“Come, be reasonable. Don’t you know me? It is I.”
“Who, I?”
“Maurice Levasseur, your nephew.”
Father Fouchard took up his candle. He recognized his nephew, beyond a doubt, but was firm in his resolve not to give so much as a glass of water.
“How can I tell whether you are my nephew or not in this infernal darkness? Clear out, everyone of you, or I will fire!”
And amid an uproar of execration, and threats to bring him down and burn the shanty, he still had nothing to say but: “Clear out, or I’ll fire!” which he repeated more than twenty times.
Suddenly a loud clear voice was heard rising above the din:
“But not on me, father?”
The others stood aside, and in the flickering light of the candle a man appeared, wearing the chevrons of a quartermaster-sergeant. It was Honoré, whose battery was a short two hundred yards from there and who had been struggling for the last two hours against an irresistible longing to come and knock at that door. He had sworn never to set foot in that house again, and in all his four years of army life had not exchanged a single letter with that father whom he now addressed so curtly. The marauders had drawn apart and were conversing excitedly among themselves; what, the old man’s son, and a “non-com.”! it wouldn’t answer; better go and try their luck elsewhere! So they slunk away and vanished in the darkness.
When Fouchard saw that he had nothing more to fear he said in a matter-of-course way, as if he had seen his son only the day before: