LXXXVII

LXXXVII

He could not doubt that she had heard and answered. There was no explanation possible. It had happened, that was all. You may rub shoulders, in the course of a morning’s walk down one of the big world’s crowded thoroughfares, with a hundred men and women who are genuinely convinced of the impossibility of such communication between the minds and souls of those who, separated by countries, or continents, or oceans, are not even aware of one another’s whereabouts. But the hundred-and-first will be initiate. She or he will have felt the tightening of the invisible spider-thread, experienced the thrill, known the familiar touch upon the brow or breast--heard the beloved voice speaking at the inner ear. And, like Dunoisse, having experienced, they will refrain from questioning. It has happened.... When the time comes, it will certainly happen again....

Not long after, during an attack of fever, Dunoisse dreamed that he awakened in the chill gray dawn of a February morning to see Ada Merling sitting by his bed. It seemed so natural to have her there, and so divinely sweet and comforting, that he lay for a long time gazing at her, dwelling on each dear, remembered trait and lovely feature, breathing her atmosphere, drinking her in. She wore in this his vision of her, not the gray nurse’s dress of Cavendish Street, but a plain black gown, though the frilled white muslin cap of his remembrance sat close and sober, as of old, upon her rich, brown, waving hair, and the cambric apron made a splash of white upon the blackness of the dress. The lines of the pure features were a little sharpened, the eyes larger, the sensitive, clearly-cut lips were closely folded. She looked sadder ... older.... Even as he realized this she smiled; and such a radiance of beauty kindled in her, and shone forth from her, that he cried out in rapture and awakened; and in his weakness shed tears on finding himself a prisoner and alone.

But the dream, following the answer on the ramparts, left a clear impression. She was living, and yet unwedded, and she had not forgotten him--not quite forgotten him! The conviction of this gave him new strength to live. Later on he received another intimation, not from the living world beyond the ramparts and the poplared marshes, but from the other World that is beyond the Veil.

It came to him one day at dusk with a crisping of the hair and a shuddering of the flesh that was not terror--rather wonder and awe, and solemn gladness. The day had been dark and rainy. His lamp had not been lighted, the scanty fire burned low in the rusty grate. Dunoisse sat thinking, leaning his elbows on the table where his silent servitor had set his meager supper. And suddenly the recollection of his mother as he had last seen her rose up in him. The whisper of her woolen draperies seemed to cross the rough brick floor, her thin light touch was between his eyebrows, tracing there the Sacred Sign. And almost without conscious volition her son rose up, placed a rush-seated chair opposite his own at the poorly-furnished table; filled a goblet with pure water, cut bread, laid it upon a plate, sprinkled a Cross of salt upon it, and set it for his unseen guest.... Then he resumed his own seat and ate, comprehending that she wished it. And as he ate he talked, in low, soft murmurs, as though answering.... Depend upon it, one never pours out one’s hidden self so freely as when one speaks with the beloved dead.

And then he found himself rising up, bidding God-speed and farewell to the guest unseen, in a solemn form of words quite strange to him. And then he knew himself alone.

Upon the following morning, being unexpectedly visited by the Commandant, he said to the official:

“Sir, I already know what you have come to tell me. My mother died yesterday.”

The Commandant started, and dropped a paper. It was a telegraphic message from the Minister of the Interior, conveying, and bidding him impart the news. He asked the prisoner:

“How did you hear this?”

And Dunoisse smiled so strangely in answer that the Commandant’s next official report contained the sentence quoted hereunder:

“No. X.--the officer confined during His Imperial Majesty’s pleasure--is undoubtedly becoming insane.”

“Zut!” said de Morny with a shrug, when Sire my Friend showed him this communication. “That is what you wanted, is it not?” He added: “You have used the man, and broken the man! When you need him again--he will not be available. Brains of such caliber as his are not often found under a Staff-officer’s cocked hat. Leave him shut up--and they will find them plastered on the wall one morning.... Heads are softer than walls; madmen always remember that!”

He shrugged again, and the shrug and the cynical inflection dismissed the subject of discussion. But not many weeks subsequently the Commandant again visited Dunoisse, and said to him abruptly:

“You are free.”

“Free!...”

Dunoisse trembled in every limb, and caught at the table to save himself from falling. So well had the instructions of Sire my Friend been carried out, that all hope of being delivered out of his bondage had abandoned him. It was almost appalling to learn that he might now ask questions. He faltered out:

“How long have I been here?” and was told:

“About six months.”

Six months!... If they had said six years, Dunoisse would have believed them. Could it be possible that such slow, interminable agonies as he had drunk of, such painful resignation as he had fought for and won, had been packed into so short a space of time as half-a-year? He asked for a mirror he had been denied--and they brought him one. He looked in it, and saw a face bleached to the tint of reddish ivory, framed in white hair that fell in waving locks almost to the shoulders. The long straggling mustache and beard were of white with streaks of blackness. From the deep caves under the arched black eyebrows the bright black eyes of Hector Dunoisse looked back at him. But they looked with a gentleness that was new. And the smile that hovered about the sharply-modeled lips had in it a sorrowful, patient sweetness that the smile of Dunoisse had never had previously. It was partly this change that had caused the Commandant to report the prisoner as insane.

Dunoisse’s watch and chain, with his penknife, pencil-case, and razors were now restored to him, with his clothes and a portion of the considerable sum of money that had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. A military barber of the garrison trimmed his hair and reduced the mustache and beard to more conventional proportions. Attired in a well-worn suit of gray traveling clothes, hanging in folds upon his stooping emaciated figure, you saw the late prisoner take leave of the Commandant and step into a closed carriage that was waiting in the courtyard, with an officer of police in plain clothes seated by the driver on the box. When the carriage rumbled out under the great square gate-tower erected in the fifteenth century by the Count of St. Pol, the man inside had an access of nervous trembling. He shut his eyes, and presently the shadow passed, and he could look upon the free, fair world again.

* * * * *

It was the end of October; the gaunt poplars had shed their yellowed leaves, and the haws were scarlet on the bushes. Mists hung over the marshes--the odor of decaying vegetation came to Dunoisse with each free breath he drew.

He could no longer judge of time, and the watch they had returned to him had not been wound up. It seemed to him a drive of many hours before the carriage stopped. He was told to get out, and obeyed. He found himself in a graveled enclosure outside a railway-station. His meager baggage was deposited. The carriage was driven away. It was so marvelous to have a porter come and pick up his battered valise and light portmanteau, and so overwhelming to be asked where the latter was to be labeled for, that Dunoisse, standing on the Paris departure platform, could only stare at the interrogative porter, and answer after a bewildered silence:

“I really do not know!”

* * * * *

He knew a few moments later. For a gray-painted express rushed, with a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings, through the station. The train was full of English soldiers, their unbuttoned coats testifying to the heat of the closely-packed compartments. Their fresh-colored faces crowded at the windows; they left behind with their cheers and fag-ends of comic songs an impression of rude health and pathetic ignorance, above all, of extreme youth.

Dunoisse, unnerved by captivity, rendered dizzy by the sudden shock of revelation, reeled back and collided with a person who stood behind him, and proved to be a humpbacked, withered little old man, in charge of the station newspaper-stall. The little old man--who wore a black velvet cap, and had a ginger-colored chin-tuft, and spoke French with a curious hissing accent--received his apologies with a smiling air.

“A nothing! A mere touch!... Monsieur was momentarily startled by the passage of the monster. For months those expresses from Boulogne have been thundering through here. Full--as Monsieur saw--of soldiers, French soldiers at the beginning.... Regiments of the Line from Helfaut, batteries of Artillery from Lille, and St. Omer, and other fortresses; then English, English, nothing but Englishmen.... Via Paris for Marseilles and Toulon, to be shipped for the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.”

The prattle of the newspaper stall-keeper had never before been listened to so greedily as by this white-haired, haggard, shabbily-clothed traveler. The little man went on, plainly reveling in the sound of his own queer voice:

“They were fine men at first, some of them giants. Now they are boys--mere infants, one might say!... Conscripts, one might say also; but that they are without the conscription in England. Food for the Hungry One all the same. For Death is a glutton, Monsieur, not a gourmet. All he asks is--enough to eat.”

He added with his whinnying laugh:

“And he gets enough. For of all those train-loads of British that have rolled through here since January, not one has come back, Monsieur.... Possibly there have been returns by sea, but by this route we have seen none of them. We have French invalids in incredible numbers, en route for the Northern military hospitals and convalescent camps. They are not beautiful to see, those men who are recovering from fever, and dysentery, and cholera; and”--he wrinkled his nose expressively--“they are excessively unpleasant to smell! But--with the exception of the bodies of wealthy officers, who have died out there and are being forwarded, embalmed, for interment in their family mausoleums--as I have said, Monsieur--there are no English at all. With regard to these last, my peculiar humor, in connection with my trade of bookseller, has suggested a little pleasantry.... They went out to the East in cloth, gilt--and they return in plain boards! Monsieur will pardon my humor? Occasionally one must laugh at Death, who laughs as no else can!”

The haggard black eyes of the white-haired traveler had never quitted the face of the speaker. The hunchback gave another irrepressible little skip, and went on:

“Seriously though, Monsieur, it is incredible what a fatality has dogged the footsteps of these English. From the moment of disembarkation at Varna, new misfortunes, fresh calamities, have fallen on them every day. I ask myself why, and there is no answer but one! They are brave, but stupid, these sons of foggy Albion! And yet there are two great secrets they have mastered perfectly. How to fight, Monsieur--and how to die!”

“Go on,” urged Dunoisse, with feverish eagerness. “Tell me more--tell me everything you know!”

“Assuredly!” cried the hunchback, smiling widely. “But where,” he added, with irrepressible curiosity, “has Monsieur buried himself all these months that he is ignorant of what the whole world knows? I have not a single paper left to sell, if Monsieur would give me ten francs for it, But I possess a memory and a gift of eloquence. Listen, then, Monsieur!”

He gave another little goatlike skip upon the asphalt, and went on eagerly, fearing to be interrupted; pouring out words, weaving an invisible web about him by the rapid gestures of his supple, bony hands. And Dunoisse realized, as the grim recital continued, in how far his own deep-laid schemes had been successful; and in what respects they had been set at nought by the grim Power that men call Destiny. With incredible fatuity or appalling dishonesty, those officials who controlled the Commissariat and Transport Departments of the British Eastern Expedition had poured out the troops of England upon a foreign soil without clothing, provisions, forage, or beasts of burden sufficient to supply, support, and transport an army of twenty-eight thousand men. They had relied almost exclusively upon the resources of the country. Thanks to a well-laid plan, the country had been found without resources: the Allies had been condemned to a stagnant immobility, as injurious to discipline as dangerous to health.

Sickness had raged among them like a wolf in a sheepfold. Nor had the Army of France escaped. That chart of the Pestilential Places had availed it nothing. Even while on the voyage from Marseilles to Gallipoli cholera had broken out virulently among the French troops. Encamped upon the heights north of Varna, the deadly exhalations rising from the smitten British camps had infected them. They had suffered as severely as the white Tufts, and the Bearskins Plain, and the Cut Red Feathers, whose tents were pitched upon the sylvan shores of the Lake of Death, and amidst the blossom-starred, poison-breathing meadows and fruit-laden orchards of Aladyn.

He heard of the Russian evacuation of the Danubian Principalities, and of the Council of the Allied Generals, resulting in the Invasion of the Crimea. He learned how the buoy, set to mark the landing-point of Britain’s forces, had been moved mysteriously in the night. And he knew by whose command the thing must have been done, instantly. And when, after the story of the great battle of Infantry and Artillery that had trodden out the grapes of the vineyards on the banks of Alma and reddened her chalky shallows with the wine of life, came intelligence of the death of St. Arnaud--he realized with a strange, awful thrill, that the master whose service he himself had abjured, had been deprived by Death of his chief confidant and most unscrupulous instrument, and that in this, Fate had been upon the side of England. For the new Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Boisrobert, though willing enough to oblige his master at the Tuileries, lacked the supple skill in lying, and the keen relish for bloodshed, which had distinguished the late intimate of Sire my Friend.

He heard next of the Flank March, and the passing of the ridge of the Tchernaya, and how the harbor of Balaklava, guarded at its narrow, constricted entrance by its two stupendous cliffs of calcareous marl, had become the English base. He was told of the Russian attack, and the battle on the Upland, and the magnificent Light Cavalry charge that had thrilled the watching world to wonder, and admiration, and pity, and wrath, but a few days before....

“There was loss upon our side, naturally. But upon the side of the British it is astonishing what slaughter!” pursued the newsvendor. “And what numbers of wounded there are to be dealt with Monsieur may conceive. In litters, or upon the backs of mules and horses, they are being conveyed to the coast, where the transport-vessels wait to receive and carry them to the Bosphorus. On board--Heaven knows whether they will get any medical aid or surgical treatment until they arrive at the Hospital Barracks of Scutari.... And even there--since the English Army owns no trained nurse-attendants, or sanitary organization--and the building covers some six miles of ground and accommodates--according to the published reports--fifteen thousand men--the greater number of these poor devils are likely to spit up their souls unaided! For what can one young, high-bred English lady, aided by a handful of Catholic Sisters of Mercy and Protestant religieuses, do to assuage the sufferings of thousands? Why--nothing at all! Not even so much as that!”

He shrugged again as he snapped his fingers, and then added, with one of his curious little skips upon the pavement:

“I can picture that young lady, for I, like all my family, have the gift of imagination. She is flat-chested, Monsieur, as are all the English Meeses. She has hair like tow, blue eyes, round, pale, and staring--a nose without charm or character--projecting teeth, bony red hands, sharp elbows, and large flat feet. She is clothed in garments of colors that shriek at you--she carries an English Protestant Bible and a bottle of smelling-salts in her reticule--and a red guide-book under her arm. She is immensely rich and execrably sensible, avec un grain de folie. A little cracked, like all the rest of her tribe. And she will be confident in herself and in her mission to-day, but to-morrow, Monsieur!--to-morrow she will have a crisis of the nerves, and resign her commission from the British War Office. And--I predict it confidently--take a berth on the next passenger-steamer bound for her island of----”

The close of the sentence was snatched from the speaker’s lips by the hurricane-passage of another of the gray-painted expresses, crowded with English troops. It flashed by and was gone. With the thin hair upon his big head yet stirring with the wind of its passage, the hunchback said, pointing to the lowered indicator of the up-train signal:

“The Paris mail is due in another moment.... Monsieur is traveling by that train?”

But Dunoisse, hardly knowing why, responded with another question.

“The English lady who has gone out to the great Hospital of Scutari to nurse the British wounded.... Oblige me by telling me her name?”

The deformed newspaper-seller answered, not knowing that he spoke with the mouth of Destiny:

“Merling, Monsieur; Mademoiselle Ada Merling.... Just Heaven!... Is Monsieur ill?”...

For a mist had come before the burning eyes of the man who heard, and his heart had knocked once, heavily within his breast, and then ceased beating. Another moment, and the thin red stream within his veins, rushed upon the ceaseless, hurrying circle of its life-journey, bearing a definite message to his brain....

His star of pure, benignant womanhood, his light of hope and healing had risen in the pestilence-smitten, war-ridden East. Well, he would follow her there. And, if she would hear him, he would tell her all, and ask one word of pitying kindness to carry with him on the path he meant to tread.

Dead Marie-Bathilde had pointed it out with her little shrunken finger. He seemed to hear her saying: “For Peace is only reached by the Way of Expiation.”

To have Carmel in the blood is no light heritage. Thenceforth the feet of Hector Dunoisse were to be set with inflexible purpose upon that way of thorns and anguish. He lived but to atone.

LXXXVIII

About this time a new voice began to be heard in England, a big insistent voice that the deafest ears could not shut out. It spoke with candid fearlessness and direct simplicity. It painted, with rough, sure touches, in the very colors of life, pictures that were living and real. It gave praise where praise was due. It pointed out neglects and denounced abuses, having begun by drawing the attention of Britannia to the fact that the sick among her troops--and we had brought the Cholera with us from England--had been landed without blankets or nourishment at Gallipoli.

Looking back through many yellowed, time-faded columns of this date, one sees the formless, weltering confusion upon which the Cimmerian darkness that is dear to Officialdom heavily brooded, pierced by a ray of pure dazzling light. And presently the thick mists were to be scattered--the bat-winged demons of Ignorance, Incapacity, Meanness, Neglect, Indifference, and Carelessness, Mismanagement, Corruption, Greed, and Venality, exorcised and--if not absolutely banished--at least deprived of power to work unlimited misery and ruin upon Humanity, by the timely intervention of that beneficent Genius, the Influence of the Daily Press.

What time the Brigade of Guards were encamped upon the grass-slopes of Scutari, near the great Cemetery where the wild dogs and the nightingales sang all the night through, a little blue striped tent had sprung up on the flank of the Cut Red Feathers. Between 2 and 6 a. m., Tussell, War Correspondent of The Thunderbolt, was occasionally to be found inside, writing, upon a saddle, and by the light of a tallow dip stuck in an empty whiskey-bottle, the letters that were presently to wake all England up.

* * * * *

When the cases containing the new Minié rifles were opened, and the weapons they contained served out to the Cut Red Feathers and their neighbors, the Bearskins Plain, in lieu of the old smooth-bore Brown Bess, this intrusive person--destined to earn an unfading halo of popularity by telling unpleasant truths with force and vigor--happened, by the merest accident, to be upon the ground.

The odor of cabbaging was rank in the nostrils--not only of young Mortimer Jowell--as the contents of the cases were distributed. For only the top layers consisted of Miniés. Removing these new and serviceable weapons of warfare, the Armorer-Sergeant and his minions laid bare--what a heterogeneous collection of obsolete and discarded firelocks, bearing the marks of no less than fifty different corps!

Roars of Homeric laughter went up from the ranks as the men stood at ease and handled the interesting relics. And Morty’s C. O. promptly returned Brown Bess to her original owners, conferred the Miniés upon certain Regimental sharpshooters, tumbled the rusty relics back into their cases, and returned them whence they came. And the War Office--which had contracted with Crowell for the supply of the new rifles, maintained a Rhadamanthine silence--and Crowell, a member of the great fraternity not previously mentioned, preserved a discreet opaqueness.... Of his blunt iron swords that would not cut through Russian helmets and great-coats; of his soft-iron, short-handled picks and mattocks, that bent and buckled and broke in the frost-bitten hands of the soldiers toiling at the trenches before Sevastopol--Tussell, War Correspondent of The Thunderbolt, told us later on.

The myrmidons of other Fleet Street rags, following Tussell’s lead, presently took to telling the truth in ladlefuls. There was no silencing them. They would write home. And Jowell, Cowell, Sowell, Crowell, Dowell, Bowell, and Co., danced and popped like chestnuts on a red-hot shovel as they perused the columns containing their latest revelations. And when one ink-smeared varlet presumed to weigh in with a copy of the official statement regarding the personnel of the Medical Department of the Eastern Expedition--which afforded for the comfort and relief of twenty-seven thousand men of all arms, two hundred and four medical officers; including one chief Apothecary and three dispensers of medicines--and provided no ambulance-corps, beyond the stretcher-carrying bandsmen--and revealed the fact that three out of the four Divisions of troops landed in the Crimea had been without their knapsacks since the day of disembarkation--even Officialdom wriggled uneasily in its well-stuffed chair at the War Office Council Board; and Britannia, lulled to hypnotic slumber by the mellifluous voice and snaky eye of Sire my Ally, drowsily wondered whether it would not be as well to think about waking up?

Those Letters from the Seat of Hostilities, how eagerly they were devoured by the British Public! How they were welcomed, discussed, denounced, and praised! And presently, when sorrow and bereavement came knocking at the doors of people of all ranks and classes, and every hour added to the huge roll of Deaths issued from the War Office--even Routine and Red Tape were powerless to silence those voices that clamored in Britannia’s drowsy ears....

“Wake up!” they cried, “wake up! for your sons are dying! On the stinking, earthen floors of the hospital-tents--on the naked, filthy planks of the hospital-ships, they lie unhelped, unfed, unclothed, unpitied! Doomed to be the food of vermin, flies, and maggots!--sealed as the victims of Fever, Gangrene, and Cholera, unless you wake and come speedily to the rescue!”

And so, with a tremendous start, Britannia WOKE UP.

* * * * *

Over the United Kingdom broke a cyclone of indignant grief and generous emotion. Not a woman but was enveloped and carried off her feet. From the seamstress in the attic to the Queen in her palace the wave spread, the thrill was communicated, the magic worked its wonder.... Do you remember when that cry of pity came from the heart of Victoria? She was more a sovereign in the true sense of the word, at that moment, than any Queen that had ever reigned before her on the throne of England.... She atoned for a thousand faults, she reached the hearts of her people once and forever, with those outstretched, womanly hands of sorrow and compassion and love.

Perhaps you can see my grandmother rushing to her store-cupboards, filling boxes with pots of home-made jam, pound-cakes, bottles of calf’s-foot jelly, potted meats, and pickled shalots. Imagine how my Aunts--typifying the younger generation of Britain’s daughters--pitched The Ladies’ Mentor--always gracefully reticent about the War--behind the fire--tore up their Berlin-woolwork patterns--threw the green baize cover over the canary’s cage--boxed the King Charles spaniel’s ears--had hysterics--came out of them--and set to scraping lint with a vengeance. The most rigorous spinster knitted waistcoats and socks and undervests. Professed man-haters compromised on helmet-caps and muffetees.

My Aunt Julietta bottled broth, scraped lint, cut out and made Hospital shirts in a kind of sacred frenzy. Her Captain Goliath was not amongst the wounded, but any day--who knew?... Her round face grew puckered, and her pretty eyes dim by dint of searching through War Office Casualty Lists. She pictured her hero on outpost-duty on the snowy plains, knee-deep in the freezing slush of the muddy trenches--many a time when he was sheltered by a roof of ragged canvas, and warmed by a scanty fire of grubbed up-roots. She dreamed of him as starving when he had cleared his tin platter-full of hot fried biscuit and scraps of salt pork, it may be. And how often she saw him brought back dead and bloody from a sortie, when he was roaring some stave of an Irish song over the punch-bowl, I leave you to guess. Yet for all that, the Captain took his manly share of peril, privation, suffering and hardship with the best of them; and a day dawned when--oh! with what tears of anguish, and delight, and rapture--my Aunt got him back again....

* * * * *

You have heard how the call came to the less heroic daughters of England.... To Ada Merling, dreaming one gold October noon under her Wraye Rest cedars, it came, as of old, to the virgin Joan of Arc. If Tussell of the roaring bull-voice and the pronounced Hibernian brogue was her St. Michael, who shall wonder?... God chooses His Messengers when and where He wills.

For as the Sainted Maid was chosen, consecrated, inspired, and sped, nearly five hundred years before upon the errand that was to end in the deliverance of her dear land of France; so certainly the path this woman was to tread was pointed by a Hand from Heaven; so surely the words she was to utter, the deeds that were to be done by her--were prompted and helped by the Angelic Messengers of God.

One wonders whether any foreknowledge of her high fate, her great and wonderful destiny, the sufferings she was to alleviate and soothe; the sorrows she was to pity and console; the crying wrongs she was to redress; the prim and mean and narrow Officialism her generosity was to put to shame,--may have been vouchsafed her, ere that sunset hour?

I do not think she ever dreamed of what was coming. Her path was set about with homely duties; her mild, beneficent influence was exercised in a comparatively narrow sphere. She would have smiled if it had been told her that a time was at hand when the demands upon her trained skill, her fertile brain, her vast genius for organization were to be varied and innumerable; when the road before her was to widen out into a vast Field of Battle where nations strove with nations in bloody combat; where the smoke of cannon blotted out Heaven, and Earth shook with the roll of iron-shod wheels and the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and was furrowed deep with trenches and honeycombed with mines, and mines yet more; though the picks and shovels of the haggard men who dug them tunneled their dreadful way through the festering bodies of the buried dead, whom Famine and Pestilence--no less than steel and shot and shell--had slain.

* * * * *

With her to decide was to act, swiftly and certainly. To Bertham, once again in divided, incomplete authority at the War Office, the quivering butt for every shaft launched at Officialdom, she wrote in words like these:

“It is asked whether there is not at least one woman in England who is fitted by knowledge, training, character, and experience to organize and take a Staff of nurses to the East, in aid of these suffering soldiers? I know that I am capable of undertaking the leadership. If you think me worthy, say so, and I will go!”

Twenty-four hours before, as the Emergency Sitting had ended, and friend and foe had passed out into the cool of the Westminster night air, a pale man with long black hair and a markedly sarcastic cast of countenance, had said in Bertham’s hearing to a colleague of the Opposition benches:

“The Government needs three remarkable men to save the country at this crisis. It has not got them, and that Thunderbolt fellow knows it has not! Therefore he appeals to the nation, on the principle that if nine tailors go to the making of one ordinary son of Adam, nineteen millions of average Britons of both sexes may produce a reliable Prime Minister, a capable Commander-in-Chief, and an efficient Secretary at War!”

Disraeli’s gibe failed to wound. Bertham was devoid of the base quality of vanity. Single-handed he had striven against colossal and venerable prejudices, moss-grown abuses, corruption wide-spreading as unsuspected and unseen. He had fought a good fight against overwhelming odds, and he knew it. As he walked home with his long light step and through the graying gaslit streets, he repeated the beginning of the wit’s poisoned sentence:

“‘We need three remarkable men to save the country. We have not got them.’” And then he added: “But we have one woman who might help us! Why have I not thought before of Ada Merling? I will write and ask her now!”

No answer came to his letter. We may know she had not received it. She was hurrying to London, to beg him to let her go. Ignorant of this, unable to endure suspense longer, he went next morning early to the house in Cavendish Street, and found that she was there.

She had arrived on the previous night. She expected him--came hurrying into the hall at the sound of his voice, speaking to the servant. And her air seemed so gallant, her eyes were so beautiful and calm and courageous, that the sick heart of Robert Bertham lifted on a wave of hope as he looked at her, and said, taking her hand in his courtly way:

“In this my hour of sorrow and humiliation I have turned to you, dear Ada. Give me your answer. Decide--not as friendship dictates, but as reason counsels, and let your great heart have the casting-vote. It is tender to those suffering men, I know!”

She had answered in that voice of warm, human kindness:

“It would break for them, if it could not serve them infinitely better by keeping in working-order. But you speak of your letter. Has not mine?--no!--mine must have traveled up in the very train by which I came. You will find it on your table when you go home presently, asking you to lay upon me if you think fit, this burden of duty. Ah! if you do, God knows that I will bear it faithfully as long as He gives me strength.”

So she had entreated to be let help when her help was the one thing needful! A passionate gratitude dimmed his brilliant eyes as he looked at her. He had no words, who was usually eloquent. But he took her white, strong, slender hand, and stooped low over it and reverently kissed it. Then he threw on his hat in his careless, breezy fashion, and, hardly speaking, and with his face turned from her, went upon his way.... And so out of the story, taking with him the love and respect of all true men and women, for one of whom, in the best and most chivalrous sense of the words, it may be written:

“He loved and labored for his fellow-men!”

