Title: The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale
Author: Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
Language: English
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THE POINT OF HONOR

BY

A MILITARY TALE

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD



ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAN SAYRE GROESBECK


NEW YORK

THE MCCLURE COMPANY

MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company

Copyright, 1907, 1908, by Joseph Conrad



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"You will fight no more duels now" Frontispiece

"Bowing before a sylph-like form reclining on a couch"

"The angry clash of arms filled that prim garden"

"You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert"



I

Napoleon the First, whose career had the quality of a duel against the
whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The
great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect
for tradition.

Nevertheless, a story of duelling which became a legend in the army runs
through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of
their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined
gold or paint the lily, pursued their private contest through the
years of universal carnage. They were officers of cavalry, and their
connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men
into battle seems particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to
imagine for heroes of this legend two officers of infantry of the line,
for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise and whose
valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind. As to artillery,
or engineers whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it is
simply unthinkable.

The names of the two officers were Feraud and D'Hubert, and they were
both lieutenants in a regiment of hussars, but not in the same regiment.

Feraud was doing regimental work, but Lieutenant D'Hubert had the good
fortune to be attached to the person of the general commanding the
division, as _officier d'ordonnance_. It was in Strasbourg, and in this
agreeable and important garrison, they were enjoying greatly a short
interval of peace. They were enjoying it, though both intensely warlike,
because it was a sword-sharpening, firelock-cleaning peace dear to a
military heart and undamaging to military prestige inasmuch that no one
believed in its sincerity or duration.

Under those historical circumstances so favourable to the proper
appreciation of military leisure Lieutenant D'Hubert could have been
seen one fine afternoon making his way along the street of a cheerful
suburb towards Lieutenant Feraud's quarters, which were in a private
house with a garden at the back, belonging to an old maiden lady.

His knock at the door was answered instantly by a young maid in Alsatian
costume. Her fresh complexion and her long eyelashes, which she lowered
modestly at the sight of the tall officer, caused Lieutenant D'Hubert,
who was accessible to esthetic impressions, to relax the cold, on-duty
expression of his face. At the same time he observed that the girl had
over her arm a pair of hussar's breeches, red with a blue stripe.

"Lieutenant Feraud at home?" he inquired benevolently.

"Oh, no, sir. He went out at six this morning."

And the little maid tried to close the door, but Lieutenant D'Hubert,
opposing this move with gentle firmness, stepped into the anteroom
jingling his spurs.

"Come, my dear. You don't mean to say he has not been home since six
o'clock this morning?"

Saying these words, Lieutenant D'Hubert opened without ceremony the
door of a room so comfortable and neatly ordered that only from internal
evidence in the shape of boots, uniforms and military accoutrements, did
he acquire the conviction that it was Lieutenant Feraud's room. And he
saw also that Lieutenant Feraud was not at home. The truthful maid had
followed him and looked up inquisitively.

"H'm," said Lieutenant D'Hubert, greatly disappointed, for he had
already visited all the haunts where a lieutenant of hussars could be
found of a fine afternoon. "And do you happen to know, my dear, why he
went out at six this morning?"

"No," she answered readily. "He came home late at night and snored. I
heard him when I got up at five. Then he dressed himself in his oldest
uniform and went out. Service, I suppose."

"Service? Not a bit of it!" cried Lieutenant D'Hubert. "Learn, my child,
that he went out so early to fight a duel with a civilian."

She heard the news without a quiver of her dark eyelashes. It was very
obvious that the actions of Lieutenant Feraud were generally above
criticism. She only looked up for a moment in mute surprise, and
Lieutenant D'Hubert concluded from this absence of emotion that she
must have seen Lieutenant Feraud since the morning. He looked around the
room.

"Come," he insisted, with confidential familiarity. "He's perhaps
somewhere in the house now?"

She shook her head.

"So much the worse for him," continued Lieutenant D'Hubert, in a tone of
anxious conviction. "But he has been home this morning?"

This time the pretty maid nodded slightly.

"He has!" cried Lieutenant D'Hubert. "And went out again? What for?
Couldn't he keep quietly indoors? What a lunatic! My dear child...."

Lieutenant D'Hubert's natural kindness of disposition and strong sense
of comradeship helped his powers of observation, which generally were
not remarkable. He changed his tone to a most insinuating softness; and
gazing at the hussar's breeches hanging over the arm of the girl, he
appealed to the interest she took in Lieutenant Feraud's comfort and
happiness. He was pressing and persuasive. He used his eyes, which were
large and fine, with excellent effect. His anxiety to get hold at
once of Lieutenant Feraud, for Lieutenant Feraud's own good, seemed so
genuine that at last it overcame the girl's discretion. Unluckily she
had not much to tell. Lieutenant Feraud had returned home shortly before
ten; had walked straight into his room and had thrown himself on his
bed to resume his slumbers. She had heard him snore rather louder than
before far into the afternoon. Then he got up, put on his best uniform
and went out. That was all she knew.

She raised her candid eyes up to Lieutenant D'Hubert, who stared at her
incredulously.

"It's incredible. Gone parading the town in his best uniform! My dear
child, don't you know that he ran that civilian through this morning?
Clean through as you spit a hare."

She accepted this gruesome intelligence without any signs of distress.
But she pressed her lips together thoughtfully.

"He isn't parading the town," she remarked, in a low tone. "Far from
it."

"The civilian's family is making an awful row," continued Lieutenant
D'Hubert, pursuing his train of thought. "And the general is very angry.
It's one of the best families in the town. Feraud ought to have kept
close at least...."

"What will the general do to him?" inquired the girl anxiously.

"He won't have his head cut off, to be sure," answered Lieutenant
D'Hubert. "But his conduct is positively indecent. He's making no end of
trouble for himself by this sort of bravado."

"But he isn't parading the town," the maid murmured again.

"Why, yes! Now I think of it. I haven't seen him anywhere. What on earth
has he done with himself?"

"He's gone to pay a call," suggested the maid, after a moment of
silence.

Lieutenant D'Hubert was surprised. "A call! Do you mean a call on a
lady? The cheek of the man. But how do you know this?"

Without concealing her woman's scorn for the denseness of the masculine
mind, the pretty maid reminded him that Lieutenant Feraud had arrayed
himself in his best uniform before going out. He had also put on his
newest dolman, she added in a tone as if this conversation were getting
on her nerves and turned away brusquely. Lieutenant D'Hubert, without
questioning the accuracy of the implied deduction, did not see that it
advanced him much on his official quest. For his quest after Lieutenant
Feraud had an official character. He did not know any of the women this
fellow who had run a man through in the morning was likely to call on in
the afternoon. The two officers knew each other but slightly. He bit his
gloved finger in perplexity.

"Call!" he exclaimed. "Call on the devil." The girl, with her back to
him and folding the hussar's breeches on a chair, said with a vexed
little laugh:

"Oh, no! On Madame de Lionne." Lieutenant D'Hubert whistled softly.
Madame de Lionne, the wife of a high official, had a well-known salon
and some pretensions to sensibility and elegance. The husband was a
civilian and old, but the society of the salon was young and military
for the greater part. Lieutenant D'Hubert had whistled, not because the
idea of pursuing Lieutenant Feraud into that very salon was in the least
distasteful to him, but because having but lately arrived in Strasbourg
he had not the time as yet to get an introduction to Madame de Lionne.
And what was that swashbuckler Feraud doing there? He did not seem the
sort of man who...

"Are you certain of what you say?" asked Lieutenant D'Hubert.

The girl was perfectly certain. Without turning round to look at him
she explained that the coachman of their next-door neighbours knew
the _maitre-d'hôtel_ of Madame de Lionne. In this way she got her
information. And she was perfectly certain. In giving this assurance she
sighed. Lieutenant Feraud called there nearly every afternoon.

"Ah, bah!" exclaimed D'Hubert ironically. His opinion of Madame de
Lionne went down several degrees. Lieutenant Feraud did not seem to him
specially worthy of attention on the part of a woman with a reputation
for sensibility and elegance. But there was no saying. At bottom they
were all alike--very practical rather than idealistic. Lieutenant
D'Hubert, however, did not allow his mind to dwell on these
considerations. "By thunder!" he reflected aloud. "The general goes
there sometimes. If he happens to find the fellow making eyes at
the lady there will be the devil to pay. Our general is not a very
accommodating person, I can tell you."

"Go quickly then. Don't stand here now I've told you where he is," cried
the girl, colouring to the eyes.

"Thanks, my dear. I don't know what I would have done without you."

After manifesting his gratitude in an aggressive way which at first was
repulsed violently and then submitted to with a sudden and still more
repellent indifference, Lieutenant D'Hubert took his departure.

He clanked and jingled along the streets with a martial swagger. To
run a comrade to earth in a drawing-room where he was not known did not
trouble him in the least. A uniform is a social passport. His position
as _officier d'ordonnance_ of the general added to his assurance.
Moreover, now he knew where to find Lieutenant Feraud, he had no option.
It was a service matter.

Madame de Lionne's house had an excellent appearance. A man in livery
opening the door of a large drawing-room with a waxed floor, shouted his
name and stood aside to let him pass. It was a reception day. The
ladies wearing hats surcharged with a profusion of feathers, sheathed in
clinging white gowns from their armpits to the tips of their low satin
shoes, looked sylphlike and cool in a great display of bare necks
and arms. The men who talked with them, on the contrary, were arrayed
heavily in ample, coloured garments with stiff collars up to their
ears and thick sashes round their waists. Lieutenant D'Hubert made his
unabashed way across the room, and bowing low before a sylphlike form
reclining on a couch, offered his apologies for this intrusion, which
nothing could excuse but the extreme urgency of the service order he
had to communicate to his comrade Feraud. He proposed to himself to come
presently in a more regular manner and beg forgiveness for interrupting
this interesting conversation....

A bare arm was extended to him with gracious condescension even before
he had finished speaking. He pressed the hand respectfully to his lips
and made the mental remark that it was bony. Madame de Lionne was a
blonde with too fine a skin and a long face.

"_C'est ça!_" she said, with an ethereal smile, disclosing a set of
large teeth. "Come this evening to plead for your forgiveness."

"I will not fail, madame."

Meantime Lieutenant Feraud, splendid in his new dolman and the extremely
polished boots of his calling, sat on a chair within a foot of the couch
and, one hand propped on his thigh, with the other twirled his moustache
to a point without uttering a sound. At a significant glance from
D'Hubert he rose without alacrity and followed him into the recess of a
window.

"What is it you want with me?" he asked in a tone of annoyance, which
astonished not a little the other. Lieutenant D'Hubert could not imagine
that in the innocence of his heart and simplicity of his conscience
Lieutenant Feraud took a view of his duel in which neither remorse
nor yet a rational apprehension of consequences had any place. Though
Lieutenant Feraud had no clear recollection how the quarrel had
originated (it was begun in an establishment where beer and wine are
drunk late at night), he had not the slightest doubt of being himself
the outraged party. He had secured two experienced friends or his
seconds. Everything had been done according to the rules governing that
sort of adventure. And a duel is obviously fought for the purpose of
someone being at least hurt if not killed outright. The civilian got
hurt. That also was in order. Lieutenant Feraud was perfectly tranquil.
But Lieutenant D'Hubert mistook this simple attitude for affectation and
spoke with some heat.

"I am directed by the general to give you the order to go at once to
your quarters and remain there under close arrest."

It was now the turn of Lieutenant Feraud to be astonished.

"What the devil are you telling me there?" he murmured faintly, and fell
into such profound wonder that he could only follow mechanically the
motions of Lieutenant D'Hubert. The two officers--one tall, with an
interesting face and a moustache the colour of ripe corn, the other
short and sturdy, with a hooked nose and a thick crop of black, curly
hair--approached the mistress of the house to take their leave. Madame
de Lionne, a woman of eclectic taste, smiled upon these armed young men
with impartial sensibility and an equal share of interest. Madame de
Lionne took her delight in the infinite variety of the human species.
All the eyes in the drawing-room followed the departing officers, one
strutting, the other striding, with curiosity. When the door had closed
after them one or two men who had already heard of the duel imparted the
information to the sylphlike ladies, who received it with little shrieks
of humane concern.

Meantime the two hussars walked side by side, Lieutenant Feraud trying
to fathom the hidden reason of things which in this instance eluded the
grasp of his intellect; Lieutenant D'Hubert feeling bored by the part he
had to play; because the general's instructions were that he should see
personally that Lieutenant Feraud carried out his orders to the letter
and at once.

"The chief seems to know this animal," he thought, eyeing his companion,
whose round face, the round eyes and even the twisted-up jet black
little moustache seemed animated by his mental exasperation before
the incomprehensible. And aloud he observed rather reproachfully, "The
general is in a devilish fury with you."

Lieutenant Feraud stopped short on the edge of the pavement and cried
in the accents of unmistakable sincerity: "What on earth for?" The
innocence of the fiery Gascon soul was depicted in the manner in which
he seized his head in both his hands as if to prevent it bursting with
perplexity.

"For the duel," said Lieutenant D'Hubert curtly. He was annoyed greatly
by this sort of perverse fooling.

"The duel! The..."

Lieutenant Feraud passed from one paroxysm of astonishment into another.
He dropped his hands and walked on slowly trying to reconcile this
information with the state of his own feelings. It was impossible. He
burst out indignantly:

"Was I to let that sauerkraut-eating civilian wipe his boots on the
uniform of the Seventh Hussars?"

Lieutenant D'Hubert could not be altogether unsympathetic toward that
sentiment. This little fellow is a lunatic, he thought to himself, but
there is something in what he says.

"Of course, I don't know how far you were justified," he said
soothingly. "And the general himself may not be exactly informed. A lot
of people have been deafening him with their lamentations."

"Ah, he is not exactly informed," mumbled Lieutenant Feraud, walking
faster and faster as his choler at the injustice of his fate began to
rise. "He is not exactly.... And he orders me under close arrest with
God knows what afterward."

"Don't excite yourself like this," remonstrated the other. "That young
man's people are very influential, you know, and it looks bad enough
on the face of it. The general had to take notice of their complaint at
once. I don't think he means to be over-severe with you. It is best for
you to be kept out of sight for a while."

"I am very much obliged to the general," muttered Lieutenant Feraud
through his teeth.

"And perhaps you would say I ought to be grateful to you too for the
trouble you have taken to hunt me up in the drawing-room of a lady
who..."

"Frankly," interrupted Lieutenant D'Hubert, with an innocent laugh, "I
think you ought to be. I had no end of trouble to find out where you
were. It wasn't exactly the place for you to disport yourself in under
the circumstances. If the general had caught you there making eyes at
the goddess of the temple.... Oh, my word!... He hates to be bothered
with complaints against his officers, you know. And it looked uncommonly
like sheer bravado."

The two officers had arrived now at the street door of Lieutenant
Feraud's lodgings. The latter turned toward his companion. "Lieutenant
D'Hubert," he said, "I have something to say to you which can't be said
very well in the street. You can't refuse to come in."

The pretty maid had opened the door. Lieutenant Feraud brushed past
her brusquely and she raised her scared, questioning eyes to Lieutenant
D'Hubert, who could do nothing but shrug his shoulders slightly as he
followed with marked reluctance.

In his room Lieutenant Feraud unhooked the clasp, flung his new dolman
on the bed, and folding his arms across his chest, turned to the other
hussar.

"Do you imagine I am a man to submit tamely to injustice?" he inquired
in a boisterous voice.

"Oh, do be reasonable," remonstrated Lieutenant D'Hubert.

"I am reasonable. I am perfectly reasonable," retorted the other,
ominously lowering his voice. "I can't call the general to account for
his behaviour, but you are going to answer to me for yours."

"I can't listen to this nonsense," murmured Lieutenant D'Hubert, making
a slightly contemptuous grimace.

"You call that nonsense. It seems to me perfectly clear. Unless you
don't understand French."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean," screamed suddenly Lieutenant Feraud, "to cut off your ears to
teach you not to disturb me, orders or no orders, when I am talking to a
lady."

A profound silence followed this mad declaration--and through the open
window Lieutenant D'Hubert heard the little birds singing sanely in the
garden. He said coldly:

"Why! If you take that tone, of course I will hold myself at your
disposal whenever you are at liberty to attend to this affair. But I
don't think you will cut off my ears."

"I am going to attend to it at once," declared Lieutenant Feraud, with
extreme truculence. "If you are thinking of displaying your airs and
graces to-night in Madame de Lionne's salon you are very much mistaken."

"Really," said Lieutenant D'Hubert, who was beginning to feel irritated,
"you are an impracticable sort of fellow. The general's orders to
me were to put you under arrest, not to carve you into small pieces.
Good-morning." Turning his back on the little Gascon who, always sober
in his potations, was as though born intoxicated, with the sunshine
of his wine-ripening country, the northman, who could drink hard on
occasion, but was born sober under the watery skies of Picardy, made
calmly for the door. Hearing, however, the unmistakable sound, behind
his back, of a sword drawn from the scabbard, he had no option but to
stop.

"Devil take this mad Southerner," he thought, spinning round and
surveying with composure the warlike posture of Lieutenant Feraud with
the unsheathed sword in his hand.

"At once. At once," stuttered Feraud, beside himself.

"You had my answer," said the other, keeping his temper very well.

At first he had been only vexed and somewhat amused. But now his face
got clouded. He was asking himself seriously how he could manage to get
away. Obviously it was impossible to run from a man with a sword, and as
to fighting him, it seemed completely out of the question.

He waited awhile, then said exactly what was in his heart:

"Drop this; I won't fight you now. I won't be made ridiculous."

