"Arranged?"
"Yes, no matter at what cost to your amour propre. You should have
remembered you were engaged. You forgot that, too, I suppose. And then
you go and forget your quarrel. It's the most hopeless exhibition of
levity I ever heard of."
"Good heavens, Monsieur! You don't imagine I have been picking up this
quarrel last time I was in Paris, or anything of the sort, do you?"
"Eh! What matters the precise date of your insane conduct," exclaimed
the Chevalier, testily. "The principal thing is to arrange it."
Noticing General D'Hubert getting restive and trying to place a word,
the old emigre raised his hand, and added with dignity, "I've been a
soldier, too. I would never dare suggest a doubtful step to the man
whose name my niece is to bear. I tell you that entre galants hommes an
affair can always be arranged."
"But saperiotte, Monsieur le Chevalier, it's fifteen or sixteen years
ago. I was a lieutenant of hussars then."
The old Chevalier seemed confounded by the vehemently despairing tone of
this information. "You were a lieutenant of hussars sixteen years ago,"
he mumbled in a dazed manner.
"Why, yes! You did not suppose I was made a general in my cradle like a
royal prince."
In the deepening purple twilight of the fields spread with vine leaves,
backed by a low band of sombre crimson in the west, the voice of the old
ex-officer in the army of the Princes sounded collected, punctiliously
civil.
"Do I dream? Is this a pleasantry? Or am I to understand that you have
been hatching an affair of honour for sixteen years?"
"It has clung to me for that length of time. That is my precise meaning.
The quarrel itself is not to be explained easily. We met on the ground
several times during that time, of course."
"What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can
account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution
which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned emigre in a
low tone. "Who's your adversary?" he asked a little louder.
"My adversary? His name is Feraud."
Shadowy in his tricorne and old-fashioned clothes, like a bowed, thin
ghost of the ancien regime, the Chevalier voiced a ghostly memory. "I
can remember the feud about little Sophie Derval, between Monsieur de
Brissac, Captain in the Bodyguards, and d'Anjorrant (not the pock-marked
one, the other--the Beau d'Anjorrant, as they called him). They met
three times in eighteen months in a most gallant manner. It was the
fault of that little Sophie, too, who would keep on playing . . ."
"This is nothing of the kind," interrupted General D'Hubert. He laughed
a little sardonically. "Not at all so simple," he added. "Nor yet half
so reasonable," he finished, inaudibly, between his teeth, and ground
them with rage.
After this sound nothing troubled the silence for a long time, till the
Chevalier asked, without animation: "What is he--this Feraud?"
"Lieutenant of hussars, too--I mean, he's a general. A Gascon. Son of a
blacksmith, I believe."
"There! I thought so. That Bonaparte had a special predilection for the
canaille. I don't mean this for you, D'Hubert. You are one of us, though
you have served this usurper, who . . ."
"Let's leave him out of this," broke in General D'Hubert.
The Chevalier shrugged his peaked shoulders. "Feraud of sorts. Offspring
of a blacksmith and some village troll. See what comes of mixing
yourself up with that sort of people."
"You have made shoes yourself, Chevalier."
"Yes. But I am not the son of a shoemaker. Neither are you, Monsieur
D'Hubert. You and I have something that your Bonaparte's princes, dukes,
and marshals have not, because there's no power on earth that could give
it to them," retorted the emigre, with the rising animation of a man who
has got hold of a hopeful argument. "Those people don't exist--all these
Ferauds. Feraud! What is Feraud? A va-nu-pieds disguised into a general
by a Corsican adventurer masquerading as an emperor. There is no earthly
reason for a D'Hubert to s'encanailler by a duel with a person of that
sort. You can make your excuses to him perfectly well. And if the manant
takes into his head to decline them, you may simply refuse to meet him."
"You say I may do that?"
"I do. With the clearest conscience."
"Monsieur le Chevalier! To what do you think you have returned from your
emigration?"
This was said in such a startling tone that the old man raised sharply
his bowed head, glimmering silvery white under the points of the little
tricorne. For a time he made no sound.
"God knows!" he said at last, pointing with a slow and grave gesture at
a tall roadside cross mounted on a block of stone, and stretching its
arms of forged iron all black against the darkening red band in the
sky--"God knows! If it were not for this emblem, which I remember seeing
on this spot as a child, I would wonder to what we who remained faithful
to God and our king have returned. The very voices of the people have
changed."
