Old Hector Dunoisse could not sleep that night. Sharp pains racked his
worn bones; his paralyzed muscles were as though transfixed by surgical
needles of finely-tempered steel. He would not permit the nurse to sit
up, despite the physician’s orders, therefore the medical Head of the
Institution suffered the patient to have his way. So he lay alone in
the large, light, airy room, furnished with all the appliances that
modern surgical skill can devise for the aid of helplessness, and the
alleviation of suffering, and yet a place of pain....
He would not suffer the nurse to lower the green Venetian blinds of
the high, clear windows that fronted to the south-east and south-west;
the moonbeams could not do him any harm, he declared. On the contrary!
The mild, bright planet shining above the lonely _kulms_ and terrible
crevasses, shedding her radiant light upon the peasant’s Alpine hut and
the shepherd’s hillside cave, as upon the huge hotel-caravanserais,
glittering with windows and crowded with wealthy tourists, and the
stately mediæval castles, ruined and inhabited by owls and bats and
foxes, or lovingly preserved and dwelt in by the descendants of the
great robber knights who reared their Cyclopean towers--was she not his
well-loved friend?
* * * * *
So, as one waits for a friend, old Hector lay waiting for the
moonrise; the white-haired, handsome, vivacious old face, with the
bright black eyes, propped high upon the pillow, the wasted, half-dead
body of him barely raising the light warm bed-coverings, the helpless
arms and stiff white hands stretched rigidly along its sides.
* * * * *
And not only the man waited; the heavens seemed also waiting. The
ghostly white ice-peaks and snowy mountain-ranges, crowded on the
horizon as though they waited too. Corvus burned bright, low down on
the south horizon; Spica blazed at the maidenly-pure feet of Virgo.
Bootes looked down from the zenith, a pale emerald radiance, dimmed by
the fierce red fires of the Dog Star.... The purple-dark spaces beyond
these splendors were full of the palely glimmering presences of other
stars. But the old man wanted none of these. He had forgotten to look
at the almanac. He began to fear there would be no moon that night.
Old, sick and helpless as he was, this was a great grief to him.
Useless the presence of others when we lack the one we need. And a
little crack in a dam-wall is enough to liberate the pent-up waters;
the thin, bright trickle is soon followed by the roaring turbid flood.
Then, look and see what fetid slime, what ugly writhing creatures bred
of it, the shining placid surface masked and covered.... The purest
women, the noblest men, no less than we who know ourselves inwardly
corrupt and evil, have such depths, where things like these are hidden
from the light of day....
* * * * *
The pain was intolerable to-night,--almost too bad to bear without
shrieking. Dunoisse set his old face into an ivory mask of stern
resistance, and his white mustache and arched and still jet-black
eyebrows bristled fiercely, and the cold drops of anguish gathered upon
the sunken purple-veined temples upon which the silky silver hair was
growing sparse and thin. Ouf!... what unutterable relief it would have
been to clench his fists, even!... But the poor hands, helpless as a
wax doll’s or a wooden puppet’s, refused to obey his will.
He lay rigid and silent, but his brain worked with vivid, feverish
activity, and his glance roved restlessly round the white-papered
walls of the airy, cleanly room. Shabby frames containing spotted
daguerreotypes and faded old _cartes-de-visite_ of friends long dead;
some water-color portraits and engravings of battle-scenes, hung there;
with some illuminated addresses, a few more modern photographs, a
glazed case of Orders and Crosses, a cheap carved rack of well-smoked
pipes, and--drawn up against the painted wainscot--an imposing array
of boots of all nationalities, kinds and descriptions, in various
stages of wear. His small library of classics filled a hanging shelf,
while a pair of plain deal bookcases were stuffed with publications in
half-a-dozen European languages, chiefly well-known reference-works
upon Anatomy and Physiology, Surgery and Medicine; whilst a row of
paper-bound, officially-stamped Government publications--one or two
of these from his own painstaking, laborious pen--dealt with the
organization, equipment and sanitation of Military Field Hospitals,
Hospital Ships and Hospital Trains, the clothing, diet and care of
sick and wounded, and, in relation to these, the Laws and Customs of
grim and ghastly War. And a traveling chest of drawers, a bath, and
a portable secretary, battered and ink-stained by half a century of
honorable use; with the scanty stock of antique garments hanging in the
white-pine press; a meager store of fine, exquisitely darned and mended
old-world linen; an assortment of neckties, wonderfully out of date;
some old felt wideawakes, and three black velvet caps, with a camel’s
hair _bournous_, that had served for many years as a dressing-gown; and
the bust of a woman, in marble supported on a slender ebony pedestal
set between the windows, completed the inventory of the worldly
possessions of old Hector Dunoisse.
