"Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country
there was no one I could trust safely with the object of your presence
here," explained General D'Hubert, urbanely.
They saluted, looked round, and remarked both together:
"Poor ground."
"It's unfit."
"Why bother about ground, measurements, and so on? Let us simplify
matters. Load the two pairs of pistols. I will take those of General
Feraud, and let him take mine. Or, better still, let us take a mixed
pair. One of each pair. Then let us go into the wood and shoot at sight,
while you remain outside. We did not come here for ceremonies, but for
war--war to the death. Any ground is good enough for that. If I fall,
you must leave me where I lie and clear out. It wouldn't be healthy for
you to be found hanging about here after that."
It appeared after a short parley that General Feraud was willing to
accept these conditions. While the seconds were loading the pistols,
he could be heard whistling, and was seen to rub his hands with perfect
contentment. He flung off his coat briskly, and General D 'Hubert took
off his own and folded it carefully on a stone.
"Suppose you take your principal to the other side of the wood and let
him enter exactly in ten minutes from now," suggested General D'Hubert,
calmly, but feeling as if he were giving directions for his own
execution. This, however, was his last moment of weakness. "Wait. Let us
compare watches first."
He pulled out his own. The officer with the chipped nose went over to
borrow the watch of General Feraud. They bent their heads over them for
a time.
"That's it. At four minutes to six by yours. Seven to by mine."
It was the cuirassier who remained by the side of General D'Hubert,
keeping his one eye fixed immovably on the white face of the watch he
held in the palm of his hand. He opened his mouth, waiting for the beat
of the last second long before he snapped out the word, "Avancez."
General D'Hubert moved on, passing from the glaring sunshine of the
Provencal morning into the cool and aromatic shade of the pines. The
ground was clear between the reddish trunks, whose multitude, leaning at
slightly different angles, confused his eye at first. It was like going
into battle. The commanding quality of confidence in himself woke up in
his breast. He was all to his affair. The problem was how to kill the
adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile
nightmare. "It's no use wounding that brute," thought General D'Hubert.
He was known as a resourceful officer. His comrades years ago used also
to call him The Strategist. And it was a fact that he could think in
the presence of the enemy. Whereas Feraud had been always a mere
fighter--but a dead shot, unluckily.
"I must draw his fire at the greatest possible range," said General
D'Hubert to himself.
At that moment he saw something white moving far off between the
trees--the shirt of his adversary. He stepped out at once between the
trunks, exposing himself freely; then, quick as lightning, leaped
back. It had been a risky move but it succeeded in its object. Almost
simultaneously with the pop of a shot a small piece of bark chipped off
by the bullet stung his ear painfully.
General Feraud, with one shot expended, was getting cautious. Peeping
round the tree, General D'Hubert could not see him at all. This
ignorance of the foe's whereabouts carried with it a sense of
insecurity. General D'Hubert felt himself abominably exposed on his
flank and rear. Again something white fluttered in his sight. Ha! The
enemy was still on his front, then. He had feared a turning movement.
But apparently General Feraud was not thinking of it. General D'Hubert
saw him pass without special haste from one tree to another in the
straight line of approach. With great firmness of mind General D'Hubert
stayed his hand. Too far yet. He knew he was no marksman. His must be a
waiting game--to kill.
Wishing to take advantage of the greater thickness of the trunk, he sank
down to the ground. Extended at full length, head on to his enemy, he
had his person completely protected. Exposing himself would not do now,
because the other was too near by this time. A conviction that Feraud
would presently do something rash was like balm to General D'Hubert's
soul. But to keep his chin raised off the ground was irksome, and not
much use either. He peeped round, exposing a fraction of his head with
dread, but really with little risk. His enemy, as a matter of fact, did
not expect to see anything of him so far down as that. General D'Hubert
caught a fleeting view of General Feraud shifting trees again with
deliberate caution. "He despises my shooting," he thought, displaying
that insight into the mind of his antagonist which is of such great help
in winning battles. He was confirmed in his tactics of immobility. "If
I could only watch my rear as well as my front!" he thought anxiously,
longing for the impossible.