LXXXIX

In the Paris mail, as in the Southern Express speeding to Marseilles, Dunoisse, per medium of the newspapers, plunged once more into the arena of worldly affairs.

At Marseilles he learned of the combined attack of Soimonoff, Pauloff, and Dannenberg in concert with Menschikoff; and of the great battle that had raged two days previously, upon the scrub-bushed slopes that rise to a plateau from the yellow marl cliff, honeycombed with the cave-dwellings of the ancient Tauri, and topped with the gray line of battlements, broken by round towers, that are known as the Ruins of Inkerman. And of the War Council resulting in the decision that the Allied Forces should winter in the Tauric Chersonese.

At the Docks of Marseilles the landing-quays were paved with sick and wounded French soldiers, just landed from two Imperial Government transports, newly returned from the seat of War. Lying upon straw and bedding, awaiting the arrival of the hospital-ambulances, they were very patient, even cheerful--with the smiling spirit of their gallant nation--despite the ravages of cholera, and fever, and dysentery, and the dreadful wounds too many of them bore. Those thus disfigured or mutilated were the merriest. Those whom sickness had robbed of the joy of real fighting regretted their bad luck, and to the pitying exclamations or horrified looks of strangers they had one reply:

“It’s bad, Madame, or Monsieur! but when you lend soldiers to the Sultan of Turkey to play with, you must expect to get them back a little chipped and damaged. We are pretty to look at, compared with those who are coming presently, sacred thunder! But what would you have? It’s the Fortune of War!”

The steamer by which Dunoisse took passage for the East was crowded to overflowing with French and English officers going out to fill up gaps created by Alma and Balaklava casualties. Newspaper correspondents of both nations, Greek and Turkish merchants, were aboard her. Also, a Queen’s Messenger, a Spanish dancer going out in charge of an aunt to fulfill an engagement at the Imperial Opera House of Constantinople, and some ladies of the French and British Diplomatic Staffs, returning to their winter villas at Pera and Therapia.

Great Indiamen crowded with English troops; gray-painted, red-flagged, and numbered transports with drafts of French, thronged the Mediterranean sea-ways. Ship-loads of invalids of both nations passed, with a crowding of haggard, unshaven faces at the taffrail, and troop-deck gun-ports; and a waving of caps in thin hands, and a feeble, unsteady cheer. A few homeward-bound warships towed Russian prizes, and carried Russian prisoners, red-bearded, flat-faced men in gray caps and ragged gray great-coats, on their way to the hulks at Toulon, or Sheerness, or Devonport; who squatted in the ’tween decks or upon the forecastle under sentry guard, and played with noisy laughter and good-humored horse-play a childish game of cards, in which the forfeits consisted of raps upon the nose.

Among his countrymen and countrywomen, Dunoisse had at first feared recognition; but, thanks to the change wrought in him by sickness and mental suffering, the eyes of people whose names and faces were familiar to him, glanced at him indifferently and moved away.

They gossiped in his near vicinity as freely as though he were deaf or ignorant of their language. One day it was mentioned in his hearing that de Moulny, Secretary-Chancellor of the Ministry of the Interior during the Presidency, had abandoned the diplomatic career, received Holy Orders, and gone out to the Crimea as chaplain-in-charge of one of the war-hospitals at the French base of Kamiesch. Upon another occasion a knot of French officers discussed with mordant relish the funeral of St. Arnaud....

The obsequies of the Imperial favorite had taken place, with all the pomp of military and official state, at the Chapel of the Invalides, at the end of October. The galleries had been packed with tearful ladies in black and bugles.... Ambassadors had held the ends of the pall.... The entire Army had acted as chief mourner.... And a representative of the Emperor had conveyed to Madame la Maréchale the following touching message from his Imperial master:

“I simply transfer to you, Madame, the sentiments I entertained for my departed friend.”

Which noble and touching utterance, for some reason, tickled these Gallic warriors hugely. But he was droll, they said, that fellow Badinguet! Depend upon it, he would presently compose an epitaph which would make everybody laugh like mad.... One of the gossipers suggested that “Morte la bête mort le venin” (which is a polite version of “Dead dogs cannot bite”) would look well in gilt letters upon the memorial tablet dedicated to the virtues of the deceased.

Another quotation occurred to Dunoisse as he stood leaning on the bulwark not far from the chatterers:

“I am taken in mine own toils; I am fallen in the pit I dug for others: Death hath pierced me while I sent forth my swift arrows against the lives of many men.”

Though those men had died, and other men would die, there was no help for it! That was the word brought by those silent ghastly messengers who came drifting down from the seat of War.

As the steamer threaded her way amidst the swirling currents of the Cyclades, their accusing shapes began to start up, in some eddy of water and sunshine, or water and moonlight, under the steamer’s side, and vanish in the flurry of her paddles and reappear in her wake, drifting away....

Sometimes they were animals of draught, and Commissariat and burden, who, despite the bloating of long immersion, had plainly died of want. Or they were shapeless forms, swathed in canvas, of sick or wounded soldiers who had died upon the homeward-bound transports, and had been consigned to the deep, sewn up in hammocks too scantily shotted. Or they came in little knots and groups of red coats and blue coats, consorting and intermingling, parting and drifting on in silent, passionless acquiescence with the will of the winds and tides.

These were the dead, French and Turkish, but chiefly English soldiers who had sailed from Varna in September, and had been thrown overboard during the transit of the Black Sea. They were heralds of the hospital-ships that, packed from stem to stern with unspeakable misery and suffering, would soon be hurrying down the Bosphorus on their way to Scutari.

Young soldiers, raw recruits upon their way to Gallipoli, peeping rosy-gilled or pale-faced through the gun-ports on the troop-decks, would jerk back their heads in consternation as they encountered an eyeless grin of greeting from one of these stark voyagers, of whom the great bossy-mailed turbot, and the giant sturgeon of the Black Sea, grown dainty with full feeding, had merely taken toll, and passed on to the ravenous sharks and the huge rays and octopi of the Ægean, and Ionian, and Mediterranean seas.

“Hail, comrade! Soon shall you be as I am, food for Death the Insatiable!” the silent one would say, and with the wave of a rigid arm, pass on. And the recruit, with a sick heart under his coarse red jacket, would crack a brutal jest, or the older man would comment, spitting into the oily water:

“Poor beggar, he do look bad, sure_ly_! Well, War or Peace, that’s what we all will come to at the last!”

Whilst the Zouave or Voltigeur would shrug, pipe in mouth, and say, grimacing at the foul exhalations of corruption, and the fœtid odors of the sludge:

“He stinks, our friend there, sacred name of a pig! and he is not quite so handsome as when his sweetheart last embraced him, but what of that? It’s the Fortune of War! Our Army of France has been pruned; ten thousand out of seventy-five thousand brave fellows have spit up their souls of cholera and dysentery. Saperlipopette! it’s the Fortune of War!”

And the wheeling cloud of gulls that came with and followed the visitors would scream as though in derision, and settle again to their feast in the transport’s wake. And the Voltigeur, or Chasseur, or Zouave would toss off a glass of Cognac and return to the game of dice or cards. But Dunoisse leaned upon the taffrail of the steamer, and stared at the floating dead men with eyes that were full of horror. It seemed to him that the empty sockets glared at him, that the stark hands pointed at him, that the lipless mouths cried to him: “Thou art Cain!”

Had he not been going to her he could not have borne it.... He said to himself that, of all women living, Ada Merling alone would pity and understand.

* * * * *

Said a ruddy-haired, high-colored, handsome young British giant to another, graver, older man, and both were officers of a crack Dragoon Regiment going out to fill up Balaklava chinks in Redlett’s Heavy Brigade:

“That white-haired polyglotter in the shabby togs, who answers you and me in English, and talks Parisian French with the French fellows, and Greek with the Cypriote currant-merchant who makes such a hog of himself at the cabin table d’hôte--and is civil in Spanish to the opera-dancer and her aunt from Madrid whenever he can’t avoid ’em--and swops Turkish with the Osmanli Bey who’s been Consul for the Porte at Marseilles--is a queer kind of chap, uncommonly! Do you know, I’ve seen him looking at those floating soger-men as if he’d killed ’em all!”

Answered the speaker’s senior officer, lighting a large cheroot:

“Why should he look as if he had when he hasn’t, and couldn’t have? My dear Foltlebarre, you’re talking bosh!”

“Bosh, if you like, Major,” agreed the ruddy-haired boy good-humoredly; “but such a melancholy customer as that white-haired chap I never yet came across!” He broke off to cry: “By Gad! what a thundering big Government transport! That must be The Realm, going out with the forage and stores and winter clothing to the tune--a fellow I know at Lloyd’s told me--of five hundred thousand pounds. They’ve been keeping her back in Docks at Portsmouth on the chance of the war being over before the winter, and now they’re rushing her out for everything she’s worth!”

She was a great three-masted screw steamship of two thousand six hundred tons, and as, with her Master’s pennant flying from her main top-gallant mast, and the red Admiralty flag with the foul anchor and the Union Jack canton bannering splendidly from her mizzen halyards--she bustled by--hurrying under full steam and every stitch of canvas for her pilotage through the Dardanelles--she was to the inexperienced eye a gallant sight. But the experienced eye saw something else in her than bigness. And the senior officer who had been invited to admire her, being a keen and experienced yachtsman--shook his head.

“My own opinion--supposing you care to have it!--is that your friend at Lloyd’s--take it he belongs to one of the firms of underwriters who’ve insured her?--is likely to find himself in the cart. For I’ve seen some crank Government tubs in my time, and sailed in ’em--very much to my disadvantage. But never a cranker one than this, give you my word of honor! Why, she sits on her keel with a crooked list to port that a bargeman couldn’t miss the meaning of. And she has no more buoyancy than a log of green wood. Look at our skipper shaking his head at the Second Officer as he shuts his glass up. Lay you any money you please he wouldn’t like to have to chaperon her through a November Black Sea squall! By Jupiter! you were right just now, and I beg your pardon, Foltlebarre!”

He had been following the course of the “thundering big transport” through a Dollond telescope, and the face of the white-haired man in the shabby togs, as he leaned upon the taffrail of the passenger deck forward, had come into his field of view.

He said, after another look: “It’s a disease, the existence of which is denied by the Faculty, but he has got it! That man is dying of a broken heart!”

You were right, Major, who were doomed yourself to die so soon in the freezing mud of Balaklava. But the end did not come for many, many years.

A dark-blue haze hung over the Sea of Marmora. Rain fell, soaking those passengers who, owing to the crowding on board the vessel, had been compelled to sleep on deck. Dunoisse was one of these, and, little fitted as he was to endure hardship, he suffered. The cough returned, and with it fever and pain. But he forgot both when a wind from the southwest lifted the fog, rolled it up like a curtain, and showed the cypress-canopy of the great Cemetery of Scutari hanging like a thunderous cloud against the rose-flushed eastern sky. And as the steamer entered the Bosphorus, the dusk shape of Bûlgurlû Daghi, girt about the flanks with snow-white mosques and glittering palaces and fairy gardens, rose into view; and on the grassy slopes that climbed from the water’s edge--where the Brigade of Guards had camped, and where the black and yellow striped tents of the German Legion now dotted the hillside--you saw, as you see to-day, the great quadrangle of yellow stone, flanked with spire-topped square towers--that had been the barracks of the Turkish Imperial Guard.

One traveler drank the vision in with a sense of revived hope and a wonderful thrill of expectation. And as though his unuttered thought had communicated itself to another, an English infantry officer standing near him turned to another man and said, gravely pointing to the building on the green hillside:

“She is there!”

And the heart of Dunoisse echoed with unspeakable gladness:

“She is there!”

XC

For days the dark malodorous blue fog had hung over Stamboul. Now the southwest wind had rolled it up like a curtain and carried it away into Syria, and the great imperial city of marble domes and snowy minarets tipped with golden crescents, cypress-groves, and fountains, bagnios and beggars, sylvan vistas and screeching stinks, lay basking in golden November sunshine under a sky of purest turquoise. The scarlet and yellow tinting of the vines and creepers that draped the walls and the balconies of the black and red and white and yellow houses, alone told of winter, like the deepened crimson of the robin’s breast, and the pale purple of the crocus-like colchicum starring the meadows by the Sweet Waters. For those who chose, it would be summer. And all the vices of the Old World and the New came out to bask in the warmth and the beauty. And the roar of traffic and the confusion of tongues in the offal-ridden, stinking thoroughfares and on the filthy quays, above the broad belt of discarded straw slippers, rusty tin kettles, and wooden basins, and decomposing cats and dogs, that rose and fell upon the margin of the crystal-blue Bosphorus--deafened the ears and dazed the brain.

The roadsteads of Beshiktash were packed with French and English battleships and transports. The vessels of the Turkish Fleet, with the great golden lions sprawling on their prows, were anchored lower down. Innumerable gilded caïques, richly draped and cushioned, propelled by rowers in gay liveries and crowded--not only by Turkish ladies veiled in the yashmak, and swathed in the feridjeh, but by English and French women of Society--dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, and accompanied by uniformed officers and civilian friends in correct afternoon attire--shot to and fro over the surface of the harbor; seeming to avoid, yet encircling and following a large galley, gorgeous as a dying dolphin in colors of crimson and silver and green, and closely attended by one or two vessels of magnificence only inferior to the first, which had been waiting all the morning at the Dolma Bâghchi Palace Stairs.

His Sublime Majesty, the Padishah, a sallow, black-bearded, impassive personage--suggestive, in his tightly-buttoned frock coat and plain fez, of a dark blue glass medicine-bottle with a red seal--attended by one or two privileged Ministers, corpulent and spectacled dignitaries with gray beards, was pleased to take the air of the harbor instead of seeking the refreshment of the Sweet Waters; and it was etiquette to follow, at a respectful distance, the galley containing the Luminary of the World. Thus, the gilded caïques containing the veiled inmates of the harems of Stamboul and Pera and Therapia, or the well-dressed ladies of the Legations and Consulates with their male companions, followed the turns and windings of the monster dolphin, like a flock of variegated Pacific parrot-fish, while the fervid sunshine poured down upon the glory and the loveliness, the filth and the degradation of the ancient seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and all the vices of the East and of the West mingled in the olla-podrida of nations and of tongues.

Veiled and muffled Turkish ladies, elevated above the mud upon wooden clogs, went by, with chattering Nubian women in attendance on them. Old men in green turbans hawked coco and sweetmeats; gypsy-girls, brazen of glance and bold of tongue, trafficked in fortunes and did business in smiles. Turkish soldiers of the Reserve, garrisoning the capital--the fine flower of the Ottoman Army being with Omar Pasha at Eupatoria--shambled by, smoking cigarettes, or munching lumps of coarse ration-bread. And Jews, Armenians, Germans of the Legion, Styrians, Levantines, Africans, Bulgarians, Wallachs, Czechs, rubbed shoulders with men of every rank and branch of the Sister Services of Britain and her Ally of France.

And amongst the English officers who thronged the European Clubs, and crowded the hotels, and strolled upon the public places, were well-groomed, dandified, curled and whiskered Adonises who had been the spoiled and petted beauty-men of their regiments at Home, and were going out to Balaklava under the impression that they were heroes. But when they encountered the men who had come down invalided from the Front, the luster fled from their Macassared whiskers, and the assurance of their manners underwent alteration. For these were the Real Thing--the genuine article--and only for the genuine article were the ladies, English and French, Greek or Italian--possessed of ears and eyes.

Upon the deck of a large, luxurious steam-yacht, anchored with other private vessels in the roadstead below Beshiktash, and flying the Ensign of St. George, with the white, red-crossed, gold-crowned burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron, were gathered so many men and women representative of Society in Paris or London, that the background might have been Cowes, or Ryde, or Henley at the height of the season, instead of the European shore of the Bosphorus in November drear. And though many brilliant uniforms were present, with handsome men inside some of them, the loveliest ladies, icily ignoring these, vied with each other in attentions to certain hairy, ragged, bandaged, and limping tatterdemalions, who sported their rags with insufferable arrogance, or the profound reposeful pride of old Egyptian kings. For they were officers of Infantry and Artillery who had been wounded at the Alma, or they were Cavalrymen whose stained red jackets, striped overalls, and battered brass helmets, proclaimed them to be of Redlett’s Heavy Brigade.... And he who lolled under the green-and-white after-deck awning in a big Indian cane chair, with a little court of admiring beauties gathered round him, and the wife of the English Ambassador sitting upon his right hand--the man whose astrakhan-trimmed Hussar jacket, stiff with tarnished gold lace, was slashed to ribbons; whose busby had been shorn by a sword-cut of its red plume and gilded cord--whose crimson overalls were stained like the tights of a street tumbler--who had lost his sabretasche and half a spur, and whose boots--once the pride of a Pall Mall maker’s heart--were slit in places and had burst in others, was the most cosseted, complimented, caressed and waited-on of all those who basked in the light of admiring glances and the warmth of approving smiles.

As Houris in rustling silks, marvelous lace mantles, and bonnets of the latest Parisian mode hovered about him, ministering with champagne-cup, Russian tea, caviar-sandwiches, little Turkish pastries, and large Turkish cigarettes to his imperial needs, you saw him as a man of forty-nine or thereabouts, tall and lean in figure, sinewy of muscle, long of bone. His features were boldly aquiline and not unhandsome; his eyes were of keen, sparkling yellowish hazel, his reddish curling hair and bushy, untrimmed whiskers of the same shade were just sprinkled with gray. The outline of his jaw had the sharp salient line that distinguished the bows of the brand-new pivot-gun screw-steamer that lay anchored with the French and British line-of-battleships in the roads at Beshiktash; his smile revealed a magnificent unbroken row of shining white teeth, and his left arm was bandaged and slung. Also, he had a Russian saber-cut on his sharp cheekbone, and a Russian bullet in the muscles of his ribs made him catch his breath and grimace occasionally. For this egregious dandy, the owner of the luxurious steam-yacht and many things more desirable; who said “aw” for “are” and “wheiah” for “where,” and “Bay Jove!” with the drawl one has heard Bancroft use in Robertson comedies, was Lord Cardillon, the Brigadier who had led the famous Light Cavalry Charge at Balaklava, on the white-legged, big brown horse--who was even then being pampered with cakes and sugar in his loose-box in the ’tween decks--and whose tail the hero-worshiping crowd were to pluck bare when he got back to London.

* * * * *

Now, as the gold-and-crimson twenty-six-oared State caïque with the gilded whorl and the preening peacock at the prow, shot up-stream towards Therapia, Cardillon laughed, and said to the middle-aged handsome woman who sat near, the diamonds on her white hands flashing in the sunlight as she stitched at a masculine garment of coarse white calico....

“You haven’t asked how my audience went off, Lady Stratclyffe?”

“I had forgotten,” she answered, “but I presume nothing new or original was said or done, and that you were dismissed with the customary compliments?”

His laugh, rather sharp and hard, rang out again clearly. People were listening, and his white teeth gleamed in rather a self-conscious smile.

After the usual stage-wait--filled up with coffee and chibuks--we found his Sublimity at the top of a long crystal staircase, illuminated with red glass lusters. The Shadow of Omnipotence took exception to the condition of my toggery. He said to Prince Galamaki, who presented me: “Mâshallah! but the infidel’s clothes are torn and filthy! Does the Queen of England pay her Pashas so badly that they cannot afford to buy new uniforms?”

There was a burst of laughter, masculine and feminine. He went on, in the dandified drawl, pulling at his bushy whiskers with the free unbandaged hand:

“Galamaki--who had the honor of meeting you at Petersburg, Lady Stratclyffe--and who had attended to make his bow prior to leaving for the Embassy at Vienna, looked civilly agonized, not having mentioned to the Padishah that I understand Turkish pretty well. So I said, in that language, that in England we considered that the uniform of a soldier who had seen Service was his robe of honor. And that I had dressed to wait upon the Sultan as I should dress to wait upon the Queen!”

There were “bravos” and the clapping of hands. Faces of both sexes turned towards the speaker; and though he hid his pride and exultation at the homage under an affectation of cynical indifference, it expanded his sharply-cut nostril and burned in his light hazel eyes. He went on:

“Though the look of some of these fellows we’re waiting for might scare her....”

“Oh no!” said Lady Stratclyffe, looking up from her work. “How could you possibly imagine that?”

“English ladies are all so brave, nowadays!” he returned, with an inflection of sarcasm.

Said a velvet voice behind him, with a sweet foreign accent that added honey to the implied compliment:

“Milord, the English ladies but follow the example of the English gentlemen!”

“Capital, Madame de Roux!” called out a handsome gray-haired man, rather formally and stiffly dressed for a yacht-party, who had been conversing with a French officer in Zouave uniform. “You scatter your sugar-plums broadcast!--even a diplomatist may hope to pick up one in the scramble.... Now, if you had said ‘The English Army,’--Lord Cardillon would have taken the compliment to himself!”

Cardillon returned, ignoring the prick of sarcasm:

“Madame de Roux, who is upon her way to the Crimea, to confer supreme happiness upon a gallant countryman, can afford to give English ladies due credit for bravery. When do you sail, Madame?”

She thought in two days’ time.... He said, with gallant regret:

“I wish I might have had the pleasure of carrying you there in the Foam Star. But I am compelled to return to England, worse luck!”

She said, with her lovely smile, as Lord Stratclyffe was buttonholed by a gray-whiskered bluff-faced Rear-Admiral:

“There are many who will rejoice at what you so much regret. For me, I have been granted a passage upon one of my country’s war-steamers--thanks to the influence of one who is soon to become far nearer than a friend....”

He said, with a certain sharp subtlety, understanding that she referred to her approaching marriage with one of the Generals of France’s Eastern Army:

“He should be grateful for whom you risk so much! But at Kamiesch you will not suffer the inconveniences of Balaklava. Your countrymen have already built a harbor and macadamized the principal roads. They have a railway to their Front--public conveyances--field and general hospitals--ambulances, and a corps of trained attendants, supplemented by Sisters of Charity. In fact, everything that we have not--and that we ought to have!”

“And whose is the fault,” she asked, “that you have not what you ought to have?”

His debonair face suddenly changed into a mask of stiff Officialism. His eyes hardened. His lips lost their jocund curve as they dropped out the formula:

“I am really not aware!”

He shrugged his shoulders, and turned the conversation to the beauty of the sables in which she was wrapped, leaning close as he spoke of them with the air of a connoisseur, and looking at the wearer. Some other women present there were younger and more brilliant. Not one, he thought, exhaled the charm that breathed from Madame de Roux. He noted the fine lines about her eyes and mouth, and on her forehead, and the thread or two of white that showed amidst the silken black hair. Its superb coils were crowned with a wide-brimmed hat of cavalier fashion, black with drooping plumes of mauve. The tone of half-mourning characterized the exquisite array of one who had been widowed a year previously; conveying the impression of sorrow that had mellowed into resignation, bereavement not unwilling to be consoled.... Bands of mauve velvet, fastened with clasps of cameos set in brilliants, closed her full lace sleeves at the wrists and encircled the lovely throat that rose above the chemisette. Ample skirts of black gros de Naples, stamped with mauve velvet flowers, billowed about her; exquisite feet adorning little kid boots peeped from the expansive folds. With his eyes upon the perfect arch of the revealed instep, Cardillon sighed, envying this exquisite creature’s future husband, that noted fire-eater Leguerrier.

* * * * *

We remember Grandguerrier, formerly Governor-General of Algeria, whom the retirement of Boisrobert was soon to place in the chief command of France’s Expeditionary Forces. Thick-set, short, hot-tempered--burnt brown by African suns, with a close cap of gray hair coming down low on the sagacious forehead--with bloodshot brown eyes, snub nose, deep-cut mouth pouting under the bristling black mustache, the middle-aged commander of Zouaves and Spahis appeared what he was, a gallant soldier.... How loyally he stood by England when the imperious hand at the Tuileries checked maddeningly at the electric bridle, we never should forget!

“On the 7th of June the Mamelon Vert, the Ouvrages Blancs and the Quarries must be taken. Lord Dalgan and I have decided it. Ours is the responsibility.” And so broke up the Council of War. But when the stout little man on the white Arab rode through the English camps on the day after the successful attack, what roaring cheers went up from British throats at the sight of him.... And that he was tender-hearted as well as brave we know.

* * * * *

Cardillon had sighed, and his sighs were not generally wasted. Henriette turned upon him the eyes that had always reminded Dunoisse of moss-agates gleaming under running brook-water, and said with the subtle, half-mischievous smile that crinkled the corners of her eyelids, and hardly curved her mouth:

“You should have nothing left to sigh for at this hour!”

He said:

“But I have! I sigh for one of those violets you are wearing.”

She glanced down at the knot of pale purple blossoms pinned at the bosom of her lawn chemisette, revealed by the unfastened mantle of sables. Emboldened by her smile, he stretched a hand to them. But she leaned back, avoiding the contact of the sinewy, sunburned, covetous fingers. She had grown pale, her eyes and lips had shadows round them--she looked older, more worn. Then, as he hesitated whether to pursue his intent or withdraw his hand, she rose in a frou-frou of silken draperies, and was gone upon the arm of Lord Stratclyffe, leaving only a perfume and a desire behind her.... And Lady Stratclyffe, looking across her sewing, said quietly:

“Answer me, since even our exquisite ally must not be trusted with official secrets!... With whom does the blame rest? Need our Army of Invasion have suffered all these hardships and privations and miseries? How comes it that we are so lamentably deficient in Commissariat and Transport arrangement? Why--I quote your own words--have we ‘nothing that we ought to have’?”

He glanced about him before replying. But, seeing him engaged in talk with the Ambassadress, his guests had moved away, leaving an island of gleaming white planks about them. He said:

“Dear Lady Stratclyffe, the system of our Army Administrations has been, from first to last, a system of Contracts. One must own it has not been a success. Contractors are not, as a rule, trustworthy or conscientious.... Ours have not proved themselves exceptions to the rule!”

His shrug spoke volumes. She said, with hesitation:

“Surely the resources of the country----”

He answered harshly:

“The resources of the country, reported to be vast, were in our ease non-existent. We could get nothing! We were upon the soil of a nation for whose liberty we were about to fight, and they treated us from the first as enemies. There’s no question about it! The native Bulgarians refused to sell us grain, forage, fuel and provisions, nor would they supply us with wagons, and beasts of burden and draught, or serve us as drivers, guides or interpreters! They let us encamp where cholera and fever were rife--and so we invaded the Crimea with a weakly, invalidy, crippled army, two-thirds of ’em too weak to carry their packs and the rest horizontal--disabled or moribund! And Burgoyle rode up to the head of Varna Harbor when his Division was being put on board the transports. He shook his fist and howled--he was quite beside himself. ‘Sick men to fight the Russian Imperial Guards with! Better give me dead ones!’ But that we have achieved what we have, ma’am, we owe to the pith and pluck and endurance of these sick men.”

