"For her sake I could be glad. Not, of course, for my own."
"Fact is, there's no manner of use in expecting you to take reasonable views of things, while your head is in this state," declared Jack.
But he became so troubled that he confided his cares to Lucille. He could not worry the Colonel or Mrs. Baron, who were anxious enough already.
"I'm not at all happy about him, and that's the solemn truth," Jack declared confidentially, a fortnight or so after his arrival. "I don't like the look in his eyes, or here," drawing a finger across his brow. "And as for strength—just see him this afternoon! He's utterly floored by that stroll on the ramparts. Why, in old days he'd do his twenty or thirty miles at a stretch, and get back as fresh as he started. He didn't know what it was to be done up."
Lucille had not the least idea why, at this point, she should find herself to be confiding to Jack a secret which she had told to nobody else. She and he were becoming extremely good friends. Jack had taken to Lucille on the spot, when they were first introduced, and the feeling was returned. Still, Lucille had not meant to let anybody know what she had done. Somehow, it slipped out.
She had long wondered whether it might not be possible to obtain leave for Denham to return home. Some few among the détenus had been permitted by the Emperor to do so, under exceptional circumstances. And Captain Ivor was a soldier. It was well known that, if Napoleon were chivalrous to anybody, he would be so first to a soldier. He was always harder upon civilians.
At the Emperor's court an old friend of hers moved—one who had been formerly a Royalist, and who now for many years had attached himself to the fortunes of Buonaparte. Lucille had found it hard to pardon this change of front in her old friend—more strictly her parents' friend—and intercourse between the two had been almost entirely dropped. Yet Lucille had heard of him from time to time; and she knew he was not one to forget the past—the more so in her case, since that past included a debt of gratitude from him to Lucille's father.
It had one day occurred to her that she might write to this friend, explaining about Captain Ivor's failing health, and asking him to intercede with the Emperor for leave for Ivor to go home. Lucille did not tell Jack how many days she had held out against the notion. Not for Denham's sake, but for her own. He had been so long the main centre of thought in her quiet existence, that she could hardly now picture life at Verdun without him. Not that she was exactly in love with Ivor, because from the beginning she had known him to belong to Polly; and though she had been in danger of caring for him a great deal too much, she had fought against the tendency. But she was very much his friend.
So she hesitated, till one day the selfishness of her own conduct broke upon her, awakened by some fresh view of his altered looks. Then at once she acted. She wrote to the friend, putting the matter before him, frankly stating her own belief that Ivor was in point of fact slowly dying of captivity, and entreating him, in memory of old days, to interest himself in the matter, and if possible to get permission for Ivor's return to England.
The friend—whose name Lucille did not mention to Jack—had answered her letter. He had written kindly, cordially,—promising to take an opportunity, sooner or later, to lay the matter before the Emperor. He might or might not meet with success; but at least Mademoiselle de St. Roques could depend upon him to do his best for Captain Ivor.