It required some force of character to lay his pistols down; but, on a
sudden impulse, General D'Hubert did this very gently--one on each side
of him. In the army he had been looked upon as a bit of a dandy because
he used to shave and put on a clean shirt on the days of battle. As
a matter of fact, he had always been very careful of his personal
appearance. In a man of nearly forty, in love with a young and charming
girl, this praiseworthy self-respect may run to such little weaknesses
as, for instance, being provided with an elegant little leather
folding-case containing a small ivory comb, and fitted with a piece of
looking-glass on the outside. General D'Hubert, his hands being free,
felt in his breeches' pockets for that implement of innocent vanity
excusable in the possessor of long, silky moustaches. He drew it out,
and then with the utmost coolness and promptitude turned himself over
on his back. In this new attitude, his head a little raised, holding the
little looking-glass just clear of his tree, he squinted into it with
his left eye, while the right kept a direct watch on the rear of his
position. Thus was proved Napoleon's saying, that "for a French soldier,
the word impossible does not exist." He had the right tree nearly
filling the field of his little mirror.
"If he moves from behind it," he reflected with satisfaction, "I am
bound to see his legs. But in any case he can't come upon me unawares."
And sure enough he saw the boots of General Feraud flash in and out,
eclipsing for an instant everything else reflected in the little mirror.
He shifted its position accordingly. But having to form his judgment of
the change from that indirect view he did not realize that now his feet
and a portion of his legs were in plain sight of General Feraud.
General Feraud had been getting gradually impressed by the amazing
cleverness with which his enemy was keeping cover. He had spotted the
right tree with bloodthirsty precision. He was absolutely certain of it.
And yet he had not been able to glimpse as much as the tip of an ear. As
he had been looking for it at the height of about five feet ten inches
from the ground it was no great wonder--but it seemed very wonderful to
General Feraud.
The first view of these feet and legs determined a rush of blood to his
head. He literally staggered behind his tree, and had to steady himself
against it with his hand. The other was lying on the ground, then! On
the ground! Perfectly still, too! Exposed! What could it mean? . . . The
notion that he had knocked over his adversary at the first shot entered
then General Feraud's head. Once there it grew with every second of
attentive gazing, overshadowing every other supposition--irresistible,
triumphant, ferocious.
"What an ass I was to think I could have missed him," he muttered to
himself. "He was exposed en plein--the fool!--for quite a couple of
seconds."
General Feraud gazed at the motionless limbs, the last vestiges of
surprise fading before an unbounded admiration of his own deadly skill
with the pistol.
"Turned up his toes! By the god of war, that was a shot!" he exulted
mentally. "Got it through the head, no doubt, just where I aimed,
staggered behind that tree, rolled over on his back, and died."
And he stared! He stared, forgetting to move, almost awed, almost
sorry. But for nothing in the world would he have had it undone. Such a
shot!--such a shot! Rolled over on his back and died!
For it was this helpless position, lying on the back, that shouted its
direct evidence at General Feraud! It never occurred to him that
it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man. It was
inconceivable. It was beyond the range of sane supposition. There was no
possibility to guess the reason for it. And it must be said, too, that
General D'Hubert's turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead. General Feraud
expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but, from what
he felt to be an excessive scrupulousness, refrained for a while.
"I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet," he mumbled
to himself, leaving carelessly the shelter of his tree. This move was
immediately perceived by the resourceful General D'Hubert. He concluded
it to be another shift, but when he lost the boots out of the field of
the mirror he became uneasy. General Feraud had only stepped a little
out of the line, but his adversary could not possibly have supposed him
walking up with perfect unconcern. General D'Hubert, beginning to wonder
at what had become of the other, was taken unawares so completely that
the first warning of danger consisted in the long, early-morning shadow
of his enemy falling aslant on his outstretched legs. He had not even
heard a footfall on the soft ground between the trees!
