Part 62

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIV

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

CV

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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