfully anxious to comport themselves with dignity and coolness in the eyes of their fellows, mentally clinging with desperation to evasive Rules, forgot their inexperience, and rose above their youth, in the heat and strength and fury of that lust to slay.... And by-and-by de Moulny had a jagged bleeding scratch upon the forearm, and Hector a trickling scarlet prick above the collar-bone, and now they fought in earnest, as Man and other predatory animals will, each having tasted the other’s blood.

De Moulny’s wide, heavy parry, carried out time after time with the same stiff, sweeping pump-handle movement of the arm, had warded off the other’s sudden savage attack in quinte. He disengaged, dallied in a clumsy feint, made a blundering opening, delivered one of his famous long-armed lunges. Hector, in act to riposte, trod upon a slug in the act of promenading over the dew-wet flagstones, reducing the land-mollusc of the rudimentary shell to a mere streak of sliminess; slipped on the streak, made an effort to recover his balance, and fell, in the seated position sacred to the Clown in the knockabout scenes of a Pantomime, but with the right wrist at the wrong angle for the ducal house of de Moulny.

Your schoolboy is invariably entertained by the mishap of the sitter-down without premeditation. At Hector’s farcical slide and bump the spectators roared; the seconds grinned despite their official gravity. De Moulny laughed too, they said afterwards; even as the broken point of the foil pierced the abdominal bulge above the tightly-tied silk handkerchief that held up his thin, woolen drawers. A moment he hesitated, his heavy features flushing to crimson; then he said, with a queer kind of hiccough, staring down into Hector’s horrified eyes:

“That spoils my breakfast!”

And with the scarlet flush dying out in livid deadly paleness, de Moulny collapsed and fell forwards on the blade of the sword.

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VIII

The Penal Department of the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, so soon to become an institution where the youth of the nation were taught to fight for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity under the banner of the Second Republic of France,--the Penal Department was a central passage in the basement of the Instructors’ Building, with an iron-grated gate at either end, and a row of seven cool stone cells on either side, apartments favorable to salutary reflection, containing within a space of ten square feet a stool, and a window boarded to the upper panes.

In one of these Pupil 130, guilty of an offense of homicidal violence against the person of a schoolfellow, was subjected to cold storage, pending the Military Court Martial of Inquiry which would follow the sentence pronounced by the Civil Director-in-Chief of Studies. Pending both, the offender, deprived of his brass-handled hanger and the esteem of his instructors, nourished upon bread and water--Seine water in those unenlightened days, and Seine water but grudgingly dashed with the thin red vinegary ration-wine--had nothing to do but sit astraddle on the three-legged stool, gripping the wooden edge between his thighs, and remember--and remember....

And see, painted on the semi-obscurity of the dimly-lighted cell, de Moulny’s plume of drab-colored fair hair crowning the high, knobbed, reflective forehead; the stony-blue eyes looking watchfully, intolerantly, from their narrow eye-orbits; the heavy blockish nose; the pouting underlip; the long, obstinate, projecting chin; the ugly, powerful, attractive young face moving watchfully from side to side on the column of the muscular neck, in the hollow at the base of which the first light curly hairs began to grow and mass together, spreading downwards over the broad chest and fleshy pectorals in a luxuriance envied by other boys, for to them hirsuteness meant strength, and to be strong, for a man, meant everything....

He would hear de Moulny grunt as he lunged. He would straighten his own arm for the riposte--tread on that thrice-accursed slug: feel the thing squelch under his foot and slip: land in the ridiculous sitting posture, bump! upon those inhospitable paving-stones, shaken, inclined to laugh, but horribly conscious that the point of the foil he still mechanically gripped had entered human flesh....

That bulge of the big sallow body over the edge of the tightly-tied white silk handkerchief! Just there the steel had entered.... There was a little trickle of the dark red blood....

“That spoils my breakfast,” he would hear de Moulny say.... He would see him leaning forward with the forlorn schoolboy grin fixed upon his scarlet face.... And then--there would be the facial change, from painful red to ghastly bluish-yellow, and the limp heavy body would descend upon him, a crushing, overwhelming weight. The foil had broken under it.... Oh, God! And de Moulny would die.... And he, Hector Dunoisse, his friend, who loved him, as Jonathan, David, would be his murderer....

He leaped up in frenzy, oversetting the stool.... Came podgy Pédelaborde in the twenty-ninth hour of a confinement that seemed to the prisoner to have endured for weeks, in the character of one whose feet are beautiful upon the mountains. Undeterred by the fact that he possessed not the vestige of a voice, the dentist’s nephew had recourse to the method of communicating intelligence to one in durance vile, traditionally hit upon by the Sieur Blondel. A free translation of the lay is appended:

“_You have not cooked his goose! (Although at the first go-off it appeared uncommonly like it!) They’ve plugged him up with tow--(I mean the surgeons) If he does not inflame--(and the beggar is as cool as a cucumber and as strong as a drayhorse!) He may possibly get over it. So keep up your pecker!_” sang Pédelaborde.

Upon the captive Cœur-de-Lion the song of the Troubadour could hardly have had a more tonic effect. Hector sang out joyfully in answer:

“A thousand thanks, old boy!” and a savage access of appetite following on the revulsion from black despair to immense relief, he promptly plumped down on his stiff knees, and began to rummage in the semi-obscurity for one of the stale bread-rations previously pitched away in disgust. And had found the farinaceous brickbat, and got his sharp young teeth in it even as Pédelaborde was collared by the curly-whiskered, red-faced, purple-nosed ex-Sergeant of the Municipal Guard in charge of the Penal Department, and handed over to the School Police, as one arrested in the act of clandestinely communicating with a prisoner in the cells.

The civil ordeal beneath the shining spectacles of the Director-in-Chief, assisted by the six Professors, the School Administrator, and the Treasurer, proved less awful than the culprit had reason to expect.

An imposition; Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Crassus” to be written out fairly without blots or erasures, three times, was inflicted. The address of the Director-in-Chief moved five out of the six Professors to tears, so stately was it, so paternal, so moving in its expressions. The sixth Professor would have wept also, had he not, with his chin wedged in his stock and his hands folded upon his ample waistcoat, been soundly, peacefully, sleeping in his chair.

Monseigneur le Duc had graciously entreated, said the Director-in-Chief, clemency for one whose young, revengeful hand had well-nigh deprived him of his second son, and plunged himself and his exalted family in anxiety of the most cruel. The future of the young sufferer, who, the Director-in-Chief was grateful to say, was pronounced by the surgeons to be progressing favorably--(“Then he was not inflamed!” ... thought Hector, with a rush of infinite relief.)--the future of M. Alain de Moulny must inevitably be changed by this deplorable occurrence--a profession less arduous than the military must now inevitably be his. Let him who had reft the crown of laurels from the temples of his comrade reflect upon the grave consequences of his act. The Director-in-Chief ended, rapping the table as a signal to the Professor who had not wept, to wake up, “Pupil 130, you may now return to your studies, but, pending the decision of the Military Tribunal, you are Still Provisionally Under Arrest.”

The verdict of the Military Tribunal was in favor of the prisoner. It was decided that Pupil No. 130, roused to choler by an expression injurious to his family honor, had challenged Pupil No. 127 with justification. Having already undergone three days’ imprisonment, no further punishment than a reprimand for leaving the dormitory before beat of drum would be administered by the Court, which rose as M. the General gave the signal. And Hector was free.

But for many days after the completion of those three unblotted copies of “Marcus Crassus” he did not see de Moulny.... He hung about the Infirmary, waiting for scraps of intelligence as a hungry cat was wont to hang about the kitchen quarters, wistful-eyed, hollow-flanked, waiting for eleemosynary scraps. One of the two Sisters of Charity in charge took pity on him, perhaps both of them did.... A day came when he was admitted into the long bare sunshiny ward.... At the end nearest the high west window that commanded a view of the flowery garden-beds and neat green grass-plats surrounding the house of Monsieur the Director-in-Chief, upon a low iron bedstead from which the curtains had been stripped away, lay stretched a long body, to which an unpleasant effect of bloated corpulence was imparted by the wicker cage that held the bedclothes up.... The long face that topped the body was very white, a lock of ashen blonde hair drooped over the knobby forehead; the pouting underlip hung lax; the blue eyes, less stony than of old, looked out of hollowed orbits; a sparse and scattered growth of fluffy reddish hairs had started on the lank jaws and long, powerful chin. Hector, conscious of his own egg-smooth cheeks, knew a momentary pang of envy of that incipient beard.... And then as de Moulny grinned in the old cheerful boyish way, holding out a long attenuated arm and bony hand in welcome, something strangling seemed to grip him by the throat....

Only de Moulny saw his tears. The Sister, considerately busy at the other end of a long avenue of tenantless beds with checked side-curtains, assiduously folded bandages at a little table, as the sobbing cry broke forth:

“Oh, Alain, I always loved you!--I would rather you had killed me than have lived to see you lie here! Oh! Alain!--Alain!”

“It does not matter,” said de Moulny, but his long upper lip quivered and the water stood in his own eyes. “They will make a priest of me now, that is all. She”--he jerked his chin in the direction of the busy Sister--“would say the foil-thrust was a special grace. Tell me how Paris is looking? I have not seen the slut for--how long?” He began a laugh, and broke off in the middle, and gave a grimace of pain. “Dame!--but that hurts!” he said before he could stop, and saw his smart reflected in the other’s shamed, wet face, and winced at it.

“Pupil 127 must not excite himself or elevate his voice above a whisper in speaking. The orders of the Surgeon attending are stringent. It is my duty to see that they are obeyed.”

Sister Edouard-Antoine had spoken. Hector rose up and saluted as the nun came gliding down the avenue of beds towards them, her beads clattering and swinging by her side, her black robes sweeping the well-scrubbed boards, her finger raised in admonition, solicitude on the mild face within the coif of starched white linen....

“They shall be obeyed, my Sister,” said de Moulny in an elaborate whisper. The Sister smiled and nodded, and went back to her work. Hector, on a rush-bottomed chair by the low bed, holding the hot, thin, bony hand, began to say:

“I went out yesterday--being Wednesday. Paris is looking as she always looks--always will look, until England and Russia and Germany join forces to invade France, and batter down her forts and spike her batteries, and pound her churches and towers and palaces to powder with newly-invented projectiles, bigger than any shell the world has ever yet seen, filled with some fulminate of a thousand times the explosive power of gunpowder....”

“Go it!” whispered de Moulny. Then a spark of fanatical enthusiasm kindled in his pale blue eyes. “An explosive of a thousand times the power of gunpowder, you say!” he repeated. “Remember that inspection, and the grimy neck and black hands that cost me my Corporal’s galon! I had been working in the Department of Chemistry that morning.... I had got all that black on me through a blow-up in the laboratory. Nom d’un petit bonhomme! I thought I had discovered it--then!--that explosive that is to send gunpowder to the wall. Listen----”

“Do not excite yourself!” begged Hector, “or the Sister will turn me out.”

De Moulny went on: “I shall pursue the thing no further, for how shall one who is to be a Catholic priest spend his time inventing explosives to destroy men? But--one day you may take up the thread of discovery where I left off.”

“Or where the discovery went off!” suggested Hector.

De Moulny grinned, though his eyes were serious.

“Just so. But listen. I had been reading of the experiments made in 1832 by Braconnot of Nancy, who converted woody fiber into a highly-combustible body by treating it with nitric acid. And I dipped a piece of carded cotton-wool in nitric, and washed it. Then I dipped it in concentrated sulphuric. The sulphuric not only dehydrated the nitric--saisissez?--but took up the water. Then it occurred to me to test the expansive power of the substance in combustion by packing it into a paper cone and lighting it. Well, I was packing the stuff with the end of an aluminum spatula, into the little paper case, when--but you must have heard?”

“Ps’st! Br’roum! Boum!” Hector nodded. “I heard, most certainly! But let me now tell you of Wednesday.” He leaned forwards, gripping the seat of the rush-bottomed chair between his knees with his strong supple red hands as he had gripped the edge of the prison stool, and his bright black eyes were eager on de Moulny’s.

“First I went and looked up at the outside of the great Carmelite Convent in the Rue Vaugirard--the place where I was taken when I was eight years old, to say good-by to my mother before she went away.... Where she was going they would not tell me--nor, though I have always received a letter from her regularly twice a year, has there ever been any address or postmark upon it by which I might be guided to find out her whereabouts. But of course she is at Widinitz, in the Priory Convent there. And it seems to me that she did right in returning. In her place I should have done the same. He says I say so because I have Carmel in my blood!”

A faint pink flush forced its way to the surface of de Moulny’s thick sallow skin. He whispered, averting his eyes:

“You have spoken to him about...?”

“When he heard of our--difference of opinion, he naturally inquired its cause.”

Hector’s small square white teeth showed in a silent mocking laugh that was not good to see. “He thought I fought in defense of my father’s honor. He said so. He may say so again--but he will not think it now!”

The boyish face changed and hardened at the recollection of that interview. Terrible words must have been exchanged between the father and the son. De Moulny, cadet of a family whose strongest hereditary principle, next to piety towards the Church, was respect towards parents, shuddered under his wicker-basket and patchwork coverlet. There was a cautious tap at the black swing-doors leading out upon the tile-paved passage. They parted, Madame Gaubert appeared looking for the Sister, caught her mild eye as she glanced round from her work, beckoned with an urgent finger and the whole of her vivacious face.... The Sister rose, and the face vanished. As the doors closed behind the nun’s noiseless black draperies, Hector took up his tale:

“I said to him that the terms upon which he had permitted my mother to return to the bosom of the Church were infamous. He laughed at first at what he called my pompous manner and fine choice of words. He was very witty about the recovery of the dowry--called it ‘squeezing the Pope’s nose,’ ‘milking the black cow,’ and other things. All the while he pretended to laugh, but he gnashed his teeth through the laughter in that ugly way he has.”

“I know!” de Moulny nodded.

“Then he reproached me for unfilial ingratitude. He said it was to endow his only son with riches that he demanded return of the dowry--the surrender of the three-hundred-thousand silver thalers.... ‘You are a child now,’ he told me, ‘but when you are a man, when you need money for play, dress, amusements, pleasure, women, you will come to me hat in hand.’ I said: ‘Never in my life!...’ He told me: ‘Wait until you are a man!’”

Hector pondered and rubbed his ear. De Moulny cackled faintly:

“He tweaked you well when he told you to wait, I see!”

Hector nodded, grimacing.

“To pull the hair, or tweak the ear, that was his Emperor’s habit, when he was in a good temper.... My father copies the habit, just as he carries Spanish snuff loose in the pockets of his buff nankeen vests and wears his right hand in the bosom--so!” He imitated the historic pose and went on: “He kept it there as he pinched and wrung with the left finger and thumb”--the speaker gingerly touched the martyred ear--“laughing all the time. I thought my ear would have come off, but I set my teeth and held my tongue.... Then he let go, and chucked me under the chin--another trick of the Emperor’s. ‘A sprig of the blood-royal for Luitpold’s blood-pudding! That is not a bad return! We shall have a fine Serene Highness presently for those good people of Widinitz.’ And he went away laughing and scattering snuff all over his vest and knee-breeches; he calls pantaloons ‘the pitiable refuge of legs without calves.’ Now, what did he mean by a Serene Highness for those good people of Widinitz?”

“I--am--not quite sure.” De Moulny pastured upon a well-gnawed finger-nail, pulled at his jutting underlip, and looked wise. “What I think he meant I shall not tell you now--! What I want you to do now is to swear to me, solemnly, that you will never touch a franc of that money.”

“I have promised.”

“A promise is good, but an oath is better.”

Hector began to laugh in a sheepish way, but de Moulny’s knobby forehead was portentous. That mass of gold, reclaimed from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz seemed to him the untouchable thing; the taking it unpardonable--an act of simony his orthodox Catholic gorge rose at. So, as Hector looked at him, hesitating, he gnawed and glowered and breathed until he lost patience and hit the basket that held up the bedclothes with his fist, and whispered furiously:

“Swear, if you value my friendship! And I--I will swear, as you once asked me--remember, Redskin!--as you once asked me!--to be your friend through life--to the edge of Death--beyond Death if that be permitted!”

Ah me! It is never the lover who loves the more, never the friend whose friendship is the most ardent, who seeks the testing-proof of love or friendship, who demands the crowning sacrifice in return for the promise of a love that is never to grow cool, a loyalty that shall never fail or falter....

* * * * *

Perhaps if the boy who was now to repeat the vow that the other boy dictated had known at this juncture all that its keeping was to involve, he would have taken it all the same. Here before him lay his chosen friend, brought to the verge of that grave of which he spoke, laid low in the flower of his youth, in the pride of his strength, by the hand of him who loved him; the bright wings of his ambition clipped, the prosaic, sedentary life of a theological student unrolled before him instead of the alluring, vari-colored career of soldierly adventure, his well-loved researches in War-chemistry tabu forever by that pale, prohibitory reflection of the priestly tonsure.... Do you wonder that his will was as wax in the molding hands?

De Moulny’s Rosary, disinterred at the commencement of his wound-sickness from among the cake-crumbs and bits of flue at the bottom of his dormitory kit-locker by Sister Edouard-Antoine when searching for nightcaps, hung upon one of the iron knobs at the head of his bed.... He reached up a long gaunt arm to get it; gave the blue string of lapis-lazuli beads, with the silver Paternosters and silver-scrolled and figured Crucifix, into Hector’s hands, ... bade him, in a tone that already had something of the ecclesiastical authority, kiss the sacred Symbol and repeat the vow.

“‘I, Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, solemnly swear and depose’--where did de Moulny get all the big words he knew? ... ‘swear and depose that I will never profit by one penny of the dowry of three-hundred-thousand silver thalers paid to the Prioress of the Convent of Widinitz as the dowry of my mother, the Princess Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz, otherwise Dunoisse, in religion Sister Térèse de Saint François. So help me, Almighty God, and our Blessed Lady! Amen.’”

He kissed the Crucifix de Moulny put to his lips, and de Moulny took the oath in his turn:

“And I, Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny, solemnly swear to be a faithful, true, and sincere friend to Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, through Life to the edge of Death, and beyond Death--if that be permitted? In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

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IX

The Crucifix was duly saluted, the Rosary hung back upon the bed-knob.

“Embrace me now, my friend,” said de Moulny, his blue eyes shining under a smooth forehead. Hector held out his hand.

“We will shake hands as English boys do. They ridicule our French way of kissing, Miss Smithwick says.”

“And we die of laughter,” said de Moulny, “when we see them hand a lady a cushion or a chair, or try to make a bow. If I had not this basket on my stomach I would get up and show you how my cousin Robert Bertham comports himself in a drawing-room. He is certainly handsome, but stiff! His backbone must be a billiard-cue, nom d’un petit bonhomme! Yet he can run and jump and row, for if he has not the grace of an athlete he has the muscles of one. He was stroke of the Eton Eight last year; they rowed against the School of Westminster in a race from Windsor Bridge to Surly and back, and beat. They have beaten them again this year, Bertham tells me in his last letter. He writes French with a spade, as M. Magne would say.”

The nerves of both boys were tingling still with the recollection of the double compact they had sealed with an oath. Now they could look at one another without consciousness, and were glad to talk of Bertham, his English awkwardness and his British French. For mere humanity cannot for long together endure to respire the thin crystal air of the Higher Emotions. It must come down, and breathe the common air of ordinary life, and talk of everyday things, or perish. So Hector listened while de Moulny held forth.

“Bertham will be Bertham of Wraye when he succeeds to the peerage of his father. It is of ancient creation and highly respectable. He is my cousin by virtue of an alliance between our houses some eighteen years back, when my grandmother’s youngest daughter--my Aunt Gabrielle--married Lord Bertham, then Ambassador for England here. You know the English Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré? My grandmother did not approve of the union at first, the Berthams are Protestants of the English Establishment. But an agreement was arrived at with regard to my aunt’s faith and the faith of her daughters. The sons, Robert and the younger boy ... but that’s my grandmother’s cross, she says, that she has heretics for grandsons.... My Aunt Gabrielle is a charming person--I am very fond of her. She boasts of being English to the backbone ... pleases her husband by wearing no costumes that are not from the atelier of a London couturiére--that must be her cross, though she does not say so!” De Moulny grinned at his own joke.

“How you talk!” said Hector, flushed with admiration of his idol’s powers of conversation.

“I like words,” said the idol, lightly taking the incense as his due. “Terms, expressions, phrases, combinations of these, please me like combinations in Chemistry. I do not enjoy composition with the pen; the tongue is my preference. Perhaps I was meant for a diplomatic career.” His face fell as his eyes rested upon the basket that humped the bedclothes. It cleared as he added, with an afterthought:

“Diplomacy is for priests as well as statesmen. Men of acumen and eloquence are wanted in the Church.” De Moulny folded his lean arms behind his head, and perused the whitewashed ceiling.

“Tell me more about your cousin Bertham,” Hector begged, to lure de Moulny from the subject that had pricks for both.

“You are more interested in him than I am,” said de Moulny. “He writes to me, but I have not seen him since I spent an autumn month at their château of Wraye in Peakshire two years ago. Their feudal customs were interesting, but their society.... Just Heaven, how dull! Even my Aunt Gabrielle could not enliven us. And he--my cousin Robert--who cannot fence, was scandalized because I do not box. Because I said: ‘If you fight with your fists, why not with the teeth and the feet?’ That I should speak of the savate--it made him very nearly ill.... He implored: ‘For God’s sake, never say that in the hearing of any other Eton fellows! They’ll make my life a hell if you do!’ Say that in English, Redskin, you who have the tongue of John Bull at your finger-ends.”

Hector translated the words into the original English and repeated them for de Moulny’s amusement.

“It must be a queer place, that Eton of theirs,” went on de Moulny. “When they leave to enter their Universities they know nothing. Of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arithmetic, they are in ignorance. Their rowing and other sports--considered by all infinitely more important than intellectual attainments--are ignored by the Directors of the School, and yet--to these their chief efforts are addressed; to excel in strength is the ambition above all. They are flogged for the most trifling offenses, upon the naked person with a birch, by the Director-in-Chief of Studies, who is a clergyman of the Established Church. And the younger boys are servants to their elders.”

“We make them so here,” said Hector pointedly. “We subject them to the authority that others exercised over us, and that they in their turn will use over others.”

“Subjects are not serfs. These younger boys of Eton are worse used than serfs. They call the system of torture ‘fagging’; it is winked at by the Directors,” explained de Moulny. “To be kicked and tormented and beaten--that is to be fagged. To carry coals to make your master’s fire, to bring him buckets of water from the pump, to sweep and dust and black his boots, make his bed and sleep on the floor without even a blanket if he does not choose that you shall enjoy that luxury--that is to be fagged, as Bertham knows it. They are infinitely worse off than we, these sons of the English nobles and great landed gentlemen. And yet one thing that we have not got, they have”; de Moulny thrust out his underlip and wagged his big head, “and it is worth all--or nearly all these things we have that they have not. They are loyal to each other. There is union among them. In Chemistry we know the value of cohesion.... Well!... there is cohesion among these Eton boys. How much of it is there here? Not as much as--that!” He measured off an infinitesimal space upon the bitten finger-nail, and showed it to Hector, who nodded confirmatively, saying:

“There is no currying favor with pions and tattling to masters, then? Or lending money at usury to other pupils--hein?”

“No!” said de Moulny, with a frowning shake of the head. “There is none of that sort of thing. Because--Bertham told me!--the boy who was proved to be guilty of it would have to leave Eton. Instantly. Or--it would come about that that boy would be found dead; and as to how he died”--he shrugged his shoulders expressively--“it would be as possible to gain an explanation from the corpse, Bertham says, as to wring one from the resolute silence of the School.”

Hector knew a delicious thrill of mingled horror and admiration of those terrible young Britons, who could maintain honor among themselves by such stark laws, and avenge betrayal by sentence so grim.

“But there are other rules in the Code of Eton that are imbecile, absolutely, on my honor, idiotic!” said de Moulny. “Not to button the lower button of the waistcoat--that is one rule which must not be broken. Nor must Lower boys turn up their trousers in muddy weather, or wear greatcoats in cold, until their elders choose to set the example. And unless you are of high standing in the School, you dare not roll your umbrella up. It is a presumption the whole School would resent. For another example, you are invariably to say and maintain that things others can do and that you cannot, are bad form. Bertham saw me make a fire one day, camp-fashion, in five minutes, when he had been sweating like a porter for an hour without being able to kindle a dead stick. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, with his eyebrows climbing up into his curly hair, ‘for a fellow to light fires; but to do servant’s work well is bad form, our fellows would say.’”

“Why did you want a fire?” demanded Hector, balancing his rush-bottomed chair on one hind-leg.

