“FRENCH HEADQUARTERS,
“BEFORE SEVASTOPOL,
“_December, 1854_.
_To His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the British
Forces. Staff Headquarters, near Balaklava._
“MY LORD,
“I have to inform your Lordship that a person, passing under the alias
of M. Cain, and who is known to have left Scutari _en route_
for the Crimea, is an ex-Brigadier General of His Imperial Majesty’s
private staff, named von Widinitz-Dunoisse, who was employed upon
Survey in Bulgaria a few years previously, and upon his return to
Paris, in May last, committed a gross outrage upon the person of
the Emperor, and was consequently deprived of his rank in the
French Army, and imprisoned in the Fortress of Ham. Of exceptional
ability--this officer--who was released by the clemency of his
Imperial Master--rendered excellent service to his Majesty, who has
attributed his fantastic conduct and the strange suspicions that
apparently possess him, to an intermittent fever contracted in the
Dobrudja, the effects of which have permanently unhinged his mind.
“Madness is in the family of this unhappy gentleman, who, as a
pupil at the Technical School of Military Instruction, attacked and
dangerously wounded a fellow-student with a broken fencing-foil. His
mother, the late Princesse Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz-Dunoisse, was
for many years in confinement, and died as the inmate of a lunatic
asylum a few months ago.
“Should your lordship find yourself annoyed by the assiduities of this
person, you are respectfully requested to send him under guard to our
Headquarters, where he will be placed under the human surveillance
that his malady requires.
“I beg to assure your Lordship of my distinguished considerations,
“A. BOISROBERT,
“Commander-in-Chief.”
Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in the Crimea,
stood leaning an elbow upon the narrow mantelshelf of the clay-brick
fireplace that had been built in the corner of the bare, comfortless
room of the farmhouse that served him as Headquarters, as he perused
this letter--which was penned upon a square sheet of blue official
paper, emblazoned with the eagle of Sire my Friend.
The handsome, high-bred, resolute face of Moggy Geogehagan’s bould
ould gintleman bore the stamp of weariness and exhaustion. The gallant
martial figure in the blue frock-coat that looked so absurdly plain
beside the profusely gold-laced and bestarred uniforms of the French
Generals, had gained a stoop; the dark gray trousers hung loosely on
the wasted limbs.
It was dusk; by the light of the low-burning fire, and by the flicker
of the stable-lantern that was held by an orderly who waited just
inside the door as though for instructions--you saw the significant
disorder of the place.
Papers were piled upon the central stove, papers were heaped upon
the trestle-table, upon the three chairs and my lord’s narrow
camp-bedstead. Papers filled the wine-hampers that served as
waste-paper baskets, papers littered the floor of beaten earth, yet
every moment fresh telegrams and dispatches were being brought in by
breathless messengers.... One of my lord’s Staff aides-de-camp, a
handsome, fair-haired, long-legged young Lieutenant of Lancers, came
in, bringing a great handful, as my lord thoughtfully folded the letter
that he had been reading and scratched his strong old chin with it in
rather a characteristic way he had, and said to the orderly in quiet,
level tones:
“Sergeant-Major Ransome, if the person who has again applied for an
interview be still waiting in the courtyard, perhaps you had better
bring him here!...” He added, taking three telegrams and a couple
of bulky envelopes from the aide-de-camp: “And you will wait in the
ante-room, Foltlebarre, and see that they have the horses in readiness.
I purpose to visit the Cavalry Camp and the Camp of the Second Division
before I go to bed.”
“But you had no sleep last night, my lord, or the night before that!”
The boy, scarlet to the ears, met the kindly, almost quizzical look
that responded. My lord said, and condescension and hauteur mingled in
his tone:
“I am obliged to you, my dear Foltlebarre, but rest will come for me in
the due course of things. At present there is duty to be done.”
He opened a telegraphic message from the War Office. It read:
“_Communicate whether Captain Cronan Hundredth Fusiliers has
been bitten by a snake or a centipede? Family urgently desirous to
know._”
A second telegram repeated this message with the addition of the words:
“_Highly urgent._” Amidst the innumerable interrogations, advices,
demands, orders and counter-orders that had reached my lord that day,
the casualty of Captain Cronan--who was son-in-law to a personage high
in power at the Horse Guards, had figured prominently. My lord, with a
stifled sigh of weariness, crossed the room and added the telegram to
a file of others, as the orderly sergeant-major ushered in the person
who had so urgently sought an interview, and saluted and retired, on
the heels of the aide-de-camp.
