Fortuné had realised the incredible thing quickly enough. Dazed though he was by the ear-splitting general discharge at such close quarters, he had no sooner perceived that he was still on his feet, unharmed, than he had torn off the bandage round his eyes, taken one glance at the scene through the drifting smoke, and with a single bound had cleared the low stone wall behind him. Even as he jumped, however, came a report, and his left, his already injured, arm fell powerless to his side. He staggered a moment with the shock, recovered himself, plunged through the little thicket of dwarfed trees, and in another minute was running like a deer across the pale barley-field beyond. He was saved—for the time at least—by a chance the possibility of which had never entered his head. At the moment of the command to fire, his executioners had been stooping after the gold which he had just thrown to them. . . . One man only, he who had just winged him, was bringing his musket to the level as the émigré had snatched the handkerchief from his eyes and turned. Now, as he ran, the barley catching at his bare feet, the rest of the belated volley and some other shots came after him. But they went wide; the light, at that distance, was too uncertain. La Vireville tore on.
Yet that one marksman had scored heavily enough, as was soon only too obvious to the fugitive. His left elbow was shattered, and—what for the moment was worse—the injury was bleeding very copiously. La Vireville supported it with his other hand and arm as he raced through the barley, but he knew that between the severity of the pain, which the rapid motion was momentarily intensifying to agony, and the haemorrhage, he would not be able to run much farther. And indeed there was not much farther for him to run, since beyond the field was nothing but the shore. That solved the question, anyhow. With forty others to despatch, too, there was just a chance that they would not pursue him immediately.
So, where the edge of the barley-field curved gently over to the beach, he scrambled down, panting and dizzy, and fell to his knees on the soft sand. One thing he knew to be imperative—to stop the blood pouring from his arm, and in a kind of frenzy he tore off the bandage from his former, half-healed wound and tied it tightly above and around the new. This proceeding, necessary though it was, put the coping-stone on his endurance, and it was barely finished before he toppled forward on to his face and lay there motionless. Dimly, as consciousness left him, he heard the sound of the second series of volleys.
He came to—how much later he had small idea—with sand in his mouth and an almost intolerable aching in his fractured elbow. Whether the soldiers had searched for him or no he could not tell. He hardly realised that, except from the beach itself, he was invisible where he lay. But he did not conceive that there was any permanent shelter for him on Quiberon. Looking stupidly at his arm, he saw that the bleeding had stopped, but the arm was much worse than useless, for it was anguish to move it in any direction. . . . Really the simplest plan was to stay where he was. The soldiers would find him in time, and could finish their work; on the whole, it was foolishness not to have stayed up there by the wall to let them do it. . . . And Fortuné lay down again, with relief, on the fine and kindly sand that had already drunk his blood and now offered him oblivion.
For though he had said to himself a little while ago that if he had a chance he would take it, and though he had leapt the wall instinctively, and had run as never before in his life, yet now, after all, his will faltered. For one thing, he was sick with pain; for another, he was badly crippled. And what inducements had he, he asked himself, to wrestle further with destiny?—for a fight it would be, and most probably a losing one. Anne-Hilarion, to whom he now owed a duty; his mother, whom he loved; the cause he followed? Yes; but to none of these was he indispensable. That dark star of his, which for ten years had represented love to him, certainly offered him no light to live by; nor did revenge, since St. Four was dead. All he asked for was to yield, to contend no more.
But in a few moments he had struggled up again on to his elbow. The naturally unsubmissive bent of his mind worked automatically against such a surrender, and the remembrance of his promise to René came back even stronger than it had done last night. He had pledged himself to do his best to escape; René's last words to him—possibly the last he had ever spoken—had been on that matter. But how was he to fulfil that promise?
Leaning thus on his right elbow, La Vireville studied the sand, that strangely white sand of Quiberon. How could he save himself—it was practically impossible now! Under his gaze, covered with half-dried blood from the shattered arm which it had supported in his flight, lay his right hand, and that was all he had to depend on. Slowly and awkwardly enough (and even then at the cost of what made him set his teeth) he raised himself a little higher. And as he propped himself on this sound but bloodstained hand, he was suddenly aware of a minor pang in that. Glancing down again he saw that in changing his position he had brushed it against a plant of sea-holly, of which there were many on the shore and the dunes of Quiberon.
And La Vireville stared at that sturdy thistle, with its sharp, glaucous leaves and its beautiful dream-blue flower, both misty now in the dim light, almost as if he saw it in a dream, for its harsh touch had carried him back in a flash to the little bay in the Côtes-du-Nord where all this, surely, had happened before—where, when he was crippled, that same hand had known the scratch of the sea-holly, even to blood, and Mme. de Guéfontaine's kiss.
"She would not like to kiss that hand now!" he reflected, rather grimly. Yet suddenly he had the impression, as vivid as if she were there now, kneeling by him, near the sea-holly, as she had knelt that evening in the northern bay, that she, with her high courage and her ideals of devotion, would never counsel him to lie here like a coward till he was found and shot. She would have counselled him—did indeed seem to be counselling him now—to bestir himself, for the child's sake, for his own self-respect. But how was he to obey her?