“To boil some water,” de Moulny answered, his eyes busy with the flowery, sunshiny parterres of the Director’s garden. “Up on the Peakshire hills,” he added, a second later, “to heat some water to bathe a dog’s hurt leg. Oh! there’s not much of a story. Bertham and I had been out riding; we had dismounted, tied our horses to a gate, and climbed Overmere Hill to look at a Roman camp that is on the top--very perfect: entrenchments, chariot-road, even sentry-shelters to be made out under the short nibbled grass.... Sheep as black as the gritstone of the Peakshire hills were feeding there, scattered all about us--lower down an old white-haired shepherd was trying to collect them; his dog, one of the shaggy, long-haired, black-and-white English breed that drives and guards sheep, seemed not to know its business. Bertham spoke of that, and the shepherd explained in his patois that the dog was not his, but had been borrowed of a neighbor--a misfortune had happened to his own. It had got the worst in a desperate fight with another dog, a combat à outrance, fought perhaps in defense of its master’s sheep; it was injured past cure; he thought he would fetch up a cord later, from the farm whose thatched roofs we could see down in the valley below, and put the unlucky creature out of its pain. We thought we might be able to do something to prevent that execution, so Bertham and I went to the shed, an affair of hurdles and poles and bunches of heather, such as our Breton shepherds of Finistère and the Côtes du Nord build to shelter them from the weather....”

“And the dog?”

“The dog was lying in a pool of blood on the beaten earth floor. A shoulder and the throat were terribly mangled, a fore-leg had been bitten through; one would have said the creature had been worried by a wolf rather than a dog of its own breed. And she was sitting on the ground beside it, holding its bloody head in her lap....”

De Moulny’s eyes blinked as though the Director’s blazing beds of gilliflowers and calceolarias, geraniums and mignonette, had dazzled them. Hector asked, with awakening interest in a story which had not at first promised much:

“Who was she?”

De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:

“She was the type of jeune personne of whom my grandmother would have approved.”

“A young girl!” grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.

“One might say to you, ‘There are young girls and young girls.’”

“This one was charming, then?” Hector’s waning interest began to burn up again.

“Certainly, no! For,” said de Moulny authoritatively, “to be charming you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought of coquetry. And--if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should give you again the negative. Beauty--the beauty of luxuriant hair, pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl’s should, loosely upon shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear, burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened, thickly lashed--these she possessed, with features much too large for beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of her age and sex, I have no name for that!”

“No?” Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on:

“No!--nor would you. Suppose you had met the Venerable Jeanne d’Arc in her peasant kirtle, driving her sheep or cows to pasture in the fields about Domremy in the days before her Voices spoke and said: ‘Thou, Maid, art destined to deliver France!’ Or--what if you had seen the Virgins of the Temple at Jerusalem pass singing on their way to the tribune surrounded with balconies, where while the Morning Sacrifice burned upon the golden Altar to the fanfare of the silver trumpets, they besought God Almighty, together with all Israel, for the speedy coming of the Saviour of mankind.... Would not One among them, draped in her simple robe of hyacinth blue, covered with the white, plainly-girdled tunic, a veil of Syrian gauze upon her golden hair, have brought you the conviction that She, above all the women you had ever seen, was destined, marked out, set apart, created to serve a peculiar purpose of her Creator, stamped with His stamp----”

The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector’s astonished gape, and their owner barked out: “What are you opening your mouth so wide about?”

Hector blurted out:

“Why--what for? Because you said that a raw English girl nursing a dying sheep-dog on a mountain in Peakshire reminded you of the Maid of Orleans and Our Blessed Lady!”

“And if I did?”

“But was she not English?... A Protestant?... a heretic?”

“Many of the Saints were heretics--until Our Lord called them,” said de Moulny, with that fanatical spark burning in his blue eye. “But He had chosen them before He called. They bore the seal of His choice.”

“Perhaps you are right. No doubt you know best. It is you who are to be----” Hector broke off.

“You were going to finish: ‘It is you who are to be a priest, not me...!’” de Moulny said, with the veins in his heavy forehead swelling, and a twitching muscle jerking down his pouting underlip.

“I forget what I was going to say,” declared Hector mendaciously, and piled Ossa upon Pelion by begging de Moulny to go on with his story. “It interested hugely,” he said, even as he struggled to repress the threatening yawn.

“What is there to tell?” grumbled de Moulny ungraciously. “She was there, that is all--with that dog that had been hurt. A pony she had ridden was grazing at the back of the shed, its bridle tied to the pommel of the saddle. Bertham approached her and saluted her; he knew her, it seems, and presented me. She spoke only of the dog--looked at nothing but the dog! She could not bear to leave it, in case it should be put to death by the master it could serve no more....”

Hector interrupted, for de Moulny’s voice had begun to sound as though he were talking in his sleep:

“Tell me her name.”

“Her name is Ada Merling.”

Even on de Moulny’s French tongue the name was full of music; it came to Hector’s ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner, with a defiant “tuck-tuck!” takes wing, with curious slanting flight. The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind, as de Moulny went on:

“True, the dog seemed at the last gasp, but if it were possible to stop the bleeding, she said, there might be a chance, who knew? It had occurred to her that cold-water applications might check the flow of blood. ‘We will try, and see, Mademoiselle,’ said I.”

De Moulny’s tone was one of fatuous self-satisfaction.

“A rusty tin saucepan is lying in a corner of the shed. This I fill with water from a little spring that trickles down the cliff behind us. We contribute handkerchiefs. Bertham and I hold the dog while she bathes the torn throat and shoulder, and bandages them. Remains the swollen leg. It occurs to me that fomentations of hot water might be of use there; I mention this idea. ‘Good! good!’ she cries, ‘we will make a fire and heat some.’ She sets to collecting the dry leaves and sticks that are scattered in a corner. Bertham makes a pile of these, and attempts to kindle it with fusees.” A smile of ineffable conceit curved de Moulny’s flabby pale cheeks and quirked the corners of his pouting lips. “He burns matches and he loses his temper; there is no other result. Then I stepped forward, bowed.... ‘Permit me, Mademoiselle, to show you how we arrange these things in my country.’” De Moulny’s tone was so infinitely arrogant, his humility so evidently masked the extreme of bumptiousness, that Hector wondered how the athletic Bertham endured it without knocking him down?

“So I hollow a fireplace in the floor, with a pocket-knife and a piece of slate, devise a flue at each corner, light the fire--which burns, one can conceive, to a marvel.... She has meanwhile refilled the rusty saucepan at the little spring; she sets it on, the water boils, when it occurs to us that we have no more handkerchiefs. But the shepherd’s linen blouse hangs behind the shed-door; at her bidding we tear that into strips.... All is done that can be done; we bid Mademoiselle Merling au revoir. She will ride home presently when her patient is a little easier, she says. We volunteer to remain; she declines to allow us. She thanks us for our aid in a voice that has the clear ring of crystal--I can in no other way describe it! When I take my leave, I desire to kiss her hand. She permits me very gracefully; she speaks French, too, with elegance, as she asks where I learned to make a fireplace so cleverly?

“‘We are taught these things,’ I say to her, ‘at the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, in my Paris. For we do not think one qualified for being an officer, Mademoiselle, until he has learned all the things that a private should know.’ Then it was that Bertham made that celebrated coq-à-l’âne about its being bad form to do servant’s work well. You should have seen the look she gave him. Sapristi!--with a surprise in it that cut to the quick. She replies: ‘Servants should respect and look up to us, and not despise us; and how can they look up to us if we show ourselves less capable than they? When I am older I mean to have a great house full of sick people to comfort and care for and nurse. And everything that has to be done for them I will learn to do with my own hands!’ My sister Viviette would have said: ‘When I grow up I shall have a rivière of pearls as big as pigeons’ eggs,’ or ‘I shall drive on the boulevards and in the Bois in an ivory-paneled barouche.’ Then I ask a stupid question: ‘Is it that you are to be a Sister of Charity, Mademoiselle?’ She answers, with a look of surprise: ‘Can no one but a nun care for the sick?’ I return: ‘In France, Mademoiselle, our sick-nurses are these holy women. They are welcome everywhere: in private houses and in public hospitals, in time of peace: and in the time of war you will find them in the camp and on the battle-field. Your first patient is a soldier wounded in war,’ I say to her, pointing to the dog. ‘Perhaps it is an augury of the future?’

“‘War is a terrible thing,’ she answers me, and grows pale, and her great eyes are fixed as though they look upon a corpse-strewn battle-field. ‘I hope with all my heart that I may never see it!’ ‘But a nurse must become inured to ugly and horrible sights, Mademoiselle,’ I remind her. She replies: ‘I shall find courage to endure them when I become a nurse.’ Then Bertham blurts out in his brusque way: ‘But you never will! Your people would not allow it. Wait and see if I am not right?’ She returns to him, with a smile, half the child’s, half the woman’s, guileless and subtle at the same time, if you can understand that? ‘We will wait--and you will see.’”

De Moulny’s whisper had dwindled to a mere thread of sound. He had long forgotten Hector, secretly pining for the end of a story that appeared to him as profoundly dull as interminably long; and, oblivious of the other’s martyrdom, talked only to himself.

“‘We will wait and you will see.... You have the courage of your convictions, Mademoiselle,’ I tell her, ‘and courage always succeeds.’ She says in that crystal voice: ‘When things, stones or other obstacles, are piled up in front of you to prevent your getting through a gap in the dyke, you don’t push because you might topple them all over, and kill somebody on the other side; and you don’t pull because you might bring them all down on your own head. You lift the stones away, one at a time; and by-and-by you see light through a little hole ... and then the hole gets bigger, and there is more and more light.’... There I interpose.... ‘But if the stones to be moved are too big for such little hands, Mademoiselle?’ And she answers, looking at them gravely: ‘My hands are not little. And if they were, there would always be men to lift the things that are too heavy, and do the things that are too hard.’

“‘Men or boys, Mademoiselle?’ I question. Then she gives me her hand once more. ‘Thank you, M. de Moulny! I will not forget it was you who built the fireplace, and helped to hold the dog.’ And Bertham was so jealous that he would not speak to me during the whole ride home!”

Upon that note of exultation the story ended. To Hector the recital had been of unmitigated dullness. Nothing but his loyalty to de Moulny had kept him from wriggling on his chair; had checked the yawns that had threatened to unhinge his youthful jaws. Now he was guilty of an offense beside which yawning would have been pardonable. He opened his black eyes in a stare of youthful, insufferable curiosity, and called out in his shrill young pipe:

“Jealous, do you say! Why, was he in love with her as well as you?”

De Moulny’s muscles jerked. He almost sat up in bed. A moment he remained glaring over the basket, speechless and livid with rage. Then he cried out furiously:

“Go away! Leave me! Go!--do you hear?”

And as Hector rose in dismay and stood blankly gaping at the convulsed and tragic face, de Moulny plucked the pillow from behind his head, and hurled that missile of low comedy at the cruel eyes that stung, and fell back upon the bolster with a cry of pain that froze the luckless blunderer to the marrow. Hector fled then, as Sister Edouard-Antoine, summoned from her colloquy in the passage by the sound, came hurrying back to the bedside. Looking back as he plunged through the narrow, black swing-doors--doors very much like two coffin-lids on hinges, set up side by side, he saw the Sister bending over the long heaving body on the bed, solicitude painted on the mild face framed in the starched-white linen coif; and heard de Moulny’s muffled sobbing, mingled with her soft, consoling tones.

* * * * *

Why should de Moulny shed tears? Did he really hate the idea of being a priest? And if so, would he be likely to love his friend Dunoisse, who had, with a broken foil, pointed out the way that ended in the seminary, the cassock, and the tonsure?

The savage, livid, loathing face rose up before Hector’s mental vision--the furious cry that had issued from the twisted lips: “Go! Leave me! Go!--do you hear?” still rang in the boy’s ears. The look, the cry, were full of hate. Yet Alain had, but a moment before, solemnly sworn to be his friend.... When we are very young we believe such oaths unbreakable.

Came Pédelaborde, and thrust a warty hand under Redskin’s elbow, as he stood frowning and pondering still, on the wide shallow doorstep of the Infirmary portico, brick-and-plaster Corinthian, elegant and chaste....

“Hé bien, mon ami; nous voilà reconciliés? A visit of sympathy, hein? It is quite proper! absolutely in rule.... But”--Pédelaborde’s little yellow eyes twinkled and glittered in his round brown face like a pair of highly-polished brass buttons, his snub nose cocked itself with an air of infinite knowingness, his bullet head of cropped black hair sparked intelligence from every bristle--“but--all the same, to call a spade a spade, saisissez? the trick that did the job for de Moulny is a dirty one. As an expert, I told you of it. As a gentleman, voyez?--I hardly expected you to use it!”

“A trick.... Use it!” Hector stuttered, and his round horrified stare would have added to de Moulny’s offense. “You don’t mean--you cannot believe that I----” He choked over the words.

Pédelaborde chuckled comfortably, thrusting his warty hands deep into the pockets of his baggy red serge breeches.

