XI

The months went by. Hector ended his course at the School of Technical

Military Instruction with honors, and his examiners, in recognition

of the gift for languages, the bent for Science, the administrative

and organizing capacities that were distinctive of this student,

transferred him, with another equally promising youth, not to the

Academy of Ways, Works, and Transport, where the embryo artillery and

engineer officers of the School of Technical Military Instruction were

usually ground and polished, but to the Training Institute for Officers

of the Staff. An annual bounty tacked to the tail of the certificate

relieved that pressing necessity for pocket-money. Redskin, with fewer

anxieties upon his mind, could draw breath.

The Training Institute for Officers of the Staff was the School of

Technical Military Instruction all over again, but upon a hugely

magnified scale. To mention the School was the unpardonable sin: you

spent the first term in laboriously unlearning everything that had

been taught you there. On being admitted to the small gate adjacent

to the large ones of wrought and gilded iron, you beheld the façade

of the Institute, its great portico crowned with a triangular

pediment supported upon stately pillars, upon which was sculptured an

emblematical bas-relief of France, seated on a trophy of conquered

cannon, instructing her sons in the military sciences, and distributing

among them weapons of war. Following your guide, you shortly afterwards

discovered two large yards full of young men in unbuttoned uniforms,

supporting on their knees drawing-boards with squares of cartridge

paper pinned upon them, upon which they were busily delineating the

various architectural features of the buildings of the Institute, while

a Colonel of the Corps of Instructors sternly or blandly surveyed the

scene. Within the Institute, studies in Mathematics, Trigonometry

and Topography, Cosmography, Geography, Chemistry, Artillery, Field

Fortifications, Permanent Fortifications, Assault and Defense, Plans,

Military Administration, Military Maneuvers, French, English, and

German Literature, Fencing, Swimming, and Horsemanship in all its

branches were thoroughly and comprehensively taught. And once a quarter

the pupil-basket was picked over by skilled hands; and worthy young

men, who were eminently fitted to serve their country in the inferior

capacity as regimental officers, but did not possess the qualities

necessary for the making of Officers of the Staff, were, at that little

gate by the side of the great gilded iron ones, blandly shown out.

For, sane even in her maddest hour, France has never--under every

conceivable political condition, in every imaginable national crisis,

and under whatever government--Monarchical, Imperial, or Republican,

that may for the time being have got the upper hand--ceased laboring

to insure the supply to her Army, constantly renewed, of officers

competent to command armies, of scientists skilled in the innumerable

moves of the Great Game of War. Nor have other nations, Continental or

insular, ever failed to profit by France’s example, and follow France’s

lead.

* * * * *

The Marshal’s son was not dismissed by that dreaded little exit. The

fine flower of Young France grew in the neat parterres behind those

lofty gilded railings. Sous-lieutenant Hector Dunoisse found many

intellectual superiors among his comrades, whose society stimulated him

to greater efforts. He worked, and presently began to win distinction;

passed, with a specially-endorsed certificate, his examinations in the

branches of study already enumerated and a few more; served for three

months as Supernumerary-Assistant-Adjutant with an Artillery Regiment

at Nancy; did duty for a corresponding period in the same capacity at

Belfort with a corps of Engineers; and then received his appointment

as Assistant-Adjutant to the 33rd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique,

quartered at Blidah.

Money would not be needed to make life tolerable at Blidah, where

mettlesome Arab horses could be bought by Chasseurs d’Afrique at

reasonable prices, and the mastic and the thin Dalmatian wine were

excellent and cheap. Algerian cigars and pipe-tobacco were obtainable

at the outlay of a few coppers; and from every thicket of dwarf oak

or alfa-grass, hares started out before the sportsman’s gun; and

partridges and Carthage hens were as plentiful as sparrows in Paris.

Yet even at Blidah Dunoisse knew the nip of poverty, and there were

times when the pack that de Moulny’s hand had bound upon his shoulders

galled him sore. For--the stroke of a pen and one could have had all

one wanted. It needed no more than that.

For in Paris, at the big hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, in

the book-lined, weapon-adorned, half library, half smoking-room that

was Redskin’s private den, and had been the boudoir of Marie Bathilde;

there lay in a locked drawer of the inlaid ebony writing-table, a

white parchment-covered pass-book inscribed with the name of Hector

Dunoisse, and a book of pretty green-and-blue checks upon the Messieurs

Rothschild, 9, Rue d’Artois. The dip of a quill in the ink, and one of

the bland, well-dressed, middle-aged, discreet-looking cashiers behind

the golden grilles and the broad, gleaming rosewood counters, would

have opened a metal-lined drawer of gold louis, and plunged a copper

shovel into the shining mass and filled the pockets of young Hector; or

more probably would have wetted a skillful forefinger and thumb--run

over a thick roll of crackling pink, or blue, or gray _billets de

banque_, jotted down the numbers, and handed the roll across the

counter to its owner, with a polite bow.

* * * * *

“So you think there is a curse upon my money, eh?” Monsieur the

Marshal had said, upon an occasion when one of those scenes that leave

ineffaceable scars upon the memory, had taken place between the father

and the son.

Hector, spare, upright, muscular, lithe, ruddy of hue, bright of eye,

steady of nerve, newly issued from the mint and stamped with the stamp

of the Training Institute, and appointed to join his regiment in

Algeria, turned pale under the reddish skin. He was silent.