“They’re glorious!” she said. “They’re glorious....”! And the Brigadier went on:

“They were exhausted from exposure, dropping from want of sleep, half-starved from shortage of rations when they carried the Great Redoubt, and smashed two-thirds of Menschikoff’s army into gray lumps on the Alma. On the day of the Balaklava Attack neither men nor beasts had had bite or sup since the middle of the day before.... How the Light Brigade charged I hardly know; their horses’ legs were tottering under ’em! And they lay down after the battle, round their smoky fires of green wood, with their baggage and camp equipment knocking about on board the transports, and nothing but a sopping wet blanket between half of ’em and the sky! And then they couldn’t sleep for the neighing of the horses, and the row made by the camels and mules and bullocks. For you can’t teach animals to starve in silence!--they’ve no pride like two-legged brutes! There’s a verse I’d liked at Eton, about the lions roaring and asking their meat from God. Well, the row made me think of that and wonder whether He heard them?... And---- But I suppose they’re quiet enough now!”

XCI

They were--but there a silence that is clamorous in the hearing of the Eternal. Do you see those pinched ghosts of gallant Cavalry horses tethered in the driving blizzards behind the low stone walls? A few rags of tents shivered in the piercing wind that blew from Sevastopol.... Here and there shanties of mud and earth sheltered officers, but the rank-and-file of Britannia’s Army had gone down into the ground where the dead were, that they might keep the life in them. And for Blueberry and his kind there was nothing but to stand and wait for death.

Blueberry’s beautiful blue-black eyes were glazed with fever, and gaunt with famine. Dreams of the full rack and the brimming manger tortured the suffering beast. And Joshua Horrotian leaned his cheek upon the broad front of his dying charger, and begged him to keep up!--and tried to comfort him. He had no fodder to give the horse--nothing but promises and kind words. He promised him Old England and plenty of sound oats again--a grassy paddock to kick his heels in--everything else a good horse might desire, if only he would keep on living.... He scraped wood-shavings fine as paper and offered them to him--and when Blueberry snuffed at them feebly, and turned his sorrowful eyes away, the tears rolled down his master’s weather-beaten cheeks for the creature he had bred. He took the dying head in his ragged arms and fairly moaned over him:

“Oh Lord! Oh Lord!--my poor old Blueberry! why ever did us go a sogering?”

* * * * *

Blueberry had done with that hungry profession for good and all.... And Joshua Horrotian kissed him again, and staggered away to borrow a mattock to dig his grave with.... When he returned with this, narrowly escaping destruction at the hoofs of a frenzied Brocken-hunt of ownerless, starving Cavalry horses, he found that great pieces had been torn from Blueberry’s yet quivering sides by these perishing comrades: and that his mane and tail had been gnawed away....

Perhaps Somewhere Else it was all made up to these blameless four-legged martyrs?... Perhaps Blueberry woke up in radiant meadows beside crystal-clear pools?... Stern theologian, do not shake your head.... You can be sure no more than I can. And there is room enough in Eternity for every soul, be it human or brute.

XCII

Still speaking of the horses, Cardillon ended:

“It sounds brutal to say it, perhaps, but they’re better dead. Even if forage could have been got up to the camps in time to save them, they haven’t a chance--with the Russian winter coming upon them, and no shelter of any kind. Take my word for it, we shall fight no more Cavalry actions on the soil of Crim Tartary--as sure as I’m a Brigadier on my way home to be heckled by a Government Commission of Inquiry for obeying a written order of Her Majesty’s Commander-in-Chief!”

He tugged at his sandy bush of whisker and frowned. Lady Stratclyffe returned mellifluously:

“Granted that the order was an error, scrawled in a moment of perplexity or confusion--the loyal obedience and high discipline of the commanding officers and the men, have turned a blunder into a blaze of glory.”

He took her hand and touched it lightly with his lips:

“Never believe, though, that my fellows cheered as they rode down the Valley under the plunging fire of all those Ruski batteries. They cursed and swore. Jove! how they did just swear!” He chuckled like a schoolboy.

“But they rode on, nevertheless,” said Lady Stratclyffe; “and knowing what they are, I burn with indignation to think how they have been wronged! For it is a grievous wrong, to have cast them out upon an unfriendly foreign shore and denied them their rights of food and fuel and shelter. Without which, I quote your own words in reference to the horses, ‘with the Russian winter coming upon them, they haven’t a chance!’”

He begged her not to pelt him with his own rash words to his undoing. Winter clothing--stores of all kinds, huts for the troops, were even then on their way up the Bosphorus en route for the Black Sea.

“And,” he went on, dexterously changing the topic of conversation, “you spoke of ‘flurry and confusion’ just now, in connection with the Commander-in-Chief. He was cool enough to perpetrate a clever epigram at the very moment when he must have realized that the order was disastrous. After all was over, it appears--a French chef d’escadron attached to his Staff got down from horseback, and--not to put too nice a point upon it! was violently sick. When he had somewhat recovered, he said to Lord Dalgan: ‘Monseigneur, I entreat your pardon for my weakness. I have been in action many times, but this is the first massacre I ever saw!’ And he raised his eyebrows and said in his charming French: ‘Really, Major? I had imagined that you, with your regiment, played rather a prominent part in clearing the streets of Paris at the time of the coup d’État!’ Not bad for a ‘flurried’ man, was it? And he was cool enough two hours later, when he rode up to me, and said, almost in the words he had used to the Chief of the Division: ‘Do you know what you have done, Lord Cardillon? You have thrown away the Light Brigade!’”

“If Lord Dalgan be sometimes guilty of an injustice,” she said, looking full at him with her clear gray eyes, “he has never shirked his share of privation and hardship.”

The hit told. For the Brigadier had clung to the comforts of his yacht in Varna Bay and Balaklava Harbor. He had never tasted the discomforts, and knew nothing of the hardships, of the campaign.

“You are in pain?” she asked, for he had winced and thrown up his hand with the gesture of a hit fencer, and the hot color had mounted to his reddish hair.

“No, no!” He stooped to pick up her forgotten work, without concealing the twinge that the bullet gave him, for Fate had bestowed the title of the bravest upon one of the vainest of men. He added, as he laid the mass of coarse white calico back upon her knee; “Do say what this is you have been sewing at? It looks like--dare I say?--a nightshirt?”

“It looks as it ought,” she answered, placidly threading a gold-eyed needle. “And Ada will applaud me. Your recognition of the garment should lend it value in her eyes.”

“It is for the Hospital?” He added as she signified assent:

“How is Miss Merling, by the way? She got in yesterday morning, I understand, with her staff of nursing ladies--of all denominations, according to the newspapers.... One hopes they exaggerate?”

She answered:

“Of the thirty-eight trained nurses who have arrived with Ada, fourteen are Church of England Sisters, three or four are Congregationalists, there are a certain number of Presbyterians; and ten are Catholic Sisters of Charity from the London East End.”

He screwed his mouth into the shape of a whistle, and elevated his eyebrows dubiously:

“By George! I fancy I hear the whoops of the ultra Low Church Party against Popish proselytizers and priestesses of the Romish Mysteries. The gale will break, though there is calm at present. And then--there will be a heckling of the Minister at War!”

She said, displeased:

“The Sisters are strictly bound not to speak of religious matters to any patient who is not of their Church.... I am sure that they can be depended upon. So far as I can judge, their demeanor is perfect. It struck me that they accorded a more prompt obedience to Ada’s orders than the other nurses displayed. And when one remembers that they only arrived yesterday morning, the changes that have already been wrought are astonishing. I could not have believed it had I not seen!”

He asked:

“And the Lady-in-Chief. One hopes she is serenely confident in the success of her great undertaking?”

Something in his tone stung. Lady Stratclyffe answered, with her eyes upon her work:

“The undertaking is great, undoubtedly. As you must know, her letter volunteering to assume its burden crossed that which Robert Bertham had written entreating her to accept it. The Barrack Hospital here and the General Hospital will be under her sole direction. She has also the supervision of all other British Military Hospitals in the East. But I can detect no ‘confidence’ in her bearing.... It would be more appropriate to describe it as calm.”

“The Mediterranean is calm,” Cardillon said, smiling and shrugging. “Yet I’ve been three times wrecked in it, and once in the Ionian Sea!”

“There is no storm behind Ada’s calm,” said Lady Stratclyffe, “though when she found that the head and foot-pieces of two thousand iron bedsteads sent out from England in our transport The Realm for use in the Barrack Hospital here, had been buried under mountains of shot and empty shell, destined for the batteries of Balaklava, she was certainly not complimentary to the contractor who supplied, and the agent who undertook to pack and ship them! For the shot and shell must be unloaded at Balaklava before Ada can receive the missing parts of the beds. And that may mean a matter of weeks: From the windows of the Embassy I saw the transport pass this morning--a magnificent vessel!”

He asked:

“You are speaking of The Realm?” Adding, as she signified assent: “It was to her I referred just now when I said that all stores and clothing needed by the Army were even now on their way up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. Your bungling agent is a well-known middleman between Government and its purveyors. Has a son, by the way, for whom he got a commission in the Guards, and who has good blood in him--however he may have come by it! Was mentioned in Dispatches from Headquarters after the Alma. Not bad for a callow Ensign, it appears to me!”

“Do tell me what he has done!” she begged. “I have missed so much that has been reported!”

“I’ll do better than tell you. You shall hear the story from his company Captain, Caddisbroke!”

The hirsute and bandaged wearer of a superlatively shabby red coat which had formed the center of a group gathered near the saloon-cabin companion came limping on a crutch across the deck, followed by the silken swish of feminine skirts and the creak of masculine boots.

“You called me, Lord Cardillon?”

“To tell Lady Stratclyffe what young Jowell said at Alma to the dandy False Retreat in the Hussar jacket and red forage-cap.”

A pretty woman with an infantile lisp wanted firtht to know what wath a Faith Retreat? The crutched newcomer answered, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier:

“We’re beginning to get used to ’em, Madame de Bessarine, in moments of crisis. In fact, they’re a feature of this campaign. They’re mounted officers with airs of authority, and Staff epaulets and brassards as correct as their English accent. Buglers with ’em too, up in all our calls--particularly numbers Four and Seven.... And when the Light Division were beginning to reckon with the six Vladimir battalions, the ‘Retire’ was sounded, and down they came pell-mell, officers and men, smack into the middle of the White Tufts, who were coming on towards the river in first-class form.... They disordered their center, and jumbled the Bearskins Plain, who were advancing a little to the right of ’em. And in the confusion the Ruskis broke in on their center and left--and tried to take the Colors, and there was trouble. So Sir Bayard Baynes rode back to us--and you may guess we were well in the background, having Royalty to keep in a bandbox!--and suggested an onward movement. And the Duke of Bambridge gave in. And we came up at the double, hurraying like mad to have got the chance of a crack at ’em!--and formed on the left of the White Tufts; and had no sooner begun to pound the two great columns of gray coats into smithereens--the White Tufts file-firing while we poured volleys in--than up comes a dandy False Retreat riding with an order. ‘The Duke requests the Cut Red Feathers to retire without delay!’ And the bugler-blackguard blew--and our bugles sounded down the line--and the men called out ‘No, no!’ And this young Jowell--acting as Lieutenant for his half-company in place of Ardenmore killed--calls out--and I heard him from the ditch I’d tumbled into when they shot me: ‘The Duke never gave that order--and I’m dam’ if I’ll obey it!--I’m blest if I do, so there!’ And when His Royal Highness heard it, he was uncommonly tickled--and said they should hear it at home!”

XCIII

The laugh went round. Men said there was thoroughly fine stuff in that fellow. Women wanted to know what he was like? Lady Stratclyffe hoped he had a mother to be proud of him. Cardillon was tugging at his auburn whiskers and, thinking of the missing head and tail-pieces of the bedsteads destined for the Hospital, wondered how many of them lay at the bottom of the holds under the munitions? Two or three hundred, he guessed, knowing the Jowellian methods. Damn the man! You came across him everywhere. He really went a bit too far!

The Ambassador’s wife went on to tell him of the four miles of mattresses already laid upon the pavement in default of bedsteads, and ranged in double rows down the sides of the Barrack Hospital corridors. She was afraid the stones would strike cold, and that the long passages would be draughty in the winter.

“The men won’t complain,” Cardillon told her. “But are all the wards so full?”

“Four large wards,” she answered him, “and half-a-dozen small rooms were found available. But there are sixteen hundred sick and wounded--including cholera patients--already within the walls. And nearly six hundred in the General Hospital, of which Ada also has superintendence.... And if the patients there, lie in filth and misery such as I saw yesterday....”

Her brows contracted and her fine lips quivered. He asked:

“You went through the wards yesterday?”

“Yesterday morning, with Ada and the Sisters of Charity. And the horrors of them were like nothing of which I ever heard or read. To start with, the condition of the floors was indescribable. Luckily we thought of Turkish clogs. And mounted on them we followed Ada through the Inferno----”

He gloomed. Oblivious of his displeasure, she went on: “There were no vessels for water, or utensils of any kind. They had no soap, or towels, or Hospital clothing. The sick were lying in their uniforms, stiff with filth, upon the dreadful pallets. Unwashed--untended--covered with vermin--”

She could not go on. He said between his teeth:

“I have said from the first that women have no business in War-Hospitals. They’re the necessary complement of the camp and the battle-field, and they’ll be horrible and ghastly as long as the world lasts. The things that are seen in them are too grim to be talked about! But why need we talk? We can’t better things by talking!”

“I agree with you perfectly,” she said, with a fine smile of sarcasm. “But the condition of things I have described is, since yesterday, astonishingly improved.... To begin with, those Augean floors have been thoroughly scrubbed!”

“Surely not by--ladies?”

“By the Sisters of Charity, aided by the Hospital orderlies who had told them--‘It cannot be done!’ They said: ‘It must’--and set the example forthwith!”

He commented:

“That’s the pace that kills. They’ll never be able to hold on at it!”

“Wait and prove! I credit Ada and her nuns with immense reserves of energy. They waste no words. But, oh! Lord Cardillon, when I think that all this abomination and misery lay close at our doors--here in Constantinople--and that I and others never knew of it--never dreamed of it!--I burn with shame and sicken with disgust. No! I do not exaggerate!”

Her sewing had fallen to the deck. Her white hands wrung themselves in her lap. Her matronly calm face was contracted and quivering. She continued:

“I sent from our kitchen at the Embassy quantities of broth and jelly and other articles of invalid diet. Wine from the cellars and so on. But neither I nor Stratclyffe ever went there--to our shame never thought of going there! And but for those articles in the English papers we never should have known----”

He ground his spurred heel into the deck, and something very like an oath escaped from him.

“Confound the London newspapers! As for the men who came out here to cater for news--paid Paul Prys and chiels in butcher-boots and traveling-caps, taking notes--they go too far. It is unbearable espionage--presumption!--insolence! I’d hang up every one of them, if I had the authority and the privileges the Provost-Marshal enjoys! Why, one of those rags of papers actually published information as to where we’d stored our powder! What business have Fleet Street journalists nosing about at the Seat of War?”

She said with spirit:

“They make mistakes occasionally, like the rest of us. But nearly all of them are gentlemen of education, good sense, and good feeling. Could anything but honest, fearless indignation have penned those articles in the Times? And--if there is maladministration--lack of organization--are they not right in pointing where the fault lies? The British Public, who give their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers to the service of the country--surely have a right to know how they fare!... Lord Cardillon!--could not much of this horrible suffering and waste of life have been prevented by a little forethought?”

He frowned, but answered:

“Since you will have it--yes!” He added, as she thanked him with a look for the truth, seeing that it had galled in the utterance:

“Please, no more now on that subject. Here’s Miss Delavayle!” And their conversation ended with the rustling arrival of a tall, elegant woman, who hurried up and sank down into a chair between them, saying with an affectation of breathlessness:

“I’m dead, hearing people sing your praises, and telling them that you don’t deserve any!”

She was a blonde of rather hard and brilliant coloring, dressed as brilliantly as a tropical bird. Her cheeks and eyes were burning with suppressed, none the less evident, excitement; her nerves seemed tense and strung. As she looked at the man, her glance was feverishly bright and hungrily possessive. He moved uneasily as though he felt it so.

“Rest; why don’t you rest?” he said to her. “But you never rest. I wonder when you will?”

Lady Stratclyffe had risen and joined the Ambassador’s circle. The answer was given:

“When your wife dies, and we’re married; then I shall rest--not before!”

He moved restlessly and bit his lip. She went on:

“Do you think I didn’t see you playing the gallant with Madame de Roux? Don’t protest! I’ve eyes in the middle of my back,” she said, quivering, “for every petticoat that comes near you. Don’t I know your charming ways with women, poor idiots that we are!”

“Laura!” he muttered, as her ringed hand clenched upon his chair-arm, and her fever-bright eyes shot challenges at him. “For Heaven’s sake don’t make me a scene of jealousy!”

“All right! Tell me what you thought when the Brigade got fairly in movement. Was it anything about me?”

“By Gad! no!” he said, wounding her unintentionally. “What I thought to myself was: ‘Here goes the last of the Paradynes!’”

“Trot! Canter! Gallop! Charge!” She imitated the staccato tones of the officer commanding. “Why wasn’t I born a man, so that I might have followed you--and fought for you--and died for you when I got my chance! There! Lady Granbyson is beckoning to me.... I’m compromising myself hopelessly, sitting here with you like Darby and Joan....”

She flashed a disdainful eye-dart at Lady Granbyson, a portly dowager in voluminous cinnamon satin, fluttering in distress afar off, like a large maternal hen. Then she rose, and stooped over him, clasping the wrist of the unwounded arm that he had thrown across the chair-back, and whispered, with her blazing eyes looking into his, as her burning breath beat upon his cheek, and a long, snaky ringlet of her hot-colored golden hair trailed across the tarnished Brandenbourgs of his Hussar jacket:

“Do you know what I would have done if the last of the Paradynes had gone that way? Drowned myself in the Bosphorus when the news came from the Front!”...

He flushed crimson to the temples and caught his breath.

“Laura!”

But she was gone--and the attendant ladies, who had melted into the background when she drew near, were bearing down on him. He cursed women, in his heart, for the mulls they dragged one into. Compunction, pity, strove in him with anger and resentment. Poor Laura! Yet how the clasp of her hand had burned, and how green her eyes had gleamed with jealousy! He foresaw hideous complications with her family--more terrible with his wife’s people. Confound it! And just now when one’s Sovereign--always down like bricks upon conjugal offenders--notoriously strict in matters of morals--might be expected to smile on a popular Brigadier....

“No, Lady Hathermore, no iced lemonade, thank you. You’re too kind, Madame de Mirecourt, but I’ve three cushions and a footstool now!”

So forbidding was his frown, that they rustled away in search of more accessible divinities. Then--lovely eyes--greenish hazel with golden lights and dusky shadows playing in them--looked down into his and a lovely mouth smiled bewilderingly. A small white hand with clusters of rubies and diamonds like drops of blood mingled with tears sparkling on its slender, pink-tipped fingers, held under his nose a little bunch of violets....

Henriette had charmed--she must charm again--she had been asked for a single flower--she must give the whole bunch in her lavishness. You remember that she could never say No! to a man?...

“I was unkind just now.... You asked--and I denied you. See--I will make amends! Smell them--are they not sweet?”

“Divinely sweet!--both the gift and the giver!” He forgot his new-born prejudice against her sex, as she sank with a whispering rustle of silken draperies into the vacant chair at his side. Suave enchantress! Exquisite witch! How these ivory-white, supple, small-boned creatures vulgarized high-colored, big-boned women! Laura, who would presently have to lead her own forlorn hope down into the Valley of Death under the plunging fire of the eyes of Society, was high-colored and big of bone.

“You were angry with me, and for good cause.... I offended, and I have been punished....”

She said, delighting him with her voice, with her smile, with the play of her mobile features:

“The fault lay not in your words, Milord, or in your actions, but in your eyes. Men with such blue eyes are inimical to me. I believe ‘unlucky’ is your English word? Ah, no! Do not suppose I do not like the color.... Unhappily, I liked it but too well!”

Her glance was enchantment. Her voice was a song. She allured and drew and provoked him. Laura, under cover of her chaperon’s parasol, glared at him tigerishly from the other side of the deck. But he had forgotten Laura. He wondered, noting the delicate spider-lines about Henriette’s lovely eyes, and on her ivory temples, where the blue veins melted in the bluish shadows of her jetty, silken hair, how old she was? Thirty-four or five. Worth a dozen of younger women. He thought this as he asked whether she was not staying at the Embassy?

“No, not at the French Legation.... I am engaged to visit there when I return from the Crimea. For the present I share, with Madame de Bessarine, some rooms at the Hotel of Missiri.” She added, as he asked if he might not call? “Alas! I leave for the Crimea so soon--it will not be possible to receive visitors!”

But Cardillon pressed for an appointment and she yielded.

“You are an angel of kindness!” he declared.

She returned, with lovely gravity:

“You are of those who have faith in Angels and Heaven? You believe in the existence of another world beyond this earth of ours?”

“Certainly. But you could make this earth so sweet for a man that he wouldn’t barter it for Mahomet’s Paradise.”

She said, ignoring the compliment:

“When you were near to death--not long ago, did you feel more sure of the existence of that other world than your tone now indicates?”

He answered with reluctance:

“I cannot say. To be sure, one would have to die, and come back to life again.”

* * * * *

She rose up with her supple exquisite grace, and moved to the yacht’s side, and stood with one jeweled hand upon the taffrail looking over at the opposite shore of Asia, as from the thousand minarets of Stamboul came clear musical voices calling the Faithful to the prayer of afternoon.

“I am sure, because I once died, and returned to life again. And I came back out of that dim, strange country that lies beyond this world, with a secret to tell, and a gift to bestow. And he to whom I would tell my secret, and give my gift, had departed--where I know not! It may be we shall never meet on earth any more! And well for him if it were so! For I have come to believe that if he is ever to know peace or happiness, his path and mine must never cross again!”

What strange impulse of confidence moved her? One cannot answer. She went on, not looking at the Brigadier:

“This seems strange to you--will seem stranger when I tell you that I go to the East to marry another.... But Love and Marriage--are they not different things, Milord? Does not your experience teach you so?”

He was silent. Her voice sighed on:

“The gift I spoke of but now, is Love--perhaps you have guessed it? I tell you that a woman may yield to passion--may be much beloved, without ever having learned that!... It was revealed to me when I lay as one dead, and one whom I had despised and ill-used stood by what he and another believed to be a dead body. And in the face of scandal, dishonor--the mockery and contempt of the world!--he said--I shall never forget the tone in which he said it: ‘Because that other man has left you, I stay beside you here!’”

Cardillon said, possessed by a sudden, savage jealousy:

“Was that the man with the blue eyes?”

She shook her head. The pearly line of her white profile, as she turned her face from him, seemed the subtlest thing he had ever looked on. Her plume of herons’ feathers gleamed black-blue against the night of her coiled and knotted hair. The little delicate shell-like ear had a ruby hanging from it, like a blood-drop. She said, in that voice of exquisite, sighing cadences, looking at a shabby caïque containing a single passenger, that was being paddled from the steamer-quay of Tophaneh across to the landing-place of Scutari,--and half-consciously noting the struggles of the little craft as it battled against the stiff rush of the current that sweeps past the promontory where transformed Io landed....

“No, Milord. This man had black eyes. When they looked at you.... Ayme!... Madre de Dios, misericordia! C’est lui!--c’est lui!”

The final words were unheard; they had exhaled in a sigh from lips suddenly bleached pale as poplar-leaves. As her head fell forwards on her breast, and the tall, rounded, supple figure swayed as though about to fall, Cardillon threw his strong unwounded arm about her; knowing by the dead weight that the swoon was unfeigned--wondering what had brought it about?

Nothing had happened to alarm her. Only the toiling rower had pulled up-stream diagonally, as though making for the point above the landing-place of Scutari, and had then let the head of the frail craft swing round. And the pasenger, a white-haired, black-eyed man, in worn gray traveling dress, had thus been brought plainly into view of those on the steam-yacht’s after-deck.

The man had never glanced at the two people who leaned upon the rail, talking. His eyes were for the green slope and the great quadrangle of yellow stone masonry reared by Sultan Suleiman....

Madame de Roux recovered almost instantly. The caïque had shot out of sight past the bend of the promontory. The traveler had landed and passed on about his business--an accidental likeness had deceived her, that was all. She lifted her head, smiled with lips still white, and declared herself well again. And the Brigadier, whose keen light eyes had the instant before seen a European lady--seated in a caïque with others--start back and hide her face in horror, as something grim and shapeless rose up at the boat’s side, said:

“Do not explain! I can guess what happened. You were looking at the water.... One of those dead men!...”

She said, with a shadowy, troubled glance at the deep, rushing tide that swept downwards round the promontory of Scutari:

“I do not fear the dead. The living can be more terrible sometimes!”

“Still,” he said, with an effort of unselfishness, “if certain sights affect you so painfully, it would be well not to wait to see the arrival of the Hospital-ships.”

“Are we not all assembled,” she asked, “to honor the brave unfortunate? And, if I could not support tragic, or grim, or squalid spectacles, should I be now upon my journey to the scene of war?”

“Must you go there? Is Grandguerrier so exigent? Have you really set your hearts upon being married amidst the tragic spectacles to which you refer?”

She told him, with her shadowy smile:

“I go, not because I desire to, but because I am destined to.... All my life long I have done what I wished not to do, at the bidding of an inexorable Fate....”

He did not know how true it was. But the sensual fever she had kindled in his veins abated. He looked at her with more sympathy and less desire. She went on:

“Besides, I must tell you that I have campaigned with my first husband’s regiment in Algeria, and helped to nurse the wounded. Recently at Toulon and Marseilles I visited the transports that had brought in our invalided soldiers from the War-Hospitals of the Levant. Now I would cry, ‘Bravo, mes amis!’ and wave my handkerchief to your wounded heroes of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman.... Listen, Milord! Surely that was a salute of guns!”

XCIV

She did not err. The south-westerly breeze had shifted. Sky and water darkened, a cold north wind blew, scattering some sleety drops of rain. And as the squall broke, and the awnings tugged at their reevings, came the splitting crack of the old brass Turkish cannon from the batteries of Deli Talian, and the deeper, more sonorous boom of ships’ guns answering back again.

Eighteen guns. They were coming! they were coming! The quays of Pera and the landing-places of Tophaneh and Scutari were crowded with eager, many-colored sightseers. On the balconies and roofs of houses, on the gardenwalls bordering the Bosphorus, on the decks and in the rigging of the warships anchored in the roadsteads, human figures thronged and clustered. A susurration of excitement--a hum of expectation, quickened into a clamor--broadened into a roar. For they were coming--they were coming! the men of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman, whom their country and the nation they had fought for could never praise and honor enough.