“Why, just as he lunged after his feint, didn’t you--hein? Plump!--in the act to riposte, and cleverly managed, too. Suppose he believes it a pure accident. I am not the fellow to tell tales.... Honor”--Pédelaborde extracted one of the warty hands on purpose to lay it upon his heart--“honor forbids. Now we’re on the subject of honor, I have positively pledged mine to pay Mère Cornu a trifling sum I owe her--a mere matter of eight francs--could you lend them until my uncle--hang the old skin-namalinks!--forks out with my allowance that is due?”

“I will lend you the money,” said Hector, wiping the sickly drops from his wet forehead. “But--I swear to you that was an accident--I slipped on a slug!” he added passionately. “Never dare to believe me capable of an act so vile!”

He had not had the heart to spend a franc of his own monthly allowance of two louis. He pulled the cash out of his pocket now; a handful of silver pieces, with one treasured napoleon shining amongst them, and was picking out the eight francs from the bulk, when, with a pang, the barbed memory of his oath drove home. Perhaps these coins were some infinitesimal part of that accursed dowry....

“Take it all!--keep it! I do not want it back!” he stammered hurriedly, and thrust the wealthy handful upon greedy Pédelaborde so recklessly that the napoleon and several big silver coins escaped that worthy’s warty clutches, and dropped, ringing and rolling and spinning, making a temporary Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Junior’s parade.

“Paid not to split! Saperlipopette!... Then there was no slug! He meant to do the thing!...”

Honest Pédelaborde, pausing even in the congenial task of picking up gold and silver, straightened his back to stare hard after the Redskin’s retreating figure, and whistle with indrawn breath, through a gap in his front teeth: “Phew-w!”

Those little yellow eyes of the dentist’s nephew were sharp. The brain behind them, though shallow, worked excellently in the interests of Pédelaborde. It occurred to him that when next Madame Cornu should clamor for the discharge of her bill for sweetstuff and pastry, the little affair of the trick fall might advantageously be mentioned again.

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X

Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules, cadet of the illustrious and ducal house of de Moulny, recovered of his wound, much to the gratification of his noble family, more by grace of a sound constitution and the faithful nursing of the Infirmary Sisters than by skill of the surgeons, who knew appallingly little in those days of the treatment of internal wounds. He left the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction to travel abroad under the grandmaternal care of the Duchesse, for what the Chief Director gracefully termed the “reconstitution of his health.” Later he was reported to have entered as a student at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice. It was vain to ask Redskin whether this was true. You got no information out of the fellow. He had turned sulky, the pupils said, since the affair of the duel, which invested him in the eyes even of the great boys of the Senior Corps, to which he was shortly afterwards promoted, with a luridly-tinted halo of distinction.

So nobody save Hector was aware that after the first short, stiff letter or two Alain had ceased to write. In silence the Redskin bucklered his pride. Hitherto he had not permitted his love of study to interfere with the more serious business of amusement. Now he applied himself to the acquisition of knowledge with a dogged, savage concentration his Professors had never remarked in him before. Attending one of the stately half-yearly School receptions, arrayed in all the obsolete but imposing splendors of his gold-encrusted, epauletted, frogged, high-stocked uniform of ceremony, adorned with the Cross of the Legion of Honor,--an Imperial decoration severely ignored by the Monarchy,--Marshal Dunoisse was complimented by the General-Commandant and the Chief Director upon the brilliant abilities and remarkable progress of his son.

“So it seems the flea of work has bitten you?” the affectionate parent commented a few days later, tweaking Hector’s ear in the Napoleonic manner, and turning upon his son the fanged and gleaming smile, that in conjunction with its owner’s superb height, fine form, boldly-cut swarthy features, fierce black eyes, and luxuriant black whiskers, had earned for the ex-aide-de-camp of Napoleon I. the reputation of an irresistible lady-killer.

The handsome features of the elderly dandy were thickened and inflamed by wine and good living, the limbs in the tight-fitting white stockinet pantaloons, for which he had reluctantly exchanged his golden-buckled knee-breeches; the extremities more often encased in narrow-toed, elastic-sided boots, or buckled pumps, than in the spurred Hessians, were swollen and shapeless with rheumatic gout. The hyacinthine locks, or the greater part of them, came from the atelier of Michalon Millière, His Majesty’s own hairdresser, in the Rue Feydeau; the whiskers owed their jetty gloss to a patent pomade invented by the same highly-patronized tonsorial artist. The broad black eyes were bloodshot, and could blaze under their bushy brows at times with an ogre-like ferocity, but were not brilliant any more.

Yet, from the three maids to the stout Bretonne who was cook, from the cook to Miss Smithwick,--who had acted in the capacity of dame de compagnie to Madame Dunoisse; had become governess to her son when the gates of the Convent clashed once more behind the remorse and sorrow of that unhappy lady; and in these later years, now that Hector had outgrown her mild capacity for instruction, fulfilled the duties of housekeeper at No. 000, Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,--the female staff of the ex-military widower’s household worshiped Monsieur the Marshal.

“Do you think papa so handsome?” Hector, when a very small boy, would pipe out boldly. “He has eyes that are always angry, even when he smiles. He gnashes his teeth when he laughs. He kicked Moustapho” (the poodle) “so hard in the chest with the sharp toe of his shiny boot, when Moustapho dropped a macaroon he did not want, that Moustapho cried out loud with pain. He bullies the menservants and swears at them. He smells of Cognac, and is always spilling his snuff about on the carpets, and tables, and chairs. Me, I think him ugly, for my part.”

“Your papa, my Hector, possesses in an eminent degree those personal advantages to which the weakness of the female sex renders its members fatally susceptible,” the gentle spinster said to her pupil; and she had folded her tidy black mittens upon her neat stomacher as she said it, and shaken her prim, respectable head with a sigh, adding, as her mild eye strayed between the lace and brocade window-curtains to the smart, high-wheeled cabriolet waiting in the courtyard below; the glittering turnout with the showy, high-actioned mare in the shafts, and the little top-booted, liveried, cockaded, English groom hanging to her nose:

“I would that your dear mother had found it compatible with the fulfillment of her religious duties to remain at home! For the Domestic Affections, Hector, which flourish by the connubial fireside, are potent charms to restrain the too-ardent spirit, and recall the wandering heart.” And then Miss Smithwick had coughed and ended.

She winked at much that was scandalous in the life of her idol, that prim, chaste, good woman; but who shall say that her unswerving fidelity and humble devotion did not act sometimes as a martingale? The bon-vivant, the gambler, the dissipated elderly buck of the First Napoleon’s Court, the ex-Adonis of the Tuileries, who never wasted time in resisting the blandishments of any Venus of the Court or nymph of the Palais Royal, respected decent Smithwick, was even known, at the pathetic stage of wine, to refer to her as the only woman who had ever understood him.

Yet when her sister (her sole remaining relative, who lived upon a small annuity, in the village of Hampstead, near London), sustained a paralytic stroke, and Smithwick was recalled to nurse her, did that poor lady’s employer dream of providing,--out of those hundreds of thousands of thalers wrested from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz,--for the old age of the faithful creature? You do not know Monsieur the Marshal if you dream he did.

He generously paid her the quarter due of her annual salary of fifteen hundred francs, kissed her knuckly left hand with the garnet ring upon it, placed there by a pale young English curate deceased many years previously--for even the Smithwicks have their romances and their tragedies--told her that his “roof” was “open” to her whenever she desired to return; and bowed her graciously out of his library, whose Empire bookcases were laden with costly editions of the classics, published by the Houbigants and the Chardins, Michaud and Buére (tomes of beauty that were fountains sealed to the illiterate master of the house), and whose walls were hung with splendid engravings by Renard and F. Chauveau, a few gems from the brushes of Watteau and Greuze, Boucher and Mignard; and one or two examples of the shining art of the young Meissonier.

The luxurious house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was less wholesome for good Smithwick’s going. But I fear young Hector regretted her departure less than he should have done. True, the meek gentlewoman had not been able to teach her patron’s son very much. But she had at least implanted in him the habit of truth, and the love of soap-and-water and clean linen. Last, but not least, she had taught him to speak the English of the educated upper classes with barely a trace of accent, whereas the Paris-residing teachers of the tongue of Albion were in those days, and too frequently are in these, emigrants from the green isle adjacent; Miss Maloney’s, Misther Magee’s, and Mrs. Maguire’s; equipped with the thinnest of skins for imagined injuries, and the thickest of brogues for voluble speech, that ever hailed from Dublin or Wexford, King’s County or the County Cork.

Not a servant of the household but had some parting gift for Smithwick--from the blue handkerchief full of apples offered by the kitchen-girl, to the housemaid’s tribute of a crocheted lace fichu; from the cook’s canary-bird, a piercing songster, to the green parasol--a sweet thing no bigger than a plate, with six-inch fringe and an ivory handle with a hinge, to purchase which Monsieur Brousset, the Marshal’s valet, Duchard the butler, and Auguste the coachman had clubbed francs.

The question of a token of remembrance for faithful Smithwick was a thorn in her ex-pupil’s pillow. You are to understand that Redskin, in his blundering, boyish way, had been trying hard to keep inviolate the oath imposed upon him by de Moulny. The monthly two louis of pocket-money were scrupulously dropped each pay-day into the alms-box of the Carmelite Church in the Rue Vaugirard, and what a hungry glare followed the vanishing coins, and to what miserable shifts the boy resorted in the endeavor to earn a meager pittance to supply his most pressing needs, and what an unjust reputation for stinginess and parsimony he earned, when it became known that he was willing to help dull or lazy students with their papers for pay, you can conceive.

He possessed the sum of five francs, amassed with difficulty after this fashion, and this represented the boy’s entire capital at this juncture. A five-franc piece is a handsome coin, but you cannot buy anything handsome with it, that is the trouble. The discovery of the scene-painter Daguerre, first made in 1830, was not published by the Government of France until 1839. Otherwise, how the faithful heart of the attached Smithwick might have been gladdened by one of those inexpensive, oily-looking, semi-iridescent, strangely elusive portraits; into which the recipient peered, making discoveries of familiar leading features of relatives or friends, hailing them with joy when found, never finding them all together.

A portrait, even a pencil miniature with stumped shadows, its outlines filled with the palest wash of water-color, was out of the question. There was a silhouettist in the Rue de Chaillot. To this artist Hector resorted, and obtained a black paper profile, mounted and glazed, and enclosed in a gilt tin frame, at cost of all the boy possessed in the world.

That the offering was a poor one never occurred to simple Smithwick. She received it with little squeaking, mouselike cries of delight, and grief, and admiration; she ran at the tall, awkward, blushing youth to kiss him, unaware how he recoiled from the affectionate dab of her cold, pink-ended nose.

You could not say that the organ in question was disproportionately large, but its owner never managed to dispose of it inoffensively in the act of osculation. It invariably got in the eye or the ear of the recipient of the caress. A nose so chill in contact, say authorities, indicates by inverse ratio the temperature of the heart.

Hector got leave from the School, and went with the poor troubled Smithwick to the office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Boulevard des Capucines, where for ten of her scanty store of francs she got her passport signed. Stout Auguste drove them in the shiny barouche with the high-steppers in silver-mounted harness, to meet the red Calais coach at the Public Posting-Office in the Rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires, whither one of the stablelads had wheeled Miss Smithwick’s aged, piebald hair-trunk, her carpet-bag, and her three band-boxes on a hand-truck. And, judging by the coldness of the poor soul’s nose when, a very Niobe for tears, she kissed the son of her lost mistress and her adored patron good-by, the heart beneath Smithwick’s faded green velvet mantle must have been a very furnace of maternal love and tenderness.

“Never neglect the necessity of daily ablution of the entire person, my dearest boy!” entreated the poor gentlewoman, “or omit the exercises of your religion at morning and night. Instruct the domestics to see that your beloved papa’s linen is properly aired. I fear they will be only too prone to neglect these necessary precautions when my surveillance is withdrawn! And--though but a humble individual offers this counsel, remember, my Hector, that there are higher aims in life than the mere attainment of great wealth or lofty station. Self-respect, beloved child, is worth far more!” She was extraordinarily earnest in saying this, shaking her thin gray curls with emphatic nods, holding up a lean admonitory forefinger. “Persons with gifts and capacities as great, natures as noble and generous as your distinguished father’s, may be blinded by the sparkling luster of a jeweled scepter, allured by the prospect of dominion, power, influence, rule....” What could good Smithwick possibly be driving at? “But an unstained honor, my beloved boy, is worth more than these, and a clean conscience smooths the--way we must all of us travel!” She blinked the tears from her scanty, ginger-hued eyelashes, and added: “I have forfeited a confidence and regard I deeply appreciated, by perhaps unnecessarily believing it my duty to reiterate this.” She coughed and dabbed her poor red eyes with the damp white handkerchief held in the thin, shaking hand in the shabby glove; and continued: “But a day will come when the brief joys and bitter disillusions of this life will be at an end. The bitterest that I have ever known come late, very late indeed!” Had Smithwick met it in the library that morning when the Marshal bade her adieu? “When I lay my head upon my pillow to die, it will be with the conviction that I did my duty. It has borne me fruit of sorrow. But I hope and pray that this chastening may be for my good. And oh! my dearest child, may God for ever bless and keep you!”

