He got into the carriage, and the captain of hussars silently followed him in, and sat down opposite him, his sabre across his knees. In a few seconds the carriage was rolling noisily over the cobblestones of the archway into the street. But they would not pass near Valentine now; they would soon be going further away every moment . . . for ever.
They had traversed Paris, and were in the Avenue de Neuilly, when the young officer said abruptly,
“Monsieur le Duc, if when we are past Neuilly, I were to get out, to halt the escort, make some diversion, and call off the men on either side if you could slip out . . .”
Gaston shook his head, smiling, despite himself, at the wild idea. “My dear boy—apart from a personal preference for not being shot in the back—do you suppose that I would accept your young life for mine?”
“My life! But my career was my life—and I am going to resign my commission before this day is over! I cannot serve any more a soldier who violates a safe-conduct. And I thought him . . . I was with him in Italy—at Acre—at Aboukir . . .” He put his forehead down on the hands that rested over each other on the hilt of his sabre, upright between his knees.
Gaston’s face softened as he looked at him. It was as he thought. He would not have died in vain.
He leant back with folded arms. The rumble of the wheels, the trot of the horses on either hand, the figures of their riders as they rose and fell close to the carriage windows, held a rhythm that was almost soothing. And now that the shock of indignation and disgust was over, what better place at which to die than Mirabel, which had re-united him and Valentine? It was his dream come true; he was not going away from her; she was—was she not?—waiting for him there.
Only just this side of death had they plucked the flower of flowers; but they had plucked it. And the life whose uselessness had hurt her so, at the end he had contrived to do something with it after all. By refusing to ransom it, as he might conceivably have done, he was flinging it down, not as a forfeit, but as a challenge, against the walls that had been his and Valentine’s. In having him shot in defiance of the strictest article of military honour, Bonaparte plainly designed to make of the Duc de Trélan’s death a terrible example—in decreeing that the sentence should be carried out, against all the dictates of decent feeling, in front of his own confiscated house, to make that death a kind of show as well. But the more publicity given to so callous and unscrupulous an action, the longer it was likely to be remembered—against its author; and the impression might not be what Bonaparte designed. The hope of such a result was partly what Gaston de Trélan was laying down his life for. Already, as he knew, there was no small clamour and protest in Paris over his probable fate, so that the added affront of this morning did but make dying, after all, the more worth while.
The short miles had slipped past. Here already, by the slackening pace, was the turn off the Saint-Germain road. Nearly ten years. . . . The carriage, swaying a little, swung round at right angles into the way lined with gaunt poplars, where the frozen puddles crackled under hoofs and wheels—the last stage but one of the journey that was bearing him away from all he loved. No! “Death could never take you from me!” Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi. Crossing himself, he began silently to recite his act of contrition.