A deep voice, clear and musical, replied to them. Beatrix entered the room with hesitating step, and stood for a little while, breathing quickly in the close atmosphere. That was the friendship of Louis Gatelet, then—that den of dirt, that hovel in the auberge; that garret from which even a trooper below might have turned scornfully. The very windows she saw were broken and mended with paper. The couch upon which the wounded man lay was but a bed of rags. A single candle in a dirty iron stick gave him light. The flickering rays of it showed her the pallor of his face, the thin hands, the unshaven chin. And he had been there for days, waiting for her to come to him. His friend had left him there in that garret of the city, which even a beggar would have passed by. She blamed herself that she had delayed even for an hour.
“Oh, my God, Brandon, what a place! You cannot stop here.”
He pressed her hand lightly, and made an effort to raise himself from the couch.
“That’s what I’ve been telling my leg every day for the last two days. But it differs from me. I say ‘go;’ the leg says ‘stop.’ Who is to decide when the limbs disagree?”
Jeannette set down the candle and sighed.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, if you could have seen him when he came here. That was a dreadful day. I went from the house and found him lying in the road—ah, mon Dieu, the dreadful wound, the pale face, the blood upon the pavement! But he will get better now. You will cure him, Mademoiselle. And you will not want Jeannette to help you. Oh—ah—I know how it is, Mademoiselle, and I will come back in an hour.”
She slipped from the room, and closed the door quietly behind her. The room possessed but one cane-seated chair, and that but half a back. Beatrix drew it to the side of the couch, while Brandon began to speak to her about his accident.
“I don’t like your coming here, and yet I am glad that you came,” he said, with a look which implied the disappointment he had suffered. “Of course, you must tell somebody now, and must not come alone again. Old Hélène will be best. She is a good old soul, and may be prevailed upon to hold her tongue. If only I knew where Richard Watts was living, I would ask you to go to him. He has a better head than most, and would help me out of a tight place. It just shows you, Beatrix, what fools men can be sometimes. Bobbie Burns was right after all. The best laid schemes don’t always hit it. There was nothing I left out of my calculations that you could think of. I had even got a safe-conduct to help me back to German lines. And then, just at the crossing here, an artillery waggon crushes my foot, and down I go like a nettle. Was there ever such a cursed piece of luck?”
He sank back again upon the pillow of rags, and a spasm of pain drew down the muscles of his mouth and made him clench his hands. She thought how greatly the wound had changed him. His coat hung limply upon his chest; the hand that he stretched out showed awkward knuckles, and skin drawn tight; his eyes were very bright, as the eyes of one who needed sleep. But his manner was the manner of the old time. He was angry with himself because he could not conceal from her the fact that he was in pain.
“It’s nothing,” he said, when he saw her eyes fill with tears, and guessed how heavy was her self-reproach. “If you wouldn’t mind pouring me out a glass of that wine—a hundred thanks; you’re curing me already, you know. And, of course, I dare not send to my old rooms. Antoine, there, has a tongue as long as the Minster spire. He would give me away in five minutes. You see, there’s not much chance of disguise now, Beatrix. Gatelet says he got me in here only just in time. One of the curates of St. Thomas’s, who knew me well, came to the door just as they were carrying me upstairs. The fellow would have put it all over Strasburg in five minutes. It’s their business to talk, and they don’t neglect it. Gatelet, on the other hand, will hold his tongue just as long as it suits him. How long it will suit him I really don’t know. It’s a case of trusting in Providence and a fifth-rate Italian quack he unearthed from somewhere. Perhaps it will be better now that you have come. And you might find Richard Watts, eh?”