He could not doubt that she had heard and answered. There was no
explanation possible. It had happened, that was all. You may rub
shoulders, in the course of a morning’s walk down one of the big
world’s crowded thoroughfares, with a hundred men and women who
are genuinely convinced of the impossibility of such communication
between the minds and souls of those who, separated by countries, or
continents, or oceans, are not even aware of one another’s whereabouts.
But the hundred-and-first will be initiate. She or he will have
felt the tightening of the invisible spider-thread, experienced the
thrill, known the familiar touch upon the brow or breast--heard the
beloved voice speaking at the inner ear. And, like Dunoisse, having
experienced, they will refrain from questioning. It has happened....
When the time comes, it will certainly happen again....
Not long after, during an attack of fever, Dunoisse dreamed that he
awakened in the chill gray dawn of a February morning to see Ada
Merling sitting by his bed. It seemed so natural to have her there, and
so divinely sweet and comforting, that he lay for a long time gazing
at her, dwelling on each dear, remembered trait and lovely feature,
breathing her atmosphere, drinking her in. She wore in this his vision
of her, not the gray nurse’s dress of Cavendish Street, but a plain
black gown, though the frilled white muslin cap of his remembrance sat
close and sober, as of old, upon her rich, brown, waving hair, and
the cambric apron made a splash of white upon the blackness of the
dress. The lines of the pure features were a little sharpened, the eyes
larger, the sensitive, clearly-cut lips were closely folded. She looked
sadder ... older.... Even as he realized this she smiled; and such a
radiance of beauty kindled in her, and shone forth from her, that he
cried out in rapture and awakened; and in his weakness shed tears on
finding himself a prisoner and alone.
But the dream, following the answer on the ramparts, left a clear
impression. She was living, and yet unwedded, and she had not forgotten
him--not quite forgotten him! The conviction of this gave him new
strength to live. Later on he received another intimation, not from the
living world beyond the ramparts and the poplared marshes, but from the
other World that is beyond the Veil.
It came to him one day at dusk with a crisping of the hair and a
shuddering of the flesh that was not terror--rather wonder and awe,
and solemn gladness. The day had been dark and rainy. His lamp had not
been lighted, the scanty fire burned low in the rusty grate. Dunoisse
sat thinking, leaning his elbows on the table where his silent servitor
had set his meager supper. And suddenly the recollection of his mother
as he had last seen her rose up in him. The whisper of her woolen
draperies seemed to cross the rough brick floor, her thin light touch
was between his eyebrows, tracing there the Sacred Sign. And almost
without conscious volition her son rose up, placed a rush-seated chair
opposite his own at the poorly-furnished table; filled a goblet with
pure water, cut bread, laid it upon a plate, sprinkled a Cross of
salt upon it, and set it for his unseen guest.... Then he resumed his
own seat and ate, comprehending that she wished it. And as he ate he
talked, in low, soft murmurs, as though answering.... Depend upon it,
one never pours out one’s hidden self so freely as when one speaks with
the beloved dead.
And then he found himself rising up, bidding God-speed and farewell to
the guest unseen, in a solemn form of words quite strange to him. And
then he knew himself alone.
Upon the following morning, being unexpectedly visited by the
Commandant, he said to the official:
“Sir, I already know what you have come to tell me. My mother died
yesterday.”
The Commandant started, and dropped a paper. It was a telegraphic
message from the Minister of the Interior, conveying, and bidding him
impart the news. He asked the prisoner:
“How did you hear this?”
And Dunoisse smiled so strangely in answer that the Commandant’s next
official report contained the sentence quoted hereunder:
“_No. X.--the officer confined during His Imperial Majesty’s
pleasure--is undoubtedly becoming insane._”
“_Zut!_” said de Morny with a shrug, when Sire my Friend showed
him this communication. “That is what you wanted, is it not?” He added:
“You have used the man, and broken the man! When you need him again--he
will not be available. Brains of such caliber as his are not often
found under a Staff-officer’s cocked hat. Leave him shut up--and they
will find them plastered on the wall one morning.... Heads are softer
than walls; madmen always remember that!”
He shrugged again, and the shrug and the cynical inflection dismissed
the subject of discussion. But not many weeks subsequently the
Commandant again visited Dunoisse, and said to him abruptly:
“You are free.”
