LXXVII…

LXXVII

Morty--after an eclipse somewhat protracted--being at length emancipated from the shadow of the brocade bed-curtains, having changed his skin, shaved, and attired himself--by parental request--in his Mess-uniform, came down to the five o’clock dinner--a feast comprising every delicacy most beloved of the young man.

Morty was in great spirits. The solemn butler--who had presided over the sideboard of an Archbishop--condescended to smile at his jokes, and the three powdered footmen openly sniggered. All the female servants were gathered on the upper landing listening and giggling and admiring. Jowell, too, was in great form.

He had--like other bulky birds of the carrion-feeding kind--who display excitement when there are preparations amongst humans for hostilities--been clumsily flying from place to place, making Contracts and Arrangements. He would be at the Horse Guards one moment--at the Admiralty the next, at Plymouth, Southampton, or Portsmouth before you could turn round. He had seen all the fine sights his boy had missed.... The Queen’s Review of the Baltic Fleet, and the Embarkation of the Guards, as of the first Drafts of Regiments of the Line--and he described these stirring sights to his wife and son in the characteristic Jowellian way.

“It brought tears to My Eyes--it did, upon my word!” he assured his hearers, in reference to such and such a demonstration of patriotic enthusiasm. And whether he spoke the truth or not, the water certainly stood in those bulging orbs of his, as he bade the archiepiscopal butler bring forth his most ancient white-sealed Port, wherein to pledge his newly-recovered son.

“To my dear boy’s health! Good luck to him, and God bless him!” he proposed, goggling fondly at the large young figure in the scarlet Mess-Jacket, through the tawny-golden wine. The next glass was swallowed to the toast of “The Queen, our Army and our Allies!” while the third was “Here’s to the Flour, Forage, Freightage, and Transport Trade. Large Profits and No returns!”

He chuckled so over this cryptic sentiment (which Cowell, Shoell, Sewell and Co. would have perfectly understood and enthusiastically applauded)--that he choked in his wine, and gasped and crowed so awfully that his wife--upon her way to the door, which Morty, with his recently-acquired gloss of good manners rather too obviously upon him, held open--was fain to pause behind her husband’s chair and pat him on the back. And then she kissed her son, whispering. “Not too much wine, my dearest!” And with a wistful smile at her one joy, went away to sit and knit at stockings for him, in a gorgeous gilded desert of drawing-rooms, opening one out of the other.

Left alone, Morty chatted with his sire, and found him well-informed and interesting. He knew so many things at first-hand. For instance, how many picked squadrons went to the Cavalry Division that was under orders for the East, and what vessels these warriors and their steeds would sail in. For as the British Government possessed but three available transports, Britannia may be said to have leaned with confidence, at this juncture, upon the bosom of Jowell. Who--it not being desirable that lofty officials should soil their fingers with such vulgar transactions--not only acted as the Government’s middleman or agent, in the hire and charter of such vessels of the Regular Screw Steamship Company; the Eastern and Occidental Steamship Company; and the Antipodean Company, as had been marked down for War-Service--and reaped very considerable profit and enrichment from such mediation--but for the conveyance of the heavier munitions of War; the Forage, the Commissariat Stores, and the horses of the Cavalry and Artillery--had been privileged to place his own private fleet of sailing-vessels and steamers at the service of an appreciative country.

It is to be whispered here, that the knowledge of ships and maritime matters indubitably possessed by Thompson Jowell had been gained by that great man in his earlier years, while serving in the humble capacity of private in a Regiment of Marines....

The private soared to become Quartermaster-Sergeant, and married the penniless orphan daughter of a Naval Surgeon. Being of a bilious temperament, and invariably deadly sick when upon sea-service, Thompson Jowell made haste to retire, upon a nest-egg that he had accumulated by the sweat of the brow of a true-born Englishman.... Which nest-egg, being invested in the shop, stock, and goodwill of a ship’s chandler and drysalter--later expanding into a rope walk (taken over for a bad trade-debt), and in process of time engulfing the business of a bankrupt forage merchant--was in time to hatch out the Great Contractor, the glory of his age.

He was in a beaming, radiant mood upon this particular afternoon. Smiles garlanded his large visage, even his rummaging, sniffing nose was cocked at a less aggressive angle, say forty-five instead of sixty degrees.... As the wine warmed him--though he could drink enough of his old tawny port to float a jolly-boat, without overheating or muddling the hard, sharp little brain enclosed in his pear-shaped skull--the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he spoke to his son and heir as to a second self, unreservedly.

He had attended at the newly-created Transport Office at the Admiralty, and had secured fresh Contracts--and he had been to the Victualling Office--(also a sub-department of the first-named Institution) and there he had received such gracious usage at the hands of the presiding genius, Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, that it had brought the tears into his eyes again.

Pray take a glimpse of Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, whose name was later to be spelt by prejudiced Press correspondents and critics of the Commission of ’56 with an initial to be found much later in the alphabet.

* * * * *

Comparatively obscure, previously to this period, you found him suddenly become all-powerful in half-a-dozen Departments. He was indubitably an official of great experience, having been present at the later Peninsular battles of the Duke’s time, in the character of a Director of Wagon Trains--unhappily abolished during the days of the Prince Regent, and not yet replaced by any organized means of Land Transport. Now you saw him as a little dry, meager man of seventy, his baldness covered with a black, scratch-wig, his sharp black eyes looking out over angular cheek-bones, scrawled with strange characters as though in official red-ink. Topped with the cocked-hat of a Brigadier-General, his little round pot-stomach buttoned up in the epauletted gold-laced swallowtail of Full Dress, he was barely a stately or imposing figure. But later, he was to reveal himself as a powerful Necromancer, who with so many strokes of a pen would create a squadron of paper horses, clap these unsubstantial beasts between the legs of as many solid, British troopers, and make the Nation pay for them in good hard money. Or, with a wave of the same inky wand he would command forage and rations, shirts and great-coats and blankets to be compounded and formed out of impalpable air; so that real horses and real men might feed upon these shadows and be clothed with them.

Newly endued with the power to pay away vast sums of Government money, it is little wonder that Mr. Commissary-General Blunder seemed to Jowell a being almost divine. By dint of perching him upon the piled-up bodies of his forty Commissariat staff-clerks, the Contractor saw him--and conveyed to his son the impression that he too saw him--as a giant rather than a dwarf.... Hearken to Thompson Jowell, enlarging in his idol’s praise....

“Comes into the Office--hangs up his hat himself--cracks a joke with the head of his staff of clerks--a Man Like That--who has authority, in case of need, to communicate direct with Foreign Governments--and can dip his hand in the Treasury as if it was his own breeches’ pocket.... ‘The weather’s warum, Colonel Jinkins,’ says he, in his sing-song Northern drawl--by the New Order they have military ranks according to grade, and, by Gosh! you should see ’em in their uniforms!--‘but by the latest adveece from the East we’re to have it warumer still!’ Says Jinkins: ‘Glad to hear it, Sir, and so is Mr. Thompson Jowell, unless I’m mistaken?’ Says I: ‘My name being John Bull--it can’t be too hot for me!’ ‘Glaed to find you in such speerits, Mr. Jowell,’ says His Honor, taking a pinch of snuff and speaking as dry as chips and shavings--‘for when I saw you I was afraid you were going to aesk me for some of the Government’s money.... What?... You are?... Waell!--since we caen’t stave you off, sign your name to this Contract Demand Dischaerge Receipt, and I’ll make you out an Order on the Treasury.’ Wuff! goes the sand over the wet ink--none of your new-fangled blotting-paper at the Crown Offices. ‘There you are, Mr. Jowell!... Thirty-Five Thousand Pounds!’ And between me, and my boy, and the bedpost,” said Thompson Jowell, nodding over his wine at his son and heir, “that’s a mere flea-bite to what I am a-going to get out of this here Eastern Expedition--long before the end!”

“Gaw!” ejaculated the Ensign, who had inherited the paternal reverence for money. He added, with a tongue somewhat thickened by the frequency with which, in defiance of his mother’s warning, he had applied to the decanters. “You jolly old Croe--what the dooce was the tremendously wealthy feller’s name who was ordered to be burnt alive?--don’t I wish I was in your jolly old shoes, that’s all!”

“You are in ’em, Morty, my own boy!” said the father, goggling at the younger Jowell tenderly. “Don’t think that what I do is done for myself--for I am a bloody humble man!” His little slanting forehead--so like the lid of a Noah’s Ark hooked tightly down over the jumbled beasts inside--the Lamb and the Dove being uppermost at that psychological moment--was full of anxious lines and corrugations. He mopped his overflowing eyes with his table-napkin, and his voice shook and wobbled with emotion as he went on:

“What I do is done for you--what I get is got for you! Remember that!” said Thompson Jowell, leaning forward over his dessert-plate until his vast expanse of shirt-front bulged--why are the shirt-fronts of great financiers invariably badly got up?--and two or three diamond studs unshipped their moorings, and the son caught a glimpse of the hairy bosom the hardy parent scorned to shield with a flannel vest. “Win distinction in the Field--out there!” Jowell waved a gross fat hand in the direction of the London Docks. “You can do it--it’s in your blood!--if you told me that it wasn’t I shouldn’t believe you!--and I shall see you General Sir Mortimer Jowell, K.C.B., before I die, please Heaven!”

“Gaw, Governor! how you pile it on,” responded the young man, who was not at all inclined to underestimate his own capacity for heroism. “You ambitious old Codger,” he elegantly pursued, “Military Knight Commanderships of the Bath don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush.... Why,” said Morty, opening his round brown eyes and shaking his bullet head at his parent, “even a first-class tip-top hero like our C.O.”--the young man referred to the gallant Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers--“hasn’t got that yet! And perhaps he don’t deserve it?... Oh, no!... Certainly not!” said Morty in a tone of sarcasm. “Not by no manner of means!...”

“And why hasn’t he got it? Not because he ain’t brave enough, or enough of a tip-top swell,” Jowell wagged his bristly head of upright gray hair sagely at his heir-apparent, and punctuated his periods by sips of the tawny port, “but because he hasn’t Money enough to back him. And whose fault is that but his own? Look at his position--think of his chances and opportunities!--and tell me whether he mightn’t be as rich as a Jew if he made use of ’em? Don’t you go to tell me he couldn’t--because I know best!”

“And so do I!--and hang me, if it don’t do him honor! I mean,” said Mortimer in a tone of disdain that mingled verjuice with the bumper Jowell was in the act of emptying, “his refusin’ to cabbage from the men’s rations, and firing, and clothing, and uniforms.... Everybody knows it’s done, and Government winks at it,” pursued the Ensign, getting very red about the gills, but looking straight out of the eyes that were so oddly clear and honest for a son of Jowell’s, into the muddier, more prominent orbs that goggled back at him. “But I’m confounded glad he sets that fine old face of his against it! and in his place I’m dam’ if I shouldn’t do the same myself!”

Jowell hastily set down his glass, and fell back in his armchair with a hot and clammy dew breaking out upon his large, and just now queerly-mottled countenance. He puffed and blew like a stout, shaven walrus for some moments before he could speak. Then he said--and the short, thick hand that held a choice cigar he had just taken from a chased casket of precious metal emblazoned with the large and ornate coat-of-arms that had been bought at Heralds’ College, shook as he said it:

“But if he had a son, he’d alter his notions about Cabbaging. Not to tell you a lie, my boy!--and my name’s Jack Candid--and has been all my life long--I’m a Cabbager myself! Lord!--if I hadn’t made use o’ my opportunities for Cabbaging--you’d be a private in the ranks, or serving out flour and treacle in an apron behind a chandler’s counter, and your mother’d be at the washtub--or charing for a livelihood at eighteenpence a day....”

His thick voice shook and his surface grew more unwholesomely mottled, and his popping eyes whirled in their circular orbits. That this beloved son--in whose interests so many nefarious and tricky schemes had already been concocted and carried out--for whose ultimate aggrandizement Thompson Jowell had planned a crowning masterstroke of villainy that--the man’s conscience not being dead in him--jolted him up on end o’ nights with his heart thumping and every hair upon his body prickly with fright--should thus have turned and rent him, pierced him to the quick through his pachydermatous hide.

As for Morty--the adage that evil communications corrupt good manners may be reversed in his case with some appropriateness. This big, chuckle-headed young man was sloughing his skin in more senses than one. Since he had mingled daily and hourly in the society of men of honor and high-breeding, the Honorable and Reverend Alfred no longer appeared to him as a model to copy or even a person to tolerate. New ideals had risen up before the eyes of Jowell’s son.

The Colonel, who, like many another commanding officer, preferred to be a comparatively poor man, rather than use his prerogative of plunder, seemed to Morty more enviable than the parent who had piled up enormous riches by means he dimly realized to be dishonest and mean.... True, Jowell was never weary of assuring his boy that he, Mortimer, would never be ashamed of his old Governor. But Morty was, secretly, not at all certain on this point.

“I’m not the man to boast, Morty, my boy,” the father went on as the son wriggled in his chair with growing uneasiness. “Ben Bragg never was my name or nature, but many another man in my place would have Cabbaged without as good an object. You have been my object--ever since you were born. To be a Millionaire--and I am one, I tell you plainly! isn’t enough for me--being my boy’s father. I’ve made up my mind to be as rich as Coutts and Gurney rolled together--and by the Lord! I see my way clear. Draw close--fill up your glass, and listen.”

He pushed away the painted porcelain dessert-plate from before him so clumsily that it fell from the shining, slippery mahogany to the floor and was shattered; and went on, jabbing a thick stumpy finger at his son, to emphasize notable points; and sometimes banging a gross fist upon the table, so that choice hothouse fruit and crystallized dainties piled up in costly dishes escaped from their receptacles, and the lusters of the chandeliers trembled overhead.

* * * * *

“This here Eastern Expedition of the Army is the Big Thing I have been a-waiting for. It has put in my way opportunities such as I have only dreamed of up to now. If I didn’t grab ’em, other Contractors would--and small blame to ’em. That’s why I sank money in that fleet o’ nine sail and steam vessels, every one of ’em hired out to Government for Transport at up’ards o’ Two Hundred Pounds per day.”

He puffed and blew and snorted in his walrus-fashion, and, between wine, and the sense of his own importance, seemed to increase in bulk as he went on; punctuating his sentences with jabs of the podgy finger, and sometimes scratching in his stubby growth of hair with it, or tweaking at a gross and purple ear.

“I’m paid for the use o’ the ships, and I’m paid for the stuff that goes into ’em. Hay at Twenty Pounds per ton--thousands o’ tons--and thousands o’ barrels of Flour. Maybe some of the trusses of hay are packed round a core o’ cow-parsley, and road, or common-trimmings--them that talk of old hats and empty jam-tins are liars, and I’ll prove it in their teeth! Likely you’ll happen on a barrel o’ breadstuff here and there that’s sour or blue-moldy in the middle.... Fraud I scorn,” said Jowell, breathing noisily, “but Business is Business with me as other men. The bad with the good--the rotten with the sound--that’s the secret of successful dealing. Push the decanter over, will ye? David Drychops is my name this evening! Thanks, my own dear boy!”

He filled a bumper and drank with greedy, spluttering noises, and went on, sucking at his fleshy lips, that were moistened with the sweet red wine:

“Lord! if you knew as much of the tricks of the trade as I do!--you’d think your old Gov. a Angel without wings.... I tell you--and my name’s Nick Know--millions o’ golden pounds’ll be paid, before this here War is over, for Rot, and Rubbish--and nothing more. War Scares are got up--that’s what they are--to give opportunity for Cabbaging on the Grand Scale to Nobs and Bigwigs--War Office and Admiralty Bigwigs--whose names--if I whispered ’em--’ud take away your breath. And me and the other Contractors--men as they are lofty to, and patronize--are in their secrets, and up to every move and dodge of the game they couldn’t play without us--and their hands--white as they keep ’em--and with gems engraved with family crests that are heirlooms shining on ’em--are not a whit cleaner than what ours are--and there’s the naked truth!”

Fate spurred him on--who had never even to himself, or that gray confederate Cowell, spoken thus openly--to this unbosoming, else his son might have died believing him a worthy kind of man. In his urgent need for the love and respect and admiration of this hulking young scion of the house of Jowell, he emptied himself, to the foiling of his passionate desire.

“Take the case of a brand-new Government Transport I am a-loading with my own and other Contractors’ stuff at Portsmouth Dockyard,” he babbled on recklessly. “By Gosh! if you could see the inside of the barrels and crates and cases her holds are chock-full of--to the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds! Thousands o’ barrels o’ salt beef and pickled pork that were laid down in brine before the Battle o’ Waterloo. Ay!--and thousands o’ tins of preserved meat that ’ud blow your head off with stink and stench--if they were ever to be opened!--and cases--thousands o’ cases o’ dead worms that were born of biscuit and lived on biscuit--and died when there was no more biscuit to live on--and ankers of Prime Jamaica Rum made of burnt sugar-and-water and Spirits of potato and beet--not to talk of the crates full of Shoell’s Army Boots that are boots--till you get down to where they’re nothing but odd sizes, and spoiled uppers, and scraps of old leather--and the Winter Clothing and comforts from Sewell’s Factories--watch-coats and guernsey frocks; coatees and trousers; woolen vests and drawers and socks atop, and Dunnage underneath--and nothing but Dunnage! Like the Medical Stores that are the sweepings of every Hospital in the United Kingdom. All packed under loose shot, and empty shell, and supplies of munitions for the Ordnance--to prevent ’em being too easily got at, d’ye twig?... Whoof! I’m short o’ breath!” snorted Jowell, fanning his large red face with his crumpled napkin. “Old Billy Blowhard, and no mistake about me!”

He had really talked himself into an apoplectic and congested condition, and now was fain to break off speech and muster a second wind, while his son, whose large ears were humming with these revelations, regarded him with a circular stare of surprise. But even as Morty’s mouth opened for speech, Thompson Jowell put up a coarse, ringed hairy hand and stopped him; and plunged back into the subject ere his son could get out a word.