* * * * *
We know who the stranger was. The interview was brief, and as Ada
Merling had prophesied, fruitless. Dunoisse had no sooner made
the purport of his visit plain, than my lord said, gently but
authoritatively, checking him with a gesture of the hand:
“No more, sir! You have sought me, it may be, in all sincerity, but
the obligations of my post forbid me to hear you to the end. You have
suffered imprisonment--possibly ill-usage--and your views have become
distorted. My sympathy for your evident suffering induces me to be
lenient. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to hand you over to the
representatives of your country, who would deal with you, harshly, it
might be....”
He added: “Do you not suppose that reports and accusations of treachery
have not already reached me, as they probably have the French
Commander-in-Chief! You must have little experience if you doubt
this!... Yet I tell you, that were these accusations true, I should not
alter, by one single hair’s-breadth, my method of procedure. For it
would be better that the British Army of the East should perish to a
man in the trenches before Sevastopol than that England should stoop to
show suspicion of her Ally. Our interview is over.... Sir, good-night
to you!”
And my lord struck upon a bell that stood upon his portable
writing-table, and consigned the dismissed visitor to the guidance of
the orderly. So, with a burning brain, and dazed eyes and unsteady
feet, Dunoisse passed out into a frosty night, bitten in with cold,
white, twinkling stars--and went down, stumbling over the deep ruts of
the snow-covered road, towards the lights of the Khutor Farm.
* * * * *
It was all over, all over! No atonement was possible!... Weary and
weak, and sick at heart, he reached the farmstead, turned in under a
shed where some sacks had been thrown upon the ground, flung himself
face downwards upon these, and either slept or swooned.
When he awakened or revived it was daybreak. A couple of Zouaves passed
him, making their way northwards towards the French headquarters after
a night of drink and gambling. One of them was singing in a nasal tenor
voice. As though in mockery the words came:
“_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!_”
“O God!” cried Dunoisse, as the men passed, “be merciful and send me
Death! For I cannot keep my vow to Thee and to the woman who has my
earthly worship. It is not in my power to atone!”
A flush of rosy color filled his haggard eyes. He lifted them
and saw--beyond the heights that were dotted with the Turkish
defense-works, beyond the deep glen through which the darkling flood
of the Tchernaya rolled downwards to the sea--topping the rugged line
of hills to the eastward, where the fires of the Cossack camps sent up
thin lines of smoke, blue-white and slanting northwards, the rising of
the sun. And the disk of the luminary was pale, dazzling as burnished
silver. And a broad, vertical bar of crimson rose above and below
it--and a transverse bar of the same glowing, ruddy splendor made the
semblance of a Crimson Cross with a central glory. And in that moment
knowledge and power and strength came to the son of Marie-Bathilde. He
knew what his atonement was to be.
He had money that had been returned to him upon his release from the
Fortress. He bought a donkey and a canvas saddle with panniers that
day in Balaklava, and with a store of simple comforts, bought at a
great price from the masters of the store-ships in the Harbor, he
began to go about amongst the camps of the Divisions, and to frequent
the pest-houses called hospitals, and to visit the soldiers dying of
hunger, and bronchitis, and pneumonia in the slushy, freezing trenches,
and to do what good he might.
He wore a sheepskin cap and coat, and leggings of pig-leather. He
made himself a dwelling in the crypt of a ruined Greek church.
Under the inlaid picture of Our Lady on the wall he made his bed of
withered leaves and Army sacking. He lived on the coarsest, plainest
food--taking no more than was needed to sustain the life in him. It is
not for nothing that one has Carmel in the blood.
And toiling thus, he forgot his griefs, for labor is a powerful
anodyne. And still the war went on, and still the eyes of England
turned towards the Upland, and still her sons died in thousands, and
were buried in its marly soil.
* * * * *
The great Tsar died. Marshal Boisrobert retired, and was succeeded by
Grandguerrier, the hot, fierce, stout little warrior of whom we know.
