AT RAINCY-LA-TOUR
When I opened my eyes it was with a peculiarly reluctant feeling, for
my eyelids were so heavy that they seemed to weigh a ton. My head was
unspeakably groggy, and I had quite lost my memory. I couldn’t,
if suddenly interrogated, have replied with one intelligent bit of
information about myself, not even with my name.
Flat on my back I was lying, gazing up at what, surprisingly, seemed to
be a ceiling festooned with garlands of roses and painted with ladies
and cavaliers, idling about a stretch of greensward, decidedly in
the Watteau style. Where was I? What had happened to make me feel so
helpless? It reminded me of an episode of my childhood, a day when my
pony had fallen and rolled upon me, and I had been carried home with two
crushed ribs and a broken arm.
Coming out at that time from the influence of the ether, I had found
Dunny at my bedside. If only he were here now! I looked round. Why,
there he was, sitting in a brocaded chair by the window, his dear old
silver head thrown back, dozing beyond a doubt.
To see him gave me a warm, comforted, homelike feeling. Nor did it
surprise me, but my surroundings did. The room, a veritable Louis Quinze
jewel in its paneling, carving, and gilding, might have come direct
from Versailles by parcel post; my bed was garlanded and curtained in
rose-color. Where I had gone to sleep last night I couldn’t remember;
but it hadn’t, I was obstinately sure, been here.
What ailed me, anyhow? I began a series of cautious experiments,
designed to discover the trouble. My arms were weak and of a strange,
flabby limpness, but they moved. So did my left leg; but when I came to
the right one I was baffled. It wouldn’t stir; it was heavily encased in
something. Good heavens! now I knew! It was in a plaster cast.
The shock of the discovery taught me something further, namely, that my
head was liable to excruciating little throbs of pain. I raised a hand
to it. My forehead was swathed in bandages, like a turbaned Turk’s.
Oh, to be sure, in the castle at Prezelay, as we were retreating up the
staircase, Schwartzmann had fired at me; but, then, hadn’t that been a
pin prick, the merest scratch?
The name Prezelay served as a key to solve the puzzle. The whole
fantastic, incredible chain of happenings came back to me in a rush;
the gray car, the inn, the murder, the night in the castle,
Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier.
“Dunny!” I heard myself quavering in a voice utterly unlike my own.
The figure in the chair started up and hurried toward me, and then
Dunny’s hands were holding my hands, his eyes looking into mine.
“There, Dev, there! Take it easy,” the familiar voice was soothing me.
“Hold on to me, my boy, You are safe now. You’re all right!”
My safety, however, seemed of small importance for the time being.
“Dunny,” I implored, “listen! You have got to find out for me about a
girl. How am I to tell you, though? If I start the story, you’ll think
I’m raving.”
“I know all about it, Dev,” my guardian reassured me. “I’ve seen Miss
Falconer. She’s absolutely safe.”
If that were so, I could relax, and I did with fervent thankfulness. Not
for long, however; my brain had begun to work.
“See here! I want to know who has been playing football with me,” was my
next demand, which Dunny answered obligingly, if with a slightly dubious
face.
“That French doctor, nice young chap, said you weren’t to talk,” he
muttered, “but if I were in your place I’d want to know a few things
myself. It was this way, Dev. A fragment of a shell struck you--”
“A fragment!” I raised weak eyebrows. “I know better. Twenty shells at
least, and whole!”
“--and didn’t strike your Teuton friends,” he charged on, suddenly
purple of visage. “It was a true German shell, my boy, the devil looking
after his own. The man in the seat with you was cut up a bit; the other
two were thrown clear of the motor. If you hadn’t already given the
alarm, they would probably have got off scot-free. As it was, the French
held a drumhead court martial a little later, and all three of the
fellows--well, you can fill in the rest.”
I was silent for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray
dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim’s dark, grim face. No
doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a
recollection of the hall at Prezelay.
“As for you,” Dunny was continuing, “you seem to have puzzled
them finely. There you were in a French uniform, at your last gasp
apparently, and with an American passport, that you seem to have clung
to through thick and thin, inside your coat. They took a chance on you,
though, because you had made them a present of the Franz von
Blenheim; and by the next day, thanks to Miss Falconer and the Duke of
Raincy-la-Tour, you were being looked for all over France.