“Don’t you say what you’re a-going to say!--and tell me that you don’t mind Government and the Nation being Cabbaged from--but as an officer holding the Queen’s Commission you’re damned if you like the notion of the British Army being served up on toast. I tell you--and my name’s Sure and Certain in the present instance--the British Army--God bless it!--won’t be a ha’porth the worse for anything on board the Transport I’ve told you of--even if anything on board of her was likely to be wanted--which won’t be the case--mark me! For this here Eastern Expedition will be back by the beginning of October at the latest; and--I tell you with all my cards on the table--this Two-Thousand-Six-Hundred-Ton steam-screw Transport I am a-talking of is as crank as a child’s tin boat.... Built of unseasoned Baltic pine she is--not a plank of honest English oak in her--the man who contracted with the Admiralty to supply the timber is a friend of mine--d’ye twig? She won’t weather out a Black Sea gale, by Gosh she won’t! If Old Moore and Mother Shipton and Zadkiel’s Almanac told me she would I should call ’em liars! A crank ship!--a damned crank ship!” said Thompson Jowell, thrusting his great crimson face and starting eyes near his son’s, and speaking in a husky whisper. “Nobody would be so wicked as to count on her Going Down--people don’t do such things!--if they owned to me that they did I wouldn’t believe ’em! But now the cat is out of the bag--and tip us your fist, my boy!”

He squeezed his son’s large, unresponsive hand, and, reluctantly releasing it, went on, in the flux of confidential talk that had seized and overmastered him: “And remember that you have a Brilliant Career before you--that’s what you have! Through you I mean the name of Jowell to strike root deep in the Old Country and spread wide and tower high. I ha’ lived small--here and at that little place of ours in Sloughshire--and haven’t launched out in a Scotch Castle and a Deer Forest and a Salmon River when I might--perhaps you’ve thought? What I say is--Wait until you come back from this campaign, and then you shall see a thing or two! Why have I bought up the village, field by field, and cottage by cottage, and whole streets o’ freehold shops and dwelling-houses in Market Drowsing Town? Because I mean you to be returned Member of Parliament for the Borough--and you shall sit in the Upper House among the other nobs as Baron Jowell by-and-by! There’s a pretty estate of ten thousand acres of park and stubble, covert and woodland, will be on the market presently--and a sixty acre o’ clay upland freehold within a mile o’ Market Drowsing--with a homestead and some good gore meadows--suitable to build a Stud Farm and Kennels on--as I’ve a mortgage on and mean to have by-and-by. And, by Gosh, my boy!--the County shall cap to you as Lord Lieutenant before you’re forty,” said Jowell, stretching the coarse hairy hand across the table. “Here’s my hand again on it--and so you know!”

“Haw, haw, haw! You’re going to go it, Governor, ain’t you?--with a vengeance!” said the son, with heartiness rather forced. He added, repressing a hiccup, for his potations had half-fuddled him: “But what’s this sixty-acre you’re talking about for a Stud Farm within a mile of Market Drowsing?... Gaw!--you don’t mean to say you mean my Cousin Sarah’s bit o’ land?”

“She’s not your cousin--if Burke took his Bible oath she was I wouldn’t believe him!” said Thompson Jowell, his large cheeks purpling as he bent his brows upon his son. “She’s a Poor Relation of mine--and what is it to you how I get land? If you’re to be a Nobleman, Land is what you want--and Land is what you must have. Trust your old Gov.!--my name’s Stephen Staunch where you’re concerned, ain’t it? And now tell me--when do you leave for the East, and what’s your barkey? Is she a regular good ’un? The British Queen, dy’e say?... She’s a clipper of a ship,” said Jowell, rummaging in a hairy nostril. “One o’ my own--I bought her from the Newfoundland Emigration Labor Company for a mere song, better than new! She sails on the 18th from Southampton, with a draft of the Hundredth Lancers; six officers, and seventy Rank-and-File, and the Admiralty Agent, the Honorable Mr. Skiffington. My Hay in the fore-hold, troop-horses in the after-hold,” said Jowell, smiling and winking knowingly. “Dunnage under the horses--barrels of Cowell’s salt beef under the Dunnage--it ain’t my lookout if it gets spoiled--and Cowell wouldn’t object, I rather fancy!... And now we’ll adjourn to the drawing-room,” said Jowell, scraping back his chair, and getting up on his short, thick legs, and gripping his son affectionately by the elbows--his inferior stature not permitting him to reach the Ensign’s broad shoulders. He ended, looking with moist, smiling tenderness in the owlish, rather tipsy young face, as he shook Morty to and fro. “And we’ll have a little music.... You shall tip us ‘Vilikins And His Dinah’--if anybody told me Robson could sing it better I wouldn’t believe ’em. And I’m damned if I haven’t half a mind to give you ‘Marble Halls.’”

Morty obliged with “Vilikins”--the newest thing out in ditties of the comic order, and Jowell was as good as his word with the operatic selection to which he referred. “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” is a melody with many turns and flourishes, and Jowell executed them conscientiously, not sparing one....

If Britannia, leaning with complete confidence at this juncture upon that stout and sturdy stem of tough old British oak, had peeped in and beheld the great Contractor--gathered with his family about the grand piano in the most sumptuous of the telescopic drawing-rooms--and beating time all wrong as he murdered the tune with simple, whole-hearted enjoyment,--she might have withdrawn her helmeted head in the conviction that here Was an honest man.

Though in Morty’s muddled mind some degree of dubiousness was created, as to the exact description of “Marble Halls” merited by a man who was cramming a crank-built transport of Baltic oak with rot and rubbish to the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds. He was secretly wondering whether--in the estimation of his demigod, the Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers, a cool stone cell in Newgate Jail might not meet the case?--when Mrs. Jowell--at his own request--tried to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’--and broke down in the second bar. He was wondering still, when three silver bedroom candlesticks arrived on a tray so massive, that the footman who bore it staggered. He was wondering yet, as his parents accompanied him up the broad, shallow staircase, and parted from him on the threshold of his palatial, gorgeous bedroom, with blessings and kisses and tears.

He could not have done with wondering. The scene closes upon him, standing--in an Oriental dressing-robe of sumptuous fabric superimposed above the long-tailed garment of the night, before his colossal, gilt-plate-laden dressing-table--saying, as he regarded his own foolish, tipsy young face in the great glittering mirror:

“Well, Blow Me Tight, if I don’t believe the Governor is the very devil!” He added, as he crowned himself with a tasseled nightcap and blundered into bed: “And he may be a regular tip-top business man--but I’m hanged if I cotton to such games. No, sir! I’m dam’ if I do like ’em! I’m Blest if I do--so there!”

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LXXVIII

You are to imagine how Morty’s mother sobbed and kissed and blessed him, over and over at parting; and how earnestly the poor woman begged of her darling never to forget his prayers, or go out fasting in the chill morning air, and always to wear flannel next to his skin--and you are to learn that the big young man had left the poor soul shut up in the biggest of her suite of gilded drawing-rooms, and was in the act of clanking down the doorsteps to the brougham that was to convey him with his father to the railway station, when he suddenly turned--and galloped clattering back.

He strode through the hall--burst into the drawing-room--sending all the crystal dillywangles on the vases and chandeliers into tinkling fits of agitation--called with the old, old voice of the child to the woman sitting there in stony, despairing silence:

“Mummy!”

--and fell down at her trembling knees; butted his bullet-head against her thin, aching bosom, and hugged her again and again.... She thanked her Maker all her life afterwards for that unexpected burst of love and tenderness.... Her boy was to call her once more--out of the jaws of Death--and she was to hear him--even though thousands of miles of dry land and bitter water separated mother and son....

As for Thompson Jowell, that fond parent traveled down with his boy to Southampton, and benefited him with parental advice and fatherly counsel by the way. He repeated over and over again that Morty was to be sure and win distinction; and trust to his old Governor to back him up. And the young man, touched to melting by the evident solicitude and affection--responded in his characteristic vein of clumsy raillery, punctuated by heavy pats on the back, and filial pokes in the fleshy ribs that were covered with a waistcoat of gorgeousness even more pronounced than usual, made of an embroidered Turkish shawl. He told Thompson Jowell that he was a regular Out-and-Outer, a capital Brick, a Rare old File, and a stunning old Nailer, and Jowell never guessed that Morty’s habitually-stated conviction that his parent was the devil--the very devil!--was not forthcoming because Morty had once felt it to be so nearly true.

Later on--in that new-born sensitiveness of his--Morty found himself wishing that he were the son of a man several sizes smaller. As, for instance, when Thompson Jowell stood with his short legs wide apart on the hearthrug of the Officers’ Mess Cabin on the poop-deck, and rattled the big tills in his trousers-pockets, and patronized the Colonel and the half-dozen officers of Her Majesty’s Hundredth Lancers who were going out with this draft.

It hideously irked Morty--not ordinarily thin skinned--to find that, as in the case of the Admiralty Agent the Honorable Mr. Skiffington--who was going out in the British Queen to watch over the maritime interests of Britannia at Constantinople, two of the after-cabin staterooms had been, by the removal of the bulkhead between them, knocked into one for his reception; and that in consequence, some of the ladies--as several of the male cabin passengers--were grievously incommoded and squeezed.

Nor was this the least objectionable of the many ways in which Jowell’s paternal tenderness for his boy manifested itself. Consignments of special luxuries had been provided for the after-cabin table. Nay, every one of the rank-and-file upon the troop-deck was to be allowed per day, throughout the voyage, and at the Good Fairy Jowell’s expense, an extra half-pint of porter. In addition to this, Jowell explained to the Colonel, he had taken the liberty of augmenting the Mess wine-list with twelve dozen of the tawny port, from his own cellars. And he caused shudders to course down the spine of his son, by calling the steward, and ordering bottles of this precious vintage to be uncorked there and then, that all might taste of his bounty. And, as his oppressive patronage and condescending geniality extended to the ladies present--as he counseled those who were parting from their husbands, fathers, or brothers, to drink of his liquor that they might be nerved to bear the ordeal; and pressed yet others who were going out with the regiment to partake that they might face the trials of the voyage with a better heart--he seemed to Morty to swell and grow so that his upright hair appeared shooting through the cabin skylight, and the shadow of his bloated body banished the bright spring sunshine from the place.

One ought to love and honor one’s father, it was the duty of a Christian as well as of a gentleman, but--Gaw!--when the Governor was facetious with the Colonel’s wife--and when he tipped the company a speech--and was alternately patriotic and pathetic--it made at least one person present go hot and cold.

“By Gosh! ladies and gentlemen, if these Roosians think they can beat us, let them try it!” he said, over and over. He became intolerable in his looseness and prodigality of words. His son, whom he had so often assured that he should never find cause to be ashamed of his father, found it now; and was dyed in crimson blushes to the roots of his hair, as Jowell addressed his fair hearers and his gallant friends.

He told them that this here War was a War of Right and Justice--a War about to be fought by Old England shoulder to shoulder with her Natural Allies. And that Heaven--Thompson Jowell confidently answered for Heaven--would not fail to nerve the arms of those who were taking the part of the weak against the strong. Talk of Uncle Tom--Cousin Turk being a-many shades nearer the true British color, ought to be as many degrees nearer the true-born Briton’s heart.... Thompson Jowell laid a podgy paw upon his own, and dropped the “h” as he enunciated the word. If anybody told him otherwise, he added--his name being Peter Plain--he wouldn’t believe him, by Gosh! he wouldn’t. But all present were Englishmen and also gentlemen. And--Britannia--Thompson Jowell had answered for Heaven and now he answered for Britannia--Britannia confidently looked to all his gallant friends--might the speaker call them his dear and gallant friends?--somebody said “Oh Lord, yes!” to this, and Thompson Jowell thanked him in a stately way, and lumbered on to his peroration. Britannia looked to every one of his dear and gallant friends here present to uphold the reputation of British Arms. England, he added, was not absolutely ignorant of the name of Jowell. He bowed his tier of chins, above their stiff frill of gray whiskers, in the direction of the sarcastic voice that cried “Hear, hear!” And ended, with overflowing eyes turned upon his boy, and real emotion surging behind his magnificent Turkish-shawl waistcoat:

“May she hear more of it before this War is done!”

* * * * *

Jowell hugged and kissed his boy at parting, ignorant of the secret shrinking with which Morty received these caresses--bade God bless him and take care of him! and the tears rolled openly down his large whiskered face as he thrust a bulky roll of banknotes into his hand.

And then he tore himself away, and Morty--conscience-stricken in the realization of his own unfilial relief at the sight--saw the bulky back of him--topped with a low-crowned curly-brimmed hat that was of straw in deference to the hot May weather--waddle down the bouncing gangway--saw the great red face slewed midway for a last glance, and a clumsy farewell flourish of a big gross hand that gripped a gold-topped stick. And then the Great Man was lost in the huge crowd surging and roaring at the quay-edge as completely as though the grave had swallowed him up.

And with much churning of oily-looking salt water and vomitings of sooty-black coal-smoke and cindery flavored white steam by an excited paddle-wheel tug-steamer; amidst waving of male hats and feminine handkerchiefs, cheers and good-byes from the throngs upon the quays--with a return of hurrahs from the troopers crowding at her bulwarks and thrusting their faces through the ports of her main troop-deck--with chorusing of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer, Old Russia’s All Before Us!”--the second line having been adapted by an anonymous genius to fit the case--The British Queen dropped her moorings, and was towed away down the River on her watery way to Gallipoli, via--why on earth via Gibraltar?--receiving the customary compliment of eighteen guns from the Platform, and leaving the usual deposit of red-eyed, shabbily-clothed soldier’s wives and children, crying on the sunshiny, cheerful quay.

Had Moggy Geogehagan been numbered among those disconsolate women left weeping on the quayside, she would have had no tale to tell me in Ballymullet Workhouse, where her days were ended. But, indeed, had “the lots gone agin’ her,” she declared--and it was not possible to doubt her, for there was fire in the glance of her eye, and energy in the thump of her staff-end on the tiled floor, even at eighty-nine--she would have made her way out to where Jems was fighting with the Ridgimint--on her own four bones.

But here she was, on The British Queen--and near her Mrs. Joshua Horrotian. When the Call was sounded for the drawing, and the folded slips of official paper that had an inky scrawl of “Go” inside them, or a blank more eloquent still, were tossed--as was the ancient custom in this Regiment--upon the sheepskin of the kettledrums yet vibrating from the Charge--Nelly had waited her turn in a mounting fever of anxiety that had melted the last icicles away from her poor heart. Joshua Horrotian had hardly known the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked creature, who had run to him, panting and trembling, and thrown glad arms about his neck, and shed tears of bliss upon his bosom, crying, “I’m to go!--I’m to go!” For until you are about to lose the last remaining joy, you never realize how rich you are, or how poor you may yet live to be if God takes that also.

After dinner that evening, while the light airs from the nor’-west were pushing The British Queen--long since parted from her tug--towards the Bay of Biscay, and glowing cigar-ends were patroling the quarter-deck singly and in couples; and the tinkle of a piano-played waltz came cheerfully from the Officers’ Mess Cabin, and the strains of “Annie Laurie” and “A Life on the Ocean Wave” proceeded from the troop-deck as the forecastle--where troopers and tars fraternized in high accord--Morty heard one semi-visible stroller say, in answer to some remark of a companion:

“By Jove no! But with me it’s like this!--I don’t object to a man who smells of Money--but a man who stinks of it, I simply can’t stand!”

It was the male voice that had cynically cried “Oh Lord, yes!” and “Hear, Hear!” when Jowell was speechifying. And a feminine voice responded:

“He meant well, dear, I’m sure! But what a dreadful man!”

Morty knew whom the officer’s wife was discussing with her husband. And whilst he burned and smarted, he admitted perforce the truth of their utterances. His father did stink of Money. His father undoubtedly must appear to persons of any breeding and refinement a really dreadful man. Why, his own son--

Later, when Morty was in bed in the comfortable lower berth of the state-room that had been expanded, to the compression of the young man’s fellow-passengers--and The British Queen, having left the glassy Solent far behind her, was beginning to roll amidst the restless surges of the Atlantic so that cabin doors banged, cabin crockery rattled, timbers groaned and creaked--and heavy rushes of footsteps on the deck were followed by the flumping of tightened canvas and the noisy coiling away of ropes--Jowell’s son--who, like his great parent, was of queasy sea-stomach--found this question cropping up again.

The Governor stank of Money. That was why his son, who had learned since he joined the Cut Red Feathers to refrain from quenching his thirst with brandy-and-water early in the morning, and to eschew cravats and waistcoats of violently contrasting hues--who had left off sleeking the stiff brown hair upon his bullet-head with perfumed bear’s grease and besprinkling his person with the combined essences of Frangipani and Jockey Club--found respiration difficult in his father’s company. But--was it only Money the Governor stank of?... The air of the big dining-room at Hanover Square had been heavy with the odor of roguery on that night when Thompson Jowell had laid his cards, as he had said, upon the table, and owned up to playing--from first to last, an infernal dirty game!...

“I’m a bit of a Cabbager myself!” Morty could hear him saying it. And--“The bad with the good--the rotten with the sound--that’s the secret of successful Contracting!”

It was jolly--confounded jolly to be a British Guardsman and know yourself the son of a father who had become a millionaire--and meant to become yet richer--by diddling the British Army. It was enough to drive sleep from any honest, decent pillow, and this is a feeble pen if it has not conveyed that Morty Jowell was an honest, decent young man. Vulgar and dull and clumsy perhaps--but sound at the core, and wholesome-natured, as his mother’s son could hardly fail to be.

The rolling of the vessel increased, and, from the adjoining cabin, occupied by the Honorable Mr. Skiffington, the Admiralty Agent--whose experience of the ocean had been gathered in the course of two or three Naval Reviews at Spithead and half-a-dozen trips across the English Channel--groans of the most piteous description now began to be heard. So Morty sat up, hugging his knees and frowning at the pale eye of the state-room port-light--which, sometimes hidden by its short green velvet curtain, or revealed--as the drapery swung aside with the ship’s rolling--seemed to wink in a derisive way.

“Gaw! how this dam’ ship rolls!--and, talkin’ of stinks--how smelly she is!... Horses and soger-men and tar and bilge--piff!--and somethin’ else to top up.” He sniffed, becoming more and more sensible of having inherited the queasy paternal stomach.... “Somethin’ I’ve smelt at those kilns at Little Milding--where the Governor dries his sprouted oats and mildewed hay.” He added, in an aggrieved tone:

“My forage ’ud taste a deal sweeter if it had been bought with cleaner money. That’s what I say, and to that I shall stick. And I’m ready to lay any fellow ten to one in tenners--and the Governor’s given me a hundred of ’em!--I shall come across that core of cow-parsley in every truss I get!”

