CHAPTER XXXII.
THE DUEL IN THE AUBERGE GARDEN
Whoever it was that moved at the instigation of Madame on my behalf, he put speed into the business, for the very next day I was told my sous-lieutenancy was waiting at the headquarters of the regiment. A severance that seemed almost impossible to me before I learned from the lady's own lips that her heart was elsewhere engaged was now a thing to long for eagerly, and I felt that the sooner I was out of Dunkerque and employed about something more important than the tying of my hair and the teasing of my heart with thinking, the better for myself. Teasing my heart, I say, because Miss Walkinshaw had her own reasons for refusing to see me any more, and do what I might I could never manage to come face to face with her. Perhaps on the whole it was as well, for what in the world I was to say to the lady, supposing I were privileged, it beats me now to fancy. Anyhow, the opportunity never came my way, though, for the few days that elapsed before I departed from Dunkerque, I spent hours in the Rue de la Boucherie sipping sirops on the terrace of the Café Coignet opposite her lodging, or at night on the old game of humming ancient love-songs to her high and distant window. All I got for my pains were brief and tantalising glimpses of her shadow on the curtains; an attenuate kind of bliss it must be owned, and yet counted by Master Red-Shoes (who suffered from nostalgia, not from love, if he had had the sense to know it) a very delirium of delight.
One night there was an odd thing came to pass. But, first of all, I must tell that more than once of an evening, as I would be in the street and staring across at Miss Walkinshaw's windows, I saw his Royal Highness in the neighbourhood. His cloak might be voluminous, his hat dragged down upon the very nose of him, but still the step was unmistakable. If there had been the smallest doubt of it, there came one evening when he passed me so close in the light of an oil lamp that I saw the very blotches on his countenance. What was more, he saw and recognised me, though he passed without any other sign than the flash of an eye and a halfstep of hesitation.
“H'm,” thinks I, “here's Monsieur Albany looking as if he might, like myself, be trying to content himself with the mere shadows of things.”