It was too much even for his coolness. He jumped up thoughtlessly,
leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of an
average man (unless totally paralyzed by discomfiture) would have been
to stoop for his weapons, exposing himself to the risk of being shot
down in that position. Instinct, of course, is irreflective. It is its
very definition. But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing whether
in reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of instinct are not
affected by the customary mode of thought. In his young days, Armand
D'Hubert, the reflective, promising officer, had emitted the opinion
that in warfare one should "never cast back on the lines of a mistake."
This idea, defended and developed in many discussions, had settled into
one of the stock notions of his brain, had become a part of his mental
individuality. Whether it had gone so inconceivably deep as to affect
the dictates of his instinct, or simply because, as he himself declared
afterwards, he was "too scared to remember the confounded pistols," the
fact is that General D'Hubert never attempted to stoop for them. Instead
of going back on his mistake, he seized the rough trunk with both hands,
and swung himself behind it with such impetuosity that, going right
round in the very flash and report of the pistol-shot, he reappeared on
the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud. This last,
completely unstrung by such a show of agility on the part of a dead man,
was trembling yet. A very faint mist of smoke hung before his face which
had an extraordinary aspect, as if the lower jaw had come unhinged.
"Not missed!" he croaked, hoarsely, from the depths of a dry throat.
This sinister sound loosened the spell that had fallen on General
D'Hubert's senses. "Yes, missed--a bout portant," he heard himself
saying, almost before he had recovered the full command of his
faculties. The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of
homicidal fury, resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of
a lifetime. For years General D 'Hubert had been exasperated and
humiliated by an atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by this man's
savage caprice. Besides, General D'Hubert had been in this last instance
too unwilling to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to
take the shape of a desire to kill. "And I have my two shots to fire
yet," he added, pitilessly.
General Feraud snapped-to his teeth, and his face assumed an irate,
undaunted expression. "Go on!" he said, grimly.
These would have been his last words if General D'Hubert had been
holding the pistols in his hands. But the pistols were lying on the
ground at the foot of a pine. General D'Hubert had the second of leisure
necessary to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man, but as a
lover; not as a danger, but as a rival; not as a foe to life, but as an
obstacle to marriage. And behold! there was the rival defeated!--utterly
defeated, crushed, done for!
He picked up the weapons mechanically, and, instead of firing them into
General Feraud's breast, he gave expression to the thoughts uppermost in
his mind, "You will fight no more duels now."
His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General
Feraud's stoicism. "Don't dawdle, then, damn you for a cold-blooded
staff-coxcomb!" he roared out, suddenly, out of an impassive face held
erect on a rigidly still body.
General D'Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was
observed with mixed feelings by the other general. "You missed me
twice," the victor said, coolly, shifting both pistols to one hand; "the
last time within a foot or so. By every rule of single combat your life
belongs to me. That does not mean that I want to take it now."
"I have no use for your forbearance," muttered General Feraud, gloomily.
"Allow me to point out that this is no concern of mine," said General
D'Hubert, whose every word was dictated by a consummate delicacy of
feeling. In anger he could have killed that man, but in cold blood he
recoiled from humiliating by a show of generosity this unreasonable
being--a fellow-soldier of the Grande Armee, a companion in the wonders
and terrors of the great military epic. "You don't set up the pretension
of dictating to me what I am to do with what's my own."
General Feraud looked startled, and the other continued, "You've forced
me on a point of honour to keep my life at your disposal, as it were,
for fifteen years. Very well. Now that the matter is decided to my
advantage, I am going to do what I like with your life on the same
principle. You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I choose. Neither
more nor less. You are on your honour till I say the word."
"I am! But, sacrebleu! This is an absurd position for a General of the
Empire to be placed in!" cried General Feraud, in accents of profound
and dismayed conviction. "It amounts to sitting all the rest of my
life with a loaded pistol in a drawer waiting for your word. It's--it's
idiotic; I shall be an object of--of--derision."
"Absurd?--idiotic? Do you think so?" queried General D'Hubert with sly
gravity. "Perhaps. But I don't see how that can be helped. However, I
am not likely to talk at large of this adventure. Nobody need ever know
anything about it. Just as no one to this day, I believe, knows the
origin of our quarrel. . . . Not a word more," he added, hastily.
"I can't really discuss this question with a man who, as far as I am
concerned, does not exist."
When the two duellists came out into the open, General Feraud walking a
little behind, and rather with the air of walking in a trance, the two
seconds hurried towards them, each from his station at the edge of the
wood. General D'Hubert addressed them, speaking loud and distinctly,
"Messieurs, I make it a point of declaring to you solemnly, in the
presence of General Feraud, that our difference is at last settled for
good. You may inform all the world of that fact."
"A reconciliation, after all!" they exclaimed together.
"Reconciliation? Not that exactly. It is something much more binding. Is
it not so, General?"
General Feraud only lowered his head in sign of assent. The two veterans
looked at each other. Later in the day, when they found themselves alone
out of their moody friend's earshot, the cuirassier remarked suddenly,
"Generally speaking, I can see with my one eye as far as most people;
but this beats me. He won't say anything."
"In this affair of honour I understand there has been from first to last
always something that no one in the army could quite make out," declared
the chasseur with the imperfect nose. "In mystery it began, in mystery
it went on, in mystery it is to end, apparently."
General D'Hubert walked home with long, hasty strides, by no means
uplifted by a sense of triumph. He had conquered, yet it did not seem
to him that he had gained very much by his conquest. The night before
he had grudged the risk of his life which appeared to him magnificent,
worthy of preservation as an opportunity to win a girl's love. He had
known moments when, by a marvellous illusion, this love seemed to
be already his, and his threatened life a still more magnificent
opportunity of devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost
its special magnificence. It had acquired instead a specially alarming
aspect as a snare for the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous
illusion of conquered love that had visited him for a moment in the
agitated watches of the night, which might have been his last on earth,
he comprehended now its true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of
delirious conceit. Thus to this man, sobered by the victorious issue
of a duel, life appeared robbed of its charm, simply because it was no
longer menaced.
Approaching the house from the back, through the orchard and the kitchen
garden, he could not notice the agitation which reigned in front. He
never met a single soul. Only while walking softly along the corridor,
he became aware that the house was awake and more noisy than usual.
Names of servants were being called out down below in a confused noise
of coming and going. With some concern he noticed that the door of his
own room stood ajar, though the shutters had not been opened yet. He
had hoped that his early excursion would have passed unperceived. He
expected to find some servant just gone in; but the sunshine filtering
through the usual cracks enabled him to see lying on the low divan
something bulky, which had the appearance of two women clasped in each
other's arms. Tearful and desolate murmurs issued mysteriously from that
appearance. General D'Hubert pulled open the nearest pair of shutters
violently. One of the women then jumped up. It was his sister. She stood
for a moment with her hair hanging down and her arms raised straight up
above her head, and then flung herself with a stifled cry into his arms.
He returned her embrace, trying at the same time to disengage himself
from it. The other woman had not risen. She seemed, on the contrary, to
cling closer to the divan, hiding her face in the cushions. Her hair was
also loose; it was admirably fair. General D'Hubert recognized it with
staggering emotion. Mademoiselle de Valmassigue! Adele! In distress!
He became greatly alarmed, and got rid of his sister's hug definitely.
Madame Leonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir,
pointing dramatically at the divan. "This poor, terrified child has
rushed here from home, on foot, two miles--running all the way."
"What on earth has happened?" asked General D'Hubert in a low, agitated
voice.
But Madame Leonie was speaking loudly. "She rang the great bell at
the gate and roused all the household--we were all asleep yet. You may
imagine what a terrible shock. . . . Adele, my dear child, sit up."