"Ah, you won't!" hissed the Gascon. "I suppose you prefer to be made
infamous. Do you hear what I say?... Infamous! Infamous! Infamous!" he
shrieked, raising and falling on his toes and getting very red in the
face. Lieutenant D'Hubert, on the contrary, became very pale at the
sound of the unsavoury word, then flushed pink to the roots of his fair
hair.

"But you can't go out to fight; you are under arrest, you lunatic," he
objected, with angry scorn.

"There's the garden. It's big enough to lay out your long carcass in,"
spluttered out Lieutenant Feraud with such ardour that somehow the anger
of the cooler man subsided.

"This is perfectly absurd," he said, glad enough to think he had found a
way out of it for the moment. "We will never get any of our comrades to
serve as seconds. It's preposterous."

"Seconds! Damn the seconds! We don't want any seconds. Don't you worry
about any seconds. I will send word to your friends to come and bury
you when I am done. This is no time for ceremonies. And if you want
any witnesses, I'll send word to the old girl to put her head out of a
window at the back. Stay! There's the gardener. He'll do. He's as deaf
as a post, but he has two eyes in his head. Come along. I will teach
you, my staff officer, that the carrying about of a general's orders is
not always child's play."

While thus discoursing he had unbuckled his empty scabbard. He sent it
flying under the bed, and, lowering the point of the sword, brushed past
the perplexed Lieutenant D'Hubert, crying: "Follow me." Directly he had
flung open the door a faint shriek was heard, and the pretty maid, who
had been listening at the keyhole, staggered backward, putting the backs
of her hands over her eyes. He didn't seem to see her, but as he was
crossing the anteroom she ran after him and seized his left arm. He
shook her off and then she rushed upon Lieutenant D'Hubert and clawed at
the sleeve of his uniform.

"Wretched man," she sobbed despairingly. "Is this what you wanted to
find him for?"

"Let me go," entreated Lieutenant D'Hubert, trying to disengage himself
gently. "It's like being in a madhouse," he protested with exasperation.
"Do let me go, I won't do him any harm."

A fiendish laugh from Lieutenant Feraud commented that assurance. "Come
along," he cried impatiently, with a stamp of his foot.

And Lieutenant D'Hubert did follow. He could do nothing else. But in
vindication of his sanity it must be recorded that as he passed out
of the anteroom the notion of opening the street door and bolting out
presented itself to this brave youth, only, of course, to be instantly
dismissed: for he felt sure that the other would pursue him without
shame or compunction. And the prospect of an officer of hussars being
chased along the street by another officer of hussars with a naked sword
could not be for a moment entertained. Therefore he followed into the
garden. Behind them the girl tottered out too. With ashy lips and wild,
scared eyes, she surrendered to a dreadful curiosity. She had also
a vague notion of rushing, if need be, between Lieutenant Feraud and
death.

The deaf gardener, utterly unconscious of approaching footsteps, went
on watering his flowers till Lieutenant Feraud thumped him on the back.
Beholding suddenly an infuriated man, flourishing a big sabre, the old
chap, trembling in all his limbs, dropped the watering pot. At once
Lieutenant Feraud kicked it away with great animosity; then seizing the
gardener by the throat, backed him against a tree and held him there
shouting in his ear:

"Stay here and look on. You understand you've got to look on. Don't dare
budge from the spot."

Lieutenant D'Hubert, coming slowly down the walk, unclasped his dolman
with undisguised reluctance. Even then, with his hand already on his
sword, he hesitated to draw, till a roar "_En garde, fichtre!_ What do
you think you came here for?" and the rush of his adversary forced him
to put himself as quickly as possible in a posture of defence.

The angry clash of arms filled that prim garden, which hitherto had
known no more warlike sound than the click of clipping shears; and
presently the upper part of an old lady's body was projected out of
a window upstairs. She flung her arms above her white cap, and began
scolding in a thin, cracked voice. The gardener remained glued to the
tree looking on, his toothless mouth open in idiotic astonishment, and
a little farther up the walk the pretty girl, as if held by a spell,
ran to and fro on a small grass plot, wringing her hands and muttering
crazily. She did not rush between the combatants. The onslaughts of
Lieutenant Feraud were so fierce that her heart failed her.

Lieutenant D'Hubert, his faculties concentrated upon defence, needed all
his skill and science of the sword to stop the rushes of his adversary.
Twice already he had had to break ground.

[Illustration: 028.jpg "The angry clash of arms filled that prim
garden"]

It bothered him to feel his foothold made insecure by the round dry
gravel of the path rolling under the hard soles of his boots. This was
most unsuitable ground, he thought, keeping a watchful, narrowed
gaze shaded by long eyelashes upon the fiery staring eyeballs of his
thick-set adversary. This absurd affair would ruin his reputation of a
sensible, steady, promising young officer. It would damage, at any rate,
his immediate prospects and lose him the good will of his general. These
worldly preoccupations were no doubt misplaced in view of the solemnity
of the moment. For a duel whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of
honour or even when regrettably casual and reduced in its moral essence
to a distinguished form of manly sport, demands perfect singleness of
intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. On the other hand, this vivid
concern for the future in a man occupied in keeping sudden death at
sword's length from his breast, had not a bad effect, inasmuch as it
began to rouse the slow anger of Lieutenant D'Hubert. Some seventy
seconds had elapsed since they had crossed steel and Lieutenant D'Hubert
had to break ground again in order to avoid impaling his reckless
adversary like a beetle for a cabinet of specimens. The result was that,
misapprehending the motive, Lieutenant Feraud, giving vent to triumphant
snarls, pressed his attack with renewed vigour.

This enraged animal, thought D'Hubert, will have me against the wall
directly. He imagined himself much closer to the house than he was; and
he dared not turn his head, such an act under the circumstances being
equivalent to deliberate suicide. It seemed to him that he was
keeping his adversary off with his eyes much more than with his point.
Lieutenant Feraud crouched and bounded with a tigerish, ferocious
agility--enough to trouble the stoutest heart. But what was more
appalling than the fury of a wild beast accomplishing in all innocence
of heart a natural function, was the fixity of savage purpose man
alone is capable of displaying. Lieutenant D'Hubert in the midst of
his worldly preoccupations perceived it at last. It was an absurd and
damaging affair to be drawn into. But whatever silly intention the
fellow had started with, it was clear that by this time he meant to
kill--nothing else. He meant it with an intensity of will utterly beyond
the inferior faculties of a tiger.

As is the case with constitutionally brave men, the full view of the
danger interested Lieutenant D'Hubert. And directly he got properly
interested, the length of his arm and the coolness of his head told in
his favour. It was the turn of Lieutenant Feraud to recoil. He did this
with a blood-curdling grunt of baffled rage. He made a swift feint and
then rushed straight forward.

"Ah! you would, would you?" Lieutenant D'Hubert exclaimed mentally to
himself. The combat had lasted nearly two minutes, time enough for any
man to get embittered, apart from the merits of the quarrel. And all at
once it was over. Trying to close breast to breast under his adversary's
guard, Lieutenant Feraud received a slash on his shortened arm. He did
not feel it in the least, but it checked his rush, and his feet slipping
on the gravel, he fell backward with great violence. The shock
jarred his boiling brain into the perfect quietude of insensibility.
Simultaneously with his fall the pretty servant girl shrieked
piercingly; but the old maiden lady at the window ceased her scolding
and with great presence of mind began to cross herself.

In the first moment, seeing his adversary lying perfectly still, his
face to the sky and his toes turned up, Lieutenant D'Hubert thought he
had killed him outright. The impression of having slashed hard enough
to cut his man clean in two abode with him for awhile in an exaggerated
impression of the right good will he had put into the blow. He went down
on his knees by the side of the prostrate body. Discovering that not
even the arm was severed, a slight sense of disappointment mingled with
the feeling of relief. But, indeed, he did not want the death of that
sinner. The affair was ugly enough as it stood. Lieutenant D'Hubert
addressed himself at once to the task of stopping the bleeding. In this
task it was his fate to be ridiculously impeded by the pretty maid. The
girl, filling the garden with cries for help, flung herself upon his
defenceless back and, twining her fingers in his hair, tugged at his
head. Why she should choose to hinder him at this precise moment he
could not in the least understand. He did not try. It was all like
a very wicked and harassing dream. Twice, to save himself from being
pulled over, he had to rise and throw her off. He did this stoically,
without a word, kneeling down again at once to go on with his work. But
when the work was done he seized both her arms and held them down. Her
cap was half off, her face was red, her eyes glared with crazy boldness.
He looked mildly into them while she called him a wretch, a traitor and
a murderer many times in succession. This did not annoy him so much as
the conviction that in her scurries she had managed to scratch his face
abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He
imagined it making its way through the garrison, through the whole army,
with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance,
spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of
his taste even into the very bosom of his honourable family. It was all
very well for that fellow Feraud, who had no connections, no family
to speak of, and no quality but courage which, anyhow, was a matter
of course, and possessed by every single trooper in the whole mass of
French cavalry. Still holding the wrists of the girl in a strong grip,
Lieutenant D'Hubert looked over his shoulder. Lieutenant Feraud had
opened his eyes. He did not move. Like a man just waking from a deep
sleep he stared with a drowsy expression at the evening sky.

Lieutenant D'Hubert's urgent shouts to the old gardener produced no
effect--not so much as to make him shut his toothless mouth. Then
he remembered that the man was stone deaf. All that time the girl,
attempting to free her wrists, struggled, not with maidenly coyness but
like a sort of pretty dumb fury, not even refraining from kicking
his shins now and then. He continued to hold her as if in a vice, his
instinct telling him that were he to let her go she would fly at his
eyes. But he was greatly humiliated by his position. At last she gave
up, more exhausted than appeased, he feared. Nevertheless he attempted
to get out of this wicked dream by way of negotiation.

"Listen to me," he said as calmly as he could. "Will you promise to run
for a surgeon if I let you go?"

He was profoundly afflicted when, panting, sobbing, and choking, she
made it clear that she would do nothing of the kind. On the contrary,
her incoherent intentions were to remain in the garden and fight with
her nails and her teeth for the protection of the prostrate man. This
was horrible.

"My dear child," he cried in despair, "is it possible that you think me
capable of murdering a wounded adversary? Is it.... Be quiet, you little
wildcat, you," he added.

She struggled. A thick sleepy voice said behind him:

"What are you up to with that girl?"

Lieutenant Feraud had raised himself on his good arm. He was looking
sleepily at his other arm, at the mess of blood on his uniform, at a
small red pool on the ground, at his sabre lying a foot away on the
path. Then he laid himself down gently again to think it all out as far
as a thundering headache would permit of mental operations.

Lieutenant D'Hubert released the girl's wrists. She flew away down the
path and crouched wildly by the side of the vanquished warrior. The
shades of night were falling on the little trim garden with this
touching group whence proceeded low murmurs of sorrow and compassion
with other feeble sounds of a different character as if an imperfectly
awake invalid were trying to swear. Lieutenant D'Hubert went away, too
exasperated to care what would happen.

He passed through the silent house and congratulated himself upon the
dusk concealing his gory hands and scratched face from the passers-by.
But this story could by no means be concealed. He dreaded the discredit
and ridicule above everything, and was painfully aware of sneaking
through the back streets to his quarters. In one of these quiet side
streets the sounds of a flute coming out of the open window of a lighted
upstairs room in a modest house interrupted his dismal reflections. It
was being played with a deliberate, persevering virtuosity, and through
the _fioritures_ of the tune one could even hear the thump of the foot
beating time on the floor.

Lieutenant D'Hubert shouted a name which was that of an army surgeon
whom he knew fairly well. The sounds of the flute ceased and the
musician appeared at the window, his instrument still in his hand,
peering into the street.

"Who calls? You, D'Hubert! What brings you this way?"

He did not like to be disturbed when he was playing the flute. He was a
man whose hair had turned gray already in the thankless task of tying up
wounds on battlefields where others reaped advancement and glory.

"I want you to go at once and see Feraud. You know Lieutenant Feraud? He
lives down the second street. It's but a step from here."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Wounded."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure!" cried D'Hubert. "I come from there."

"That's amusing," said the elderly surgeon. Amusing was his favourite
word; but the expression of his face when he pronounced it never
corresponded. He was a stolid man. "Come in," he added. "I'll get ready
in a moment."

"Thanks. I will. I want to wash my hands in your room."

Lieutenant D'Hubert found the surgeon occupied in unscrewing his flute
and packing the pieces methodically in a velvet-lined case. He turned
his head.

"Water there--in the corner. Your hands do want washing."

"I've stopped the bleeding," said Lieutenant D'Hubert. "But you had
better make haste. It's rather more than ten minutes ago, you know."

The surgeon did not hurry his movements.

"What's the matter? Dressing came off? That's amusing. I've been busy
in the hospital all day, but somebody has told me that he hadn't a
scratch."

"Not the same duel probably," growled moodily Lieutenant D'Hubert,
wiping his hands on a coarse towel.

"Not the same.... What? Another? It would take the very devil to make
me go out twice in one day." He looked narrowly at Lieutenant
D'Hubert. "How did you come by that scratched face? Both sides too--and
symmetrical. It's amusing."

"Very," snarled Lieutenant D'Hubert. "And you will find his slashed arm
amusing too. It will keep both of you amused for quite a long time."

The doctor was mystified and impressed by the brusque bitterness of
Lieutenant D'Hubert's tone. They left the house together, and in the
street he was still more mystified by his conduct.

"Aren't you coming with me?" he asked.

"No," said Lieutenant D'Hubert. "You can find the house by yourself. The
front door will be open very likely."

"All right. Where's his room?"

"Ground floor. But you had better go right through and look in the
garden first."

This astonishing piece of information made the surgeon go off without
further parley. Lieutenant D'Hubert regained his quarters nursing a hot
and uneasy indignation. He dreaded the chaff of his comrades almost
as much as the anger of his superiors. He felt as though he had been
entrapped into a damaging exposure. The truth was confoundedly grotesque
and embarrassing to justify; putting aside the irregularity of the
combat itself which made it come dangerously near a criminal offence.
Like all men without much imagination, which is such a help in the
processes of reflective thought, Lieutenant D'Hubert became frightfully
harassed by the obvious aspects of his predicament. He was certainly
glad that he had not killed Lieutenant Feraud outside all rules and
without the regular witnesses proper to such a transaction. Uncommonly
glad. At the same time he felt as though he would have liked to wring
his neck for him without ceremony.

He was still under the sway of these contradictory sentiments when the
surgeon amateur of the flute came to see him. More than three days had
elapsed. Lieutenant D'Hubert was no longer _officier d'ordonnance_
to the general commanding the division. He had been sent back to his
regiment. And he was resuming his connection with the soldiers' military
family, by being shut up in close confinement not at his own quarters
in town, but in a room in the barracks. Owing to the gravity of the
incident, he was allowed to see no one. He did not know what had
happened, what was being said or what was being thought. The arrival
of the surgeon was a most unexpected event to the worried captive. The
amateur of the flute began by explaining that he was there only by a
special favour of the colonel who had thought fit to relax the general
isolation order for this one occasion.

"I represented to him that it would be only fair to give you authentic
news of your adversary," he continued. "You'll be glad to hear he's
getting better fast."

Lieutenant D'Hubert's face exhibited no conventional signs of gladness.
He continued to walk the floor of the dusty bare room.

"Take this chair, doctor," he mumbled.

The doctor sat down.

"This affair is variously appreciated in town and in the army. In fact
the diversity of opinions is amusing."

"Is it?" mumbled Lieutenant D'Hubert, tramping steadily from wall to
wall. But within himself he marvelled that there could be two opinions
on the matter. The surgeon continued:

"Of course as the real facts are not known--"

"I should have thought," interrupted D'Hubert, "that the fellow would
have put you in possession of the facts."

"He did say something," admitted the other, "the first time I saw him.
And, by-the-bye, I did find him in the garden. The thump on the back of
his head had made him a little incoherent then. Afterwards he was rather
reticent than otherwise."

"Didn't think he would have the grace to be ashamed," grunted D'Hubert,
who had stood still for a moment. He resumed his pacing while the doctor
murmured.

"It's very amusing. Ashamed? Shame was not exactly his frame of mind.
However, you may look at the matter otherwise----"

"What are you talking about? What matter?" asked D'Hubert with a
sidelong look at the heavy-faced, gray-haired figure seated on a wooden
chair.

"Whatever it is," said the surgeon, "I wouldn't pronounce an opinion on
your conduct...."

"By heavens, you had better not," burst out D'Hubert.

"There! There! Don't be so quick in flourishing the sword. It doesn't
pay in the long run. Understand once for all that I would not carve any
of you youngsters except with the tools of my trade. But my advice is
good. Moderate your temper. If you go on like this you will make for
yourself an ugly reputation."

"Go on like what?" demanded Lieutenant D'Hubert, stopping short,
quite startled. "I! I! make for myself a reputation.... What do you
imagine----"

"I told you I don't wish to judge of the rights and wrongs of this
incident. It's not my business. Nevertheless...."

"What on earth has he been telling you?" interrupted Lieutenant D'Hubert
in a sort of awed scare.

"I told, you already that at first when I picked him up in the garden
he was incoherent. Afterwards he was naturally reticent. But I gather at
least that he could not help himself...."

"He couldn't?" shouted Lieutenant D'Hubert. Then lowering his voice,
"And what about me? Could I help myself?"

The surgeon rose. His thoughts were running upon the flute, his constant
companion, with a consoling voice. In the vicinity of field ambulances,
after twenty-four hours' hard work, he had been known to trouble with
its sweet sounds the horrible stillness of battlefields given over
to silence and the dead. The solacing hour of his daily life was
approaching and in peace time he held on to the minutes as a miser to
his hoard.

