Part 56
“Galamaki--who had the honor of meeting you at Petersburg, Lady Stratclyffe--and who had attended to make his bow prior to leaving for the Embassy at Vienna, looked civilly agonized, not having mentioned to the Padishah that I understand Turkish pretty well. So I said, in that language, that in England we considered that the uniform of a soldier who had seen Service was his robe of honor. And that I had dressed to wait upon the Sultan as I should dress to wait upon the Queen!”
There were “bravos” and the clapping of hands. Faces of both sexes turned towards the speaker; and though he hid his pride and exultation at the homage under an affectation of cynical indifference, it expanded his sharply-cut nostril and burned in his light hazel eyes. He went on:
“Though the look of some of these fellows we’re waiting for might scare her....”
“Oh no!” said Lady Stratclyffe, looking up from her work. “How could you possibly imagine that?”
“English ladies are all so brave, nowadays!” he returned, with an inflection of sarcasm.
Said a velvet voice behind him, with a sweet foreign accent that added honey to the implied compliment:
“Milord, the English ladies but follow the example of the English gentlemen!”
“Capital, Madame de Roux!” called out a handsome gray-haired man, rather formally and stiffly dressed for a yacht-party, who had been conversing with a French officer in Zouave uniform. “You scatter your sugar-plums broadcast!--even a diplomatist may hope to pick up one in the scramble.... Now, if you had said ‘The English Army,’--Lord Cardillon would have taken the compliment to himself!”
Cardillon returned, ignoring the prick of sarcasm:
“Madame de Roux, who is upon her way to the Crimea, to confer supreme happiness upon a gallant countryman, can afford to give English ladies due credit for bravery. When do you sail, Madame?”
She thought in two days’ time.... He said, with gallant regret:
“I wish I might have had the pleasure of carrying you there in the _Foam Star_. But I am compelled to return to England, worse luck!”
She said, with her lovely smile, as Lord Stratclyffe was buttonholed by a gray-whiskered bluff-faced Rear-Admiral:
“There are many who will rejoice at what you so much regret. For me, I have been granted a passage upon one of my country’s war-steamers--thanks to the influence of one who is soon to become far nearer than a friend....”
He said, with a certain sharp subtlety, understanding that she referred to her approaching marriage with one of the Generals of France’s Eastern Army:
“He should be grateful for whom you risk so much! But at Kamiesch you will not suffer the inconveniences of Balaklava. Your countrymen have already built a harbor and macadamized the principal roads. They have a railway to their Front--public conveyances--field and general hospitals--ambulances, and a corps of trained attendants, supplemented by Sisters of Charity. In fact, everything that we have not--and that we ought to have!”
“And whose is the fault,” she asked, “that you have not what you ought to have?”
His debonair face suddenly changed into a mask of stiff Officialism. His eyes hardened. His lips lost their jocund curve as they dropped out the formula:
“I am really not aware!”
He shrugged his shoulders, and turned the conversation to the beauty of the sables in which she was wrapped, leaning close as he spoke of them with the air of a connoisseur, and looking at the wearer. Some other women present there were younger and more brilliant. Not one, he thought, exhaled the charm that breathed from Madame de Roux. He noted the fine lines about her eyes and mouth, and on her forehead, and the thread or two of white that showed amidst the silken black hair. Its superb coils were crowned with a wide-brimmed hat of cavalier fashion, black with drooping plumes of mauve. The tone of half-mourning characterized the exquisite array of one who had been widowed a year previously; conveying the impression of sorrow that had mellowed into resignation, bereavement not unwilling to be consoled.... Bands of mauve velvet, fastened with clasps of cameos set in brilliants, closed her full lace sleeves at the wrists and encircled the lovely throat that rose above the chemisette. Ample skirts of black _gros de Naples_, stamped with mauve velvet flowers, billowed about her; exquisite feet adorning little kid boots peeped from the expansive folds. With his eyes upon the perfect arch of the revealed instep, Cardillon sighed, envying this exquisite creature’s future husband, that noted fire-eater Leguerrier.