They had passed Therapia, for from the nearer fortresses of Europe and Asia the salute crashed deafeningly. Columns of white smoke rose beyond the promontory, slanted and came down upon the wind. As nervous ladies stopped their ears, expectant of an answering salute, the gorgeous king-dolphin, followed by the flying cloud of variegated parrot-fish, darted round the promontory that as yet hid the first of the approaching ships from view, and fled downstream towards Seraglio Point.

* * * * *

What could have scattered the glittering flotilla? They had gone out, led by the Golden Peacock and the Sublime Umbrella to do honor to the brave. They had fled in panic before something unexpected and appalling; for the retreat was most palpably a flight.

Even as the spectators wondered and questioned, a dark blue mist came down like a lowered curtain upon the scene that had been instinct a moment before with light and movement, and color. The wooded hills, the palaces, and mosques, and shops, and kiosks, the thronged terraces and quays, the vessels, with their manned yards and decks crowded with gayly dressed sightseers, were seen dimly as through a thick gauze veil. And the cold breeze brought with it an appalling stench--a cold and deadly exhalation as of the battle-field, the charnel-house, and the plague-pit--as the first of the three great transports came gliding into view.

They came! and from the flagships of the English, French, and Turkish Admirals anchored at Beshiktash the guns boomed out their welcome--the Three Ensigns dipped as in a royal salute. But the cheers and acclamations died in the throats of the thousands whose eyes were nailed upon those mighty argosies, deep-laden, deck-piled, with Death’s blackening harvest.... The shouts went up, quavered, and broke, and died....

The transports followed each other at an interval of a cable’s length. They moved slowly, laboriously, painfully, like living creatures enfeebled by famine and sick to death. Such canvas as they spread hung crookedly; their tangled cordage, hanging in neglected loops, gave to them a strange air of neglect and dishevelment. Their sails had proved useless; their auxiliary steam-power alone had proved available. For the wounded and the pestilence-smitten, the dead and the living, were herded and packed and crowded on those dreadful decks, as wantonly as though some giant child had been playing at soldiers with real men and real ships--and had wearied of the game half through, jumbled the men in anyhow--and given each ship a spiteful shake, and gone sulkily away.

* * * * *

Filth flowed from their scuppers and streaked their flanks as the three transports moved slowly towards their anchorage. Bevies of the pretty little Adriatic gull accompanied them, screaming and mewing as in derision; dropping upon the water that had become oily, dark, and malodorous, to feed eagerly; rising, wheeling, and dropping again. And flocks of the tiny blue-breasted gray shear-water that haunts the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles fluttered above them, twittering and piping: “See here! See here!”

Faces crowded at their ports, and beyond these you could see more and more faces.... The bulwarks were hedged with faces; the decks were heaped with them.... The bodies belonging to them were clad in discolored rags of uniforms, or thin, and torn, and tattered shreds of linen underwear, and shivered in the bitter wind unceasingly; with a chattering of the teeth that sounded like the rattle of hail upon wood or canvas--with a vibration that communicated itself to the timbers of the ship.

But you could think of nothing but those faces, haggard and worn with privation and suffering, gaunt and terrible with famine, disfigured with wounds, or hideous from the ravages of pestilence. There were faces lividly blue or greenish-yellow with the discoloration of cholera or dysentery, darkly spotted with typhus, fiercely flushed with rheumatic fever or pneumonia, black with the decomposition of gangrene. And, swathed in clotted rags of bandages; or nakedly exposed to the shuddering sight of men, were faces mutilated by loss of noses or lips; and blind faces, showing red, empty eye-sockets; or mere fragments of faces, shattered, and split, and mutilated by grape, and shrapnel, and shell-splinters; or cloven with great sword-strokes from the forehead to the chin. And among these were faces snow-white, or yellow as wax--upheld by the pressure of the living crowd about them--that showed in the glassy stare and the dropped jaw where Death had taken toll. For the Red Reaper was busy gathering in his harvest. Many of these men would not live to be carried up the hilly road that was to serve as England’s Calvary. They died even as you looked, inwardly crying.... What wanton wreck and waste of splendid life, what reckless spill of strength, and hope, and courage! Was it for this, O God! that Britain has sent forth her pride and flower?--her manly, gallant officers, her stark and sturdy men?

It is a sacred duty to fight for one’s country, a glorious fate to die for her, if need be. But to perish, gaunt with famine and rotten with gangrene, through the neglect and indifference of that same country; to become, living, the prey of flies and the food of maggots that little middlemen may grow fat and flourish--and great Contractors become multi-millionaires--and Nobs and Bigwigs build unto themselves palaces, and the secret animosities working in crowned heads be gratified and glutted--that is to be a martyr, not a hero! Surely the gulls and the little gray shearwaters were crying: “Betrayed! Betrayed! Betrayed!”

* * * * *

One day a great writer will rise up, who will tell this story as it should be told. You will burn and thrill, you will weep and laugh as you read.... Meanwhile, be patient with the feebler pen that stumbles and falters, lost amidst a wilderness of nameless, forgotten graves.

Not that they suffered and died for nought, these men who upheld the honor of England at Alma, and Balaklava, and Inkerman. With the odor of their filthy garments, the stench of their gangrened wounds, the exhalations of fever and pestilence, they brought with them the perfume of sublime obedience and the fragrance of great acts of heroism, forever buried in the silence of official reports.

And the sight of them, grotesque, and strange, and awful as the pipe-dream of an opium or hashish-smoker, fascinated and held those thousands that beheld. In silence, with suspended breath, the men and women of many nations looked, and could not cease from looking; while the gulls shrieked and wheeled, and the tiny gray shearwaters piped and twittered--and a stranger sound than either of these grew upon the ear and filled it, and presently drowned out every other sound:

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a!”

It was feeble, and faint, and broken, and unutterably pitiful.... It reminded you of the bleating of sheep buried in a snowdrift--or the complaint of young calves being bled by the butcher’s knife--or the whimpering of dogs, bound and tortured by the vivisector’s cruel, skillful hand.... Most of all it suggested the wailing of innumerable pauper babies, pining in the grim nursery-wards of the many workhouses of great grimy London....

“A-a-a-a-a-a!”

It was a sound that plucked at the heart-strings, and brought a choke into the throat, you knew not why or wherefore. Women broke into tears and sobs as they heard it, and a salt stinging mist came before the harder eyes of the men. Not until the warships of the Three Nations anchored at Beshiktash had dipped their Ensigns to the leading transport--not until, in her slow course, she came abreast of the luxurious steam-yacht that displayed the Light Cavalry pennant under her burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron--were even those who wept to understand.

Then the wail of the dying pauper babies, the bleating of the perishing sheep upon the mountain, came louder than ever.

“A-a-a-a-a!”

And blackened hands waved rags of caps, and even gory bandages; and the woman he had called Laura rushed to Lord Cardillon, as the Brigadier stood--center of the deep half-circle of well-known men and women assembled on the steam yacht’s after-deck--and a gallantly conspicuous figure by reason of his height and bearing, and the brilliant tatters of his Hussar uniform--and clutched him wildly by the arm, and shrieked:

“Oh, Arthur! stop them!--stop them! Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let them moan like that! Oh! will no one have pity and stop them?”

And he thrust her from him, crying:

“You idiot! Can’t you understand they’re cheering? They’ve seen us!... They’ve recognized their officers!... Mildare! Leighbury! Southgrave!” he shouted to the other wearers of soiled and tattered uniforms: “What the devil has come over you that you don’t know your own Guards and the fellows of the 555th and 442nd? Briddwater! Gauntless! there are your plungers of the Heavies! And the rest are my own!--my men of the Light Brigade!”

And he ran forwards, forgetful of his wound, and leaped upon the bulwarks; and so stood; holding to the ratlines with the hand that was uninjured--and gave back the cheer in his clear, hard, ringing tones:

“Hurrah, my men! hurrah!”

And as though a spell had been broken, a mighty shout of acclamation went up from every British throat in all that vast assemblage, drowning out the vivas of the French, and the Hochs of the German Legion, massed upon the crowded slopes of Scutari:

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

XCV

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” is a hackneyed adage, undeniably true in the case hereunder quoted. For when young Mortimer’s not very shining repartee to the False Retreat in the dandy red forage-cap was mentioned in Dispatches, by request of the Duke of Bambridge, and reproduced, with additions and embellishment, in all the daily papers, headed “Amusing Incident During The Action Of Alma,” or “Good For The Guards,” or “Smart Retort Of A Young Ensign,” the joy of Thompson Jowell almost turned his brain.

The man exulted like a triumphant ogre. He had said to the boy “Win distinction!--it’s in your blood!” and by Gosh! the youngster had gone and done it! He wearied Cowell, Sowell, Dowell, and the rest to the verge of tears with endless boasts--with windy prophecies of Morty’s future greatness. At home, or at his office or Club, or in the sacred ante-rooms of stately Government Departments, he would sit heaving and swelling and fermenting like a large moist, crimson heap of beetroot being distilled into the old Jamaica rum supplied by Mowell to Her Majesty’s Forces--until he broke and burst in bubbles of pride. On an average he must have repeated the “I’m dam’ if I retreat! I’m blest if I do, so there!” utterance upwards of a hundred times a day.

The fact of his son having ceased to write to him since his unrelenting reply to the letter we know of, did not shake the monstrous egotism of the father’s certainty that all would be well between them by-and-by. Meanwhile he laid domineering, greedy hands on all letters that the son wrote to his mother--opening them first, and permitting that much-bullied woman, as a favor, to read them when he had done. He had only to get richer, and Mortimer would come to heel, like a blundering young pointer, none the worse in his owner’s estimation, for having shown spirit in threatening to break away.

And every day that dawned did see the man rise up with a thicker coating of golden mud upon him, to be scraped off and invested in safe things. He had boasted to his heir that he stood to make millions by the War, and his boast was verified. There had been moments when his success had almost frightened him.

But now, between paternal pride and gratified vanity, his greed of gain was quickened, and his few remaining scruples sailed down the wind like thistle-blow. His conscience slept behind his gorgeous waistcoat, seldom calling for Cockle’s pills or any other helpful remedy. He left off jolting up in bed o’ nights with the gray sweat of terror standing on him, when the north-west wind roared among the elms of his country place near Market Drowsing, or bellowed among the sooty chimney-pots of Hanover Square. He could think placidly under these circumstances of The Realm thrashing on her way to the Bay of Balaklava, looking for the Black Sea gale she was not meant to weather through. He could await with calmness the arrival of the cablegram which should cram the coffers of Cowell, Towell, Powell, Sowell, Bowell, Crowell, Dowell, and Co. with solid golden drops wrung from the veins of victimized firms of underwriters--and materially hasten the hour that should transform himself into a glittering joss of solid bullion, before whom the world--and chief of all the world--his son--should burn incense and bow down.

And all the time his Fate was drawing nearer, sword uplifted.... And a day dawned when the blade flashed and fell. And it bit deep through the little slanting forehead, behind which all the creatures of the Noah’s Ark--the Goose and the Donkey uppermost lately--were jumbled and packed away.

* * * * *

It had been a wild wet summer in the British Isles that year, and a wild wet autumn had followed. November had set in with gales and thunderstorms. The floods were out when Jowell went down to his little place in Sloughshire. Suppose him humming “Marble Halls” and building castles in the air of Government hay-trusses at twenty pounds a ton, as the train carried him through the submerged country, where men in punts were lassoing the floating stacks and cornricks, and fishing with grapnels for drowned pigs, sheep, and cows.

Where the land was not under water, laborers were breaking up the green fallows for the Spring sowing. They were veterans or striplings for the most part. Middle-aged men and young men were almost as rare as strawberries in winter--so many had been taken by the War.... And the cry was for more men, and more, unceasingly. At every barracks and police-station, at every town-hall or railway booking-office, gayly-pictured placards were posted offering bounties, baited lines were dangled, to catch the Recruit.... Brakes carrying brass-bands, and with beribboned warriors on the box, drove through the country towns on market days, to the strains of “Rule, Britannia” and “See the Conquering Hero”; the alluring stories of the dashing sergeant, battled with newspaper-reports of a country where there was wonderful little in the way of eating, and scarce a drop o’ beer.

But the bounties scored in the long run. Gearge and Tummus, Market-Day over, would go back to their field-work and plod behind the teams, whistling stray bars of “See the Conquering” and “Rule, Britannia!” Then, as the bright steel share clogged with the fat brown clay, Gearge would throw down the plow-stilts, swearing bitterly:

“Ten shillin’ to-wick and nowt but bread for dinner! I’ll stand it no more--be danged if I do now! Wut say, lad? Ool’t jine th’ Army?”

“Ay! wi’ all my heart!” Lad would say. And they would leave the farmer’s team in mid-furrow in charge of the whimpering plowboy--tramp the six, ten or fifteen miles to the nearest recruiting station--take the Queen’s shilling, and be sent up to Regimental Headquarters with the very next draft.

A month of drill, a week at home to say “Good-by!” and then the rookies would be shipped to the distant land where very often there was not even the tough crust to gnaw for dinner; and you plowed your way, not amidst cleanly clods, but through deep and stinking mud, where dead bodies of men and beasts that had perished lay bloated and corrupting, until swine or dogs or ravens had picked their bones.

* * * * *

Arrived at his “little place,” the large pretentious country mansion standing in its brand-new shrubberies and experimental gardens on the outskirts of a rustic hamlet within a mile of Market Drowsing, the Contractor sent for his agent--who in a petty way was another Thompson Jowell, and went--thoroughly as was his wont--into his rents and dues.

His gross shadow loomed large upon the village, the greater part of which belonged to him, in virtue of his benevolent habit of advancing money upon mortgage to small freeholders who were in difficulties, and subsequently gulping down their land. His trail was upon the ancient Church--where the brazen pulpit-lamps by which the Parson read his sermon on winter evenings--the font in which infant pagans were made Christians--the harmonium that chased the flying choir to the last line of the hymn, the copper shovels upon which the Church wardens collected halfpennies and buttons--bore brazen plates, testifying that they had been presented by Thompson Jowell, Esq. And in the churchyard an imposing vault, containing the remains of his deceased mother, transferred from a remote burying-ground in the neighborhood of Shadwell--where the honest soul had kept a little tobacco-shop--awaited the hour when her son should condescend to die.

Death did not hover in the mind of Jowell at this particular juncture. He was happy as he issued mandates for Distraint upon the goods of non-paying cottage tenants, and indicated those mortgagors who were to have a little rope, and those others who were to be shown no quarter. Chief of these unfortunates was Sarah Horrotian, to whom her kinsman had, some seven years previously, lent cash upon her freehold of the Upper Clays.

“She’s letting the place go to rack and ruin,” said the agent. “For her own good, sir, you ought to foreclose!”

His master pondered, routing in the stiff upright hair that had perceptibly whitened lately. Then he roused himself with a snort, and said that as it was a fine morning after yesterday’s rain, and the Clays not two miles distant, he would walk over there, by Gosh, he would! and see the widow himself.

* * * * *

When he set out, a tussle was going on between the business side of him and the part that was paternal. The woman owed him money, but her son had saved his son.... One may suppose, that at first he had some vague idea of appearing before his debtor in the character of a grateful father. But as exercise quickened Jowell’s brain, he perceived that this would be wrong. People who had the impudence to borrow money without the means to pay it back, were presumptuous no less than improvident. Ergo, to waive his claim to arrears of interest, was to encourage Sarah Horrotian in presumption and improvidence. Moreover, other people in the same boat as the widow would hear, and expect Thompson Jowell to extend to them a similar benevolence. Further, it was the bounden duty of the trooper to have saved young Mortimer Jowell from the sea. In common Christianity he couldn’t have done otherwise. He ought to think himself lucky that he had got the chance.

And to delay foreclosing would be to wrong this same son Mortimer, who had won distinction as he had promised his old Governor, and through whom the name of Jowell was to strike deep root in the County and spread wide and tower high. Whether the boy wanted it or not, he should have The Clays for a stud-farm and hunting-box. Tip-top nobs needed these things. And, by Gosh! Jowell’s son was going to be a tip-top nob.

Baron Jowell of Drowsing, K.C.B., Lord-Lieutenant of Sloughshire. He said the words to himself over and over, chewing them, ruminating over them, extracting their juice. And set his face--by dint of their constant repetition--into so coarse a cast of greed and mercilessness, that when his squat shadow fell over the half-door of the farm-kitchen, Sarah Horrotian looked up from the tub of clothes she was washing, and the feeble spark of hope that had kindled in her gaunt black eyes at the sight of her great kinsman died out there and then.

* * * * *

Things had gone ill at The Clays since the Second Exodus of Joshua Horrotian. Betsey Twitch, the half-widow, having been taken on as dairymaid in place of Nelly, had, in company with the pigman, Digweed, been detected in scarlet doings, and, with her fellow sinner, incontinently cast forth. And without even such clumsy supervision as the departed Jason’s, Sarah’s laborers had ceased laboring and her weeders took their rest.

Stock had to be sold ere long, to pay up interest due on Jowell’s mortgage. The stately hayricks vanished one by one. After the Declaration of War, read by the Mayor from the balcony of the Town Hall in Market Drowsing, Sarah ceased to sell her eggs, chickens and butter on Thursdays in the shadow of the civic edifice. She even left off attending the local Bethesda, where the Mayor was regarded as a shining light.

For the Almighty would judge the man, she prophesied, for bringing on the War between England and Russia. If he had set his foot down firmly, the Lord Mayor of London and Queen Victoria might have been led to see the error of their ways.

She preached this belief of hers unceasingly, in tones that clanged like beaten fire-irons. It was no use to argue.--Sarah knew best.... Ere long, when Tudd Dowsall and Joe Chinney took the Queen’s shilling and trudged away in the wake of the recruiting sergeant, flying ribbons of patriotic colors, Sarah made no attempt to fill their vacant places. The last beast had been sold to pay the poor-rates. Her purse was as empty as the heart behind her wedge-shaped apron-bib, when Thompson Jowell threw open the half-door, and rolled into the kitchen, keeping his curly-brimmed, low-topped hat upon his pear-shaped head, and flourishing his gold-mounted cane.

“What’s this I hear?” he said blusteringly. “Now what does this mean, Mrs. Horrotian? Here have I come marching up your muddy lane to know! You’re a religious woman and you don’t pay your debts! Do you call that a-keeping up of your profession? Four hundred pounds of my money has gone to bolster up this here farming-business of yours, and two years’ interest will be due in a week. You may tell me that Juffkins has taken stock and what-not from time to time, on account of my Twenty-five per cent. Ay! and he may have--but Cash Payments should be made in cash. Those cows and pigs and that hay of yours fetched nothing--I’m a loser by the sum I allowed you for ’em. I am, and by Gosh! ma’am, what have you got to say?”

“It is the will of the Lord,” returned Sarah Horrotian, returning Jowell’s stare unflinchingly, though her thin face was as white as chalk between her graying hair-loops, and her heart beat in sickening thumps. “Though, if my son were here he would find a word to say for the mother that suckled him, and the farm be his, take it how you like it. He have been of age these ten years, and ought to ha’ been considered. There would be lawyers should say as I ought never to ha’ borrowed money on th’ property wi’out his written name!”

She had put her bony finger on the weak place in Thompson Jowell’s mortgage. If he had for a moment intended to spare her, the flicker of pity died out in him as he stood rolling his moist eyes and blowing at her in his walrus-style. His mind was made up. He would foreclose at once, in case the bumptious ne’er-do-well of a son should live to come home, and--taking dishonest advantage of the flaw--rob his son Mortimer of his hunting-box. There should be no delay.

Meaning to turn the widow out, without fail, upon the morrow, he spoke of time to pay, even hinted at a further loan. Then Sarah broke down and wept with loud hard sobs. This brought the ready tears into the eyes of Thompson Jowell. He called her his dear Cousin Sarah, quoted the adage about blood being thicker than water, even made an uncertain dab with his pursed-up mouth at the knobby forehead between the black-gray hair-loops, as though to plant a cousinly kiss there--thought better of it, took leave, and went upon his way.

Fate, the grim executioner, walked behind Thompson Jowell as he waddled across the Upper Clays farmyard, sloppy as of yore, but populous no longer with squattering ducks, musing pigs reclining on moist litter, and hairy faces of cows and plow-horses contemplating their world across the half-doors of stables and sheds.

The white gate clashed behind Fate as well as the Contractor; and, when he struck into the narrow hedgerow-bordered lane dividing the westerly slope of the clay-lands, whose deep, sticky mire had made havoc of his brown cloth spatterdashes on the way up, Fate followed at his heels.

He was portentously cheerful at dinner that evening. Fate stood behind his chair as he gobbled, and cracked his bottle of Port. When he pulled his tasseled nightcap down to his great mottled ears and flounced into bed after his aggressive fashion, Fate snuffed the candle and drew the brocaded bed-curtains close. And when the meek, dowdy woman, lying sleepless beside him, wondered why he groaned and snorted?--he was having his Fate-sent dream.

* * * * *

You are to know that it seemed to Thompson Jowell that he arose from bed, and without even waiting to throw on his Oriental dressing-gown over the brief and airy garment of slumber, straightway flew to the Seat of War. And presently, with a sound in his ears as though two prehistoric beasts of inconceivable size were roaring at each other, he found himself hanging over the Advanced Line of Siege Works, scanning three finger-shaped plateaus, powdered with snow, and divided from each other by deep ravines.

* * * * *

Beyond a strip of plain, tufted with scrub, and humped with the crumbling ruins of Greek churches--that had been reared above the tombs and temples of ancient Scythian Kings--lay the proud fortress-city of Tsar Nicholas, in the crook of an arm of glittering blue-black sea. And from the marvelous array of Defense-works that had sprung up since the Army of the South had rolled away towards Simferopol, puffs of white smoke accompanied the ringing crash of brazen 64-pounders, and the dull boom of the mortar-firing answered similar puffs, booms, and crashes, hailing from the French and British batteries.

Even as Jowell gazed--hanging suspended under a leaden sky-arch in which pale, luminous meteors crossed and recrossed, whistling like curlews, and sometimes bursting in mid-air, a tremendous explosion not far beneath his naked feet, accompanied by a sound as though an express train, loaded with scrap-iron, had passed upon its journey to Sevastopol, warned him that the Lancaster batteries were upon the cliffs immediately behind him, and that his position had its risks.

“This is all very well,” said the Contractor, “and uncommon like what I have a-read of in the newspapers, proving that the blackguards who write for ’em tell the truth once in a way. But what I have come here for is to see my son, Ensign Mortimer Jowell, Second Battalion Cut Red Feathers. And I’ll give anybody a sovereign who’ll take me to their Lines.”

With the words, Jowell began to sink; and--firmly convinced that he was being taken in the wrong direction--presently found himself standing in a slushy alley-way.

Upon his right was a ten-foot parapet of yellow clay, strengthened with sandbags and earth-filled gabions. Upon his left was a low cliff, in which caves that were magazines for ammunition, and magnified rabbit-holes that made bomb-proof shelters for human beings, had been delved and burrowed out. There were embrasures in the right-hand parapet, and a row of thirty-two pounders was mounted on the platforms facing the embrasures; and haggard, hairy-faced sentries in tattered great-coats, wearing leg-bandages of sacking and canvas, were placed at intervals on mounds of clay, so that their eyes were raised above the level of the parapet.

The men who worked the guns were Royal Artillery, but the sentries, and two of a group of haggard men who sat with their backs against the parapet were Guards, wearing the forage-cap badge of the Garter Star, peculiarly distinctive of the Cut Red Feathers. Save for those shabby tarnished badges, and the stained and ragged silk sashes the two men wore over clumsy coats of rabbit-skin, there was nothing to distinguish them as officers, except an authoritative manner. Not even the fact that he knew himself to be in his nightshirt would have kept Jowell from breaking in upon their conversation. But even as he opened his mouth, there was a cry of “Shot!” followed by a crash; and earth and stones flew in showers, mingled with clouds of yellow dust.

A solid projectile from one of the Barbarians’ big brass sixty-two pounders had struck the parapet, knocking a good-sized piece away. One of the look-out men had toppled off his earth-mound, and lay sprawling in the shin-deep icy slush that was all stained with red about him. Men with gabions and shovels hastened to make good the damage to the epaulement. One of the seated officers got up, strode over, stooped down and examined the fallen private. Even to Thompson Jowell’s unskilled eyes there was no repairing him.

But something in the gait of the tall, broad-shouldered, weather-beaten young officer quickened the beating of the Contractor’s heart, and brought the tears into his eyes. It was his son, bronzed and whiskered, hard-bitten and lean, who said, “Gaw! Poor beggar!” as he rose up and turned away from the headless private. Regardless of his naked legs, and the freezing blasts that sported with his single garment, Thompson Jowell ran forwards, with hands outstretched, crying, in a gush of tenderness:

“Morty! My own boy!”

The face of the young officer had not previously been turned towards the visitor in the nightshirt. But now it met his fully, and the heart of Jowell stopped beating with a jolt. For that cold, ignoring look disowned him and unfathered him. It told him that he had been warned, and had ignored the warning; and that henceforth, of his own act, he must be a stranger to his only son.

In the horror of this revelation he screamed out, and awakened. He leaped out of bed and floundered to the window, pulled aside the blind, and looked upon a calm, bright dawn. Not a breath of wind creaked his elms, but far away in the Bay of Balaklava, Fate was brewing that Black Sea gale The Realm had waited for so long.

XCVI

She had got into harbor on the previous evening. Some of the troops on board--a draft of the 146th--had already been landed. The others came ashore after the ship broke up.

Fate sent young Mortimer Jowell down from the Front that morning, in charge of a fatigue-party, detailed to draw rations of hard biscuit, salt-pork, and the green coffee-berries supplied by a maternal Government to men who had no fires to roast or mills to grind them with.

The tramp of eight miles through knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep slough would have been no joke to men full-fed and in hard condition. They were muddy to the hair, weary and sore-footed, when they passed the camps of the Four British Divisions--lying under the Argus-eyes and iron mouths of the French Artillery, whose breastworks crowned the line of cliffs along their rear and flank. For the Red Snake lay coiled about the grim fortress-city of Tsar Nicholas, and the Blue Snakes had lapped themselves between the Red Snake and retreat.

To the eye of Hector Dunoisse that disposition of the Allied Forces would have spoken volumes. To the uninstructed glance of young Mortimer Jowell it merely suggested a barely-possible contingency. He said to himself:

“My eye! Suppose the Emperor of the French and that pasty chap, the Sultan, were to turn those whacking big guns on us one of these fine mornin’s! Gaw! I wonder where we should all be then?”

It was the most brilliant thing the Ensign had ever said in the whole of his life, but he was not conscious that he was being clever. He was only glad that he had got his draggled party of muddy scarecrows safely into Balaklava. He was inhaling almost with relief the smells of that ramshackle, rag-and-bone town.

