Angelot felt himself drawn to the soldier, whose return home had touched him with so strange a thrill. There was a spark of the heroic in this young fellow. Angelot found himself watching him, listening to him, perhaps as a kind of refuge from the cold looks of his relations; for even Riette dared not run after him as of old.
When purple shadows began to lie long in the yellow evening glow, and the crickets sang louder than ever, and sweet scents came out of the warm ground—when the day's work was nearly done, Angelot walked away with Martin from the vineyard. He wanted some of those stirring stories to himself, it seemed. If one must go away and fight, if the old Angevin life became once for all impossible, then might it not be better under the eagles, as his wise father thought, than with that army and on that side for which, in spite of his mother and his uncle, he could not rouse in himself any enthusiasm? True, he liked little he knew of the Empire and its men, except this poor lamed conscript; but always in his whirling thoughts there was that will-o'-the-wisp, that wavering star of hope that Hélène's father had seemed to offer him. Could he forsake, for any other reason, the sight of the forbidden walls that held her!
He and Martin went away up the lane together, and climbed along the side of the moor towards La Joubardière, Martin telling wild stories of battles and sieges, of long marching and privation, Angelot listening fascinated, as he helped the crippled soldier over the rough ground.
Martin had been wounded under Suchet at the siege of Tortosa, so that he had seen little of the more recent events of the war, but his personal adventures, before and since, had been exciting; and not the least wonderful part of the story was his wandering life, a wounded beggar on his way back across the Pyrenees into his own country. As Angelot listened, the politics of French parties faded away, and he only realised that this was a Frenchman, fighting the enemies of France and giving his young life for her without a word of regret. Napoleon might have conquered the world, it seemed, with such conscript soldiers as this. These, not men like Ratoneau or Georges de Sainfoy, were the heroes of the war.
The sun had set, and swift darkness was coming down, before the young men reached La Joubardière. The lane, the same in which the two carriages had met, ran in a hollow between high banks studded with oaks like gigantic toadstools, adding to the deepness of the shadow.
"There are people following us," said Angelot.
He interrupted Martin in the midst of one of his stories; the soldier was standing still, leaning on his stick, and laughed with a touch of annoyance, for he was growing vain of his skill as a story-teller.
"My father and mother," he said. "And here I am forgetting their soup, which I promised to have ready."
"It is not—I know Maître Joubard's step," said Angelot.
"Some of the vintagers—" Martin was beginning, when he and Angelot were surrounded suddenly in the dusk by several men, two of whom seized Angelot by the shoulders.