Noticing General D’Hubert getting restive and trying to place a word, the old emigre raised his hand, and added with dignity, “I’ve been a soldier, too. I would never dare suggest a doubtful step to the man whose name my niece is to bear. I tell you that entre galants hommes an affair can always be arranged.”
“But saperiotte, Monsieur le Chevalier, it’s fifteen or sixteen years ago. I was a lieutenant of hussars then.”
The old Chevalier seemed confounded by the vehemently despairing tone of this information. “You were a lieutenant of hussars sixteen years ago,” he mumbled in a dazed manner.
“Why, yes! You did not suppose I was made a general in my cradle like a royal prince.”
In the deepening purple twilight of the fields spread with vine leaves, backed by a low band of sombre crimson in the west, the voice of the old ex-officer in the army of the Princes sounded collected, punctiliously civil.
“Do I dream? Is this a pleasantry? Or am I to understand that you have been hatching an affair of honour for sixteen years?”
“It has clung to me for that length of time. That is my precise meaning. The quarrel itself is not to be explained easily. We met on the ground several times during that time, of course.”
“What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution which has tainted a whole generation,” mused the returned emigre in a low tone. “Who’s your adversary?” he asked a little louder.
“My adversary? His name is Feraud.”
Shadowy in his tricorne and old-fashioned clothes, like a bowed, thin ghost of the ancien regime, the Chevalier voiced a ghostly memory. “I can remember the feud about little Sophie Derval, between Monsieur de Brissac, Captain in the Bodyguards, and d’Anjorrant (not the pock-marked one, the other—the Beau d’Anjorrant, as they called him). They met three times in eighteen months in a most gallant manner. It was the fault of that little Sophie, too, who would keep on playing . . .”