* * * * *
We remember Grandguerrier, formerly Governor-General of Algeria, whom the retirement of Boisrobert was soon to place in the chief command of France’s Expeditionary Forces. Thick-set, short, hot-tempered--burnt brown by African suns, with a close cap of gray hair coming down low on the sagacious forehead--with bloodshot brown eyes, snub nose, deep-cut mouth pouting under the bristling black mustache, the middle-aged commander of Zouaves and Spahis appeared what he was, a gallant soldier.... How loyally he stood by England when the imperious hand at the Tuileries checked maddeningly at the electric bridle, we never should forget!
“_On the 7th of June the Mamelon Vert, the Ouvrages Blancs and the Quarries must be taken. Lord Dalgan and I have decided it. Ours is the responsibility._” And so broke up the Council of War. But when the stout little man on the white Arab rode through the English camps on the day after the successful attack, what roaring cheers went up from British throats at the sight of him.... And that he was tender-hearted as well as brave we know.
* * * * *
Cardillon had sighed, and his sighs were not generally wasted. Henriette turned upon him the eyes that had always reminded Dunoisse of moss-agates gleaming under running brook-water, and said with the subtle, half-mischievous smile that crinkled the corners of her eyelids, and hardly curved her mouth:
“_You_ should have nothing left to sigh for at this hour!”
He said:
“But I have! I sigh for one of those violets you are wearing.”
She glanced down at the knot of pale purple blossoms pinned at the bosom of her lawn chemisette, revealed by the unfastened mantle of sables. Emboldened by her smile, he stretched a hand to them. But she leaned back, avoiding the contact of the sinewy, sunburned, covetous fingers. She had grown pale, her eyes and lips had shadows round them--she looked older, more worn. Then, as he hesitated whether to pursue his intent or withdraw his hand, she rose in a frou-frou of silken draperies, and was gone upon the arm of Lord Stratclyffe, leaving only a perfume and a desire behind her.... And Lady Stratclyffe, looking across her sewing, said quietly:
“Answer _me_, since even our exquisite ally must not be trusted with official secrets!... With whom does the blame rest? Need our Army of Invasion have suffered all these hardships and privations and miseries? How comes it that we are so lamentably deficient in Commissariat and Transport arrangement? Why--I quote your own words--have we ‘nothing that we ought to have’?”
He glanced about him before replying. But, seeing him engaged in talk with the Ambassadress, his guests had moved away, leaving an island of gleaming white planks about them. He said:
“Dear Lady Stratclyffe, the system of our Army Administrations has been, from first to last, a system of Contracts. One must own it has not been a success. Contractors are not, as a rule, trustworthy or conscientious.... Ours have not proved themselves exceptions to the rule!”
His shrug spoke volumes. She said, with hesitation:
“Surely the resources of the country----”
He answered harshly:
“The resources of the country, reported to be vast, were in our ease non-existent. We could get nothing! We were upon the soil of a nation for whose liberty we were about to fight, and they treated us from the first as enemies. There’s no question about it! The native Bulgarians refused to sell us grain, forage, fuel and provisions, nor would they supply us with wagons, and beasts of burden and draught, or serve us as drivers, guides or interpreters! They let us encamp where cholera and fever were rife--and so we invaded the Crimea with a weakly, invalidy, crippled army, two-thirds of ’em too weak to carry their packs and the rest horizontal--disabled or moribund! And Burgoyle rode up to the head of Varna Harbor when his Division was being put on board the transports. He shook his fist and howled--he was quite beside himself. ‘Sick men to fight the Russian Imperial Guards with! Better give me dead ones!’ But that we have achieved what we have, ma’am, we owe to the pith and pluck and endurance of these sick men.”
“They’re glorious!” she said. “They’re glorious....”! And the Brigadier went on:
“They were exhausted from exposure, dropping from want of sleep, half-starved from shortage of rations when they carried the Great Redoubt, and smashed two-thirds of Menschikoff’s army into gray lumps on the Alma. On the day of the Balaklava Attack neither men nor beasts had had bite or sup since the middle of the day before.... How the Light Brigade charged I hardly know; their horses’ legs were tottering under ’em! And they lay down after the battle, round their smoky fires of green wood, with their baggage and camp equipment knocking about on board the transports, and nothing but a sopping wet blanket between half of ’em and the sky! And then they couldn’t sleep for the neighing of the horses, and the row made by the camels and mules and bullocks. For you can’t teach animals to starve in silence!--they’ve no pride like two-legged brutes! There’s a verse I’d liked at Eton, about the lions roaring and asking their meat from God. Well, the row made me think of that and wonder whether He heard them?... And---- But I suppose they’re quiet enough now!”
