“God forgive you, sergeant!” said Dard, with some feeling. “Not look for OUR COLONEL! We turned over every body that lay there,—full thirty there were,—and you were one of them.”
“Only thirty! Why, we settled more Prussians than that, I’ll swear.”
“Oh! they carried off their dead.”
“Ay! but I don’t see why they should carry our colonel off. His epaulets was all the thieves could do any good with. Stop! yet I do, Private Dard; I have a horrible suspicion. No, I have not; it is a certainty. What! don’t you see, ye ninny? Thunder and thousands of devils, here’s a disgrace. Dogs of Prussians! they have got our colonel, they have taken him prisoner.”
“O God bless them!” cried Josephine; “O God bless the mouth that tells me so! O sir, I am his wife, his poor heart-broken wife. You would not be so cruel as to mock my despair. Say again that he may be alive, pray, say it again!”
“His wife! Private Dard, why didn’t you tell me? You tell me nothing. Yes, my pretty lady, I’ll say it again, and I’ll prove it. Here is an enemy in full retreat, would they encumber themselves with the colonel? If he was dead, they’d have whipped off his epaulets, and left him there. Alive? why not? Look at me: I am alive, and I was worse wounded than he was. They took me for dead, you see. Courage, madame! you will see him again, take an old soldier’s word for it. Dard, attention! this is the colonel’s wife.”
She gazed on the speaker like one in a trance.
Every eye and every soul had been so bent on Sergeant La Croix that it was only now Raynal was observed to be missing. The next minute he came riding out of the stable-yard, and went full gallop down the road.
“Ah!” cried Rose, with a burst of hope; “he thinks so too; he has hopes. He is gone somewhere for information. Perhaps to Paris.”
Josephine’s excitement and alternations of hope and fear were now alarming. Rose held her hand, and implored her to try and be calm till they could see Raynal.