They went down into her by the Kadikoi Road that skirts the top of the retort-shaped, jug-mouthed harbor, presided over by the Star Fort and the Mortar Batteries. Stacks of sleepers and rusty lengths of rail marked the site of the proposed railway between the Front and Balaklava. A living-wagon, reversed upon the summit of a mountain of mud, bore upon its canvas tilt the pithy inscription:

“NO PAI FOR 6 MUNTHS AND HARDLY ENNY VITTALS.

PRESHUS SIK OF THE HOLE JOBB.”

A forest of masts fringed the harbor. You saw vessels of every imaginable class, from the stately Indiaman to the paddle-wheeled gunboat, tied up in tiers like the mackerel-boats of a Cornish fishing-village. Upon the oily pewter-colored waters bobbed and wallowed innumerable carcasses--canine, porcine, equine, and bovine.

“Hair-trunks” the sailors called these unpleasantly-inflated objects; and as every ship was supposed to tow those in her immediate vicinity, she naturally left her neighbors to carry the business out.

One bottle-nosed Commander of a screw line-of-battle-ship, putting by the desire for promotion, earned the gratitude of his fellow-men, and a deathless name in History, by an appreciation of the peculiar sanitary demands of the situation, that was at least sixty years in advance of the age.

Said he, in effect: “These carcasses, ignored by the Executive Heads of the Army, the Harbor-Master and the Port Captains, are as perilous to the life of man as effective shelling.... Let others serve their country after their own fashion. I tow dead cows henceforth.”

So his boats were sent regularly to collect the bobbing hair-trunks packed with fetid odors, and tow them out of the roadstead crowded with shipping of three nations, away to the open sea.... And the Fleet and the Army gave their benefactor the Chinese-sounding appellation of “Commander Tow Cow.” And the nickname adhered to him to his dying day.

* * * * *

Suppose that you see the Ensign, with his sergeant and section, tramping down the miry main street of the South-Crimean coast-town, between villas that had been clean and dapper and habitable when the Allied Armies rolled down from the North.

An endless procession of men on foot, men on horseback, men driving beasts or charioteering vehicles of various descriptions, passed up and down that swarming thoroughfare, all day and nearly all night. Lean dogs and ownerless swine routed in piles of offal and garbage. And--for Death constantly dropped in in the shape of shell or round-shot--and dysentery and cholera were always with the Army--human refuse lay sprawled or huddled in strange fashion, waiting for the burial which did not always come....

* * * * *

Shrieking stenches saluted young Jowell’s nose, the din of voices mingled with the distant bellow of the Lancasters, and the fainter answer of the great brass sixty-two pounders from the batteries of Sevastopol.... Faces he knew nodded cheerily to him from windows of improvised Clubs and temporary restaurants. Hands waved, voices shouted hospitable invitations. He shook his head and passed on.

Dreadful women beckoned with ringed chalked hands and leered at him with painted faces, from the upper balconies of abominable houses where the business of vice went on ceaselessly by day as by night. Roulette-balls clicked--occasionally revolvers cracked, and knives were used--under the canvas of gambling-booths where French and German, Greek and Italian and British gamesters crowded about the green-covered trestle-board.

Cracked pianos vamped accompaniments to villainous songs, screeched by red-tighted sirens in soi-disant music-halls. Barrel-organs ground out popular waltzes for the revelers in crazy dancing-saloons, where shadows of revolving couples passed and re-passed, thrown on the crimson blinds by flaring naphtha-lamps. Next door to a house of this type was another that was an hospital; a single-storied, mud-walled, windowless and doorless building that stood close upon the thoroughfare. A lean hog shambled over the threshold as Mortimer Jowell passed. He looked in, and saw green men, blue men, yellow men and black men lying upon the bare earth floor in rows, side by side....

* * * * *

Many had been dead for days. The silence of the others rivaled that of Death itself, for the most part. But sometimes a thready voice cried on God or Our Lady, or faintly cursed, or asked in vain for drink. And Mortimer Jowell halted his men; and went in and drove out the hog, and barricaded the threshold with a broken shutter. As he left the dreadful place a man came in.

He was a priest, tall, broad-shouldered and sufficiently clean-shaven to be remarkable, where nineteen men out of twenty were hairy-faced. He wore a rusty biretta and a thin, torn cassock, and had no other protection against the piercing cold. He had a canvas wallet slung about him, and moved with his hands crossed upon his breast as though something were hidden there.... He glanced at Mortimer Jowell as he stepped aside to make room for him in passing--and his hard blue eyes and jutting underlip and long, powerful chin were features distinctive of a man we have met before.

His name was known to no one in Balaklava. He came over three or four times a week from the French base at Kamiesch--where he wrought with many others among the wounded in the hospitals--to minister to the dying Catholic soldiers in this and similar places of misery and woe. Their dull and glassy eyes flickered a little at the sight of him. He made the sign of the Cross, drew out the purple stole--passed it round his neck--and knelt down by one of the prostrate bodies, murmuring a Latin benediction. And, too ignorant of his high, awful function to be conscious of intrusiveness, the Ensign watched and listened to him as he drew a silver pyx from the bosom of his cassock and fed the starving with the Bread of Life.

The ex-State official, diplomat and viveur who had become a priest, and the bullet-headed young English subaltern were never to exchange one word, never again to meet--and yet there was a link between them.... Both were--one quite unconsciously--seeking the Peace that is only gained by the Way of Expiation. And one of them was to find it before the sun went down.

Ignorant of this, the Ensign tramped on, and, having dropped his party at the Commissariat Stores--a row of sheet-iron roofed sheds that had sprung up, with many other buildings of the same kind, on the offal-strewn beach, above high-water mark--was free to wander where he would.

So he strolled along the muddy foreshore among the huge stacks of planking for stables and huts, and the great mountains of food and forage that lay piled up and rotting--rendered useless by lack of transport and plenitude of Red Tape--doomed never to supply the needs of perishing beasts and starving men.

A store-ship sent out many months previously had just unloaded a cargo of Showell’s Army boots by the simple process of digging them out from the hold with shovels, filling boats with them, and emptying the boats on the beach close to low-water mark. And a half-company of Fusiliers, bare-footed, and several degrees more ragged than those of Morty’s fatigue-party, had been marched down and directed to take what they needed from the pile.

The boots were all too small. You saw men eagerly turning over the heaps, sorting and comparing, pitching away and swearing, sitting down and trying in vain to force the ridiculously inadequate coverings on their swollen, bleeding feet. A minority succeeded in getting shod--after a fashion. But upon the hairy faces of the muddy, ragged, hunger-bitten majority, anger and disgust and disappointment were vividly painted; and presently found vent in words.

Their N.C.O’s--in like case with them--vainly endeavored to cast oil upon the troubled waters. Then the officer in command of the party emerged from a low-browed beach café, built of mud, mules’ bones and Army Mess-tins, where a red-fezzed Greek sold coffee, vodka, rum, and Crimean wine. He said--shouldering a net of potatoes, tucking the head of a dead fowl under his sword-belt, and Sucking his mustache, gemmed with ruby drops of generous liquor:

“Whass this, Rathkeales? Sergeant-Major Lonergan, bring these mutinous divvies up before me! Can’t get the boots on, is that whass the matter wit’ you? And whoever thought you could?--and your feet swelled to the size of pontoons with chilblains and frostbite! Whass that you’re saying, Private Biles? ‘Women’s and children’s sizes’? Get to the divvle with your women and children! Do you suppose the Government’s a fool?”

But the production of a bundle of elastic-sided foot-coverings of unmistakably feminine proportions reduced even the Captain to silence; and a pair of little clump-soled shoes brandished in a gaunt and grimy hand, put a clincher on the case.

“Who says they’re not child’s sizes now?” shouted the owner of the grimy hand hoarsely. “Are these men’s boots? Maybe you’ll look and say!” He added: “And may the feet o’ them that has palmed ’em off on us march naked over Hell’s red-hot floor, come the Day o’ Judgment! If there’s a God in Heaven, He’ll grant that prayer!”

He threw down the little hobnailed shoes, and went over, muttering, and scowling, and staggering in his gait, to where the stark body of a long-booted navvy lay in the shadow of a pyramid of Commissariat crates.

His comrades and officers and Mortimer Jowell watched in silence, as he sat himself down opposite the dead man, and measured the soles of his feet against the rigid feet. They were of a size. He nodded at the livid blue face of their late owner, and said grimly:

“You and me, matey, seem about the same size in corn-boxes. Maybe you’ll not grudge to part with your boots to a covey who’ll be in your shoes next week or to-night!”

Mortimer Jowell sickened as the ghastly process of removal was completed, but the ugly fascination of the scene held him as it did other men. Nobody had noticed the blue haze creeping in from the sea, pushed by a wind that had veered suddenly. As the soldier stood up in the dead navvy’s boots, the gale yelled, and broke....

XCVII

It came from the southwest with hail and blizzards of snow in it. Tents scattered at its breath like autumn leaves--iron roofs of Army store-sheds took wing like flights of frightened rooks. Thunder cracked and rolled incessantly--fierce blue lightnings cleft the mirk with jagged yataghans of electric fire. Huge waves beat upon the narrow beaches, and leaped upon the towering cliffs, dragging mouthfuls of acres down. Ships and steamers, large and small, crowding the Harbor, were jumbled in wild confusion. The smashing of bowsprits and cutwaters, bulwarks, paddle-boxes and stern-boats may be better imagined than described. Outside in the Bay, Hemp, Iron, and Steam waged war with the unleashed elements of Wind and Water. And through all, the siege-batteries of the Allies went on bellowing; and from the wonderful array of Defense Works that had sprung up as by magic since the Army of the South rolled away on the road to Simferopol--Sevastopol answered, with canister, and round-shot, and shell.

As store-ships and troop-ships beached, and pivot-gun war-steamers foundered--and great line-of-battle ships staggered out to sea--The Realm set herself to ride out the gale with full steam up and both anchors out. But as red sparks and black smoke weltered out of her funnels, and the great iron cables rolled off her capstan-drums--one after the other those port and starboard anchors went to the bottom with a roar. And the gale took the brand-new two-thousand-six-hundred-ton Government transport, twisted her round, lifted her up and broke her, as a child breaks a sugar ship that has come off the top of a birthday-cake.

A petty officer of artificers--his rating is unknown, but he ranks as Second-Class Scoundrel--had been bribed with the sum of fifty pounds not to clinch the cable-ends. When the great stern-wave lifted the doomed ship, this man, with another, was on the poop. He shrieked to his mate to dive, but the heart of the poor wretch failed him. And the Second-Class Scoundrel dived--and, looking down into an awful gulf of sliding black-green water, his mate saw him swimming like a frog, far down below the surface, straight for the open sea.... And then The Realm bumped thrice--and broke into barrel-staves and flinders. And her cargo of good goods and bad goods--bogus goods and no goods--and nearly every living soul aboard her--went to the bottom of the Euxine. And young Mortimer Jowell, who had skirted the Harbor on its windward side, and climbed the towering wall of rock that gates it from the Bay, shut up the Dollond telescope through which he had witnessed the tragedy--and sat down upon the hailstone carpeted ground behind a big boulder of pudding-stone to recover and think over things....

“O God, save those poor beggars!” he had groaned out over and over, as the little red and black specks that were men bobbed about in the boiling surf. It was quite clear to him that they were shrieking, though the howl of the sleety gale had drowned their cries.

“Damn the old man! He’s done it, as he said he would!” he muttered, hugging his knees and blinking as the stinging tears came crowding, and a sob stuck in his throat. “And I used to chaff him for being such a thundering old Dodger! Gaw!” He shuddered and dropped his haggard young face into his grimy, chilblained hands.

* * * * *

He knew he could never again face his brother-officers. He knew he could never, never again go home. He roused himself out of a giddy stupor presently at the sound of voices. Two officers of the Fleet had taken refuge from the blizzard in a buttress-angle of the Fort wall, not far distant. They were talking about the wreck of The Realm, and, sheltered as they were from the wind, their voices reached the ear of Jowell’s son.

“It’s a gey guid thing for the Contractors,” said one man. “They’ve saved their bacon by letting the Army salt-pork and junk go to Davy Jones’s locker, ye ken!”

And his companion answered significantly:

“Supposing it ever was aboard!”

“Ay!--now I come to think of it,” said the first man, who had a North of the Tweed accent, “that was varra odd the way the port and starboard cables went ripping oot o’ her. Will we be getting any explanation of that circumstance, do ye suppose, later on?”

“Undoubtedly, if we wait until the Day of Judgment,” said the second speaker, who seemed a bit of a cynic. “And meanwhile--I’ll bet you a sovereign that more stuff will be proved to have gone down in her than ever could have been got into her holds. She’ll be the scapegoat of the Commissariat--and by Gad! they want one!”

Said the other man:

“Ay! do they--gey and badly! Come, let’s be ganging doon. I’m sorely wanting a nip!”

And their figures crossed the threshold of the broken doorway, and Mortimer Jowell heard the pebbles rolling under their sliding feet as they negotiated the downward path.

“If I were the kind of man I’d like to be, I wouldn’t even take the twenty-five thousand pounds he settled on me when I got my Commission,” he muttered. “No, sir! I’d send it back--and send in my papers--and get a berth in the Sultan’s pay. Turn Bashi, perhaps, though I hate Turks, filthy beggars! Still.... Gaw!... that ain’t half a bad idea!”

Momentarily he forgot his keen unhappiness in contemplation of a glowing portrait of Mortimer--not Jowell Pasha--riding to war upon an Arab charger of dazzling beauty, presented by his royal master in conjunction with a gold and jeweled scimitar--in recognition of His Excellency’s distinguished services as Commander of an Imperial Order.

He saw the Pasha, followed by a lengthy train of aide-de-camps, orderlies, and pipe-bearers, returning to his luxurious tent at nightfall, to be welcomed by his mother--an English lady of pleasant but dowdy appearance--and His Excellency’s young and lovely bride. And he put his hand into his breast and pulled out a note-case--and took from this the oddest little scrawly letter--that had been brought to him at the camp of the First Division before he went to the Front.

“HONORED SIR,

“I am told it is thus one begins a letter to a gentleman of Ingiland. Pardon me if I am wrong! When my nurse binds the pencil to my wrist with a ribbon I can write as the Ingliz ladies at the school at Pera taught me, though it is not so well as I speak.

“I have much heard of your deeds at the Alma Battle, and of your noble answer to the false messenger of the English Emir, and I am proud to the bottom of my heart! For so brave a man has told me that he loves me. Honored Sir, you have given me what I thought to have never! I pray Our Lord Isa and the Lady Maryam to bless and guard you! Do we, I wonder, meet again?

“Honored Sir,

“I am yours respectfully,

“ZORA, “Of the House of Jones.”

The Ensign folded up the funny little letter and kissed it--and put it back in his note-case, and stowed the note-case away. And then he remembered the sergeant and section, waiting at what was left of the Commissariat-Sheds, and hoisted himself by that rope of Duty, up upon his stiff and aching legs.

* * * * *

He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The storm that had brewed and burst with the diabolical suddenness peculiar to Black Sea hurricanes had begun to pass over. Tears in the pall of sooty vapor rushing north-east showed patches of chill blue sky and blinks of frosty-pale sunshine. The batteries had never for an instant ceased bellowing and growling. Now men who had left off work, or play--to stare from the cliffs at the sight of war-steamers buckling up, and transports smashing like matchwood--went back to play or work again.

But, where the cliff lowered to a saddleback below the Fortress, a rescue-party of men of both Services--with lifebuoys and lines and a rocket-apparatus--were energetically busy--and the Ensign joined them and asked the reason why? When they pointed to the brink of the cliff, he crawled on his hands and knees, and, craning his neck over--saw that shipwrecked mortals no bigger than swarming bees were clinging to a fragment of wreckage--jammed amidst jagged rocks and boiling surges, a sheer three hundred feet below.

The question argued was, who should be lowered down and make fast a line, by which these perishing wretches might be hauled into safety? They would have settled the thing by drawing of lots. But Fate stepped in in the person of the bullet-headed young subaltern of the Cut Red Feathers, who shouted as he unbuckled his sword-belt, untied his sash, and threw off his mud-stained fur-coat.

“I’m the owner’s son, and this is my affair, I’m blest if it ain’t! I’m dam’ if anybody goes down that cliff but me!”

He had not the least desire to die, but it had suddenly been revealed to him as by a mental lightning-flash, that there was but one way to cleanse the tarnished name of Jowell. Not by discarding it--but by good deeds purifying it, and sweetening it in the nostrils of honest men.

As they made fast the line about him, he fumbled in his breast and pulled out a little note-case, calling out:

“I want some fellow to take charge of this!”

No one volunteering, he scanned the faces of the throng about him--and lighted on one that, despite a shag of crimson beard--he knew. He said, moving over to the owner, a tall, broad-shouldered, ragged soldier, in the tatters of a Lancer uniform, and holding out his hand to him:

“You’re the man who saved me in the wreck of The British Queen, and wouldn’t tip me your fist afterwards. Have you any objection to doing it now?” He added, as Joshua Horrotian complied shamefacedly: “And as you’re a kind of cousin, you might look after this ’ere note-case. There are some flimsies in it, and two letters that are to be posted, supposing I don’t come up from down there! You can keep the tin in the event I’ve mentioned, and spend it as you choose! Do you twig? And have my sword and sash sent to my mother! Now, ain’t you beggars about ready to lower away?”

And they lowered away--swimmingly for a hundred-and-fifty feet or so, and then the gale--that had been crouching and holding its breath--roared and leaped. And the hope of the house of Jowell was beaten into a red rag against the face of those stupendous precipices of pudding-stone, in less time than it takes to write these lines.

He sobbed out “Mummy!” as the life went out of him, and something plucked at the vitals of a dowdy woman, separated from him by thousands of miles of dry land and bitter water, and she cried out: “My boy!...” And then there was nothing left for those on the cliff-top, but to haul the limp and broken body up again.

XCVIII

Upon the morning that saw the wreck of The Realm in Balaklava Bay, Thompson Jowell traveled up to London, big with the determination that what he had planned should not be carried out. It would be difficult to arrest the hand of his hired Fate, but with tact and promptitude it could be managed. He eased his mind by saying that it could, as the London Express carried him to Paddington at the Providence-defying speed of thirty miles an hour.

Even as he composed his cautiously-worded cablegram a wire from the Admiralty was lying on his office-desk. But he felt happier than he had done for months, and correspondingly virtuous as he chartered a hackney cab and drove to the City--and got out at the paved entrance to the narrow alley of squalid houses in the shade of the Banking House of Lubbock and Son.

It was a moist, foggy November forenoon, and the yellow gas-jets made islands of light in the prevailing murkiness.... Broadsheets papered the gutters, advertising the Latest Intelligence from the Crimea. Fate had arranged that Jowell’s newspaper should not be delivered at his country seat that morning, and that--absorbed in the composition of his message--he should have omitted to buy one at the railway station. It occurred to him that he would buy one now.

He thrust his big hand in his trousers-pocket and wagged his umbrella at a scudding newsboy. The boy darted on, and Jowell condemned him for a young fool. Then a coatless, shivering misery, with wild eyes staring through a tangle of matted hair--padded up on blue and naked feet and thrust a paper under the nose of the Contractor, saying:

“Buy it, sir! It’s the last I have!”

“Give it here!” snorted Jowell, grabbing it and fumbling for a penny. As he dropped the copper in the dirty hand, he knew that he and the sea-green Standish had met again. The ex-clerk laughed huskily as he recognized his old tyrant, and said, in a voice that shook and wobbled with some strange emotion:

“Keep your damned money! I’ll make you a present of the paper! I’ve prayed for a chance like this ever since my wife died!”

With a shrill, crazy laugh he shoved the penny back into the stout hairy hand with the big showy rings upon it, and was swallowed up in the moving crowd and blotted out. And Jowell damned him for an impudent hound, and pitched the coin angrily after him. And a guttersnipe pounced on it, turned a Catherine-wheel with a flourish of dirty heels, and vanished. And Jowell, standing under the gas-lamp at the head of the alley, tucked his umbrella under his arm, and opened the newspaper. These headlines caught his eye:

“GREAT GALE IN BALAKLAVA BAY.

DAMAGE TO ALLIED FLEETS’ WAR-SHIPS.

FOUNDERING OF ‘THE REALM’ TRANSPORT WITH ALL HANDS.

HEROIC CONDUCT OF YOUNG BRITISH OFFICER

MEETS DEATH IN EFFORT TO SAVE SHIPWRECKED MEN.”

By Gosh! the thing had happened, and would have to be made the best of. The boy would come round, by-and-by. Thompson Jowell folded the newspaper, and walked down the alley to his office, and rolled in amongst the pale-faced clerks, who did not dare to lift their heads from their ledgers, knowing what they knew already, and went in silence to his private room.

And Chobley, the Manager, peeping out of his own little glass-case, said to himself that it would be better to leave his employer to himself for a little. Hence we may gather that Chobley had peeped into the Admiralty telegram that lay waiting on the blotting-pad.

Jowell opened it, sitting at his table. It briefly conveyed the news, and condoled with him on the irreparable loss of his gallant son. He did not collapse as on a previous occasion. He sat very still after he had read the message, with his ghastly face hidden in his thick, shaking hands.

His son, for whom he had saved, and planned, and plotted, and swindled, who was to become a Titled Nob and found a race of Nobs that should carry down into remote posterity the glories of the paternal name, had repudiated the name, and cast off his father, and gone down to death, defying and disowning him.

He lifted his livid face and rolled his bloodshot eyes about the office, and the sentences of the letter he had burned seemed written on the dingy wall-paper and woven into the dirty carpet on the floor. An organ in the street was grinding out a popular air, and they fitted themselves to it, were jarred out over and over in maddening repetition. He knew that he must soon go mad if this sort of thing went on.

* * * * *

There was courage in the man. He took pen and paper and wrote a letter to the firm of underwriters who had insured The Realm, making it clear that he would accord no grace in the matter of the great sum they would have to pay. His name was Peter Prompt in such matters, he added, and had always been. And then he penned an additional sentence or so that made the Senior Partner open his eyes.

His letter directed, sealed and stamped, he pulled himself out of his chair, took his umbrella from its usual corner, and went about his City business in the usual way. Save that his eyes were bloodshot, and that he wore no hat, there was nothing out of the common in his appearance. Yet, wherever he went, by something that, unknown to him, kept cropping up in his conversation--he left the impression that grief had turned his brain.

He became conscious ere long that he was bareheaded, and supplied himself with the needed article--with the latest thing in mourning bands upon it--at his hatter’s in Cornhill. Leaving the shop, he blundered into the capacious waistcoat of Sowell, who was walking arm-in-arm with Powell and Cowell. And they wrung his hands and tenderly condoled with him, lengthening their faces that were expanded in irrepressible smiles of happiness, and squeezing tears into eyes that were twinkling with relief and joy.

For the wreck of The Realm had saved the credit of the Army Contractors. The quills of Tussell of The Thunderbolt and those other War Correspondents who told barbed truths were robbed of their venom. They were to be feared no more. Henceforth everything that was lacking to the health and comfort of the British Eastern Expedition would be proved to have been contained in that capacious scapegoat. There would be no end to the possibilities of the transport--safe at the bottom of Balaklava Bay.

And the sacrifice of young Mortimer had wreathed the crime of Jowell with a halo of impeccability. Sowell, Cowell, Powell and Co. could hardly refrain from chuckling, and digging him in the ribs. And they bore him off to lunch with them in a private room at a well-known City tavern, where Bowell, Dowell, Crowell, Shoell, and others of the fraternity were to meet them by appointment. And they plied the bereaved parent with meats and wines, and flattered and cockered him. After the cloth was drawn, their exultation bubbled over. There were toasts and speeches, full of allusions of the sly and subtle kind. And the health of their idol being drunk with acclamations, he got up heavily out of his chair to make a speech.

“Gentlemen...” he began.

There were protestations. Cowell would rather have heard the words “My friends” from the lips of a man so endeared to those present by long years of business association and successful enterprise, as his honored friend, Thompson Jowell. There were cries of “Hear, hear!” at this.

“By Gosh! You shall have your way!” said Jowell thickly, beating his big knuckles heavily on the shiny mahogany. Then he cleared his throat and began:

“My friends, if you do this thing that you have planned to do I will never come home again or call myself by your name, or take another sixpence of your money. Don’t do it, Governor! Don’t do it, for God’s sake! He might forgive you! I never should, I know!”

He smiled upon the sickened faces round the table, waiting for the applause that should have greeted the shoddy sentiment he had intended to dish up for them.... He did not know that he had repeated the words of his dead son’s last letter; or that he had wound up his communication to the underwriters by quoting them.

He must have left the confederates staring, for he found himself in the street, walking Westwards at a great rate.... It was now dark, and very wet--and the people who passed him were for the most part sheltered by umbrellas, and omitted to notice the stout man in the mourning hatband and flaring waistcoat, who walked with his coat unbuttoned heedless of the pouring rain.... But it seemed to Jowell that eyes followed him, and fingers pointed at him--and that the sentences of Mortimer’s last letter flared at him from every hoarding, and were written in fiery characters upon the pavement under his feet.

He let himself into the great house in Hanover Square, shut up and blinded and looked after, in his absence from town--by a housekeeper and an under-butler. He was expected, and preparations had been made to receive him. But, explaining to the curtseying housekeeper that he would want no dinner, he passed into his sumptuous library and locked the door. Nobody ventured to disturb him, and when he came out it was nearly midnight. To the under-butler, who was waiting up to valet him, he spoke quite gently, bidding him fasten up the house and go to rest.

And then he took his candlestick from the hall-table and passed up the wide, shallow-stepped, softly-carpeted staircase and went into the splendid suite of rooms he had furnished for his boy....

* * * * *

Evidences of the young man’s sporting tastes were not lacking in the driving-whips and fishing-rods, single-sticks, fencing-foils and boxing-gloves that--in conjunction with divers brilliantly-colored pictorial representations of Stars of the Ballet, and Beauties of the Harem, yachts winning cups, favorite racers winning the Derby, and Pets of the Prize-Ring winning Championships--decorated the walls.

The costly inlaid banjo, upon which the hope of the House of Jowell had been wont to thrum out the accompaniment to “Villikins and His Dinah,” lay upon a cedar cigar-cabinet, beside an Oriental divan stood the gilded huqua that had never failed to make its owner deadly sick. A Turkish dressing-gown lay over a chair--an embroidered smoking-cap hung upon the corner of a gilded reading-stand.... Upon a table stood the Ensign’s library, consisting of an English Dictionary, a Bible presented by his mother on his tenth birthday; some Manuals of Infantry Drill and Musketry; sundry lives of celebrated pugilists, Ruff’s Guide to the Turf, the Stud Book, Stonehenge on the Horse, Hoyle on Whist, and the Sporting Almanac.