"Yes, it is a changed France," said General D'Hubert. He seemed to have
regained his calm. His tone was slightly ironic. "Therefore I cannot
take your advice. Besides, how is one to refuse to be bitten by a dog
that means to bite? It's impracticable. Take my word for it--Feraud
isn't a man to be stayed by apologies or refusals. But there are
other ways. I could, for instance, send a messenger with a word to
the brigadier of the gendarmerie in Senlac. He and his two friends are
liable to arrest on my simple order. It would make some talk in the
army, both the organized and the disbanded--especially the disbanded.
All canaille! All once upon a time the companions in arms of Armand
D'Hubert. But what need a D'Hubert care what people that don't exist may
think? Or, better still, I might get my brother-in-law to send for the
mayor of the village and give him a hint. No more would be needed to get
the three 'brigands' set upon with flails and pitchforks and hunted into
some nice, deep, wet ditch--and nobody the wiser! It has been done only
ten miles from here to three poor devils of the disbanded Red Lancers
of the Guard going to their homes. What says your conscience, Chevalier?
Can a D'Hubert do that thing to three men who do not exist?"
A few stars had come out on the blue obscurity, clear as crystal, of the
sky. The dry, thin voice of the Chevalier spoke harshly: "Why are you
telling me all this?"
The General seized the withered old hand with a strong grip. "Because
I owe you my fullest confidence. Who could tell Adele but you? You
understand why I dare not trust my brother-in-law nor yet my own sister.
Chevalier! I have been so near doing these things that I tremble yet.
You don't know how terrible this duel appears to me. And there's no
escape from it."
He murmured after a pause, "It's a fatality," dropped the Chevalier's
passive hand, and said in his ordinary conversational voice, "I shall
have to go without seconds. If it is my lot to remain on the ground, you
at least will know all that can be made known of this affair."
The shadowy ghost of the ancien regime seemed to have become more bowed
during the conversation. "How am I to keep an indifferent face this
evening before these two women?" he groaned. "General! I find it very
difficult to forgive you."
General D 'Hubert made no answer.
"Is your cause good, at least?"
"I am innocent."
This time he seized the Chevalier's ghostly arm above the elbow, and
gave it a mighty squeeze. "I must kill him!" he hissed, and opening his
hand strode away down the road.
The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the
General perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest.
He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of
the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity
of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other
inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open his
lips he would break out into horrible and aimless imprecations, start
breaking furniture, smashing china and glass. From the moment he opened
the private door and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of a winding
staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he
went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated
madman with blood-shot eyes and a foaming mouth played inconceivable
havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed
dining-room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over,
and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs
of the chairs while crossing the room to reach a low and broad divan
on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still
greater. That brutality of feeling which he had known only when
charging the enemy, sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not
recognize in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. But in
his mental and bodily exhaustion this passion got cleared, distilled,
refined into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to
die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
That night, General D'Hubert stretched out on his back with his hands
over his eyes, or lying on his breast with his face buried in a
cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at
the absurdity of the situation, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his
existence, and mistrust of his best sentiments (for what the devil did
he want to go to Fouche for?)--he knew them all in turn. "I am an
idiot, neither more nor less," he thought--"A sensitive idiot. Because
I overheard two men talking in a cafe. . . . I am an idiot afraid of
lies--whereas in life it is only truth that matters."
Several times he got up and, walking in his socks in order not to be
heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the
dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry
somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud,
the awful persistence of that imbecile brute, came to him with the
tremendous force of a relentless destiny. General D'Hubert trembled as
he put down the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General
D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in
his dry mouth the faint sickly flavour of fear, not the excusable fear
before a young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death
and the honourable man's fear of cowardice.
But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul, and heart recoil together, General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and at infantry squares, and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.
He staggered on, disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. In the colourless and pellucid dawn the wood
of pines detached its columns of trunks and its dark green canopy very
clearly against the rocks of the grey hillside. He kept his eyes fixed
on it steadily, and sucked at an orange as he walked. That temperamental
good-humoured coolness in the face of danger which had made him an
officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors was gradually
asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at the edge of
the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange in his hand,
and reproached himself for coming so ridiculously early on the ground.
Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes, footsteps
on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed, loud conversation. A
voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, "He's game for my bag."
He thought to himself, "Here they are. What's this about game? Are they
talking of me?" And becoming aware of the other orange in his hand, he
thought further, "These are very good oranges. Leonie's own tree. I may
just as well eat this orange now instead of flinging it away."
Emerging from a wilderness of rocks and bushes, General Feraud and his
seconds discovered General D'Hubert engaged in peeling the orange. They
stood still, waiting till he looked up. Then the seconds raised their
hats, while General Feraud, putting his hands behind his back, walked
aside a little way.
"I am compelled to ask one of you, messieurs, to act for me. I have
brought no friends. Will you?"