Part 6

“No!--nor would you. Suppose you had met the Venerable Jeanne d’Arc in her peasant kirtle, driving her sheep or cows to pasture in the fields about Domremy in the days before her Voices spoke and said: ‘_Thou, Maid, art destined to deliver France!_’ Or--what if you had seen the Virgins of the Temple at Jerusalem pass singing on their way to the tribune surrounded with balconies, where while the Morning Sacrifice burned upon the golden Altar to the fanfare of the silver trumpets, they besought God Almighty, together with all Israel, for the speedy coming of the Saviour of mankind.... Would not One among them, draped in her simple robe of hyacinth blue, covered with the white, plainly-girdled tunic, a veil of Syrian gauze upon her golden hair, have brought you the conviction that She, above all the women you had ever seen, was destined, marked out, set apart, created to serve a peculiar purpose of her Creator, stamped with His stamp----”

The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector’s astonished gape, and their owner barked out: “What are you opening your mouth so wide about?”

Hector blurted out:

“Why--what for? Because you said that a raw English girl nursing a dying sheep-dog on a mountain in Peakshire reminded you of the Maid of Orleans and Our Blessed Lady!”

“And if I did?”

“But was she not English?... A Protestant?... a heretic?”

“Many of the Saints were heretics--until Our Lord called them,” said de Moulny, with that fanatical spark burning in his blue eye. “But He had chosen them before He called. They bore the seal of His choice.”

“Perhaps you are right. No doubt you know best. It is you who are to be----” Hector broke off.

“You were going to finish: ‘It is you who are to be a priest, not me...!’” de Moulny said, with the veins in his heavy forehead swelling, and a twitching muscle jerking down his pouting underlip.

“I forget what I was going to say,” declared Hector mendaciously, and piled Ossa upon Pelion by begging de Moulny to go on with his story. “It interested hugely,” he said, even as he struggled to repress the threatening yawn.

“What is there to tell?” grumbled de Moulny ungraciously. “She was there, that is all--with that dog that had been hurt. A pony she had ridden was grazing at the back of the shed, its bridle tied to the pommel of the saddle. Bertham approached her and saluted her; he knew her, it seems, and presented me. She spoke only of the dog--looked at nothing but the dog! She could not bear to leave it, in case it should be put to death by the master it could serve no more....”

Hector interrupted, for de Moulny’s voice had begun to sound as though he were talking in his sleep:

“Tell me her name.”

“Her name is Ada Merling.”

Even on de Moulny’s French tongue the name was full of music; it came to Hector’s ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner, with a defiant “tuck-tuck!” takes wing, with curious slanting flight. The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind, as de Moulny went on:

“True, the dog seemed at the last gasp, but if it were possible to stop the bleeding, _she_ said, there might be a chance, who knew? It had occurred to her that cold-water applications might check the flow of blood. ‘We will try, and see, Mademoiselle,’ said I.”

De Moulny’s tone was one of fatuous self-satisfaction.

“A rusty tin saucepan is lying in a corner of the shed. This I fill with water from a little spring that trickles down the cliff behind us. We contribute handkerchiefs. Bertham and I hold the dog while she bathes the torn throat and shoulder, and bandages them. Remains the swollen leg. It occurs to me that fomentations of hot water might be of use there; I mention this idea. ‘Good! good!’ she cries, ‘we will make a fire and heat some.’ She sets to collecting the dry leaves and sticks that are scattered in a corner. Bertham makes a pile of these, and attempts to kindle it with fusees.” A smile of ineffable conceit curved de Moulny’s flabby pale cheeks and quirked the corners of his pouting lips. “He burns matches and he loses his temper; there is no other result. Then I stepped forward, bowed.... ‘_Permit me, Mademoiselle, to show you how we arrange these things in my country._’” De Moulny’s tone was so infinitely arrogant, his humility so evidently masked the extreme of bumptiousness, that Hector wondered how the athletic Bertham endured it without knocking him down?