"Of course! Of course!" he said perfunctorily. "You would think so. It's
amusing. However, being perfectly neutral and friendly to you both,
I have consented to deliver his message. Say that I am humouring an
invalid if you like. He says that this affair is by no means at an
end. He intends to send you his seconds directly he has regained his
strength--providing, of course, the army is not in the field at that
time."

"He intends--does he? Why certainly," spluttered Lieutenant D'Hubert
passionately. The secret of this exasperation was not apparent to the
visitor; but this passion confirmed him in the belief which was gaining
ground outside that some very serious difference had arisen between
these two young men. Something serious enough to wear an air of mystery.
Some fact of the utmost gravity. To settle their urgent difference
those two young men had risked being broken and disgraced at the outset,
almost, of their career. And he feared that the forthcoming inquiry
would fail to satisfy the public curiosity. They would not take the
public into their confidence as to that something which had passed
between them of a nature so outrageous as to make them face a charge of
murder--neither more nor less. But what could it be?

The surgeon was not very curious by temperament; but that question,
haunting his mind, caused him twice that evening to hold the instrument
off his lips and sit silent for a whole minute--right in the middle of a
tune--trying to form a plausible conjecture.



II

He succeeded in this object no better than the rest of the garrison and
the whole of society. The two young officers, of no especial consequence
till then, became distinguished by the universal curiosity as to the
origin of their quarrel. Madame de Lionne's salon was the centre of
ingenious surmises; that lady herself was for a time assailed with
inquiries as the last person known to have spoken to these unhappy and
reckless young men before they went out together from her house to
a savage encounter with swords, at dusk, in a private garden. She
protested she had noticed nothing unusual in their demeanour. Lieutenant
Feraud had been visibly annoyed at being called away. That was natural
enough; no man likes to be disturbed in a conversation with a lady
famed for her elegance and sensibility» But, in truth, the subject
bored Madame de Lionne since her personality could by no stretch of
imagination be connected with this affair. And it irritated her to hear
it advanced that there might have been some woman in the case. This
irritation arose, not from her elegance or sensibility, but from a more
instinctive side of her nature. It became so great at last that she
peremptorily forbade the subject to be mentioned under her roof. Near
her couch the prohibition was obeyed, but farther off in the salon
the pall of the imposed silence continued to be lifted more or less. A
diplomatic personage with a long pale face resembling the countenance
of a sheep, opined, shaking his head, that it was a quarrel of long
standing envenomed by time. It was objected to him that the men
themselves were too young for such a theory to fit their proceedings.
They belonged also to different and distant parts of France. A
subcommissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor
in keysermere breeches, Hessian boots and a blue coat embroidered with
silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls,
suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.
The feud was in the forgotten past. It might have been something quite
inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls
remembered the animosity and manifested an instinctive antagonism. He
developed his theme jocularly. Yet the affair was so absurd from the
worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential point of view,
that this weird explanation seemed rather more reasonable than any
other.

The two officers had confided nothing definite to any one. Resentment,
humiliation at having been worsted arms in hand, and an uneasy feeling
of having been involved into a scrape by the injustice of fate, kept
Lieutenant Feraud savagely dumb. He mistrusted the sympathy of mankind.
That would of course go to that dandified staff officer. Lying in bed he
raved to himself in his mind or aloud to the pretty maid who ministered
to his needs with devotion and listened to his horrible imprecations
with alarm. That Lieutenant D'Hubert should be made to "pay for it,"
whatever it was, seemed to her just and natural. Her principal concern
was that Lieutenant Feraud should not excite himself. He appeared so
wholly admirable and fascinating to the humility of her heart that her
only concern was to see him get well quickly even if it were only to
resume his visits to Madame de Lionne's salon.

Lieutenant D'Hubert kept silent for the immediate reason that there was
no one except a stupid young soldier servant to speak to. But he was not
anxious for the opportunities of which his severe arrest deprived him.
He would have been uncommunicative from dread of ridicule. He was aware
that the episode, so grave professionally, had its comic side. When
reflecting upon it he still felt that he would like to wring Lieutenant
Feraud's neck for him. But this formula was figurative rather than
precise, and expressed more a state of mind than an actual physical
impulse. At the same time there was in that young man a feeling of
comradeship and kindness which made him unwilling to make the position
of Lieutenant Feraud worse than it was.

He did not want to talk at large about this wretched affair. At the
inquiry he would have, of course, to speak the truth in self-defence.
This prospect vexed him.

But no inquiry took place. The army took the field instead. Lieutenant
D'Hubert, liberated without remark, returned to his regimental duties,
and Lieutenant Feraud, his arm still in a sling, rode unquestioned with
his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields
and the fresh air of night bivouacs. This bracing treatment suited his
case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he
could turn without misgivings to the prosecution of his private warfare.

This time it was to be regular warfare. He dispatched two friends to
Lieutenant D'Hubert, whose regiment was stationed only a few miles away.
Those friends had asked no questions of their principal. "I must pay him
off, that pretty staff officer," he had said grimly, and they went
away quite contentedly on their mission. Lieutenant D'Hubert had no
difficulty in finding two friends equally discreet and devoted to their
principal. "There's a sort of crazy fellow to whom I must give another
lesson," he had curtly declared, and they asked for no better reasons.

On these grounds an encounter with duelling swords was arranged one
early morning in a convenient field. At the third set-to, Lieutenant
D'Hubert found himself lying on his back on the dewy grass, with a hole
in his side. A serene sun, rising over a German landscape of meadows
and wooded hills, hung on his left. A surgeon--not the flute-player but
another--was bending over him, feeling around the wound.

"Narrow squeak. But it will be nothing," he pronounced.

Lieutenant D'Hubert heard these words with pleasure. One of his
seconds--the one who, sitting on the wet grass, was sustaining his head
on his lap-said:

"The fortune of war, _mon pauvre vieux_. What will you have? You had
better make it up, like two good fellows. Do!"

"You don't know what you ask," murmured Lieutenant D'Hubert in a feeble
voice. "However, if he..."

In another part of the meadow the seconds of Lieutenant Feraud were
urging him to go over and shake hands with his adversary.

"You have paid him off now--_que diable_. It's the proper thing to do.
This D'Hubert is a decent fellow."

"I know the decency of these generals' pets," muttered Lieutenant Feraud
through his teeth for all answer. The sombre expression of his face
discouraged further efforts at reconciliation. The seconds, bowing from
a distance, took their men off the field. In the afternoon, Lieutenant
D'Hubert, very popular as a good comrade uniting great bravery with
a frank and equable temper, had many visitors. It was remarked that
Lieutenant Feraud did not, as customary, show himself much abroad to
receive the felicitations of his friends. They would not have failed
him, because he, too, was liked for the exuberance of his southern
nature and the simplicity of his character. In all the places where
officers were in the habit of assembling at the end of the day the
duel of the morning was talked over from every point of view. Though
Lieutenant D'Hubert had got worsted this time, his sword-play was
commended. No one could deny that it was very close, very scientific.
If he got touched, some said, it was because he wished to spare his
adversary. But by many the vigour and dash of Lieutenant Feraud's attack
were pronounced irresistible.

The merits of the two officers as combatants were frankly discussed; but
their attitude to each other after the duel was criticised lightly and
with caution. It was irreconcilable, and that was to be regretted. After
all, they knew best what the care of their honour dictated. It was not a
matter for their comrades to pry into overmuch. As to the origin of the
quarrel, the general impression was that it dated from the time they
were holding garrison in Strasburg. Only the musical surgeon shook his
head at that. It went much farther back, he hinted discreetly.

"Why! You must know the whole story," cried several voices, eager with
curiosity. "You were there! What was it?"

He raised his eyes from his glass deliberately and said:

"Even if I knew ever so well, you can't expect me to tell you, since
both the principals choose to say nothing."

He got up and went out, leaving the sense of mystery behind him. He
could not stay longer because the witching hour of flute-playing was
drawing near. After he had gone a very young officer observed solemnly:

"Obviously! His lips are sealed."

Nobody questioned the high propriety of that remark. Somehow it added
to the impressiveness of the affair. Several older officers of both
regiments, prompted by nothing but sheer kindness and love of harmony,
proposed to form a Court of Honour to which the two officers would
leave the task of their reconciliation. Unfortunately, they began by
approaching Lieutenant Feraud. The assumption was, that having just
scored heavily, he would be found placable and disposed to moderation.

The reasoning was sound enough; nevertheless, the move turned out
unfortunate. In that relaxation of moral fibre which is brought about
by the ease of soothed vanity, Lieutenant Feraud had condescended in
the secret of his heart to review the case, and even to doubt not the
justice of his cause, but the absolute sagacity of his conduct. This
being so, he was disinclined to talk about it. The suggestion of the
regimental wise men put him in a difficult position. He was disgusted,
and this disgust by a sort of paradoxical logic reawakened his animosity
against Lieutenant D'Hubert. Was he to be pestered with this fellow
for ever--the fellow who had an infernal knack of getting round people
somehow? On the other hand, it was difficult to refuse point-blank that
sort of mediation sanctioned by the code of honour.

Lieutenant Feraud met the difficulty by an attitude of fierce reserve.
He twisted his moustache and used vague words. His case was perfectly
clear. He was not ashamed to present it, neither was he afraid to defend
it personally. He did not see any reason to jump at the suggestion
before ascertaining how his adversary was likely to take it.

Later in the day, his exasperation growing upon him, he was heard in
a public place saying sardonically "that it would be the very luckiest
thing for Lieutenant D'Hubert, since next time of meeting he need not
hope to get off with a mere trifle of three weeks in bed."

This boastful phrase might have been prompted by the most profound
Machiavelism. Southern natures often hide under the outward
impulsiveness of action and speech a certain amount of astuteness.

Lieutenant Feraud, mistrusting the justice of men, by no means desired
a Court of Honour. And these words, according so well with his
temperament, had also the merit of serving his turn. Whether meant for
that purpose or not, they found their way in less than four-and-twenty
hours into Lieutenant D'Hubert's bedroom. In consequence, Lieutenant
D'Hubert, sitting propped up with pillows, received the overtures made
to him next day by the statement that the affair was of a nature which
could not bear discussion.

The pale face of the wounded officer, his weak voice which he had yet
to use cautiously, and the courteous dignity of his tone, had a great
effect on his hearers. Reported outside, all this did more for deepening
the mystery than the vapourings of Lieutenant Feraud. This last was
greatly relieved at the issue. He began to enjoy the state of general
wonder, and was pleased to add to it by assuming an attitude of moody
reserve.

The colonel of Lieutenant D'Hubert's regiment was a gray-haired,
weather-beaten warrior who took a simple view of his responsibilities.
"I can't"--he thought to himself--"let the best of my subalterns get
damaged like this for nothing. I must get to the bottom of this affair
privately. He must speak out, if the devil were in it. The colonel
should be more than a father to these youngsters." And, indeed, he loved
all his men with as much affection as a father of a large family can
feel for every individual member of it. If human beings by an oversight
of Providence came into the world in the state of civilians, they were
born again into a regiment as infants are born into a family, and it was
that military birth alone which really counted.

At the sight of Lieutenant D'Hubert standing before him bleached and
hollow-eyed, the heart of the old warrior was touched with genuine
compassion. All his affection for the regiment--that body of men which
he held in his hand to launch forward and draw back, who had given him
his rank, ministered to his pride and commanded his thoughts--seemed
centred for a moment on the person of the most promising subaltern. He
cleared his throat in a threatening manner and frowned terribly.

"You must understand," he began, "that I don't care a rap for the life
of a single man in the regiment. You know that I would send the 748
of you men and horses galloping into the pit of perdition with no more
compunction than I would kill a fly."

"Yes, colonel. You would be riding at our head," said Lieutenant
D'Hubert with a wan smile.

The colonel, who felt the need of being very diplomatic, fairly roared
at this.

"I want you to know, Lieutenant D'Hubert, that I could stand aside and
see you all riding to Hades, if need be. I am a man to do even that, if
the good of the service and my duty to my country required it from me.
But that's unthinkable, so don't you even hint at such a thing."

He glared awfully, but his voice became gentle. "There's some milk yet
about that moustache of yours, my boy. You don't know what a man like
me is capable of. I would hide behind a haystack if... Don't grin at me,
sir. How dare you? If this were not a private conversation, I would...
Look here. I am responsible for the proper expenditure of lives under my
command for the glory of our country and the honour of the regiment. Do
you understand that? Well, then, what the devil do you mean by letting
yourself be spitted like this by that fellow of the Seventh Hussars?
It's simply disgraceful!"

Lieutenant D'Hubert, who expected another sort of conclusion, felt vexed
beyond measure. His shoulders moved slightly. He made no other answer.
He could not ignore his responsibility. The colonel softened his glance
and lowered his voice.

"It's deplorable," he murmured. And again he changed his tone. "Come,"
he went on persuasively, but with that note of authority which dwells
in the throat of a good leader of men, "this affair must be settled. I
desire to be told plainly what it is all about. I demand, as your best
friend, to know."

The compelling power of authority, the softening influence of the
kindness affected deeply a man just risen from a bed of sickness.
Lieutenant D'Hubert's hand, which grasped the knob of a stick, trembled
slightly. But his northern temperament, sentimental but cautious and
clear-sighted, too, in its idealistic way, predominated over his impulse
to make a clean breast of the whole deadly absurdity. According to the
precept of transcendental wisdom, he turned his tongue seven times in
his mouth before he spoke. He made then only a speech of thanks, nothing
more. The colonel listened interested at first, then looked mystified.
At last he frowned.

"You hesitate--_mille tonerres!_ Haven't I told you that I will
condescend to argue with you--as a friend?"

"Yes, colonel," answered Lieutenant D'Hubert softly, "but I am afraid
that after you have heard me out as a friend, you will take action as my
superior officer."

The attentive colonel snapped his jaws.

"Well, what of that?" he said frankly. "Is it so damnably disgraceful?"

"It is not," negatived Lieutenant D'Hubert in a faint but resolute
voice.

"Of course I shall act for the good of the service--nothing can prevent
me doing that. What do you think I want to be told for?"

"I know it is not from idle curiosity," tested Lieutenant D'Hubert. "I
know you will act wisely. But what about the good fame of the regiment?"

"It cannot be affected by any youthful folly of a lieutenant," the
colonel said severely.

"No, it cannot be; but it can be by evil tongues. It will be said that
a lieutenant of the Fourth Hussars, afraid of meeting his adversary, is
hiding behind his colonel. And that would be worse than hiding behind
a haystack--for the good of the service. I cannot afford to do that,
colonel."

"Nobody would dare to say anything of the kind," the colonel, beginning
very fiercely, ended on an uncertain note. The bravery of Lieutenant
D'Hubert was well known; but the colonel was well aware that the
duelling courage, the single combat courage, is, rightly or wrongly,
supposed to be courage of a special sort; and it was eminently
necessary that an officer of his regiment should possess every kind
of courage--and prove it, too. The colonel stuck out his lower lip and
looked far away with a peculiar glazed stare. This was the expression of
his perplexity, an expression practically unknown to his regiment, for
perplexity is a sentiment which is incompatible with the rank of colonel
of cavalry. The colonel himself was overcome by the unpleasant
novelty of the sensation. As he was not accustomed to think except on
professional matters connected with the welfare of men and horses and
the proper use thereof on the field of glory, his intellectual efforts
degenerated into mere mental repetitions of profane language. "_Mille
tonerres!... Sacré nom de nom..._" he thought.

Lieutenant D'Hubert coughed painfully and went on, in a weary voice:

"There will be plenty of evil tongues to say that I've been cowed. And
I am sure you will not expect me to pass that sort of thing over. I may
find myself suddenly with a dozen duels on my hands instead of this one
affair."

The direct simplicity of this argument came home to the colonel's
understanding. He looked at his subordinate fixedly.

"Sit down, lieutenant," he said gruffly. "This is the very devil of a...
sit down."

"_Mon colonel_" D'Hubert began again. "I am not afraid of evil tongues.
There's a way of silencing them. But there's my peace of mind too. I
wouldn't be able to shake off the notion that I've ruined a brother
officer. Whatever action you take it is bound to go further. The
inquiry has been dropped--let it rest now. It would have been the end of
Feraud."

"Hey? What? Did he behave so badly?"

"Yes, it was pretty bad," muttered Lieutenant D'Hubert. Being still very
weak, he felt a disposition to cry.

As the other man did not belong to his own regiment the colonel had no
difficulty in believing this. He began to pace up and down the room.
He was a good chief and a man capable of discreet sympathy. But he was
human in other ways, too, and they were apparent because he was not
capable of artifice.

"The very devil, lieutenant!" he blurted out in the innocence of his
heart, "is that I have declared my intention to get to the bottom of
this affair. And when a colonel says something... you see..."

Lieutenant D'Hubert broke in earnestly.

"Let me entreat you, colonel, to be satisfied with taking my word of
honour that I was put into a damnable position where I had no option.
I had no choice whatever consistent with my dignity as a man and an
officer.... After all, colonel, this fact is the very bottom of this
affair. Here you've got it. The rest is a mere detail...."

The colonel stopped short. The reputation of Lieutenant D'Hubert for
good sense and good temper weighed in the balance. A cool head, a warm
heart, open as the day. Always correct in his behaviour. One had to
trust him. The colonel repressed manfully an immense curiosity.

"H'm! You affirm that as a man and an officer.... No option? Eh?"

"As an officer, an officer of the Fourth Hussars, too," repeated
Lieutenant D'Hubert, "I had not. And that is the bottom of the affair,
colonel."

"Yes. But still I don't see why to one's colonel... A colonel is a
father--_que diable_."

Lieutenant D'Hubert ought not to have been allowed out as yet. He
was becoming aware of his physical insufficiency with humiliation and
despair--but the morbid obstinacy of an invalid possessed him--and at
the same time he felt, with dismay, his eyes filling with water. This
trouble seemed too big to handle. A tear fell down the thin, pale cheek
of Lieutenant D'Hubert. The colonel turned his back on him hastily. You
could have heard a pin drop.

