I have a cut in tierce of which I have always had the mastery, and it was this cut I was giving Cheverny, when suddenly the lantern back of him went out. At the same moment his foot slipped; his guard gave way completely, and my sword’s point went exactly where I had never meant it to go—into his left side. He dropped like a stone.
I was the first to reach him, and turned him over on his back. Bellegarde, a silly popinjay, lost his head completely, and began to howl for one of those new-fangled screw tourniquets which had been invented by Jean Louis Petit, not so long before. But of course nobody had one, or could get one, or knew how to use it, had it dropped from heaven. Jacques Haret, as usual, kept his wits and disappeared in search of a doctor and a coach.
I bound my mantle around Gaston Cheverny’s body, told him to lie still, meanwhile examining him to see if he was about to die. I thought he was. His face was quite green, his extremities grew cold and he was deathly sick. But his eye retained its undimmed brightness; and while he was lying there on the ground, in this sad state, he burst out into a feeble laugh.
“Babache, you are so damned ugly,” he whispered.
Was it strange I loved the boy who was so much himself 46 in such circumstances, and would have given my right arm if that cursed lantern had not gone out? I said to him:
“If you open your mouth again, I swear to leave you lying here on the ground; and you will probably die of that hole I made in you.”
His own sensations by that time must have shown him the seriousness of his wound. He lay still and silent and greenish-gray and sick and gasping; and I—I could not look at him for very anguish.
It was but half a quarter of an hour before Jacques Haret returned with a physician and one of those sedan chairs which can be made into a litter. The physician, an intelligent looking man, examined the rude bandage I had made for the wounded man, and then silently motioned us to lay him on the litter, which we did. His lodgings were close by, so Bellegarde told us—and we bore our gruesome burden through the street.
Gaston Cheverny’s hurt was as much an accident as if it had been a lightning bolt, but no man ever suffered more than I at the thought that I had inflicted it. Arrived at his lodging—an excellent one in the quarter of the Temple—we carried him into his bedchamber, laid him on his bed, got his valet, and, except the valet, we were all ordered to leave by the physician. As I turned away from the bed, Gaston Cheverny managed to hold out his hand to me. I took it, and I am not ashamed to say that, for the second time that night, tears came into my eyes. Outside in the street I watched and waited. The night grew sharp, and the darkness grew dense, and the city’s throbbing pulse grew still. I 47 walked up and down the street, and only the watchman’s distant cry and my own quiet foot-fall, broke the midnight silence. The inevitable thought came to me, whether, after all, there be any such thing as chance in the world—or, whether all is chance. I had paused that afternoon before the grille of an old garden, softly called to stop by the scent of the lilacs—and because I had ever loved the scent of lilacs a man might die that night.
No one came out of the house where Gaston Cheverny battled with death. The lights burned steadily in the saloon which communicated with the bedchamber where we had carried the wounded man, and the room remained empty, so I knew Gaston Cheverny still lived. Some time after midnight the valet came out running. I ran after him to ask how his master fared.