“So I hollow a fireplace in the floor, with a pocket-knife and a piece of slate, devise a flue at each corner, light the fire--which burns, one can conceive, to a marvel.... She has meanwhile refilled the rusty saucepan at the little spring; she sets it on, the water boils, when it occurs to us that we have no more handkerchiefs. But the shepherd’s linen blouse hangs behind the shed-door; at her bidding we tear that into strips.... All is done that can be done; we bid Mademoiselle Merling _au revoir_. She will ride home presently when her patient is a little easier, she says. We volunteer to remain; she declines to allow us. She thanks us for our aid in a voice that has the clear ring of crystal--I can in no other way describe it! When I take my leave, I desire to kiss her hand. She permits me very gracefully; she speaks French, too, with elegance, as she asks where I learned to make a fireplace so cleverly?

“‘We are taught these things,’ I say to her, ‘at the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, in my Paris. For we do not think one qualified for being an officer, Mademoiselle, until he has learned all the things that a private should know.’ Then it was that Bertham made that celebrated _coq-à-l’âne_ about its being bad form to do servant’s work well. You should have seen the look she gave him. _Sapristi!_--with a surprise in it that cut to the quick. She replies: ‘Servants should respect and look up to us, and not despise us; and how can they look up to us if we show ourselves less capable than they? When I am older I mean to have a great house full of sick people to comfort and care for and nurse. And _everything_ that has to be done for them I will learn to do with my own hands!’ My sister Viviette would have said: ‘When I grow up I shall have a _rivière_ of pearls as big as pigeons’ eggs,’ or ‘I shall drive on the boulevards and in the Bois in an ivory-paneled barouche.’ Then I ask a stupid question: ‘Is it that you are to be a Sister of Charity, Mademoiselle?’ She answers, with a look of surprise: ‘Can no one but a nun care for the sick?’ I return: ‘In France, Mademoiselle, our sick-nurses are these holy women. They are welcome everywhere: in private houses and in public hospitals, in time of peace: and in the time of war you will find them in the camp and on the battle-field. Your first patient is a soldier wounded in war,’ I say to her, pointing to the dog. ‘Perhaps it is an augury of the future?’

“‘War is a terrible thing,’ she answers me, and grows pale, and her great eyes are fixed as though they look upon a corpse-strewn battle-field. ‘I hope with all my heart that I may never see it!’ ‘But a nurse must become inured to ugly and horrible sights, Mademoiselle,’ I remind her. She replies: ‘I shall find courage to endure them when I become a nurse.’ Then Bertham blurts out in his brusque way: ‘But you never will! Your people would not allow it. Wait and see if I am not right?’ She returns to him, with a smile, half the child’s, half the woman’s, guileless and subtle at the same time, if you can understand that? ‘_We will wait--and you will see._’”

De Moulny’s whisper had dwindled to a mere thread of sound. He had long forgotten Hector, secretly pining for the end of a story that appeared to him as profoundly dull as interminably long; and, oblivious of the other’s martyrdom, talked only to himself.

“‘_We will wait and you will see._... You have the courage of your convictions, Mademoiselle,’ I tell her, ‘and courage always succeeds.’ She says in that crystal voice: ‘When things, stones or other obstacles, are piled up in front of you to prevent your getting through a gap in the dyke, you don’t push because you might topple them all over, and kill somebody on the other side; and you don’t pull because you might bring them all down on your own head. You lift the stones away, one at a time; and by-and-by you see light through a little hole ... and then the hole gets bigger, and there is more and more light.’... There I interpose.... ‘But if the stones to be moved are too big for such little hands, Mademoiselle?’ And she answers, looking at them gravely: ‘My hands are not little. And if they were, there would always be men to lift the things that are too heavy, and do the things that are too hard.’

“‘Men or boys, Mademoiselle?’ I question. Then she gives me her hand once more. ‘Thank you, M. de Moulny! I will not forget it was you who built the fireplace, and helped to hold the dog.’ And Bertham was so jealous that he would not speak to me during the whole ride home!”

