Marigny galloped past. “Save yourself, Saint-Ermay!” he cried. “Make for the marshes!”
Louis shook his head. He would not leave his men, and the gun. Besides, what was the use? He had no fancy for being slaughtered in a ditch; he preferred to die standing, and in the open.
The gun by him spoke for the last time, and almost immediately Toussaint Lelièvre pitched forward on his face.
And suddenly Louis, who, all through the war, in his maddest exploits had never been touched by a bullet, knew that he should not die by a bullet now, and was glad. The grenadiers had ceased to advance. In front of them, racing madly towards the slope, came on the cavalry they had screened. Westermann’s hussars were coming to clear out the wood; the pounding of their nearing hoofs on the wet grass was like the beat of the last pulses of life. The three men at the guns were on their knees, reciting their acts of contrition, calm, as if they had been in church. Only a little sob broke from one, the youngest. Louis turned towards them, brought his sword to the salute, and, walking very coolly to a tree a few yards away, set his back against it and waited.
There was just here a little hedge for a boundary to the copse. Would their horses take it well . . . as Saladin would have done? . . . Yes; in a moment they were over it gallantly, their red, fur-edged pelisses flying. They seemed in an enormous hurry. A couple of them, striking right and left, despatched in an instant the three men by the gun. Then the line swept on. And Louis straightened himself as he saw death riding at him—a big man on a roan horse, something restive. Under his high red and black headgear his fair, stupid face glistened with exertion; his doubled tresses of plaited hair hung to his shoulders. As he passed Louis he cut savagely at him. Louis sprang a little to one side, the roan swerved, and Saint-Ermay parried the stroke, though not entirely, for the point of the sabre bit into his collarbone. The force of the blow sent him back for a second against the tree-trunk, and another hussar was on him, young, dark, smiling sardonically. Leaning from the saddle, this man made as though to cut, then, suddenly stooping, thrust instead.
“Take that, brigand!” he cried, his smile widening.
The long, heavy blade, with the momentum of the horse behind it, went leaping treacherously under the Vicomte’s raised guard, and drove through the tarnished silver facings full into his breast.
Louis was conscious of a spasm of rending pain, of a conviction that he was pinned to the tree behind him (which was momentarily true), of the horseman’s laugh as he wrenched out his sword and rode on . . . then of a noisy, rushing red mist and a sensation of falling.
For all that he stood swaying for an instant by the tree, with his mouth full of blood, and but one unreasoning thought in his mind—to get back to the gun to die. And observing him to be still on his feet, though visibly not long to remain there, another hussar, looking over his shoulder, wheeled his horse with the intention of giving him the coup de grâce. Louis did not see him. He could indeed see nothing now, but with his head thrown back in agony, and both hands pressed to his breast, whence the blood poured hot through his fingers, he took a couple of blind paces forward in the direction where he imagined the gun to be. Then he staggered, flung out his hands, and fell.
The hussar, whose arm was already raised to strike, glanced carelessly down at him and did not trouble to dismount. “He has his affair already, parbleu,” he muttered, and, swinging his sabre till it whistled through the air, rode after his comrades.