It had been the father’s whim that Mortimer’s rooms should be kept exactly as Mortimer had left them, and that nothing the Ensign had forgotten should be moved, or put away. There was a pair of doeskin military gloves he had worn, lying upon the toilet-table in the bedroom. And a strap that had formed part of a sword-belt lay forgotten upon the Brussels carpet near the foot of the bed.

Thompson Jowell picked up the strap, and as he set down his candlestick, he ran it between his fingers, remembering that it had belonged to his son, who, rather than be defiled by the golden mud that every roll in the gutter crusted more thickly upon him, had cast him off and chosen to die.

“I’m piling it up for you, Morty, my boy,” he heard himself saying, as he laid himself down heavily into the armchair by the huge carved four-poster, and sat there staring, and drumming heavily with his fists upon his knees.

* * * * *

He had throughout his life been a man destitute of imagination. Now, at this final hour, the gift was born in him. He heard thousands of voices cursing him. He saw thousands of blackened hands pointing at him. He knew himself a murderer. He realized that the millions he had gained by fraud and trickery had bought him estate in Hell.

* * * * *

“My name’s Done Brown--that’s what it is,” he muttered, thickly.

He lifted a shaking hand to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead, and started as the strap of the sword-belt dangled before his eyes. He lowered his hand and looked intently at the narrow band of tough, doubled buff-leather; pipeclayed, and having a solid gilt-brass ring stitched and riveted in the loop at either end. As he turned it musingly about in his fingers, he found that, doubled, and pushed through one of the gilt rings, it made a slip-noose. Then Imagination suggested the thing that he might do. No thought of the dowdy woman weeping for her son in the lonely house at Market Drowsing came to stay him. She had never been anything to Thompson Jowell but the mother of his son....

The thought of Mortimer spurred him to the act of desperation. He got up and went to the door that led from the bedroom into the luxuriously-furnished apartment adjoining, where the Stars of the Ballet and the Beauties of the Harem simpered from the walls. He measured its height with his eye--rolled an ottoman, worked in Berlin wools by Mortimer’s mother, to the right position--got heavily upon it--threw an end of the buff strap over the top of the door--shut the door, and put the noose about his short, thick neck. Then, supporting himself by the wooden molding of the upper framework--he drove the ottoman from him with a clumsy kick and flourish of his stumpy legs....

Lights danced before his eyes that might have been the fires of a distant camp. There were explosions in his ears that might have been the thirty-four pounders speaking from the batteries. There was a hissing as of steam from flooded engine-furnaces--and a crying and shouting as of men packed and crowded together upon the bursting decks of a great transport that was going down....

And then there was nothing but the dead body of a gross stout man in shiny broadcloth--hanging behind the door of the bedroom--waiting to scare the life out of the housekeeper when she looked in at seven upon a bright November morning to pull up the window-blinds.

* * * * *

The decision of the Coroner’s jury was that grief for the death of his son had temporarily unhinged the mind of the great Contractor, and there were many expressions of sympathy for the widow, and there was a pompous Funeral.

Cowell, Sowell, and the rest of the fraternity attended the solemnity. They shook their heads regretfully, and the water stood in their eyes. They said that he had been the very devil, sir! and that there never had been a man like him, and that there might never be another; and added that they were surprised he had left as little as three millions behind him--considering his opportunities!--and that they shouldn’t wonder if the gross amount turned out to be a great deal more!

It did; much to the benefit of the various charities among which the great fortune was divided by his widow, carrying out the expressed wishes of the son who would never have been his heir.

But even from the grave, his gross and greedy hand bore heavily upon the Army; nor has his spirit been altogether exorcised up to the present day. A Jowell was mixed up in the Forage and Remount scandals--which occupied the attention of a Commission of Inquiry--subsequently to the close of the most recent South African War.

It was a Neapolitan descendant of his--one Thompsono Jowelli--who washed the oats destined for the Artillery horses of the Italian Army in Tripoli, who filled up the Commissariat cattle with dry hay and coarse salt--drove them to the weighing-machines past those water-tanks in the Via Angioina--kept back part of the shipments of coffee and sugar intended for the troops--carried it back to its original starting-point, and re-sold it to the Government. And of these, as in the case of their distinguished forerunner, the inevitable lesson must be learned in the long-run.

No man can plunder and defraud the community without injuring and despoiling himself.

XCIX

When Sarah Horrotian heard of the strange and terrible ending of Thompson Jowell, she found it hard to believe that she was never to see his coarse red face again, never to be uprooted and ruined by him.... Even when weeks passed without foreclosure, she was still expectant of his turning up suddenly, big and gross and greedy as ever.... When at length she realized that he was dead, she forbade herself to hope.

For the man had a son, and the son would be no more pitiful than the father, thought Sarah Horrotian. When the legal representatives of Jowell’s widow wrote, saying that the interest and principal of her debt would be remitted--when the deed of mortgage was returned to her with “Canceled” written across it--the widow faintly wondered, having gone too numb to be joyfully surprised.

Nothing now was needed to set the farm upon its legs again but a little money and a certain amount of energy.... The money she might have found, but the springs of vitality had dried up. Though there were hours, when, sitting in the gaunt, bare farm-kitchen towards nightfall, staring at the handful of coals that burned in the capacious fire-grate, she knew that the desert of her heart might grow green things again, if only Josh and his wife came home.

And, though she told herself they never would, something in her secret heart gave the lie to her. She would have died rather than admit it to herself--but for fear lest they should come, after all, and miss her, and go away to return no more--she ceased to leave the house. Presently the news spread that Widder Horrotian had come down in the world, and gone crazy-like, and never even crept outdoors to look for eggs in the tenantless sheds and empty pigsties--and that you could range over the whole place wi’out coming athirt the woman at all.

Gangs of marauding boys ventured first, after ungathered apples and unharvested turnips; and then their seniors began to take a fearful joy in nocturnal visits from which they returned, bending under mysterious loads.

The fowls disappeared--the wood-stack melted--the farm and garden tools took to themselves wings, and the vegetable shed was broken into one night, and gutted. Discovering this, the widow realized that when the flour in the garret, and the potatoes in the cellar; the sides of bacon hanging in the kitchen, and the cheese under the press in the dairy should be eaten, Want would come knock at the door of Upper Clays Farm.

Yet when the threshold was approached by ragged tramps with mendacious stories of misfortune, or lean and hairy men with scurvy-marked faces, who said simply that they were invalided soldiers who had been sent home from the Front--Sarah gave of what she had, without reproach or girding. To these last, especially when they came limping on crutches, or showed bandaged wounds, or sleeves empty of arms, she was almost gentle. None of them could tell her anything of Joshua Horrotian, except that two squadrons of the Hundredth Lancers had ridden in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Hope was all but dead in the woman, when upon a sultry summer evening, the white gate clashed behind a tall, thin, ragged, red-haired and bearded man--and a shabby woman carrying a baby--wrapped in the folds of a faded plaid shawl. As they stood faltering, doubtful of their reception, the heart of Sarah leapt within her faded wincey bodice, and the ice of her frozen nature broke up.

Always of formal gait and scanty gesture, there was now something eloquent, free, and almost noble in the woman’s action. She had no words--she was bankrupt of a single text to fit the occasion. But she set back the half-doors, and knelt down upon the worn stone threshold. Bowing her head, she crossed her thin arms upon her aching bosom, then spread them open wide, and waited so.

“Oh! my dear son, whom I have ill-used; and cast out and denied the right of heritage. Come, take your own, and forgive me, my son!--my son! Oh! my dear daughter, whom I have wronged so cruelly--try--try to pardon me! Teach your child to think of me forgivingly. For I have sinned, and the Lord has punished me with rods and scourges. Yet He must have relented towards me--for He has sent you home!”

In words like these the silent action and the mute gesture spoke to the returned wanderers. So they lifted Sarah up, and kissed her; and she wept and kissed them and their child, and was comforted. And they went into the house together. And with them Happiness, and in the end Prosperity, came back to dwell at Upper Clays Farm.

C

The three hospital-ships slowly rounded the promontory. Their anchors fell with a sudden plunge. The bugles sounded, the gangways opened, the ladders fell--the barges of the Turkish hospital-hulk below the Point of the Seraglio, hurried, with a host of other craft, to receive their load of wretchedness. No surf beat on the rotten planks and shifting stones of the landing-place, and yet the process of disembarkation was lengthy and slow.

Day waned, the sickly haze fell dead, and the atmosphere grew denser. A round, red sun, hanging over Constantinople, stared through the dark blue fog malevolently, like some ogre’s solitary eye. Presently by the light of flaming torches the endless procession of litters--carried by English and French sailors, Turkish gendarmerie, porters of the markets, and soldiers of the militia regiments of Artillery that had been recalled from Tripoli to man the batteries and garrison the forts of the Bosphorus--moved over the crazy planks of the landing-quay, and climbed the steep paved road that led to the great yellow stone Barrack Hospital, between the crowds of sightseers of all nations that walled them in on either side.

For men and women could not tear themselves away from the awful fascination of the spectacle, as scourged and thorn-crowned England staggered, bleeding, up her Hill of Calvary--even as it had been prophesied to Prince Gortschakoff by the Tsar, his master--who was so soon to lie a-dying on his sack of leather stuffed with hay.

* * * * *

There was one woman among the many who held to blackened hands that hung over the sides of litters, or staggered upwards, aiding some tottering cripple’s steps with the little strength they had.... You saw her as a lean, tanned, big-boned creature, with ropes of coarse black hair tumbling down over the tatters of a cavalryman’s cloak. Passionately she resisted some sailors who shouted at her--gesticulating and crying herrings on them.... All the litters were in use, they said. Her man was no worse off than hundreds! Let him bide by the roadside with the others, dead and living, who lay there waiting for bearers! What call had a common soger to be treated any better than the rest?

What call? But that the blaggyardly rapscallions would not stop and listen to her, Moggy Geogehagan would have let them hear a thing or two.... As it was, with her Jems drawing every breath like a bucketful of stones, there was no time to waste in arguing with the likes of them....

So she bowed herself, and hoisted the yellow parchment-covered skeleton that had been her man upon the shoulders that had carried many a brimming creel of herrings, and, leaning on a knotted staff she had, began to make the ascent.

A few steps, and the woman tottered. But that a black-eyed, white-haired and bearded man, in worn gray traveling clothes, broke through the hedge of spectators, and lent his wasted strength to eke out hers, she would have fallen with her precious load.

So together they carried Jems Geogehagan up the stone-paved road that led to England’s Calvary. As long as Moggy lived--and she did not die for many years--she remembered that stranger’s face.

The man was Hector Dunoisse. Nor did he ever forget how--as they reached the summit of the toilsome ascent, and the great archway of the Barrack Hospital gaped before them--he saw at last the woman he had come so far to find.

* * * * *

She stood upon a rising knoll of ground, upon the right of the entrance to the Hospital. As in his dream of her, she wore a plain black dress, and a black silk kerchief was tied over the frilled white cap. She was very pale; her eyes burned gray-blue fire beneath her leveled brows, and her lips were colorless and closely set.

Officials of various grades, in mufti and in uniform, were grouped behind her. Nurses in gray, or brown holland dresses and white caps gathered about her: the black habits and white guimpes of the Sisters of Mercy were actively conspicuous among the rest. And as her keen, observant eyes glanced hither and thither--and swift orders dropped from her lips--one nun after another would dart from her side and vanish; to return and speed forth again--diligent as little black-and-white humble-bees obeying the orders of their Queen.

It is upon record that all through the day, all through the night of fog-bleared moonlight and far into the morning that followed, Ada Merling stood while the sick and wounded were being carried into the Hospital.

Strong men grew weary, and went away in search of rest and refreshment. Nurses collapsed, and were succeeded by other nurses. Relays of bearers were replaced by fresh relays. But the Lady-in-Chief remained at her post unflinchingly, and the white-haired man toiled on, and never stopped. For the strength and endurance that breathed from the still composure of Ada Merling seemed, despite his weakness, to communicate itself to Dunoisse. He was giddy, and faint, and breathless--his shoulders were galled, his hands were raw--his boots were in rags upon his blistered feet, when a rose-red dawn suffused the sky behind the wooded slopes of Bûlgurlû, and the last burden of wretchedness was carried in.

Then, and not until then, Ada Merling quitted her post, and followed. He who watched saw the tall, slight figure pass under the deep archway, saw the sentries present arms, saw the heavy gates shut. The last sightseers straggled away, and Dunoisse went down the hill-path, weary, and faint, and limping, yet happier and more at peace than he had been for many years. A tumbledown wooden eating-house, kept by a Greek named Demetrios, stood in those days near the landing-quay of Scutari. Dunoisse obtained a miserable room with a poor bed in it, slept for an hour or two, ate what they put before him, and returned to the Hospital.

CI

Changes were taking place in that vast, uncleanly caravanserai. Soldiers’ wives were washing linen, surgeons and nurses were passing to and fro. Working-parties of orderlies with barrows, brooms, and shovels, were gathering up waste-paper and vegetable refuse; removing from the great quadrangle derelict tin cans, piles of cast-off rags, and decomposing carcasses of cats and dogs. Others were bringing buckets of broth, milk, tea, and coffee, and trays of bread from the huge untidy kitchens, soon to be transformed into models of good management and economical excellence. Others--for the Red Reaper made his harvest daily--so that there was always room for more--no matter how many were received into the Hospital--were carrying the dead to the long trenches full of quicklime that scarred the hillside under the nightingale-haunted cypresses of the vast Cemetery of Scutari.

* * * * *

Fortune favored Dunoisse in his search for Ada Merling. He found her standing near a storehouse, barred, and fastened with its heavy Turkish lock, and guarded by a stolid Irish infantryman. Two nuns were with her--a minor official of the Hospital argued and gesticulated--the situation was evidently one of strain. As Dunoisse drew near, he heard her say to this personage:

“But, my good sir, this store contains most of the bales and cases that I brought with me from England. And I am in authority here!”

The man stammered something about an order from the Deputy Inspector-General.

She returned:

“It has been applied for, and has not been received; and patients are hourly dying for want of the nourishment and comforts that are contained in this store. Under the circumstances----”

“Under the circumstances there is nothing for it but to wait! Excuse me, madam!”

The official spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders, bowed and evaporated. She looked from his retreating back to the nuns’ faces, saw loyalty framed in bands of starched linen, and issued a mandate in unfaltering tones.

“Find me a hatchet, Mother Aquinas. Look for an iron bar, or a beam light enough for us to handle, Sister Jerome! For we are going to break open that door!”

The sentry muttered, bringing the butt of his musket sharply to the flagstones.

“Ma’am, av ye do, ’tis myself will smarrut for ut!... Flogged, an’ broke will I be, an’ divil a lie!”

His starting eyes and scarlet face confirmed his sincerity. She said to him:

“You shall not be flogged! I would strip my own shoulders to the lash rather than that you should suffer! Stand aside!” She caught up a stone and struck upon the wooden lock.

One of the nuns had found, and now brandished, an ancient, rusty chopper. The other had a bent poker, disinterred from a heap of scrap. As they advanced upon the door, the sentry whimpered, gave in, and put down his musket, crying:

“Stand away, ma’am! Hould harrud, Sisthers! I’ll do ut, be the hokey! The knife to my buttons--the lash to my back--divil a one av me cares wan way or the odher! Give me a hoult av the chopper!” He amended, for Dunoisse, with a brief word to the nun, had already possessed himself of the weapon. “The poker, thin--since the gintleman has a taste for the other article!--and we’ll be in among the blankuts and broth-bottles before yez can say ‘knife!’”

The door yielded to their united attack upon it. As the Sisters darted joyfully in, as the sentry resumed his musket, Dunoisse knew that he was recognized. For Ada Merling’s eyes were fixed on him, and a faint tinge of color suffused her paleness. He threw down the chopper on the scrap-heap and approached her, saying hurriedly:

“Miss Merling, I trust I have not alarmed you by an appearance you were not prepared for? When you have time to listen to me, I will explain why I am here.... Meanwhile, let me serve as best I may in this house of sickness and anguish, under an assumed name, for it will be best that my own should be forgotten! You will not deny me that comfort, I hope?”

“Not if it is a comfort,” she said, with her great eyes fixed upon him, and her delicate lip quivering. “But--are there not grave reasons for your desire to remain unknown? I cannot but suspect it and fear it. You look so worn, and changed from what you were!...”

“I am changed, as you say,” returned Dunoisse, “but the change is not altogether due to long sickness and close imprisonment----”

“Can it be possible?... You have really been a prisoner?” she asked, looking at him strangely; and he replied:

“I have been confined in a military fortress of Northern France for the last six months.”

“I dreamed it!”

The words had broken from her despite her will to stay them. To Dunoisse the utterance brought revival of life and hope. He drew nearer, and said, with deep, vibrating earnestness:

“Miss Merling, I was imprisoned without trial, for no crime, but for a desperate effort to retrieve a great wrong that I had done--at the instance of my superiors, unknowingly.... Should you hear ill of me, do not judge me!--do not condemn me!--try to believe that I have told you the very truth!”

“I do believe you!”

The words, softly spoken, conveyed unfaltering sincerity. He looked his gratitude, and said, in broken tones:

“You have no time to listen to the story now, but when you are free, you will hear me tell it?” He added, as she bent her head in assent: “And until then I will do what service I may in the Hospital. Years back, had I listened to you, I should have plucked myself from the morass of vanity and sensuality in which I was slowly, surely sinking. But I had gone too far to draw back. So I took, and spent, that money I had vowed never to touch, and leagued with rogues to put myself upon the throne of Widinitz, and was repaid, and richly, in disgrace and failure. You see, I hide nothing from you! Even in my days of blindness, you were for me the ideal of a woman, noble and pure, disinterested and true!”

She said, putting out her hand entreatingly:

“Your praise is undeserved. I have often reproached myself since, for the lack of tact and discrimination which I showed that night in our conversation at the Embassy. Upon the first occasion of our meeting, you may remember that you bestowed your confidence upon me very freely, very generously.... Possibly that is why I spoke to you candidly, as an old friend or an elder sister, forgetting that I had no right....”

“The right was yours!” said Dunoisse, gripping his thin hands together and speaking low and eagerly. “It is yours to-day! it will always belong to you! In exchange, you have given me a noble woman to believe in, an earthly angel to be my guardian and guide. How can I speak to you, who are so much above me, of what is in my heart towards you? How dare I dream----”

He broke off, for she had silenced him with an entreating look.

“I must go!” she said, and penciled a hasty line in a memorandum-book taken from her apron pocket, and tore out the scribbled leaf, and put it in his hand. “Give this to the Head of our Medical Department, Surgeon-Major Cray, if you are in earnest in your wish to help us? When I have leisure, we shall meet again, and I will hear your story. And in the meantime, have courage! You are among friends here!”

“If I have one in you,” said Dunoisse, deeply moved, “I need no other, for God has given me the best of all!... Yet one question I must entreat you to answer, before you leave me. You said just now that you had dreamed I was a prisoner.... To me, as I walked upon the ramparts under guard one day last March, came a message, in answer to a cry of waking anguish. For I called upon a woman’s name in my loneliness and desolation, and the woman answered--

“‘I hear you! Oh! where are you!’...”

It was the unforgettable voice, the very words that were graven upon his memory. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were starry, the rosy flush had risen to her very hair. He said, with a shock of joy in the revelation:

“I am sure, but I need words to confirm the belief that is mine already. Answer me, I entreat you! Was not the voice that answered yours?”

She bent her head and hurried swiftly from Dunoisse, leaving him standing in the great Hospital quadrangle, under the hot, blue, November sky.

The blood in his veins sang a song of hope. New life had come to him. He pressed the scribbled memorandum to his lips, and hurried in search of the Head of the Medical Department. Helpers were sorely needed; the services of the new volunteer were eagerly accepted. And for weeks Dunoisse wrought among the wounded in the Hospital of Scutari. No one cared to ask his name; to those he nursed he was a hand that raised and fed--a voice that spoke consolation--nothing more tangible. Nor during the weeks of toil and exertion that followed did he exchange a word with the woman who had become the one star of his lonely night. But he saw her, and that was enough. Wherever help and sympathy, skill and courage, were most needed, she was to be found unfailingly. Slight creature that she was, her strength seemed superhuman; the fire of zeal that burned in her was quenchless. She breathed her spirit into those who worked with her: they seemed to need no rest.

The most revolting cases, the most arduous duties, were hers invariably, by right, and claim, and choice. Anæsthetics were not supplied by Britannia for use in her military hospitals; surgical science was as yet in its infancy--but the presence, the voice, the touch, of Ada Merling nerved men to endure, unflinchingly, the atrocious agonies of amputation; if she stood by, there was no outcry when the sharp saw cut into the flesh, or bit through the bone.

And at the end of the long day, when Night had fallen upon the ancient city of the Byzantine Emperors, and porters, hawkers, and beggars slept, wrapped in their ragged mantles, on the grass slopes where Io rested--and only a few silent nuns on night-duty moved through the corridors of the Hospital of Scutari--a twinkling light would grow into vision at the end of those dark halls of anguish--echoing with shrieks of delirious laughter--death-rattles, and groans....

Like a Will-o’-the-Wisp of charity and mercy, a little brass lamp, carried in a woman’s hand, would move forwards--deviate to right or left, stop for a moment--then flit on again.... It is upon record how the blackened lips of the dying soldier kissed the shadow of the pure, clear profile of her who bore it, as it glided over his pillow. He buried his haggard cheek where it had been, and slept, when she had passed.

CII

When fever touched Ada Merling with his scorching wing, there was consternation among the staff, and grief among the patients of the Hospital. The attack was severe, but short; she was removed, during its continuance, to a small garden-villa adjoining the great Cemetery of Scutari.

And there, as she walked on the short, sweet grass, under the vast and ancient cypresses, Dunoisse--having been sent for--came to her; and had no words, seeing her pale and wan and wasted. She held out to him her thin, white hand, and said, with her smile of infinite sweetness:

“Now that I have leisure, I keep my promise. I do not think you need an introduction to Sister Jerome, who has nursed me so kindly and so well.”

Dunoisse exchanged a handshake and a smile with the Sister, who was a round-faced, bright-eyed little creature, with a voice sweet as a piping bullfinch’s, and the activity of a kitten or a child. To see Sister Jerome kiss a baby was to think of a blackbird pecking at a cherry.... When she dressed her patients’ cruel wounds, she joked and laughed with those who were able to enjoy chatter. But tears dropped from her bright eyes on the dressings whenever they could drop unseen.

Sister Jerome flitted up and down like a little black-and-white humble-bee between the alleys of turban-capped or flower-decked tombstones, while Dunoisse told his story to the accompaniment of the doves’ hoarse cooing in the branches overhead. And as he spoke, he sometimes looked for belief and sometimes for comprehension; and never failed to find them in Ada Merling’s eyes.

“I did not need to be told,” she said, when he had ended, “that you have suffered most cruelly. It is written on your face.... Possibly another might tell you you blame yourself needlessly--you were a tool in the hand of a master who was responsible--but I shall not do so!”

She sank down upon the prone trunk of a great cypress that old age had leveled, and in the characteristic way clasped her hands about her knee. She had on a plain gray dress of some soft material; a white silk shawl was wrapped about her. Not being on duty, she wore no cap, and the pure Greek outlines of the lovely head, with its classic coils and braids of golden-brown hair, were revealed in all their beauty--and the pale sea-shell pink of returning health was upon the oval cheek.

“I knew it!” she said, as though communing with herself, and forgetful of the man who stood beside her. “That the secret feeling of this man towards England and her people was fanged and venomous hatred, something has told me whenever I looked him in the face.... For the very generosity that harbored him, as for the indifference that merely tolerated while it despised him, he was bound to repay in his own coin. And that coin has been minted in Hell! And it has not only scorched and blistered the fingers that took it, but it has carried with it a pestilence that scourges and devastates.... And now that mourning, and sorrow, and ruin and desolation, sit in ashes by Britain’s hearth--he comes knocking at the door with soft words of sympathy. For those who are the victims of his vengeance will never realize it! he has learned in those years of poverty, obscurity and humiliation, to hide his hate so well!”

She might have been a Fate as she linked her long white fingers and looked out beneath her leveled brows over the olive-groves and gardens fringing the Cemetery, and beyond the sapphire-blue water, populous with boats and shipping, towards the European shore. A moment she waited, gathering her forces, and then she drew a deep breath, and rose, and said to Dunoisse, holding out her hand:

“You tell me that it is your purpose to leave here and go to the Crimea, obtain an audience of Lord Dalgan, and unfold the plot to him. It will be a difficult task to convince him--almost an impossible task. Still--since to you as to me the voice of conscience is the Voice of God--go--and Heaven be with you and bring you safely back again!”

The thrill in her sweet voice, the magic of the hand that gently touched his, thawed the old ice about Dunoisse’s heart. He fell down upon his knees before her, and caught a fold of her dress and kissed it, crying passionately:

“Oh! my good angel, from whom once I turned away! oh! dearest and noblest of women, I bless you for those words that hold out hope to me! I swear to you that I will atone!”

He sought her hands, and she yielded them to his clasp, and he kissed them lingeringly. He folded them in his own, and laid them upon his heart, and cried:

“How can one speak to one so spotless of an earthly passion? And yet I will earn the right, one day. Tell me--when I have erased all those black entries from the book of the Recording Angel--when I have washed my soul clean of the guilt of all this blood--tell me that I may come to you and claim my priceless joy--my great reward of you! Give me some sign, even though you do not speak!”

Their eyes met. For answer she leaned over him, and kissed him once, upon the lips, divinely.... Her mouth was a chalice of strengthening. The clasp of her hands gave new life.... He said, exultantly, as they rose up, still looking in each other’s faces:

“Oh, my beloved! I will deserve so much of God, that one day He will give me even you!”

“Hush--hush!” she said, and touched his lips with her cool hand to bid them silence. He kissed the hand, glanced downwards and stooping, disentangled from the soft material of her dress a trailing branch of delicate, vividly-green creeper, hardly larger in leaf than the climbing rose, and set with long sharp thorns.

“What is that? How beautiful and how unusual!” she commented. Then--as he twisted the dewy green leaves and the sharp prickles into a rough circlet and offered it to her, she took it from him silently--saying to herself: “It is always the hand we love that gives us the crown of thorns!”

And then she called the nun, and bade him good-night, and went back to the little painted wooden villa standing in its nightingale-haunted garden on the main road to Ismid.

And Dunoisse knew a mad impulse to follow the tall, lightly moving figure, clutch at the softly flowing garments--stay her with desperate prayers not to leave him without one more kiss or at least a word of tenderness. But he fought it down, and went by the northern avenue back to his narrow, stuffy quarters at the Hospital, said farewell to his fellow-workers, and left next morning for the seat of war.

CIII

“FRENCH HEADQUARTERS, “BEFORE SEVASTOPOL, “December, 1854.