Upon that note of exultation the story ended. To Hector the recital had been of unmitigated dullness. Nothing but his loyalty to de Moulny had kept him from wriggling on his chair; had checked the yawns that had threatened to unhinge his youthful jaws. Now he was guilty of an offense beside which yawning would have been pardonable. He opened his black eyes in a stare of youthful, insufferable curiosity, and called out in his shrill young pipe:

“Jealous, do you say! Why, was he in love with her as well as you?”

De Moulny’s muscles jerked. He almost sat up in bed. A moment he remained glaring over the basket, speechless and livid with rage. Then he cried out furiously:

“Go away! Leave me! Go!--do you hear?”

And as Hector rose in dismay and stood blankly gaping at the convulsed and tragic face, de Moulny plucked the pillow from behind his head, and hurled that missile of low comedy at the cruel eyes that stung, and fell back upon the bolster with a cry of pain that froze the luckless blunderer to the marrow. Hector fled then, as Sister Edouard-Antoine, summoned from her colloquy in the passage by the sound, came hurrying back to the bedside. Looking back as he plunged through the narrow, black swing-doors--doors very much like two coffin-lids on hinges, set up side by side, he saw the Sister bending over the long heaving body on the bed, solicitude painted on the mild face framed in the starched-white linen coif; and heard de Moulny’s muffled sobbing, mingled with her soft, consoling tones.

* * * * *

Why should de Moulny shed tears? Did he really hate the idea of being a priest? And if so, would he be likely to love his friend Dunoisse, who had, with a broken foil, pointed out the way that ended in the seminary, the cassock, and the tonsure?

The savage, livid, loathing face rose up before Hector’s mental vision--the furious cry that had issued from the twisted lips: “Go! Leave me! Go!--do you hear?” still rang in the boy’s ears. The look, the cry, were full of hate. Yet Alain had, but a moment before, solemnly sworn to be his friend.... When we are very young we believe such oaths unbreakable.

Came Pédelaborde, and thrust a warty hand under Redskin’s elbow, as he stood frowning and pondering still, on the wide shallow doorstep of the Infirmary portico, brick-and-plaster Corinthian, elegant and chaste....

“_Hé bien, mon ami; nous voilà reconciliés?_ A visit of sympathy, _hein?_ It is quite proper! absolutely in rule.... But”--Pédelaborde’s little yellow eyes twinkled and glittered in his round brown face like a pair of highly-polished brass buttons, his snub nose cocked itself with an air of infinite knowingness, his bullet head of cropped black hair sparked intelligence from every bristle--“but--all the same, to call a spade a spade, _saisissez?_ the trick that did the job for de Moulny is a dirty one. As an expert, I told you of it. As a gentleman, _voyez?_--I hardly expected you to use it!”

“A trick.... Use it!” Hector stuttered, and his round horrified stare would have added to de Moulny’s offense. “You don’t mean--you cannot believe that I----” He choked over the words.

Pédelaborde chuckled comfortably, thrusting his warty hands deep into the pockets of his baggy red serge breeches.

“Why, just as _he_ lunged after his feint, didn’t you--_hein?_ Plump!--in the act to riposte, and cleverly managed, too. Suppose he believes it a pure accident. I am not the fellow to tell tales.... Honor”--Pédelaborde extracted one of the warty hands on purpose to lay it upon his heart--“honor forbids. Now we’re on the subject of honor, I have positively pledged mine to pay Mère Cornu a trifling sum I owe her--a mere matter of eight francs--could you lend them until my uncle--hang the old skin-namalinks!--forks out with my allowance that is due?”

“I will lend you the money,” said Hector, wiping the sickly drops from his wet forehead. “But--I swear to you _that_ was an accident--I slipped on a slug!” he added passionately. “Never dare to believe me capable of an act so vile!”

He had not had the heart to spend a franc of his own monthly allowance of two louis. He pulled the cash out of his pocket now; a handful of silver pieces, with one treasured napoleon shining amongst them, and was picking out the eight francs from the bulk, when, with a pang, the barbed memory of his oath drove home. Perhaps these coins were some infinitesimal part of that accursed dowry....

“Take it all!--keep it! I do not want it back!” he stammered hurriedly, and thrust the wealthy handful upon greedy Pédelaborde so recklessly that the napoleon and several big silver coins escaped that worthy’s warty clutches, and dropped, ringing and rolling and spinning, making a temporary Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Junior’s parade.

“_Paid not to split! Saperlipopette!_... Then there was no slug! He meant to do the thing!...”

Honest Pédelaborde, pausing even in the congenial task of picking up gold and silver, straightened his back to stare hard after the Redskin’s retreating figure, and whistle with indrawn breath, through a gap in his front teeth: “_Phew-w!_”

Those little yellow eyes of the dentist’s nephew were sharp. The brain behind them, though shallow, worked excellently in the interests of Pédelaborde. It occurred to him that when next Madame Cornu should clamor for the discharge of her bill for sweetstuff and pastry, the little affair of the trick fall might advantageously be mentioned again.

X

Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules, cadet of the illustrious and ducal house of de Moulny, recovered of his wound, much to the gratification of his noble family, more by grace of a sound constitution and the faithful nursing of the Infirmary Sisters than by skill of the surgeons, who knew appallingly little in those days of the treatment of internal wounds. He left the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction to travel abroad under the grandmaternal care of the Duchesse, for what the Chief Director gracefully termed the “reconstitution of his health.” Later he was reported to have entered as a student at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice. It was vain to ask Redskin whether this was true. You got no information out of the fellow. He had turned sulky, the pupils said, since the affair of the duel, which invested him in the eyes even of the great boys of the Senior Corps, to which he was shortly afterwards promoted, with a luridly-tinted halo of distinction.

So nobody save Hector was aware that after the first short, stiff letter or two Alain had ceased to write. In silence the Redskin bucklered his pride. Hitherto he had not permitted his love of study to interfere with the more serious business of amusement. Now he applied himself to the acquisition of knowledge with a dogged, savage concentration his Professors had never remarked in him before. Attending one of the stately half-yearly School receptions, arrayed in all the obsolete but imposing splendors of his gold-encrusted, epauletted, frogged, high-stocked uniform of ceremony, adorned with the Cross of the Legion of Honor,--an Imperial decoration severely ignored by the Monarchy,--Marshal Dunoisse was complimented by the General-Commandant and the Chief Director upon the brilliant abilities and remarkable progress of his son.

“So it seems the flea of work has bitten you?” the affectionate parent commented a few days later, tweaking Hector’s ear in the Napoleonic manner, and turning upon his son the fanged and gleaming smile, that in conjunction with its owner’s superb height, fine form, boldly-cut swarthy features, fierce black eyes, and luxuriant black whiskers, had earned for the ex-_aide-de-camp_ of Napoleon I. the reputation of an irresistible lady-killer.

The handsome features of the elderly dandy were thickened and inflamed by wine and good living, the limbs in the tight-fitting white stockinet pantaloons, for which he had reluctantly exchanged his golden-buckled knee-breeches; the extremities more often encased in narrow-toed, elastic-sided boots, or buckled pumps, than in the spurred Hessians, were swollen and shapeless with rheumatic gout. The hyacinthine locks, or the greater part of them, came from the _atelier_ of Michalon Millière, His Majesty’s own hairdresser, in the Rue Feydeau; the whiskers owed their jetty gloss to a patent pomade invented by the same highly-patronized tonsorial artist. The broad black eyes were bloodshot, and could blaze under their bushy brows at times with an ogre-like ferocity, but were not brilliant any more.

Yet, from the three maids to the stout Bretonne who was cook, from the cook to Miss Smithwick,--who had acted in the capacity of _dame de compagnie_ to Madame Dunoisse; had become governess to her son when the gates of the Convent clashed once more behind the remorse and sorrow of that unhappy lady; and in these later years, now that Hector had outgrown her mild capacity for instruction, fulfilled the duties of housekeeper at No. 000, Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,--the female staff of the ex-military widower’s household worshiped Monsieur the Marshal.

“Do you think papa so handsome?” Hector, when a very small boy, would pipe out boldly. “He has eyes that are always angry, even when he smiles. He gnashes his teeth when he laughs. He kicked Moustapho” (the poodle) “so hard in the chest with the sharp toe of his shiny boot, when Moustapho dropped a macaroon he did not want, that Moustapho cried out loud with pain. He bullies the menservants and swears at them. He smells of Cognac, and is always spilling his snuff about on the carpets, and tables, and chairs. Me, I think him ugly, for my part.”

“Your papa, my Hector, possesses in an eminent degree those personal advantages to which the weakness of the female sex renders its members fatally susceptible,” the gentle spinster said to her pupil; and she had folded her tidy black mittens upon her neat stomacher as she said it, and shaken her prim, respectable head with a sigh, adding, as her mild eye strayed between the lace and brocade window-curtains to the smart, high-wheeled cabriolet waiting in the courtyard below; the glittering turnout with the showy, high-actioned mare in the shafts, and the little top-booted, liveried, cockaded, English groom hanging to her nose:

“I would that your dear mother had found it compatible with the fulfillment of her religious duties to remain at home! For the Domestic Affections, Hector, which flourish by the connubial fireside, are potent charms to restrain the too-ardent spirit, and recall the wandering heart.” And then Miss Smithwick had coughed and ended.

She winked at much that was scandalous in the life of her idol, that prim, chaste, good woman; but who shall say that her unswerving fidelity and humble devotion did not act sometimes as a martingale? The _bon-vivant_, the gambler, the dissipated elderly buck of the First Napoleon’s Court, the ex-Adonis of the Tuileries, who never wasted time in resisting the blandishments of any Venus of the Court or nymph of the Palais Royal, respected decent Smithwick, was even known, at the pathetic stage of wine, to refer to her as the only woman who had ever understood him.

Yet when her sister (her sole remaining relative, who lived upon a small annuity, in the village of Hampstead, near London), sustained a paralytic stroke, and Smithwick was recalled to nurse her, did that poor lady’s employer dream of providing,--out of those hundreds of thousands of thalers wrested from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz,--for the old age of the faithful creature? You do not know Monsieur the Marshal if you dream he did.

He generously paid her the quarter due of her annual salary of fifteen hundred francs, kissed her knuckly left hand with the garnet ring upon it, placed there by a pale young English curate deceased many years previously--for even the Smithwicks have their romances and their tragedies--told her that his “roof” was “open” to her whenever she desired to return; and bowed her graciously out of his library, whose Empire bookcases were laden with costly editions of the classics, published by the Houbigants and the Chardins, Michaud and Buére (tomes of beauty that were fountains sealed to the illiterate master of the house), and whose walls were hung with splendid engravings by Renard and F. Chauveau, a few gems from the brushes of Watteau and Greuze, Boucher and Mignard; and one or two examples of the shining art of the young Meissonier.

The luxurious house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was less wholesome for good Smithwick’s going. But I fear young Hector regretted her departure less than he should have done. True, the meek gentlewoman had not been able to teach her patron’s son very much. But she had at least implanted in him the habit of truth, and the love of soap-and-water and clean linen. Last, but not least, she had taught him to speak the English of the educated upper classes with barely a trace of accent, whereas the Paris-residing teachers of the tongue of Albion were in those days, and too frequently are in these, emigrants from the green isle adjacent; Miss Maloney’s, Misther Magee’s, and Mrs. Maguire’s; equipped with the thinnest of skins for imagined injuries, and the thickest of brogues for voluble speech, that ever hailed from Dublin or Wexford, King’s County or the County Cork.

Not a servant of the household but had some parting gift for Smithwick--from the blue handkerchief full of apples offered by the kitchen-girl, to the housemaid’s tribute of a crocheted lace _fichu_; from the cook’s canary-bird, a piercing songster, to the green parasol--a sweet thing no bigger than a plate, with six-inch fringe and an ivory handle with a hinge, to purchase which Monsieur Brousset, the Marshal’s valet, Duchard the butler, and Auguste the coachman had clubbed francs.