“Free!...”
Dunoisse trembled in every limb, and caught at the table to save
himself from falling. So well had the instructions of Sire my Friend
been carried out, that all hope of being delivered out of his bondage
had abandoned him. It was almost appalling to learn that he might now
ask questions. He faltered out:
“How long have I been here?” and was told:
“About six months.”
Six months!... If they had said six years, Dunoisse would have believed
them. Could it be possible that such slow, interminable agonies as he
had drunk of, such painful resignation as he had fought for and won,
had been packed into so short a space of time as half-a-year? He asked
for a mirror he had been denied--and they brought him one. He looked
in it, and saw a face bleached to the tint of reddish ivory, framed in
white hair that fell in waving locks almost to the shoulders. The long
straggling mustache and beard were of white with streaks of blackness.
From the deep caves under the arched black eyebrows the bright black
eyes of Hector Dunoisse looked back at him. But they looked with
a gentleness that was new. And the smile that hovered about the
sharply-modeled lips had in it a sorrowful, patient sweetness that the
smile of Dunoisse had never had previously. It was partly this change
that had caused the Commandant to report the prisoner as insane.
Dunoisse’s watch and chain, with his penknife, pencil-case, and razors
were now restored to him, with his clothes and a portion of the
considerable sum of money that had been taken from him at the time
of his arrest. A military barber of the garrison trimmed his hair
and reduced the mustache and beard to more conventional proportions.
Attired in a well-worn suit of gray traveling clothes, hanging in
folds upon his stooping emaciated figure, you saw the late prisoner
take leave of the Commandant and step into a closed carriage that was
waiting in the courtyard, with an officer of police in plain clothes
seated by the driver on the box. When the carriage rumbled out under
the great square gate-tower erected in the fifteenth century by the
Count of St. Pol, the man inside had an access of nervous trembling. He
shut his eyes, and presently the shadow passed, and he could look upon
the free, fair world again.
* * * * *
It was the end of October; the gaunt poplars had shed their yellowed
leaves, and the haws were scarlet on the bushes. Mists hung over the
marshes--the odor of decaying vegetation came to Dunoisse with each
free breath he drew.
He could no longer judge of time, and the watch they had returned to
him had not been wound up. It seemed to him a drive of many hours
before the carriage stopped. He was told to get out, and obeyed. He
found himself in a graveled enclosure outside a railway-station. His
meager baggage was deposited. The carriage was driven away. It was so
marvelous to have a porter come and pick up his battered valise and
light portmanteau, and so overwhelming to be asked where the latter
was to be labeled for, that Dunoisse, standing on the Paris departure
platform, could only stare at the interrogative porter, and answer
after a bewildered silence:
“I really do not know!”
* * * * *
He knew a few moments later. For a gray-painted express rushed, with a
winnowing and fanning as of giant wings, through the station. The train
was full of English soldiers, their unbuttoned coats testifying to the
heat of the closely-packed compartments. Their fresh-colored faces
crowded at the windows; they left behind with their cheers and fag-ends
of comic songs an impression of rude health and pathetic ignorance,
above all, of extreme youth.
Dunoisse, unnerved by captivity, rendered dizzy by the sudden shock of
revelation, reeled back and collided with a person who stood behind
him, and proved to be a humpbacked, withered little old man, in charge
of the station newspaper-stall. The little old man--who wore a black
velvet cap, and had a ginger-colored chin-tuft, and spoke French with a
curious hissing accent--received his apologies with a smiling air.
“A nothing! A mere touch!... Monsieur was momentarily startled by
the passage of the monster. For months those expresses from Boulogne
have been thundering through here. Full--as Monsieur saw--of
soldiers, French soldiers at the beginning.... Regiments of the Line
from Helfaut, batteries of Artillery from Lille, and St. Omer, and
other fortresses; then English, English, nothing but Englishmen....
_Via_ Paris for Marseilles and Toulon, to be shipped for the
Bosphorus and the Black Sea.”