XCI
They were--but there a silence that is clamorous in the hearing of the Eternal. Do you see those pinched ghosts of gallant Cavalry horses tethered in the driving blizzards behind the low stone walls? A few rags of tents shivered in the piercing wind that blew from Sevastopol.... Here and there shanties of mud and earth sheltered officers, but the rank-and-file of Britannia’s Army had gone down into the ground where the dead were, that they might keep the life in them. And for Blueberry and his kind there was nothing but to stand and wait for death.
Blueberry’s beautiful blue-black eyes were glazed with fever, and gaunt with famine. Dreams of the full rack and the brimming manger tortured the suffering beast. And Joshua Horrotian leaned his cheek upon the broad front of his dying charger, and begged him to keep up!--and tried to comfort him. He had no fodder to give the horse--nothing but promises and kind words. He promised him Old England and plenty of sound oats again--a grassy paddock to kick his heels in--everything else a good horse might desire, if only he would keep on living.... He scraped wood-shavings fine as paper and offered them to him--and when Blueberry snuffed at them feebly, and turned his sorrowful eyes away, the tears rolled down his master’s weather-beaten cheeks for the creature he had bred. He took the dying head in his ragged arms and fairly moaned over him:
“Oh Lord! Oh Lord!--my poor old Blueberry! why ever did us go a sogering?”
* * * * *
Blueberry had done with that hungry profession for good and all.... And Joshua Horrotian kissed him again, and staggered away to borrow a mattock to dig his grave with.... When he returned with this, narrowly escaping destruction at the hoofs of a frenzied Brocken-hunt of ownerless, starving Cavalry horses, he found that great pieces had been torn from Blueberry’s yet quivering sides by these perishing comrades: and that his mane and tail had been gnawed away....
Perhaps Somewhere Else it was all made up to these blameless four-legged martyrs?... Perhaps Blueberry woke up in radiant meadows beside crystal-clear pools?... Stern theologian, do not shake your head.... You can be sure no more than I can. And there is room enough in Eternity for every soul, be it human or brute.
XCII
Still speaking of the horses, Cardillon ended:
“It sounds brutal to say it, perhaps, but they’re better dead. Even if forage could have been got up to the camps in time to save them, they haven’t a chance--with the Russian winter coming upon them, and no shelter of any kind. Take my word for it, we shall fight no more Cavalry actions on the soil of Crim Tartary--as sure as I’m a Brigadier on my way home to be heckled by a Government Commission of Inquiry for obeying a written order of Her Majesty’s Commander-in-Chief!”
He tugged at his sandy bush of whisker and frowned. Lady Stratclyffe returned mellifluously:
“Granted that the order was an error, scrawled in a moment of perplexity or confusion--the loyal obedience and high discipline of the commanding officers and the men, have turned a blunder into a blaze of glory.”
He took her hand and touched it lightly with his lips:
“Never believe, though, that my fellows cheered as they rode down the Valley under the plunging fire of all those Ruski batteries. They cursed and swore. Jove! how they did just swear!” He chuckled like a schoolboy.
“But they rode on, nevertheless,” said Lady Stratclyffe; “and knowing what they are, I burn with indignation to think how they have been wronged! For it is a grievous wrong, to have cast them out upon an unfriendly foreign shore and denied them their rights of food and fuel and shelter. Without which, I quote your own words in reference to the horses, ‘with the Russian winter coming upon them, they haven’t a chance!’”
He begged her not to pelt him with his own rash words to his undoing. Winter clothing--stores of all kinds, huts for the troops, were even then on their way up the Bosphorus _en route_ for the Black Sea.
