"Yes, I have heard that it was so," said the Colonel. "Of what took place at that time I can tell nothing, naturally, and Madame is no doubt sufficiently informed. But I saw him—I saw them both—within a week of their return. Upon that occasion I dined at a hotel with two friends, Captain Vaucher and Lieutenant de Sailles. Bertin, with some friends and his wife, was at a table near-by. She was the only lady of the party; her place was between an Englishman, a lean, twisted man with the thin legs of a groom, and a Belgian who passed for an artist. It was de Sailles who pointed them out; and in effect it was a group to see with emotion. The lady—she was known to you, Madame? Then the position will be clear. She was of that complete and perfect type we honor as the Parisienne, a product of the most complex life in the world. She was slender and straight—ah! straight as a lance, with youth and spirit and buoyancy in the carriage of her head, the poise of her body, the color upon her cheeks. But it was not that— the beauty and the courage—that caused her to stand out among those men as a climbing rose stands out from an old wall; it was the schooled and perfected quality of her, the fineness and delicacy of her manner and expression, the—in short, the note of breeding, Madame, the unmistakable ensign of caste. The Englishman fidgeted and lounged beside her; the fat Belgian drank much and was boisterous; Bertin was harsh and rudely jovial and loud. It was as though she were enveloped in a miasma."
"'So that is what Bertin has brought back,' said Vaucher slowly, as his custom was."
"'It is a crime,' said de Sailles."
"'I wonder,' said Vaucher, and drank his wine. He was much my friend, a man with the courage and innocence of a good child; but his thought was not easy to follow. He gave Bertin's group another look under puckered brows, and then turned his back on it and began to talk of other matters. I might have known then that—but I must tell my tale in order."
"Bertin was not wise—if it were nothing more—to bring such a wife to Algiers. It turned eyes upon him. Those who had been aware of him merely as a man of low tastes now began to notice his particular actions. He had a house in a certain impasse, and one night there was a brawl there—an affair of a man drunk and angry, of a knife drawn and some one stabbed. Before, it might have passed; our discipline was indulgent; but now it took on the shape of a scandal. It was brief and ugly, but it marked a stage passed in Bertin's career. And it was only two days later that Vaucher came to me in my quarters with a manner at once deprecating and defiant. He sat in my arm-chair and laughed quietly before he spoke."
"'I am looking for friends,' he said; 'for a pair of friends.'"
"Then, of course, I understood. I bade him count on me. 'And there is also de Sailles,' I reminded him. 'He has a very just taste in these affairs. But who is our opponent?'"
"'It is Bertin,' he answered."
"I was astonished, and he told me all. It was an episode of quixotry, a thing entirely imprudent and altogether lovable in him. It chanced that on the evening of Bertin's little—er—fracas, Vaucher had passed by the impasse in which Bertin lived. He had heard the scream of the man with the knife in him and paused. It was a dark night, and in the impasse there was but one lamp which stood near Bertin's door. There was a babble of many voices after that scream—shouts of fury, the whining of the would-be assassin, and so on; he was about to pass on, when Bertin's door opened and a woman slipped out and stood listening on the pavement. Her attitude was that of one ready to flee, terrified but uncertain. As the noises within died down she relapsed from her tense pose and showed her face to Vaucher in the light of the lamp. It was Madame Bertin. She did not see him where he waited, and all of a sudden her self-possession snapped like a twig you break in your fingers. She was weeping, leaning against the wall, weeping desolately, in an abandonment of humiliation and impotence. But Vaucher was not moved when he told me of it."
"'That I could have endured,' he said. 'I held my peace and did not intrude upon her. But presently they brought the wounded man downstairs, and Bertin came forth to seek a fiacre to take him away. She heard him ere he came out and gained thus the grace of an instant. There was never anything in life so pitiful, so moving, as the woman's strength that strangled down her sobs, dried the tears at their source, and showed to her husband a face as calm as it was cold. He spoke to her and she gave him a word in answer. But'—and he leaned forward in my chair and struck his fist on the arm of it—'but that poor victory is sore in my memory like a scar."