The prattle of the newspaper stall-keeper had never before
been listened to so greedily as by this white-haired, haggard,
shabbily-clothed traveler. The little man went on, plainly reveling in
the sound of his own queer voice:
“They were fine men at first, some of them giants. Now they are
boys--mere infants, one might say!... Conscripts, one might say also;
but that they are without the conscription in England. Food for the
Hungry One all the same. For Death is a glutton, Monsieur, not a
_gourmet_. All he asks is--enough to eat.”
He added with his whinnying laugh:
“And he gets enough. For of all those train-loads of British that have
rolled through here since January, not one has come back, Monsieur....
Possibly there have been returns by sea, but by this route we have
seen none of them. We have French invalids in incredible numbers,
_en route_ for the Northern military hospitals and convalescent
camps. They are not beautiful to see, those men who are recovering
from fever, and dysentery, and cholera; and”--he wrinkled his nose
expressively--“they are excessively unpleasant to smell! But--with
the exception of the bodies of wealthy officers, who have died out
there and are being forwarded, embalmed, for interment in their family
mausoleums--as I have said, Monsieur--there are no English at all. With
regard to these last, my peculiar humor, in connection with my trade
of bookseller, has suggested a little pleasantry.... They went out to
the East in cloth, gilt--and they return in plain boards! Monsieur will
pardon my humor? Occasionally one must laugh at Death, who laughs as no
else can!”
The haggard black eyes of the white-haired traveler had never quitted
the face of the speaker. The hunchback gave another irrepressible
little skip, and went on:
“Seriously though, Monsieur, it is incredible what a fatality
has dogged the footsteps of these English. From the moment of
disembarkation at Varna, new misfortunes, fresh calamities, have fallen
on them every day. I ask myself why, and there is no answer but one!
They are brave, but stupid, these sons of foggy Albion! And yet there
are two great secrets they have mastered perfectly. How to fight,
Monsieur--and how to die!”
“Go on,” urged Dunoisse, with feverish eagerness. “Tell me more--tell
me everything you know!”
“Assuredly!” cried the hunchback, smiling widely. “But where,” he
added, with irrepressible curiosity, “has Monsieur buried himself all
these months that he is ignorant of what the whole world knows? I have
not a single paper left to sell, if Monsieur would give me ten francs
for it, But I possess a memory and a gift of eloquence. Listen, then,
Monsieur!”
He gave another little goatlike skip upon the asphalt, and went on
eagerly, fearing to be interrupted; pouring out words, weaving an
invisible web about him by the rapid gestures of his supple, bony
hands. And Dunoisse realized, as the grim recital continued, in how far
his own deep-laid schemes had been successful; and in what respects
they had been set at nought by the grim Power that men call Destiny.
With incredible fatuity or appalling dishonesty, those officials who
controlled the Commissariat and Transport Departments of the British
Eastern Expedition had poured out the troops of England upon a foreign
soil without clothing, provisions, forage, or beasts of burden
sufficient to supply, support, and transport an army of twenty-eight
thousand men. They had relied almost exclusively upon the resources
of the country. Thanks to a well-laid plan, the country had been
found without resources: the Allies had been condemned to a stagnant
immobility, as injurious to discipline as dangerous to health.
Sickness had raged among them like a wolf in a sheepfold. Nor had
the Army of France escaped. That chart of the Pestilential Places
had availed it nothing. Even while on the voyage from Marseilles to
Gallipoli cholera had broken out virulently among the French troops.
Encamped upon the heights north of Varna, the deadly exhalations rising
from the smitten British camps had infected them. They had suffered as
severely as the white Tufts, and the Bearskins Plain, and the Cut Red
Feathers, whose tents were pitched upon the sylvan shores of the Lake
of Death, and amidst the blossom-starred, poison-breathing meadows and
fruit-laden orchards of Aladyn.
He heard of the Russian evacuation of the Danubian Principalities, and
of the Council of the Allied Generals, resulting in the Invasion of
the Crimea. He learned how the buoy, set to mark the landing-point of
Britain’s forces, had been moved mysteriously in the night. And he knew
by whose command the thing must have been done, instantly. And when,
after the story of the great battle of Infantry and Artillery that
had trodden out the grapes of the vineyards on the banks of Alma and
reddened her chalky shallows with the wine of life, came intelligence
of the death of St. Arnaud--he realized with a strange, awful thrill,
that the master whose service he himself had abjured, had been deprived
by Death of his chief confidant and most unscrupulous instrument, and
that in this, Fate had been upon the side of England. For the new
Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Boisrobert, though willing enough to oblige
his master at the Tuileries, lacked the supple skill in lying, and the
keen relish for bloodshed, which had distinguished the late intimate of
Sire my Friend.
