Victor de Marmont had effected the gruesome exchange. He was now dressed in the black uniform of a Brunswick regiment wherein so many French royalists were serving. By a wide détour he had reached the approach to Brussels. Indeed it seemed as if the news which he had sent flying to Paris was true after all. Behind the forest of Soigne where he now was, the fields and roads were full of running men and galloping horses. The dull green of Belgian uniforms, the yellow facings of the Dutch, the black of Brunswickers, all mingled together in a moving kaleidoscopic mass of colour: men were flying unpursued yet panic-stricken towards Brussels, carrying tidings of an awful disaster to the allied armies in their haggard faces, their quivering lips, their blood-stained tunics.
De Marmont joined in with them: though his heart was full of hope, he too contrived to look pale and spent and panic-stricken at will—he heard the shouts of terror, the hastily murmured "All is lost! even the British can no longer stand!" as horses maddened with fright bore their half-senseless riders by. He set his teeth and rode on. His dark eyes glowed with satisfaction; there was no fear that the great gambler would stake his last in vain: the news would travel quick enough—as news of disaster always will. Brussels even now must be full of weeping women and children, as it soon would be of terror-driven men, of wounded and of maimed crawling into the shelter of the town to die in peace.
And as he rode, de Marmont thought more and more of Crystal. The last three months had only enhanced his passionate love for her and his maddening desire to win her yet at all costs. St. Genis would of course be fighting to-day. Perchance a convenient shot would put him effectively out of the way. De Marmont had vainly tried in this wild gallopade to distinguish his rival's face among this mass of foreigners.
As for the Englishman! Well! no doubt he had disappeared long ago out of Crystal de Cambray's life. De Marmont had never feared him greatly. That one look of understanding between Crystal and Clyffurde, and the latter's strange conduct about the money at the inn, were alone responsible for the few twinges of jealousy which de Marmont had experienced in that quarter.
Indeed, the Englishman was a negligible quantity. De Marmont did not fear him. There was only St. Genis, and with the royalist cause rendered absolutely hopeless—as it would be, as it must be—St. Genis and the Comte de Cambray and all those stiff-necked aristocrats of the old regime who had thought fit to turn their proud backs on him at Brestalou three months ago, would be irretrievably ruined and discredited and would have to fly the country once more . . . and Crystal, faced with the alternative of penury in England or a brilliant existence at the Tuileries as the wife of the Emperor's most faithful friend, would make her choice as he—de Marmont—never doubted that any woman would.
Hope for him had already become reality. Brussels was the half-way halt to the uttermost heights of his ambition. Fortune, the Emperor's gratitude, the woman he loved, all waited for him there. He reached the city just as that distant horizon in the west was lit up by a streak of brilliant crimson from the fast sinking sun: just when—had he but known it!—on the crest of Mont Saint Jean, Wellington had waved his hat over his head and given the heroic British army—exhausted, but undaunted—the order for a general charge; just when the Grand Army, finally checked in its advance, had first set up the ominous call that was like the passing-bell of its dying glory: "Sauve qui peut!"
III
"Sauve qui peut!"
Bobby Clyffurde heard the cry too through the fast gathering shadows of unconsciousness that closed in round his wearied senses, and, as a film that was so like the kindly veil of approaching Death spread over his eyes, he raised them up just once to that vivid crimson glow far out in the west, and on the winged chariot of the setting sun he sent up his last sigh of gratitude to God. All day he had called for Death—all day he had wooed her there where bullets and grape-shot were thickest—where her huge scythe had been most busily at work.
Sons of fond mothers, husbands, sweethearts that were dearly loved, brothers that would be endlessly mourned, lives that were more precious than any earthly treasures—the ghostly harvester claimed them all with impartial cruelty. And he—desolate and lonely—with no one greatly to care if he came back or no—with not a single golden thread of hope to which he might cling, without a dream to brighten the coming days of dreariness—with a life in the future that could hold nothing but vain regrets, Bobby had sought Death twenty times to-day and Death had resolutely passed him by.