Here Morty succumbed to the malady of the ocean, groaning just as dismally as the Admiralty Agent. You may imagine corresponding sounds breaking out in neighboring cabins--indeed, for some hours the stuffy, crowded troop-deck had been littered with the bodies of those who had fallen victims to this insidious complaint.

And as the weather worsened, and hatchways, companions, and even scuttles were kept closed, that smell that Morty Jowell had said “Piff!” at--and that was reminiscent of the kilns at Little Milding, where fermenting hay was dried--mingled more potently in the hotch-potch of weird smells that distinguishes a troopship full of seasick soldiers.

* * * * *

It came in overpowering gusts from the fore-hold, that was close-packed with the Government forage-trusses. It came in blasts more overpowering still--being mingled with an appalling equine odor--through a square black hole in the lower deck--a yawning hole that had not been padded with sacks of straw like the corresponding aperture in the deck above it--when by means of canvas slings and tackle from the mainyard, the horses had been lowered into the after-hold.

Descending into the stifling blackness of this place, you presently made out by the significantly-haloed light of a couple of wire-guarded ship’s lanterns, rows of frightened hairy faces ranged along the sides of the hold, and looking at you across the spars that kept their owners--slung in canvas belts from hooks in the over-deck beams--in the stalls that were padded with straw and bundles of tow.

The central space between the rows of frightened hairy faces was packed to the upper-deck with more of Jowell’s forage-trusses. Dunnage was beneath the hoofs of these unlucky four-legged passengers, and layers of Cowell’s beef-barrels were underneath this. And when the ship rolled in stress of heavy weather, and the barrels shifted, the legs that got between them were frequently mashed to jelly, adding to the deadly qualms of nauseau torments more cruel still.

Sire my Friend accommodated the horses of his Cavalry, Artillery and Transport on the spar-decks of troop-ships--or at worst in the ’tween decks; sheltering them in the first instance beneath canvas, or housing them under temporary sheds of planks. But Britannia, at the instance of her evil genius Jowell, stowed--in nine cases out of ten--these luckless brutes upon the ballast.

Every day on board The British Queen--as on board those other transports speeding in the cause of Humanity to the East with men and horses--shots were heard far down in these submarine hells; and every night hairy bodies--sometimes dreadfully disfigured and distorted--were hauled up with rope-tackle and hove overboard. For your horse, whose anatomical structure renders it next to impossible to vomit, is capable of going mad; and does it under given circumstances, with conspicuous thoroughness. Therefore the faces of the men who went down into these places, looking pale or red as the case might be, came up again livid or purple; and the oaths they swore grew more sulphurous every day. For between good men and good horses there is love.

What time The British Queen was staggering, close-hauled, through the shattering yellow-green seas of the Bay of Biscay O! two hundred miles from England--and it blew a great gale through heavy squalls of rain--and the hatches were battened down, and every soul on the troop-decks, and every military officer in the poop cabin and several of the ship’s officers and crew, were dog-sick and helpless; even stout Blueberry nearly gave up hope of seeing the light of day again, and breathing something sweeter than the atmosphere of the after-hold.

For the comrade on his off-side was screaming in the convulsions of tetanus; and the mare on his near-side was dead like many another, with her long neck and helpless head banging him, flail-fashion, whenever the smelly, stifling stable you were pent up in stood on its front end--or swinging the other way and banging Corporal Geogehagan’s horse--and even the sailors who had come down at intervals to pump the tainted water from the tanks and serve out the musty hay had left off coming.

* * * * *

Then, in the middle of one unforgettable, fateful night, was heard aboard The British Queen, and heard in every conceivable tone of human and animal terror, fear, and anguish--the dreadful cry of Fire!

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LXXIX

Upon a fine June morning some eight days later, Jowell, in his dingy office in The Poultry, London, in the narrow alley of sordid houses hard by the Banking House of Lubbock, received a telegram from the Admiralty. A moment later the gray-faced Chobley, busy in his little glass case opening out of the office where the seven pallid clerks bent over ledgers, was summoned by a strangled shriek that came from the whistle of the speaking-tube, and entered the Contractor’s private sanctum. A moment later he rang the bell.

For a dreadful, white-and-blue faced jabbering Something that wore the clothing of Thompson Jowell had come staggering at the manager, shaking a slip of flimsy yellow paper; and, jabbering out an unintelligible word or so, had fallen down in a fit.

“Fetch a doctor from somewhere, will you!” said Chobley to the sea-green Standish’s pallid successor, as he knelt over the bulky, stertorously-breathing body that sprawled upon the shabby ink-stained carpet, fumbling at its shirt-collar stud. He had been enlightened by a glance at the telegraphic message from Whitehall, and added, working away:

“There has been bad work at sea. The forage aboard The British Queen worked and took fire--at least, the message says so. Ship was a blazing hulk in half-an-hour from the outbreak--they took to the boats, such of ’em as they could get at. A Dundee brig bound for Lisbon picked up three of ’em--a Southampton-bound barque and a schooner for Port au Prince, St. Domingo, overhauled the rest. Eighty-nine souls were saved, twenty-three drowned or burned--including the Veterinary Surgeon and the Colonel of the Regiment. And all the horses except one--I should like to know how that one managed to save himself,” said Chobley rather gruesomely, “from being frizzled with the rest in the after-hold?”

Avid of more horrors, Standish’s successor queried:

“And Mr. Mortimer?”

“Why,” returned the manager, still busying himself about the neck of the prone, insensible figure, “Mr. Mortimer has been picked up, with the rest, aboard the ship’s boats. It’s the shock of hearing that his son was in danger lays the Governor snoring and choking here. For The British Queen and everything aboard of her was insured--pretty heavily insured; and there’s no loss to us resulting from the casualty--rather the reverse!”

Chobley, the leaden-complexioned, meant a great deal the reverse; and the clerk knew it as he went away for the doctor; and the manager--having loosened his employer’s collar and cravat, opened the window to admit what passed in The Poultry for fresh air. And presently Jowell recovered sufficiently to be hoisted up from the carpet, and got into his chair; and damn them for calling in the medical man.

He went home early to Hanover Square, and--saying nothing of his own indisposition--broke the news of Morty’s peril and deliverance--escape-end first--to his boy’s mother. And then--sending one of the large powdered footmen for the immense gilt Church Service, usually borne after him upon Sundays in the country by one of these privileged menials, as the great man waddled up the aisle of Market Drowsing Parish Church--he mounted his glasses and read, occasionally pausing to take off and wipe these aids to vision--the Prayer for Those at Sea.

His wife, subsequently entering his library, found him thus employed, and was secretly thankful. It seemed like a first answer to all her petitions for him. He looked up as she came in, and found no fault with her red eyes on this occasion, his own being, if possible, redder.

He spoke gently to her, and finding him in this unusual mood, and being anxious to improve the occasion, she bade him take comfort and be thankful, for their dear son was under the protection--forbid that I should quote the words irreverently!--of a Heavenly Father’s Hand.

At which Jowell blew his nose--cocked at quite a subdued angle--and agreed with her, adding:

“All the same, the boy has got a good ’un Down Here. No man can call me Ben Blinker at any time, but where my son’s concerned I’m William Wide Awake, Esquire. As to the hay firing of itself--I don’t believe it! To palm off hay green, or hay half-cured, upon Her Majesty’s Government’s Contractors would be a Fraud. People don’t do such things--they ain’t capable of it!” said Jowell virtuously. “Some drunken sailor dropped a lighted candle-lantern into the fore-hold, or some trooper smoking on the sly on stable duty stuck his pipe in amongst the straw and left it there--and if I had him here,” said Jowell ogreishly, “I’d make him smoke on the wrong side of his mouth, by Gosh, I would!”

He added: “And you’re a good woman, Maria, by Gosh, you are!” And in testimony to this excellence he bought her, the very next day, an immense cameo brooch, representing the triumph of Venus, and set with many blazing brilliants of great price.

* * * * *

Wounds of the soul, neglects of years, are healed and made as nought in the belief of men like this man, by a trinket purchased at the jeweler’s. Disloyalties and treacheries are blotted out--harsh words, ill-usage and infidelity atoned for. The wives who receive these gewgaws know sorrowfully well why they are given.

All unsolicited gifts bestowed by men like Jowell are sops to the shrill-voiced Conscience chiding behind their waistcoats. Thus, the man gave to his wife because she had so much to forgive; he sent a draft for a great sum to his son, not only because his own dishonesty had placed that beloved one in peril, but because he had so greatly swindled the sons of other men. That half-pint of porter shed upon the troopers and their wives in the ’tween-decks did them good, perhaps! But how they paid for it in the end!

Young Mortimer Jowell escaped, not without risk of life, upon that night of terror. For when columns of stifling smoke lanced through with yellow flame came pouring up the fore-hatch--and the ineffectual hoses had ceased to play upon the conflagration--while the burning vessel ran with lashed helm before the westerly gale to keep the fire forward, while the boats were being hurried off the skids and launched and loaded--a big young man in night-shirt and trousers--a young man who had been knocked senseless by a tackle-block falling from the blazing mainyard--was being lowered by the Captain of The British Queen into the last boat of all--when a horizontal, swordlike tongue of flame licked through the smoke now rolling up the mizzen-hatchway, proving how fearfully the fire gained below--and the rope was severed by it as by a saber-stroke--and the half-naked senseless wretch fell into the raging sea. And would have been drowned undoubtedly, had not a hulking, red-headed trooper of the Hundredth Lancers, when a dripping head rose in the yeasty smother close to the boat’s side--reached forth his hand and grabbed its owner by the scruff, and hauled him so near that other hands could help to drag him into comparative safety.

And presently, his scattered wits returning, young Morty Jowell became aware that he was bitter cold. Next, that sea-water was washing over him; next that he was not on board a ship, but a comparatively small ship’s boat, dancing like a walnut-shell in the tourney of monstrous seas. And then--opening his raw and stiffened eyelids--he became aware that he, half naked, wet and shivering, was one of a crowd of fellow-creatures, chiefly male, equally unclad, perished and soaking. And that, as the boat was pitched from ridge to ridge of huge and watery mountains--there were to be had brief, appalling glimpses of a burning ship with showers of incandescent fragments falling from her rigging, and clouds of firefly sparks drifting away to leeward--painted in hues of rose and apricot, clear dazzling scarlet, peacock blue and springlike, exquisite apple-green upon the background of pitch-black tempestuous, rainy night--and that the shrill song of the gale in their frozen ears was mingled with the roar of the greedy flames that crunched her bones. And that those dreadful shrieks that ripped and tore through the other noises were the cries of horses burning in her after-hold, and men burning on the blazing decks of her.... For the Captain of the unlucky vessel, the Veterinary Surgeon of the Hundredth Lancers--twenty troopers and the Colonel--had--the long boat having been rendered useless--remained on board The British Queen.

One other terrific picture was bitten in as with corrosive acid on Mortimer Jowell’s memory. It was when--her mainmast having fallen with a tremendous crash, and her ballast having shifted from her unguided, furious wallowings amidst the liquid mountains--The British Queen canted over with a tremendous list to port.... They saw her decks then as one sees a stage with a steep rake, all smoking and charring and crawling with tongues of liquorish fire. Also, they saw, and groaned aloud with ineffectual pity--for they had but one oar, and, had the boat been capable of holding another passenger, could not have moved to the rescue--doomed human beings huddled in her starboard mizzen channels, that were as yet not burned away.

And they recognized, in less time than one takes to write it, in a fiery object that burst screaming up upon her after-deck, a maddened horse, whose mane and tail were on fire, whose legs were flayed and bleeding, and whose sides and flanks were garnished with blazing patches of tow.

There was a piteous cry at that sad sight, and a woman swooned. Strange things had been seen that night, but none more strange and terrible. How the brute had freed himself from that fiery hell below may not even be conjectured, but there he was, as I have said....

* * * * *

He pranced down the deck with heraldic, rampant gait, screaming and snorting; reared, with his bloody forelegs stuck out stiffly, and leaped into the sea. And a man sprang up in the boat and pointed with a scorched and naked arm; and yelled out something that was drowned in the shriek of the gale and the bellowing of the fire. What he yelled was:

“That’s my horse! I’d know him among a thousand! And, by G----, he’s swimming. Keep up! Don’t ye give in, my brave old Bluberry!”

He could not have heard, but he did not give in.... He was breathing yet, with his long neck thrown across the charred and floating wreckage of the fallen mainmast when the wild gray dawn broke, and the brig Maggie o’ Muirhead and the St. Domingo schooner overhauled the red-hot hulk of The British Queen.

The Captain and a trooper were rescued, living, from her mizzen channels, the perishing castaways in the boat were saved. Sailors are superstitious. Not being desirous of a mutiny in his forecastle, the master of the Maggie yielded to the pressure brought to bear by his crew. And they got a bight of a line round Blueberry, and hauled the horse aboard; dosed him, all limp and sprawling--with tincture of ginger--kept by the mate for stomachic chills--in hot water; doctored his burns with linseed oil--and presently he floundered up on those raw legs of his, and tried to be himself again.

Thenceforth he consorted with the ship’s goat until the Maggie reached Lisbon; and, though he bore the scars of that wild night’s work all the rest of his life, and the hair, where it grew again upon his flanks, came white in patches, he lived to carry his master through the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and die at the long last of cold and famine at the Cavalry Camp on the slopes above Kadikoi.

* * * * *

Said Morty, coming up to a red-headed trooper on the forecastle-deck of the Maggie: “Look here! I’ve just found out it was you who saved my life. And I’m obliged to you--tremenjous!--and though all the money I’d got was burned on that dam’ ship, my father--Mr. Thompson Jowell--owner--will give you anything you want! See?”

And the speaker, attired in a cast-off pair of trousers of the master’s and a pea-jacket lent by the Maggie o’ Muirhead’s second mate--and wearing a list slipper of the steward’s on his right foot, and a half-boot contributed by another philanthropist, on the left one--held out his large hand to his savior with genuine eagerness.

“Blast your father!” said the red-headed trooper, so suddenly and so savagely that Morty jumped in his odd foot-coverings. “Can he give me back my boy? And do you think--if I’d been let to have a chance o’ choosing--I’d ha’ put out my hand--knowingly--to save his son? Wait till next time, that’s all I ha’ got to say!--you wait till next time, that’s all!”

And Joshua Horrotian turned his back on the heir of his enemy, and spat over the bulwarks of the forecastle-deck in loathing, and then a thought occurred to him that brought his head round again.

His wish had been granted. He had lived to see Jowell’s son, half-clad and penniless, with an old boot on one foot and an old shoe on the other--asking--and asking vainly for the hand he had denied.

It was merely an odd chance. That experimental curse of Josh’s had had nothing to do with it. And yet--supposing Some One Above had heard--the granting of that ill wish had not spared misfortune to the wisher. The wife and the horse were safe, though; and Corporal and Mrs. Geogehagan were in one of the boats that had been picked up by the St. Domingo schooner. One would do well not to grumble at one’s luck, reflected Joshua Horrotian.

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LXXX

The Tsar was right. Men who desire Death very keenly and bitterly, who seek the grim tyrant in his very citadel, find him difficult of access, as a rule.

Something that had been a man came staggering back out of the poisonous swamps of the delta of the Dobrudja, and--more dead than alive--reached the port of Kustendje on the Black Sea, what time Protestant England and Catholic France had allied with the Moslem against Christian Russia; and Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces, and H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge, were being entertained by Sire my Friend, at Paris.

As though the out-at-elbows refugee, the borrowing adventurer, the temporary occupant of the Presidential armchair had never existed, you are to see him Sire my Friend as the Ally of Great Britain, the gracious patron and protector of the Sick Man. He had had his will; his plot had blossomed in this gorgeous flower of International War--the Allied Fleets were in the Black Sea--France was rent with the shouting of trumpets and the screaming of bugles; she quaked with the tramping of cavalry, the ceaseless passing of batteries of artillery, and trains of wagons and ammunition-carts. And day by day his crowded transports steamed for the East from Toulon and Brest and Marseilles.

He was happy. The Northern potentate who would not call him brother--the Army he had bribed with stolen millions to enthrone him--which he feared, and which openly ridiculed him--the English Sovereign and her Consort, who had despised and condescended to him--these were destined to drink of a cup that had taken years to mix.

England’s trust in him entertained him hugely. She took the leap, with all its tragic possibilities, like a generous horse ridden by a reckless sportsman at a killing fence; ignoring the deadly possibilities of the stake, and the barbed wire, and the back-breaking deep ditch beyond.

To gratitude, good faith, rectitude, loyalty to vows a stranger--all must smart sooner or later, who had trusted this man.... Thus, France paid in the end in other things than her virtue for that furious midnight ride upon the saddle-bow. But her new owner amused her; and she was prosperous, or seemed to be.

For this was the era of great Booms in zinc, and charcoal, and foreign bonds, and American steel rails. It was also the age of folly, flummery, flippancy, and frolic. The ponderous classicism of the Empire style, the rococo ugliness of the Monarchy, both were kicked into the dustbin on the arrival of the Second Empire. Gaudy colors, bizarre fashions, gay, sparkling music, chic saucy women, men who amused themselves--where Sire my Friend reigned, these reigned. Ashtaroth, Belphegor, and Belial were worshiped at the Tuileries and Compiègne. But the High-Priest of their mysteries improved Paris if he corrupted her--that must be allowed.

After Nero, he was possibly the greatest designer of landscape-gardens, the most gifted layer-out of streets and promenades, that has ever existed. He inspired Haussman. He dreamed in avenues wide enough to maneuver cavalry in; he thought in boulevards down which whole batteries of artillery could sweep. He who had been immured in a prison loved Freedom, Air, Light, Space--and he gave these good things to his capital. Also he gave her the Cocodette.

The lionne of 1848--of her we know something.... She was passionate, wayward, exquisite, and unprincipled. In three words, she was Henriette. But in exchanging her for the cocodette of the Second Empire, France paid in the resultant loss of beauty. With her limbs eased in the steel cage of the crinoline that hid the fault; with her little hat tilted above her mountains of bleached hair; with her fringe, her panniers puffed above the artificial deformity that later became the bustle--with her huge and tasteless lockets and chains, belts and dog-collars of precious metal--she is a type of the decadence of the Age of Sire my Friend.

