"You would not understand if I told you," said I. "Are you detailed
to look after me?"
He said he was, and I informed him that I needed nobody; that it was
much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion
in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles
blowing a silvery sonnerie--"Garde à vous!"
"I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos," he said,
proudly, "and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven
ancestors were. Have I my inspector's permission to go?"
He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor of the bugles rang
through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered
like a cobra's.
"Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout," said I, laughing.
The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his
scarlet fez, and, "Salute! O my inspector!" he cried, sonorously, and
was gone at a bound.
That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one
another's throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the
window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command
after command was ringing out in the street below. "Forward!" shouted
a resonant voice, and "Forward! forward! forward!" echoed the voices
of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling
of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.
The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant
tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill
whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their
_toug_; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a
clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime--and nothing,
save the immense monotone of the cannonade.
I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand,
snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily
buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my
shoulders, and cried, "Come in!"
A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my
mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to
my senses under the surgeon's probe. But at the touch of her fingers
on the door outside, I knew her--I was certain that it could be nobody
but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift
this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.
She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but
when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen
from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.
"What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?" she whispered.
"No--oh no. I'm only a fool, and quite hungry, madame."
She brought the broth and bread and a glass of the most exquisite wine
I ever tasted--a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its
liquid sunshine.
"Do you know where you are?" she asked, gravely.
"Oh yes--in Morsbronn."
"And in whose house, monsieur?"
"I don't know--" I glanced instinctively at the tarnished coronet on
the canopy above the bed. "Do you know, Madame la Comtesse?"
"I ought to," she said, faintly amused. "I was born in this room. It
was to this house that I desired to come before--my exile."
Her eyes softened as they rested first on one familiar object, then on
another.
"The house has always been in our family," she said. "It was once
one of those fortified farms in the times when every hamlet was a
petty kingdom--like the King of Yvetôt's domain. Doubtless the ancient
Trécourts also wore cotton night-caps for their coronets."
"I remember now," said I, "a stone turret wedged in between two
houses. Is this it?"
"Yes, it is all that is left of the farm. My ancestors built this
crazy old row of houses for their tenants."