He was very weak indeed; it seemed a miracle that, at the sounds below, he had found strength to drag himself from his bed and crawl inch by inch to the room of the secret panel to mount guard there; and no sooner had he soothed Miss Falconer than he collapsed in a sort of swoon. We laid him on the chest, and I fetched a pillow for his head and stripped off my coat and spread it over him. I took out my pocket-flask, too, and forced a few drops between his teeth. In short I tried to play the game.
When his eyes opened, however, my endurance had reached its limits. With a muttered excuse,—not that I flattered myself they wanted me to stay!—I left them and stumbled into the room of the squires, taking refuge in the grateful dark. I don’t know how long I sat there, elbows on knees, hands propping my head; but it was a ghastly vigil. In this round, unlike the battle in the hall, I had not been victor. Instead, I had taken the count.
I knew now, of course, that I was in love with Esme Falconer. Judging from the violence of the sensation, I must have loved her for quite a while. Probably it had begun that night in the St. Ives restaurant; for when before had I watched any girl with such special, ecstatic, almost proprietary rapture? Yes, that was why, ever since, I had been cutting such crazy capers. From first to last they were the natural thing, the prerogative of a man in my state of mind or heart.
Many threads of the affair still remained to be unraveled. I didn’t know what the duke was doing here, what he had been about for a month past, how the girl, far off in America, had guessed his whereabouts and his need; nor did I care. His mere existence was enough—that and Esme’s love for him. All my interest in my Chinese puzzle had come to a wretched end.
“Confound him!” I thought savagely. “We could have spared him perfectly. What business has he turning up at the eleventh hour? He didn’t cross the ocean with her. He didn’t suspect her unforgivably. He didn’t help her, and disguise himself as a chauffeur for her, and wing Schwartzmann, and bruise up the other chaps and send them rolling in a heap. This is my adventure. He must have had a hundred. Why couldn’t he stick to his high-flying and dazzling and let me alone?”
The murmur of voices drifted from the lord’s bedchamber. I could guess what they had to say to each other, Miss Falconer and her duke. The Firefly of France! Even I, a benighted foreigner, knew the things that title stood for: heroism, in a land where every soldier was a hero; praise and medals and glory; thirty conquered aeroplanes—a record over which his ancestors, those old marshals and constables lying effigied on their tombs of marble with their feet resting on carved lions, must nod their heads with pride.
“Mr. Bayne!”
It was Miss Falconer’s voice. I rose reluctantly and obeyed the summons. The Firefly was sitting propped on the chest, white, but steadier, while Esme still knelt beside him, holding his hand in hers.
“I have been telling Jean, Mr. Bayne, how you have helped us.” The radiance of her face, the lilt of her voice, stabbed me with a jealous pang. I wanted to see her happy, Heaven knew, but not quite in this manner. “And he wants to thank you for all that you have done.”
The Duke of Raincy-la-Tour spoke to me in English that was correct, but quaintly formal, of a decided charm.
“Monsieur,” he said, “I offer you my gratitude. And if you will touch the hand of one concerning whom, I fear, very evil things are believed—”
I forced a smile and a hearty pressure.
“I’ll risk it,” I assured him. “The chain of evidence against you seemed far-fetched to say the least. They pointed out accusingly that your father and your grandfather had been royalists, and that therefore—”
He made a gesture.
“May their souls find repose! Monsieur, it is true that they were. But if they lived to-day, my father and grandfather, they would not be traitors. They would wear, like me, the uniform of France.”
He smiled, and I knew once for all that I could never hate him; that mere envy and a shame of it were the worst that I could feel. Everything about him won me, his simplicity, his fine pride, his clearness of eye and voice, his look of a swift, polished sword blade. I had never seen a man like him. The Duchess of Raincy-la-Tour would be a lucky woman; so much was plain.
I found a seat on the window ledge, the girl remained kneeling by him, and he told us his story, always in that quaint, formal speech. As it went on it absorbed me. I even forgot those clasped hands for an occasional instant. In every detail, in every quiet sentence, there was some note that brought before me the Firefly’s achievements, the marauding airships he had climbed into the air to meet, the foes he had swooped from the blue to conquer, his darts into the land of his enemies where there was a price upon his head.
The story had to do with a night when he had left the French lines behind him. His commander had been quite frank. The mission meant his probable death. He was to wear a German uniform; to land inside the lines of the kaiser, to conceal his plane, if luck favored him, among the trees in the grounds of the old chateau of Ranceville; to get what knowledge and sketch what plans he could of defenses against which the French attacks had hitherto broken vainly, and to bring them home.