“And,” he went on, dexterously changing the topic of conversation, “you spoke of ‘flurry and confusion’ just now, in connection with the Commander-in-Chief. He was cool enough to perpetrate a clever epigram at the very moment when he must have realized that the order was disastrous. After all was over, it appears--a French _chef d’escadron_ attached to his Staff got down from horseback, and--not to put too nice a point upon it! was violently sick. When he had somewhat recovered, he said to Lord Dalgan: ‘Monseigneur, I entreat your pardon for my weakness. I have been in action many times, but this is the first massacre I ever saw!’ And _he_ raised his eyebrows and said in his charming French: ‘Really, Major? I had imagined that you, with your regiment, played rather a prominent part in clearing the streets of Paris at the time of the _coup d’État_!’ Not bad for a ‘flurried’ man, was it? And he was cool enough two hours later, when he rode up to me, and said, almost in the words he had used to the Chief of the Division: ‘_Do you know what you have done, Lord Cardillon? You have thrown away the Light Brigade!_’”
“If Lord Dalgan be sometimes guilty of an injustice,” she said, looking full at him with her clear gray eyes, “he has never shirked his share of privation and hardship.”
The hit told. For the Brigadier had clung to the comforts of his yacht in Varna Bay and Balaklava Harbor. He had never tasted the discomforts, and knew nothing of the hardships, of the campaign.
“You are in pain?” she asked, for he had winced and thrown up his hand with the gesture of a hit fencer, and the hot color had mounted to his reddish hair.
“No, no!” He stooped to pick up her forgotten work, without concealing the twinge that the bullet gave him, for Fate had bestowed the title of the bravest upon one of the vainest of men. He added, as he laid the mass of coarse white calico back upon her knee; “Do say what this is you have been sewing at? It looks like--dare I say?--a nightshirt?”
“It looks as it ought,” she answered, placidly threading a gold-eyed needle. “And Ada will applaud me. Your recognition of the garment should lend it value in her eyes.”
“It is for the Hospital?” He added as she signified assent:
“How is Miss Merling, by the way? She got in yesterday morning, I understand, with her staff of nursing ladies--of all denominations, according to the newspapers.... One hopes they exaggerate?”
She answered:
“Of the thirty-eight trained nurses who have arrived with Ada, fourteen are Church of England Sisters, three or four are Congregationalists, there are a certain number of Presbyterians; and ten are Catholic Sisters of Charity from the London East End.”
He screwed his mouth into the shape of a whistle, and elevated his eyebrows dubiously:
“By George! I fancy I hear the whoops of the ultra Low Church Party against Popish proselytizers and priestesses of the Romish Mysteries. The gale will break, though there is calm at present. And then--there will be a heckling of the Minister at War!”
She said, displeased:
“The Sisters are strictly bound not to speak of religious matters to any patient who is not of their Church.... I am sure that they can be depended upon. So far as I can judge, their demeanor is perfect. It struck me that they accorded a more prompt obedience to Ada’s orders than the other nurses displayed. And when one remembers that they only arrived yesterday morning, the changes that have already been wrought are astonishing. I could not have believed it had I not seen!”
He asked:
“And the Lady-in-Chief. One hopes she is serenely confident in the success of her great undertaking?”
Something in his tone stung. Lady Stratclyffe answered, with her eyes upon her work:
“The undertaking is great, undoubtedly. As you must know, her letter volunteering to assume its burden crossed that which Robert Bertham had written entreating her to accept it. The Barrack Hospital here and the General Hospital will be under her sole direction. She has also the supervision of all other British Military Hospitals in the East. But I can detect no ‘confidence’ in her bearing.... It would be more appropriate to describe it as calm.”
“The Mediterranean is calm,” Cardillon said, smiling and shrugging. “Yet I’ve been three times wrecked in it, and once in the Ionian Sea!”
“There is no storm behind Ada’s calm,” said Lady Stratclyffe, “though when she found that the head and foot-pieces of two thousand iron bedsteads sent out from England in our transport _The Realm_ for use in the Barrack Hospital here, had been buried under mountains of shot and empty shell, destined for the batteries of Balaklava, she was certainly not complimentary to the contractor who supplied, and the agent who undertook to pack and ship them! For the shot and shell must be unloaded at Balaklava before Ada can receive the missing parts of the beds. And that may mean a matter of weeks: From the windows of the Embassy I saw the transport pass this morning--a magnificent vessel!”