The cocodette was giddy of brain, false from the love of deceit, impure without passion, hideous in the extreme; and knew not her absurdity or her ugliness any more than the Frenchwoman of to-day--whom her English and American sisters ape, in their hobble or harem skirts, and their waste-paper-basket hats, trimmed with patches of brocade, whole fowls, and lumps of velvet. Elegance has fled--Grace has departed--Good Taste conceals her face--Beauty has ceased to exist, in France, since Religion was abolished. How should it be otherwise when from His peculiar country, men have driven out God?

When the Athenians lost the sense of loveliness that lies in the pure vigorous line, that was the commencement of Greek degradation. In like manner the boneless ugliness called The New Art was a symptom of disease and decay. Buildings without angles are as faces without noses. Design that is all curves marks exhaustion in the brain that conceived it, and impotence in the hand that executed--nothing more.

But Sire my Friend was pleased, and extremely well contented. In the popular acclamations accorded to H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge and the Commander of Britannia’s Forces, their host had had his share. Also, the Empress’s Monster Ball at the Élysée--given in honor of these distinguished visitors--had come off successfully. Though M. Chose, Secretary to the venerable Duchesse de Viellecourt, and Mademoiselle Mirepoix, amanuensis of the aged and purblind Marquis de l’Autretemps, had returned their respective employers’ cards, with the intimation that neither enjoyed the acquaintance of M. and Madame Bonaparte.

All through Good Friday, and its night, and the following day, sleepless workmen toiled at the Palace of the Élysée; and there rose under their cracked and bleeding hands a vast and flimsy edifice, of unseasoned wood and hurriedly-laid brick.... One may regard it as a typical and apt representation of the Second Empire, when, its walls of wet plaster covered with satin draperies, their gaping cracks concealed with gilded moldings, huge mirrors, trophies of arms and garlands of real and artificial flowers, it stood at length complete and challenged admiration.

Christ hung upon the Cross--the Tabernacles stood empty of the Blessed Sacrament--the faithful crowded the black-draped churches--priests, gaunt with fasting, succeeded one another in the pulpit; but still the workmen toiled like busy ants, and still the great ballroom went on growing--in honor of the bluff Protestant Duke, who in his own way, with a high hat and a black coat, hot-cross buns, a service in church, and salt fish at dinner, held sacred that Day of Days.

The Soul of Man’s Redeemer, breathed forth on Calvary, passed downwards on the way to Purgatory, with the saved thief trotting in His footsteps like a dog. He descended to those regions where souls under penalty lie writhing in the torture of purifying fires. His tidings of pardon and salvation fell like cooling dews upon their expiatory anguish, ere He rose like the sun upon the spirits of the Blessed, walking before His dawn in the calm fields of Paradise. But before he ascended to His Throne of Glory He came to comfort a little knot of sorrowing men and women gathered together in a bare chamber at Jerusalem--and to rejoice His Mother with the sight of her risen Son.

But the honored guests of the Empire attended a Review on the Champ de Mars, and inspected the Barracks of the famous Regiment of Guides, and dined at the Tuileries in state, and entertained Ministers of the Crown, Foreign Ambassadors, Nobles of the Empire and distinguished members of the Senate, royally at the British Embassy; and the Monster Ball went off like an Arabian Night before they departed--amidst the united strains of massed bands playing the British National Anthem, and Partant Pour La Syrie--and cries of “Vive la Reine Victoria!” “Vive le Duc!” “Vivent les Anglais!” for Marseilles. They and their Staffs were banqueted there by Marshal de St. Arnaud and his Staff--while the great screw-transports, chock-full of men and horses, guns and stores of all kinds, were scurrying away from Toulon and Brest and Marseilles as fast as steam could carry them--en route for the Dardanelles.

And presently--both French and English Commanders-in-Chief with their Staffs having sailed for Constantinople--Sire my Friend could draw unhampered breath. Despite his boast of belonging to the genus of Imperturbables, his pulses had been unpleasantly quickened by something that had happened. For a moment he had seen the basilisk that Time and opportunity had hatched out of that egg of his, in danger; he had known the torture bred of long-meditated, almost-consummated vengeance that is about to be foiled. But all was well!--prompt measures had been taken.... Still, it was inconvenient that the man had lived to return....

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LXXXI

The inconvenient thing had happened on the night of the Ball at the Élysée. Sire my Friend had dined early in private with the Empress--the dinner at the English Embassy taking place upon that night--and now at seven of the clock, the fairyland of imitation marble halls and green gauze grottos filled with real and artificial flowers and illuminated with blue and pink and yellow Chinese lights, not being appointed to open before nine-thirty, he was smoking in his peculiar snuggery at the Tuileries, one of a suite of low-ceiled rooms on the ground-floor between the Pavillon d’Horloge and the Pavilion de Flore, containing a splendid collection of arms, many priceless miniatures, and exquisite articles of furniture and bijouterie and priceless Sèvres that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. And with him were the Duke de Morny, Persigny--also elevated to the Peerage--and the Commander-in-Chief of his Eastern Forces, Marshal de St. Arnaud.

Time and an excessive indulgence in the pleasure of the senses had not added to the personal attractions of Sire my Friend. He looked--despite the artistic make-up of his valets and dressers--sick and sleepy, sluggish and old. His person was soaked with scent; the side of the middle and the top-joint of the first finger of the right hand were dyed yellow with perpetual cigarette-smoking. It had played havoc with his digestion, and his nerves, and his throat.... And the bevy of enameled, dyed and bewigged roués surrounding him, looked not one whit better for world’s wear than their master. They bored him by grumbling--perpetually grumbling.... He had poured out money in floods upon them, and yet they were not content....

De Morny had had a million--Persigny a million--de Fleury the appointment of aide-de-camp in chief and half-a-million--Kate Harvey a quarter-of-a-million and the title of Comtesse de Belletaille. Only some few who had loved and served him disinterestedly may have been forgotten in this hour of his prosperity.... And how many of the Henriettes were left to chew the cud of broken promises and disappointed hopes....

To more than these he had been prodigal of promises, liberal of vows, forgetting that these are birds that sooner or later come back to roost. That oath of the Carbonari was presently to haunt his pillow, dog his steps with the assassin’s soundless footfall; explode bombs--in the hour of his triumph--that strewed his fated pathway with the dying and the dead.

He sat and smoked and ruminated, upon this April night of ’54, much as he had done upon that November night of ’51, when he had received news of the laying of the Channel Cable. There was one now that reached from Marseilles to Constantinople; he could dictate his will by the mouth of his Ambassador to the Sublime Porte without delay or hindrance; by tugging at the fiery rein of the live wire he would presently be able to make his Army curvet or demivolt without exposing himself to the discomforts of a campaign beyond seas. And the burden of his hidden thought was that his Star had again befriended him. For when the time came to broach the great secret, his followers would believe the master-plan was solely his. There was no one now to start up before him and claim the credit. Months back he had information.... Today decisive intelligence had confirmed the report. The officer who had devised the undertaking, the emissary who had been dispatched to carry out the indispensable survey and make the secret treaties, was dead.

Dead.... Thenceforth Dunoisse’s vast capacity for toil, his discretion and silence; his powers of concentration, his geographical, topographical, and scientific knowledge; his consummate powers of arrangement and organization, his command of tongues, were lost to his master at the Tuileries. He was--his great task complete--to have had high military rank and a great guerdon in money. He had been asked to name his price, and he had stipulated for One Million One Hundred and Twenty-Five Thousand Francs. Sire my Friend smiled, knowing this to be the exact amount of a fortune its owner had squandered--remembering who had helped Dunoisse to scatter the glittering treasure to the four winds of the world. He wondered whether Madame de Roux had heard of the death of her old lover? She came to Court but seldom now, and then only to those unimportant functions to which the stars of lesser social magnitude were invited. The violent colors and bizarre fashions of the Second Empire did not suit her style of beauty--only ugly women looked really well in them!--or she was getting a little passée--the poor Henriette! She had a new liaison--an intrigue with one of the Generals of the Army of Algeria, recently appointed to the command of the Fourth Division of his Eastern Forces. It was said that she was to accompany Grandguerrier on the campaign. Pleasant for de Roux, who was still at Algiers--very pleasant! The dull eyes of Sire my Friend almost twinkled as this occurred to him. He smiled, caressing the chin-tuft that had become an imperial.

Said de Morny, Duke and Peer of France, gracefully masking a yawn with three long, slim fingers:

“Sire, if Your Majesty has anything amusing to impart to us--and your smile conveys the idea that you have--we entreat you not to withhold it. We are all dull, drowsy, and damnably out of spirits!... These imported fogs of Britain have chilled us to the bone!”

His Imperial Majesty exhaled a cloud of smoke, leaning his long thick body back in the well-cushioned corner of an Oriental sofa. He wore, as customary upon gala occasions, the levee uniform of a General of Division, adorned with many blazing Orders and Stars. His short legs--clad in white kid knee-breeches fastened with diamond buckles, white silk stockings, and high-heeled pumps of white patent leather, also diamond-buckled--were crossed, and as he ruminated he stroked one well-turned ankle with his dainty womanish hand. He glanced at the hand appreciatively as he dropped his cigarette-ash on the costly carpet. Then, barely lifting those sick, faded eyes of his to the face of de Morny, he answered in his drawling, nasal tones:

“Since my smile must be translated into words, it had at that moment occurred to me how consummately foolish our British guests would look, did they know why they were embarking on this Eastern Expedition.” He caressed his high instep with musing approbation. De Morny said:

“Sapristi! I presume they are no more ignorant than ourselves that this is a war without an adequate reason. Monseigneur the Duke of Bambridge, if he be ever to succeed the Earl of Dalgan at the War Office, must see some Active Service--that is undeniable. M. de St. Arnaud requires a dress-rehearsal with volleys of real ball-cartridge, in his rôle of a Marshal of France. Also, your Army is plethoric--its health requires blood-letting. Beyond these reasons--none that I can see.... Unless you, Sire, by personally leading your hosts to battle, intend to follow the glorious example of the Emperor Napoleon the First?”

Sire my Friend detecting a supercilious smile upon the face of the speaker, bestowed on him between his narrow lids a glance of fraternal hate. De Morny--now President of the Legislative Council--carried the diplomatic swallow-tail of dark blue velvet, heavily encrusted with silver oak-branches and palm-leaves, upon his tall, well-bred figure, with the grace and ease that were distinctive of him. He wore the broad red ribbon of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor beneath his single-breasted waistcoat of white cashmere. His white lawn cravat was a dream of perfection. His long, well-made legs, encased in silver-striped, faultlessly-cut trousers of white cashmere, and buckled pumps of black patent leather, nearly as small as those of Imperial Majesty, were fraught with offense to Sire my Friend, always sensitively conscious of the shortness of his own.

For this reason that stumpy Jove did not rise to hurl the thunderbolt. He leaned back, with an exaggerated affectation of indolence, and said deliberately:

“As a fact, my dear fellow, I weary of the achievements of my glorious uncle. I am not disposed to emulate them at all! One is not born into the world for the purpose of copying one’s predecessors.... I prefer to strike out a line extraordinary--astounding--marvelous--above all, original and new!”

De Moray merely bowed, but the bow was to Sire my Friend superlatively offensive. He rose up, forgetful of his disadvantages of stature, and said, looking round upon the dyed heads of hair and painted elderly faces surmounting the brilliantly laced and bedizened uniforms--and as of habit, assuming his Napoleonic attitude.

“These English are bound to the East to carry out my Mission--to fulfill the destiny presaged by my Fortunate Star. You, my brother, who found it inconvenient to know me when that Star was below the horizon, have since accused me to your confidants of abrogating to myself the credit of successes that others have helped me to achieve. You taunt me perpetually with the desire to emulate the First Napoleon. Well! I shall show you soon--very soon--some things accomplished that he could not do. I will avenge at one blow the catastrophe of the Moskva, the defeat of Waterloo, and the humiliation of St. Helena. How? Did you ask how? By all means you shall learn!”

He laughed, and that outrageous mirth did such violence to the sense of hearing that even de Moray shuddered, and St. Arnaud made a clicking sound of dismay with his tongue against his teeth. The speaker resumed, looking glassily about him:

“My uncle would have declared War against the nation he designed to crush and conquer. His nephew, wiser than he, will share with her the apple of amity, cut, Borgia-fashion, with a knife poisoned only on one side! Needed only to further my plan that Russia should pick a quarrel with Turkey. The old question of her authority over the Eastern Christians--the smoldering grudge in the matter of her claim to precedence of admission to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher--served me excellently! And I have championed the cause of the Sultan--I take the field against the Northern Power, with England my Ally!”

He lifted the drooping lids of those eyes of his, and they were dim and lack-luster no longer. They blazed with a radiance that was infernal and malign. He said--and the breathless silence of his hearers was intoxicating joy to him:

“And, blinded by that stiff-necked pride of hers, she will walk into a death-trap, planned and devised and perfected by the man she has despised! Russia shall have supremacy over the Danubian Principalities. I may even cede her Constantinople--I am not quite certain.... But Great Britain shall be France’s footstool and East India her warming-pan!”

He fancied de Morny about to interrupt, and said, turning upon him with a tigerish suavity:

“Proofs--you require proofs! Assuredly, you shall have them. Be good enough to follow me. This way, Messieurs!”

He led the way to a room at the end of the suite, the walls of which were hung with maps, plans and diagrams, and lined with bookshelves and presses; whose tables were loaded with models of public buildings, steam-boilers, and engines of artillery; and where the gilded cornices and moldings were chipped with rifle and revolver bullets, as had been those of the smaller cabinet at the Élysée. Lamps burning under green shades illuminated this place of labor. He took a Bramah key from under the setting of a signet ring he wore, unlocked a press and racked back the sliding doors in their grooves with a gesture of the theater. The alphabetically-numbered shelves were loaded with papers. He said, indicating these:

“You see there the fruit of three years of unremitting labor, performed in secrecy. To-night there is an end to secrecy. I hardly thought the hour would come so soon!”

He took from a compartment of the shelves two square sheets of yellow, semi-transparent tracing-paper, and turned to face his audience exactly as an actor would have done upon the stage. He was master of the situation--he was making the great disclosure just as he had mentally rehearsed it. Not for nothing had he trusted in his Destiny and his Star.

“The sealed orders you, M. de St. Arnaud, were to have received from me upon your departure for Marseilles to-morrow,” he said, addressing the Commander-in-Chief of his Eastern Army, “would have made you sole participator in my secret. Yet I feel no hesitation or reluctance at enlarging the circle of my confidence,” he added, as he encountered the satirically-smiling glance of de Morny. “To betray me would be an act of madness. For--insignificant as I may appear--I am the Empire! Remember that, Messieurs!”

He delicately laid one of the semi-transparent, crackling papers upon the lamp-illumined Russia leather surface of a writing-table near him. A pencil tracing of just such a map of Eastern Europe as was habitually in use at his Ministry of War, and in his Military Institutes--only that the tracing was enriched with added lines, diagrams and notes, in red and blue and various-colored inks. He said, as his followers crowded to look at this--and now there was a shiny gray dampness on his cheeks and forehead, and he secretly dried the palms of his hands with his delicate handkerchief:

“These numbered circles and squares in colored inks represent depots of timber, cattle, salted provisions, forage, and grain, established by me--under private names of ownership--at Sinope, Bourgas, Varna, Kustendje, and other places on the shores of the Black Sea. So that, in the case of an Army of Invasion marching from Varna towards the frontiers of Bessarabia, or maintaining a siege, shall we say?--of any fortified harbor on the coasts of the Crimea----You are surprised, M. de Morny? That is gratifying indeed!”

De Morny had given vent to a long shrill street-boy’s whistle, about as expressive of astonishment as it could be. But he did not possess the quality of reverence. He sang, in English, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his wide-hipped, silver-striped, white cashmere pantaloons, and executing a cancan step cleverly and neatly:

“That’s the way the milliard went! Pop! goes the weasel!”

and ceased as Sire my Friend went on, rolling his handkerchief--dampened with his hidden agony of exultation--into a ball between his palms:

“Immense contracts for the further supply of cattle, provisions, cereals and fodder to France, have been signed by the heads of the principal firms in the Levant and Eastern Europe. Much of the land-transport throughout the Danubian Principalities had already been chartered by Russian agents--a partial check, I will admit, to my views in this direction. Yet thousands of wagons, arabas, telegas, and other vehicles; hundreds of teams of horses, yokes of bullocks, strings of baggage-mules, are at my sole disposal--their proprietors having received liberal payment on account, and having before them the hope of treatment still more generous. Do I weary you? Am I prosy? Do stop me if I bore you!” entreated Sire my Friend.

Nobody stirred or spoke. He went on, savoring his triumph, tasting each sentence as a morsel of some delicate dish:

“Without spies, informers, interpreters, and agents of all grades, an Invading Army is blindfold and helpless. Thus, the assistance of pachas, boyards, consuls, attachés, secretaries, postmasters, innkeepers, will be ours, having been secured on liberal terms. Every Commissariat-clerk, commercial traveler and correspondent who could be bought to serve my purpose has found in me a ready purchaser. And every Turk or Tartar has made oath upon the beard of the Prophet--every Jew is sworn upon the Ark of the Tabernacle--every Bulgarian is pledged upon the Blessed Sacrament--not to supply the English with wood for gabions or shelters, with provisions, grain, fodder, horses, wagons or carts. Wherefore, if they need these things, they must draw supplies from Great Britain, or from Italy. And, failing these sources----”

The speaker shrugged again, and said with a sardonic affectation of humility:

“For the unworthy successor of my glorious uncle, it seems to me that I have hit upon a very good idea!”

He smiled upon them, saying it, and between that swelling sense of achievement, and his inward laughter at having thus duped and distanced those who thought they swayed and guided him, he seemed to increase in stature and gain in dignity. Even de Morny was momentarily bankrupt of a gibe to throw at him. De Fleury could only gape and goggle at him. St. Arnaud said, in a voice broken by surprise and admiration:

“My master--my Emperor, you are greater than Napoleon the Great!”