All had gone well at first. His gallant little plane had winged its way into the unknown like a darting swallow; he had landed safely; and after he had walked for hours with the Germans about him and death beside him, he had gained his spoils. It was as he rose for the return flight that the alarm was given. He got away; but he had five hostile aircraft after him. Could he hope to elude them and to land safely at the French lines?
It was in that hour, while the night lingered and the stars still shone and the cannon of the two armies challenged each other steadily, that the Firefly of France fought his greatest battle in the air. Since his whole aim was escape, it was bloodless; he had to trust to skill and cunning; he dared manoeuvers that appalled others, dropped plummet-like, looped dizzily, soared to the sheerest heights. He had been wounded. The framework of his plane was damaged. Still he gained on his foes and won through to the lines of France.
“But I might not land there,” he explained. “The Germans followed. A mist had closed about us, hiding us from my friends below. I heard only my propeller; and that, by now, sounded faint to me, for I was weakening; one shot had hit my shoulder and another had wounded my left arm.”
The girl swayed closer against him, watching him with eyes of worship. Well, I didn’t wonder, though it cut me to the heart. Even a fairy prince could have been no worthier of her than this Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier; of that at least, I told myself dourly, I must be glad.
“As I raced on,” said the duke, “there came a certain thought to me. We had traveled far; we were in the country near Prezelay, my cousin’s house. The village, I knew, was ruined, but the chateau stood; and if I could reach it, old Marie-Jeanne would help me. You comprehend, my weakness was growing. I knew I had little more time.”
The shrouding mist had aided him to lose those pursuing vultures. The last of them fell off, baffled,—or afraid to go deeper into France. Now he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the forest of La Fay.
And then, suddenly, he knew he must land if he were not to lose consciousness and hurtle down blindly; and with set teeth and sweat beading his forehead, he began the descent. At the end his strength failed him. The plane crashed among the trees. “But Saint Denis, who helps all Frenchmen, helped me,”—he smiled—“and I was thrown clear.”
From that thicket where his machine lay hidden it was a mile to Prezelay. He dragged himself over this distance, sometimes on his hands and knees. Soon after dawn Marie-Jeanne, answering a discordant ringing, found a man lying outside the gate and babbling deliriously, her master’s cousin, in a blood-soaked uniform, holding out a bundle of papers, and begging her by the soul of her mother to put them in the castle’s secret hiding-place.
She did it. Then she coaxed the wounded man to the rooms opening from the gallery and tended him day and night through the weeks of fever that ensued. From his ravings she learned that he was in danger and feared pursuers; and with the peasant’s instinct for caution, she had not dared to send for help.
“It was yesterday,” the duke told us, “that my mind came back. I knew then what must be thought of me, what must be said of me, all over France.” He was leaning on the wall now, exhausted and white, but dauntless. “No matter for that—I have the papers. You recall the hiding-place?”
He smiled as he asked the question, and Miss Falconer smiled back at him. Getting to her feet, she ran her fingers across the oak panel over his head, where for centuries a huntsman had been riding across a forest glade and blowing his horn. The bundle of his hunting-knife protruded just a little; and as the girl pressed it, the panel glided silently open, revealing a space, square and dark and cobwebby.
Something was lying there, a thin, wafer-like packet of papers, the papers for which the Firefly of France had shed his blood. She held them up in triumph. But the duke was still smiling faintly. He thrust one hand into his shirt and drew out a duplicate package, which he raised for us to see.
“Behold!” he said. “They are copies. All that I sketched that night near Ranceville, all that I wrote—I did not once, but twice. These I carried openly, to be found if I were captured. But those you hold went hidden in the sole of my boot, which was hollowed for them, so that if I were taken and then escaped, they might go too!”
I had read of such devices, I remembered vaguely. There was a story of a young French captain who had tried the trick in Champagne and succeeded with it, a rather famous exploit. Then I thought of something else. I got up slowly.
“You have two sets of papers?” I repeated.
“As you see, Monsieur.”
“Then I’ll take one of them,” said I.
Miss Falconer was looking at me in a puzzled fashion. As for the duke, his brows drew together; his figure straightened; the cool glint grew in his eyes.
“Monsieur,” he stated somewhat icily, “such things as these are not souvenirs. When they leave my possession they will go to the supreme command.”