He heard next of the Flank March, and the passing of the ridge of the
Tchernaya, and how the harbor of Balaklava, guarded at its narrow,
constricted entrance by its two stupendous cliffs of calcareous marl,
had become the English base. He was told of the Russian attack, and the
battle on the Upland, and the magnificent Light Cavalry charge that had
thrilled the watching world to wonder, and admiration, and pity, and
wrath, but a few days before....
“There was loss upon our side, naturally. But upon the side of the
British it is astonishing what slaughter!” pursued the newsvendor.
“And what numbers of wounded there are to be dealt with Monsieur
may conceive. In litters, or upon the backs of mules and horses,
they are being conveyed to the coast, where the transport-vessels
wait to receive and carry them to the Bosphorus. On board--Heaven
knows whether they will get any medical aid or surgical treatment
until they arrive at the Hospital Barracks of Scutari.... And even
there--since the English Army owns no trained nurse-attendants, or
sanitary organization--and the building covers some six miles of
ground and accommodates--according to the published reports--fifteen
thousand men--the greater number of these poor devils are likely to
spit up their souls unaided! For what can one young, high-bred English
lady, aided by a handful of Catholic Sisters of Mercy and Protestant
_religieuses_, do to assuage the sufferings of thousands?
Why--nothing at all! Not even so much as _that_!”
He shrugged again as he snapped his fingers, and then added, with one
of his curious little skips upon the pavement:
“I can picture that young lady, for I, like all my family, have the
gift of imagination. She is flat-chested, Monsieur, as are all the
English Meeses. She has hair like tow, blue eyes, round, pale, and
staring--a nose without charm or character--projecting teeth, bony red
hands, sharp elbows, and large flat feet. She is clothed in garments of
colors that shriek at you--she carries an English Protestant Bible and
a bottle of smelling-salts in her reticule--and a red guide-book under
her arm. She is immensely rich and execrably sensible, _avec un
grain de folie_. A little cracked, like all the rest of her tribe.
And she will be confident in herself and in her mission to-day, but
to-morrow, Monsieur!--to-morrow she will have a crisis of the nerves,
and resign her commission from the British War Office. And--I predict
it confidently--take a berth on the next passenger-steamer bound for
her island of----”
The close of the sentence was snatched from the speaker’s lips by the
hurricane-passage of another of the gray-painted expresses, crowded
with English troops. It flashed by and was gone. With the thin hair
upon his big head yet stirring with the wind of its passage, the
hunchback said, pointing to the lowered indicator of the up-train
signal:
“The Paris mail is due in another moment.... Monsieur is traveling by
that train?”
But Dunoisse, hardly knowing why, responded with another question.
“The English lady who has gone out to the great Hospital of Scutari to
nurse the British wounded.... Oblige me by telling me her name?”
The deformed newspaper-seller answered, not knowing that he spoke with
the mouth of Destiny:
“Merling, Monsieur; Mademoiselle Ada Merling.... Just Heaven!... Is
Monsieur ill?”...
For a mist had come before the burning eyes of the man who heard, and
his heart had knocked once, heavily within his breast, and then ceased
beating. Another moment, and the thin red stream within his veins,
rushed upon the ceaseless, hurrying circle of its life-journey, bearing
a definite message to his brain....
His star of pure, benignant womanhood, his light of hope and healing
had risen in the pestilence-smitten, war-ridden East. Well, he would
follow her there. And, if she would hear him, he would tell her all,
and ask one word of pitying kindness to carry with him on the path he
meant to tread.
Dead Marie-Bathilde had pointed it out with her little shrunken finger.
He seemed to hear her saying: “For Peace is only reached by the Way of
Expiation.”
To have Carmel in the blood is no light heritage. Thenceforth the feet
of Hector Dunoisse were to be set with inflexible purpose upon that
way of thorns and anguish. He lived but to atone.