“So that’s how it stands. You’re at Raincy-la-Tour now, at the duke’s
chateau. The place has been a hospital ever since the war began. Only
you’re not with the other wounded. You are--well--a rather special
patient in the pavilion across the lake; and you’re by way of being a
hero. The day I landed, the first paper I saw shrieked at me how you had
tracked the kaiser’s star agent and outwitted him and handed him over to
justice.”
“The deuce it did!” I exclaimed. “You must have been puffed up with
pride.”
My guardian’s jaw set itself rigidly. “I was too busy,” was his grim
answer. “You see, the end of the statement said there was no hope that
you could survive. And when I got here I found you with fever, delirium,
one leg shot up, four bits of shell in your head, a fine case of brain
concussion. That was nearly three weeks ago, and it seems more like
three years!”
An idea, at this point, made me fix a searching gaze on him.
“By the way,” I asked accusingly, “how did you happen to arrive so
opportunely on this side? It seemed as natural as possible to find
you settled here waiting for my eyes to open; but on second thoughts I
suppose you didn’t fly?”
He looked extraordinarily embarrassed.
“Why,” he growled at length, “I had business. I got a cablegram soon
after you left New York. The thing was confoundedly inconvenient, but I
had no choice about it.”
“Dunny,” I said weakly, but sternly, “you didn’t bring me up to tell
whoppers, not bare-faced ones like that, anyhow, that wouldn’t deceive
the veriest child. What earthly business could you have over here in
war-time? Own up, now, and take your medicine like a man.”
His guilty air was sufficient answer.
“Well, Dev,” he acknowledged, “it was your cable. That Gibraltar mess
was a nasty one, and I didn’t like its looks. I’m getting old, and
you’re all I’ve got; so I took a passport and caught the _Rochambeau_.
Not, of course, that I doubted your ability to take care of yourself, my
boy--”
“Didn’t you? You might have,” I admitted with some ruefulness, “if
you had known I was bucking both the Allied governments and the picked
talent of the Central powers. It was too much. I was riding for a fall,
and I got it. But I don’t mind saying, Dunny, I’m infernally glad you
came.”
He wiped his eyes.
“Well, you go to sleep now,” he counseled gruffly. “You’ve got to get
well in a hurry; there’s work for you to do! All sorts of things have
been happening since that _obus_ knocked you out. Just a week ago, for
instance, the President went before Congress and--”
“What’s that you say? Not war?”
“Yes, war, young man! We’re in it at last, up to our necks; in it with
men and ships and munitions and foodstuffs and everything else we
have to help with, praise the Lord! You’ll fight beneath the Stars and
Stripes, instead of under the Tricolor. I say, Dev, that’s positively
the last word I’ll utter. You’ve got to rest!”
In a weak, quavering fashion, but with sincere enthusiasm, I tried to
celebrate by singing a few bars of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and a
little of the “Marseillaise.” Dunny was right, however; the conversation
had exhausted me. In the midst of my patriotic demonstration I fell
asleep.
My convalescence was a marvel, I learned from young Dr. Raimbault, the
surgeon from the chateau who came to see me every day. According to
him, I was a patient in a hundred, in a thousand; he never wearied
of admiring my constitution, which he described by the various French
equivalents of “as hard as nails.” Not a set-back attended the course of
my recovery. First, I sat propped up in bed; then I attained the dignity
of an arm-chair; later, slowly and painfully, I began to drag myself
about the room. But the day on which my physician’s rapture burst all
bounds was the great one when I crawled from the pavilion, gained a
bench beneath the trees, and sat enthroned, glaring at my crutches. They
were detestable implements; I longed to smash them. And they would, the
doctor airily informed me, be my portion for three months.
To feel grumpy in such surroundings was certainly black ingratitude.
It was an idyllic place. My pavilion was a sort of Trianon, a Marie
Antoinette bower, all flowers and gold. Fresh green woods grew about
it; a lake stretched before it; swans dotted the water where trees
were mirrored, and there were marble steps and balustrades. Across this
glittering expanse rose Raincy-la-Tour, proud and stately, with its
formal gardens and its fountains and its Versailles-like front. In
the afternoons I could see the wounded soldiers walking there or being
pushed to and fro in wheel-chairs; legless and armless, some of them;
wreckage of the mighty battle-fields; timely reminders, poor heroic
fellows, that there were people in the world a great deal worse off than
I.