He asked:
“You are speaking of _The Realm_?” Adding, as she signified assent: “It was to her I referred just now when I said that all stores and clothing needed by the Army were even now on their way up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. Your bungling agent is a well-known middleman between Government and its purveyors. Has a son, by the way, for whom he got a commission in the Guards, and who has good blood in him--however he may have come by it! Was mentioned in Dispatches from Headquarters after the Alma. Not bad for a callow Ensign, it appears to me!”
“Do tell me what he has done!” she begged. “I have missed so much that has been reported!”
“I’ll do better than tell you. You shall hear the story from his company Captain, Caddisbroke!”
The hirsute and bandaged wearer of a superlatively shabby red coat which had formed the center of a group gathered near the saloon-cabin companion came limping on a crutch across the deck, followed by the silken swish of feminine skirts and the creak of masculine boots.
“You called me, Lord Cardillon?”
“To tell Lady Stratclyffe what young Jowell said at Alma to the dandy False Retreat in the Hussar jacket and red forage-cap.”
A pretty woman with an infantile lisp wanted firtht to know what wath a Faith Retreat? The crutched newcomer answered, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier:
“We’re beginning to get used to ’em, Madame de Bessarine, in moments of crisis. In fact, they’re a feature of this campaign. They’re mounted officers with airs of authority, and Staff epaulets and brassards as correct as their English accent. Buglers with ’em too, up in all our calls--particularly numbers Four and Seven.... And when the Light Division were beginning to reckon with the six Vladimir battalions, the ‘Retire’ was sounded, and down they came pell-mell, officers and men, smack into the middle of the White Tufts, who were coming on towards the river in first-class form.... They disordered their center, and jumbled the Bearskins Plain, who were advancing a little to the right of ’em. And in the confusion the Ruskis broke in on their center and left--and tried to take the Colors, and there was trouble. So Sir Bayard Baynes rode back to us--and you may guess we were well in the background, having Royalty to keep in a bandbox!--and suggested an onward movement. And the Duke of Bambridge gave in. And we came up at the double, hurraying like mad to have got the chance of a crack at ’em!--and formed on the left of the White Tufts; and had no sooner begun to pound the two great columns of gray coats into smithereens--the White Tufts file-firing while we poured volleys in--than up comes a dandy False Retreat riding with an order. ‘_The Duke requests the Cut Red Feathers to retire without delay!_’ And the bugler-blackguard blew--and our bugles sounded down the line--and the men called out ‘No, no!’ And this young Jowell--acting as Lieutenant for his half-company in place of Ardenmore killed--calls out--and I heard him from the ditch I’d tumbled into when they shot me: ‘The Duke never gave that order--and I’m dam’ if I’ll obey it!--I’m blest if I do, so there!’ And when His Royal Highness heard it, he was uncommonly tickled--and said they should hear it at home!”
XCIII
The laugh went round. Men said there was thoroughly fine stuff in that fellow. Women wanted to know what he was like? Lady Stratclyffe hoped he had a mother to be proud of him. Cardillon was tugging at his auburn whiskers and, thinking of the missing head and tail-pieces of the bedsteads destined for the Hospital, wondered how many of them lay at the bottom of the holds under the munitions? Two or three hundred, he guessed, knowing the Jowellian methods. Damn the man! You came across him everywhere. He really went a bit too far!
The Ambassador’s wife went on to tell him of the four miles of mattresses already laid upon the pavement in default of bedsteads, and ranged in double rows down the sides of the Barrack Hospital corridors. She was afraid the stones would strike cold, and that the long passages would be draughty in the winter.
“The men won’t complain,” Cardillon told her. “But are all the wards so full?”
“Four large wards,” she answered him, “and half-a-dozen small rooms were found available. But there are sixteen hundred sick and wounded--including cholera patients--already within the walls. And nearly six hundred in the General Hospital, of which Ada also has superintendence.... And if the patients there, lie in filth and misery such as I saw yesterday....”
Her brows contracted and her fine lips quivered. He asked:
“You went through the wards yesterday?”
“Yesterday morning, with Ada and the Sisters of Charity. And the horrors of them were like nothing of which I ever heard or read. To start with, the condition of the floors was indescribable. Luckily we thought of Turkish clogs. And mounted on them we followed Ada through the Inferno----”