"This is some silly woman story--is it not?"

The chief spun round to seize the truth, which is not a beautiful shape
living in a well but a shy bird best caught by stratagem. This was
the last move of the colonel's diplomacy, and he saw the truth shining
unmistakably in the gesture of Lieutenant D'Hubert, raising his weak
arms and his eyes to heaven in supreme protest.

"Not a woman affair--eh?" growled the colonel, staring hard. "I don't
ask you who or where. All I want to know is whether there is a woman in
it?"

Lieutenant D'Hubert's arms dropped and his weak voice was pathetically
broken.

"Nothing of the kind, mon colonel."

"On your honour?" insisted the old warrior.

"On my honour."

"Very well," said the colonel thoughtfully, and bit his lip. The
arguments of Lieutenant D'Hubert, helped by his liking for the person,
had convinced him. Yet it was highly improper that his intervention, of
which he had made no secret, should produce no visible effect. He kept
Lieutenant D'Hubert a little longer and dismissed him kindly.

"Take a few days more in bed, lieutenant. What the devil does the
surgeon mean by reporting you fit for duty?"

On coming out of the colonel's quarters, Lieutenant D'Hubert said
nothing to the friend who was waiting outside to take him home. He said
nothing to anybody. Lieutenant D'Hubert made no confidences. But in the
evening of that day the colonel, strolling under the elms growing near
his quarters in the company of his second in command opened his lips.

"I've got to the bottom of this affair," he remarked.

The lieutenant-colonel, a dry brown chip of a man with short
side-whiskers, pricked up his ears without letting a sound of curiosity
escape him.

"It's no trifle," added the colonel oracularly. The other waited for a
long while before he murmured:

"Indeed, sir!"

"No trifle," repeated the colonel, looking straight before him. "I've,
however, forbidden D'Hubert either to send to or receive a challenge
from Feraud for the next twelve months."

He had imagined this prohibition to save the prestige a colonel should
have. The result of it was to give an official seal to the mystery
surrounding this deadly quarrel. Lieutenant D'Hubert repelled by an
impassive silence all attempts to worm the truth out of him. Lieutenant
Feraud, secretly uneasy at first, regained his assurance as time went
on. He disguised his ignorance of the meaning of the imposed truce by
little sardonic laughs as though he were amused by what he intended to
keep to himself. "But what will you do?" his chums used to ask him. He
contented himself by replying, "_Qui vivra verra_," with a truculent
air. And everybody admired his discretion.

Before the end of the truce, Lieutenant D'Hubert got his promotion. It
was well earned, but somehow no one seemed to expect the event. When
Lieutenant Feraud heard of it at a gathering of officers, he muttered
through his teeth, "Is that so?" Unhooking his sword from a peg near the
door, he buckled it on carefully and left the company without another
word. He walked home with measured steps, struck a light with his flint
and steel, and lit his tallow candle. Then, snatching an unlucky glass
tumbler off the mantelpiece, he dashed it violently on the floor.

Now that D'Hubert was an officer of a rank superior to his own, there
could be no question of a duel. Neither could send nor receive a
challenge without rendering himself amenable to a court-martial. It
was not to be thought of. Lieutenant Feraud, who for many days now had
experienced no real desire to meet Lieutenant D'Hubert arms in hand,
chafed at the systematic injustice of fate. "Does he think he will
escape me in that way?" he thought indignantly. He saw in it an
intrigue, a conspiracy, a cowardly manoeuvre. That colonel knew what he
was doing. He had hastened to recommend his pet for promotion. It was
outrageous that a man should be able to avoid the consequences of his
acts in such a dark and tortuous manner.

Of a happy-go-lucky disposition, of a temperament more pugnacious than
military, Lieutenant Feraud had been content to give and receive blows
for sheer love of armed strife and without much thought of advancement.
But after this disgusting experience an urgent desire of promotion
sprang up in his breast. This fighter by vocation resolved in his mind
to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion of his
chiefs like a mere worldling. He knew he was as brave as any one
and never doubted his personal charm. It would be easy, he thought.
Nevertheless, neither the bravery nor the charm seemed to work very
swiftly. Lieutenant Feraud's engaging, careless truculence of a "_beau
sabreur_" underwent a change. He began to make bitter allusions to
"clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on." The army was full of
them, he would say, you had only to look round. And all the time he had
in view one person only, his adversary D'Hubert. Once he confided to an
appreciative friend: "You see I don't know how to fawn on the right sort
of people. It isn't in me."

He did not get his step till a week after Austerlitz. The light cavalry
of the _Grande Armée_ had its hands very full of interesting work for a
little while. But directly the pressure of professional occupation had
been eased by the armistice, Captain Feraud took measures to arrange a
meeting without loss of time. "I know his tricks," he observed grimly.
"If I don't look sharp he will take care to get himself promoted over
the heads of a dozen better men than himself. He's got the knack of that
sort of thing." This duel was fought in Silesia. If not fought out to
a finish, it was at any rate fought to a standstill. The weapon was
the cavalry sabre, and the skill, the science, the vigour, and the
determination displayed by the adversaries compelled the outspoken
admiration of the beholders. It became the subject of talk on both
shores of the Danube, and as far south as the garrisons of Gratz
and Laybach. They crossed blades seven times. Both had many slight
cuts--mere scratches which bled profusely. Both refused to have the
combat stopped, time after time, with what appeared the most deadly
animosity. This appearance was caused on the part of Captain D'Hubert by
a rational desire to be done once for all with this worry; on the part
of Feraud by a tremendous exaltation of his pugnacious instincts and
the rage of wounded vanity. At last, dishevelled, their shirts in rags,
covered with gore and hardly able to stand, they were carried forcibly
off the field by their marvelling and horrified seconds. Later on,
besieged by comrades avid of details, these gentlemen declared that they
could not have allowed that sort of hacking to go on. Asked whether the
quarrel was settled this time, they gave it out as their conviction that
it was a difference which could only be settled by one of the parties
remaining lifeless on the ground. The sensation spread from army to army
corps, and penetrated at last to the smallest detachments of the troops
cantoned between the Rhine and the Save. In the cafés in Vienna where
the masters of Europe took their ease it was generally estimated from
details to hand that the adversaries would be able to meet again in
three weeks' time, on the outside. Something really transcendental in
the way of duelling was expected.

These expectations were brought to naught by the necessities of the
service which separated the two officers. No official notice had been
taken of their quarrel. It was now the property of the army, and not
to be meddled with lightly. But the story of the duel, or rather their
duelling propensities, must have stood somewhat in the way of their
advancement, because they were still captains when they came together
again during the war with Prussia. Detached north after Jena with
the army commanded by Marshal Bernadotte, Prince of Ponte-Corvo, they
entered Lubeck together. It was only after the occupation of that town
that Captain Feraud had leisure to consider his future conduct in view
of the fact that Captain D'Hubert had been given the position of third
aide-de-camp to the marshal. He considered it a great part of a night,
and in the morning summoned two sympathetic friends.

"I've been thinking it over calmly," he said, gazing at them with
bloodshot, tired eyes. "I see that I must get rid of that intriguing
personage. Here he's managed to sneak onto the personal staff of the
marshal. It's a direct provocation to me. I can't tolerate a situation
in which I am exposed any day to receive an order through him, and God
knows what order, too! That sort of thing has happened once before--and
that's once too often. He understands this perfectly, never fear. I
can't tell you more than this. Now go. You know what it is you have to
do."

This encounter took place outside the town of Lubeck, on very open
ground selected with special care in deference to the general sense of
the cavalry division belonging to the army corps, that this time the two
officers should meet on horseback. After all, this duel was a cavalry
affair, and to persist in fighting on foot would look like a slight
on one's own arm of the service. The seconds, startled by the unusual
nature of the suggestion, hastened to refer to their principals. Captain
Feraud jumped at it with savage alacrity. For some obscure reason,
depending, no doubt, on his psychology, he imagined himself invincible
on horseback. All alone within the four walls of his room he rubbed his
hands exultingly. "Aha! my staff officer, I've got you now!"

Captain D'Hubert, on his side, after staring hard for a considerable
time at his bothered seconds, shrugged his shoulders slightly. This
affair had hopelessly and unreasonably complicated his existence for
him. One absurdity more or less in the development did not matter. All
absurdity was distasteful to him; but, urbane as ever, he produced a
faintly ironic smile and said in his calm voice:

"It certainly will do away to some extent with the monotony of the
thing."

But, left to himself, he sat down at a table and took his head into
his hands. He had not spared himself of late, and the marshal had been
working his aides-de-camp particularly hard. The last three weeks of
campaigning in horrible weather had affected his health. When overtired
he suffered from a stitch in his wounded side, and that uncomfortable
sensation always depressed him. "It's that brute's doing," he thought
bitterly.

The day before he had received a letter from home, announcing that his
only sister was going to be married. He reflected that from the time she
was sixteen, when he went away to garrison life in Strasburg, he had
had but two short glimpses of her. They had been great friends and
confidants; and now they were going to give her away to a man whom he
did not know--a very worthy fellow, no doubt, but not half good enough
for her. He would never see his old Léonie again. She had a capable
little head and plenty of tact; she would know how to manage the fellow,
to be sure. He was easy about her happiness, but he felt ousted from
the first place in her affection which had been his ever since the
girl could speak. And a melancholy regret of the days of his childhood
settled upon Captain D'Hubert, third aide-de-camp to the Prince of
Ponte-Corvo.

He pushed aside the letter of congratulation he had begun to write, as
in duty bound but without pleasure. He took a fresh sheet of paper
and wrote: "This is my last will and testament." And, looking at these
words, he gave himself up to unpleasant reflection; a presentiment
that he would never see the scenes of his childhood overcame Captain
D'Hubert. He jumped up, pushing his chair back, yawned leisurely, which
demonstrated to himself that he didn't care anything for presentiments,
and, throwing himself on the bed, went to sleep. During the night he
shivered from time to time without waking up. In the morning he rode
out of town between his two seconds, talking of indifferent things and
looking right and left with apparent detachment into the heavy morning
mists, shrouding the flat green fields bordered by hedges. He leaped a
ditch, and saw the forms of many mounted men moving in the low fog. "We
are to fight before a gallery," he muttered bitterly.

His seconds were rather concerned at the state of the atmosphere,
but presently a pale and sympathetic sun struggled above the vapours.
Captain D'Hubert made out in the distance three horsemen riding a little
apart; it was his adversary and his seconds. He drew his sabre and
assured himself that it was properly fastened to his wrist. And now the
seconds, who had been standing in a close group with the heads of their
horses together, separated at an easy canter, leaving a large, clear
field between him and his adversary. Captain D'Hubert looked at the pale
sun, at the dismal landscape, and the imbecility of the impending
fight filled him with desolation. From a distant part of the field
a stentorian voice shouted commands at proper intervals: _Au pas--Au
trot--Chargez!_ Presentiments of death don't come to a man for nothing
he thought at the moment he put spurs to his horse.

And therefore nobody was more surprised than himself when, at the very
first set-to, Captain Feraud laid himself open to a cut extending over
the forehead, blinding him with blood, and ending the combat almost
before it had fairly begun. The surprise of Captain Feraud might have
been even greater. Captain D'Hubert, leaving him swearing horribly and
reeling in the saddle between his two appalled friends, leaped the ditch
again and trotted home with his two seconds, who seemed rather awestruck
at the speedy issue of that encounter. In the evening, Captain D'Hubert
finished the congratulatory letter on his sister's marriage.

He finished it late. It was a long letter. Captain D'Hubert gave reins
to his fancy. He told his sister he would feel rather lonely after this
great change in her life. But, he continued, "the day will come for me,
too, to get married. In fact, I am thinking already of the time when
there will be no one left to fight in Europe, and the epoch of wars
will be over. I shall expect then to be within measurable distance of a
marshal's baton and you will be an experienced married woman. You shall
look out a nice wife for me. I will be moderately bald by then, and a
little blasé; I will require a young girl--pretty, of course, and with
a large fortune, you know, to help me close my glorious career with the
splendour befitting my exalted rank." He ended with the information
that he had just given a lesson to a worrying, quarrelsome fellow, who
imagined he had a grievance against him. "But if you, in the depth of
your province," he continued, "ever hear it said that your brother is of
a quarrelsome disposition, don't you believe it on any account. There
is no saying what gossip from the army may reach your innocent ears;
whatever you hear, you may assure our father that your ever loving
brother is not a duellist." Then Captain D'Hubert crumpled up the sheet
of paper with the words, "This is my last will and testament," and threw
it in the fire with a great laugh at himself. He didn't care a snap
for what that lunatic fellow could do. He had suddenly acquired the
conviction that this man was utterly powerless to affect his life in any
sort of way, except, perhaps, in the way of putting a certain special
excitement into the delightful gay intervals between the campaigns.

From this on there were, however, to be no peaceful intervals in the
career of Captain D'Hubert. He saw the fields of Eylau and Friedland,
marched and countermarched in the snow, the mud, and the dust of Polish
plains, picking up distinction and advancement on all the roads of
northeastern Europe. Meantime, Captain Feraud, despatched southward with
his regiment, made unsatisfactory war in Spain. It was only when the
preparations for the Russian campaign began that he was ordered north
again. He left the country of mantillas and oranges without regret.

The first signs of a not unbecoming baldness added to the lofty aspect
of Colonel D'Hubert's forehead. This feature was no longer white and
smooth as in the days of his youth, and the kindly open glance of his
blue eyes had grown a little hard, as if from much peering through the
smoke of battles. The ebony crop on Colonel Feraud's head, coarse and
crinkly like a cap of horsehair, showed many silver threads about the
temples. A detestable warfare of ambushes and inglorious surprises had
not improved his temper. The beaklike curve of his nose was unpleasantly
set off by deep folds on each side of his mouth. The round orbits of his
eyes radiated fine wrinkles. More than ever he recalled an irritable
and staring fowl--something like a cross between a parrot and an owl.
He still manifested an outspoken dislike for "intriguing fellows." He
seized every opportunity to state that he did not pick up his rank in
the anterooms of marshals.

The unlucky persons, civil or military, who, with an intention of being
pleasant, begged Colonel Feraud to tell them how he came by that very
apparent scar on the forehead, were astonished to find themselves
snubbed in various ways, some of which were simply rude and others
mysteriously sardonic. Young officers were warned kindly by their more
experienced comrades not to stare openly at the colonel's scar. But,
indeed, an officer need have been very young in his profession not
to have heard the legendary tale of that duel originating in some
mysterious, unforgivable offence.



III

The retreat from Moscow submerged all private feelings in a sea of
disaster and misery. Colonels without regiments, D'Hubert and Feraud
carried the musket in the ranks of the sacred battalion--a battalion
recruited from officers of all arms who had no longer any troops to
lead.

In that battalion promoted colonels did duty as sergeants; the generals
captained the companies; a marshal of France, Prince of the Empire,
commanded the whole. All had provided themselves with muskets picked
up on the road, and cartridges taken from the dead. In the general
destruction of the bonds of discipline and duty holding together the
companies, the battalions, the regiments, the brigades and divisions
of an armed host, this body of men put their pride in preserving some
semblance of order and formation. The only stragglers were those who
fell out to give up to the frost their exhausted souls. They plodded on
doggedly, stumbling over the corpses of men, the carcasses of horses,
the fragments of gun-carriages, covered by the white winding-sheet of
the great disaster. Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of
the plains, shining with a livid light under a sky the colour of ashes.
Whirlwinds of snow ran along the fields, broke against the dark column,
rose in a turmoil of flying icicles, and subsided, disclosing it
creeping on without the swing and rhythm of the military pace. They
struggled onward, exchanging neither words nor looks--whole ranks
marched, touching elbows, day after day, and never raising their eyes,
as if lost in despairing reflections. On calm days, in the dumb black
forests of pines the cracking of overloaded branches was the only sound.
Often from daybreak to dusk no one spoke in the whole column. It was
like a _macabre_ march of struggling corpses towards a distant grave.
Only an alarm of Cossacks could restore to their lack-lustre eyes a
semblance of martial resolution. The battalion deployed, facing about,
or formed square under the endless fluttering of snowflakes. A cloud of
horsemen with fur caps on their heads, levelled long lances and yelled
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" around their menacing immobility, whence, with muffled
detonations, hundreds of dark-red flames darted through the air thick
with falling snow. In a very few moments the horsemen would disappear,
as if carried off yelling in the gale, and the battalion, standing
still, alone in the blizzard, heard only the wind searching their very
hearts. Then, with a cry or two of "_Vive l'Empereur!_" it would resume
its march, leaving behind a few lifeless bodies lying huddled up, tiny
dark specks on the white ground.

Though often marching in the ranks or skirmishing in the woods side
by side, the two officers ignored each other; this not so much from
inimical intention as from a very real indifference. All their store of
moral energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of Nature and
the crushing sense of irretrievable disaster.

Neither of them allowed himself to be crushed. To the last they counted
among the most active, the least demoralised of the battalion; their
vigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroic
pair in the eyes of their comrades. And they never exchanged more than
a casual word or two, except one day when, skirmishing in front of the
battalion against a worrying attack of cavalry, they found themselves
cut off by a small party of Cossacks. A score of wild-looking, hairy
horsemen rode to and fro, brandishing their lances in ominous silence.
The two officers had no mind to lay down their arms, and Colonel Feraud
suddenly spoke up in a hoarse, growling voice, bringing his firelock to
the shoulder:

"You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert; I'll settle the next one.
I am a better shot than you are."