Yet, instead of being thankful, I was profoundly wretched. I moped and
sulked; I fell each day into a deeper, more consistent gloom. I tried
grimly to regain my strength, with a view to seeking other quarters.
While I stayed here I was the guest of the Firefly of France; and though
I admired him,--I should have been a cad, a quitter, a poor loser,
everything I had ever held anathema in days gone by, not to do
so,--still I couldn’t feel toward him as a man should feel toward his
host; not in the least!
On three separate occasions Dunny motored up to Paris, bringing back
as the fruits of his first excursion my baggage from the Ritz. I was
clothed again, in my right mind; except for my swathed head, I looked
highly civilized. The day when I had raced hither and yon, and fought an
unbelievable battle in a dark hall, and insanely masqueraded first in
a leather coat, then in a pale-blue uniform, seemed dim and far-off
indeed.
“It was a nice hashish dream,” I told my mirrored image. “But it wasn’t
real, my lad, for a moment; such things don’t happen to folks like you.
You’re not the romantic type; you don’t look like some one in an
old picture; you haven’t brought down thirty German aeroplanes or
thereabouts, and won every war medal the French can give and the name of
Ace. No; you look like a--a correct bulldog; and winning an occasional
polo cup is about your limit. Even if it hadn’t been settled before you
met her, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
There were times when I prayed never to see Esme Falconer again. There
were other times when I knew I would drag myself round the world--yes,
on my crutches!--if at the end of the journey I could see her for an
instant, a long way off. I could see that my despondency was driving
Dunny to distraction. He evolved the theory that I was going into a
decline.
Then came the afternoon that made history. I was sitting at my window.
The trees seemed specially green, the sky specially blue, the lake
specially bright. I was feeling stronger and was glumly planning a move
to Paris when I saw an automobile speed up the poplared walk toward
Raincy-la-Tour.
Rip-snorting and chugging, the thing executed a curve before the
chateau, and then, hugging the side of the lake, advanced, obviously
toward my humble abode. My heart seemed to turn a somersault. I should
have known that car if I had met it in Bagdad. It was a long blue motor,
polished to the last notch, deeply cushioned, luxurious, poignantly
familiar, the car, in short, that I had pursued to Bleau, and that
later, in flat defiance of President Poincare or the Generalissimo
of France, or whoever makes army rules and regulations, I had guided
through the war zone to the castle of Prezelay.
As the chauffeur halted it near the pavilion, it disgorged three
occupants, one of who, a young officer, slender of form and gracefully
alert of movement, wore the dark-blue uniform of the French Flying
Corps. I knew him only too well. It was Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier.
But the glance I gave him was most cursory; my attention was focused
hungrily on the two ladies in the tonneau. They had risen and were
divesting themselves in leisurely fashion of a most complicated
arrangement of motor coats and veils.
From these swathing disguises there first emerged, as if from a
chrysalis, a black-clad, distinguished-looking young woman whom I had
never seen before. However, it was the second figure, the one in the
rosy veils and the tan mantle, that was exciting me. Off came her
wrappings, and I saw a girl in a white gown and a flowered hat--the
loveliest girl on earth.
I did not stand on the order of my going. I rocked perilously, and
my crutches made a furious clatter, but I was outside in a truly
infinitesimal space of time. Yes; there they were, chatting with Dunny,
who had hurried to meet them. And at sight of me the Firefly of France
ran forward with hands extended, greeting me as if I were his oldest
friend, his brother, his dearest comrade in arms.
I took his hands and I pressed them with what show of warmth I could
summon. It was as peasant as a bit of torture, but it had to be gone
through. Then I stared past him toward the ladies, who were coming up
with Dunny; and except for that girl in white, I saw nothing in all the
world.
“Monsieur,” the duke was saying, “I pay you my first visit. Only my
weakness has prevented me from sooner welcoming to Raincy-la-Tour so
honored a guest.”
He turned to the lady who stood beside Miss Falconer, a slender,
dark-eyed, gracious young woman wearing a simple black gown and a black
hat and a string of pearls.
“Here is another,” said the Firefly, “who has come to welcome you. Oh,
yes, Monsieur, you must know, and you must count henceforth as your
friends in any need, even to the death, all those who bear the name of
Raincy-la-Tour. Permit that I present you to my wife, who is of your
country.”
“Jean’s wife is my sister, Mr. Bayne,” Miss Falconer said.