The mail-bags were stowed. The three inside passengers’ seats being taken, poor weeping Smithwick perforce was compelled to negotiate the ladder, must climb into the cabriolet in company with the guard. With her thin elderly ankles upon her mind, it may be judged that no more intelligible speech came from her. She peered round the tarred canvas hood as the bugle flourished; she waved her wet handkerchief as the long, stinging whip-lash cracked over the bony backs of the four high-rumped, long-necked grays.... She was gone. Something had gone out of Hector’s life along with her; he had not loved her, yet she left a gap behind. His heart was cold and heavy as he brought his eyes back from the dwindling red patch made by the mail amongst the vari-colored Paris street-traffic, but the hardening change that had begun in him from the very hour of de Moulny’s revelation stiffened the muscles of his face, and drove back the tears he might have shed.

“Holy blue!” gulped stout Auguste, who was sitting on his box blubbering and mopping his eyes with a red cotton handkerchief, sadly out of keeping with his superb mauve and yellow livery, blazing with gold lace and buttons, and the huge cocked hat that crowned his well-powdered wig. “There are gayer employments than seeing people off, my faith there are! Who would have dreamed I should ever pipe my eye for the old girl! It is a pity she is gone? She was an honest creature!” He added huskily, tucking away the red cotton handkerchief: “One could do uncommonly well now with two fingers of wine?”

He cocked his thirsty eye at penniless Hector, who pretended not to hear him, and turned away abruptly; saying that he would walk back to the School.

“That is not a chip of the old block, see you, when it comes to a cart-wheel for drink-money,” said Auguste over his shoulder, as the silver-harnessed blacks with much champing and high action, prepared to return to the stables in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, and the silkstockinged footman mounted his perch behind.

“It is a learned prig,” pronounced the footman, authoritatively, adding: “They turn them out all of one pattern at that shop of his.”

“Yet he fought a duel,” said Auguste, deftly twirling the prancing steeds into a by-street and pulling up outside a little, low-browed wine-shop much frequented by gold-laced liveries and cocked-hats. “And came off the victor,” he added, with a touch of pride.

“By a trick got up beforehand,” said the footman pithily, as he dived under the striped awning, in at the wineshop door.

“Nothing of the sort!” denied Auguste.

“Just as you please,” said the footman, emerging with two brimming pewter measures, “but none the less true. M. Pédelaborde’s nephew, who taught the coup to M. Hector, told M. Alain de Moulny, long after the affair, how cleverly he had been grassed. It was at the Hôtel de Moulny, my crony Lacroix, M. Alain’s valet, was waiting in the ante-room and listened at the door. Money passed, Lacroix says. M. Alain de Moulny paid Pédelaborde handsomely not to tell.”

“That is a story one doesn’t like the stink of,” said Auguste, making a wry mouth, draining his measure, handing it back to the silk-calved one, and spitting in the dust. “But the knowing fellow who taught M. Hector the dirty dodge and blows the gaff for hush-money, that is a rank polecat, my word!”

A crude pronouncement with which the reader may possibly be inclined to agree.

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XI

The months went by. Hector ended his course at the School of Technical Military Instruction with honors, and his examiners, in recognition of the gift for languages, the bent for Science, the administrative and organizing capacities that were distinctive of this student, transferred him, with another equally promising youth, not to the Academy of Ways, Works, and Transport, where the embryo artillery and engineer officers of the School of Technical Military Instruction were usually ground and polished, but to the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff. An annual bounty tacked to the tail of the certificate relieved that pressing necessity for pocket-money. Redskin, with fewer anxieties upon his mind, could draw breath.

The Training Institute for Officers of the Staff was the School of Technical Military Instruction all over again, but upon a hugely magnified scale. To mention the School was the unpardonable sin: you spent the first term in laboriously unlearning everything that had been taught you there. On being admitted to the small gate adjacent to the large ones of wrought and gilded iron, you beheld the façade of the Institute, its great portico crowned with a triangular pediment supported upon stately pillars, upon which was sculptured an emblematical bas-relief of France, seated on a trophy of conquered cannon, instructing her sons in the military sciences, and distributing among them weapons of war. Following your guide, you shortly afterwards discovered two large yards full of young men in unbuttoned uniforms, supporting on their knees drawing-boards with squares of cartridge paper pinned upon them, upon which they were busily delineating the various architectural features of the buildings of the Institute, while a Colonel of the Corps of Instructors sternly or blandly surveyed the scene. Within the Institute, studies in Mathematics, Trigonometry and Topography, Cosmography, Geography, Chemistry, Artillery, Field Fortifications, Permanent Fortifications, Assault and Defense, Plans, Military Administration, Military Maneuvers, French, English, and German Literature, Fencing, Swimming, and Horsemanship in all its branches were thoroughly and comprehensively taught. And once a quarter the pupil-basket was picked over by skilled hands; and worthy young men, who were eminently fitted to serve their country in the inferior capacity as regimental officers, but did not possess the qualities necessary for the making of Officers of the Staff, were, at that little gate by the side of the great gilded iron ones, blandly shown out.

For, sane even in her maddest hour, France has never--under every conceivable political condition, in every imaginable national crisis, and under whatever government--Monarchical, Imperial, or Republican, that may for the time being have got the upper hand--ceased laboring to insure the supply to her Army, constantly renewed, of officers competent to command armies, of scientists skilled in the innumerable moves of the Great Game of War. Nor have other nations, Continental or insular, ever failed to profit by France’s example, and follow France’s lead.

* * * * *

The Marshal’s son was not dismissed by that dreaded little exit. The fine flower of Young France grew in the neat parterres behind those lofty gilded railings. Sous-lieutenant Hector Dunoisse found many intellectual superiors among his comrades, whose society stimulated him to greater efforts. He worked, and presently began to win distinction; passed, with a specially-endorsed certificate, his examinations in the branches of study already enumerated and a few more; served for three months as Supernumerary-Assistant-Adjutant with an Artillery Regiment at Nancy; did duty for a corresponding period in the same capacity at Belfort with a corps of Engineers; and then received his appointment as Assistant-Adjutant to the 33rd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, quartered at Blidah.

Money would not be needed to make life tolerable at Blidah, where mettlesome Arab horses could be bought by Chasseurs d’Afrique at reasonable prices, and the mastic and the thin Dalmatian wine were excellent and cheap. Algerian cigars and pipe-tobacco were obtainable at the outlay of a few coppers; and from every thicket of dwarf oak or alfa-grass, hares started out before the sportsman’s gun; and partridges and Carthage hens were as plentiful as sparrows in Paris.

Yet even at Blidah Dunoisse knew the nip of poverty, and there were times when the pack that de Moulny’s hand had bound upon his shoulders galled him sore. For--the stroke of a pen and one could have had all one wanted. It needed no more than that.

For in Paris, at the big hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, in the book-lined, weapon-adorned, half library, half smoking-room that was Redskin’s private den, and had been the boudoir of Marie Bathilde; there lay in a locked drawer of the inlaid ebony writing-table, a white parchment-covered pass-book inscribed with the name of Hector Dunoisse, and a book of pretty green-and-blue checks upon the Messieurs Rothschild, 9, Rue d’Artois. The dip of a quill in the ink, and one of the bland, well-dressed, middle-aged, discreet-looking cashiers behind the golden grilles and the broad, gleaming rosewood counters, would have opened a metal-lined drawer of gold louis, and plunged a copper shovel into the shining mass and filled the pockets of young Hector; or more probably would have wetted a skillful forefinger and thumb--run over a thick roll of crackling pink, or blue, or gray billets de banque, jotted down the numbers, and handed the roll across the counter to its owner, with a polite bow.

* * * * *

“So you think there is a curse upon my money, eh?” Monsieur the Marshal had said, upon an occasion when one of those scenes that leave ineffaceable scars upon the memory, had taken place between the father and the son.

Hector, spare, upright, muscular, lithe, ruddy of hue, bright of eye, steady of nerve, newly issued from the mint and stamped with the stamp of the Training Institute, and appointed to join his regiment in Algeria, turned pale under the reddish skin. He was silent.

“You have used none of it since you heard that story, hein? It would defile the soul and dirty the hands, hein?” queried Monsieur the Marshal, plunging one of his own into the waistcoat-pocket where he kept his snuff, and taking an immense pinch. “Yet let me point out that the allowance you disburse in pious alms and so forth----” Hector jumped, and wondered how his father had found out, and then decided that it was only a good piece of guessing, “may not be any portion of your mother’s dowry. I was not poor when I recovered those three hundred-and-twenty-thousand silver thalers from the Prioress of the Carmelite Convent at Widinitz. I wished to be so much richer, that is all!”

“Poverty,” said his son, breathing sharply through the nostrils and looking squarely in the Marshal’s swollen, fierce-eyed, bushily-whiskered face, “poverty would have been some excuse--if anything could have excused so great an----”

“‘Infamy,’ was the word you were going to use,” said Monsieur the Marshal, smiling across his great false teeth of Indian ivory, which golden bands retained in his jaws, and scattering Spanish snuff over his white kersey, tightly-strapped pantaloons, as he trumpeted loudly in a voluminous handkerchief of yellow China silk. “Pray do not hesitate to complete the sentence.”

But Hector did not complete the sentence. The Marshal went on, shrugging his shoulders and waving his ringed hands: “After all, it is better to be infamous than idiotic. You hamper your career by playing the incorruptible; you are put to stupid shifts for money when plenty of money lies at your command.”

“Do I not know that?”

“You have won honors, and with them a reputation for parsimony--are called a brilliant screw,--name of a thousand devils!--among your comrades. You coach other men for pay; you translate foreign technical works for military publishers; you burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. It is all very honorable and scrupulous, but would those who have sneered at you think better of you if they knew the truth? You know they would not! Instead of being despised, you would be laughed at for playing Don Quixote. That is one of the books I have read,” Monsieur the Marshal added, pricked by the evident surprise with which his son received this unexpected testimony of his parent’s literacy. “One can get some useful things out of a book like that, even though the hero of it is mad as a March hare. It is one of the books with blood and marrow in them, as the Emperor would have said: books that--unlike those of your Chateaubriands, Hugos, Lamartines, the devil knows who else!--are the literature that nourish men who are alive, not wooden puppets of virtue and propriety whose strings are pulled by priests--sacred name of----”

The Marshal went on, as his son stood silent before him, to lash himself into a frenzy of rage that imperiled the seams of a tight-waisted high-collared frock-coat of Frogé’s own building, and gave its wearer what the Germans term a red head; with such accompaniments of gasping and snorting, rollings of the eyes and starting of the forehead-veins as are painfully suggestive of bleedings and sinapisms; cuppings and hot bricks; soft-footed personages with shiny black bags, candles, wreaths of white, purple and yellow immortelles inscribed with “Regrets,” and all the plumed pomp and sable circumstance of a funeral procession to the Cemetery of Père La Chaise. He wound up at last, or rather, ran down; sank, puffing and perspiring and purple, into an easy chair.... Hector, who had listened with an unmoved countenance and heels correctly approximated, bowed and left the room, across which a broad ray of sunshine fell from the high, velvet-draped windows, across the inlaid ebony writing-table near which the Marshal lay back, wheezing and scowling, and muttering.... The thousands of shining motes that danced in that wide golden beam might have been wasps; the old man about whom they sported was so goaded and stung. Who wants to watch the Marshal in his hour of rageful humiliation.... He fumed and cursed awhile under his dyed mustaches, and then hit on an idea which made him chuckle and grin. He wheeled round, and splashed off a huge blotty letter to his bankers, and from that day the sum of One Million One Hundred and Twenty-five Thousand Francs stood to the credit of Hector Dunoisse upon Rothschild’s books, and stood untouched.... One did not need much money out in Algeria, the temptation to dip into the golden store was barely felt, the malice of the Marshal was not to be gratified just yet awhile.

Though perhaps it was not altogether malice that inspired that action of Monsieur. His son forgot to question before long; forgot that old desertion of de Moulny’s and its fanged tooth; forgot that check-book dimming with dust that drifted through the keyhole of the locked drawer in the writing-table, whose key was on his ring.

For there came a day when the boy--for he was little more--rode out at the Algiers Gate in command of a squadron of Chasseurs d’Afrique, under orders to reinforce the Zouaves garrisoning a hill-fort in Kabylia, threatened with siege by a rebellious Arab Kaïd who had thrown up his office, and his pay, and declared war against the Francos.