Colonel D'Hubert only nodded over his levelled musket. Their shoulders
were pressed against the trunk of a large tree; in front, deep
snowdrifts protected them from a direct charge.

[Illustration: 088.jpg "You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert"]

Two carefully aimed shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks
reeled in their saddles. The rest, not thinking the game good enough,
closed round their wounded comrades and galloped away out of range. The
two officers managed to rejoin their battalion, halted for the night.
During that afternoon they had leaned upon each other more than once,
and towards the last Colonel D'Hubert, whose long legs gave him an
advantage in walking through soft snow, peremptorily took the musket
from Colonel Feraud and carried it on his shoulder, using his own as a
staff.

On the outskirts of a village, half-buried in the snow, an old wooden
barn burned with a clear and immense flame. The sacred battalion of
skeletons muffled in rags crowded greedily the windward side, stretching
hundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze. Nobody had noted their
approach. Before entering the circle of light playing on the multitude
of sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D'Hubert spoke in his
turn:

"Here's your firelock, Colonel Feraud. I can walk better than you."

Colonel Feraud nodded, and pushed on towards the warmth of the fierce
flames. Colonel D'Hubert was more deliberate, but not the less bent
on getting a place in the front rank. Those they pushed aside tried
to greet with a faint cheer the reappearance of the two indomitable
companions in activity and endurance. Those manly qualities had never,
perhaps, received a higher tribute than this feeble acclamation.

This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreat
from Moscow by Colonels Feraud and D'Hubert. Colonel Feraud's
taciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage. Short, hairy,
black-faced with layers of grime, and a thick sprouting of a wiry beard,
a frost-bitten hand, wrapped in filthy rags, carried in a sling, he
accused fate bitterly of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of
Destiny. Colonel D'Hubert, his long moustache pendent in icicles on each
side of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare of
snows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat
looted with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp follower
found in an abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of events. His
regularly handsome features now reduced to mere bony fines and fleshless
hollows, looked out of a woman's black velvet hood, over which was
rammed forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels of an empty army
fourgon which must have contained at one time some general officer's
luggage. The sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches, ended
very high up his elegant person, and the skin of his legs, blue with the
cold, showed through the tatters of his nether garments. This, under
the circumstances, provoked neither jeers nor pity. No one cared how the
next man felt or looked. Colonel D'Hubert himself hardened to exposure,
suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of
his costume. A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of
inanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have
been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But the great majority
of these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had been
already despoiled; and besides, to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen
corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It requires
time. You must remain behind while your companions march on. And Colonel
D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. They arose from a point of
honour, and also a little from dread. Once he stepped aside he could not
be sure of ever rejoining his battalion. And the enterprise demanded a
physical effort from which his starved body shrank. The ghastly intimacy
of a wrestling match with the frozen dead opposing the unyielding
rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant to the inborn delicacy
of his feelings.

Luckily, one day grubbing in a mound of snow between the huts of a
village in the hope of finding there a frozen potato or some vegetable
garbage he could put between his long and shaky teeth, Colonel D'Hubert
uncovered a couple of mats of the sort Russian peasants use to line the
sides of their carts. These, shaken free of frozen snow, bent about his
person and fastened solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether
garment, a sort of stiff petticoat, rendering Colonel D'Hubert a
perfectly decent but a much more noticeable figure than before.

Thus accoutred he continued to retreat, never doubting of his personal
escape but full of other misgivings. The early buoyancy of his belief
in the future was destroyed. If the road of glory led through such
unforeseen passages--he asked himself, for he was reflective, whether
the guide was altogether trustworthy. And a patriotic sadness not
unmingled with some personal concern, altogether unlike the unreasoning
indignation against men and things nursed by Colonel Feraud, oppressed
the equable spirits of Colonel D'Hubert. Recruiting his strength in a
little German town for three weeks, he was surprised to discover within
himself a love of repose. His returning vigour was strangely pacific in
its aspirations. He meditated silently upon that bizarre change of
mood. No doubt many of his brother officers of field rank had the same
personal experience. But these were not the times to talk of it. In one
of his letters home Colonel D'Hubert wrote: "All your plans, my dear
Leonie, of marrying me to the charming girl you have discovered in your
neighbourhood, seem farther off than ever. Peace is not yet. Europe
wants another lesson. It will be a hard task for us, but it will be done
well, because the emperor is invincible."

Thus wrote Colonel D'Hubert from Pomerania to his married sister Léonie,
settled in the south of France. And so far the sentiments expressed
would not have been disowned by Colonel Feraud who wrote no letters to
anybody; whose father had been in life an illiterate blacksmith; who had
no sister or brother, and whom no one desired ardently to pair off for a
life of peace with a charming young girl. But Colonel D'Hubert's letter
contained also some philosophical generalities upon the uncertainty of
all personal hopes if bound up entirely with the prestigious fortune of
one incomparably great, it is true, yet still remaining but a man in
his greatness. This sentiment would have appeared rank heresy to
Colonel Feraud. Some melancholy forebodings of a military kind expressed
cautiously would have been pronounced as nothing short of high treason
by Colonel Feraud. But Léonie, the sister of Colonel D'Hubert, read them
with positive satisfaction, and folding the letter thoughtfully remarked
to herself that "Armand was likely to prove eventually a sensible
fellow." Since her marriage into a Southern family she had become a
convinced believer in the return of the legitimate king. Hopeful and
anxious she offered prayers night and morning, and burned candles in
churches for the safety and prosperity of her brother.

She had every reason to suppose that her prayers were heard. Colonel
D'Hubert passed through Lutzen, Bautzen, and Leipsic, losing no limbs
and acquiring additional reputation. Adapting his conduct to the needs
of that desperate time, he had never voiced his misgivings. He concealed
them under a cheerful courtesy of such pleasant character that people
were inclined to ask themselves with wonder whether Colonel D'Hubert
was aware of any disasters. Not only his manners but even his glances
remained untroubled. The steady amenity of his blue eyes disconcerted
all grumblers, silenced doleful remarks, and made even despair pause.

This bearing was remarked at last by the emperor himself, for Colonel
D'Hubert, attached now to the Major-General's staff, came on several
occasions under the imperial eye. But it exasperated the higher strung
nature of Colonel Feraud. Passing through Magdeburg on service this last
allowed himself, while seated gloomily at dinner with the _Commandant
de Place_, to say of his lifelong adversary: "This man does not love
the emperor,"--and as his words were received in profound silence Colonel
Feraud, troubled in his conscience at the atrocity of the aspersion,
felt the need to back it up by a good argument. "I ought to know him,"
he said, adding some oaths. "One studies one's adversary. I have met him
on the ground half a dozen times, as all the army knows. What more do
you want? If that isn't opportunity enough for any fool to size up his
man, may the devil take me if I can tell what is." And he looked around
the table with sombre obstinacy.

Later on, in Paris, while feverishly busy reorganising his regiment,
Colonel Feraud learned that Colonel D'Hubert had been made a general. He
glared at his informant incredulously, then folded his arms and turned
away muttering:

"Nothing surprises me on the part of that man."

And aloud he added, speaking over his shoulder: "You would greatly
oblige me by telling General D'Hubert at the first opportunity that his
advancement saves him for a time from a pretty hot encounter. I was only
waiting for him to turn up here."

The other officer remonstrated.

"Could you think of it, Colonel Feraud! At this time when every life
should be consecrated to the glory and safety of France!"

But the strain of unhappiness caused by military reverses had spoiled
Colonel Feraud's character. Like many other men he was rendered wicked
by misfortune.

"I cannot consider General D'Hubert's person of any account either
for the glory or safety of France," he snapped viciously. "You don't
pretend, perhaps, to know him better than I do--who have been with him
half a dozen times on the ground--do you?"

His interlocutor, a young man, was silenced. Colonel Feraud walked up
and down the room.

"This is not a time to mince matters," he said. "I can't believe that
that man ever loved the emperor. He picked up his general's stars under
the boots of Marshal Berthier. Very well. I'll get mine in another
fashion, and then we shall settle this business which has been dragging
on too long."

General D'Hubert, informed indirectly of Colonel Feraud's attitude, made
a gesture as if to put aside an importunate person. His thoughts were
solicited by graver cares. He had had no time to go and see his family.
His sister, whose royalist hopes were rising higher every day, though
proud of her brother, regretted his recent advancement in a measure,
because it put on him a prominent mark of the usurper's favour which
later on could have an adverse influence upon his career. He wrote
to her that no one but an inveterate enemy could say he had got his
promotion by favour. As to his career he assured her that he looked no
farther forward into the future than the next battlefield.

Beginning the campaign of France in that state of mind, General D'Hubert
was wounded on the second day of the battle under Laon. While being
carried off the field he heard that Colonel Feraud, promoted that moment
to general, had been sent to replace him in the command of his brigade.
He cursed his luck impulsively, not being able, at the first glance,
to discern all the advantages of a nasty wound. And yet it was by this
heroic method that Providence was shaping his future. Travelling slowly
south to his sister's country house, under the care of a trusty old
servant, General D'Hubert was spared the humiliating contacts and the
perplexities of conduct which assailed the men of the Napoleonic empire
at the moment of its downfall. Lying in his bed with the windows of his
room open wide to the sunshine of Provence, he perceived at last the
undisguised aspect of the blessing conveyed by that jagged fragment of
a Prussian shell which, killing his horse and ripping open his thigh,
saved him from an active conflict with his conscience. After fourteen
years spent sword in hand in the saddle and strong in the sense of his
duty done to the end, General D'Hubert found resignation an easy virtue.
His sister was delighted with his reasonableness. "I leave myself
altogether in your hands, my dear Léonie," he had said.

He was still laid up when, the credit of his brother-in-law's family
being exerted on his behalf, he received from the Royal Government not
only the confirmation of his rank but the assurance of being retained on
the active list. To this was added an unlimited convalescent leave.
The unfavourable opinion entertained of him in the more irreconcilable
Bonapartist circles, though it rested on nothing more solid than the
unsupported pronouncement of General Feraud, was directly responsible
for General D'Hubert's retention on the active list. As to General
Feraud, his rank was confirmed, too. It was more than he dared to
expect, but Marshal Soult, then Minister of War to the restored king,
was partial to officers who had served in Spain. Only not even the
marshal's protection could secure for him active employment. He remained
irreconcilable, idle and sinister, seeking in obscure restaurants the
company of other half-pay officers, who cherished dingy but glorious
old tricolour cockades in their breast pockets, and buttoned with the
forbidden eagle buttons their shabby uniform, declaring themselves too
poor to afford the expense of the prescribed change.

The triumphant return of the emperor, a historical fact as marvellous
and incredible as the exploits of some mythological demi-god, found
General D'Hubert still quite unable to sit a horse. Neither could he
walk very well. These disabilities, which his sister thought most lucky,
helped her immensely to keep her brother out of all possible mischief.
His frame of mind at that time, she noted with dismay, became very far
from reasonable. That general officer, still menaced by the loss of a
limb, was discovered one night in the stables of the château by a groom
who, seeing a light, raised an alarm of thieves. His crutch was lying
half buried in the straw of the litter, and he himself was hopping on
one leg in a loose box around a snorting horse he was trying to
saddle. Such were the effects of imperial magic upon an unenthusiastic
temperament and a pondered mind. Beset, in the light of stable lanterns,
by the tears, entreaties, indignation, remonstrances and reproaches of
his family, he got out of the difficult situation by fainting away there
and then in the arms of his nearest relatives, and was carried off to
bed. Before he got out of it again the second reign of Napoleon, the
Hundred Days of feverish agitation and supreme effort passed away like a
terrifying dream. The tragic year 1815, begun in the trouble and unrest
of consciences, was ending in vengeful proscriptions.

How General Feraud escaped the clutches of the Special Commission and
the last offices of a firing squad, he never knew himself. It was partly
due to the subordinate position he was assigned during the Hundred Days.
He was not given active command but was kept busy at the cavalry depot
in Paris, mounting and despatching hastily drilled troopers into the
field. Considering this task as unworthy of his abilities, he discharged
it with no offensively noticeable zeal. But for the greater part he
was saved from the excesses of royalist reaction by the interference of
General D'Hubert.

This last, still on convalescent leave but able now to travel, had been
despatched by his sister to Paris to present himself to his legitimate
sovereign. As no one in the capital could possibly know anything of the
episode in the stable, he was received there with distinction. Military
to the very bottom of his soul, the prospect of rising in his profession
consoled him from finding himself the butt of Bonapartist malevolence
which pursued him with a persistence he could not account for. All the
rancour of that embittered and persecuted party pointed to him as the
man who had _never_ loved the emperor--a sort of monster essentially
worse than a mere betrayer.

General D'Hubert shrugged his shoulders without anger at this ferocious
prejudice. Rejected by his old friends and mistrusting profoundly the
advances of royalist society, the young and handsome general (he was
barely forty) adopted a manner of punctilious and cold courtesy which
at the merest shadow of an intended slight passed easily into harsh
haughtiness. Thus prepared, General D'Hubert went about his affairs in
Paris feeling inwardly very happy with the peculiar uplifting happiness
of a man very much in love. The charming girl looked out by his sister
had come upon the scene and had conquered him in the thorough manner in
which a young girl, by merely existing in his sight, can make a man of
forty her own. They were going to be married as soon as General D'Hubert
had obtained his official nomination to a promised command.

One afternoon, sitting on the _terrasse_ of the Café Tortoni, General
D'Hubert learned from the conversation of two strangers occupying
a table near his own that General Feraud, included in the batch of
superior officers arrested after the second return of the king, was in
danger of passing before the Special Commission. Living all his spare
moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers a day
in advance of reality, as it were, and in a state of bestarred
hallucination, it required nothing less than the name of his perpetual
antagonist pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon's
generals away from the mental contemplation of his betrothed. He looked
round. The strangers wore civilian clothes. Lean and weather-beaten,
lolling back in their chairs, they looked at people with moody and
defiant abstraction from under their hats pulled low over their eyes. It
was not difficult to recognise them for two of the compulsorily retired
officers of the Old Guard. As from bravado or carelessness they chose to
speak in loud tones, General D'Hubert, who saw no reason why he should
change his seat, heard every word. They did not seem to be the personal
friends of General Feraud. His name came up with some others; and
hearing it repeated General D'Hubert's tender anticipations of a
domestic future adorned by a woman's grace were traversed by the harsh
regret of that warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of
arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster--the marvellous
work and the special possession of his own generation. He felt an
irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated
emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into
his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He
remembered the flavour with sudden melancholy. He would never taste
it again. It was all over.... "I fancy it was being left lying in the
garden that had exasperated him so against me," he thought indulgently.

The two strangers at the next table had fallen silent upon the third
mention of General Feraud's name. Presently, the oldest of the two,
speaking in a bitter tone, affirmed that General Feraud's account was
settled. And why? Simply because he was not like some big-wigs who loved
only themselves. The royalists knew that they could never make anything
of him. He loved the Other too well.

The Other was the man of St. Helena. The two officers nodded and touched
glasses before they drank to an impossible return. Then the same who had
spoken before remarked with a sardonic little laugh:

"His adversary showed more cleverness."

"What adversary?" asked the younger as if puzzled.

"Don't you know? They were two Hussars. At each promotion they fought a
duel. Haven't you heard of the duel that is going on since 1801?"

His friend had heard of the duel, of course. Now he understood the
allusion. General Baron D'Hubert would be able now to enjoy his fat
king's favour in peace.

"Much good may it do to him," mumbled the elder. "They were both
brave men. I never saw this D'Hubert--a sort of intriguing dandy, I
understand. But I can well believe what I've heard Feraud say once of
him--that he never loved the emperor."

They rose and went away.

General D'Hubert experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes
up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a
quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his
way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from
his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been
or hoped to be would be lost in ignominy unless he could manage to save
General Feraud from the fate which threatened so many braves. Under
the impulse of this almost morbid need to attend to the safety of his
adversary General D'Hubert worked so well with hands and feet (as the
French saying is) that in less than twenty-four hours he found means of
obtaining an extraordinary private audience from the Minister of Police.

General Baron D'Hubert was shown in suddenly without preliminaries. In
the dusk of the minister's cabinet, behind the shadowy forms of writing
desk, chairs, and tables, between two bunches of wax candles blazing in
sconces, he beheld a figure in a splendid coat posturing before a tall
mirror. The old _Conventional_ Fouché, ex-senator of the empire, traitor
to every man, every principle and motive of human conduct, Duke of
Otranto, and the wily artisan of the Second Restoration, was trying the
fit of a court suit, in which his young and accomplished _fiancée_ had
declared her wish to have his portrait painted on porcelain. It was a
caprice, a charming fancy which the Minister of Police of the Second
Restoration was anxious to gratify. For that man, often compared in
wiliness of intellect to a fox but whose ethical side could be worthily
symbolised by nothing less emphatic than a skunk, was as much possessed
by his love as General D'Hubert himself.

Startled to be discovered thus by the blunder of a servant, he met this
little vexation with the characteristic effrontery which had served
his turn so well in the endless intrigues of his self-seeking career.
Without altering his attitude a hair's breadth, one leg in a silk
stocking advanced, his head twisted over his left shoulder, he called
out calmly:

"This way, general. Pray approach. Well? I am all attention."

While General D'Hubert, as ill at ease as if one of his own little
weaknesses had been exposed, presented his request as shortly as
possible, the minister went on feeling the fit of his collar, settling
the lappels before the glass or buckling his back in his efforts to
behold the set of the gold-embroidered coat skirts behind. His still
face, his attentive eyes, could not have expressed a more complete
interest in those matters if he had been alone.

"Exclude from the operations of the Special Commission a certain Feraud,
Gabriel Florian, General of Brigade of the promotion of 1814?" he
repeated in a slightly wondering tone and then turned away from the
glass. "Why exclude him precisely?"