“You have used none of it since you heard that story, _hein_? It would

defile the soul and dirty the hands, _hein_?” queried Monsieur the

Marshal, plunging one of his own into the waistcoat-pocket where he

kept his snuff, and taking an immense pinch. “Yet let me point out

that the allowance you disburse in pious alms and so forth----” Hector

jumped, and wondered how his father had found out, and then decided

that it was only a good piece of guessing, “may not be any portion

of your mother’s dowry. I was not poor when I recovered those three

hundred-and-twenty-thousand silver thalers from the Prioress of the

Carmelite Convent at Widinitz. I wished to be so much richer, that is

all!”

“Poverty,” said his son, breathing sharply through the nostrils

and looking squarely in the Marshal’s swollen, fierce-eyed,

bushily-whiskered face, “poverty would have been some excuse--if

anything could have excused so great an----”

“‘Infamy,’ was the word you were going to use,” said Monsieur the

Marshal, smiling across his great false teeth of Indian ivory, which

golden bands retained in his jaws, and scattering Spanish snuff over

his white kersey, tightly-strapped pantaloons, as he trumpeted loudly

in a voluminous handkerchief of yellow China silk. “Pray do not

hesitate to complete the sentence.”

But Hector did not complete the sentence. The Marshal went on,

shrugging his shoulders and waving his ringed hands: “After all, it is

better to be infamous than idiotic. You hamper your career by playing

the incorruptible; you are put to stupid shifts for money when plenty

of money lies at your command.”

“Do I not know that?”

“You have won honors, and with them a reputation for parsimony--are

called a brilliant screw,--name of a thousand devils!--among your

comrades. You coach other men for pay; you translate foreign technical

works for military publishers; you burn the candle at both ends and

in the middle. It is all very honorable and scrupulous, but would

those who have sneered at you think better of you if they knew the

truth? You know they would not! Instead of being despised, you would

be laughed at for playing Don Quixote. That is one of the books I have

read,” Monsieur the Marshal added, pricked by the evident surprise

with which his son received this unexpected testimony of his parent’s

literacy. “One can get some useful things out of a book like that, even

though the hero of it is mad as a March hare. It is one of the books

with blood and marrow in them, as the Emperor would have said: books

that--unlike those of your Chateaubriands, Hugos, Lamartines, the devil

knows who else!--are the literature that nourish men who are alive,

not wooden puppets of virtue and propriety whose strings are pulled by

priests--sacred name of----”

The Marshal went on, as his son stood silent before him, to lash

himself into a frenzy of rage that imperiled the seams of a

tight-waisted high-collared frock-coat of Frogé’s own building,

and gave its wearer what the Germans term a red head; with such

accompaniments of gasping and snorting, rollings of the eyes and

starting of the forehead-veins as are painfully suggestive of bleedings

and sinapisms; cuppings and hot bricks; soft-footed personages with

shiny black bags, candles, wreaths of white, purple and yellow

_immortelles_ inscribed with “_Regrets_,” and all the plumed pomp and

sable circumstance of a funeral procession to the Cemetery of Père La

Chaise. He wound up at last, or rather, ran down; sank, puffing and

perspiring and purple, into an easy chair.... Hector, who had listened

with an unmoved countenance and heels correctly approximated, bowed

and left the room, across which a broad ray of sunshine fell from the

high, velvet-draped windows, across the inlaid ebony writing-table near

which the Marshal lay back, wheezing and scowling, and muttering....

The thousands of shining motes that danced in that wide golden beam

might have been wasps; the old man about whom they sported was so

goaded and stung. Who wants to watch the Marshal in his hour of rageful

humiliation.... He fumed and cursed awhile under his dyed mustaches,

and then hit on an idea which made him chuckle and grin. He wheeled

round, and splashed off a huge blotty letter to his bankers, and from

that day the sum of One Million One Hundred and Twenty-five Thousand

Francs stood to the credit of Hector Dunoisse upon Rothschild’s books,

and stood untouched.... One did not need much money out in Algeria, the

temptation to dip into the golden store was barely felt, the malice of

the Marshal was not to be gratified just yet awhile.

Though perhaps it was not altogether malice that inspired that action

of Monsieur. His son forgot to question before long; forgot that old

desertion of de Moulny’s and its fanged tooth; forgot that check-book

dimming with dust that drifted through the keyhole of the locked drawer

in the writing-table, whose key was on his ring.

For there came a day when the boy--for he was little more--rode out at

the Algiers Gate in command of a squadron of Chasseurs d’Afrique, under

orders to reinforce the Zouaves garrisoning a hill-fort in Kabylia,

threatened with siege by a rebellious Arab Kaïd who had thrown up his

office, and his pay, and declared war against the Francos.

* * * * *

The rustle of the white cap-cover against his epaulet as he turned his

head, the jingle of the scabbard against his stirrup, the clink of the

bridle, made pleasant harmony with the other clinking and jingling. The

air was cool before dawn, and the blue shadow of mighty Atlas stretched

far over the plain of Metidja. In the deep-foliaged sycamores; from the

copses of mastic, the nightingales trilled: turtle-doves were drinking

and bathing in the mountain-rills, Zachar lifted a huge stony brow

upon the horizon.... A slender young trooper with a high, reedy, tenor

voice, sang an Arab song; his comrades joined in the chorus:

“Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path

of Honor. Ride on! Who knows what lies at the end of the long journey?

Ride on!

“Life and Love, Death and Sleep, these are from the Hand of the Giver.

Ride on! Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee

the path of Honor! Ride on!”

So Dunoisse rode on; the feet of his Arab mare falling softly on the

thick white dust of the Dalmatie Road. And the great mysterious East

rose up before him, smiling her slow, mystic smile, and opened her

olive-hued, jeweled arms, and drew the boy of twenty to her warm,

perfumed bosom, and kissed him with kisses that are potent philters,

and wove around him her magic spells. And he forgot all the things that

it had hurt him so to remember, for a space of two years.