All that he owned on earth, these few shabby chattels, these dimmed
insignia, with their faded ribbons--this man who had once been greatly
rich, and prodigally generous, subsisted now in his helpless age upon
a small annuity, purchased when he had been awarded the Nobel Prize.
What bitter tears had been wrung from the bright black eyes when he
was compelled to accept this charity! But it had to be; the burden of
his great humanitarian labors had exhausted his last energies and his
remaining funds; and Want had risen up beside his bed of sickness, and
laid upon him, who had cheered away her specter from so many pallets,
her chill and meager hand.
Ah, how he loved the glaring daguerreotypes, the spotty photographs,
the old cheap prints! Far, far more dearly than the Rembrandts and
Raphaels, the Watteaus and the three superb portraits by Velasquez
that he had sold to the Council of the Louvre, and the Austrian
Government and the Trustees of the National Gallery. The cabinets of
rare and antique medals, the collection of Oriental porcelain and
Royal Sèvres that had been bequeathed to him with the immense private
fortune of Luitpold, the long-deceased Prince-Regent of Widinitz,
that had also been disposed of under the hammer to supply his needs
for funds,--always more funds,--had never possessed one-tenth of the
preciousness of these poor trifles. For everything was a memento
or token of something done or borne, given or achieved towards the
fulfillment of the one great end.
The _chibuk_ with the bowl of gilded red clay, the cherry-stick stem
and the fine amber mouthpiece, an officer of the English Guards had
forced upon Dunoisse at Balaklava. The inkstand, a weighty sphere of
metal mounted on three grape-shot, with a detached fourth for the
lid--that was a nine-pound shell from the Sandbag Battery. And the
helmet-plate with a silver-plated Austrian Eagle and the brass device
like a bomb, with a tuft of green metal oak-leaves growing out of the
top, that was a souvenir of the bloody field of Magenta. It had been
pressed upon Dunoisse by a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Ensign of Austrian
Infantry, whom he had rescued from under a hecatomb of dead men and
horses, still living, but blackened from asphyxia, the colors of his
regiment yet clutched in his cramped and blackened hands.
Even the _bournous_, the voluminous long-sleeved, hooded garment of
gray-white camel’s hair, bordered with delicate embroideries of silver
and orange-red floss silk--that had its touching history; that had been
also the legacy of one who had nothing else to give.
“He was an Arab of pure blood, a pious Moslem, Sergeant-Major in the
First Regiment of Spahis, a chief in his own right. He fell in the
assault upon the Hill of Cypres. Towards the end of the day, when
the sun had set upon Solferino’s field of carnage, and the pale moon
was reflected in the ponds of blood that had accumulated in every
depression of the ravaged ground, we found him, riddled with bullets,
pierced with wounds, leaning with his back against a little tree, his
bleeding Arab stallion standing by him as he prayed in the words of the
Prophet: ‘_Lord, grant me pardon, and join me to the companionship on
high!_...’ He died two nights later upon a heap of bloody straw in the
Church of Santa Rosalia at Castiglione. This had been strapped in the
roll behind his saddle--his young bride had embroidered the gold and
silken ornaments; in the field it had served him as a covering, and
until the dead-cart came to remove the corpse,--as a pall.”
More relics yet. The broken lock of a Garibaldian musket from
Calatifimi. The guard of a Papal soldier’s saber from Castel Fidardo,
brown with Sardinian blood.
More still.... The gilded ornament from the staff-top of a Prussian
Eagle--a souvenir of Liebenau, or was it Hühnerwasser? A Uhlan
lance-head from Hochhausen. An exploded cartridge gathered on the
field of Alcolea, where the Spanish Royalists were beaten in 1868.
And a French _chassepot_ and a Prussian needle-gun, recalling the
grim tragedy of 1870 and the unspeakable disaster of Sedan. While a
fantastically chased cross of Abyssinian gold, and a Bersagliere’s
plume of cocks’ feathers, their glossy dark green marred with dried
blood, were eloquent of the massacre of the Italian troops at Dagoli,
in ’87.
What memories were this old man’s!