"I am surprised that your Excellency, so competent in the valuation of
men of his time, should have thought it worth while to have that name
put down on the list."

"A rabid Bonapartist."

"So is every grenadier and every trooper of the army, as your Excellency
well knows. And the individuality of General Feraud can have no more
weight than that of any casual grenadier. He is a man of no mental
grasp, of no capacity whatever. It is inconceivable that he should ever
have any influence."

"He has a well-hung tongue though," interjected Fouché.

"Noisy, I admit, but not dangerous."

"I will not dispute with you. I know next to nothing of him. Hardly his
name in fact."

"And yet your Excellency had the presidency of the commission charged by
the king to point out those who were to be tried," said General D'Hubert
with an emphasis which did not miss the minister's ear.

"Yes, general," he said, walking away into the dark part of the vast
room and throwing himself into a high-backed armchair whose overshadowed
depth swallowed him up, all but the gleam of gold embroideries on the
coat and the pallid patch of the face. "Yes, general. Take that chair
there."

General D'Hubert sat down.

"Yes, general," continued the arch-master in the arts of intrigue
and betrayal, whose duplicity as if at times intolerable to his
self-knowledge worked itself off in bursts of cynical openness. "I
did hurry on the formation of the proscribing commission and took its
presidency. And do you know why? Simply from fear that if I did not
take it quickly into my hands my own name would head the list of the
proscribed. Such are the times in which we live. But I am minister of
the king as yet, and I ask you plainly why I should take the name of
this obscure Feraud off the list? You wonder how his name got there. Is
it possible that you know men so little? My dear general, at the very
first sitting of the commission names poured on us like rain off the
tiles of the Tuileries. Names! We had our choice of thousands. How do
you know that the name of this Feraud, whose life or death don't matter
to France, does not keep out some other name?..."

The voice out of the armchair stopped. General D'Hubert sat still,
shadowy, and silent. Only his sabre clinked slightly. The voice in the
armchair began again. "And we must try to satisfy the exigencies of the
allied sovereigns. The Prince de Talleyrand told me only yesterday that
Nesselrode had informed him officially that his Majesty, the Emperor
Alexander, was very disappointed at the small number of examples the
government of the king intends to make--especially amongst military men.
I tell you this confidentially."

"Upon my word," broke out General D'Hubert, speaking through his teeth,
"if your Excellency deigns to favour me with any more confidential
information I don't know what I will do. It's enough to make one break
one's sword over one's knee and fling the pieces..."

"What government do you imagine yourself to be serving?" interrupted the
minister sharply. After a short pause the crestfallen voice of General
D'Hubert answered:

"The government of France."

"That's paying your conscience off with mere words, general. The truth
is that you are serving a government of returned exiles, of men who have
been without country for twenty years. Of men also who have just got
over a very bad and humiliating fright.... Have no illusions on that
score."

The Duke of Otranto ceased. He had relieved himself, and had attained
his object of stripping some self-respect off that man who had
inconveniently discovered him posturing in a gold-embroidered court
costume before a mirror. But they were a hot-headed lot in the army,
and it occurred to him that it would be inconvenient if a well-disposed
general officer, received by him on the recommendation of one of the
princes, were to go and do something rashly scandalous directly after
a private interview with the minister. In a changed voice he put a
question to the point:

"Your relation--this Feraud?"

"No. No relation at all."

"Intimate friend?"

"Intimate... yes. There is between us an intimate connection of a nature
which makes it a point of honour with me to try..."

The minister rang a bell without waiting for the end of the phrase.
When the servant had gone, after bringing in a pair of heavy silver
candelabra for the writing desk, the Duke of Otranto stood up, his
breast glistening all over with gold in the strong light, and taking a
piece of paper out of a drawer held it in his hand ostentatiously while
he said with persuasive gentleness:

"You must not talk of breaking your sword across your knee, general.
Perhaps you would never get another. The emperor shall not return this
time.... _Diable d'homme!_ There was just a moment here in Paris, soon
after Waterloo, when he frightened me. It looked as though he were going
to begin again. Luckily one never does begin again really. You must not
think of breaking your sword, general."

General D'Hubert, his eyes fixed on the ground, made with his hand a
hopeless gesture of renunciation. The Minister of Police turned his
eyes away from him and began to scan deliberately the paper he had been
holding up all the time.

"There are only twenty general officers to be brought before the Special
Commission. Twenty. A round number. And let's see, Feraud. Ah, he's
there! Gabriel Florian. _Parfaitement_. That's your man. Well, there
will be only nineteen examples made now."

General D'Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an
infectious illness.

"I must beg your Excellency to keep my interference a profound secret. I
attach the greatest importance to his never knowing..."

"Who is going to inform him I should like to know," said Fouché, raising
his eyes curiously to General D'Hubert's white face. "Take one of these
pens and run it through the name yourself. This is the only list in
existence. If you are careful to take up enough ink no one will be able
to tell even what was the name thus struck out. But, _par example_, I am
not responsible for what Clarke will do with him. If he persist in
being rabid he will be ordered by the Minster of War to reside in some
provincial town under the supervision of the police."

A few days later General D'Hubert was saying to his sister after the
first greetings had been got over:

"Ah, my dear Léonie! It seemed to me I couldn't get away from Paris
quick enough."

"Effect of love," she suggested with a malicious smile.

"And horror," added General D'Hubert with profound seriousness. "I have
nearly died there of... of nausea."

His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him
attentively he continued:

"I have had to see Fouché. I have had an audience. I have been in his
cabinet. There remains with one, after the misfortune of having to
breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished
dignity, the uneasy feeling of being not so clean after all as one hoped
one was.... But you can't understand."

She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well on the
contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was.
Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin
Fouché, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every
virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole
generation and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.

"My dear Armand," she said compassionately, "what could you want from
that man?"

"Nothing less than a life," answered General D'Hubert. "And I've got
it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the
necessity to the man I had to save."

General Feraud, totally unable as is the case with most men to
comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War's
order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings
whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and
savage grinding of the teeth. But he went. The bewilderment and awe at
the passing away of the state of war--the only condition of society he
had ever known--the prospect of a world at peace frightened him. He went
away to his little town firmly persuaded that this could not last. There
he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension
(calculated on the scale of a colonel's half-pay) was made dependent on
the circumspection of his conduct and on the good reports of the police.
No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a
disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted
from sheer incredulity. This could not be. It could not last. The
heavens would fall presently. He called upon thunder, earthquakes,
natural cataclysms. But nothing happened. The leaden weight of an
irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who, having no
resources within himself, sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude.
He haunted the streets of the little town gazing before him with
lack-lustre eyes, disregarding the hats raised on his passage; and the
people, nudging each other as he went by, said: "That's poor General
Feraud. His heart is broken. Behold how he loved the emperor!"

The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest to be found in that
quiet nook of France clustered round him infinitely respectful of
that sorrow. He himself imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He
experienced quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his
fists till blood came, to lie for days on his bed with his head thrust
under the pillow; but they arose from sheer _ennui_, from the anguish
of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. Only his mental
inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him
from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing;
but his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty of expressing the
overwhelming horror of his feelings (the most furious swearing could do
no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of silence:--a sort of death
to a Southern temperament.

Great therefore was the emotion amongst the _anciens militaires_
frequenting a certain little café full of flies when one stuffy
afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of
formidable curses.

He had been sitting quietly in his own privileged corner looking through
the Paris gazettes with about as much interest as a condemned man on
the eve of execution could be expected to show in the news of the day.
A cluster of martial, bronzed faces, including one lacking an eye and
another lacking the tip of a nose frost-bitten in Russia, surrounded him
anxiously.

"What's the matter, general?"

General Feraud sat erect, holding the newspaper at arm's length in order
to make out the small print better. He was reading very low to himself
over again fragments of the intelligence which had caused what may be
called his resurrection.

"We are informed... till now on sick leave... is to be called to the
command of the 5th Cavalry Brigade in..."

He dropped the paper stonily, mumbled once more... "Called to the
command"... and suddenly gave his forehead a mighty slap.

"I had almost forgotten him," he cried in a conscience-stricken tone.

A deep-chested veteran shouted across the café:

"Some new villainy of the government, general?"

"The villainies of these scoundrels," thundered General Feraud, "are
innumerable. One more, one less!..." He lowered his tone. "But I will
set good order to one of them at least."

He looked all round the faces. "There's a pomaded curled staff officer,
the darling of some of the marshals who sold their father for a handful
of English gold. He will find out presently that I am alive yet," he
declared in a dogmatic tone.... "However, this is a private affair.
An old affair of honour. Bah! Our honour does not matter. Here we are
driven off with a split ear like a lot of cast troop horses--good only
for a knacker's yard. Who cares for our honour now? But it would be
like striking a blow for the emperor.... _Messieurs_, I require the
assistance of two of you."

Every man moved forward. General Feraud, deeply touched by this
demonstration, called with visible emotion upon the one-eyed veteran
cuirassier and the officer of the _Chasseurs à cheval_, who had left the
tip of his nose in Russia. He excused his choice to the others.

"A cavalry affair this--you know."

He was answered with a varied chorus of "_Parfaitement mon Général...
C'est juste... Parbleu c'est connu..._" Everybody was satisfied. The
three left the café together, followed by cries of "_Bonne chance_."

Outside they linked arms, the general in the middle. The three rusty
cocked hats worn _en bataille_, with a sinister forward slant, barred
the narrow street nearly right across. The overheated little town of
gray stones and red tiles was drowsing away its provincial afternoon
under a blue sky. Far off the loud blows of some coopers hooping a cask,
reverberated regularly between the houses. The general dragged his left
foot a little in the shade of the walls.

"That damned winter of 1813 got into my bones for good. Never mind. We
must take pistols, that's all. A little lumbago. We must have pistols.
He's sure game for my bag. My eyes are as keen as ever. Always were. You
should have seen me picking off the dodging Cossacks with a beastly old
infantry musket. I have a natural gift for firearms."

In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head with owlish
eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a
_sabreur_, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity as in the main a
massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here
he had on hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow of peace had
passed away from him like the shadow of death. It was a marvellous
resurrection of the named Feraud, Gabriel Florian, _engagé volontaire_
of 1793, general of 1814, buried without ceremony by means of a service
order signed by the War Minister of the Second Restoration.



IV

No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all
failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the
effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It is
our vanity which hurries us into situations from which we must come out
damaged. Whereas pride is our safeguard by the reserve it imposes on
the choice of our endeavour, as much as by the virtue of its sustaining
power.

General D'Hubert was proud and reserved. He had not been damaged by
casual love affairs successful or otherwise. In his war-scarred body
his heart at forty remained unscratched. Entering with reserve into his
sister's matrimonial plans, he felt himself falling irremediably in love
as one falls off a roof. He was too proud to be frightened. Indeed, the
sensation was too delightful to be alarming.

The inexperience of a man of forty is a much more serious thing than
the inexperience of a youth of twenty, for it is not helped out by the
rashness of hot blood. The girl was mysterious, as all young girls
are, by the mere effect of their guarded ingenuity; and to him the
mysteriousness of that young girl appeared exceptional and fascinating.
But there was nothing mysterious about the arrangements of the match
which Madame Léonie had arranged. There was nothing peculiar, either. It
was a very appropriate match, commending itself extremely to the young
lady's mother (her father was dead) and tolerable to the young lady's
uncle--an old _émigré_, lately returned from Germany, and pervading cane
in hand like a lean ghost of the _ancien régime_ in a long-skirted brown
coat and powdered hair, the garden walks of the young lady's ancestral
home.

General D'Hubert was not the man to be satisfied merely with the girl
and the fortune--when it came to the point. His pride--and pride aims
always at true success--would be satisfied with nothing short of love.
But as pride excludes vanity, he could not imagine any reason why this
mysterious creature, with deep and candid eyes of a violet colour,
should have any feeling for him warmer than indifference. The young lady
(her name was Adèle) baffled every attempt at a clear understanding on
that point. It is true that the attempts were clumsy and timidly made,
because by then General D'Hubert had become acutely aware of the number
of his years, of his wounds, of his many moral imperfections, of his
secret unworthiness--and had incidentally learned by experience the
meaning of the word funk. As far as he could make it out she seemed
to imply that with a perfect confidence in her mother's affection and
sagacity she had no pronounced antipathy for the person of General
D'Hubert; and that this was quite sufficient for a well-brought-up
dutiful young lady to begin married life upon. This view hurt and
tormented the pride of General D'Hubert. And yet, he asked himself with
a sort of sweet despair, What more could he expect? She had a quiet and
luminous forehead; her violet eyes laughed while the lines of her lips
and chin remained composed in an admirable gravity. All this was set off
by such a glorious mass of fair hair, by a complexion so marvellous, by
such a grace of expression, that General D'Hubert really never found the
opportunity to examine, with sufficient detachment, the lofty exigencies
of his pride. In fact, he became shy of that line of inquiry, since it
had led once or twice to a crisis of solitary passion in which it was
borne upon him that he loved her enough to kill her rather than lose
her. From such passages, not unknown to men of forty, he would come out
broken, exhausted, remorseful, a little dismayed. He derived, however,
considerable comfort from the quietist practice of sitting up now and
then half the night by an open window, and meditating upon the wonder of
her existence, like a believer lost in the mystic contemplation of his
faith.

It must not be supposed that all these variations of his inward state
were made manifest to the world. General D'Hubert found no difficulty
in appearing wreathed in smiles: because, in fact, he was very happy.
He followed the established rules of his condition, sending over flowers
(from his sister's garden and hothouses) early every morning, and a
little later following himself to have lunch with his intended, her
mother, and her _émigré_ uncle. The middle of the day was spent in
strolling or sitting in the shade. A watchful deferential gallantry
trembling on the verge of tenderness, was the note of their intercourse
on his side--with a playful turn of the phrase concealing the profound
trouble of his whole being caused by her inaccessible nearness. Late in
the afternoon General D'Hubert walked home between the fields of vines,
sometimes intensely miserable, sometimes supremely happy, sometimes
pensively sad, but always feeling a special intensity of existence: that
elation common to artists, poets, and lovers, to men haunted by a great
passion, by a noble thought or a new vision of plastic beauty.

The outward world at that time did not exist with any special
distinctness for General D'Hubert. One evening, however, crossing a
ridge from which he could see both houses, General D'Hubert became aware
of two figures far down the road. The day had been divine. The festal
decoration of the inflamed sky cast a gentle glow on the sober tints
of the southern land. The gray rocks, the brown fields, the purple
undulating distances harmonised in luminous accord, exhaled already
the scents of the evening. The two figures down the road presented
themselves like two rigid and wooden silhouettes all black on the ribbon
of white dust. General D'Hubert made out the long, straight-cut military
_capotes_, buttoned closely right up to the black stocks, the cocked
hats, the lean carven brown countenances--old soldiers--_vieilles
moustaches!_ The taller of the two had a black patch over one eye;
the other's hard, dry countenance presented some bizarre disquieting
peculiarity which, on nearer approach, proved to be the absence of the
tip of the nose. Lifting their hands with one movement to salute the
slightly lame civilian walking with a thick stick, they inquired for the
house where the General Baron D'Hubert lived and what was the best way
to get speech with him quietly.

"If you think this quiet enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round
at the ripening vine-fields framed in purple lines and dominated by the
nest of gray and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a
steep, conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape
of a crowning rock--"if you think this quiet enough you can speak to
him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to speak openly with perfect
confidence."

They stepped back at this and raised again their hands to their hats
with marked ceremoniousness. Then the one with the chipped nose,
speaking for both, remarked that the matter was confidential enough and
to be arranged discreetly. Their general quarters were in that village
over there where the infernal clodhoppers--damn their false royalist
hearts--looked remarkably cross-eyed at three unassuming military men.
For the present he should only ask for the name of General D'Hubert's
friends.

"What friends?" said the astonished General D'Hubert, completely off the
track. "I am staying with my brother-in-law over there."

"Well, he will do for one," suggested the chipped veteran.

"We're the friends of General Feraud," interjected the other, who had
kept silent till then, only glowering with his one eye at the man who
had never loved the emperor. That was something to look at. For even
the gold-laced Judases who had sold him to the English, the marshals and
princes, had loved him at some time or other. But this man had _never_
loved the emperor. General Feraud had said so distinctly.

General D'Hubert felt a sort of inward blow in his chest. For an
infinitesimal fraction of a second it was as if the spinning of the
earth had become perceptible with an awful, slight rustle in the eternal
stillness of space. But that was the noise of the blood in his ears and
passed off at once. Involuntarily he murmured:

"Feraud! I had forgotten his existence."

"He's existing at present, very uncomfortably it is true, in the
infamous inn of that nest of savages up there," said the one-eyed
cuirassier drily. "We arrived in your parts an hour ago on post horses.
He's awaiting our return with impatience. There is hurry, you know. The
general has broken the ministerial order of sojourn to obtain from you
the satisfaction he's entitled to by the laws of honour, and naturally
he's anxious to have it all over before the _gendarmerie_ gets the
scent."

The other elucidated the idea a little further.

"Get back on the quiet--you understand? Phitt! No one the wiser. We
have broken out, too. Your friend the king would be glad to cut off our
scurvy pittances at the first chance. It's a risk. But honour before
everything."

General D'Hubert had recovered his power of speech.

"So you come like this along the road to invite me to a throat-cutting
match with that--that..." A laughing sort of rage took possession of
him.

"Ha! ha! ha! ha!"

