V
When Gilles de Crohin, Sire de Froidmont, once more recovered consciousness, it was broad daylight. The slanting rays of a genial, wintry sun had struck him full in the face, and incidentally had been infusing some warmth into his numbed body. He opened his eyes and tried to visualize his position. It took him some time. He still felt very giddy and very sick, and when he tried to move he ached in every limb. But he was not cold, and his temples did not throb with fever. As he groped about with his right hand, he encountered firstly the folds of a thick woollen cloak which had been carefully wrapped around him, and then, at a foot or so away, a pitcher and a hunk of something which to the touch appeared very like bread.
Messire Gilles paused after these preliminary investigations, closed his eyes and thought things out. He had been dreaming, of that there was no doubt, but he would be hanged, drawn and quartered if he knew whence had come the pleasing reality of a cloak, a pitcher and a hunk of bread.
It was some time after that, and when the sun was already high in the heavens, that he managed to sit up, feeling the pangs of hunger and of thirst intensified by the vicinity of that delectable bread. The pitcher contained fresh, creamy milk, which Messire Gilles drank eagerly. Somehow the coolness of it, its sweetness and its fragrance made his dream appear more vivid to him. The bread was white and tasted uncommonly good. After he had eaten and drunk he was able to look about him.
As far as he could recollect anything, he was lying very near the spot where he had fallen the day before—or the day before that, or a week, or a month ago—Messire Gilles was not at all clear on the point. But here he was, at any rate, and there were all the landmarks which he had noted at the time, when first his troop was attacked by the Spaniards. There was the clump of leafless shrubs, trampled now into the mud by thousands of scurrying feet; there was the group of broken trees, stretching gaunt arms up to the skies, and beyond them the little white house with the roof all broken in—a miserable derelict in the midst of the desolation.
He, Gilles, had been propped up against a broken tree-trunk which lay prone upon the ground. Underneath him there was a thick horse-blanket, and over him the aforementioned warm cloak. His cut wrist had been skilfully bandaged, the wounds about his body had been dressed and covered with soft linen, and, hidden away under the trunk, behind where he was lying, there was another loaf of bread, another pitcher containing water, the limbs of a roasted capon and a pat of delicious-looking cream cheese.
The Benedictine monastery which, from the distant heights had dominated the field of battle, was on Gilles' right. All around him the valley appeared silent and deserted save by the dead who still lay forgotten and abandoned even by the human vultures who had picked them clean. There were no more dying on the field of Gembloux now. Here and there a clump of rough shrubs, a broken tree with skeleton arms stretched out toward the distance, as if in mute reproach for so much misery and such wanton devastation; here and there the crumbling ruins of a wayside habitation, roofless and forlorn, from which there still rose to the wintry firmament above, a thin column of smoke. From somewhere far away came the rippling murmur of the stream and through it the dismal sound of a dog howling in this wilderness, whilst overhead a flight of rooks sent their weird croaking through the humid air.
All other sounds were stilled—the clash of arms, the call of despair or of victory, the snorting of horses, the cries of rage and of triumph had all been merged in the mist-laden horizon far away. Was it indeed yesterday, or a cycle of years ago that Gilles de Crohin had lain just here, not far from this same fallen tree-trunk, a prey to the ghoulish body-snatchers who, by their very act of hideous vandalism, had brought him back to his senses?