As all our impetuous troops had now passed through the breach, the French were driven beyond it; but the conflict raged with undiminished fury in other parts of the fortress. The place where I had fallen, benumbed and bruised, was comparatively quiet and still; and whilst I lay there, I heard a voice close by me exclaim, in pure English, "O, my God! and here end all my hopes, my joys, and sorrows! My mother—my home—I shall never see them more! Alas! the one would weep for, the other scorn me! Aloise—dearest Aloise! we meet no more! Well, I have ever been faithful to you, and to our emperor. You have ever been loving, and my sovereign grateful."
Turning with surprise, I found it was the French commandant who was thus soliloquizing; whilst he bled profusely from a wound, which disfigured him very much.
"Here is a stout Briton who has been fighting under the tricolor, or some wild spirit that has fled from Ireland after the last rising," I thought, whilst approaching him on my hands and knees. I tied up his head with my handkerchief to stanch the blood—though I myself needed the same attention—and on dividing the contents of my pocket-flask between us, the commandant recovered wonderfully.
"Sir, you have betrayed yourself to be British!" said I, in a low stern voice. "With me your secret is safe: I respect you as a brave man, and should have done so still more had you been a Frenchman; but beware how you become known to Sir John Stuart: he is a stern soldier of the old school, who will assuredly order a drum-head court-martial, and have you shot as a traitor!"
The eyes of the marquis flashed fire.
"I am now a soldier of fortune," he replied, "free to serve where and whom I please. Stuart, if he knew all—if he remembered. But there is a secret spirit whispering at this moment within me, that I have met you before: you are the officer who led the forlorn hope?" His voice faltered.
"Yes."
"And whom I encountered in the breach, before that tall officer cut me down?"
"The same."
"O, fate! if it should be so," he exclaimed, passing his hand across his blood-stained brow; and then grasping me with energy, "your name, sir?"