The Truants

by A. E. W. Mason

"I have seen the doctor this morning," said the colonel, "and he has given up hope. Barbier will hardly live out the night. They should never have sent him to us here. They should not have discharged him from the asylum as cured."

The idea of persecution had become fixed in Barbier's brain. It had never left him since the evening when he first gave utterance to it in the desert. The homeward march, indeed, had aggravated his mania. On his return he had been sent to the asylum at Bel-Abbès, but there he had developed cunning enough to conceal his hallucination. He had ceased to complain that his officers were in a conspiracy to entrap and ruin him, no more threats were heard, no more dangerous stealthy glances detected. He was sent back to his battalion at Ain-Sefra. A few weeks and again his malady was manifest, and on the top of that had come fever.

"I am very sorry," Stretton said again; and then, after looking about him and perceiving that the orderly was out of earshot, he bent down towards Barbier, lower than he had bent before, and he called upon him in a still lower voice.

But Barbier was no longer the name he used.

"Monsieur le Comte," he said, first of all, and then "Monsieur de----" He uttered a name which the generation before had made illustrious in French diplomacy.

At the sound of the name Barbier's face contracted. He started up in his bed upon one arm.

"Hush!" he cried. A most extraordinary change had come over him in a second. His eyes protruded, his mouth hung half open, his face was frozen into immobility by horror. "There is some one on the stairs," he whispered, "coming up--some one treading very lightly--but coming up--coming up." He inclined his head in the strained attitude of one listening with a great concentration and intentness, an image of terror and suspense. "Yes, coming up--coming up! Don't lock the door! That betrays all. Turn out the lights! Quickly! So. Oh, will this night ever pass!"

He ended with a groan of despair. Very gently Stretton laid him down again in the bed and covered him over with the clothes. The sweat rolled in drops from Barbier's forehead.

"He never tells us more, my colonel," said Stretton. "His real name-yes!--he betrayed that once to me. But of this night nothing more than the dread that it will never pass. Always he ends with those words. Yet it was that night, no doubt, which tossed him beyond the circle of his friends and dropped him down here, a man without a name, amongst the soldiers of the Legion."

Often Stretton's imagination had sought to pierce the mystery. What thing of horror had been done upon that night? In what town of France? Had the some one on the stairs turned the handle and entered the room when all the lights were out? Had he heard Barbier's breathing in the silent darkness of the room? Stretton could only reconstruct the scene. The stealthy footsteps on the stairs, the cautious turning of the door handle, the opening of the door, and the impenetrable blackness with one man, perhaps more than one, holding his breath somewhere, and crouching by the wall. But no hint escaped the sick man's lips of what there was which must needs be hidden, nor whether the thing which must needs be hidden was discovered by the one who trod so lightly on the stairs. Was it a dead man? Was it a dead woman? Or a woman alive? There was no answer. There was no knowledge to be gained, it seemed, but this--that because of that night a man in evening dress, who bore an illustrious name, had fled at daybreak on a summer morning to the nearest barracks, and had buried his name and all of his past life in the Foreign Legion.