_To His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces. Staff Headquarters, near Balaklava._

“MY LORD,

“I have to inform your Lordship that a person, passing under the alias of M. Cain, and who is known to have left Scutari en route for the Crimea, is an ex-Brigadier General of His Imperial Majesty’s private staff, named von Widinitz-Dunoisse, who was employed upon Survey in Bulgaria a few years previously, and upon his return to Paris, in May last, committed a gross outrage upon the person of the Emperor, and was consequently deprived of his rank in the French Army, and imprisoned in the Fortress of Ham. Of exceptional ability--this officer--who was released by the clemency of his Imperial Master--rendered excellent service to his Majesty, who has attributed his fantastic conduct and the strange suspicions that apparently possess him, to an intermittent fever contracted in the Dobrudja, the effects of which have permanently unhinged his mind.

“Madness is in the family of this unhappy gentleman, who, as a pupil at the Technical School of Military Instruction, attacked and dangerously wounded a fellow-student with a broken fencing-foil. His mother, the late Princesse Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz-Dunoisse, was for many years in confinement, and died as the inmate of a lunatic asylum a few months ago.

“Should your lordship find yourself annoyed by the assiduities of this person, you are respectfully requested to send him under guard to our Headquarters, where he will be placed under the human surveillance that his malady requires.

“I beg to assure your Lordship of my distinguished considerations,

“A. BOISROBERT,

“Commander-in-Chief.”

Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in the Crimea, stood leaning an elbow upon the narrow mantelshelf of the clay-brick fireplace that had been built in the corner of the bare, comfortless room of the farmhouse that served him as Headquarters, as he perused this letter--which was penned upon a square sheet of blue official paper, emblazoned with the eagle of Sire my Friend.

The handsome, high-bred, resolute face of Moggy Geogehagan’s bould ould gintleman bore the stamp of weariness and exhaustion. The gallant martial figure in the blue frock-coat that looked so absurdly plain beside the profusely gold-laced and bestarred uniforms of the French Generals, had gained a stoop; the dark gray trousers hung loosely on the wasted limbs.

It was dusk; by the light of the low-burning fire, and by the flicker of the stable-lantern that was held by an orderly who waited just inside the door as though for instructions--you saw the significant disorder of the place.

Papers were piled upon the central stove, papers were heaped upon the trestle-table, upon the three chairs and my lord’s narrow camp-bedstead. Papers filled the wine-hampers that served as waste-paper baskets, papers littered the floor of beaten earth, yet every moment fresh telegrams and dispatches were being brought in by breathless messengers.... One of my lord’s Staff aides-de-camp, a handsome, fair-haired, long-legged young Lieutenant of Lancers, came in, bringing a great handful, as my lord thoughtfully folded the letter that he had been reading and scratched his strong old chin with it in rather a characteristic way he had, and said to the orderly in quiet, level tones:

“Sergeant-Major Ransome, if the person who has again applied for an interview be still waiting in the courtyard, perhaps you had better bring him here!...” He added, taking three telegrams and a couple of bulky envelopes from the aide-de-camp: “And you will wait in the ante-room, Foltlebarre, and see that they have the horses in readiness. I purpose to visit the Cavalry Camp and the Camp of the Second Division before I go to bed.”

“But you had no sleep last night, my lord, or the night before that!”

The boy, scarlet to the ears, met the kindly, almost quizzical look that responded. My lord said, and condescension and hauteur mingled in his tone:

“I am obliged to you, my dear Foltlebarre, but rest will come for me in the due course of things. At present there is duty to be done.”

He opened a telegraphic message from the War Office. It read:

“Communicate whether Captain Cronan Hundredth Fusiliers has been bitten by a snake or a centipede? Family urgently desirous to know.”

A second telegram repeated this message with the addition of the words: “Highly urgent.” Amidst the innumerable interrogations, advices, demands, orders and counter-orders that had reached my lord that day, the casualty of Captain Cronan--who was son-in-law to a personage high in power at the Horse Guards, had figured prominently. My lord, with a stifled sigh of weariness, crossed the room and added the telegram to a file of others, as the orderly sergeant-major ushered in the person who had so urgently sought an interview, and saluted and retired, on the heels of the aide-de-camp.

* * * * *

We know who the stranger was. The interview was brief, and as Ada Merling had prophesied, fruitless. Dunoisse had no sooner made the purport of his visit plain, than my lord said, gently but authoritatively, checking him with a gesture of the hand:

“No more, sir! You have sought me, it may be, in all sincerity, but the obligations of my post forbid me to hear you to the end. You have suffered imprisonment--possibly ill-usage--and your views have become distorted. My sympathy for your evident suffering induces me to be lenient. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to hand you over to the representatives of your country, who would deal with you, harshly, it might be....”

He added: “Do you not suppose that reports and accusations of treachery have not already reached me, as they probably have the French Commander-in-Chief! You must have little experience if you doubt this!... Yet I tell you, that were these accusations true, I should not alter, by one single hair’s-breadth, my method of procedure. For it would be better that the British Army of the East should perish to a man in the trenches before Sevastopol than that England should stoop to show suspicion of her Ally. Our interview is over.... Sir, good-night to you!”

And my lord struck upon a bell that stood upon his portable writing-table, and consigned the dismissed visitor to the guidance of the orderly. So, with a burning brain, and dazed eyes and unsteady feet, Dunoisse passed out into a frosty night, bitten in with cold, white, twinkling stars--and went down, stumbling over the deep ruts of the snow-covered road, towards the lights of the Khutor Farm.

* * * * *

It was all over, all over! No atonement was possible!... Weary and weak, and sick at heart, he reached the farmstead, turned in under a shed where some sacks had been thrown upon the ground, flung himself face downwards upon these, and either slept or swooned.

When he awakened or revived it was daybreak. A couple of Zouaves passed him, making their way northwards towards the French headquarters after a night of drink and gambling. One of them was singing in a nasal tenor voice. As though in mockery the words came:

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

“O God!” cried Dunoisse, as the men passed, “be merciful and send me Death! For I cannot keep my vow to Thee and to the woman who has my earthly worship. It is not in my power to atone!”

A flush of rosy color filled his haggard eyes. He lifted them and saw--beyond the heights that were dotted with the Turkish defense-works, beyond the deep glen through which the darkling flood of the Tchernaya rolled downwards to the sea--topping the rugged line of hills to the eastward, where the fires of the Cossack camps sent up thin lines of smoke, blue-white and slanting northwards, the rising of the sun. And the disk of the luminary was pale, dazzling as burnished silver. And a broad, vertical bar of crimson rose above and below it--and a transverse bar of the same glowing, ruddy splendor made the semblance of a Crimson Cross with a central glory. And in that moment knowledge and power and strength came to the son of Marie-Bathilde. He knew what his atonement was to be.

He had money that had been returned to him upon his release from the Fortress. He bought a donkey and a canvas saddle with panniers that day in Balaklava, and with a store of simple comforts, bought at a great price from the masters of the store-ships in the Harbor, he began to go about amongst the camps of the Divisions, and to frequent the pest-houses called hospitals, and to visit the soldiers dying of hunger, and bronchitis, and pneumonia in the slushy, freezing trenches, and to do what good he might.

He wore a sheepskin cap and coat, and leggings of pig-leather. He made himself a dwelling in the crypt of a ruined Greek church. Under the inlaid picture of Our Lady on the wall he made his bed of withered leaves and Army sacking. He lived on the coarsest, plainest food--taking no more than was needed to sustain the life in him. It is not for nothing that one has Carmel in the blood.

And toiling thus, he forgot his griefs, for labor is a powerful anodyne. And still the war went on, and still the eyes of England turned towards the Upland, and still her sons died in thousands, and were buried in its marly soil.

* * * * *

The great Tsar died. Marshal Boisrobert retired, and was succeeded by Grandguerrier, the hot, fierce, stout little warrior of whom we know. When Dalgan breathed his last--when the gallant gray head sank under its overwhelming burden of overwork, exertion, grief, and anxiety--that is an unforgettable picture of the French Marshal standing by the deathbed in the bare room of the wooden farmhouse, his broad shoulders heaving--his swarthy, convulsed face hidden in the thick stout hands--weeping and sobbing unrestrainedly as a child for the friend who was no more.

He had a tender heart, that little, fiery man who had become Commander-in-Chief of France’s Imperial Army. Henriette might have been happy, had she married him.... And how exquisitely she would have played her part as Madame la Maréchale one may imagine, had not Fate stepped in, in the person of a little drummer of the Line.

* * * * *

For she visited the military hospitals of Kamiesch a few days subsequently to her arrival. As she was leaving the last ward, one of the Sisters of Mercy in charge pointed out to her this youth of eighteen, who had been blinded in both eyes by the explosion of a shell. And Henriette, glancing pitifully at the swollen, bandaged face upon the pillow, said with a shudder:

“Poor young man! How sad that he should suffer so cruelly! Ah! if his mother could only see him now!”

Some tone of the speaker’s seemed to reach the consciousness of the fevered sufferer upon the narrow pallet. He stretched out yellow, bony arms, groping towards the unseen sweetness. He turned his bandaged head towards it, and said, in a voice between a rattle and a gasp:

“Mother, mother, mother! They have brought you to me at last! Come and hold me, mother, my mother! Come and kiss me, and I shall get quite well!”

The nun in charge would have dissuaded Henriette, saying that the patient was not only wounded, but was suspected to be suffering from a malignant kind of fever, the true character of which had not yet declared itself. But Henriette was obstinate. She felt so strangely happy that day--it seemed to her that she must do something for somebody. And she ran to the squalid pallet and knelt beside it, saying, as though the little drummer had been a child indeed:

“Yes, yes!--I am your mother!... Come, now, be good! You disturb the other little ones. Be patient!--be quiet!--by-and-by you shall get well!”

She had never been so tender to one of the little pig-tailed girls who had been brought up by the market-gardener’s wife at Bagnères--but you will remember that Henriette could never say No! to a man. So, as the drummer still moaned to be held and kissed and cosseted, Henriette yielded, and touched with her own lips the poison-breathing lips of the pestilence-stricken--and laid the bandaged head upon her beautiful bosom--and hushed and soothed it there. She coaxed the drummer into taking food and medicine. She sang a cradle-rhyme and she rocked the dying lad to rest. Not the naughty little witch-song about the Archbishop’s cupboard, but a vague, tender lullaby, dealing with Our Lady, lilies, roses, angels and stars.

And the delirious parrot-cry was stilled in sleep, but a few days later Henriette was smitten with smallpox, of which the wounded drummer was already dead.

Symptom followed symptom in ugly, familiar procession. When the fever abated, there was no beauty left in the once witching face. The voice of honey, the sweet, enthralling smile, and the seductive shape were left, but beyond these, nothing. By-and-by she asked for a mirror.... The nun who nursed her brought her one, after repeated refusals. She looked in it, and said, almost with a smile to Grandguerrier, who had insisted upon being admitted to her bedside:

“I am even uglier than that poor boy, am I not? Well,--the best thing I can do now is to go back to my little girls.”

Grandguerrier raved and stormed, they say, but Henriette said No! this time, and said it firmly. And so she went away--she who upon that night you know of had made choice of Christ before all earthly lovers--she whom I, like so many others, have loved against my will.

True to her character of enchantress, she bewitched all those about her. For the nuns held her a saint--and to his dying day Grandguerrier believed her to be the noblest of women. And would you be surprised to learn that she played the rôle of perfect mother to the three little pig-tailed girls?

Man is merciless to the Henriettes, yet once there lived One Man who understood them; Who was merciful and chivalrous to the erring, perishable thing of clay His Hands had made. He drank pure water from the vessel of the Woman of Samaria--who was an elder sister of this Henriette of my story. As also was Mary of Magdala, who loved much, sinned greatly, and was forgiven. And, like the first, my sad, sweet prodigal, her store rifled, her treasure spent, held drink to the parched lips that thirsted; and even as the second, broke the box of spikenard--wiped the Sacred Feet with the silken veil of her tresses--embraced with passion the Holy Cross.

CIV

A day came when the Malakoff only replied with one shot to three that were fired from the batteries of the Allies, and the Second Bastion answered not at all. Between the yellow, smoke-wreathed hills and the glittering blue, wind-swept bay the fortress-citadel lay dying--she who had for so long owed life to the invigorating genius of Todleben.... Presently along her whole line of bastions no living creature moved. Ruin, Destruction, and Death, held sole possession. Amidst the red glare of conflagration--the shock of repeated explosions--the clouds of pale dust, and sooty smoke shot with ruddy flames that veiled the face of day--the clashing of bayonets and the roll of iron wheels--the garrison and the population streamed over the swaying bridge of boats that led to the northern shore; and when night came, and earth and sea and sky were wrapped in fire, it is on record that but three representatives of the invading Army of England witnessed the destruction of Sevastopol from the summit of Cathcart’s Hill.

“Oh, hang the place! Let it burn!” said the others. “We’re going to have a night in bed!”

And they had it. There were banquets subsequently, expeditions to the evacuated citadel, meetings and fusions of friends who had been foes; regimental balls and bonfires; Royal and Imperial congratulations. And then the camps of Balaklava and Kamiesch were deserted; and, to the strains of Partant Pour La Syrie and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer!” the diminished Army of Sire my Friend, and the crippled remnant of England’s Eastern Expedition, were recalled from the Crimea.

My Aunt Julietta will never forget that day, when the shabby, battered-looking transport steamed in slowly to the Dockyard quayside, and the bugle blew, and the gangways opened, and the ragged, hairy men--not a vestige of uniform remaining on the backs of nineteen out of twenty of them--began to march, or limp, or halt, or hobble ashore by companies, as the band that had come to meet them struck up “Home, Sweet Home.” And Captain Goliath McCreedy was not seen amongst them--and in her bitter distress and disappointment my Aunt ran up crying to a thin, ragged maypole of an officer with a long red beard--he would have called it a “bird”--reaching down to his middle. She meant to ask him where her husband was?--but her sobs prevented the words from coming. And the lean, red-haired giant shouted, “Juley! don’t ye know me?” and caught her in a huge embrace....

* * * * *

There was a Triumph in Paris and there were rejoicings in London, including a Service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul’s. All the Bigwigs and Nobs attended in state, and Cowell, Powell, Dowell, Bowell, Crowell, Towell, Rowell, and the rest of the fraternity, were present; and gave thanks behind their shining hats with ostentatious devoutness. It would have been a peculiarly appropriate season for a National Fast, and a Litany, with special clauses having reference to Cabbaging, but nobody seems to have thought of that.

Though that lamentable public spirit of distrust of the Army Contractor--instilled into the national bosom by the malignant demon Tussell, was never to be exorcised--has not been laid unto this hour.... And a day was to dawn when the crowned Imperial charlatan who had made France his mistress and his slave, was to see Great Britain--awake at last, if only in part, to the truth that she herself had been his dupe and victim--stand by with white arms folded over those old ineffaceable bosom-scars of 1854-56; while he whom she had befriended, believed in, championed--for whom her sons had been offered up in hecatombs of slaughter, wallowed in the dust, a fallen Power.

Not a single taunt, O my England! not the shadow of a smile of contemptuous pity; only the stern silence, the grave, immovable regard, and the arms folded over the bosom marred by those old, old cruel scars of THE CRIMEA. But, if his hidden hate of her long years before had amounted to obsession, judge to what a pitch of secret frenzy it was wrought when she afforded him, an exile, refuge from the well-earned vengeance of those whom he had ruled and ruined--a roof to shelter his disgraced and humbled head.

CV

In April, 1910, a radiant celestial traveler, with flaming silvery hair, came rushing back out of the inconceivable, immeasurable spaces that lie beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, drawn by that strange mysterious need that impels it--at the close of each successive period of eighty to eighty-five years--to revisit the dim glimpses of this speck of Earth, where once the Supreme Architect of the Universe dwelt, a poor man amongst men--and make its transit of the cooling sun, before it passes into the Southern Hemisphere, beyond the reach of the astronomer’s lens, pursuing the path appointed it to follow towards the unknown end....

In the opal dawn of mornings in late April it gleamed, a pale and sinister radiance under the white knee of the waning moon. In May it made a luminous streak of whiteness in the north-west after sunset, where an unknown comet had hung in the February of the year.

That strange new comet of February, and now this.... Old Hector Dunoisse was vaguely uneasy as he gazed at the dazzling-pale wonder. Did it presage some great approaching misfortune? Some visitations of War, or pestilence, or famine? Some cataclysmic disaster, such as the earthquake of Messina? Some great irreparable loss to the world in the sweeping away, by one swift stroke of the Death Angel’s sword, of some lofty, notable, familiar figure of man or woman, raised in virtue of high gifts, or lofty deeds, or elevated ranks above the heads of the rest?....

* * * * *

To each bird’s breast its own nest is the nearest. Old Hector trembled, remembering the great age of the woman who was the one joy and comfort of his life. But early in May, when the faces of men and women of British race were drawn and livid with suspense, as the electrical waves throbbed out from London, telling the hushed and waiting world how a great King’s last sands of life were dancing out of the glass, he breathed more freely, despite the sorrow that he felt.

“He was a pretty boy when first I saw him,” he said to one who brought him the latest, saddest news. “He was a splendid sportsman and an accomplished viveur, besides one of the greatest diplomats that have ever lived. He never spoke a discourteous word, or revenged a private grudge. He never pardoned an impertinence, or asserted his high rank, or forgot it! He fought for the political freedom of creeds he did not hold--he honored Art--and practiced hospitality. The world is better for his nine years’ reign! Take off my cap, my Sister,” he bade the nun, “and make for me the Sign of the Cross. May the soul of Edward the Peacemaker and the souls of all the faithful departed, by the Mercy of God, rest in peace!”

Thenceafter he was mentally less troubled, but yet in body he was failing. Those about him shook their heads. It was what they had long anticipated--what else, indeed, should be looked for but that one so laden with years should let their burden slip from the bowed shoulders? They did not know of his determination not to lay down life while yet his loved one lived.

The summer was gray, and wet, and cold. He suffered as all Nature did, for lack of wholesome vivifying sunshine. Rheumatic pains racked his paralyzed limbs; his great black eyes were less brilliant under their bushy arched eyebrows, his memory was less vivid, his speech less clear and concise. Sleep rarely visited him, to whom sleep was nourishment and tonic. When it came it brought terrible dreams. Dreams in which endless pageants of tortured faces and mutilated bodies, in bullet-pierced and shot-torn uniforms, defiled before him, and clashing martial music drowned the cries of dying men. And other dreams in which he, Dunoisse, died and passed into a gray void of Nothingness, in which no ray of the Divine Love might reach his groping soul--and wandered in a formless, boundless wilderness, peopled with dim intangible shapes that flitted by him--and when pursued turned on him faces of despair and horror unspeakable, crying: “Away! Trouble us not! We once were Christian men and lived on earth, were guided by priests and clergymen, and believed in the fair promises of Religion. Where now is God of Whom the preachers talked? Where are the spirits of those who have gone before with the Sign of Faith, in the blessed hope of Salvation? We cannot find One or the others--yet this is the World beyond the Grave!”

He would wake from such a dream in an agony. What consolation, then, to see, shadowed against the purple-black sky of midnight or the gray-white sky of dawn, the sculptured outline of the thoughtful bending head and the pure gentle face of his dear lady. He would look from it to the walnut Crucifix with the Emblems of the Passion, and reflect:

“God made her good, therefore He must be Goodness. And though a whole lifetime has gone by since my eyes saw, and my hands touched her--yet she lives, and is, and has her being beyond those snowy mountains of Switzerland and the broad fertile fields of France--and across the restless Channel, in the big black city of London I should find her--had I but strength to follow my will--had I but courage to disobey her command.”

For that had been the guerdon of his great and tireless labors, to be sent away empty-handed, beggared of all but a little hope. He had gone on patiently toiling among the sick and wounded soldiers in the camps at the Crimea, shunning no service that could be rendered, bearing the heaviest and most irksome burdens; always repeating to himself, over and over, the words he had said at parting to his beloved:

“When I have erased all those black entries from the Book of the Recording Angel!--when I have washed my soul clean of the guilt of all this blood, I will come and claim my priceless joy--my great reward of you! I will deserve so much of God that He will give me even you!”

Even when he knew her there, engaged in her great work of reforming and reorganizing the war-hospitals at Balaklava, he had made no attempt to see or speak with her; he had waited to be worthier still.... Sometimes a distant glimpse of the tall, slight figure was vouchsafed him, as she went from hospital to hospital with her nurses and Sisters of Charity; or her mule-drawn basket-wagon would rattle by, upon the uneven tracks that led to the various camps. But the man in the sheepskin coat and cap, who led the little donkey with panniers, was not recognizable among hundreds of other men, clad similarly. Or at least Dunoisse thought so.

But the yearning to touch her hand and hear her voice again was torture. One night, looking from afar at the light in the windows of the hut she occupied, it seemed to him that he could bear it no more. Trembling, he ventured to the door and knocked. A Sister, with a fair, kind, placid face, opened.... From her he learned that some days previously the Lady-in-Chief had been stricken down with a second attack of fever and conveyed to the Sanatorium; that the illness had yielded to treatment; but that the doctors would not hear of her remaining in the Crimea. And that she had, that very morning, been carried down to the harbor upon a stretcher, borne by soldiers, and accompanied by nurses and Sisters of Charity, and embarked, upon the yacht of a friend, for Scutari.

It was Summer, and the myriad wild-flowers of the Tauric Chersonese had sprung up upon the brown plains, and between the stones and boulders; and as in the beech-forest near the Inn of the Three Herons long ago, Dunoisse flung himself face downwards amidst the flaunting blooms and wept. Then he rose up and went back to his labors among the sick and suffering. But he wrote to her; and presently received a letter in the beloved handwriting, telling him that she had returned to England in feeble health.

* * * * *

The Allied Armies were withdrawn from the seat of war--the hospitals were closed, yet Dunoisse hesitated to follow her. He had not earned the right, it seemed to him. He volunteered as a surgeon’s assistant on one of the French hospital-ships and returned to Marseilles. Here he rendered service to his wounded countrymen, and--simultaneously with the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny--was called back to Paris, to be present at the death-bed of Marshal Dunoisse.

The stately mansion in the Rue Chaussée d’Antin had fallen into decay. A dusty board upon the weather-stained portico advertised it as Unfurnished and To Let. In the little ground-floor back room of the porter’s lodge, inhabited by Auguste and his plump-faced wife, the late master of the big house lay dying, his fur-lined cloak spread above the patchwork coverlet and drawn up to his long-unshaven chin. The curly-brimmed beaver hat was perched upon the top of the wardrobe--the gold-mounted teeth were in their morocco case on the deal toilet-table--the ambrosial wig hung upon the looking-glass--the big Malacca cane, its chased golden top replaced by a knob of tarnished pewter, lay beside the Marshal on the frowsy bed.... Monseigneur would have it, Auguste’s stout wife explained, to shake at devils that worried him. When he got too weak to do this she had set a plaster Crucifix on the chest of drawers that stood at the foot of the bed.

The Marshal’s race was nearly run, that was evident. But he was conscious, with lapses into semi-delirium. He recognized his son.

“When I said that Flemish Buonaparte should never pick my bones, I forgot you!” he told Hector. “So, when that woman of yours came to me for money for her dear imprisoned one--I gave, though I knew myself a fool! Then de Fleury sent to me, saying that--though your sentence was for life and the Emperor’s resentment was implacable--he could insure your freedom for--I forget how much, but I know it was a thumping sum of money!--and what in the name of a thousand thunders was a man with bowels to do? You were a poor creature, but Marie’s son, after all!--and so I let them plunder me.... Ah-h! What are you up to now, you rascals, you?”

He saw devils, and roared and brandished his big cane at them. Only in imagination, because his voice had sunk to a crackling whisper, and his hand was powerless. A little child--the year-old son of the ex-coachman’s daughter--sat on the bed, holding one of the shrunken fingers--undismayed by the fierce glare of the bloodshot eyes.... Monseigneur had been kind to Toto, Auguste’s wife whispered.... Dunoisse, seeing the end approach, signed to her to take the boy away.

* * * * *

A change of mood came upon the old man presently.

“Let me rise up!” he said to the coachman’s wife, a trifle wildly. “I tell you that I am in the presence of the great!...”

He added, with the rattle in his throat:

“Guilty, M. the President, upon all these counts and charges. But I never showed my back to an enemy, or gave the cold shoulder to a friend in trouble.... I am a soldier of Napoleon, I! And when I see him--even if he be chained down in Purgatory with imps swarming over him, I will draw my sword and cry: ‘Be off, you singed rapscallions!--I come, my Emperor!’ For I fear God,--but He knows me better than to suppose I shall turn tail before a rabble of fiends....” He made an ineffectual grasp at the cane--rose in imaginary stirrups, and thundered, in that crackling whisper: “Form column of squadrons! Behind the enemy is our rallying-point! Charge!”

Then he fell back into the hollowed bed limply as an empty saddle-bag, and Dunoisse, with an indescribable pang at the heart, knew that his father, who had loved him after all, was dead, and that he had died without a word of love or gratitude from the son for whom he had gone down beggared to the grave.

The poor remnant of a once handsome fortune was left to that son without conditions. The funeral over, Dunoisse sold what remained of the lease of the house--the furniture, plate, and pictures having mysteriously vanished--and left Paris for the East. Wherever the red star of battle burned, thenceforwards the son of Marie-Bathilde was to be found aiding the torn and mutilated victims of that grim Moloch we adorn with gold and scarlet; bow down before; give honorable titles to; hang with Orders and Crosses, as though in mockery of the Son of Peace, who died for Love upon the bitter tree.

When the Austrians crossed the Ticino and the French troops entered Piedmont, he quitted the hospitals of Lucknow and hurried to Italy. At Solferino he met with a kindred spirit, and erelong became enrolled a member of a band of high-souled men and women of many nations, who presently were gathered together under the banner bearing the symbol of the Crimson Cross. The funds that were needed to establish the Society upon a sound working basis were supplied from an unexpected source: for when Luitpold, Regent of Widinitz, quitted this life, having been predeceased by his wife, his son, and both his daughters, it was found, by some strange freak of will, that he had bequeathed his vast private estates to the son of Marie-Bathilde. Thus, the dowry of three hundred thousand silver thalers having been repaid to the Prioress of the Carmelite Convent at Widinitz, Dunoisse spent the huge sum that remained in the realization of his dream; and when Love and Pity, Charity and Mercy, were leagued all the world over, in a vast, comprehensive Society--when Kings and Emperors praised and thanked the man whose genius for organization and consummate mastery of detail had perfected this vast machine for the alleviation of suffering--whose riches had been poured out unstintingly to further the cause--it seemed to him that he might now seek out the woman of his worship. And he wrote to Ada Merling asking, “May I come to you?” and she answered: “Come!”

It was after the fall of the French Empire. MacMahon had succeeded Thiers as President. Upon the journey Dunoisse, whose exertions had been unceasing during the Franco-Prussian War, scarcely ate or slept. He answered at random those who spoke to him. When he reached the door of the house in Park Lane he trembled, so that he had to lean for support against the railings. He had changed and aged much in the last fifteen years.

He was admitted to the beautiful, quiet drawing-room. An elderly servant knocked at a door communicating with this, and went away. The door opened, and the wraith of Ada Merling stood upon the threshold. So white, so wan, so frail, that but for the indomitable fire burning in the blue-gray eyes, and the resolute, energetic setting of the lips, he who loved her, would hardly have known her.... He cried out, stricken to the soul with anguish.... She said to him, with no sign of emotion beyond a tremble in her voice:

“You too are changed--you too have suffered! That you should suffer no longer I have decided to tell you all. There can be no question of any closer tie between us--but while I live you have my faithful friendship. And it may be that I shall live for years--though I shall never leave my room again!”

She added, as Dunoisse sank down in a chair, and covered his face with his hands:

“Do not grieve. Try to be glad that the path I am to tread has been pointed out so clearly....”

“Oh! my beloved!” said Dunoisse brokenly. “If you have never loved me I am glad of it for your sake!... But, remembering that evening in the Cemetery at Scutari--can you tell me truly that it is so?”

“I will answer you in a letter,” she said, “when I have gathered strength sufficiently. How soon you will receive the letter, I cannot say!” She added, when they had sat together for a little space in silence: “Now bid me good-by and leave me. Never seek me!--do not follow me! If you can, find earthly happiness elsewhere. For we are set apart while we both live, by the Will of God. Nevertheless, in His good time, and in the place He has appointed, I believe that you and I shall meet again!”

And so he had left her, and never since seen her. Yearly a letter from her had reached him, but it had never been the letter. Now you know why Dunoisse would not consent to die. He was waiting for the letter that told him of her love.

He had already waited fifty-six years. Well! he would go on waiting.... The letter was sure to come.

CVI

She died in August, and the letter would never come now....

September paved the chestnut-woods with golden leaves, the ripened blackberries vanished before the onslaughts of children and the attack of birds. The snow-peaks turned into pyramids of ice, blizzards swept screaming down the gorges, there were frost-frogs in the valleys and icicles upon the edges of the rocks over which the waterfalls hung in blocks of frozen foam. The Promenade of Zeiden grew empty--people had migrated to Davos or Grindelwald. The familiar figure of the old white-haired man in the Bath-chair had not been seen for many a day. For he lay in his large bedroom at the Home, dying at ninety-three years of age, of a complaint the existence of which is, by the physicians, denied....

He was tended with the kindest care. Nor, when the land and submarine telegraphs tapped out the news East, West, North, and South, and the Wireless sent it to the ears of the helmeted operators in the Marconi Installation Room on the upper decks of the great passenger steamers, hurrying with their human cargo to distant countries, did expressions of sympathy fail.

People were very sorry. Extremely sorry. Though hardly anybody had ever in their lives before heard the name of the dying man. Of the Society of the Crimson Cross, they knew quite certainly. An excellent institution. Had done heaps of good. But they had rather imagined it to have been founded by the Prince Consort in 1859, if they were English; and if they happened to be Germans, they boldly said that the-never-to-be-sufficiently-esteemed and-now-with-his-mourned-ancestors-and-beloved-wife-reposing Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, had laid the egg of the idea that another less eminent had hatched.... Italians draped with fine art their own innate convictions that Garibaldi or the Pope was responsible. French people shrugged, superior, for even an Austro-Helvetian, born and bred in Paris, becomes by the most subtle of transitions, a Frenchman of France.

Several Crowned Heads and Scientific Associations cabled sympathetic messages, the Council of the Society of the Crimson Cross pressed for the latest bulletin, the State Council of Widinitz despatched a delegate; the Mayor of Zeiden, with two of his town councillors, made a visit of ceremony to the dying man’s bedside.... Two Little Sisters of the Poor were with him--mild-eyed religious who had taken it in turns for years with others of their Community, to visit him daily. Lights were burning between vases of flowers before a Crucifix set upon a little white-draped table. They were ending the recitation of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary as the officials were ushered in.

The man they sought lay, snow-white and barely conscious, a fitful breathing stirring the white hairs of his upper lip. A bleak pinched look was on the brave old face, the great black eyes were closed and sunken. But sometimes their lids would flutter and lift, and they would wander until they fell upon an object that might have been a woman’s bust upon a pedestal draped in a heavy veil of crape that hid its lineaments. And then--the look in them was not good to see.

“M. Dunoisse is barely conscious,” said the elder of the two Sisters. “The doctors hold that the end is close at hand. That he is quite prepared is happily certain,--Monsieur has ever been a devout Catholic. His confessor is to bring him the Viaticum at noon.” The pale face of the speaker flushed as a carriage was heard to stop before the hall-entrance. “It is here!” she said, and hurried to the double doors and flung them wide apart.

CVII

There were muffled footsteps upon the druggetted landing. The Sisters were already kneeling, two black-robed, white-wimpled, motionless images of Prayer. The Mayor of Zeiden, a devout Catholic, hastily crossed himself and knelt down. The delegate from the State Council of Widinitz followed his example--the municipal councillors backing, in exquisite discomfort and embarrassment, against the white-papered wall.

The manager of the Home and his chief assistant entered. Each carried a lighted candle in a tall silver candlestick. Their faces were common, ordinary faces, dignified by an expression of absorbed careful attention rather than devoutness. The tall, bulky, bald, aged man who followed them was not the priest who usually confessed the patient, but an ecclesiastic in the violet cassock that is distinctive of a Cardinal of the Church of Rome. His nervous, energetic-looking hands were folded against his breast; a great amethyst upon the forefinger of the right gleamed purple and rose between the wavering yellow flame of the tapers and the keen dazzle of the autumn sunshine that bathed the lovely landscape seen beyond the lofty windows. His face--pale, heavily-jowled and with the jutting underlip of an orator and a statesman--was absorbed, and rapt, and set. And, keeping his hands always folded over Something hidden in his bosom, he moved forwards slowly, continuously, as St. Christopher might have waded the drift of the icy black river, bearing the world’s Redeemer. The kneeling Catholics received the episcopal benediction, the cold blue rapier-points of the Cardinal’s keen eyes flashing, as he raised the fingers that bestowed it, at the two standing figures by the wall. A single finger waved, and there was a change. The silver candlesticks, with their burning tapers, now added to the illumination upon the temporary altar, the room was emptied of all human presence save the stately, imposing figure of the ecclesiastic and scarcely-breathing form upon the bed.

* * * * *

You saw the tall, bulky figure bend over the prone form. The sunk, sealed eyelids twitched and lifted. Recognition flashed in the great black eyes. The Cardinal said low and distinctly:

“My son, the priest who was to administer the Last Sacraments has been seized with sudden illness. Knowing me to be staying at Mölkenzell--where I have been taking the whey-cure--he telegraphed, entreating me to supply his place.” He added: “And I hesitated not to come--for it may be that Our Lord requires of you this act of final obedience. Will you consent to receive His Body from the hands of one who has been your enemy, but who has already humbly entreated your forgiveness--who renews his penitence at this final hour?”

With a great effort the dying man faltered:

“Yes!”

Then tears dimmed the eyes that had lost their brilliance, the hollow cheeks palpitated--the chin quivered--Old Hector wept.... And the visitor soothed him, bending over the pillow, and the Confession was completed; the thready, breathless whispers of the penitent replying to the resonant undertones of the priest.

He received Absolution then, and the Final Blessing. The noiseless nuns stole back at the sound of the strong, resonant voice rolling out the glorious Latin sentences--the Mayor and the delegate returned.... You are to see the dying body asperged with the holy water, the dying mouth fed with the Blessed Sacrament for the nourishment and support of the soul upon its awful journey over the great Unknown Desert, that I who write, and you who read must travel before very long.

Extreme Unction followed the Communion of the Dying. And as the sacred rite went on, an awful sternness settled over the grave old aquiline face. All the long life of Hector Dunoisse lay unrolled as a map before his mental vision. He hung poised on albatross-wings above his past. He knew as he lay speechless, sightless, scarcely sentient under the deft ministering hands, listening as the deep, melodious voice of Holy Church spoke for the penitent in accents of contrition, judged, rebuked, condemned, pardoned for God,--he knew how great a burden were his trespasses, how small a pack his justifications. He appraised, he valued, he weighed.... And, weighing, he was made aware how Self, in the opposing scale of the just balance, weighed down the seeming stately pile of noble sacrifices made and good deeds done for Heaven. Ah! little wonder that the grand old face grew sterner and sterner as the Sacrament reached its close, and he who ministered by the deathbed, passed to the Recommendation of the Departing Soul.

Do you know it, that tremendous valediction following the brief Litany, that calls upon One Who vanquished Death and trod down the powers of Hell under His Feet, to deliver and save? To pardon sin, remit the pains of present and future punishment, open the gates of Paradise--welcome the wanderer home?...

“Go forth, O Christian soul! from this world. In the Name of God the Father Almighty, Who created thee; in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who suffered for thee; in the Name of the Holy Ghost, Who was poured out upon thee; in the Name of the Angels and Archangels; in the Names of the Cherubim and Seraphim; in the Names of the Patriarchs and Prophets; in the Names of the Holy Martyrs and Confessors; in the Names of the Holy Monks and Hermits; in the Names of the Holy Virgins and all the Saints of God, may thy place be this day in peace!... Per Christum Dominum! Amen.”

It was quiet, very quiet, the passing of this soul. The grand old face grew sterner, sterner. The jaw dropped--the great dim black eyes turned slightly upwards under the thin, withered lids. The sweat of death rolled shining down the dark-veined hollows of the temples: bathed the icy body.... He was gone.... The Cardinal said the final prayers, sprinkled the body with holy water, placed a small crucifix upon the pulseless breast, stooped above the pillow, and kissed the cold forehead, ere he withdrew, followed by the two visitors, leaving the Little Sisters of the Poor to complete their pious task.

CVIII

He was very weary, the great Churchman who had traveled from Mölkenzell--but when he reached his private rooms at the hotel he could not rest. Something urged him with a soundless voice, plucked at him with invisible hands, constrained him to return to the death-chamber.... He dined, and snatched brief sleep beset with dreams upon a preposterous, green-plush sofa. Then he obeyed the entreaty, or the mandate, and took his biretta, and threw a heavy cloak about him, for it was night and cold; and stepped out upon the Promenade.

It was a dazzling night of stars; great blazing jewels spilt with a lavish hand upon the purple lap of the Night. From south-west to north-east the Milky Way made an arch across the sky-dome. Bootes made the outline of a kite, its fiery tail Arcturus. Vega in Lyra made a wondrous show. Cardinal de Moulny looked up at them, and murmured a prayer for the soul he had helped to depart. The Home was but a few minutes’ walk from the Promenade; he reached it in a few moments. The hall-door stood open; some silent-footed men in black came out as His Eminence mounted the steps.

The vestibule was fragrant with laurel-leaves, with leaves of fern and scattered petals of pure white blossoms, dropped in the hasty unpacking of memorial wreaths and crosses from the florists’ boxes that had already begun to arrive. Men and women and children of many nations and ranks and classes had also brought flowers. Many of these people were standing on the pavement near the door, and a crowd had gathered in the street, and were pointing out, with sorrowful faces, the half-open, blinded windows on the floor above the entresol.

“He is lying there,” a peasant woman said to her little daughter, as the Cardinal passed. And the keen, austere blue eyes of the Churchman turned upon the speaker, and he said to her in a kindly tone of rebuke:

“‘Was’ lying there, my daughter. He is now with God. He died a blessed death. May yours and mine be as holy!”

He traversed the vestibule and passed upstairs. The diligent hands of the Little Sisters had already completed the last arrangements. Into the middle of the lofty room, with its consecrated burning candles and massed votive wreaths and crosses, the narrow, white-draped bed had been drawn. At the foot of it stood the altar, with its Crucifix, and its vases of flowers, and burning tapers. The pure frosty night breeze, scented with larch and pine needles, flowed in through the open windows; in the bay of the one that looked south-east stood the black-draped bust, with a great Cross of violets and bay-leaves leaning against its pedestal, and a crown of white lilies on its crape-veiled head.

One of the Little Sisters of the Poor knelt on a prie-Dieu near the bed-foot. There would be a public Lying-in-State upon the morrow, when members of Religious Sodalities would take part in the solemn function; when a guard of honor, drawn from the Army of the Swiss Republic, would be posted to watch the illustrious dead. Meanwhile, the Little Sister, with her fellow-nun to relieve her at intervals, would thus keep watch through the night-hours. His Eminence must know it would be not only a duty but a pleasure to render these sacred duties to the remains of one so good as Monsieur.

Then, as de Moulny turned towards the bed to sprinkle it and its occupant from the little stoup of holy water that stood upon a small stand close by, an oblong patch of whiteness showing relief against its purple cover drew his attention. The meek, good eyes of the Sister had followed the Cardinal’s. They now encountered them.

“It was I who placed it there,” the Sister explained, with a little innocent confusion. “It arrived by the afternoon post. It is a letter from England--M. Dunoisse received one in that handwriting regularly once a year at Noël ... its arrival was Monsieur’s great festival!” She added, as the Cardinal took the letter in his hand: “The good God permitted Monsieur to suffer a terrible bereavement in the death of the dear friend who thus remembered him!” She glanced at the crape-veiled bust in the window-bay, and added: “In August he received the news. At the close of September comes this letter--a message from the dead to the dead.”

The Cardinal’s expression of composed stem gravity did not change as the Sister made her explanation.

“Leave me, my child,” he said to the nun, “and rest until I again summon you. I desire to remain alone awhile by this bed of holy death.”

The Sister withdrew, leaving the Cardinal standing with the letter in his hand by the old white head that rested upon the flower-strewn pillow. A snow-pure veil of unutterable peace had been drawn by the hand of gentle Death over the splendid, powerful brow, the sealed eyes, and the high, clear-cut, aquiline features. The face was wonderfully noble, marvelously grand.

A great prelate, a subtle theologian, a profound scholar, no priest was more deeply read than Cardinal de Moulny in the pages of the Book of Life and Death. Long years of experience among the living, stores of knowledge accumulated beside innumerable deathbeds, had taught him that the deeper you read between the pages of that Book, the less you know that you know.

An idea struck him as he looked from the dead face to the envelope, obviously yellowed, addressed in a delicate old-fashioned handwriting--handwriting faded as though by the passage of many years--to an address in Paris that had belonged to Dunoisse many years previously--now re-addressed in blacker ink in a modern upright hand. And as he looked, yielding to a sudden impulse, he tore open the envelope and mastered the contents. He read by the light of the death-tapers that flickered on the altar at the bed-foot, set on either side of the Crucifix, carved in dark walnut with the Emblems of the Passion, that had hung above the head of the bed. The letter bore the date of thirty-nine years back. It ran thus:

“It has been made clear to me that what it is my determination to reveal to you in this letter cannot be known by you while the hand that penned it is yet warm and living. So, once written, it shall lie in the shabby desk most people laugh at until my summons comes from that High Power Whose call we must all obey. There was a time, though you have never suspected it, when for the sake of the sweetness of the earthly love you had not then offered me, I would have taken my hand from the plow.

“Nor when the gift was made, was I without my hour of doubt and hesitation, for, had I linked my life with yours, I must have broken a vow. Well!--I was spared the choice by the verdict of the London physicians--the relentless progress of the disease that bound me prisoner to this room within whose four walls I have now for so many years lived and labored.... Dear friend!--dearest of all earthly friends!--there is no marriage in that world where blessed spirits dwell, but there is Oneness. It is the gift of God to souls that have purely loved upon earth. Oh my beloved! whom I loved from the first--whom I shall love to the last--and this world is not the last, thanks be to God for it!--I do most humbly trust in Him that we who have been so long divided here on earth shall meet and be one in Heaven.”

CIX

Cardinal de Moulny was not ordinarily prone to yield to emotion--not commonly open to the appeals of sentiment--yet the tears rolled down his heavy cheeks as he read. It seemed to him so exquisitely piteous that the reward of his dead friend’s unswerving devotion and lifelong fidelity should have come too late to yield him joy.

Was it fancy? Was it some shadow cast athwart the dead face by a wind-blown taper-flame that made the stern old beautiful mouth under the white mustache that charitable hands had trimmed and waxed for Dunoisse, seem to be smiling? The glassy, fixed eyes were a little open. Had they not been shut a little while before? The steady nerves of the questioner knew a strange thrill of awe.... He stepped to the bedside, gazed earnestly in the still, white face. No doubt, death was there! He touched the icy wrist,--bent his ear close to the cold, shrouded heart--Death, beyond all doubt! Yet, remembering that he had solemnly sworn, many years before, to be the friend of Dunoisse to the edge of Death, and, if possible, beyond--he would do as some unseen Mentor now prompted.... There was no sin in the thing.... It was an act of charity....

So, as he would have shouted in the ears of an expiring penitent, following the retiring consciousness to the remotest bounds of vitality with the sacred words, the gracious consolations of Holy Church, now with all the power of his splendid lungs de Moulny shouted the letter of the dead woman in the ears of her dead lover. There was not a spark of life in the glassy eyes glimmering between the rigid, livid eyelids. The deadly chill of death bit him like a frost as he slipped the letter within the folds of the shroud where the leather case that held its comrades was hidden on the breast of Hector Dunoisse. He was a little contemptuous of his own weakness as he dipped his fingers in the china shell of holy water--sprinkled the head and feet of the corpse, and murmured a Latin prayer commending the departed soul to the Divine Mercy. Then he lifted his fur-lined mantle from the floor where he had dropped it--and went out of the room with long, light, noiseless steps, shutting the door.

* * * * *

The man who lay upon the flower-decked, white-draped bed, with dimly burning tapers at his head and feet, and his dead love’s letters lying upon his dead breast under the stiff white hands that held a Rosary, saw the tall, corpulent figure in the purple cassock pass out of the room. He heard the closing of the door.

He had heard the letter, every word of it. And the revelation of her long-hidden secret had brought him unutterable joy--joy of which he knew he must infallibly have died, had he not been already dead.

For he knew quite well that he was dead; but that his spirit had not yet passed beyond the gates of its earthly tenement. He waited in a great, cold, quiet void. The little busy world spun on, forever divorced from him. He was one with the Immensity of Eternity. He hung, an isolated point in Illimitable Space, upon the borders of the Otherwhere. He knew no shrinking. Terrors are for nerves of flesh, fears for the finite, mortal, perishable.... He lay like a drop of water that is yet a boundless ocean, enclosed in the hollow of the Almighty Hand.

It has been said and written by learned men, dead ages ago--that the soul remains a prisoner for hours, perhaps days, when the spark of Life is extinguished, and the heart is forever stilled. Perhaps it was the third hour after death, perhaps the third day--who knows?--when Dunoisse became aware that four walls no longer bounded his horizon--that the peaks and ranges of the ancient snow-crowned mountains now rose up about him.... He stood beside a new-made grave, covered and surrounded with crosses and wreaths of fading flowers, in the cemetery that lies on the hillside below Zeiden. The flush of dawn was upon all Nature, the frosted grasses at his feet bowed to the earth in slumber; the lake far below, lying in the lap of the wintry woods and meadows, seemed to slumber and dream ... and in the East, to which his face was turned--the mysterious East that has been, since the childhood of this old world, the threshold across which Revelation has stepped with shining feet--the moon was rising more gloriously than he had ever known the great silvery-golden planet rise--or was it the sun?...

Or was it a Lamp of inconceivable radiance upheld in the hands of a Woman who stood upon the mountains, robed in the glory of sun and moon and stars, adorned with all the beauty of earth and sea and sky, lovely with the loveliness which human words are powerless to convey. A Wind, going whither it listed, soughed past; it brought with it the sound of rustling leaves and falling waters, with the cooing of doves; it whispered in his ear a Name, the second his first childish lispings had been taught to utter in prayer--reverenced and beloved above all on earth or in Heaven, save One.

It was no Lamp she held, it was a Child of Wonder. A Child above Whose Brow crossing and intertwisting and interweaving rays of light formed the semblance of a Crown of Thorns. And from the Eyes of the Child, as from its thorny diadem, all the Light emanated, all the glory flowed.

The vision faded, but the Light of those Eyes remained. He whom their ineffable mild gaze had turned on, standing by his own new grave in Zeiden Cemetery, understood at last. He comprehended now the breadth and depth and height of the Divine Love. He saw how Supreme Beneficence had worked for good and ultimate happiness through all the disappointments, labors, agonies, sorrows, and sufferings of his own ended life on earth. He saw it dispersing through a million million channels, to irradiate, cleanse, and transform the souls of men and make them fit for Heaven. He saw it flowing outwards through the gentle hands of the woman, his soul’s beloved, appointed to carry out the great work by which his own had been prompted and inspired. He reaped his harvest bountifully. And what had been a trembling Hope in Life became now after Death a glorious certainty of work not done in vain by any laborer, however humble or unskilled, whose aim and end are the honor and glory of God.

And he realized the huge dynamic force of Prayer, wielded by Christian men and Christian women, and saw in Faith the fulcrum of the lever that is daily moving the world. And by the Body of Christ, veritably present in the Blessed Sacrament--in the Blood of Christ shed again for us--in the Sacrifice that shall daily be renewed by Catholic priests at Catholic altars until the End of Time--he knew that all the nations of the earth shall be saved and pardoned and justified. He saw them with the brightness that is the shadow of the ineffable Light upon their faces, destroying their hideous engines of destruction, laying down their weapons of war. He heard them crying: “Since we are the Sons of God, let us be brothers in deed and verity!” And he saw purified holy souls that have passed through Purgatory; blessed spirits that are now in Paradise; all the Hierarchy of Angels, all the Thrones and Powers and Dominations, all the crowned saints, martyrs, virgins, hail with joy that day....

* * * * *

The solemn mountains were no longer round him. His temples were no longer kissed by a breeze that was chill with the frosts of earthly night. A balmy warmth, an exquisite fragrance, an enveloping, embracing sense of light and peace and rest, were his now. He stood amidst vast, illimitable fields of lilies,--tall blossomed stems that bowed and swayed and whispered as though a wind were passing over them. Yet the atmosphere was still--so still, so clear, so pure, that his unspoken thought stirred it, sending waves of vibrations eddying through its celestial ether, as uttered words of earthly speech set in motion the mundane air:

“These are the Fields of Paradise,” was his thought. And--oh! with what bliss unutterable he heard the Beloved answer in that wordless, thrilling language that is common speech with the Blest:

“These are the Fields of Paradise--and I am here with you!”

He cried out: “Blessed be God!” seeing her coming.

She answered: “Blessed be God!” even as she came.

He had had earthly dreams of meeting her after Death in some roseate land beyond the sunset, dressed in the well-loved, sober black silk gown, white cap and little cape, walking upon the virgin shores of some tideless, opal ocean.

This was the Divine reality--that she should move to him through a whispering sea of lilies; robed in the spotless glory of her unstained virginity, with the shining halo of her long martyrdom hovering over her pure brow, reflected in her radiant eyes.

“O my Love!” she said, in that thought-speech of Paradise that is sweeter than all the singing of all the nightingales of earth, “there is no marriage in Heaven, but there is Oneness. It is God’s gift to souls that have faithfully loved on earth!”

“O my Love!” he said, “I never dreamed you half so beautiful.”

“And ah! my Love,” she answered back, “I never knew before how glorious you were!”

They were speechless for a moment, gazing on each other, while the little years of our earth flitted by, and its men and women were born, and grew up and grew old. She held out both hands to him then, and he would have fallen at her feet, but, “No!” she said, and opened her dear arms, and took him to her breast instead.

And heart to heart they stood; lips hushed on lips in the kiss of Paradise that outweighs all the joys we covet. And the lilies kept whispering as though they knew a secret. “Who is coming?” they rustled to each other. “We know!--we know!”

There was a Footstep in that holy place. The lilies ceased whispering--it was still, so still! Who came, moving through His Garden of Paradise as of old time He moved through His earthly Eden, calling the man and the woman? The lilies knew, but they did not say.

The woman and the man heard His Voice. They turned, hand clasped in hand, to see the Face of Love smiling under the Crown of Thorns; and, oblivious even of each other in the bliss of the Beatific Vision, they fell in adoration at those nail-pierced Feet that trod the Dolorous Way under the weight of the Cross; toiling under the burden of their sins and yours and mine--that, repentant--we might find pardon and salvation.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spacing errors have been corrected.

Page 26: “upon the dignfied” changed to “upon the dignified”

Page 46: “de Moulney” changed to “de Moulny”

Page 55: “stepped forword” changed to “stepped forward”

Page 72: “the sun of One Million” changed to “the sum of One Million”

Page 82: “How presumptious” changed to “How presumptuous”

Page 95: “the fashionabble Frangipani” changed to “the fashionable Frangipani”

Page 118: “not unexepected” changed to “not unexpected”

Page 126: “Abbey housekeepr” changed to “Abbey housekeeper”

Page 127: “shabby-genteel vistors” changed to “shabby-genteel visitors”

Page 162: “seing how little” changed to “seeing how little”

Page 171: “to the possibilty” changed to “to the possibility”

Page 179: “were ordinarly greeted” changed to “were ordinarily greeted” “violen wrench” changed to “violent wrench”

Page 251: “miltary institute” changed to “military institute”

Page 284: “by the removel” changed to “by the removal”

Page 295: “find youself” changed to “find yourself”

Page 296: “cool offensivness” changed to “cool offensiveness”

Page 299: “canonn-ball had hit” changed to “cannon-ball had hit”

Page 303: “had ben conferred” changed to “had been conferred”

Page 306: “responsibilty for these” changed to “responsibility for these”

Page 312: “being limted to” changed to “being limited to” “hyancinthine locks” changed to “hyacinthine locks”

Page 317: “our mesenger” changed to “our messenger”

Page 321: “the exictement and suspense” changed to “the excitement and suspense”

Page 325: “painfully-embarrasing” changed to “painfully-embarrassing”

Page 376: “The inkeeper” changed to “The innkeeper”

Page 404: “exquiste glamour” changed to “exquisite glamour”

Page 413: “Survey Deparmtent” changed to “Survey Department”

Page 435: “for possesison” changed to “for possession”

Page 444: “to-yielding girl,” changed to “too-yielding girl,”

Page 453: “beginnig to end” changed to “beginning to end”

Page 454: “perahps half-a-dozen” changed to “perhaps half-a-dozen”

Page 458: “sreened off her bed” changed to “screened off her bed”

Page 477: “provinical towns” changed to “provincial towns”

Page 505: “cabin pasengers” changed to “cabin passengers”

Page 549: “Bulargian sun” changed to “Bulgarian sun”

Page 569: “impossibilty of such communication” changed to “impossibility of such communication”

Page 652: “not not deny me” changed to “not deny me”

Page 656: “humble-bee betwen” changed to “humble-bee between”

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