General D'Hubert's expression was not that of a man who "imagines" with
facility. He did, however, fish out of the chaos of surmises the notion
that his prospective mother-in-law had died suddenly, but only to
dismiss it at once. He could not conceive the nature of the event or the
catastrophe which would induce Mademoiselle de Valmassigue, living in a
house full of servants, to bring the news over the fields herself, two
miles, running all the way.
"But why are you in this room?" he whispered, full of awe.
"Of course, I ran up to see, and this child . . . I did not notice it
. . . she followed me. It's that absurd Chevalier," went on Madame
Leonie, looking towards the divan. . . . "Her hair is all come down. You
may imagine she did not stop to call her maid to dress it before she
started. . . Adele, my dear, sit up. . . . He blurted it all out to her
at half-past five in the morning. She woke up early and opened her
shutters to breathe the fresh air, and saw him sitting collapsed on a
garden bench at the end of the great alley. At that hour--you may
imagine! And the evening before he had declared himself indisposed. She
hurried on some clothes and flew down to him. One would be anxious for
less. He loves her, but not very intelligently. He had been up all
night, fully dressed, the poor old man, perfectly exhausted. He wasn't
in a state to invent a plausible story. . . . What a confidant you chose
there! My husband was furious. He said, 'We can't interfere now.' So we
sat down to wait. It was awful. And this poor child running with her
hair loose over here publicly! She has been seen by some people in the
fields. She has roused the whole household, too. It's awkward for her.
Luckily you are to be married next week. . . . Adele, sit up. He has
come home on his own legs. . . . We expected to see you coming on a
stretcher, perhaps--what do I know? Go and see if the carriage is ready.
I must take this child home at once. It isn't proper for her to stay
here a minute longer."
General D'Hubert did not move. It was as though he had heard nothing.
Madame Leonie changed her mind. "I will go and see myself," she cried.
"I want also my cloak.--Adele--" she began, but did not add "sit up."
She went out saying, in a very loud and cheerful tone: "I leave the door
open."
General D'Hubert made a movement towards the divan, but then Adele
sat up, and that checked him dead. He thought, "I haven't washed this
morning. I must look like an old tramp. There's earth on the back of my
coat and pine-needles in my hair." It occurred to him that the situation
required a good deal of circumspection on his part.
"I am greatly concerned, mademoiselle," he began, vaguely, and abandoned
that line. She was sitting up on the divan with her cheeks
unusually pink and her hair, brilliantly fair, falling all over her
shoulders--which was a very novel sight to the general. He walked away
up the room, and looking out of the window for safety said, "I fear you
must think I behaved like a madman," in accents of sincere despair. Then
he spun round, and noticed that she had followed him with her eyes. They
were not cast down on meeting his glance. And the expression of her face
was novel to him also. It was, one might have said, reversed. Those eyes
looked at him with grave thoughtfulness, while the exquisite lines of
her mouth seemed to suggest a restrained smile. This change made her
transcendental beauty much less mysterious, much more accessible to a
man's comprehension. An amazing ease of mind came to the general--and
even some ease of manner. He walked down the room with as much
pleasurable excitement as he would have found in walking up to a battery
vomiting death, fire, and smoke; then stood looking down with smiling
eyes at the girl whose marriage with him (next week) had been so
carefully arranged by the wise, the good, the admirable Leonie.
"Ah! mademoiselle," he said, in a tone of courtly regret, "if only I
could be certain that you did not come here this morning, two miles,
running all the way, merely from affection for your mother!"
He waited for an answer imperturbable but inwardly elated. It came in a
demure murmur, eyelashes lowered with fascinating effect. "You must not
be mechant as well as mad."
And then General D'Hubert made an aggressive movement towards the divan
which nothing could check. That piece of furniture was not exactly in
the line of the open door. But Madame Leonie, coming back wrapped up in
a light cloak and carrying a lace shawl on her arm for Adele to hide her
incriminating hair under, had a swift impression of her brother getting
up from his knees.
"Come along, my dear child," she cried from the doorway.
The general, now himself again in the fullest sense, showed the
readiness of a resourceful cavalry officer and the peremptoriness of a
leader of men. "You don't expect her to walk to the carriage," he said,
indignantly. "She isn't fit. I shall carry her downstairs."
This he did slowly, followed by his awed and respectful sister; but he
rushed back like a whirlwind to wash off all the signs of the night of
anguish and the morning of war, and to put on the festive garments of a
conqueror before hurrying over to the other house. Had it not been for
that, General D 'Hubert felt capable of mounting a horse and pursuing
his late adversary in order simply to embrace him from excess of
happiness. "I owe it all to this stupid brute," he thought. "He has made
plain in a morning what might have taken me years to find out--for I
am a timid fool. No self-confidence whatever. Perfect coward. And the
Chevalier! Delightful old man!" General D'Hubert longed to embrace him
also.
The Chevalier was in bed. For several days he was very unwell. The men
of the Empire and the post-revolution young ladies were too much for
him. He got up the day before the wedding, and, being curious by nature,
took his niece aside for a quiet talk. He advised her to find out from
her husband the true story of the affair of honour, whose claim, so
imperative and so persistent, had led her to within an ace of tragedy.
"It is right that his wife should be told. And next month or so will be
your time to learn from him anything you want to know, my dear child."
Later on, when the married couple came on a visit to the mother of the
bride, Madame la Generale D'Hubert communicated to her beloved old uncle
the true story she had obtained without any difficulty from her husband.
The Chevalier listened with deep attention to the end, took a pinch
of snuff, flicked the grains of tobacco from the frilled front of his
shirt, and asked, calmly, "And that's all it was?"
"Yes, uncle," replied Madame la Generale, opening her pretty eyes very
wide. "Isn't it funny? C'est insense--to think what men are capable of!"
"H'm!" commented the old emigre. "It depends what sort of men. That
Bonaparte's soldiers were savages. It is insense. As a wife, my dear,
you must believe implicitly what your husband says."
But to Leonie's husband the Chevalier confided his true opinion.
"If that's the tale the fellow made up for his wife, and during the
honeymoon, too, you may depend on it that no one will ever know now the
secret of this affair."
Considerably later still, General D'Hubert judged the time come, and the
opportunity propitious to write a letter to General Feraud. This letter
began by disclaiming all animosity. "I've never," wrote the General
Baron D'Hubert, "wished for your death during all the time of our
deplorable quarrel. Allow me," he continued, "to give you back in
all form your forfeited life. It is proper that we two, who have been
partners in so much military glory, should be friendly to each other
publicly."
The same letter contained also an item of domestic information. It was
in reference to this last that General Feraud answered from a little
village on the banks of the Garonne, in the following words:
"If one of your boy's names had been Napoleon--or Joseph--or even
Joachim, I could congratulate you on the event with a better heart. As
you have thought proper to give him the names of Charles Henri Armand,
I am confirmed in my conviction that you never loved the Emperor. The
thought of that sublime hero chained to a rock in the middle of a savage
ocean makes life of so little value that I would receive with positive
joy your instructions to blow my brains out. From suicide I consider
myself in honour debarred. But I keep a loaded pistol in my drawer."
Madame la Generale D'Hubert lifted up her hands in despair after
perusing that answer.
"You see? He won't be reconciled," said her husband. "He must never, by
any chance, be allowed to guess where the money comes from. It wouldn't
do. He couldn't bear it."
"You are a brave homme, Armand," said Madame la Generale, appreciatively.
"My dear, I had the right to blow his brains out; but as I didn't,
we can't let him starve. He has lost his pension and he is utterly
incapable of doing anything in the world for himself. We must take
care of him, secretly, to the end of his days. Don't I owe him the
most ecstatic moment of my life? . . . Ha! ha! ha! Over the fields, two
miles, running all the way! I couldn't believe my ears! . . . But for
his stupid ferocity, it would have taken me years to find you out. It's
extraordinary how in one way or another this man has managed to fasten
himself on my deeper feelings."