When Dalgan breathed his last--when the gallant gray head sank under
its overwhelming burden of overwork, exertion, grief, and anxiety--that
is an unforgettable picture of the French Marshal standing by the
deathbed in the bare room of the wooden farmhouse, his broad shoulders
heaving--his swarthy, convulsed face hidden in the thick stout
hands--weeping and sobbing unrestrainedly as a child for the friend who
was no more.
He had a tender heart, that little, fiery man who had become
Commander-in-Chief of France’s Imperial Army. Henriette might have
been happy, had she married him.... And how exquisitely she would have
played her part as Madame la Maréchale one may imagine, had not Fate
stepped in, in the person of a little drummer of the Line.
* * * * *
For she visited the military hospitals of Kamiesch a few days
subsequently to her arrival. As she was leaving the last ward, one
of the Sisters of Mercy in charge pointed out to her this youth of
eighteen, who had been blinded in both eyes by the explosion of a
shell. And Henriette, glancing pitifully at the swollen, bandaged face
upon the pillow, said with a shudder:
“Poor young man! How sad that he should suffer so cruelly! Ah! if his
mother could only see him now!”
Some tone of the speaker’s seemed to reach the consciousness of the
fevered sufferer upon the narrow pallet. He stretched out yellow, bony
arms, groping towards the unseen sweetness. He turned his bandaged head
towards it, and said, in a voice between a rattle and a gasp:
“Mother, mother, mother! They have brought you to me at last! Come and
hold me, mother, my mother! Come and kiss me, and I shall get quite
well!”
The nun in charge would have dissuaded Henriette, saying that the
patient was not only wounded, but was suspected to be suffering from
a malignant kind of fever, the true character of which had not yet
declared itself. But Henriette was obstinate. She felt so strangely
happy that day--it seemed to her that she must do something for
somebody. And she ran to the squalid pallet and knelt beside it,
saying, as though the little drummer had been a child indeed:
“Yes, yes!--I am your mother!... Come, now, be good! You disturb the
other little ones. Be patient!--be quiet!--by-and-by you shall get
well!”
She had never been so tender to one of the little pig-tailed girls who
had been brought up by the market-gardener’s wife at Bagnères--but you
will remember that Henriette could never say No! to a man. So, as the
drummer still moaned to be held and kissed and cosseted, Henriette
yielded, and touched with her own lips the poison-breathing lips of
the pestilence-stricken--and laid the bandaged head upon her beautiful
bosom--and hushed and soothed it there. She coaxed the drummer into
taking food and medicine. She sang a cradle-rhyme and she rocked
the dying lad to rest. Not the naughty little witch-song about the
Archbishop’s cupboard, but a vague, tender lullaby, dealing with Our
Lady, lilies, roses, angels and stars.
And the delirious parrot-cry was stilled in sleep, but a few days later
Henriette was smitten with smallpox, of which the wounded drummer was
already dead.
Symptom followed symptom in ugly, familiar procession. When the fever
abated, there was no beauty left in the once witching face. The voice
of honey, the sweet, enthralling smile, and the seductive shape were
left, but beyond these, nothing. By-and-by she asked for a mirror....
The nun who nursed her brought her one, after repeated refusals. She
looked in it, and said, almost with a smile to Grandguerrier, who had
insisted upon being admitted to her bedside:
“I am even uglier than that poor boy, am I not? Well,--the best thing I
can do now is to go back to my little girls.”
Grandguerrier raved and stormed, they say, but Henriette said No! this
time, and said it firmly. And so she went away--she who upon that night
you know of had made choice of Christ before all earthly lovers--she
whom I, like so many others, have loved against my will.
True to her character of enchantress, she bewitched all those about
her. For the nuns held her a saint--and to his dying day Grandguerrier
believed her to be the noblest of women. And would you be surprised to
learn that she played the _rôle_ of perfect mother to the three
little pig-tailed girls?
Man is merciless to the Henriettes, yet once there lived One Man
who understood them; Who was merciful and chivalrous to the erring,
perishable thing of clay His Hands had made. He drank pure water
from the vessel of the Woman of Samaria--who was an elder sister of
this Henriette of my story. As also was Mary of Magdala, who loved
much, sinned greatly, and was forgiven. And, like the first, my sad,
sweet prodigal, her store rifled, her treasure spent, held drink to
the parched lips that thirsted; and even as the second, broke the
box of spikenard--wiped the Sacred Feet with the silken veil of her
tresses--embraced with passion the Holy Cross.