CHAPTER XXXVII.
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY.
There was a line of light in the eastern sky. The camp was very still. It was the hour for the mounting of the guard, and, as the light spread higher and higher, whiter and whiter, as the morning came, a score of men advanced slowly and in silence to a broad strip of land screened from the great encampment by the rise and fall of the ground, and stretching far and even, with only here and there a single palm to break its surface, over which the immense arc of the sky bent, gray and serene, with only the one colorless gleam eastward that was changing imperceptibly into the warm, red flush of opening day.
Sunrise and solitude: they were alike chosen, lest the army that honored, the comrades that loved him, should rise to his rescue; casting off the yoke of discipline, and remembering only that tyranny and that wretchedness under which they had seen him patient and unmoved throughout so many years of servitude.
He stood tranquil beside the coffin within which his broken limbs and shot-pierced corpse would so soon be laid forever. There was a deep sadness on his face, but it was perfectly serene. To the words of the priest who approached him he listened with respect, though he gently declined the services of the Church. He had spoken but very little since his arrest; he was led out of the camp in silence and waited in silence now, looking across the plains to where the dawn was growing richer and brighter with every moment that the numbered seconds of his life drifted slowly and surely away.
When they came near to bind the covering over his eyes, he motioned them away, taking the bandage from their hands and casting it far from him.
“Did I ever fear to look down the depths of my enemies' muskets?”
It was the single outbreak, the single reproach, that escaped from him—the single utterance by which he ever quoted his services to France. Not one who heard him dared again force on him that indignity which would have blinded his sight, as though he had ever dreaded to meet death.
That one protest having escaped from him, he was once more still and calm, as though the vacant grave yawning at his feet had been but a couch of down to rest his tired limbs. His eyes watched the daylight deepen, and widen, and grow into one sheet of glowing roseate warmth; but there was no regret in the gaze; there was a fixed, fathomless resignation that moved with a vague sense of awe those who had come to slay him, and who had been so used to slaughter that they fired their volley into their comrade's breast as callously as into the ranks of their antagonists.
“It is best thus,” he thought, “if only she never knows——”