"You know him well?" I asked.
"Yes. I was stationed in Rheims before the war. I used to dance with Liane when she came home from school."
"Ah, if only her family hadn't stayed here till too late!" I cried.
The captain with the scarred face shrugged his shoulders. "Destiny!" he said. "Besides, the best people do not run away easily from the homes they love. Perhaps they have the feeling that, in a home which has always meant peace, nothing terrible can happen. Yet there's more in it than that—something more subtle which keeps them in the place where they have always lived: something, I think, that binds the spirits of us Frenchmen and women to the spirit of their own hearths—their own soil. Haven't you found that already, in other places you have visited in this journey of yours?"
"Yes," I answered, thinking of the old people I had seen at Vitrimont living in the granaries of their ruined houses, and strangely, unbelievably happy because they were "at home." "Yes, we have seen that in little villages of Lorraine."
"Then how much more at Rheims, under the shadow of Notre-Dame!" The scarred captain still gazed at the headless king, and faintly smiled.
CHAPTER XIX
Of course nothing did happen in Paris to break up the party. I might have known that nothing would. Nothing happened at all, except that I received a letter from Doctor Herter with the promised introduction to an oculist just now at the Front, and that I realized, after three days' absence, how Brian is improving. He has less the air of a beautiful soul, whose incarnation in a body is a mere accident, and more the look of a happy, handsome young man, with a certain spiritual radiance which makes him remarkable and somehow "disturbing," as the French say. If anything could stop the rats gnawing my conscience, it would be this blessed change. Brian is getting back health and strength. When I think what a short time ago it is that his life hung in the balance, this seems a miracle. I'm afraid I am glad—glad that I did the thing which has given him his chance. Besides, I love the Becketts. So does Brian. And they love us. It's difficult to remember that I've stolen their love. Surely, they're happier with us than they could have been without us? Brian's scheme for their visits to the liberated towns is doing good to them and to hundreds—even thousands—of people whom they intend to help.
All this is sophistry, no doubt, but oh, it's beguiling sophistry! It's so perfectly disguised that I seldom recognize it except at night when I lie awake, and it sits on my bed, without its becoming mask.