Persigny went over and knelt down upon the carpet before him. He bent over and kissed one of the little diamond-buckled pumps fervently, as a Dervish might have kissed the Holy Stone of Mecca. He said, in a voice that shook and wobbled:

“I say that you are neither my master or my Emperor. From this moment you are my god!”

“Absurd!” said Sire my Friend. But he smiled as Nero might have smiled upon Tigellinus, and said, still smiling:

“Wait--wait! I have not told everything! You have yet to look at the second chart!”

He laid it down upon the first, which it exactly resembled, save that the numbered rounds and squares indicating the depots were missing, and that along the conjectural route of the Army of Invasion certain areas were staked off with green or blue or vermilion dots, and labeled “Malarious,” or “Insalubrious,” or “Salubrious,” as the case might be, and others “Pestilential,” in a tremulous, uncertain handwriting that told its story to at least one pair of eyes there. Looking up with a vexatious expression of cynical intelligence on his well-bred, rakish countenance, said de Morny:

“And your man, your administrative, polyglot genius who planned and carried out”--he tapped the first chart with a polished finger-nail--“this masterpiece of organization, and later made this survey of Death’s garden--what has become of Dunoisse?” He added: “For this is Dunoisse’s handwriting--and two years ago he went East upon your business, and has not since been heard of. Did he die out there in Death’s garden? or--as the possessor of an inconvenient amount of secret information--have you quodded him in some snug dungeon at the Fortress of Vincennes, or the Prison of Mazas? Or have you had him shot, or scragged him, before putting him to bed in quicklime blankets? Kif--kif--burrico!--a quietus, either way!”

Horribly meaningful as the words were, the gesture accompanying them was even more significant. It brought a dull, scorched flush into the pasty cheeks of Sire my Friend. But he maintained his boasted imperturbability, and answered, with his quiet smile of menace:

“It pleases you to be offensive. Pursue your vein if you imagine it will serve you--I am indifferent to your opinion of me! As for General Dunoisse--who, as you rightly guess, acted as my instrument in carrying out these comprehensive arrangements for Commissariat and Transport--who completed this sanitary survey of the debatable ground--that unhappy officer expired of fever in the swamps of the Dobrudja, some months ago. These charts were brought me by his confidential secretary--one Michaëlis Giusko--to whom the dying man entrusted them.” He added, in answer to de Morny’s smile: “Your perspicuity is not at fault.... Lest his silence and discretion should fail us at this crucial moment--M. Giusko is in safe keeping--where, there is no need to say!... As for this second chart of the Unseen Dangers, by following its guidance our Army will not encamp within insalubrious or pestilential areas. While our Allies--unless they have taken similar precautions--are likely more or less to suffer!” He ended meditatively, stroking his imperial:

“We share with them the Borgian apple--we take the half that is not poisoned. The whole thing is simple. It is not we who die!”

He opened his eyes widely and looked upon his followers. It seemed to them that through those blazing windows they saw down into Hell. As he said again how simple the thing was, a rattling oath of the canteen and the barrack-room escaped from de Fleury, that caused the green shades of the table-lamps to shiver in their gilded sockets. Persigny’s teeth were chattering, though the April night was almost sultry. De Morny broke out peevishly as he wiped his clammy face:

“Zut!--there is no doubt you have got them in the treacle! But why did your Majesty not wait to tell us this until Lord Dalgan and the Duke had left for Marseilles? I am sick in my stomach with funk, absolutely!--at the thought of doing the civil to them and their men to-night!”

“Be uncivil, then,” advised his Imperial master. “Between your compliments and your insults there is so subtle a distinction that neither the Duke or Dalgan will be the wiser, you may be sure!”

St. Arnaud roared at this mordant witticism. De Morny was about to launch a return-shaft, when there came a gentle, significant knocking--not upon the door through which they had previously passed, but another, communicating with the outer gallery.

“Enter!” commanded Sire my Friend, for the knocker had given the prescribed number of taps that heralded his Private Military Secretary.

And the door opened, and there entered, gently closing it behind him, the very man who had died in the marshes of the Dobrudja months before.

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LXXXII

He was so strangely altered, aged, bleached and wasted, that for some moments Sire my Friend and the other owners of the curled and made-up heads that had pivoted round upon his entrance regarded him in the silence that is born of dismay. The color of old wax, or of a corpse some days dead, an atmosphere of such chilly isolation surrounded this pale spectral figure, that even de Moray, that cool smiling skeptic, knew the shudder of superstitious terror, and felt his thin hair stiffen on his scalp. A worn and shabby Staff uniform of the date of the Presidency hung in folds upon the intruder’s lean and stooping body. His black eyes burned in caves hollowed by protracted mental labors and immense physical exertions. His black hair, long uncut, and mingled with streaks and patches of white, hung in tangled elf-locks to his tarnished epaulets, and drooped in a heavy matted plume upon his brow. To the gaunt hollows beneath his haunted eyes he was raggedly bearded with this piebald mixture. And as he stood before them, intermittent gusts of fever seized and shook him, until his teeth chattered audibly, and his bones seemed to rattle in his baggy, withered skin. As, in one of these gusts, he coughed, and pressed to his parched lips a yellowed cambric handkerchief that was presently bloodstained, de Fleury--reassured by this incontestable proof of mortality--took courage and called him by his name:

“Dunoisse!”

“Dunoisse!... A thousand welcomes, mon cher General!” Sire my Friend, instantly assuming his urbane and benignant air, stepped towards the shabby scarecrow with graciously extended hand. But the scarecrow raised its own, and waved Imperial Majesty back with a gesture so expressive of warning, if not of menace, that the action sent a shudder through its witnesses. Again they doubted if this were not some ghostly visitant from the world that is beyond the grave.... And again the hacking, tearing cough came to convince them that this was no spirit, but merely a dying man.

Said Sire my Friend, after that slight pause of consternation:

“My good Dunoisse, you have dropped on us--literally from the heavens. As a fact, we had heard on excellent authority that you were--ill--and that the pleasure of welcoming you must be--indefinitely deferred. Upon this account excuse what may strike you as lack of cordiality in our greeting!” He added, and his growing confidence permitted an outcrop of anger upon the smooth polish of his accents. “And explain to us--the rules denying unknown officers access to the Emperor’s private apartments being even more stringent than those which protected the President from such intrusion--how you gained admittance here?”

For all answer, the shape he spoke to lifted its left hand, and showed, hanging loosely on a wasted finger, a signet ring. Sire my Friend, recognizing the token conferring upon his Equerry General, Private Secretary, and Military Secretaries, access to his person at all hours, shrugged his chagrin; and tapped his daintily-shod foot impatiently upon the floor.

“Of course! Naturally! Pardon my forgetfulness!” he said urbanely. “I myself bestowed that Open Sesame upon you, when your skill, and intelligence, and ability prompted me to promote you to a confidential post upon my Staff. And later--when my reliance in your discretion and fidelity led me to place in your most able hands the task which you have so superbly completed--you took the ring with you when you left Paris for the East.” He added, discerning that the black eyes burning in their shadowy caves glanced at the faces of his merry men with doubtfulness:

“Have no fear! These trusted friends who shared with me the secret of the intended coup d’État participate in knowledge of this later--measure of diplomacy.... You have arrived at the very moment of disclosure.... Therefore speak out quite freely, my very good Dunoisse!...”

Dunoisse opened his cracked lips, and said, in a voice so faint and hollow that it might have answered from the sepulcher of Lazarus when the Voice bade the dead come forth:

“I will speak out freely. To do so is my right. None can dispute it.”

He waited, gathering strength, clenching his fleshless hands, breathing painfully; and a glistening upon his sunken parchment temples and the burning patches of red upon his hollow cheeks betrayed the terrible emotions that rent and tore the wasted body that housed a suffering soul.

“I have spread your nets,” he said, in the voice that had lost its clear, sharp ring, and was feeble, and flat, and broken. “From the Balkans to the Pruth I have set your springes--dug your pitfalls--sharpened your hidden stakes. I have put it in your power to precipitate a crisis. To meet events and grapple Fate I used all the strength and all the skill I had.”

He drew a shaken breath and went on:

“I have subsidized scores of men into this service--no man knowing his neighbor for a fellow-conspirator--every man secretly bound by the oath that is most sacred in his sight. Turks, Greeks, Tartars, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Wallachs--all have been pledged not to give aid to Russia, or England the Ally of Russia, in the great War that was presently to be waged with France and the Ottoman Empire--over the Debatable Ground....”

A rush of fever dyed his sallowness to dusky crimson. The heat that radiated from his burning body struck upon the bodies of the other men.

“I served you,” he said, fixing his sunken, glittering eyes upon the face of Imperial Majesty, “to the very gates of Death. Believing myself to be dying, I placed--in the hands of two men who had sought me out and found me--the original charts that proved my task completed, and the tracings of those charts. One, at least, of my messengers could not fail to reach you----”

De Morny said, pointing to the writing-table, where the squares of shiny tracing-paper, covered with spidery diagrams and dotted lines in red and blue and green and vari-colored inks, lay in the yellow radiance cast by the green-shaded lamp:

“There are the proofs that one of your messengers did reach his destination. We had been looking at those marvelous charts the moment before you came in.”

De Morny, Duke and Peer of France, might have been a mouse squeaking in a corner or one of the love-birds and wax-bills--dainty feathered creatures for which Imperial Majesty possessed an amiable penchant--twittering in its gilded window-cage. For Dunoisse neither saw nor heard him, but folded his thin arms upon his hollow breast, and spoke with his haggard eyes on the face of Sire my Friend.

“I came back to civilization to learn the truth of you. I was not the keeper of your secret, the agent of your power, set to pit craft against craft and insure victory by wise precaution!--I was your dupe, your accomplice, and your tool. Judas! Oh, Judas!” said Dunoisse, in a dry, fierce rustling whisper that was like the sirocco passing through a field of withered maize-stalks. “How is it that I believed you--knowing you besmeared with blood, and rotten to the soul with deceits and falsehoods? How should I not be among the number of those you have flattered and swindled and betrayed?”

The silence of sickening consternation was on each of those who heard him. Their crests of false curls drooped; the paint faded from their faces under the lashing hail of his words. They were crimson or leaden or sea-green according to their various temperaments--the complexion of Sire my Friend having undergone this last and most unbecoming change. And Dunoisse went on speaking, almost without a gesture, as a man whose bodily weakness compelled economy of breath and action.

“I was to have had a great reward of you for my services. One million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, to be definite! Keep your stolen money! Could I buy back self-respect with the price of blood? As for you, you have won your Empire--have brought about the War you schemed and plotted for; you will take the field with Turkey and your Ally of England, shoulder to shoulder--side by side!... Ah!--you read Machiavelli at the Fortress of Ham to good purpose!... You grew more than violets upon the ramparts, Monseigneur! You matured plans for revenge.... And you will have your honeyed vengeance,” said Dunoisse, in that distinct, rasping whisper. “And gall will mingle with the sweetness as you suck it. For those old associates of yours--those men of the Reform and Carlton Clubs of London--will say of you: ‘By God!--this Emperor of France is a damned scoundrel!’ And, by God!--they will be right!”

The sentence, spoken in English, cut like a tandem-whip. As it hissed through the stagnant, perfumed, tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room, the speaker drew his sword. Sire my Friend recoiled and cried out at the sharp hiss of the steel, and de Fleury, brave as a bulldog, sprang before his master instantly. But Dunoisse only balanced the weapon a moment with the deftness of a master of fence, ere, with an effort that taxed his feebleness to the utmost, he snapped the tarnished steel across his thin knee, and said, as he threw the pieces down clattering at the dainty buckled feet of Imperial Majesty:

“My military oath of allegiance was to the President, not to the Emperor. I will serve you no longer, be that understood! And--though the work I have done has been fatally well done!--in so far as it be possible, I will unmesh the net I have woven.... Therefore be warned, Monseigneur!”

With this, as a man might shake off from his hand some venomous insect, he dropped the loosely-fitting signet ring upon the carpet, ground it with a sudden, savage impulse underneath his heel, and went out, leaving them staring and short of breath.

A moment later, Sire my Friend, whose complexion of sea-green had suffered change to a congested purple, staggered and clutched at nothing, and fell down frothing in an epileptic fit.

By the advice of Persigny--who had seen him before in that pitiable condition--they moved the furniture away from his vicinity, and left his devil to use him at its will. And presently he came to, staring and shuddering, with a bitten glove between his teeth; and was very feeble and exhausted, and full of fears lest the Empress had seen him thus afflicted. But by-and-by, when reassured, and restored, and renovated, he was able to interview the Chief of his Secret Police, and give orders for an arrest....

He was peculiarly benevolent, urbane and smiling, an hour later, when, to the united strains of “God Save the Queen” and “Partant Pour La Syrie,” he entered the fairyland of blue-and-white striped awnings, blue carpets, gold-tasseled hangings of pink satin, and elfin grottos of green gauze, full of palms and hot-house roses, illuminated with pink, blue and yellow Chinese lights. Leading the beautiful Empress--who rested her gloved hand on the happy arm of the Duke of Bambridge--followed by the French and British Commanders-in-Chief, with their Staffs, his brothers and his uncle, he looked--or might have with the addition of a few more inches--every inch an Emperor.

And not only an Emperor, said the Imperial Press Organs--a philanthropic lover of mankind, who--supported by Great Britain, the nursing-mother of infant nations--was about to carry out a war in the cause of Freedom, Justice, and the Rights of Man against Irresponsible Despotism.

Amidst the general joyousness, the depression of de Morny--that usually light-hearted cynic--was curiously apparent. Lord Dalgan noticed this, and commented upon it in his exquisite, polished French:

“By my faith, Monseigneur!” returned de Morny, in the English language, “I cannot deny it, I am confoundedly hipped to-night! Absolutely, I am like the Princess in the Suabian fairy legend--there is a rose-leaf under my twenty-ninth feather-bed. Why? I am envious--absolutely envious! I have seen a poor man throw away one million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs for the privilege of enjoying a luxury that I, who am a rich man, cannot afford.”

“Really! And what is that costly form of indulgence?” asked my Lord.

De Morny answered, with a curious smile on that well-bred, rakish face of his:

“The luxury of telling the truth!”

* * * * *

He could not afford it, though he would have liked it.... It was not yet convenient to break with Sire my Friend....

* * * * *

And so the Monster Ball spun and whirled itself out, dancing becoming public after the departure of the Imperial Party and their guests. At three in the morning when even young and handsome faces looked fagged, and old ones witchlike and ghastly; when the real flowers were faded, and the imitation ones dusty and limp; when the elfin grottos were revealed as garish shams which no respectable fairy would have dreamed of being seen in--when the innumerable colored lanterns hung from trees and twinkling amongst shrubberies looked pale and mean and sickly in the light of coming day; a prison-van, bolted on a railway-truck--having a carriage containing an Imperial aide-de-camp and two Commissaries of Police in front of it, and another full of gendarmerie behind it--was being whirled by a special engine into the Northern Department of the Somme.

At the station where the van was unbolted from the railway-truck an escort of Lancers waited; also a one-horse brougham, an open brake, drawn by a pair; and a couple of spare horses. These being harnessed to the van, the aide, after exchanging a sentence or two with the commander of the cavalry escort, stepped into the brougham, followed by the police-officers, who modestly took the front seat. Then at a curt word of command the party put itself in motion, and clattered and clinked and rolled away.

And presently the prison-van, with its wheeled and mounted guardians, passed--with a challenge from a sentry and the giving of a countersign at each--over two drawbridges, and clattered and rolled--the prisoner judged by the damp chill and the hollow echo--under a heavy archway of stone. And then, with the grinding of heavy iron wards in locks, and screaming of solid iron bolts in stony groovings, the van came to a halt; the steps were banged down, the door was opened; and the yawning jailers who had traveled with the prisoner unlocked his narrow cell.

Dunoisse was invited to get out. He moved his cramped limbs with difficulty, and descended the iron steps in the gay sunshine of an April morning, which painted long blue shadows on a lofty wall centered by a massive gateway with a square watch-tower, across the stones of a flagged courtyard.

Two huge round towers flanked the south and west angles of the courtyard. A block of buildings was upon his right hand that looked like a Barracks. Another, smaller, on his left, was probably the dwelling of the Commandant. A gray-haired, stout man in the undress uniform of a field-officer of the Line came out of the house, saluted the Imperial aide, and returned the salute of the officer of the escort. He had a blue paper in his hand.

He said, addressing the prisoner after a brief colloquy with the Imperial Staff officer:

“You will be confined here during the pleasure of the Emperor.”

Dunoisse knew that meant for life. He lifted his haggard eyes as he asked the question:

“Where am I?”

The answer came:

“You are in the Fortress of Ham.”

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LXXXIII

“CAMP NEAR VARNA,

“June.

“MY DEAREST MOTHER,

“We arrived Here all Safe, and are Incampt with the Division on a Scrubby Plane by a Lake full of Leaches about 2 milse inland of Varna, Which is the Beastliest Town you ever Saw. It is Full of English, French, Turks, Bulgarians, Jews, Infadels, and Herraticks. Every now and Then a Fire brakes out which Marshal St. Arnod the French Commander-in-Chief says is Dew to insendiary Greekse. Yesterday it Was the House next our Powder Maggazine, but luckily the Wind Changed, and we Lost neerly all our Stores of Barly, Biskits, Tea, Suggar, Coffy, Flower and so on. N.B.--How does He know it was insendiary Greekse?

“Tell my Father that the Army is short of Otse and Forridge. Though we have Not quite 4,000 Beests of Transport to move an Army of 27,000 Men!!! We Have Hardly Annything to Give them, And the Noise they make is something Friteful, and every day Lotts of them die. The Cavalry Horses are Fed at preasent, that is all One can Say. I am quite Well, so you must not be Fritened when you Read in the Paperse that Colera has broken out among the Troops.”

