I bent low over her hand.
"Let me stay, Mademoiselle," I whispered.
"What! and lose your beautiful uniform! 'Tis too severe a test of friendship. No, no, Monsieur," with the old mocking laugh. But before I had time to resent her teasing speech, her mood had changed. She leaned far out of the carriage and threw her beautiful arm over Fatima's arching neck.
"Good-by, Fatima," she cried—"dear, dear Fatima!" And as Fatima, in answer to her caress, drew closer to her, she dropped a light kiss on her soft muzzle, leaned back in her carriage with a signal to the coachman, and rolled away.
The weeks that followed were in some respects the strangest weeks of my life, and often in memory they return to me as a confused dream. War had been declared with England, and in Antwerp, in Dunkirk, on the Loire, in every little bay and inlet that indented the coast from Brest, where a great squadron was gathered, to Boulogne, where another was getting together, ships were building of every kind: floating fortresses of wood, light pinnaces and yawls for carrying the swift van of an army, and heavy barges for the impedimenta of war. A mighty flotilla, gathering from the Scheldt to the Garonne, from Toulon and Rochefort to Calais and Antwerp, to bear a vast invading army to the shores of England.
In constant communication with the great captain, I yet saw little of him, for day and night I was kept riding over the green fields of France, through the beautiful May and June, carrying orders, sometimes to little inland streams where tiny yawls were building, sometimes to great city dockyards where mighty ships were on the stays. And though these were not the deeds of valor I had dreamed of, I began to realize what a wonderful mind was planning all these wide-spread activities, and to understand that a great captain must be something more than a good fighter, and prowess on the field of battle was not all that was required of a soldier.
Yet I began to long for the din and stir of conflict and to see my hero, as in dreams I had often seen him, calm and unmoved, 'midst smoke and carnage, directing with unerring genius masses of men, infantry, cavalry, artillery, through the mazes of battle; or himself leading a resistless charge, sword extended, waving his men forward to victory and glory.
So when an old officer who had seen many wars told me he had no doubt it would be two years before the preparations for war were finished and war actually begun, my heart sank within me. Two years of hard work day and night and no glory! To be aide to the First Consul was not what I had dreamed of, and my thoughts turned longingly back to Paris and the Comtesse de Baloit. All the more did my thoughts turn in that direction because the Chevalier Le Moyne, who was also on the general's staff, had been for some weeks absent from headquarters. I always studiously avoided him if we happened to be in quarters at the same time, and so I did not at first miss him; but when day after day and even weeks passed without his reporting at mess, I began to be greatly troubled. My imagination pictured him as back in Paris urging his suit to Pelagie, and I feared greatly, either that she would at last yield to his importunities, seeing no way of escape, or that some trouble would come to her if she persistently scorned him.
In the midst of my anxieties a letter was brought me from home. The ten weeks were up when I could begin to expect an answer to my uncle's letter asking my father's permission for me to take service under Bonaparte, and I tore it eagerly open, hardly knowing, since hostilities would be so long delayed, whether I most hoped that it would contain his permission or his refusal. In my haste I had not noticed that it was not my father's writing on the outside, and that made it the greater shock to find within, in my mother's dearly loved penmanship, only these few words: