BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

BY
RICHARD DEHAN
AUTHOR OF “ONE BRAVER THING”
(THE DOP DOCTOR)

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1912, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian

BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What memories were this old man’s!

III

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

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

BURY THIS WITH ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

And Dunoisse would whisper, falteringly:

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

The Voice would answer:

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

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

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

The Voice would say:

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

Dunoisse would falter:

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

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

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

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

Dunoisse would stammer with quivering lips:

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will fight you!” he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hector groaned.

“It was a great sum, this dowry?”

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

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

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

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

“I will not have it!” snarled Hector.

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

Hector said:

“Thank you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Messieurs The Pupils! Return To Your Studies!” bellowed the most bull-voiced of the three Sergeants of the Line, appointed to assist the Captain-Commandant in the drilling and disciplining of the young gentlemen of the Junior Corps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That spoils my breakfast!”

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Moulny grinned, though his eyes were serious.

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

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

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

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

“You have spoken to him about...?”

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

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

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

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

“I know!” de Moulny nodded.

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

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

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

Hector nodded, grimacing.

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

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

“I have promised.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the dog?”

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

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