"Ay, very well. I knew him." And he told Churchill of how he had been attacked by the boors on the night ere the whole army set out towards the Breusch, though, naturally, he made no reference to the duel.
"Ah! I heard something of that, too. Yet, tell me, Vause--how is it you know he did not follow those who chased the enemy out of the wood? He may have done so to deliver the orders of recall. He was sent out with others of the Marshal's guard to give such orders."
"I saw him pass the other way--when the fight was over. Returning towards Holtzheim where our base was. His cousin, Debrasques, who is lying above wounded, spoke to him. It was the man."
"Strange!" reflected Churchill. "Strange! What harm could come to him between the wood and Holtzheim, and with the battle over, too, and the enemy driven out of the former and in full retreat? He was not wounded?"
"No. He was not wounded."
And thus the matter remained as it had been--a mystery from the first. De Bois-Vallée had disappeared at the very moment when he was out of danger, with the battle finished and he safe in the French lines.
Yet, to Andrew Vause, meditating hour by hour on his disappearance as he watched and tended Debrasques, it came to be no such mystery as it was to Turenne and the companions of the absent man, his brethren of the garde du corps.
For he discovered that Debrasques was not astonished at his disappearance--discovered it when he told him that it had taken place.
"You understand what I say to you?" he asked, bending gently over the half-paralysed man the next morning--and none who had not seen Andrew in his gentler moments could, perhaps, have guessed how good a nurse the great soldier could be. "You understand, my friend? De Bois-Vallée is missing. Yet he was unhurt when he passed us, returning to our ranks. What can have befallen him?"
Debrasques, wounded and lying there, fixed his blue eyes on the other, while it seemed to Andrew that there was a glance in them which showed that, if he could speak, he would say that the news caused him no surprise; and a moment later his lips moved as though muttering some word, but no sound came from them.