His fists on his hips, he roared without restraint while they stood
before him lank and straight, as unexpected as though they had been shot
up with a snap through a trapdoor in the ground. Only four-and-twenty
months ago the masters of Europe, they had already the air of antique
ghosts, they seemed less substantial in their faded coats than their own
narrow shadows falling so black across the white road--the military and
grotesque shadows of twenty years of war and conquests. They had the
outlandish appearance of two imperturbable bronzes of the religion of
the sword. And General D'Hubert, also one of the ex-masters of Europe,
laughed at these serious phantoms standing in his way.

Said one, indicating the laughing general with a jerk of the head:

"A merry companion that."

"There are some of us that haven't smiled from the day the Other went
away," said his comrade.

A violent impulse to set upon and beat these unsubstantial wraiths to
the ground frightened General D'Hubert. He ceased laughing suddenly.
His urgent desire now was to get rid of them, to get them away from his
sight quickly before he lost control of himself. He wondered at this
fury he felt rising in his breast. But he had no time to look into that
peculiarity just then.

"I understand your wish to be done with me as quickly as possible. Then
why waste time in empty ceremonies. Do you see that wood there at the
foot of that slope? Yes, the wood of pines. Let us meet there to-morrow
at sunrise. I will bring with me my sword or my pistols or both if you
like."

The seconds of General Feraud looked at each other.

"Pistols, general," said the cuirassier.

"So be it. _Au revoir_--to-morrow morning. Till then let me advise you
to keep close if you don't want the _gendarmerie_ making inquiries about
you before dark. Strangers are rare in this part of the country."

They saluted in silence. General D'Hubert, turning his back on their
retreating figures, stood still in the middle of the road for a long
time, biting his lower lip and looking on the ground. Then he began to
walk straight before him, thus retracing his steps till he found himself
before the park gate of his intended's home. Motionless he stared
through the bars at the front of the house gleaming clear beyond the
thickets and trees. Footsteps were heard on the gravel, and presently a
tall stooping shape emerged from the lateral alley following the inner
side of the park wall.

Le Chevalier de Valmassigue, uncle of the adorable Adèle, ex-brigadier
in the army of the princes, bookbinder in Altona, afterwards shoemaker
(with a great reputation for elegance in the fit of ladies' shoes) in
another small German town, wore silk stockings on his lean shanks, low
shoes with silver buckles, a brocaded waistcoat. A long-skirted coat _à
la Française_ covered loosely his bowed back. A small three-cornered hat
rested on a lot of powdered hair tied behind in a queue.

"_Monsieur le Chevalier_," called General D'Hubert softly.

"What? You again here, _mon ami_? Have you forgotten something?"

"By heavens! That's just it. I have forgotten something. I am come to
tell you of it. No--outside. Behind this wall. It's too ghastly a thing
to be let in at all where she lives."

The Chevalier came out at once with that benevolent resignation some
old people display towards the fugue of youth. Older by a quarter of a
century than General D'Hubert, he looked upon him in the secret of
his heart as a rather troublesome youngster in love. He had heard his
enigmatical words very well, but attached no undue importance to what a
mere man of forty so hard hit was likely to do or say. The turn of mind
of the generation of Frenchmen grown up during the years of his exile
was almost unintelligible to him. Their sentiments appeared to him
unduly violent, lacking fineness and measure, their language needlessly
exaggerated. He joined the general on the road, and they made a few
steps in silence, the general trying to master his agitation and get
proper control of his voice.

"Chevalier, it is perfectly true. I forgot something. I forgot till
half an hour ago that I had an urgent affair of honour on my hands. It's
incredible but so it is!"

All was still for a moment. Then in the profound evening silence of the
countryside the thin, aged voice of the Chevalier was heard trembling
slightly.

"Monsieur! That's an indignity."

It was his first thought. The girl born during his exile, the posthumous
daughter of his poor brother, murdered by a band of Jacobins, had grown
since his return very dear to his old heart, which had been starving on
mere memories of affection for so many years.

"It is an inconceivable thing--I say. A man settles such affairs before
he thinks of asking for a young girl's hand. Why! If you had forgotten
for ten days longer you would have been married before your memory
returned to you. In my time men did not forget such things--nor yet
what's due to the feelings of an innocent young woman. If I did not
respect them myself I would qualify your conduct in a way which you
would not like."

General D'Hubert relieved himself frankly by a groan.

"Don't let that consideration prevent you. You run no risk of offending
her mortally."

But the old man paid no attention to this lover's nonsense. It's
doubtful whether he even heard.

"What is it?" he asked. "What's the nature of..."

"Call it a youthful folly, _Monsieur le Chevalier_. An inconceivable,
incredible result of..."

He stopped short. "He will never believe the story," he thought. "He
will only think I am taking him for a fool and get offended." General
D'Hubert spoke up again. "Yes, originating in youthful folly it has
become..."

The Chevalier interrupted. "Well then it must be arranged."

"Arranged."

"Yes. No matter what it may cost your _amour propre_. You should have
remembered you were engaged. You forgot that, too, I suppose. And then
you go and forget your quarrel. It's the most revolting exhibition of
levity I ever heard of."

"Good heavens, Chevalier! You don't imagine I have been picking up that
quarrel last time I was in Paris or anything of the sort. Do you?"

"Eh? What matters the precise date of your insane conduct!" exclaimed
the Chevalier testily. "The principal thing is to arrange it..."

Noticing General D'Hubert getting restive and trying to place a word,
the old _émigré_ raised his arm and added with dignity:

"I've been a soldier, too. I would never dare to suggest a doubtful
step to the man whose name my niece is to bear. I tell you that _entre
gallants hommes_ an affair can be always arranged."

"But, _saperlotte, Monsieur le Chevalier_, it's fifteen or sixteen years
ago. I was a lieutenant of Hussars then."

The old Chevalier seemed confounded by the vehemently despairing tone of
this information.

"You were a lieutenant of Hussars sixteen years ago?" he mumbled in a
dazed manner.

"Why, yes! You did not suppose I was made a general in my cradle like a
royal prince."

In the deepening purple twilight of the fields, spread with vine leaves,
backed by a low band of sombre crimson in the west, the voice of the old
ex-officer in the army of the princes sounded collected, punctiliously
civil.

"Do I dream? Is this a pleasantry? Or do you mean me to understand that
you have been hatching an affair of honour for sixteen years?"

"It has clung to me for that length of time. That is my precise meaning.
The quarrel itself is not to be explained easily. We have been on the
ground several times during that time of course."

"What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can
account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution
which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned _émigré_ in a
low tone. "Who is your adversary?" he asked a little louder.

"What? My adversary! His name is Feraud." Shadowy in his_ tricorne_ and
old-fashioned clothes like a bowed thin ghost of the _ancien régime_ the
Chevalier voiced a ghostly memory.

"I can remember the feud about little Sophie Derval between Monsieur de
Brissac, captain in the Bodyguards and d'Anjorrant. Not the pockmarked
one. The other. The Beau d'Anjorrant as they called him. They met three
times in eighteen months in a most gallant manner. It was the fault of
that little Sophie, too, who _would_ keep on playing..."

"This is nothing of the kind," interrupted General D'Hubert. He laughed
a little sardonically. "Not at all so simple," he added. "Nor yet half
so reasonable," he finished inaudibly between his teeth and ground them
with rage.

After this sound nothing troubled the silence for a long time till the
Chevalier asked without animation:

"What is he--this Feraud?"

"Lieutenant of Hussars, too--I mean he's a general. A Gascon. Son of a
blacksmith, I believe."

"There! I thought so. That Bonaparte had a special predilection for
the _canaille_. I don't mean this for you, D'Hubert. You are one of us,
though you have served this usurper who..."

"Let's leave him out of this," broke in General D'Hubert.

The Chevalier shrugged his peaked shoulders.

"A Feraud of sorts. Offspring of a blacksmith and some village troll....
See what comes of mixing yourself up with that sort of people."

"You have made shoes yourself, Chevalier."

"Yes. But I am not the son of a shoemaker. Neither are you, Monsieur
D'Hubert. You and I have something that your Bonaparte's, princes,
dukes, and marshals have not because there's no power on earth that
could give it to them," retorted the _émigré_, with the rising animation
of a man who has got hold of a hopeful argument. "Those people don't
exist--all these Ferauds. Feraud! What is Feraud? A _va-nu-pieds_
disguised into a general by a Corsican adventurer masquerading as an
emperor. There is no earthly reason for a D'Hubert to _s'encanailler_
by a duel with a person of that sort. You can make your excuses to him
perfectly well. And if the _manant_ takes it into his head to decline
them you may simply refuse to meet him." "You say I may do that?" "Yes.
With the clearest conscience." "_Monsieur le Chevalier!_ To what do you
think you have returned from your emigration?"

This was said in such a startling tone that the old exile raised sharply
his bowed head, glimmering silvery white under the points of the little
_tricorne_. For a long time he made no sound.

"God knows!" he said at last, pointing with a slow and grave gesture
at a tall roadside cross mounted on a block of stone and stretching its
arms of forged stone all black against the darkening red band in the
sky. "God knows! If it were not for this emblem, which I remember seeing
in this spot as a child, I would wonder to what we, who have remained
faithful to our God and our king, have returned. The very voices of the
people have changed."

"Yes, it is a changed France," said General D'Hubert. He had regained
his calm. His tone was slightly ironic. "Therefore, I cannot take your
advice. Besides, how is one to refuse to be bitten by a dog that means
to bite? It's impracticable. Take my word for it. He isn't a man to be
stopped by apologies or refusals. But there are other ways. I could, for
instance, send a mounted messenger with a word to the brigadier of the
_gendarmerie_ in Senlac. These fellows are liable to arrest on my simple
order. It would make some talk in the army, both the organised and the
disbanded. Especially the disbanded. All _canaille_. All my comrades
once--the companions in arms of Armand D'Hubert. But what need a
D'Hubert care what people who don't exist may think? Or better still,
I might get my brother-in-law to send for the mayor of the village and
give him a hint. No more would be needed to get the three 'brigands'
set upon with flails and pitchforks and hunted into some nice deep wet
ditch. And nobody the wiser! It has been done only ten miles from here
to three poor devils of the disbanded Red Lancers of the Guard going
to their homes. What says your conscience, Chevalier? Can a D'Hubert do
that thing to three men who do not exist?"

A few stars had come out on the blue obscurity, clear as crystal, of the
sky. The dry, thin voice of the Chevalier spoke harshly.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

The general seized a withered, frail old hand with a strong grip.

"Because I owe you my fullest confidence. Who could tell Adèle but you?
You understand why I dare not trust my brother-in-law nor yet my own
sister. Chevalier! I have been so near doing these things that I tremble
yet. You don't know how terrible this duel appears to me. And there's no
escape from it."

He murmured after a pause, "It's a fatality," dropped the Chevalier's
passive hand, and said in his ordinary conversational voice:

"I shall have to go without seconds. If it is my lot to remain on
the ground, you at least will know all that can be made known of this
affair."

The shadowy ghost of the _ancien régime_ seemed to have become more
bowed during the conversation.

"How am I to keep an indifferent face this evening before those two
women?" he groaned. "General! I find it very difficult to forgive you."

General D'Hubert made no answer.

"Is your cause good at least?"

"I am innocent."

This time he seized the Chevalier's ghostly arm above the elbow, gave it
a mighty squeeze.

"I must kill him," he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the
road.

The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the
general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest.
He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of
the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity
of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other
inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open
his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking
furniture, smashing china and glasses. From the moment he opened the
private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding
staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he
went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated
madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable
havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed
dining room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over,
and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs
of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan
on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still
greater. That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when
charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise
in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. It was the revolt of
jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared,
fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having,
perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.

On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched on his back with his
hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a
cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at
the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such
a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently
insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness
to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments--for what
the devil did he want to go to Fouché for?--he knew them all in turn.
"I am an idiot, neither more nor less," he thought. "A sensitive idiot.
Because I overheard two men talk in a café... I am an idiot afraid of
lies--whereas in life it is only truth that matters."

Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to
be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in
the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry
somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the
awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous
force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down
the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert
was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth
the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a
young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the
honourable man's fear of cowardice.

But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.

He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a
colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of
brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks
of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That
temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made
him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was
gradually asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at
the edge of the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange
in his hand, and thought that he had come ridiculously early on the
ground. Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes,
footsteps on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed loud
conversation. A voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, "He's game
for my bag."

He thought to himself, "Here they are. What's this about game? Are they
talking of me?" And becoming aware of the orange in his hand he thought
further, "These are very good oranges. Leonie's own tree. I may just as
well eat this orange instead of flinging it away."

Emerging from a tangle of rocks and bushes, General Feraud and his
seconds discovered General D'Hubert engaged in peeling the orange. They
stood still waiting till he looked up. Then the seconds raised their
hats, and General Feraud, putting his hands behind his back, walked
aside a little way.

"I am compelled to ask one of you, messieurs, to act for me. I have
brought no friends. Will you?"

The one-eyed cuirassier said judicially:

"That cannot be refused."

The other veteran remarked:

"It's awkward all the same."

"Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country
there was no one I could trust with the object of your presence here,"
explained General D'Hubert urbanely. They saluted, looked round, and
remarked both together:

"Poor ground."

"It's unfit."

"Why bother about ground, measurements, and so on. Let us simplify
matters. Load the two pairs of pistols. I will take those of General
Feraud and let him take mine. Or, better still, let us take a mixed
pair. One of each pair. Then we will go into the wood while you remain
outside. We did not come here for ceremonies, but for war. War to the
death. Any ground is good enough for that. If I fall you must leave me
where I lie and clear out. It wouldn't be healthy for you to be found
hanging about here after that."

It appeared after a short parley that General Feraud was willing to
accept these conditions. While the seconds were loading the pistols he
could be heard whistling, and was seen to rub his hands with an air of
perfect contentment. He flung off his coat briskly, and General D'Hubert
took off his own and folded it carefully on a stone.

"Suppose you take your principal to the other side of the wood and let
him enter exactly in ten minutes from now," suggested General D'Hubert
calmly, but feeling as if he were giving directions for his own
execution. This, however, was his last moment of weakness.

"Wait! Let us compare watches first."

He pulled out his own. The officer with the chipped nose went over to
borrow the watch of General Feraud. They bent their heads over them for
a time.

"That's it. At four minutes to five by yours. Seven to, by mine."

It was the cuirassier who remained by the side of General D'Hubert,
keeping his one eye fixed immovably on the white face of the watch he
held in the palm of his hand. He opened his mouth wide, waiting for the
beat of the last second, long before he snapped out the word:

"_Avancez!_"

General D'Hubert moved on, passing from the glaring sunshine of the
Provençal morning into the cool and aromatic shade of the pines. The
ground was clear between the reddish trunks, whose multitude, leaning at
slightly different angles, confused his eye at first. It was like going
into battle. The commanding quality of confidence in himself woke up in
his breast. He was all to his affair. The problem was how to kill his
adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile
nightmare. "It's no use wounding that brute," he thought. He was known
as a resourceful officer. His comrades, years ago, used to call him "the
strategist." And it was a fact that he could think in the presence of
the enemy, whereas Feraud had been always a mere fighter. But a dead
shot, unluckily.

"I must draw his fire at the greatest possible range," said General
D'Hubert to himself.

At that moment he saw something white moving far off between the trees.
The shirt of his adversary. He stepped out at once between the trunks
exposing himself freely, then quick as lightning leaped back. It had
been a risky move, but it succeeded in its object. Almost simultaneously
with the pop of a shot a small piece of bark chipped off by the bullet
stung his ear painfully.

And now General Feraud, with one shot expended, was getting cautious.
Peeping round his sheltering tree, General D'Hubert could not see him
at all. This ignorance of his adversary's whereabouts carried with it a
sense of insecurity. General D'Hubert felt himself exposed on his flanks
and rear. Again something white fluttered in his sight. Ha! The enemy
was still on his front then. He had feared a turning movement. But,
apparently, General Feraud was not thinking of it. General D'Hubert saw
him pass without special haste from one tree to another in the straight
line of approach. With great firmness of mind General D'Hubert stayed
his hand. Too far yet. He knew he was no marksman. His must be a waiting
game--to kill.

He sank down to the ground wishing to take advantage of the greater
thickness of the trunk. Extended at full length, head on to his enemy,
he kept his person completely protected. Exposing himself would not
do now because the other was too near by this time. A conviction that
Feraud would presently do something rash was like balm to General
D'Hubert's soul. But to keep his chin raised off the ground was irksome,
and not much use either. He peeped round, exposing a fraction of his
head, with dread but really with little risk. His enemy, as a matter of
fact, did not expect to see anything of him so low down as that. General
D'Hubert caught a fleeting view of General Feraud shifting trees again
with deliberate caution. "He despises my shooting," he thought, with
that insight into the mind of his antagonist which is of such great help
in winning battles. It confirmed him in his tactics of immobility. "Ah!
if I only could watch my rear as well as my front!" he thought, longing
for the impossible.

It required some fortitude to lay his pistols down. But on a sudden
impulse General D'Hubert did this very gently--one on each side. He had
been always looked upon as a bit of a dandy, because he used to shave
and put on a clean shirt on the days of battle. As a matter of fact he
had been always very careful of his personal appearance. In a man of
nearly forty, in love with a young and charming girl, this praiseworthy
self-respect may run to such little weaknesses as, for instance, being
provided with an elegant leather folding case containing a small ivory
comb and fitted with a piece of looking-glass on the outside. General
D'Hubert, his hands being free, felt in his breeches pockets for that
implement of innocent vanity, excusable in the possessor of long silky
moustaches. He drew it out, and then, with the utmost coolness and
promptitude, turned himself over on his back. In this new attitude, his
head raised a little, holding the looking-glass in one hand just clear
of his tree, he squinted into it with one eye while the other kept a
direct watch on the rear of his position. Thus was proved Napoleon's
saying, that for a French soldier the word impossible does not exist. He
had the right tree nearly filling the field of his little mirror.

