After this sound nothing troubled the silence for a long time, till the Chevalier asked, without animation: “What is he — this Feraud?”
“Lieutenant of hussars, too — I mean, he’s a general. A Gascon. Son of a blacksmith, I believe.”
“There! I thought so. That Bonaparte had a special predilection for the canaille. I don’t mean this for you, D’Hubert. You are one of us, though you have served this usurper, who …”
“Let’s leave him out of this,” broke in General D’Hu-bert.
The Chevalier shrugged his peaked shoulders. “Fe-raud of sorts. Offspring of a blacksmith and some village troll. See what comes of mixing yourself up with that sort of people.”
“You have made shoes yourself, Chevalier.”
“Yes. But I am not the son of a shoemaker. Neither are you, Monsieur D’Hubert. You and I have something that your Bonaparte’s princes, dukes, and marshals have not, because there’s no power on earth that could give it to them,” retorted the emigre, with the rising animation of a man who has got hold of a hopeful argument. “Those people don’t exist — all these Ferauds. Feraud! What is Feraud? A va-nu-pieds disguised into a general by a Corsican adventurer mas-querading as an emperor. There is no earthly reason for a D’Hubert to s’encanailler by a duel with a person of that sort. You can make your excuses to him perfectly well. And if the manant takes into his head to decline them, you may simply refuse to meet him.”
“You say I may do that?”
“I do. With the clearest conscience.”
“Monsieur le Chevalier! To what do you think you have returned from your emigration?”
This was said in such a startling tone that the old man raised sharply his bowed head, glimmering silvery white under the points of the little tricorne. For a time he made no sound.
“God knows!” he said at last, pointing with a slow and grave gesture at a tall roadside cross mounted on a block of stone, and stretching its arms of forged iron all black against the darkening red band in the sky — “God knows! If it were not for this emblem, which I remember seeing on this spot as a child, I would wonder to what we who remained faithful to God and our king have returned. The very voices of the people have changed.”
“Yes, it is a changed France,” said General D’Hu-bert. He seemed to have regained his calm. His tone was slightly ironic. “Therefore I cannot take your advice. Besides, how is one to refuse to be bitten by a dog that means to bite? It’s impracticable. Take my word for it — Feraud isn’t a man to be stayed by apologies or refusals. But there are other ways. I could, for instance, send a messenger with a word to the brigadier of the gendarmerie in Senlac. He and his two friends are liable to arrest on my simple order. It would make some talk in the army, both the organized and the disbanded — especially the disbanded. All canaille! All once upon a time the companions in arms of Armand D’Hubert. But what need a D’Hu-bert care what people that don’t exist may think? Or, better still, I might get my brother-in-law to send for the mayor of the village and give him a hint. No more would be needed to get the three ‘brigands’ set upon with flails and pitchforks and hunted into some nice, deep, wet ditch — and nobody the wiser! It has been done only ten miles from here to three poor devils of the disbanded Red Lancers of the Guard going to their homes. What says your conscience, Chevalier? Can a D’Hubert do that thing to three men who do not exist?”
A few stars had come out on the blue obscurity, clear as crystal, of the sky. The dry, thin voice of the Chevalier spoke harshly: “Why are you telling me all this?”
The General seized the withered old hand with a strong grip. “Because I owe you my fullest confidence. Who could tell Adele but you? You understand why I dare not trust my brother-in-law nor yet my own sister. Chevalier! I have been so near doing these things that I tremble yet. You don’t know how terrible this duel appears to me. And there’s no escape from it.”
He murmured after a pause, “It’s a fatality,” dropped the Chevalier’s passive hand, and said in his ordinary conversational voice, “I shall have to go without seconds. If it is my lot to remain on the ground, you at least will know all that can be made known of this affair.”
The shadowy ghost of the ancien regime seemed to have become more bowed during the conversation. “How am I to keep an indifferent face this evening before these two women?” he groaned. “General! I find it very difficult to forgive you.”
General D ‘Hubert made no answer.
“Is your cause good, at least?”
“I am innocent.”
This time he seized the Chevalier’s ghostly arm above the elbow, and gave it a mighty squeeze. “I must kill him!” he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the road.
The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the General perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest. He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open his lips he would break out into horrible and aimless imprecations, start breaking furniture, smashing china and glass. From the moment he opened the private door and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of a winding staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated madman with blood-shot eyes and a foaming mouth played inconceivable havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed dining-room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over, and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs of the chairs while crossing the room to reach a low and broad divan on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still greater. That brutality of feeling which he had known only when charging the enemy, sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognize in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. But in his mental and bodily exhaustion this passion got cleared, distilled, refined into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
That night, General D’Hubert stretched out on his back with his hands over his eyes, or lying on his breast with his face buried in a cushion, made the full pil-grimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at the absurdity of the situation, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his existence, and mistrust of his best sentiments (for what the devil did he want to go to Fouche for?) — he knew them all in turn. “I am an idiot, neither more nor less,” he thought — “A sensitive idiot. Because I overheard two men talking in a cafe… . I am an idiot afraid of lies — whereas in life it is only truth that matters.”
Several times he got up and, walking in his socks in order not to be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry somebody else. His