* * * * *

The rustle of the white cap-cover against his epaulet as he turned his head, the jingle of the scabbard against his stirrup, the clink of the bridle, made pleasant harmony with the other clinking and jingling. The air was cool before dawn, and the blue shadow of mighty Atlas stretched far over the plain of Metidja. In the deep-foliaged sycamores; from the copses of mastic, the nightingales trilled: turtle-doves were drinking and bathing in the mountain-rills, Zachar lifted a huge stony brow upon the horizon.... A slender young trooper with a high, reedy, tenor voice, sang an Arab song; his comrades joined in the chorus:

“Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor. Ride on! Who knows what lies at the end of the long journey? Ride on!

“Life and Love, Death and Sleep, these are from the Hand of the Giver. Ride on! Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor! Ride on!”

So Dunoisse rode on; the feet of his Arab mare falling softly on the thick white dust of the Dalmatie Road. And the great mysterious East rose up before him, smiling her slow, mystic smile, and opened her olive-hued, jeweled arms, and drew the boy of twenty to her warm, perfumed bosom, and kissed him with kisses that are potent philters, and wove around him her magic spells. And he forgot all the things that it had hurt him so to remember, for a space of two years.

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XII

When his two years’ service with the Cavalry were ended, he was transferred, with his step as lieutenant, but still in the capacity of Assistant-Adjutant, to the First Battalion, 999th Regiment of the Line, Paris; quartered in the Barracks of the Rue de l’Assyrie.

With the return to the familiar places of his boyhood, those things that Hector thought he had forgotten began to revive sufficiently to sting. A brother-officer spoke to him of de Moulny, who had quitted St. Sulpice a year previously, under a shadow so dark, it was discreetly hinted, that only the paternal influence had saved him from expulsion.

Hector did not blaze out in passionate defense or exoneration of his whilom comrade and friend. He said, briefly and coldly: “Those who say so lie! I used to know him!” And dropped the subject, as the chatterer was glad to do. For that duel fought by two schoolboys with disbuttoned fencing-foils six years before, was to be the first upon a list that grew and lengthened, and kept on growing and lengthening.... Unless you were desirous of cold steel for breakfast, there were subjects that must not be trifled with in the hearing of Assistant-Adjutant Hector Dunoisse.

The Catholic Church: Religious, particularly nuns; more particularly nuns of the Carmelite Order: ... instances of foul play in trials of strength and skill, particularly shady coups in fencing, slim tricks in the Game of the Sword. With other cause of offense provoking the quid rides? you never were quite sure where they might crop up.

And the fellow was a fighter--loved risk, enjoyed danger....

Was the grass more slippery at one end of the paced-out ground than the other? There was no necessity to toss up unless Monsieur, the other principal, insisted on observance of the strict formality--Dunoisse rather preferred slippery grass. Was the sun in the eyes of Monsieur the other principal? Change about by all means--Dunoisse rather enjoyed facing the glare that made you blink. The gusty wind that might deflect your pistol-bullet, the blowing dust that drifted into your eyes, mouth and nostrils, and that might provoke a cough or sneeze, just at the wrong moment for the swordsman; these conditions, justly regarded as unfavorable to continued existence, were rather courted than otherwise by this young officer of the Staff.

At Blidah, it had been told about, that an Arab sorceress had given the sub-Adjutant a charm, insuring success in the duel. Only, to insure this, the holder of the amulet must embrace the contrary odds and court the handicap. This story trotted back to Paris at Dunoisse’s heels; it was told behind ladies’ fans in every drawing-room he entered. Women liked it, it was so romantic; but men sneered, knowing the truth.

The truth, according to Pédelaborde, that is....

Like a poisonous thorn, that implied accusation of foul play made by the dentist’s nephew on that morning when Redskin had visited the convalescent de Moulny in the Infirmary of the School, had rankled in the victim’s flesh since it had been planted there. Honest Pédelaborde had not been idle in spreading the story and ornamenting it. Nor, if the truth had been known, had de Moulny been the only hearer who had paid him to tell it no more.

Mud is mud, though in contrast with the foulness of the hands that plaster it upon your garments, the vile stuff seems almost clean; and a slander listened to is a slander half-believed. The Pédelabordes invariably find listeners; there are always paying customers for offal, or those who deal in it might find a more sweetly-smelling trade.

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XIII

Dunoisse had not long returned to Paris when he received one of those rare communications from his mother, bearing no address, forwarded by the hands of the priest who had been the director of Madame Dunoisse. Lifeless, formal notes, without a throb in them, without a hint of tenderness to the eye incapable of reading between the rigid lines:

“J. M. J.--x.

“MY SON,

“I am told that you are well, have returned from Algeria in good health, that your services have earned you distinguished mention in the dispatches of your Colonel, and that your abilities seem to promise a career of brilliance. Giving thanks to Almighty God and to Our Blessed Lady, and praying with all my heart that the highest spiritual graces may be vouchsafed you in addition to those mental and bodily gifts which you already possess,

“I am, “Your mother in Christ “TÉRÈSE DE S. FRANÇOIS.

“I love you and bless you! Pray also for me, my son!”

A picture burned up in living colors in the son’s memory as he read. Hector saw himself as a fair-haired boy of six in a little blue velvet dress, playing on the carpet of his mother’s boudoir. She sat in a low Indian cane chair with her year-old baby on her lap; a tiny Marie Bathilde, whose death of some sudden infantile complaint a few months later, turned the thoughts of the mother definitely in the direction of the abandoned way of religion, the vocation lost.

Even the magnificent new rocking-horse, with real hairy hide, and redundant mane and tail, and a splendid saddle, bridle, and stirrups of scarlet leather, could not blind the boy’s childish eyes to the beauty of his mother. She was all in white; her skin had the gleam of satin and the pinky hue of rose-granite in its sheath of snow; she was slender as a nymph, upright and lissome as a tall swaying reed of the river shore, with a wealth of black hair that crowned her small high-bred head with a turban of silky, glistening coils, yet left looped braids to fall down to the narrow ribbon of silver tissue that was her girdle, defining the line of the bosom as girdles did long after the death of the First Empire. And her child upon her knee was as pearly fair as she shone dark and lustrous, though with the mother’s eyes of changeful gleaming gray, so dark as almost to seem black.

The boudoir opened at one side into a dome-shaped conservatory full of palms and flowers, where a fountain played in an agate basin, and through the gush and tinkle of the falling water and the cracking of Hector’s toy-whip, Monsieur the Marshal had come upon the pretty domestic picture unseen and unheard. He stood in the archway that led from the conservatory, a stalwart handsome figure of a soldierly dandy of middle-age, who has not yet begun to read in pretty women’s eyes that his best days are over. His wife looked up from the child with which she played, holding a bunch of cherries beyond reach of the eager, dimpled hands. Their glances met.

“My own Marie!--was this not worth it?” Achille Dunoisse had exclaimed.

And Madame Dunoisse had answered, with a strange, wild, haggard change upon her beautiful face, looking her husband fully in the eyes:

“Perhaps, if this were all----”

And had put down the startled child upon a cushion near, and risen, and gone swiftly without a backward look, out of the exquisite luxurious room, into the bedchamber that was beyond, shutting and locking the door behind her, leaving the discomfited Adonis to shrug, and exclaim:

“So much for married happiness!”

Then, turning to the boy who sat upon the rocking-horse, forgetful of the toy, absorbing the scene with wide, grave eyes and curious, innocent ears, Monsieur the Marshal had said abruptly:

“My son, when you grow up, never marry a woman with a religion.”

To whom little Hector had promptly replied:

“Of course I shall not marry a woman. I shall marry a little girl in a pink frock!”

* * * * *

How rife with tragic meaning the little scene appeared, now that the boy who had flogged the red-caparisoned rocking-horse had grown to man’s estate.

Those frozen letters of his mother’s! What a contrast they presented to the gushing epistles of poor old Smithwick, studded with notes of exclamation, bristling with terms of endearment, crammed with affectionate messages, touching reminiscences of happier days in dear, dear Paris, always underlined....

The prim sandaled feet of the poor old maiden were set in stony places since the death of the paralytic sister, to nurse whom she had returned to what she invariably termed her “native isle of Britain.”... Even to Hector’s inexperience those letters, in their very reticence upon the subject of poor Smithwick’s need, breathed of poverty. The straitness of his own means galled him horribly when he read in Smithwick’s neat, prim, ladylike calligraphy confessions such as these:

“The annuity originally secured to my beloved sister by purchase having ceased at her death, I am fain to seek employment in genteel families as a teacher of the French language, with which--no one knows better than my dearest Hector--I am thoroughly conversant. I would not willingly complain against the lot which Providence has appointed me. But so small are the emoluments to be gained from this profession, that I fear existence cannot be long supported upon the scant subsistence they afford.”

The pinch of poverty is never more acutely felt than by the open-handed. In Africa Dunoisse had been sensible of the gnawing tooth of poverty. In Paris it had claws as well as teeth.

To have had five thousand francs to send to poor old Smithwick! To have been able to invest a snug sum for her in some solid British concern--those Government Three per Cents, for instance, of which the poor lady had always spoken with such reverence and respect. Or to have bought her a bundle of shares in one of the English Railway Companies, whose steel spider-webs were beginning to spread over the United Kingdom about this time. What would her old pupil not have given! And--it could have been done so easily if only he could have brought himself to fill in one of those checks upon Rothschild. But the thing was impossible.

His gorge rose at it. His religious principles were too deeply rooted, his honor stood too high, or possibly the temptation was not strong enough? There was little of the primal Eve about poor old shabby Smithwick. When white hands, whose touch thrilled to the heart’s core, should be stretched out to him for some of that banked-up gold; when eyes whose luster tears discreetly shed only enhanced should be raised pleadingly to his; when an exquisite mouth should entreat, Hector was to find that one’s own oaths, no less than the oaths of one’s friends, are brittle things; and that in the heat of the passion that is kindled in a young and ardent man by the breath of a beautiful woman, Religion and Principle and Honor are but as wax in flame.

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XIV

He scraped a few hundred francs together and sent them to poor old Smithwick, and received another letter of disproportionately-measured gratitude for the meager gift that might so easily have been a rich one, if....

He learned from a very little paragraph at the end of the grateful letter that his faithful old friend had broken down in health. That she had been seriously ill “from the effects of over-anxiety and a too strenuous battle with adversity,” ending with pious thanks to Providence--Smithwick was always curiously anxious to avoid references of a more sacred nature--that, “through the introduction and recommendation of a most generous friend,” she had obtained admission as an inmate of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish Street, London, West, “a noble charity conducted upon the purest Christian principles, where I hope, D. V., to spend my closing days in peace.”

Were they so near, those closing days of the simple, honorable, upright life? Gratitude, respect, old association, a chivalrous pity for the woman, sick, and poor, and old, conspired to make the first step on the Road Perilous easier than her pupil would have imagined. He got upon his iron-gray Arab, Djelma, dearest and most valuable of the few possessions owned by this son of a millionaire, and rode to the Rue d’Artois with the leveled brows and cold, set face of a man who rides to dishonor.

Upon the very steps of Rothschild’s, a brother-officer of the Regiment of Line to which our young sprig of the Staff was attached in the capacity of Assistant-Adjutant, met and repaid Dunoisse an ancient, moss-grown, long-forgotten debt of three thousand francs.

“You come fort à propos--for you, that is! Here, catch hold! Sorry I met you! You’re not, I’ll bet you this whacking lump!” Monsieur the Captain joyfully flourished the stout roll of billets de banque, from which he had stripped the notes he now thrust under Dunoisse’s nose. “Wonder where I got ’em? Inside there”--a thumb clothed in lemon-colored kid jerked over the shoulder--“from one of those powdered old cocks behind the gilt balusters. My old girl has stumped with a vengeance this time. I told her my tailor was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and had sent me a cartel because I hadn’t paid his bill.” One is sorry to record that Monsieur the Captain’s “old girl” was no less stately a person than Madame la Comtesse de Kerouatte, of the Château de Pigandel, Ploubanou, La Bretagne. “She swallowed the story, and see the result. Don’t shy at taking the plasters. You can lend me again when I’m broke! Pouch! and va te promener!”

So Dunoisse gratefully took the tendered banknotes and with one of them an outside place on the blue Havre diligence, rattling out of Paris, next morning, behind its four bony bays, ere the milkwomen, and postmen, and newspaper-carts began their rounds.

The salt fresh wind stinging his red-brown skin, the salter spray upon his lips, the veiled and shawled and muffled ladies, and cloaked and greatcoated gentlemen, already extended on the deck-seats and deck-chairs of the steam-packet Britannia of Southampton--patiently waiting to be dreadfully indisposed in little basins that were dealt out by the brisk, hurrying, gilt-buttoned stewards as cards are dealt at whist; the glasses of brandy-and-water being called for by robust Britons, champing ham sandwiches with mustard on their upper lips, and good-fellowship beaming out of their large pink, whiskered faces; the tumblers of eau sucrée being ordered by French travelers, who invariably got toast-and-water instead; the swaying crates of luggage, the man-traps made by coils of rope on wet and slippery decks, the crash of waves hitting bows or paddle-wheels, the shrieks of scared females, convinced their last hour had come,--recalled to Dunoisse his boyish visit to what poor Smithwick had invariably termed “the shores of Albion.”

He remembered with gratitude the self-denying hospitality of the poor sisters: the little home at Hampstead, the golden-blossomed furze of the Heath, came back to him with extraordinary vividness. Down to the piping bullfinch, whose cage hung in the little front parlor-window, and whose répertoire, consisting of the first bar of “Home, Sweet Home,” the boy had endeavored to enlarge with the melodies of “Partant Pour La Syrie” and “Jeanette et Jeannot,” every detail stood clear.

And here was England, upon a pale gray February morning, under skies that wept cold heavy tears of partly-melted snow. Black fungus-growths of umbrellas were clustered on the quay; the thick air smelled of oilskins and wet mackintoshes. And so across a dripping gangway to a splashy paved incline that ended in a Railway Station, for instead of coaching through Hants and Surrey to Middlesex by the scarlet “Defiance” or the yellow “Tally-Ho!” you traveled by the Iron Road all the way to London.

You are to picture the splay-wheeled, giraffe-necked locomotive of the time, with the top of the funnel nicked like the cut paper round a cutlet-bone; the high-bodied carriages, with little windows and hard hair-cloth cushions; the gentlemen passengers in shaggy hats with curly brims, high-waisted coats, with immense roll-collars, and full-hipped trousers strapped down over shiny boots; assisting ladies in coal-scuttle bonnets, and pelerines trimmed with fur, worn over gored skirts, swelled out by a multiplicity of starched, embroidered petticoats, affording peeps of pantalettes and sandals, to alight or to ascend....

Pray understand that there was no jumping. Violent movement was not considered genteel. Supposing you to be of the softer sex--it was softer in those days than it is now!--you were swanlike or sprightly, according to your height, figure, and the shape of your nose, and your name almost invariably ended in “anna” or “ina” or “etta.”

My Aunt Julietta was sprightly. She had a nose ever so slightly turned up at the end, and a dimple in her left cheek. Her elder sister, one of her elder sisters--Aunt Julietta was the youngest of six--her elder, Marietta, was swanlike, with a long neck and champagne-bottle shoulders, and the most elegant Early Victorian figure you can conceive; a fiddle of the old pattern has such a waist and hips.

Both my aunts traveled by this very train, in the same first-class compartment as the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th Regiment of the Line. The young ladies were, in fact, returning from a visit to the elegant and hospitable family mansion of Sir Tackton Wackton, Baronet, of Wops Hall, Hants; whose elder daughter had been their schoolfellow and bosom-friend at the Misses Squeezers’ Select Boarding-School for young ladies at Backboard House, Selina Parade, Brighton. It was the first occasion upon which they had braved the dangers of the Iron Road unprotected by a member of the sterner sex. Consequently, when, in the act of picking up and handing to my Aunt Julietta a sweet green velvet reticule she had accidentally dropped upon the platform, the black-eyed, dark-complexioned, military-looking young foreign gentleman, in a gray traveling cloak and cap, who performed this act of gallantry, peeped up the tunnel of her coal-scuttle bonnet, with evident appreciation of the wholesome apple-cheeked, bright-eyed English girl-face looking out from amongst the ringlets and frills and flowers at the end, both the young ladies were extremely fluttered. And as they passed on, Aunt Marietta whispered haughtily, “How presumptuous!” and Aunt Julietta responded: “Oh, I don’t think he meant to be that, my dear! And how handsome and distinguished-looking!” To which my Aunt Marietta only responded, with the disdainful curl of the lip that went with her Roman nose: “For a foreigner, passably so!”

Later on, by one of the oddest accidents you could conceive possible, my aunts found themselves in the same first-class compartment as the foreign-looking gentleman; and as the Southampton to London Express clanked and jolted and rattled upon its metal way (rail-carriages being unprovided at that early date with springs, pneumatic brakes, and other mechanical inventions for the better ease of the public), the courtesy and consideration of their well-bred fellow-traveler, who spoke excellent English--combined with his undeniable good looks--created an impression upon my Aunt Julietta, which by the time the Express had rattled and jolted and clanked into the junction of the provincial garrison town of Dullingstoke (near which was situated the family mansion of my grandparents), had developed into an attachment of the early, hapless, unreciprocated order.

“If only,” thought my sentimental Aunt, “the train could go on for ever!”

But the train stopped; and there was the family chariot, with the purple-nosed coachman on the box; there was the boy who had cleaned the knives, now promoted to page’s livery, at the noses of Chestnut and Browney, waiting to convey my aunts to the shelter of the paternal roof. They collected muffs, reticules, and parcels.... The military-looking young foreign gentleman handed them out, one after the other, and bowed over their respective hands with a grace that caused Aunt Marietta to exclaim, “My dear!” and Aunt Julietta to return, “Did you ever?” as the family chariot drove away, and the Express, with much preliminary snorting, prepared to start again, and did in fact start; but brought up with a jerk, and clanked back to the platform to pick up a passenger of importance, who had arrived behind time.

A dazzling scarlet mail-phaeton, pulled by a pair of high-spirited, sweating, chestnut trotters, had brought him to the junction, sitting, enveloped in a huge shaggy box-coat with buttons as large as Abernethy biscuits; covered with a curly-brimmed, low-crowned shiny beaver hat that might have belonged to a Broad Church parson of sporting proclivities, by the side of the smart groom who drove.... Another groom in the little seat behind sheltered him from the rain with a vast green silk gig-umbrella, just as though he had been any common, ordinary landholder of means and position, with a stake in the Borough Elections, a seat on the local Bench, and the right to put J.P. after his name; and commit local poachers caught by his own gamekeepers in his own plantations, then and there, in his own library, to the District Lock Up for trial at the Weekly Sessions.

* * * * *

But the guard,--a functionary in the absurdest uniform, a cross between a penny-postman’s and a military pensioner’s, knew better. So did the porters, encased in green velveteen corduroy, as worn by the porters of to-day; so did the station-master, crowned with the gilt-banded top-hat of a bank-messenger and sporting the crimson waistcoat of a beadle. With a Parliamentary Down-train waiting outside and shrieking to come through, while a Composite of horse-boxes and cattle-trucks and coal-trucks bumped and jolted over the Main Line metals; with the Up-Express from Southampton panting to be green-flagged and belled upon its metal road to London, he waited, his gilt-banded top-hat respectfully in hand, to receive the distinguished passenger, who did not hurry, possibly in virtue of his bulk, but waddled down the platform with a gait you felt to be peculiarly his own, involving a short turn to the right as he stepped out with the right foot (encased in the largest size of shiny patent-leather boot), and a short turn to the left as he set down the left one, as though inviting the whole world to take a comprehensive, satisfactory stare at a great and good man, and be the better for it.

Impatient passengers, projecting the upper halves of their bodies from the carriage-windows, saw nothing much in him. But to these, awed porters and reverent officials whispered behind their expectant palms,--on being conjured to say what the deuce the delay was about?--that the gentleman who had caused it was a Government Contractor, tremendous influential and uncommon rich; so much so as to be able to break the Bank of England by the simple process of drawing a whacking check upon it. When the hearer laughed heartily at this, or snorted indignantly, the officials and porters amended that, perhaps to say the Bank of England was a bit too strong, but that everybody knew the gentleman was a Millionaire, and regularly rolling in his thousands.

He rolled now towards the compartment of which the foreign gentleman who had assisted my aunts to alight was now the only occupant; and allowed himself to be respectfully hoisted in, and tenderly placed in a corner seat, with his valise and hat-box beside him. He filled up the compartment--compartments were narrower in those days than they are now--as completely as a large, shaggy bear might have done, when he got upon his legs again, and stood at the window, beaming so benevolently upon the admiring crowd assembled on the platform that the station-master, upon whom had not fallen one drop of gold or silver manna out of the smiler’s jingling trousers-pockets, felt impelled to say: “Lord bless you, Mr. Thompson Jowell, sir! A safe journey up to London and back! Guard, be extra careful this trip!” And the guard, who had not been tipped, touched his tall hat respectfully; and the porter, who had reaped nothing but honor from carrying Mr. Thompson Jowell’s hat-box and valise; and the other porter, who had rammed scalding hot-water tins into the carriage, that the large feet of the popular idol might be warmed thereby, threw up each his muffin-shaped cap, and cried “Hooray!” And the train started,--so suddenly, in the mistaken zeal of the engine-driver, that Thompson Jowell was shot with violence into a distant corner of the carriage, and so violently bonneted by collision with the rack above, that only his large, red, projecting ears saved him from being completely extinguished by the low-crowned, curly-brimmed, shiny beaver hat, that might have been a sporting parson’s of the jovial Broad Church brand.

He took the hat off after that, revealing his little pear-shaped head of upright, bristly gray hair, and his forehead that slanted like the lid of a Noah’s Ark over all the jumbled beasts inside, and goggled with his large, moist, circular brown eyes upon his fellow-traveler over the voluminous crimson silk handkerchief with which he mopped his damp and shining face. He unbuttoned his greatcoat and threw his long bulky body back in his corner with a “whoof!” of relief, and put up his short, thick legs upon the seat, saying to Dunoisse, with a jerky, patronizing nod:

“Plenty of room, sir, if you’re inclined to do the same. These new-fangled hot-water tins draw a man’s corns consumedly!” Adding, a moment after Dunoisse’s smiling refusal: “Please yourself, and you’ll please me. ‘Hang manners! Give me comfort!’ says Mister John Bull.... You’re French yourself, I take it?”

“Sir, since you do me the honor to inquire,” returned Dunoisse dryly, for the goggle-eyes of Mr. Thompson Jowell were curiously fixed on him, “I received my education at a public school in Paris.”

“Thought as much!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell, smiling in a satisfied way, crossing his extra-sized patent-leather-covered feet, and revolving the thumbs of the large ringed hands that were clasped upon his protuberant waistcoat. “I mayn’t comprenney the parly-voo, but I know the cut of a Frenchman’s jib when I see one. You might take in another man, I say, but you can’t deceive me. Sharp, sir, that’s what my name is!”

“I am gratified,” returned Dunoisse, without enthusiasm, “to make Mr. Sharp’s acquaintance!” And pointedly unfolded and began to read The Times, leaving Thompson Jowell uncertain whether he had or had not been insulted by a person whom he designated in his own mind as an “upstart Crappaw.”

But the paper presented little of interest, and presently, from behind its shelter, Dunoisse found himself watching his companion, who had drawn from various inner pockets of the large shaggy box-coat various little bags, containing pinches of divers brands of oats, together with divers other little parcels containing short-cut samples of straw and hay. From the inspection of these, by the nose and teeth, as well as by the organs of vision, he appeared to derive delight and satisfaction so intense, that the upstart Crappaw in the opposite corner, who had had dealings with Contractors in his own benighted, foreign country, could no longer be in doubt as to his calling.

Those black eyes of the ex-Adjutant of Chasseurs d’Afrique were extraordinarily observant, and the brain housed in the small well-shaped head, under the crisp close waves of his black hair, had not been forged and tempered and ground at the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff for nothing....

This man who had been addressed as Mr. Thompson Jowell, and who had said his name was Sharp, repelled Dunoisse and interested him, as a big and bloated spider might have disgusted and attracted an entomologist.

* * * * *

So, when the train, jolting and rattling and clanking in the Early Victorian manner, through the chilly, dripping country, at the terrific speed of twenty miles an hour, slowed up and slid groaning into a station close to a great permanent Military Encampment in the vicinity of Bagshot Heath, where, drawn up upon a deserted siding were a long row of open trucks, loaded with trusses of hay and straw, all unprotected from the pouring rain by any kind of covering whatever; and Mr. Sharp, moved to irrepressible ecstasy by this sight, was fain to get up and thrust his big hands deep in his jingling trousers-pockets to have his laugh out more comfortably; a sudden impulse of speech swayed the hitherto silent foreigner in the opposite corner to lean forwards, and say:

“You seem elated, sir, by the spectacle of all this spoiled and soaking forage?”