"If he moves from there," he said to himself exultingly, "I am bound to
see his legs. And in any case he can't come upon me unawares."

And sure enough he saw the boots of General Feraud flash in and out,
eclipsing for an instant everything else reflected in the little mirror.
He shifted its position accordingly. But having to form his judgment of
the change from that indirect view, he did not realise that his own
feet and a portion of his legs were now in plain and startling view of
General Feraud.

General Feraud had been getting gradually impressed by the amazing
closeness with which his enemy had been keeping cover. He had spotted
the right tree with bloodthirsty precision. He was absolutely certain of
it. And yet he had not been able to sight as much as the tip of an ear.
As he had been looking for it at the level of about five feet ten inches
it was no great wonder--but it seemed very wonderful to General Feraud.

The first view of these feet and legs determined a rush of blood to his
head. He literally staggered behind his tree, and had to steady himself
with his hand. The other was lying on the ground--on the ground!
Perfectly still, too! Exposed! What did it mean?... The notion that he
had knocked his adversary over at the first shot then entered General
Feraud's head. Once there, it grew with every second of
attentive gazing, overshadowing every other
supposition--irresistible--triumphant--ferocious.

"What an ass I was to think I could have missed him!" he said to
himself. "He was exposed _en plein_--the fool--for quite a couple of
seconds."

And the general gazed at the motionless limbs, the last vestiges of
surprise fading before an unbounded admiration of his skill.

"Turned up his toes! By the god of war that was a shot!" he continued
mentally. "Got it through the head just where I aimed, staggered behind
that tree, rolled over on his back and died."

And he stared. He stared, forgetting to move, almost awed, almost sorry.
But for nothing in the world would he have had it undone. Such a shot!
Such a shot! Rolled over on his back, and died!

For it was this helpless position, lying on the back, that shouted its
sinister evidence at General Feraud. He could not possibly imagine
that it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man. It was
inconceivable. It was beyond the range of sane supposition. There was no
possibility to guess the reason for it. And it must be said that
General D'Hubert's turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead. General Feraud
expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but from what
he felt to be an excessive scrupulousness, refrained for a while.

"I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet," he mumbled
to himself, stepping out from behind his tree. This was immediately
perceived by the resourceful General D'Hubert. He concluded it to be
another shift. When he lost the boots out of the field of the mirror, he
became uneasy. General Feraud had only stepped a little out of the line,
but his adversary could not possibly have supposed him walking up with
perfect unconcern. General D'Hubert, beginning to wonder where the other
had dodged to, was come upon so suddenly that the first warning he had
of his danger consisted in the long, early-morning shadow of his
enemy falling aslant on his outstretched legs. He had not even heard a
footfall on the soft ground between the trees!

It was too much even for his coolness. He jumped up instinctively,
leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of most
people (unless totally paralysed by discomfiture) would have been
to stoop--exposing themselves to the risk of being shot down in
that position. Instinct, of course, is irreflective. It is its very
definition. But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing, whether in
reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of instinct are not
affected by the customary mode of thought. Years ago, in his young
days, Armand D'Hubert, the reflective promising officer, had emitted the
opinion that in warfare one should "never cast back on the lines of
a mistake." This idea afterward restated, defended, developed in many
discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain,
became a part of his mental individuality. And whether it had gone so
inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply
because, as he himself declared, he was "too scared to remember the
confounded pistols," the fact is that General D'Hubert never attempted
to stoop for them. Instead of going back on his mistake, he seized
the rough trunk with both hands and swung himself behind it with such
impetuosity that going right round in the very flash and report of a
pistol shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face
with General Feraud, who, completely unstrung by such a show of agility
on the part of a dead man, was trembling yet. A very faint mist of smoke
hung before his face which had an extraordinary aspect as if the lower
jaw had come unhinged.

"Not missed!" he croaked hoarsely from the depths of a dry throat.

This sinister sound loosened the spell which had fallen on General
D'Hubert's senses.

"Yes, missed--a _bout portant_" he heard himself saying exultingly
almost before he had recovered the full command of his faculties.
The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury
resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of a lifetime.
For years General D'Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by an
atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by that man's savage caprice.
Besides, General D'Hubert had been in this last instance too unwilling
to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape
of a desire to kill.

"And I have my two shots to fire yet," he added pitilessly.

General Feraud snapped his teeth, and his face assumed an irate,
undaunted expression.

"Go on," he growled.

These would have been his last words on earth if General D'Hubert had
been holding the pistols in his hand. But the pistols were lying on the
ground at the foot of a tall pine. General D'Hubert had the second's
leisure necessary to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man but
as a lover, not as a danger but as a rival--not as a foe to life but
as an obstacle to marriage. And, behold, there was the rival defeated!
Miserably defeated-crushed--done for!

He picked up the weapons mechanically, and instead of firing them into
General Feraud's breast, gave expression to the thought uppermost in his
mind.

"You will fight no more duels now."

[Illustration: frontispiece166.jpg "You will fight no more duels now."]

His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General
Feraud's stoicism.

"Don't dawdle then, damn you for a coldblooded staff-coxcomb!" he roared
out suddenly out of an impassive face held erect on a rigid body.

General D'Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was
observed with a sort of gloomy astonishment by the other general.

"You missed me twice," he began coolly, shifting both pistols to one
hand. "The last time within a foot or so. By every rule of single combat
your life belongs to me. That does not mean that I want to take it now."

"I have no use for your forbearance," muttered General Feraud savagely.

"Allow me to point out that this is no concern of mine," said General
D'Hubert, whose every word was dictated by a consummate delicacy of
feeling. In anger, he could have killed that man, but in cold blood, he
recoiled from humiliating this unreasonable being--a fellow soldier
of the Grand Armée, his companion in the wonders and terrors of the
military epic. "You don't set up the pretension of dictating to me what
I am to do with what is my own."

General Feraud looked startled. And the other continued:

"You've forced me on a point of honour to keep my life at your disposal,
as it were, for fifteen years. Very well. Now that the matter is decided
to my advantage, I am going to do what I like with your life on the same
principle. You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I choose. Neither
more nor less. You are on your honour."

"I am! But _sacrebleu!_ This is an absurd position for a general of
the empire to be placed in," cried General Feraud, in the accents of
profound and dismayed conviction. "It means for me to be sitting all the
rest of my life with a loaded pistol in a drawer waiting for your word.
It's... it's idiotic. I shall be an object of... of... derision."

"Absurd?... Idiotic? Do you think so?" queried argumentatively General
D'Hubert with sly gravity. "Perhaps. But I don't see how that can be
helped. However, I am not likely to talk at large of this adventure.
Nobody need ever know anything about it. Just as no one to this day, I
believe, knows the origin of our quarrel.... Not a word more," he added
hastily. "I can't really discuss this question with a man who, as far as
I am concerned, does not exist."

When the duellists came out into the open, General Feraud walking a
little behind and rather with the air of walking in a trance, the two
seconds hurried towards them each from his station at the edge of the
wood. General D'Hubert addressed them, speaking loud and distinctly:

"Messieurs! I make it a point of declaring to you solemnly in the
presence of General Feraud that our difference is at last settled for
good. You may inform all the world of that fact."

"A reconciliation after all!" they exclaimed together.

"Reconciliation? Not that exactly. It is something much more binding. Is
it not so, general?"

General Feraud only lowered his head in sign of assent. The two veterans
looked at each other. Later in the day when they found themselves alone,
out of their moody friend's earshot, the cuirassier remarked suddenly:

"Generally speaking, I can see with my one eye as far or even a little
farther than most people. But this beats me. He won't say anything."

"In this affair of honour I understand there has been from first to last
always something that no one in the army could quite make out," declared
the chasseur with the imperfect nose. "In mystery it began, in mystery
it went on, and in mystery it is to end apparently...."

General D'Hubert walked home with long, hasty strides, by no means
uplifted by a sense of triumph. He had conquered, but it did not seem
to him he had gained very much by his conquest. The night before he had
grudged the risk of his life which appeared to him magnificent, worthy
of preservation as an opportunity to win a girl's love. He had even
moments when by a marvellous illusion this love seemed to him already
his and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of
devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost it special
magnificence. It wore instead a specially alarming aspect as a snare for
the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous illusion of conquered
love that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the
night which might have been his last on earth, he comprehended now its
true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit. Thus to
this man sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed
of much of its charm simply because it was no longer menaced.

Approaching the house from the back through the orchard and the kitchen
gardens, he could not notice the agitation which reigned in front. He
never met a single soul. Only upstairs, while walking softly along the
corridor, he became aware that the house was awake and much more noisy
than usual. Names of servants were being called out down below in a
confused noise of coming and going. He noticed with some concern that
the door of his own room stood ajar, though the shutters had not been
opened yet. He had hoped that his early excursion would have passed
unperceived. He expected to find some servant just gone in; but the
sunshine filtering through the usual cracks enabled him to see lying
on the low divan something bulky which had the appearance of two women
clasped in each other's arms. Tearful and consolatory murmurs issued
mysteriously from that appearance. General D'Hubert pulled open the
nearest pair of shutters violently. One of the women then jumped up. It
was his sister. She stood for a moment with her hair hanging down and
her arms raised straight up above her head, and then flung herself with
a stifled cry into his arms. He returned her embrace, trying at the same
time to disengage himself from it. The other woman had not risen. She
seemed, on the contrary, to cling closer to the divan, hiding her face
in the cushions. Her hair was also loose; it was admirably fair. General
D'Hubert recognised it with staggering emotion. Mlle. de Valmassigue!
Adèle! In distress!

He became greatly alarmed and got rid of his sister's hug definitely.
Madame Léonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir,
pointing dramatically at the divan:

"This poor terrified child has rushed here two miles from home on
foot--running all the way."

"What on earth has happened?" asked General D'Hubert in a low, agitated
voice. But Madame Léonie was speaking loudly.

"She rang the great bell at the gate and roused all the household--we
were all asleep yet. You may imagine what a terrible shock.... Adèle, my
dear child, sit up."

General D'Hubert's expression was not that of a man who imagines
with facility. He did, however, fish out of chaos the notion that his
prospective mother-in-law had died suddenly, but only to dismiss it at
once. He could not conceive the nature of the event, of the catastrophe
which could induce Mlle, de Valmassigue living in a house full of
servants, to bring the news over the fields herself, two miles, running
all the way.

"But why are you in this room?" he whispered, full of awe.

"Of course I ran up to see and this child... I did not notice it--she
followed me. It's that absurd Chevalier," went on Madame Léonie, looking
towards the divan.... "Her hair's come down. You may imagine she did not
stop to call her maid to dress it before she started.... Adèle, my
dear, sit up.... He blurted it all out to her at half-past four in the
morning. She woke up early, and opened her shutters, to breathe the
fresh air, and saw him sitting collapsed on a garden bench at the end of
the great alley. At that hour--you may imagine! And the evening before
he had declared himself indisposed. She just hurried on some clothes and
flew down to him. One would be anxious for less. He loves her, but not
very intelligently. He had been up all night, fully dressed, the poor
old man, perfectly exhausted! He wasn't in a state to invent a plausible
story.... What a confidant you chose there!... My husband was furious!
He said: 'We can't interfere now.' So we sat down to wait. It was awful.
And this poor child running over here publicly with her hair loose.
She has been seen by people in the fields. She has roused the whole
household, too. It's awkward for her. Luckily you are to be married next
week.... Adèle, sit up. He has come home on his own legs, thank God....
We expected you to come back on a stretcher perhaps--what do I know? Go
and see if the carriage is ready. I must take this child to her mother
at once. It isn't proper for her to stay here a minute longer."

General D'Hubert did not move. It was as though he had heard nothing.
Madame Léonie changed her mind.

"I will go and see to it myself," she said. "I want also to get my
cloak... Adèle..." she began, but did not say "sit up." She went out
saying in a loud, cheerful tone: "I leave the door open."

General D'Hubert made a movement towards the divan, but then Adèle
sat up and that checked him dead. He thought, "I haven't washed this
morning. I must look like an old tramp. There's earth on the back of
my coat, and pine needles in my hair." It occurred to him that the
situation required a good deal of circumspection on his part.

"I am greatly concerned, mademoiselle," he began timidly, and abandoned
that line. She was sitting up on the divan with her cheeks
unusually pink, and her hair brilliantly fair, falling all over her
shoulders--which was a very novel sight to the general. He walked away
up the room and, looking out of the window for safety, said: "I fear you
must think I behaved like a madman," in accents of sincere despair....
Then he spun round and noticed that she had followed him with her eyes.
They were not cast down on meeting his glance. And the expression of her
face was novel to him also. It was, one might have said, reversed. Her
eyes looked at him with grave thoughtfulness, while the exquisite lines
of her mouth seemed to suggest a restrained smile. This change made her
transcendental beauty much less mysterious, much more accessible to a
man's comprehension. An amazing ease of mind came to the general--and
even some ease of manner. He walked down the room with as much
pleasurable excitement as he would have found in walking up to a battery
vomiting death, fire, and smoke, then stood looking down with smiling
eyes at the girl whose marriage with him (next week) had been so
carefully arranged by the wise, the good, the admirable Léonie.

"Ah, mademoiselle," he said in a tone of courtly deference. "If I could
be certain that you did not come here this morning only from a sense of
duty to your mother!"

He waited for an answer, imperturbable but inwardly elated. It came in a
demure murmur, eyelashes lowered with fascinating effect.

"You mustn't be _méchant_ as well as mad."

And then General D'Hubert made an aggressive movement towards the divan
which nothing could check. This piece of furniture was not exactly in
the line of the open door. But Madame Léonie, coming back wrapped up in
a light cloak and carrying a lace shawl on her arm for Adèle to hide
her incriminating hair under, had a vague impression of her brother
getting-up from his knees.

"Come along, my dear child," she cried from the doorway.

The general, now himself again in the fullest sense, showed the
readiness of a resourceful cavalry officer and the peremptoriness of a
leader of men.

"You don't expect her to walk to the carriage," he protested. "She isn't
fit. I will carry her downstairs."

This he did slowly, followed by his awed and respectful sister. But he
rushed back like a whirlwind to wash away all the signs of the night of
anguish and the morning of war, and to put on the festive garments of a
conqueror before hurrying over to the other house. Had it not been for
that, General D'Hubert felt capable of mounting a horse and pursuing his
late adversary in order simply to embrace him from excess of happiness.
"I owe this piece of luck to that stupid brute," he thought. "This duel
has made plain in one morning what might have taken me years to find
out--for I am a timid fool. No self-confidence whatever. Perfect coward.
And the Chevalier! Dear old man!" General D'Hubert longed to embrace
him, too.

The Chevalier was in bed. For several days he was much indisposed. The
men of the empire, and the post-revolution young ladies, were too much
for him. He got up the day before the wedding, and being curious by
nature, took his niece aside for a quiet talk. He advised her to find
out from her husband the true story of the affair of honour, whose claim
so imperative and so persistent had led her to within an ace of tragedy.
"It is very proper that his wife should know. And next month or so
will be your time to learn from him anything you ought to know, my dear
child."

Later on when the married couple came on a visit to the mother of the
bride, Madame la Générale D'Hubert made no difficulty in communicating
to her beloved old uncle what she had learned without any difficulty
from her husband. The Chevalier listened with profound attention to the
end, then took a pinch of snuff, shook the grains of tobacco off the
frilled front of his shirt, and said calmly: "And that's all what it
was."

"Yes, uncle," said Madame la Générale, opening her pretty eyes very
wide. "Isn't it funny? _C'est insensé_--to think what men are capable
of."

"H'm," commented the old _émigré_. "It depends what sort of men. That
Bonaparte's soldiers were savages. As a wife, my dear, it is proper for
you to believe implicitly what your husband says."

But to Léonie's husband the Chevalier confided his true opinion.
"If that's the tale the fellow made up for his wife, and during the
honeymoon, too, you may depend on it no one will ever know the secret of
this affair."

Considerably later still, General D'Hubert judged the time come, and the
opportunity propitious to write a conciliatory letter to General Feraud.
"I have never," protested the General Baron D'Hubert, "wished for your
death during all the time of our deplorable quarrel. Allow me to give
you back in all form your forfeited life. We two, who have been partners
in so much military glory, should be friendly to each other publicly."

The same letter contained also an item of domestic information. It was
alluding to this last that General Feraud answered from a little village
on the banks of the Garonne:

"If one of your boy's names had been Napoleon, or Joseph, or even
Joachim, I could congratulate you with a better heart. As you have
thought proper to name him Charles Henri Armand I am confirmed in my
conviction that you never loved the emperor. The thought of that sublime
hero chained to a rock in the middle of a savage ocean makes life of so
little value that I would receive with positive joy your instructions to
blow my brains out. From suicide I consider myself in honour debarred.
But I keep a loaded pistol in my drawer."

Madame la Générale D'Hubert lifted up her hands in horror after perusing
that letter.

"You see? He won't be reconciled," said her husband. "We must take care
that he never, by any chance, learns where the money he lives on comes
from. It would be simply appalling."

"You are a _brave homme_, Armand," said Madame la Générale
appreciatively.

"My dear, I had the right to blow his brains out--strictly speaking.
But as I did not we can't let him starve. He has been deprived of his
pension for 'breach of military discipline' when he broke bounds to
fight his last duel with me. He's crippled with rheumatism. We are
bound to take care of him to the end of his days. And, after all, I
am indebted to him for the radiant discovery that you loved me a
little--you sly person. Ha! Ha! Two miles, running all the way!... It is
extraordinary how all through this affair that man has managed to engage
my deeper feelings."

THE END





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale" ***

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