“Certainly,” I agreed, unruffled. “That will do admirably for the first package; but about the second—no doubt Miss Falconer told you that we have German guests downstairs? Perhaps she forgot to mention the leader’s name, though. It is Franz von Blenheim. And I don’t care to have him break down the door and burst in on us, on her specially; I would rather, all things considered, interview him in the hall.”
The Firefly’s face had altered at the name of the secret agent; he was now regarding me with intentness, but without a frown. As for Miss Falconer, the trouble in her eyes was growing. I should have to be careful. Accordingly I summoned a debonair manner as I went on.
“If you’ll allow me,” I said, “I will take the papers down to him. He won’t know that they are copies; he will snatch at them, glad of the chance. And since he is in a hurry, he probably won’t stop to parley. He will simply be off at top speed, and leave us safe.
“Of course, that is the one unpleasant feature of the affair, his going.” At this point I glanced in a casual manner at the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour. “It seems a pity to let him walk off scot-free, to plan more trouble for France; but that is past praying for. I could hardly hope to stop him, except by a miracle. If there is one, I’ll be on hand.”
Would the duke guess the hope with which I was going downstairs, I wondered. I thought he did, for his eyes flashed slightly, and he stirred a little on the chest.
“Such a miracle, Monsieur,” he remarked, “would serve France greatly. As a good son of the Church, I will pray for it with all my heart!”
“I hope to come back,” I went on, “and rejoin you. But if I shouldn’t for any reason,”—with careful vagueness,—“you must stay here, barricaded, till they are gone. Then Miss Falconer can drive her car to the nearest town and bring back help for you. You see, it will be entirely simple, either way.”
The girl, very white now, took a swift step toward me.
“Simple?” she cried. “They will kill you! They hate you, Mr. Bayne, and they are four to one. You mustn’t go.”
But the duke’s hand was on her arm.
“My dear,” he said, “he has reason. This friend of yours, I perceive, is a gallant gentleman. Believe me, if I had strength to stand, he would not go alone.”
He held out the papers to me, and I took them. Then we clasped hands, the Firefly and I.
“Bonne chance, Monsieur,” he bade me with the pressure.
“Good luck and good-bye,” I answered. “Miss Falconer, will you come to the door?”
She took up the candle and came forward to light me, and we went in silence through the room of the squires and through the ante-chamber and into the room of the guards. She walked close beside me; her eyes shone wet; her lips trembled. There were things I would have given the world to say, but I suppressed them. To the very end, I had resolved, I would play fair. We were at the outer door.
“Good-by, Miss Falconer,” I said, halting. “You mustn’t worry; everything is going to turn out splendidly, I am sure. Only, now that we have the papers, it ends our little adventure, doesn’t it? So before I go I want to thank you for our day together. It has been wonderful. There never was another like it. I shall always be thankful for it, no matter what I have to pay.”
I stopped abruptly, realizing that this was not cricket. To make up, I put out my hand quite coolly; but she grasped it in both of hers and held it in a soft, warm clasp.
“I shall never forget,” she whispered. “Come back to us, Mr. Bayne!”
For a moment I looked at her in the light of the candle, at her lovely face, at the ruddy hair framing it, at the tears heavy on her lashes. Then I drew the bolt and went out and heard her fasten the door.
I stood in the gallery for an instant, indulging in a reconnoissance. The hall was now illuminated by an electric torch and three guttering candles; at the foot of the staircase lay the table which had done such yeoman’s service, split in two. As for the besiegers, they were gathered near the chimney-place in a worse-for-wear group, one nursing a nosebleed; another feeling gingerly of a loose tooth; Blenheim himself frankly raging, and decorated with a broad cut across his forehead and a cheek that was rapidly taking on assorted shades of blue, green, and black; and the redoubtable Mr. Schwartzmann, worst off of all, lying in a heap, groaning at intervals, but apparently quite unaware of what was going on.
My abrupt sally seemed transfixing. I might have been Medusa. I had a welcome minute in which to contemplate the victims of my prowess and to exult unchristianly in their scars. Then the tableau dissolved, the three men sprang up, and I took action. As I emerged I had drawn out a handkerchief and I now proceeded to raise and wave it.
“Well, Herr von Blenheim, I have come to parley with you,” I announced, “white flag and all.”
He tried to look as if he had expected me, though it was obvious that he hadn’t. To give verisimilitude to the pretense, he even pulled out his watch.
“I thought you would. You had just two minutes’ grace,” he commented, watching me narrowly. “Suppose you come down. You have brought the papers, I hope—for your own sake?”
“Oh, yes!” I assured him with all possible blandness. “I have brought them. What else was there to do? You had us in the palm of your hand. That door is old and worm-eaten; you could have crumpled it up like paper. When we thought the situation over we saw its hopelessness at once; so here I am.”
“That is sensible,” he agreed curtly, though I could see that he was puzzled. Casting a baffled glance beyond me, he scanned the gallery door. It by no means merited my description, being heavy, solid, almost immovable in aspect. “Well, let’s have the papers!” he said, with suspicion in his tone.
I descended in a deliberate manner, casting alert eyes about me, for, to use an expressive idiom, I was not doing this for my health. On the contrary I had two very definite purposes; the first, which I could probably compass, was to save Miss Falconer from further intercourse with Blenheim and to conceal the presence of the wounded, helpless Firefly from his enemies; the second, surprisingly modest, was to make the four Germans prisoners and hand them over in triumph to the gendarmes of the nearest town, Santierre.
I was perfectly aware of the absurdity of this ambition. I lacked the ghost of an idea of how to set about the thing. But the general craziness of events had unhinged me. I was forming the habit of trusting to pure luck andvogue la galere! I can’t swear that I hadn’t visions of conquering all my adversaries in some miraculous single-handed fashion, disarming them, and, as a final sweet touch of revenge, tying them up in chairs, to keep Marie-Jeanne company and meditate on the turns of fate.
“Here they are,” I said, obligingly offering the package. “We found them nestling behind a panel—old family hiding place, you know. I can’t vouch for their contents, not being an expert, but Miss Falconer was satisfied. How about it, now you look at them? Do they seem all right?”
Not paying the slightest attention to my conversational efforts, Blenheim had snatched the papers, torn them hungrily open, and run them through. He was bristling with suspicion; but he evidently knew his business. It did not take him long to conclude that he really had his spoils.
Folding them up carefully, he thrust them into his coat and stored them, displaying, however, less triumph than I had thought he would. The truth was that he looked preoccupied, and I wondered why. For the first time in all the hair-trigger situations that I had seen him face I sensed a strain in him.
“So much for that. Now, Mr. Bayne, what do you think we mean to do to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I am sure,” I answered rather absently; I was weighing the relative merits of jiu-jitsu and my five remaining revolver-shots. “Is there anything sufficiently lingering? Let me suggest boiling oil; or I understand that roasting over a slow fire is considered tasty. Either of those methods would appeal to you, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t deny it!” Blenheim answered in a tone that was convincing. “You haven’t endeared yourself to us, my friend, in the last hour. But we can’t spare you yet; our plans for the evening are lively ones and they include you. I told you, didn’t I, that we were going to no man’s-land via the trenches, when we finished this affair?”
“You told me many interesting things. I’ve forgotten some of the details.” I was aware of a thrill of excitement. The man was worried; so much was sure.
“You will recall them presently, or if you don’t, I’ll refresh your memory. The fact is, Mr. Bayne, you have put a pretty spoke in our wheel. It stands this way: our papers are made out for a party of four officers, and you have eliminated Schwartzmann. Don’t you owe us some amends for that? You like disguises, I gather from your costume. What do you say to putting on a new one, a pale-blue uniform, and seeing us through the lines?”
He looked, while uttering this wild pleasantry, about as humorous as King Attila. Could he possibly be in earnest? After all, perhaps he was! War rules were cast-iron things; if his pass called for four men, four he must have or rouse suspicion; and it was certain that Herr Schwartzmann would do no gadding to-night or for many nights to come. That shot of mine from the gallery had upset Blenheim’s plans very neatly. I stared at him, fascinated.
“Well?” said he. “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I exclaimed indignantly, “that this is too much! It is, really. I was getting hardened; I could stand a mere impossibility or two and not blink; but this! It is beyond the bounds. I shall begin to see green snakes presently or writhing sea-serpents—”
“No,” Blenheim cut me short savagely, “you are underestimating. Unless you oblige us what you will see is the hereafter, Mr. Bayne!”
Yes, he meant it. His very fierceness, eloquent of frazzled nerves, was proof conclusive. With another thrill, triumphant this time, I recognized my chance. His campaign, instead of going according to specifications, had been interfered with; his position was dangerous; he had no time to lose; for all he knew, at any point along the road his masquerade might have been suspected, the authorities notified, vengeance put on his track. In desperation he meant to risk my denouncing him, use me till he reached the Front trenches and his friends there, and then, no doubt, get rid of me. What he couldn’t guess was that I would have turned the earth upside down to make this opportunity that he was offering me on a silver tray.
“Oh, I’ll oblige you,” I assured him with what must have seemed insane cheerfulness. “I’ll oblige you, Her von Blenheim, with all the pleasure in the world. If you really want me, that is. If my presence won’t make you nervous. Aren’t you afraid, for instance, that I might be tempted to share my knowledge of your name and your profession with the first French soldiers we meet?”
“As to that, we will take our chances.” Blenheim’s face was adamant, though my suggestion had produced a not entirely enlivening effect on his two friends. “You see, Mr. Bayne, in this business the risks will be mostly yours. There will be no flights of stairs to dart up and no tables to over turn and no candles to extinguish; you will sit in the tonneau with a man beside you, a very watchful man, and a pistol against your side. You don’t want to die, do you? I thought not, since you surrendered those papers. Well, then, you’ll be wise not to say a word or stir a muscle. And now we are in a hurry. Will you make your toilet, please?”
It was the bizarre curtain scene of what I had called an extravaganza. Blenheim’s confederates, taking no special pains for gentleness, stripped off the outer garments of the prostrate Schwartzmann, who moaned and groaned throughout the process, though he never opened his eyes. Blenheim urged haste upon us; he was getting more fidgety every instant; he bit his lip, drummed with his fingers, kept an ear cocked, as if expecting to hear pursuers at the door. Still, he neglected no precautions. He demanded my revolver. I surrendered it amiably, and then doffed my chauffeur’s outfit and took, from a social standpoint, a gratifying step upward, donning one by one the insignia of France.
The fit was not perfect by any means. Schwartzmann was a giant, a mountain. My feet swished aloud groggily in his burnished putties; his garments hung round me in ample, rather than graceful, folds. However, the loose cape of horizon blue resembled charity in covering defects. As a dummy, sitting motionless in the rear of the automobile, my captors felt that I would pass.
By this time I was enchanted with the plans I was concocting. I might look like an opera-bouffe hero,—no doubt I did,—but my hour would come. Meanwhile events were marching. My transformation being complete, Blenheim gave a curt order in German, the candles were blown out, and lighted only by the torch, we turned toward the door. There was an inarticulate cry from Schwartzmann, just conscious enough, poor beggar, to grasp the fact of his abandonment in the strategic retreat his friends were beating. Then we were out in the courtyard, beneath the stars.
Down the hill, sheltered behind the stones of a ruined house, the gray car was waiting, and Blenheim climbed into the driver’s seat, meanwhile giving brief directions. There was no noise, no flurry; the affair, I must say, went with an efficiency in keeping with the proudest Prussian traditions. I was installed in the tonneau, and I was hardly seated before the motor hummed into life, and we jolted into the moonlit road.
For perhaps the hundredth time I asked myself if I was dreaming; if this person in a French disguise, speeding through the night with a blue-clad German beside him,—a German suffering, by the way, from a headache, the last stages of a nosebleed, and a pronounced dislike for me as the agency responsible for his ailments,—was really Devereux Bayne. But the air was cold on my face; a revolver pressed my side; I saw three set, hard profiles. It was not a dream; it was a dash for safety. And it was engineered by anxious, desperate men.
Blenheim, hunched over the steering wheel, had settled to his business. Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him; he took startling chances on his curves and turns. Still, he knew the country, it seemed. We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood roads. Sometimes we skirted the river, which shone silver in the moonlight, lined with rushes. Again, we could see nothing but a roof of trees overhead.
We emerged into a wider road, and I became award of various noises; a booming, clear and regular; the sound of voices; the rumbling of many wheels. We must be nearing the Front; we were rejoining the main highroad. My guess was proved correct at the next turning, where a sentry barred our path.
The sight of his honest French face was like a tonic to me. In some welcome way it seemed to hearten me for my task. The pistol of my friend in the tonneau bored through his cape into my side; I sat very quiet. If I did this four, five, perhaps six times, they might think me cowed and relax their vigilance. Their suspicions would be lulled by my tractability and their contempt. Then my hour would strike.
Satisfied with the safe-conducts, the sentry gestured us forward, and his figure slipped out of my vision as the gray car purred on. The man beside me chuckled.
“Behold this Yankee! He is as good as gold, my captain. He sits like a mouse,” he announced in his own tongue.
“He’ll be wise,” Blenheim announced, “to go on doing so.” The threat was in English for my benefit and came from between his teeth.
In front of us the noise was growing. With our next turn we entered the highroad, taking our place in a long rumbling line of ambulances and supply-carts and laboring camions, or trucks. We glimpsed faces, heard voices all about us. The change from solitude to this unbroken procession was bewildering. But we did not long remain a part of it; we turned again into narrower lanes.
The control was growing stricter. Four separate times we were halted, and always I sat hunched in my corner as impassive as a stone. The more deeply we penetrated toward the Front, the more uneasy grew my companions. Each time that a sentry halted us they waited in more anxiety for his verdict. The man beside me, it was true, still menaced me with his pistol point; but the gesture had grown perfunctory. He did not think I would attempt anything. He believed now that I was afraid.
Our road crossed a hilltop, and I saw beneath us a valley, streaked at intervals with blinding signal-flashes of red and green. In my ears the thunder of the guns was growing steadily. When we were stopped again, the sentry warned us. The road we were traveling, he said, had been intermittently under fire for two days.
It looked, indeed, as if devils had used it for a playground; the trees were mere blackened stumps; the fields on each side stretched burnt and bare. And then came the climax: something passed us,—high above our heads, I fancy, though its frightful winds seemed brushing us,—a ghost of the night, an aerial demon, a shrieking thing that made the man beside me cringe and shudder. It was new to me, but I could not mistake it. It was what the French call anobus, a word that in some subtle manner seems more menacing and dreadful than our own term of shell.
As we sped on I leaned against the cushions, outwardly quiet. Inwardly, I was gathering myself together for my attempt. I had not thought I would first approach the Front this way; but it was a good way, I had a good object. At the next stop, whatever it was, I meant to make the venture. I did not doubt I should succeed in it. But I could not hope to keep my life.
Anotherobushurtled over us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My guardian’s gray head rose before me. My heart tightened. The finest, straightest old chap who ever took a forlorn little tike in out of the wet, and petted him, and frolicked with him, and filled his stocking all the year round, and made his holidays things of rapture, and taught him how to ride and shoot and fish and swim and cut his losses and do pretty much everything that makes life worth living—that was Dunny.
“This will be a hard jolt for the old chap,” I thought, “but he’ll say that I played the game.”
And Esme Falconer, my own brave, lovely Esme! “She has come down the staircase now,” I told myself. “She has untied Marie-Jeanne. She has gone out and started the car.” What would she think of my disappearance? Well, she wouldn’t misjudge me, I felt sure; and neither would Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier. He would know that I was acting as, in my place, he would have acted, that I didn’t mean to let Franz von Blenheim defy France and go off untouched.
The whole world seemed mysteriously to have narrowed to one girl, Esme. How I had lived before I saw her; how, having seen her, I could ever have lived without her,—I didn’t know. But the sound of grinding brakes roused me. We were slowing up in obedience to a signal from a canvas-covered, half-demolished shelter filled with men in blue uniforms; we were coming to a standstill. Blenheim leaned out, and for a moment I saw his face in the beam of light from the sentry’s lantern. It looked thin and set. He was giving beneath the strain.
“Behold my comrade!” He thrust our papers into the hands of the sentry. “And make haste, for the love of heaven! We are waited forla-bas.”
I cast a quick glance at my body-guard, whose anxious eyes were on the sentinel. His pistol still lay against my side, but his thoughts were far away. It was the moment. With the rapidity of lightning I knocked his arm up, caught his wrist, and clung to it, calling out simultaneously in a voice of crisp command.
“My friends,” I cried in French, “I order you to arrest these persons! They are agents of the kaiser! They are German spies!”
The pistol, clutched between us, exploded harmlessly into the air. I head shouts, saw men running toward us. Then I caught sight of Blenheim’s face, dark and oddly contorted; he had turned and was leveling his revolver at me, resting one knee on the driver’s seat as he took deliberate aim.
“I say,” I cried again, struggling for the weapon, “that this is Franz von Blenheim, that these are men of the kaiser, spying, in disguise—”
It seemed to me that some one caught Blenheim’s arm from behind just as he fired; but I was not certain. For suddenly that same whistling shriek sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm. Blackness enveloped me, and I dropped into a bottomless pit.
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 theRochambeau. 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 thatobusknocked 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.