Young Morty Jowell, seated on the end of the tent-cot before his folding trestle-table, laid down the pen at this point, and dispiritedly rubbed his nose. Looking from where he sat, he could see under the lifted canvas of the hospital-marquees the rigid shapes of smitten soldiers lying in rows on the cut rushes that covered the bare ground.... For Spring and Summer had conspired with Sire my Friend to the undoing of his Allies of England. Spring had spread beds for the soldiers of the deep wet moss, starred with purple iris and the blue bead hyacinth. Summer had woven her nets of wild sweet roses, filled her deep vineyards with deadly bait of grapes, peaches, and figs. The bees had made for them of the yellow azalea-blossoms, the fragrant, poisonous green honey that breeds fever and delirium. They had eaten of this, and of the tempting fruit, and sickened; and Pestilence had risen up and breathed her blue miasma upon them, and gripped them in her iron cramps, and they had died. The dead were being buried as Morty wrote on:

“Odly enuf, the French on the Hites have got it Though their Camps are better Plaiced than what ours Are. They have sent 3 Divisions into the Dobrudja, where 90 thowsand Russians are being held in Chek by Omar Pasha. They are putting Whole Regiments on their Transports and sending Them out to Sea.

“Yesterday I saw the loveliest Girl I ever saw in my Life out Riding on the Road to Aladyn on the Finest Brown Horse I ever Saw in my life. She comes from the Bashi’s Camp. None of the Officers know her Naim, but all of them call her Golden Cloak, bicause of her Hair, which is the most Wonderful I ever Saw in my Life. A man of Ours told me Her Father is a Colonel of Bashis and that her mother was a Georgian Princess. I Never saw such Hair or such Eyes in All my life.

“I am your loving son, “MORTIMER.

“P.S.--I forgot to tell my Father that the Trooper who saved my life in the Reck of The British Queen is my Cousin Sarah’s Son, Joshua Horrotian. When I thanked him and asked him to Shake Hands he Rifused. I Think it is bicause of Something My Father Has Done about his Mother’s Propperty. Tell my Father I do Not want a Hunting Box and that I had rather die a Beggar than That enny man should be Wronged for me. Mind you tell that to my Father. And tell him I have Not yet Had His Anser to a Certain Letter he knose of. And that I Mean it Every Word.

“M. J.

“P.P.S.--You must Not supose that Bicause she Comes from the Bashis’ Camp she is Not a Lady. If she is Not One I never Saw one in my Life.

“M. J.

“P.P.P.S.--Love and Thanks for the Caises of Good Things which were Hily apreciated.

“M.”

That is, by the rank-and-file. For Morty, mentally burdened by the paternal confidences as to cabbaging, declined to partake of the luxuries sent out to him in huge consignments by special deliveries, week and week about. You saw the Ensign turning these over to the men of his company, and living on Service rations of fresh or salt pork, biscuit, rice, and rum. To those who asked why, he explained that he preferred this Spartan form of nourishment; at those who chaffed he grinned or scowled. And presently the big tin-lined cases from Fortnum and Mason’s, or Goodey and Cates, left off coming, as did those that had been dispatched from the emporiums of these purveyors to hundreds of other wealthy young officers, and to the caterers of countless Regimental messes. Entombed at the bottoms of holds, beneath shot and empty shell; piled up in warehouses with mountains of other good and useful things, doomed never to be drunk or eaten, worn or used, they lay until the ending of the War brought about their exhumation. And long before then, flinty biscuit had become a luxury, and salt pork was not to be had every day.

You may gather that from the very outset of the Eastern Campaign the names of Cowell, Sewell, Powell, and many others of the fraternity had not infrequently reached Morty’s ears in conjunction with expressions of disapprobation. Nor, despite all the consideration shown him by his comrades, could references to Thompson Jowell, couched in terms the reverse of admiring, fail to find utterance in the presence of the great man’s son. For when he was not present as a Forage and Supply Contractor, you met him as an Auxiliary Transport Agent. He was here, there, and everywhere.... He had a finger in every pie.... Before very long, it seemed to his son, that whenever men talked together in lowered tones, with angry faces, the name of Jowell was certain to be the burden of their discourse.

“S’sh!” someone would say hastily, as Morty’s tall shadow fell across the threshold of the mess-tent, or drew near over the sandy parading-ground.

“Why?... Who?...” the man who had been holding forth would ask, without looking up.

“His son!”... the man who had “S’sh’ed!” would say:

“Oh!”

Morty grew to hate that branding interjection. And that prophecy of Jowell’s, that he would never be ashamed of his old Governor, was falsified every day.

Sometimes he would begin to fear that he hated the man who had begotten him. This acute stage of his complaint was reached when it began to be known that the Allies would winter on the Black Sea. For forage, and clothing, and provisions, and all that the Army needed, it was said, was being sent out in the great Government transport, The Realm, from Portsmouth Dockyard.... What wonder that the boy, unwilling sharer in the grisly secret that made the stiff gray hair of Thompson Jowell bristle on his head o’ nights, was galled and tortured! His apprehension had ridden him as though he had been another Sindbad, throttled by the hairy incubus of the immortal story. Then he had hit on a plan for getting rid of this dreadful Old Man of the Sea.

He had taken his courage in both hands and written boldly to his father, maintaining at the same time a caution that made him shudder at himself. For lest Jowell’s murderous secret should leave bloody finger-marks on every page, it was necessary to be ambiguous. Yet he had conveyed his meaning clearly, and the final sentence, with all its crudity, had the ring of steel on stone.

“Sinse I Caim out Here I Have Bigun to understand Better than I did Bifore What you Meant by What you Said that Night at Dinner. And if you Do this Thing that you have Planned to do, I will never come Home Agane or call myself by your Naim, or take another Six-pens of your Money. As God lives, I won’t, so now you Know! My mother shall hear the Truth and Chuse between us! It is Hard on a Fellow To have to rite like this to His Father, but You Have Brought it on yourself!”

There was a postscript:

“Remember I will never come Home or Call myself by your Naim, or Take another Peny of your Monney. Don’t do it, Gov.! Don’t do it for God’s saik. He might Forgive you. I Never shold, I Know!

“M.”

You are to imagine Thompson Jowell perusing this composition with eyes that whirled in their shallow round orbits, and a complexion that underwent strange changes, deepening from fiery red to muddy purple, and from muddy purple to pale sea-green.

The letter had been directed to his place of business in the City. When he blundered up out of his office-chair, crumpling it in his shaking hand, he was dizzy, and there was a singing in his ears. That his boy should even dream of turning against his old Governor was preposterous and absurd, if appalling. The letter was a bit of high-flown nonsense. Nothing would ever come of it! But yet he shook in every limb, and his shirt was damp upon his back.

It was his Fate, that, priding himself as he did upon the doggedness of will and tenacity of purpose that had combined with unscrupulousness in the making of his fortune, he could not recognize in his son the first-named qualities. He had begotten his own judge. Though he blinked the fact, it was presently to come to him, after a method unexpected, terrible, and strange.

The dizziness passed off; Jowell waddled on his thick short legs to the rusty fireplace, thrust the letter deep into the heart of the handful of coal that burned there, and held it down with the poker until it blazed up and was reduced to a grayish crisp of thin ash. Then he got a glass of water from the yellow washstand, went to his cupboard, and deliberately swallowed two Cockle’s pills.

Whenever Conscience woke up, and clamored behind the gorgeous waistcoat of the great Contractor, he was accustomed to silence her by the administration of a bumping dose. Purged of repentance and relieved, we may suppose, of scruples, his reply to Morty’s letter was a masterpiece in its way.

For it reminded the son, indirectly, of all that the father had done for him, and temptingly enlarged upon all that he meant to do.... At the end came the pregnant intimation that Mortimer was not to flurry himself about affairs that were no concern of his. And that--in a particular instance not more definitely specified, Sturdy Stephen Standfast was the name of his old Gov.

“For he don’t mean that letter! Not a word of it!” snorted Thompson Jowell, quite himself as he blotted the reply to Morty’s letter on the morning after the two Cockle’s pills. He added: “Throw his old Gov. over!... By Gosh! he ain’t capable of it. By Gosh! if an Angel came down from Heaven”--one would like to hear Jowell’s conception of Heaven--“and told me he was, I wouldn’t take its word.”

When it comes to a tussle between Old Standfast and Young Standfast, one may be pretty certain as to which is going to win.... Having marked out, in his blundering boyish way, a line of conduct, Mortimer Jowell meant to follow it unswervingly. Hence the answer to the letter was a blow to all his hopes. He wrote no more to his father, though the dowdy woman regularly received his ill-spelt letters! And being of a kindly, affectionate disposition, he was profoundly wretched, in anticipation of the coming hour when he must keep his word.

Gnawing suspense and mental anxiety, combined with the effects of a deadly climate, might have hurried the Ensign to the grave on the heels of many another brave young officer, had not Love, with all its distractions, fears, and longings, acted as a tonic, and braced the patient up.

The Mounted Irregulars whom Morty had learned to refer to as the Bashis, were encamped in what had been a vineyard by the roadside on the way to Aladyn. Their chief, reported to be the father of Golden Cloak, Morty knew by sight as a bronzed, fiercely-mustached, soldierly man of perhaps forty-five. Splendidly mounted, dressed in the dark blue single-breasted tunic with green facings, light blue red-striped pantaloons, long spurred boots, black sheepskin kalpak and gray cloak, you would have taken him for an Osmanli commander of regular horse--had it not been for the blue, silver striped shawl worn round his kalpak, in combination with his unstudied off-hand manner of administering chastisement to his ragged, strangely bedizened, variously-weaponed troopers, with the flat of the naked sword.

It was torture to know that the bright cynosure hailed from that rowdy camp of brigands.... Morty, who had never previously known concern as to the reputation of any young woman, was uneasy upon this score. He found the cool, cynical attitude of his brother officers intolerable. For Golden Cloak had flashed by, a shining meteor borne on a brown-black storm-cloud--and left behind a champion and a slave.

She had ridden her magnificent Kabarda, with its costly shabrack of blue cloth, gold-embroidered, and gold and scarlet bridle, astride, after the graceful fashion of Peruvian ladies. She was small, pale, slight in stature as a child.... Her tiny features, pure as pearl, illuminated with black Oriental eyes, flashing and melting under the arches of meeting eyebrows, were crowned by a little black lambskin kalpak, in which was set an aigrette of flashing diamonds. The miraculous cloak of shining curls covered her to mid-thigh.... But he could see that she wore a Hussar tunic of dark blue, with golden frogs, green welts, and trimmings of black lambskin, and that her girdle was of gold lace, crimson-striped. Also, that her ample trousers of light blue cloth ended in high boots of scarlet leather, golden-spurred.

There was a sand-wind blowing under a blistering sun that day, and at first young Mortimer had cursed it heartily. With equal heartiness he was to bless it, presently. For as she galloped past, it had snatched the lambskin kalpak from her head, and dropped it in a puff of scorching dust at his feet. He had pounced on it greedily. Golden Cloak had reined up her splendid beast, and wheeled, and ridden towards him....

“Beg pardon! You dropped this!”

Young Mortimer had held up the dainty headgear towards her, saluting with the best grace he knew how to muster. She had answered in English.... Heavens! what lisping, quaintly-flavored English!...

“It is mine.”

“Please!... Won’t you take it?”

He had tendered the kalpak, wondering why she stretched forth no hand to receive it. Instead she had blushed and frowned, shaking her head. And as the boy had faltered, abashed by her loveliness, downcast by what seemed her disdain, a gust of the dusty wind had lifted the golden mantle, shedding it on either side of her slim young body like a pair of glittering wings; and Mortimer Jowell, standing in the soft black dust of the road between the vineyards, had known an overwhelming shock of grief, surprise, and horror; for Beauty had no hands.

The Lancer tunic had wide short, braided sleeves that ended well above the elbow. From these two slender white arms projected, ending in the stumps of little wrists.... The reins of her fiery horse were buckled to a leathern strap that went about her middle. She guided him by the sway of her slender body to right or left; stopped him by leaning back, maintained her seat by the clasp of her supple limbs about his shining barrel. There was perfect accord, complete sympathy, between the rider and the steed.

But oh! the pity of it! Young Morty had not been able to speak, lest he should stammer, and choke, and blubber. He had stood in the middle of the road, gaping stupidly, holding the dainty headgear, which he made no effort to restore.... She had flushed red. Perhaps she had thought--who knows what she thought of the dull young English officer? But the horse had drawn nearer, trotting through the thick black dust, with dainty mincing steps, whisking its superb tail and tossing its mane, spreading its scarlet nostrils, cocking its wild eye backwards at its rider, less in mischief than in play.

It had moved abreast of Morty, almost touching him with its glossy shoulder, and stopped. The rider had bent low, shedding a torrent of curls over the holsters at the saddle-bow, covering even her dainty boot with the hem of her golden cloak. Evidently she expected the Englishman to replace the kalpak on her head. But he did not. She gave him a furious glance, caught the cap in her little teeth, snatched it from his hand, rose in the saddle, and was gone like the wind itself.

“Gaw!” cried Mortimer in stupefaction, for it was the darting flight of the swallow rather than the gallop of a horse. And then the thick red blood had rushed from his heart and dyed his healthy round face to the forehead.... She was afflicted, this lovely girl, and he had stared at her! Smarting, he went back to camp, more out of conceit with Morty Jowell than he had even been before, and yet supremely, idiotically happy. For her hair had swept over him, bathed him, drowned him for one divine moment in fragrance and beauty. And he could never forget that moment, not if he lived to be an old, old man, he knew.

Now he finished his letter to his mother, addressed and stamped it, took sword and revolver from the tent-rack, and went for another walk upon the road to Aladyn. Not with the idea of meeting her. You are not to imagine it. He was merely looking for a native wagon-driver who would take his letter to the post. Presently one came along, straddling with unclean bare feet upon the foot-board of his creaking wagon, scratching the populous head under his sheepskin cap with one hand, the other being engaged in goading his ill-fed bullocks with the end of a sharpened stick. And to him Morty said in his brand-new Turkish, not being up to the Bulgarian:

“Ohay arabaji! How much casho will you aski to carry a mektub to the Posta Khanê in Varna? Understandi? Yok?”

But the native shook his shaggy head, scowling upon his interlocutor in a manner the reverse of friendly, and upon Morty’s drawing anew upon his stores of Turkish, responded with a Rabelaisian gesture of contempt which brought the wrathful blood to the rim of the Ensign’s forage-cap.

“You uncivil beast. Ain’t we here to fight for you?” he demanded; but the arabaji only prodded his lean bullocks and creaked upon his way. Morty would have dearly liked to follow him, and punch his shaggy head, but that a long way off he saw her coming, and his heart thudded against his scarlet coat, and his stock was suffocating.... Because she must not pass him by, believing that he had been a boor, coarse and unfeeling. She must stay--she must hear what had to be said. And he had no words, but intensity of feeling lent gesture eloquence. He stretched his hands, palm upwards, towards her, then brought them to his lips, and folded them upon his breast.

“You who are so stricken, yet so beautiful--you to whom my heart has gone out--whom I loved at sight--pardon me!--pity me! Oh! do not pass me by without one word!”

The gesture said all this, though he did not know it. She checked her fiery Kabarda in mid-canter, and rode slowly up to him. He grew dizzy as the breeze brought him the remembered perfume of her hair. And she said, slowly, fixing her great dark eyes upon the simple face of Mortimer Jowell:

“You wish to speak to me?” She added, as he looked away, stroking the delicate withers of the thoroughbred: “You wish to tell me that you did not know, I think, and that now you do know, you are sorry--yes?”

He gulped the lump in his throat and nodded, finding courage to look at her. She said--and an Asiatic lisping of the consonants and lengthening of the vowels lent charm and strangeness to the words--

“You are an agha in the Army of the Ingiliz?”

He answered at a venture that he was. She said, and the small pale face had a delicate vivacity:

“I like the Ingiliz. I have their blood through my father! He is Kaimakam of the Bashi of the Brigade of Adrianople, and comes of a noble family of London. He is of the Jones.”

“Beg pardon!” stuttered Morty, thinking that he had not heard clearly, “but would you mind saying that again?”

Golden Cloak repeated, folding her slender arms proudly upon her round young bosom:

“He is a Jones of London, my father. That is a name of honor in your country--yes?”

“Gaw!” said Morty, forcing enthusiasm, “I should rather think it was!”

The diamond aigrette of her cap sparkled in the hot sunshine as she bent her golden head royally. A smile played about her little lips, scarlet as pomegranate-buds.

“There are many of my father’s name in London?”

Morty said truthfully:

“Bless you! there are thousands of ’em in the Post-Office Directory!”

“Some day I will go,” she said, “to Ingiland, and make acquaintance of my relatives. For now, I am with my father.... He has no one but me.... I could not bear to leave him.... I have been with him always, since my beautiful mother died.” She added, and the tiny nostrils quivered:

“I know that she was beautiful because my father has her portrait. She was a Christian Princess of Georgia, daughter of the Eristav of Kakhetia. He was a noble Prince of the Bagratides, descended from the Great Sarbad. The price paid by that family in expiation of murder is double the blood-fine of the lower class!”

She showed her little gleaming teeth in so proud a smile as she made this statement that Morty stammered out:

“Uncommon gratifying, and--and jolly for them, I’m sure, Miss!”

She did not look at Mortimer Jowell. Her great gazelle eyes were fixed upon a heron that was fishing in a little river that wound through the deep green vineyards beside the dusty road. The bird rose with a loud, melancholy honk, clapped its wings, and flew away diagonally, its long legs stuck out straight behind it, its crop thrust forwards, its slender neck curved back between its wings. A shaggy dog rushed out of a little hut that was only a reed-mat thrown over two poles, barking at the heron--a gypsy-girl thrust her tangled head out and nodded to Golden Cloak, showing grinning white teeth in a face burned black by the Bulgarian sun. The nightingales were jug-jugging in the poplars that edged the rivulet, the walnut and apricot-trees seemed full of lesser warblers, the frogs kept up a subdued bass of croakings, the black-backed, white-bellied swifts wheeled screaming through the pure, clear burning air. And it was to the boy as if he had never before seen these things, or guessed their beauty and significance. And they, and the hot blue sky that roofed them, and the thick black dust his boots and the delicate feet of her horse were bedded in, were of Golden Cloak and belonged to her, as the setting belongs to the gem. And, clear and plaintive as some shepherd’s flute, her small, sweet voice went on speaking of the dead mother:

“She died when I was born. Her family were angry when she ran away to be always with my father. They held him accursed because he had abjured Christianity and embraced the faith of Islâm. But it was her fate. Can a woman resist her fate? And besides, my father is not a good Mussulman at all!”

The great blue-black eyes were on Mortimer’s. They drew and drew him....

