The new-comer was dressed from head to foot in the fur of the silver fox, and had a grey woollen shawl about her head. I have rarely seen a more beautiful face upon a child or eyes so sorrowful.
Apparently of fourteen years of age or thereabouts, I perceived at once that she was of noble birth, while the sweetness of her voice was beyond words. Weeping upon the threshold, she ceased to weep directly she had entered the room, and, drawing herself up with a dignity worthy of her race, she told me that her name was Joan d'Izambert, and begged me to come immediately to the help of her brother, who was dying.
This was an astonishing request, and I could not forbear a question.
"Mademoiselle," I asked, "who is your brother, and what brought you to this house?"
She replied immediately that her brother was Gabriel d'Izambert, one of the pontonniers, and that he had been sent to the river by General Roguet. From this excursion I understood that the young man had returned in a state of delirium, and was now lying in an arbour of a garden close by.
"Sergeant Picard sent me to you," she explained. "He knows my brother well, and said that you would come. Oh, monsieur, we have suffered so much, and now there is this. Will you not help me?"
I told her that I would go. For another, perchance, I would not have stirred a foot that night; but there was so much in the child's manner—a gift to command and a nobility of mien which were remarkable—that I put on my great fur coat without more ado, and went down to the garden with her. It lay, perhaps, a hundred paces from the house which we occupied, and was attached to a considerable mansion, of which General Roguet and his staff had then taken possession.
The arbour itself proved to be a spacious summer-house, matted and thatched, and provided with a stove, in which a good fire had been kindled. I was presented immediately to a distinguished old gentleman, well advanced in years, but still wearing a uniform of the engineers. He told me in a word that he had followed his son as far as Smolensk upon our outward journey, and there had waited for the army's return.
"His mother was with us then," he said—and so he indicated that his wife had perished during these dreadful days.
The son himself—a fine young man of noble presence—lay upon the floor by the stove, wrapped in a bearskin coat, but plainly the victim of delirium. I found him in a burning fever, his pulse running high, and his cheeks gone scarlet. He raved incessantly of the river and the bridge, and of the Russians who had hunted us.