“Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country there was no one I could trust 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 we will go into the wood 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 an air of 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 five 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 wide, 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 Provençal 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 his adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile nightmare. “It's no use wounding that brute,” he thought. He was known as a resourceful officer. His comrades, years ago, used 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.
And now General Feraud, with one shot expended, was getting cautious. Peeping round his sheltering tree, General D'Hubert could not see him at all. This ignorance of his adversary's whereabouts carried with it a sense of insecurity. General D'Hubert felt himself exposed on his flanks 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.
He sank down to the ground wishing to take advantage of the greater thickness of the trunk. Extended at full length, head on to his enemy, he kept 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 low 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, with that insight into the mind of his antagonist which is of such great help in winning battles. It confirmed him in his tactics of immobility. “Ah! if I only could watch my rear as well as my front!” he thought, longing for the impossible.
It required some fortitude to lay his pistols down. But on a sudden impulse General D'Hubert did this very gently—one on each side. He had been always 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 been always 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 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 raised a little, holding the looking-glass in one hand just clear of his tree, he squinted into it with one eye while the other 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 there,” he said to himself exultingly, “I am bound to see his legs. And 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 realise that his own feet and a portion of his legs were now in plain and startling view of General Feraud.
General Feraud had been getting gradually impressed by the amazing closeness with which his enemy had been 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 sight as much as the tip of an ear. As he had been looking for it at the level of about five feet ten inches 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 with his hand. The other was lying on the ground—on the ground! Perfectly still, too! Exposed! What did it mean?... The notion that he had knocked his adversary over at the first shot then entered 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 said to himself. “He was exposeden plein—the fool—for quite a couple of seconds.”
And the general gazed at the motionless limbs, the last vestiges of surprise fading before an unbounded admiration of his skill.
“Turned up his toes! By the god of war that was a shot!” he continued mentally. “Got it through the head 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 sinister evidence at General Feraud. He could not possibly imagine 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 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, stepping out from behind his tree. This was immediately perceived by the resourceful General D'Hubert. He concluded it to be another shift. 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 where the other had dodged to, was come upon so suddenly that the first warning he had of his 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 instinctively, leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of most people (unless totally paralysed by discomfiture) would have been to stoop—exposing themselves 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. Years ago, 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 afterward restated, defended, developed in many discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain, became a part of his mental individuality. And whether it had gone so inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply because, as he himself declared, 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 a pistol shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud, who, 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 which had fallen on General D'Hubert's senses.
“Yes, missed—about portant” he heard himself saying exultingly 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 that 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 his teeth, and his face assumed an irate, undaunted expression.
“Go on,” he growled.
These would have been his last words on earth if General D'Hubert had been holding the pistols in his hand. But the pistols were lying on the ground at the foot of a tall pine. General D'Hubert had the second's 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! Miserably defeated-crushed—done for!
He picked up the weapons mechanically, and instead of firing them into General Feraud's breast, gave expression to the thought uppermost in his mind.
“You will fight no more duels now.”
166.jpg '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 coldblooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared out suddenly out of an impassive face held erect on a rigid body.
General D'Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was observed with a sort of gloomy astonishment by the other general.
“You missed me twice,” he began 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 savagely.
“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 this unreasonable being—a fellow soldier of the Grand Armée, his companion in the wonders and terrors of the military epic. “You don't set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do with what is 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.”
“I am! Butsacrebleu!This is an absurd position for a general of the empire to be placed in,” cried General Feraud, in the accents of profound and dismayed conviction. “It means for me to be 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 argumentatively 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 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 or even a little farther than 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, and 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, but it did not seem to him 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 even moments when by a marvellous illusion this love seemed to him already his and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost it special magnificence. It wore 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 much of its charm simply because it was no longer menaced.
Approaching the house from the back through the orchard and the kitchen gardens, he could not notice the agitation which reigned in front. He never met a single soul. Only upstairs, while walking softly along the corridor, he became aware that the house was awake and much more noisy than usual. Names of servants were being called out down below in a confused noise of coming and going. He noticed with some concern 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 consolatory 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 recognised it with staggering emotion. Mlle. de Valmassigue! Adèle! In distress!
He became greatly alarmed and got rid of his sister's hug definitely. Madame Léonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir, pointing dramatically at the divan:
“This poor terrified child has rushed here two miles from home on foot—running all the way.”
“What on earth has happened?” asked General D'Hubert in a low, agitated voice. But Madame Léonie 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.... Adèle, 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 chaos 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, of the catastrophe which could induce Mlle, 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 Léonie, looking towards the divan.... “Her hair's come down. You may imagine she did not stop to call her maid to dress it before she started.... Adèle, my dear, sit up.... He blurted it all out to her at half-past four 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 just 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 over here publicly with her hair loose. She has been seen by people in the fields. She has roused the whole household, too. It's awkward for her. Luckily you are to be married next week.... Adèle, sit up. He has come home on his own legs, thank God.... We expected you to come back on a stretcher perhaps—what do I know? Go and see if the carriage is ready. I must take this child to her mother 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 Léonie changed her mind.
“I will go and see to it myself,” she said. “I want also to get my cloak... Adèle...” she began, but did not say “sit up.” She went out saying in a loud, cheerful tone: “I leave the door open.”
General D'Hubert made a movement towards the divan, but then Adèle 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 timidly, 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. Her 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 Léonie.
“Ah, mademoiselle,” he said in a tone of courtly deference. “If I could be certain that you did not come here this morning only from a sense of duty to your mother!”
He waited for an answer, imperturbable but inwardly elated. It came in a demure murmur, eyelashes lowered with fascinating effect.
“You mustn't beméchantas well as mad.”
And then General D'Hubert made an aggressive movement towards the divan which nothing could check. This piece of furniture was not exactly in the line of the open door. But Madame Léonie, coming back wrapped up in a light cloak and carrying a lace shawl on her arm for Adèle to hide her incriminating hair under, had a vague 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 protested. “She isn't fit. I will carry her downstairs.”
This he did slowly, followed by his awed and respectful sister. But he rushed back like a whirlwind to wash away 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 this piece of luck to that stupid brute,” he thought. “This duel has made plain in one 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! Dear old man!” General D'Hubert longed to embrace him, too.
The Chevalier was in bed. For several days he was much indisposed. 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 very proper that his wife should know. And next month or so will be your time to learn from him anything you ought to know, my dear child.”
Later on when the married couple came on a visit to the mother of the bride, Madame la Générale D'Hubert made no difficulty in communicating to her beloved old uncle what she had learned without any difficulty from her husband. The Chevalier listened with profound attention to the end, then took a pinch of snuff, shook the grains of tobacco off the frilled front of his shirt, and said calmly: “And that's all what it was.”
“Yes, uncle,” said Madame la Générale, opening her pretty eyes very wide. “Isn't it funny?C'est insensé—to think what men are capable of.”
“H'm,” commented the oldémigré. “It depends what sort of men. That Bonaparte's soldiers were savages. As a wife, my dear, it is proper for you to believe implicitly what your husband says.”
But to Léonie'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 no one will ever know the secret of this affair.”
Considerably later still, General D'Hubert judged the time come, and the opportunity propitious to write a conciliatory letter to General Feraud. “I have never,” protested the General Baron D'Hubert, “wished for your death during all the time of our deplorable quarrel. Allow me to give you back in all form your forfeited life. 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 alluding to this last that General Feraud answered from a little village on the banks of the Garonne:
“If one of your boy's names had been Napoleon, or Joseph, or even Joachim, I could congratulate you with a better heart. As you have thought proper to name him 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 Générale D'Hubert lifted up her hands in horror after perusing that letter.
“You see? He won't be reconciled,” said her husband. “We must take care that he never, by any chance, learns where the money he lives on comes from. It would be simply appalling.”
“You are abrave homme, Armand,” said Madame la Générale appreciatively.
“My dear, I had the right to blow his brains out—strictly speaking. But as I did not we can't let him starve. He has been deprived of his pension for 'breach of military discipline' when he broke bounds to fight his last duel with me. He's crippled with rheumatism. We are bound to take care of him to the end of his days. And, after all, I am indebted to him for the radiant discovery that you loved me a little—you sly person. Ha! Ha! Two miles, running all the way!... It is extraordinary how all through this affair that man has managed to engage my deeper feelings.”
THE END