“Not long afterwards my father was sent upon an expedition into Mingrelia. It was the month of Nissân--the time when the people make strong wine of green honey and jundari--what you call, I think, the millet? The Bashi stole much of this, and became more than ever ‘lost heads.’ They entered the villages of Christians, they plundered, burned, and killed men, women, and children without mercy. And my mother rode up with my father, as one of his chawushes cut off the hands of a young girl.... To my father she said that night: ‘The child of our love will be born handless.’ And it was so. And when they brought me to her, she lifted the shawl that covered me, and died!”

The proud little face broke up. Great tears sprang from the beautiful eyes and ran down, splashing on the golden braidings of the Hussar tunic, falling like scattered pearls on her black sheepskin of the saddle-holsters. She shook her head, and jerked them off. Then, trembling at his own audacity, Mortimer Jowell produced from his cuff a spotless cambric handkerchief, and would have dried those sacred tears, had not the fiery Kabarda reared so suddenly, that the too-daring Ensign, catching the bridle in fear for Golden Cloak, was swung off his feet.

“Let him go,” she said, high in mid-air, unconcerned and now smiling. Adding, as Morty obeyed, and the horse came gently to the ground: “Do not be angry, Urvan, this is another friend!” Then: “Urvan is a little jealous, he sees me speak to so few people.... And next to my father and my nurse, Maryanka, a Tartar woman who has been with me since my birth, he is my protector.... My father trusts me with him.... He would be dangerous to anyone who tried to do me harm.... You cannot think how he loves me!... Even like this he loves me!”

And with a gesture that wrung the boy’s soft heart she showed her piteous stumps. And Morty blurted out, desperately:

“So do other people love you! Don’t I love you? Gaw!--I’d lie down in the dust and let that beautiful beast of yours trample me to mash if it would give you what you want! I swear I would!”

“Ah! You are generous!” she said softly. “I saw it in your face. Tell me your name, that I may always remember it!”

He said, with a boldness that appalled him:

“When you have told me yours!”

“It is Zora. You do not like it?”

He blurted out: “I adore the name. I worship the girl it belongs to! I’m blest if I don’t, so there!”

She leaned from her saddle impulsively, and the golden cloak fell over him and covered him. He looked up, drowning in the light of her glorious eyes, and his boyhood fell away like a cast garment. He had come into his kingdom. He knew himself a man....

* * * * *

They were to meet but once again upon the dusty road to Aladyn. The next letter of the yellowed bundle docketed “From my dearest son” is dated:

“BRITISH CAMP,

“KALAMITA BAY,

“September 14.

“MY DEAREST MOTHER,

“The Hole Army has landed after a Saif and Prosperus Voyag across the Black Sea to the Crimea. We--I Mean the English--saled in 7 Collums each of 30 vessels every 2 or 3 Vessels being toad by a Steemer. The Fiteing Force that convoid us was 10 Line-of-Battle Ships besides 50 gun Frigats, 2 screw and 13 small steemers. I herd an Ngineer say to his mait the Smoak was for all the World like the Pit Country. The French and Turkish Fleats we overhawled shortly after saling, the French had 15 Line-of-Battle ships and 3 War Steamers, the Turks 8 Line-of-Battle ships and 3 War steemers. I did not count the transports. But the site of the Flotilla at Sea was tremenjus, and Must have made the Ruskies at Sevastopole shaik in their shose. At Nite with all the Red, Blue, and Green litse hung from the masts it was a good deal like Vauxhall Gardens. N.B. Without the Cold Ham and the Champain, there being Preshus little to Eat on Bord.

* * * * *

“Day after Landing.

“What do you think of the Froggeys having the Impudens to Move our Boy in the Night from the Plais where It had been ankered by the Admiral of the Flaggship and the Quartermaster-General, thus Bagging the Hole Bay for their Opperations. Nice I don’t Think! We were all Landid without our Tents and Lots of the men without their Napsacks being too week to carry them and lay down on the Beech in the Poaring Rane and you never heard a Grumball, and Colera bissy among them too. Me and my Captain Lord Leighminster and Lieutenant Ardenmore (Whisky) slep in a Cornfield near the Beech and Woak in a puddel 6 in. deep, and the Duke and his Staff past the nite under a Bullok Waggon and seamed rather to Injoy it than Not.

“But if you had seen the jumball we were in, French and English all mixt up together! The Ruskies would have had an Easy Whack if they had made a Sortee.

* * * * *

“4 Days after Landing.

“We are Moving Against the Russian Position on the River Alma which means Apple, and now my darling Mother on what Perhaps may be the Eave of Axion I must tell you that I Love her with All my Hart. What I shall Do if she will Not Marry me I don’t Know, so perhaps it Wold be Best for Me to get Shott. N.B. It is the girl they called Golden Cloak at Varna. Her Father’s Regiment is with the Turkish Army 2 milse down the Cost. Her Christian name is Zora. She told me I might call her by it....

“The Pity is----” Scratched out.

“It is Sad to Think----” Scratched out.

“Perhaps the Cheaf reason I Love her So is Because She has No Hands.”

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LXXXIV

The snuff that got the best stories out of Moggy Geogehagan at Ballymullet Workhouse was a pungent, ginger-colored mixture, and an ounce cost fourpence-halfpenny. You sneezed when Mackiboy, who kept the general shop, took the lid of the tin off, but Moggy consumed vast pinches of this luxury without turning a hair. Naygurhead was her weakness when it came to smoking-tobacco. Her dearest treasure was a little old, inconceivably foul, black pipe that had belonged to Jems Geogehagan.

When the Allied Armies landed in the Crimaya, the scene upon that crowded beach was beyond all description. Every voice was swearing, the language was enough to split a stone.... You ate what you could get, or went without, according as luck would have it; and lay down anyhow and anywhere, to snatch your forty winks.

Between the crying of the trumpets, and the calling of the bugles, the shouting of men trying to find their lost regiments, and the noise of the starving beasts that clamored for their fodder, you were awake the greater part of the time you were sleeping. The hullaballoo made you think of the Judgment Day, with Donnybrook Fair thrown in.

At the beginning of the March upon the Alma, according to Moggy, the Hundredth Lancers with two other Light Cavalry Rigiments forrumed the Advance, and when the Armies were halted, and the Commanders-in-Chief rode along the Front, and Lord Dalgan--a grand, fine, bould-lookin’ ould gintleman to look at--dressed in a dark blue frock an’ gray throusers, an’ a plain undhress cap with a gould band, made a spache to the French in their quare lingo, their Commander-in-Chief, Marshal de St. Arnaud--a long, thin, painted gentleman, all over gould and jools--returned the compliment by addressing Her Majesty’s troops in their native tongue.

“Angleesh Soldats!” the Marshal is reported to have said on the occasion: “’Ow do you do? I ’ope you vill faight vell to-day!” Upon which, from the safe anonymity of the ranks, a Hibernian voice retorted:

“Arrah, Froggy! Don’t you know we will?”

Staff officers rocked in their saddles. Massed regiments were grinning. No one had the least idea as to the identity of the offender. But long after, when Jems Geogehagan was at his dullest, men remembered what he had once said to the French Commander-in-Chief.

* * * * *

The March of the Three Armies was a cure for sore eyes, the greatest sight consaivable. It was for all the worruld an’ a Chaney orange like three great snakes sthreelin’ along. A Red Snake, and a Light Blue Snake, an’ a Dark Blue snake, wid golden scales, an’ diamond hair standin’ stiff along the backs av’ thim. And the Blue Snakes were always between the Red Snake and the sea. The rowl of the Artillery batteries, and the tramplin’ of horse and fut, and the sounding of the trumpets an’ the crying of the bugles made you think again of the Day of Judgment. An’--more by tokens!--the Last Day was soon to dawn for many that was there.

The roads were more thracks than roads; the counthry Moggy considered to be not unlike the Curragh of Kildare, with a dash of Galway, a sinsation of Bagshot Heath, and a taste of Shorncliffe. There was rowling open plains to begin wid; you could see the Fleets movin’ as the Army moved, the big line-av-battle ships standin’ well out--so as to get the good av their long-range flankin’ batteries--and the smaller war-steamers keepin’ inshore, ready at the wind of a worrud to dhrop in a shell from their pivot-guns. But when the bush-covered slopes began to heave up like solid waves about you, and in front of you, begob! the say might have dhried up! For all you’d have known there was no Army in front of you at all, at all! but for the dead and dying bastes, and the sun-sick and cholera-smitten men it had sloughed as it traveled on. “Don’t leave us!” the sick cried out in a lamentable manner, and good rayson they had to cry, poor craythers! For the ambulances having been left behind at Varna, to lave them was to lave them to be aiting by the buruds av the air and the bastes av the wild. So thim among the women that was able--and many was sick, God pity them!--gave up their places on the wagons to these unfortunates, and footed it beside the thrains.

They bivouacked under a dhry sky that night, and marched in the gray of the morning, losing the road and climbing the hills in the tracks the plunging batteries had made. The bush that clad these hills was tamarisk and broom, and furze, and oak-scrub; thorny red-and-yellow berried barberry, wild grape-vines, and a shrub wid shiny leaves and the smell av thim like bog-myrtle. The scent of crushed thyme and worrumwood rose up about your feet, as you tramped on. The sun shone white-hot in a sky of harebell blue.

It was high noon of a scorching hot day when you heard the Fleet’s guns firing. Powerful the banging was. They were shellin’ the Russian Artillery posted on the heights. Then came volleys av muskethry, crackin’ and rattlin’. Clouds of salty-tastin’ powdher-smoke came driftin’ down upon the wind. And the sun bein’ in your teeth, your shadow and the shadows of the women marchin’ with you, and the carts, and the bastes, and the men that dhrove them, loomed thremenjous on the vapor that riz behind you like a wall. But when the big grass garrison-guns the Inimy had cocked up on the rock-ridges above the river began convarsin’--and the French and English Artillery answered wid shrapnel an’ rockets an’ grape--you walked in a white fog laced wid tongues of fire, an’ round-shot as big as melons trundlin’ through it--expectin’ you’d be raising the whilleleu wid the Holy Souls in Purgatory the next minute, or dhrinkin’ tay wid the Blessed in Paradise. The screaming of the bugles split the reek, and pierced the smother; and--in one lull--came the sound of the Zouave drums beating the pas de charge.

You know it.... It begins with a low faint throbbing that grows upon the ear and fills it, drowning out all other sounds. It is a hurricane from Hell that blows armed men, like red, and blue, and golden leaves before it, urged by the simultaneous desire to strike, stab, crush, overwhelm, destroy and conquer other men....

The fighting was over, when the women with the seven-mile-long wagon-train, loaded with sick and dying, drawn by gaunt horses, emaciated mules, and starving bullocks, climbed the rise where the Tartar village was still smoldering and reeking. Dismounted field-guns, shattered limbers, dead and mutilated men and horses and bloody mash that had been men and horses, showed where the Inimy’s canister and grape had done its business upon the batteries of our Artillery. Cooking-fires were already lighted, fatigue-parties were digging grave-trenches, the distant trumpets were calling the Cavalry back from the pursuit. It was for Moggy and for many of the women with the wagon-trains, the first sight of a battle-field.

But not until--word having been brought down that the Cavalry would encamp a mile south of the Katscha, and that their women were to follow them--not until their smaller train of vehicles separated from the rest, and began to roll over the ridge, and down the steep banks to the river-ford--did they realize the grim meaning of War....

The trodden slopes that were strewn with shattered Minié rifles and smashed muskets, Highland bonnets, bearskins and shakos, and dead and dying men in kilts and plaids and red coats, lying in queer contorted attitudes (as if a giant child had been playing at soldiers, and had given the green board a spiteful kick and gone away)--were covered with a low shrub like billberry, seemingly laden with a plentiful crop of red fruit, yet they were not berries but blood-drops. The grasses wept--the earth was soaked--the river in the glen-bottom ran blood.

Realizing this, there was an outcry; and pale women huddled at the back of Moggy Geogehagan, as scared ewes will seek refuge behind some aged and weather-beaten herd-mother. Said Moggy, crying herrings for shame upon these tremblers:

“Hooroo, Jude! Are ye women or girshas that do be squaling an’ squaiking? Sure what’s natheral can’t be desperate, an’ what’s more natheral than blood? Her that will lie by her man this night will do as I do. Sthrip off, pluck up, an’ leg through this wid me.”

And the brave wife of Jems whipped off her brogues and footless blue yarn stockings, tucked up her petticoats, and led the way down, striding bare-shinned through the bloody bilberries. The Woman from Clare followed, after came flocking the rest.

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LXXXV

Upon the rise beyant the sthrame that ran red, where yet other Tartar peasants’ huts were charring and smoking, brass-bound firelocks were mingled with the scattered Miniés and the broken Brown Besses; and the Highland plaids, and the red coats were infinitely outnumbered by the gray.

Up above on the hills, scored with rifle-pits, bristling with batteries, these gray coats lay in swaths and mounds as though the Divil had been makin’ hay there. And the wearers of the gray coats were pale, flat-faced men in black leather metal-spiked helmets, or white linen forage-caps. Clane-shaven men, wid sizable mouths on them, and little noses, as like wan anodher as pays out av the same pod. Catholics, too, sorrow a doubt on it! The open shirts beneath their unbuttoned coats showed, strung round their thick white necks, medals of the Mother and Child, and Crosses with the Image of the Crucified. The dead had died, grasping these. The dying strove to kiss these--making the Sign with fumbling, groping fingers--gasping out broken sentences of prayer.

And then it flashed on Moggy that this was the Inimy--could be nobody but the Inimy. The Barbarian, with teeth like prongs of hay-rakes--who dressed in sheepskins, relished tallow-candles and soap, and worshiped devil-gods--had never existed at all.

This was a shock, but nothing to the revelation of some seven hours later, when--as Moggy squatted over a fire of dried weeds and Commissariat cask-staves, toasting her man’s supper of salt pork on the end of a broken ramrod--under the black canopy of a starless night, came down the sickly, tainted wind the mournful cry:

“Oi-oi-oi!”

Even as Rachel, Russia mourned for her sons and would not be comforted. The huge, beaten army of Menschikoff, retreating down the great trunk road towards Sivernaia, had left a shattered brigade of Imperial Guards and a regiment or two of cavalry encamped upon the Belbek. And that piercing “Oi-oi” is the wail of the mujik, who, soldier though he be, is always a peasant at heart. It was the Cossack of the Eastern Caucasus who cried: “Ai-ai-ai-dalalai!”

“Mary be about us! What’s that?”

The woman rose up from her task, dropping the frizzling meat upon the dull red embers. She plucked back the shawl that hooded her, listened intently, and said, with her hollowed hand yet cupping the cocked ear:

“Musha yarra! Is it savigees they do be callin’ thim?... May I never break a pratie more av they’re not keening their dead like dacent Irish. Do ye not hear thim? Och! och! your souls to glory!” she cried. “What are we fighting yees for at all, at all? For a dirty baste of a Turk that spit on the Holy Crucifix, an’ shaves his skull as naked as me hand!”

* * * * *

They grew to like the snub-nosed, flat faced Ivan or Piotr in the coarse gray overcoat. The man of dogged imperturbable endurance, who lived on thin kvas and black bread. Who stood up in blocks as big as Trafalgar Square to be shot at. Who advanced on the bayonets or faced the batteries with the bravery of unquestioning obedience; and regarded his Little Father, the Tsar, as the Vicar upon earth of the Great Father in Heaven.

The Ivans and Piotrs, aware of their Tsar’s weakness for lightning journeys and anonymous visits of inspection, believed him to be constantly with their Army, though unseen. Over many a bivouac-fire they whispered of a huge officer who sometimes rode with the Headquarters Staff, but oftenest marched with their battalions; a man whose impassive stolid face, with the stony blue, prominent eyes bulging under the spiked black leather helmet, was reproduced in the official colored print that hung in every barrack-room. He had captured the imagination of his people in the Cholera year of ’46, when he thrust his way through the panic-stricken people surging round the Church of Our Lady of Kasan.

You know the story.... Reports had been spread that all sufferers taken to the hospitals were poisoned there. Panic reigned. Revolution was imminent. And Tsar Nicholas drove into the square in his little one-horse droschky--leaped out and mounted the church steps with those long, quick strides of his--turned, and threw open the gray great-coat, showing the glitter of the Orders he wore. Beneath the rim of the spiked helmet his sullen eyes blazed at his people.... His puffy cheeks had lost their crimson and were deadly pale.... He bellowed at the full pitch of that extraordinary voice of his: “Russians, to your knees!” and down they went.... No wonder they believed in their Tsar, those Ivans and Piotrs.

Later they arrived at the pitch of interchanging civilities with the British invader. Sentries who were posted within hailing-distance on the banks of the Tchernaya, would swop pipes or lumps of black bread for bits of biscuit--exchange confidences oddly couched in a jargon of their own. They agreed that the Frantsos were bono, the Ruskies were bono, the Anglichanin were bono; but that the Turk was no bono at all.

Referring to the Child of Islâm, the Piotrs or Ivans would expectorate, and hold their noses, as though those organs were afflicted with an unpleasant odor; while Thomas Atkins or William Brown would affect to run away in terror, squalling: “Ship, Johnny! Ship!”

This inevitable climax never failed to provoke laughter. It recalled how--briskly as some colony of whistling marmot-rats into whose rows of tenanted holes an Army naturalist had poured water--the nimble Asiatic had evacuated the Northern redoubts on the day of the Balaklava Attack.

Hopped out at the rare av the earthworks like flays, they did, whin the Inimy turraned the guns upon thim.... You might have knocked Moggy Geogehagan down with a feather when she saw the blaggyards lep....

Purty as a picther the battle was, with the green hills set round it like a frame, and the blue sea lyin’ on your right hand, so calm you saw the white clouds sailin’ in it.... Nothing Moggy had ever clapped her two eyes on would aiqual it, barrin’ the glimpse they had had of the place they called Sevastopol--a wondrous city, with great quays and populous docks edging the bright blue bay-water, white marble palaces, and yellow churches with green domes, glittering blue and green and silver ridgimints paradin’ in the public squares, and sparkling fountains springing in the sunshine--as the Red Snake and the two Blue Snakes, turning inland, crawled up the rugged heights that tower beyond the Farm of Mackenzie, and streamed down the steep defile in an endless river of dusty, dry-throated, weary, sore-footed beasts and men.