The person addressed, who was bending himself in the middle in the height of his enjoyment, straightened with a jerk. His big underjaw dropped; his nose, aggressively cocked, and with a blunted end, as though in early youth it had been held against a revolving grindstone, appeared to assume a less obstinate angle; his large face lost its ruddy color. Muddily pale, with eyes that rolled quite wildly in their large round orbits, he stared in the dark face of this bright-eyed, alert, military-looking, painfully-observant foreigner. For it occurred to him, with a breaking out of shiny perspiration upon the surface of his forehead and jowl, and a stiffening of the already bristling gray hairs upon his head, that this might be the devil.

Thompson Jowell was orthodox to the backbone, and firmly believed in the individual existence of the personage named. He glanced with nervous suspicion at the small, arched, well-booted feet of his fellow-passenger. Had one of the dark-faced stranger’s well-shaped gray trousered legs ended in a cloven hoof, Thompson Jowell would have said his prayers, or pulled the communication-cord that ended in the guard’s van. He was not quite certain which. As it was, he felt sufficiently reassured to be overbearing. He snorted, and resumed his seat with as much dignity as was compatible with the jolting of the Express. He thrust his knees apart, leaned his large hands upon them, stared the inquisitive stranger hard in the face, snorted again, and said:

“Perhaps you will be good enough to explain, sir, what you meant by that remark?”

“I shall be charmed to do so,” returned Dunoisse. “It will afford me gratification. What I meant was that you laughed: and the spectacle of waste and destruction that presumably provoked your laughter did not appear to me, a stranger and a foreigner, provocative of merriment.”

“Now look you here, young sir!” said Thompson Jowell, getting very red about the ears and gills, and jabbing at the speaker with a stout and mottled forefinger. “Foreigner or no foreigner, you have an eye in your head, I take it? Very well, then, look at me! I am not the sort of person to be called to account for my laughter--if, indeed, I laughed at all, which I don’t admit!--by any living man--British or French or Cannibal Islander--unless that individual wants to be made to laugh on the wrong side of his own mouth. Jack Blunt, my name is--and so you know! As regards those truckloads, they have been delivered on a certain date According to Contract, they have been paid for on Delivery, also According to Contract, and whether the troop-horses of Her Majesty’s Army like the hay when they get it, or whether they would prefer plum-cake and macaroons, damme if I care!”

With which the speaker threw himself back in the corner and folded his thick, short arms upon his voluminous waistcoat, which was of velvet, magnificently embroidered, and into the bosom of which cascaded a superb cravat of blue satin, ornamented with three blazing ruby breast-pins. He breathed hard awhile and frowned majestically, and then relaxed his frown in pity for the evident confusion of the snubbed foreigner; who said, without the humility that one might have expected:

“Sir, that you and other men of your standing and influence in this country do not care, is in my poor opinion a national calamity.”

The brows of Thompson Jowell relaxed at this implied concession to his greatness. He closed his eyes and puffed out his pendulous cheeks, and said, nodding his pear-shaped head, the beaver hat belonging to which was in the rack above it:

“Aye--aye! Well--well! Not badly put by half!”

“A national calamity,” pursued Dunoisse, “when one reflects how large a sum of the nation’s money went into the pockets of the Contractor who delivered the consignment, and further, when it occurs to one how impossible it will become for any expert to determine whether straw and hay so drenched and spoiled was not rotten and fermenting previous to delivery, and the exposure that must inevitably set up both conditions. And further still, when it is extremely possible that the neglect to cover the trucks was of design; and that the person--Quartermaster-Sergeant or Railway Official--whose duty it was to take this precaution, had been--for all men are not as scrupulous, sir, as yourself, and some are capable of such roguery--bribed by the Contractor or his confidential agent, to omit it!”

This being an exact summary of what had taken place, the above sentences, coined in Dunoisse’s somewhat precise and formal English, and uttered with the short, clipped inflection that characterized it, came pelting about the large and tingling ears of Thompson Jowell like stinging flakes of ice. He gasped and rolled his eyes at them in apoplectic fashion, and wagged his head and shook it from side to side, until the speaker stopped.

“No, no, young sir!” said Thompson Jowell at that juncture. “Don’t tell me! I won’t listen to you; it’s past crediting; it couldn’t be! Frenchmen might be guilty of such doings, I can credit it; Italians very likely, Germans uncommonly-probably, Roosians without doubt! But when you go to tell a true-blue Briton such as I am, that Englishmen with British blood running in their veins and British hearts a-beating in their bosoms could be capable of such doings, I tell you by Gosh the thing’s impossible! I won’t listen to you! Don’t talk to me!”

He fell back gasping at the end of this splendid tribute to the virtues of his countrymen. And, of such queerly conflicting elements are even liars and knaves composed, they were real tears that he whisked away with his big, flaming silk handkerchief, and the trembling of the hand that held it was due as much to appreciation of his own eloquence, as to alarm at the uncanny sharpness with which this disturbing young foreigner, with the cold black eyes and the admirable command of English, had put his finger on the ugly truth.

Dunoisse, far from suspecting that he had at his mercy the identical Contractor whose methods he had sketched with such brilliant fidelity to nature, pursued:

“Rogues are everywhere, sir. We have plenty of them in France, and, unhappily for other countries, we do not enjoy the monopoly. And--the person I reverence and honor, with one exception, above all living women, is an English lady. Respect for her great nation--and yours!--is not lacking in me, the adopted son of another nation, no less great; with whom England has striven in honorable war, with whom she is now most happily at peace. Yet though I admire I may criticise; and plainly say that the lamentable spectacle that has furnished our discussion, plainly points, if not to willful neglect, to lack of forethought and foresight upon the part of certain officials who should,--in the interests of the British Army,--have been trained to think and to see.”

“I don’t agree with you, young sir,” said Mr. Thompson Jowell, hooking his large splay thumbs into the armholes of his superb velvet waistcoat in a bullying manner, and folding his pendulous chin into fresh creases on his cravat after a fashion he employed in the browbeating of clerks and agents. “I disagree with you flatly, and--my name being Tom Plain--I’ll tell you for why. You called that spoiled hay and straw--my name being John Candid, I’ll admit it is spoiled!--‘a lamentable spectacle.’ To me it is not a lamentable spectacle. Far from it! I call it a beautiful illustration, sir!--a standing example of the greatness of England, and the Immensity of the resources that she has at command.”

“Name of Heaven, why?” cried Dunoisse, confounded and surprised out of his usual self-possession by this extraordinary statement.

“Aha! Now you’re getting warm, young sir,” said Thompson Jowell, triumphantly. “Keep your temper and leave Heaven out of the question, that’s my advice to you. And let me tell you that Great Britain is not so poor that she can’t afford to be at the expense of a little loss and damage, and that the high-bred, wealthy, fashionable gentlemen who hold commissions in her Army have other fish to fry and other things to attend to than keeping an eye on Quartermaster-Sergeants, Forage and Supply Agent’s clerks and Railway Officials. And that the coroneted noblemen who sit at the head of Departments in her War Office are too great, and grand, and lofty to dirty their hands with common affairs and vulgar details--and it does ’em honor! Honor, by George!” said Thompson Jowell, and smote his podgy hand upon his gross and bulky thigh, clad in a pantaloon of shepherd’s plaid of the largest pattern procurable. “My name’s John Downright--and what I say is--it does ’em honor!”

“I have to learn, sir,” said Dunoisse, with recovered and smiling urbanity, “that the criterion of a gentleman lies in his incapacity for discharging the duties of his profession, any more than in his capacity for being gulled by knavish subordinates and cheated by thievish tradesmen.”

“Now take care where you’re treading, my young sir!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning and swelling portentously. “For you’re on thin ice, that’s what you’re on. My name’s Jack Blunt, and I tell you so plumply. For I am a Contractor of Supplies and an Auxiliary-Transport Agent to the British Army, and I glory in my trade, that’s what I do! And go to the Horse Guards in Whitehall, London--and ask my Lords of the Army Council, and His Honor the Adjutant-General, and His Excellency the Quartermaster-General whether the character of Thompson Jowell is respected? Maybe you’ll get an answer--maybe you won’t! And call at the Admiralty--perhaps they don’t know him at the Victualing Office!--and the Director of Transport never heard of him! They might tell you at the Treasury that the Commissary-General bows to him! I’m not going to boast!--it ain’t my way. But if you don’t hear in every one of the high places I’ve mentioned, that the individual inside this waistcoat”--he smote it as he spoke--“is an honor to Old England and such a sturdy stem of seasoned British oak as may be relied on to uphold the Crown and Constitution in the hour of need with the last penny in his purse, and the best blood of his bosom, call me a damned liar!”

“I shall not fail in the event you mention to avail myself of the permission accorded me,” returned Dunoisse politely, “in the spirit in which it is given.”

“Ha, ha! You’re a joker, I see!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell. “Excuse me, young sir,” he added, “but if you have quite finished with that newspaper, it will save me buying one if you’ll kindly pass it over!”

With which the great man deftly whipped the unperused Times from the seat where it had been laid aside by its owner, and ignoring the political articles and Foreign Intelligence (under which heading a brief paragraph announcing the decease of the aged paralytic Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, might, had the glance of his fellow-traveler fallen upon it, have seemed to him of more than passing interest), dived into those thrilling columns that deal with the rise and fall in value of wheat and oats, hay and straw, beans and chaff, and other staple commodities of the Forage Trade, and record the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange; became in virtue of such elevations and depressions, immersed in perusal; and spoke no more either on the greatness of Great Britain, the greatness of Thompson Jowell or any other kindred subject. And the Waterloo Road Terminus being reached, a luxuriously-appointed brougham, drawn by a handsome horse, and ornamented, as to the door-panels and harness, with repetitions, illuminated or engraved, of a large and showy coat-of-arms recently purchased at Heralds’ College, received the glorious being, and whirled him away through murky miles of foggy streets to his shabby little office in The Poultry.

Here, in a shady alley of low-browed houses near the Banking House of Lubbock, amidst dirt and dust and cobwebs and incrustations of City mud, upon the floors that were never washed, upon the windows that were never cleaned, upon the souls of those who spent their lives there, the vast business of Thompson Jowell, Flour, Forage, and Straw Contractor, Freightage- and Auxiliary-Transport Agent to Her Majesty’s Army, had grown from a very little cuttle-fish into a giant octopus, all huge stomach and greedy parrot-beak; owning a hundred scaly tentacles, each panoplied with suckers for draining the golden life-blood of the British ratepayer from the coffers of the British Government; and furnished, moreover, with sufficient of that thick and oily medium, known as Humbug, in its ink-bag, to blind, not only the eyes of the people and their rulers and representatives to its huge, wholesale swindlings; but in some degree to becloud and veil its own vision, so that foul seemed fair, and petty greed and low cunning took on a pleasing aspect of great-minded and unselfish patriotism.

Cowell, the Beef-Contractor, and Sowell, who undertook to supply such garments as the Government generously provided to its soldiers free of cost; scamping materials in fashioning the one sparrow-tailed full-dress coatee and pair of trousers,--so that stalwart infantrymen found it incompatible with strict propriety to stoop; and legs and arms of robust troopers were so tightly squeezed into cases of coarse red or coarse blue cloth as to resemble nothing so much as giant sausages,--were persons of influence and standing. Towell, who turned out shirts, of regulation material something coarser than bed-ticking, paying wan workwomen fourpence per dozen--the worker finding buttons, needles and thread--and receiving for each garment two shillings and sevenpence, filched from the soldier’s pay; Rowell, who found the Cavalry and Artillery in saddlery of inferior leather and spurs of dubious metal; Powell, who roofed the British forces as to the head, with helmets, busbies, shakos, and fatigue-caps; Bowell, who stocked its surgeons’ medicine-chests with adulterated tincture of opium, Epsom-salts that never hailed from Epsom; decoction of jalap, made potent with croton oil; inferior squills and suspicious senna; and Shoell, who shod the rank-and-file with one annual pair of boots (made principally of brown paper), were, taken together, a gang of--let us write a community of upright and worthy individuals; but, viewed in comparison with Dunoisse’s acquaintance of the railway, they paled like farthing rushlights beside a transparency illuminated by gas.

A day was coming, when Britannia, leaning, in her hour of need, upon that sturdy stem of seasoned British oak, was to find it but a worm-eaten sham; a hollow shell of dust and rottenness, housing loathsome, slimy things, crawling and writhing amidst the green and fleshless bones that once wore Victoria’s uniform; housing and breeding in the empty skulls of brave and hardy men. Dead in their thousands, not of the shot and shell, the fire and steel and pestilence that are the grim concomitants of War: but dead of Privation and Want, Cold and Starvation--through the rapacity and greed, the mercenary cunning and base treachery of those staunch and loyal pillars of the British Crown and Constitution: Cowell, Sowell, Towell, Rowell, Powell, Bowell, Shoell, and, last but not least among those worthies, Thompson Jowell.

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