* * * * *

The Red Snake had led the way that day, Moggy remembered.... Riding without scouts, or advance-patrols, quite like a knightly Crusader of ancient story, the “bould ould gintleman,” with his Headquarters Staff and escort about him, had butted into the tail-end of the great Army of Russia as it ebbed away, like a great gray wounded python, towards Simferopol.

Faix an’ troth! an’ a battle there would have been to bate Banagher!--supposin’ the bould ould gintleman to have starruted two hours airlier, as the Frinch Commandher-in-Chief had coaxed him to do. As it was, there was a bit av a skirmish between the throops that did be convoyin’ the baggage-wagons av the Inimy, and our Cavalry.... When the said wagons were delivered to the sturdy hands that had captured them, Jems tasted the joys of loot.

True, his share was only a marbled paper bandbox containing some elderly field-officer’s auburn wig, and a daguerreotype of Mdlle Pasbas of the Imperial Opera, Petersburg. But as plunder, these things were prized above rubies by Corporal Geogehagan.

Often and often.... But at this point the listener would urge Moggy to speed on to the great keening-match in which the wife of Jems so grandly maintained her own against the overweening pretensions of the Woman that hailed from Clare.

You must know that on the inland side of the Valley, bottomed with coarse grass, where the Light Brigade were encamped, rose a hill that had served as a signaling-station for the Russian coastguard; and from its summit the squadron-women watched the battle throughout the livelong day.

It was when these watching women saw a cloud of men in blue and crimson and gold and scarlet--mounted on black and brown and bay horses--sweeping down the Valley towards the Cossack squadrons that had clumped in a dusk mass behind their guns on the banks of the green Tchernaya--crushing down the vines and the tamarisk-bushes and oak-scrub, falling under the plowing fire from the Russian batteries posted on the Woronzoff Ridge and the Fedioukkine Heights, vanishing in the smoke to wheel and return upon their own bloody path--that the Woman from Clare screeched out, and clapped her hands, and dropped as though she had been shot.

She had long been a thorn in Moggy’s side, by rayson of the gabbin’ an’ blather she made, claiming to be descinded from the Seven Champions of Gortgorla in Ballynahinch Knockmalone.... Wild as an aigle and brown as the say-weed, she was; and eyes like two blazing yellow torches under the red thatch of hair she had. Her man was a young color-sergeant in Lord Cloneen’s famous Hussar Regiment, and she knew him to be end-file rider on the right of the single squadron that brought up the rear.

Watching from her eyrie with those piercing yellow eyes of hers, she had seen the shell burst, and the plumed busby fly, and the little gay-colored speck that was all her joy tumble out of the saddle, as Houlahan’s riderless horse swept on, borne by the rest.

Fell wid a screech she did, an’ then riz up, an’ the eyes of her might have been sewn in wid red worsted.... Her blue Galway cloak flapped like wings as she cried, tossing up her lean freckled arms:

“Och! my grief for the sthrong men! the fine big sthrapping men that do be lying dead below the hillside! Blood on the sod, an’ the yellow fat laughing from the deep belly-wounds! Father av Heaven! Was it for this that their fathers begot and their mothers suckled them? Christ and Mary pity the wounded, comfort the dying, help for the souls av the departed, even if they passed widout a prayer!”

She clapped her hands and swayed herself, gathering all her forces, and not an Irishwoman there but clapped and rocked with her. She cried:

“Och vogh! my grief! for my own grand young husband Michael Houlahan! For the hoofs of the horses are tangled in his bowels an’ his brains are spilt like curd upon the ground! Man that I always knew you--why did I turn from you--last night when we lay togedher undher the wet tent av the sky? ‘Sleep,’ I said, ‘Sleep! that ye may be sthrong to meet the morrow!’ An’ he turned from me an’ slept, wid the cowld raindrops on his cheek.... Och! vogh, vogh! Ochone!--for my own man, Michael Houlahan! Darlin’, darlin’, why did you die? Why did I deny you, avourneen, jewel of my heart! that sought to lave a son of your race behind you? A graft to bear, a seed to spring in the womb! Blessed Saints, pray for the desolate widow of Michael Houlahan! Holy Souls! pity----”

The strained voice of lamentation cracked--just in time. For Moggy Geogehagan could bear no more. For all she knew Jems Geogehagan was killed like the rest of them--and here was this unconscionable woman monopolizing the good offices of every One of Thim Above.

She tore out a handful of her coarse black hair, cast it from her with a superb gesture, clapped her hands, and took up the theme. Ordinary language was far too poor to do justice to the merits of the departed. She gave him all the grandest words she knew.

“Woman!” she began, with a clap of her hands and a toss of her head. “Away wid you! I am extenuated wid your lamentations! What call have you to be bragging of your Mike Houlahan? Sure, beside the man that was Jems Geogehagan your Mike Houlahan showed no bigger than a flay! Of a configuration that excogitated the behoulder wid revelations av martial splindhour, where was his aiqual? What modher’s son iver got the betther av him? Whilleleu! Och, och! whatever will I do at all?”

She shrieked like a locomotive, reveling in the glory of her wretchedness, and drew her ten nails down the length of her face. The woman from Clare had collapsed by this time into a blue rag-bundle. The other women came crowding about Moggy--laying hands upon her--pointing, vociferating.... With the power that was upon her in that great hour, they fell off her elbows, she said, like a bundle av sthraws....

“Whoo! My bitther black curse upon the vagabone that kilt Jems Geogehagan! May he die like a dog in a ditch, the big murdherin’ rogue! May he----”

But every throat set up a cry and every finger pointed in one direction, and a rush of the crowd swept her down the steep hillside. You may conceive how the women greeted that straggling party of unhorsed, dejected men, some of whom were wearing bloody head-bandages, others of whom limped painfully, as, supported by their comrades, they made their way back to the camp of the Light Brigade. And the irrepressible cry broke from Moggy, as Jems ambled towards her, grinning foolishly:

“The divil baste your hide! What call have you to be alive, and me raising the widdy’s cry for you? Give me your ear, you sorrow o’ the worruld!”

But when she saw that his round face was white and drawn, and that his left arm dangled helplessly; and that a bright red stream was running from the deep sword-thrust in his side, the woman’s heart got the better of her. She uttered a great maternal cry of love, and tenderness, and sorrow, and caught him, fainting, in her brawny arms.

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LXXXVI

Dunoisse had been arrested on the steps of the English Embassy upon the night of the Monster Ball at the Élysée. Not a moment too soon, it may have been, for the safety of the chicken that had hatched out of the basilisk-egg.

Having himself suffered the slow torture of imprisonment, who should know better than Sire my Friend, how to refine and embroider upon the sufferings of a prisoner? Dunoisse was assigned to the care of the Commandant of the Fortress under minute and particular instructions, which were, by that official, scrupulously carried out.

Solitude and Silence were the regimen prescribed for the captive. Save the Commandant, or the priest who would on rare occasions be admitted to administer religious consolation--no one might speak to Dunoisse, or answer when spoken to, save by certain strictly-regulated signs. Pens, pencils, ink and paper, newspapers and books--manuals of devotion excepted--were sternly prohibited. In order to guard against communication between the prisoner and the soldiers of the garrison, blinds were nailed over the windows of the barracks looking on that restricted space upon the ramparts, where Dunoisse was permitted to take the air.

The room allotted to him in the prison of the Fortress was one of a suite of three that had in 1840 accommodated a certain political gamester, ruined by the failure of an ambitious coup at Boulogne. Luck had turned; the penniless plunger had swept the board, and broken the bank. Now, lifted and borne high upon the tidal wave of Fortune, he could look down upon Powers and dignities by whom he had been despised.

The cage that had held the Imperial bird--repaired at the time of his incarceration--was now dilapidated and leaky. The floor of uneven bricks was damp and chilly, the plaster of the ceiling was tumbling down. The paper hung upon the walls of weeping stone in folds and festoons--the rusty iron sashes of the thickly-barred windows would neither shut or open. With the fever and ague of the Dobrudja still upon him, Dunoisse, denied the comfort of fire or extra bedding, invalid nourishment, medical attendance, or the commonest human intercourse; would have died, or sunk into a lethargy of inertia ending in death, but for one thing.

Habitual criminals, when subjected to the system of solitude and silence, either become imbecile or are rendered tenfold more brutal, degraded, and dangerous than they were before. Under the same process, men and women of wide education and high intelligence condemned by the laws of Government for political offenses--although the alternative of idiocy or insanity be open to them as to the felon or the murderer--usually emerge from the ordeal--presuming they survive?--confirmed in their convictions, strengthened in determination, fortified by suffering for endurance of greater ills. The enthusiast has become a fanatic, the propagandist has become a leader. The cause for which the man or the woman has suffered becomes flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone.

That intention of atonement--vague, unspecified--that determination to unmesh the net that he had woven--upheld and supported this man. Otherwise the fatigue-party of four soldiers with spades, the box of tarred planks, and the blanket of quicklime would have been called into requisition--and Sire my Friend would have been disappointed of a reprisal he had planned.

He had not given Dunoisse the room for nothing. On the stone lintel of the low, barred window was scratched, perhaps with the point of a nail or a pair of scissors, a fragment of erotic verse beginning:

“O charmante Henriette! Mon ange, ma belle!...”

Dunoisse knew the handwriting for that of his late master. Reminiscent of that old intrigue, it had few stings for him, who had done with intrigue forever. There were other inscriptions, in the same hand--philosophical, heroic, amatory, cynical--upon the mantelshelf, upon the balustrade of the staircase, upon the parapet of the ramparts where the prisoner was allowed to exercise. Two beds of earth were here, containing some straggling untended annuals. A few sickly violets were trying to bloom in the shadow of the chill gray stone. Beneath the rampart, fosse and marsh were flanked by the canal that was edged by tall straggling poplars, standing ankle-deep in the grim green-black waters that wind snakily across the plain. Beyond the canal rose the demi-lune--beyond this mass of comparatively modern masonry was yet another fosse. And then, the interminable marshes spreading to the misty horizon, and beyond these--the world.

What was taking place out there? Were nations striving against nations? Were Fire and Iron, Lead and Steel, Death, Famine, and Pestilence playing their parts in the dreadful Theater of War? Were those secret treaties, those signed contracts, those imposed oaths, bearing fruit, not in the defeat of an enemy, but in the destruction of an ally? Had those vast sums of poured-out gold purchased for Sire my Friend the vengeance that would be sweeter to him than victory? To pace upon those ancient stones, tainted by his dainty, mincing footsteps--and wonder--and be kept in ignorance of what was common knowledge to the drummers of the garrison, the scullions of the Commandant’s kitchen--was torture to Dunoisse.

Treachery.... Ever since that night of his unexpected return to the Abbaye, the thought of treachery had held and obsessed him. It had flavored his food. He had tasted it in his drink. Unknown to himself, the traveler’s cold accusing glance had stricken terror to the soul of the Greek or Slav or Turkish innkeepers who had overcharged him, the peasants who had robbed him, and the knavish servants who had stolen the fodder from his horses, and the rugs from their backs. The nomad Tartar who refused payment for shelter in his flea-ridden tent of felt, and a share of the rancid boiled mutton smoking in his sooty caldron because it would, to his untutored mind, be a sin to barter for silver the sacred privilege of hospitality, was puzzled by that chilly, questioning look.

Suspicion had rankled in the man like a poisonous thorn or an eating ulcer. Seated near some pretty woman in a public conveyance or a public place, he would wonder with whom the charming stranger was deceiving her husband or playing her lover false? Drawing rein before some Wallach peasant’s hut of turf and reeds at eventide, as the bronzed, black-eyed maiden drew the woolen threads from the distaff stuck in her wide, embroidered girdle, the look the traveler cast on her would question: “Are you as pure as you appear? Does this virginal exterior cover a spotted conscience?” And when his dog fawned upon him, he would think, even as he caressed it: “Ah, but suppose I fell, attacked and worried by other dogs, would you defend me against them, or would you not rather aid the pack in tearing out my throat?” And as the thievish innkeeper had quailed, and the innocent young woman or the pure young girl had trembled beneath that chill regard of his, the dog would quail and tremble too, and slink guiltily away. And the heart of the man would contract in a bitter spasm, and drops of sweat would start upon his forehead. For to the generous it is anguish to suspect.

* * * * *

One does not know what would have been the end of this man--to whom no man might speak--who was not even permitted to dibble in the earth of Sire my Friend’s old flower-beds lest he should scratch a message on the arid soil that might meet some friendly eye; who might not even feed with crumbs--saved from his scant meals--the doves upon the ramparts--lest some written communication from that tabued world outside, cunningly attached to a leg or hidden beneath a wing, should reach him in his captivity. Perhaps inertia would have ended in collapse, mental or bodily. But that in his crying need of friendship, he found a Friend at last.

The Breviary and Vulgate, with the Imitatione Christi of Thomas à Kempis--left in Dunoisse’s cell by some cynical whim of his Imperial jailer--proved to contain within them fountains of healing for his sick and suffering soul. Unguessed, undreamed-of beauty and delight and sweetness had lain hidden in the narrow columns as in the closely-printed pages. The casual reader became a student, the student a scholar, long before he knew.... And the Denier denied no longer. Dayspring banished the darkness; Faith revived in him--he could pray again. How strange it is, that only when the meanest and humblest of our fellow-creatures turn from us, do we seek the companionship of One Who is King of Kings.

At Christmastide--for the snow lay on the marshes and the ramparts--the fosse and the canal were frozen--and the church bells of the distant town had rung the carillon of Nöel at midnight--they admitted a confessor to the prisoner in his cell.

* * * * *

“What is the news, my Father? What has happened in the great roaring world whose voice has never reached me since these walls of Cyclopean masonry rose up about and penned me in? War had been proclaimed when I was arrested.... Has there been War? Is there War now?” Dunoisse asked.

* * * * *

But the priest made answer to his eager questions:

“My dear son, to gain admittance here I have pledged my word that I will not discuss with you any worldly matter. Let me, while I have the opportunity, give you news of the Kingdom of God.”

* * * * *

Dunoisse, so long a willing exile from that Kingdom, had been by slow and painful stages finding his way back there. Now, with the aid of the Church, he cleansed his sin-stained soul in the lustral waters of Confession. He was absolved. He received the Bread of Life.

* * * * *

It seemed to him at the supreme moment that a burning ray of Divine Light penetrated and illumined him. He saw himself clearly as he had never seen himself before. He understood how he had fallen from his old ideals, and strayed from the way of cleanliness and honor. He realized that Sympathy had been the missing link between himself and his fellow-men. He had loved one man. He had worshiped one woman with an overwhelming, guilty passion. Both friend and mistress had deceived him; and for this reason he had reared a wall of icy doubt between himself and the rest of Humanity.

You might have smiled, could you have seen him at this juncture trying to love his silent jailers, guessing at their hidden lives, wondering about their wives and families, probing without the aid of words, to reach their conjectural hearts.

And it seemed to him that they looked more pleasantly upon him. Probably it was so, for his black eyes had lost their piercing hardness, and his smile was no longer bitter and edged with scorn. Yet he suffered more, for the melting of the ice within his bosom had freed the springs of our common nature. He yearned for human kindness and human companionship. He thirsted for the voice and the grasp of friendship. He longed inexpressibly--and none the less that he knew himself to have forfeited the right to this--for some pure woman’s devoted love.

He looked out over the ramparts as the snows vanished, and a rosy tinge that spoke of coming spring stole over the leafless copses, and young green grass-blades peeped in the sheltered hollows; and the yellow aconite and the pale primrose bloomed, and the tall scraggy poplars of the thawing marshes showed the black knots of bud. He had never been beloved, it seemed to him.... Doubtless his mother had loved him--poor old Smithwick, dead many years ago, had certainly loved him. Adjmeh might have loved him--as some pampered pretty animal loves the master who tends and feeds it. Henriette had entertained a sensuous, fanciful passion for him. But Love he had never known, in its fullness, as it may exist between woman and man.

Once he had met a woman with a noble, earnest face and calm, pure, radiant eyes, and had gone upon his world’s way and had forgotten her. They had met again, on the night of the coup d’État, at the French Embassy in London. And her glance had pierced to the quick through his armor of selfishness, and vanity, and lust. She had not spared him reproach, though at their parting she had softened and relented. She had said in effect: “Though you are nothing to me now, I might have loved the man you used to be!” What had he not lost by that change? What might he not have gained had he chosen, instead of the easy road of pleasure, the stony path of rectitude! Dimly he began to realize what an inestimable treasure of tenderness, what an inexhaustible mine of shining loyalty, and glowing faith, and pure passion, had lain hidden in the heart of Ada Merling, for the lover who should prove himself worthy of the supreme boon.

Had the lover come? Was the great gift bestowed, or yet withheld? Dunoisse wondered as he paced his daily hour upon the Fortress ramparts, followed by the two warders who were bound to keep him in sight. Was she wedded or free? He asked himself this question over and over. And, by the stab of pain that followed when he said: “She is a wife!” he knew....

He loved her. Happy for her that Fate had sundered them, if by any remote chance she might have loved a man so little worthy of her as Hector Dunoisse. But she never would have ... she never could have.... He tried to follow her in thought as she went upon her selfless way. He saw her pure, sweet influence shed on other hearts to soften, and uplift, and cheer them. He saw the poor relieved by those generous hands. He heard the sick, healed by her skilled and gentle ministrations, blessing her. He dreamed of her--with a cruel pang--as endowing some true man with the priceless treasure of her love. He pictured her with their children rocked in her arms and nourished at her bosom. He imagined her growing old, and moving down the vale of years, leaning on the stalwart sons and matronly, handsome daughters, who should look up to her even as they aided her, in perfect confidence; and whose children, inheriting their tender reverence for that dearest mother, should love and trust her, too. And a great yearning swelled in his desolate heart, and his aching, mateless soul rushed out across the void to her....

“Ada!...”

In the anguish of his loneliness he lifted his arms to the wild, gray sky of March, and, in a voice that was like the wailing of the bitter wind across the marshes, cried on the beloved name:

“Oh, Ada!--Ada!...”

And--spun to the merest spider-thread of sound by infinite distance, her unforgettable voice answered ... beyond doubt or question answered:

“I hear you.... Oh, where are you?”

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