The deformed newspaper-seller answered, not knowing that he spoke with the mouth of Destiny:
“Merling, Monsieur; Mademoiselle Ada Merling.... Just Heaven!... Is Monsieur ill?”...
For a mist had come before the burning eyes of the man who heard, and his heart had knocked once, heavily within his breast, and then ceased beating. Another moment, and the thin red stream within his veins, rushed upon the ceaseless, hurrying circle of its life-journey, bearing a definite message to his brain....
His star of pure, benignant womanhood, his light of hope and healing had risen in the pestilence-smitten, war-ridden East. Well, he would follow her there. And, if she would hear him, he would tell her all, and ask one word of pitying kindness to carry with him on the path he meant to tread.
Dead Marie-Bathilde had pointed it out with her little shrunken finger. He seemed to hear her saying: “For Peace is only reached by the Way of Expiation.”
To have Carmel in the blood is no light heritage. Thenceforth the feet of Hector Dunoisse were to be set with inflexible purpose upon that way of thorns and anguish. He lived but to atone.
LXXXVIII
About this time a new voice began to be heard in England, a big insistent voice that the deafest ears could not shut out. It spoke with candid fearlessness and direct simplicity. It painted, with rough, sure touches, in the very colors of life, pictures that were living and real. It gave praise where praise was due. It pointed out neglects and denounced abuses, having begun by drawing the attention of Britannia to the fact that the sick among her troops—and we had brought the Cholera with us from England—had been landed without blankets or nourishment at Gallipoli.
Looking back through many yellowed, time-faded columns of this date, one sees the formless, weltering confusion upon which the Cimmerian darkness that is dear to Officialdom heavily brooded, pierced by a ray of pure dazzling light. And presently the thick mists were to be scattered—the bat-winged demons of Ignorance, Incapacity, Meanness, Neglect, Indifference, and Carelessness, Mismanagement, Corruption, Greed, and Venality, exorcised and—if not absolutely banished—at least deprived of power to work unlimited misery and ruin upon Humanity, by the timely intervention of that beneficent Genius, the Influence of the Daily Press.
What time the Brigade of Guards were encamped upon the grass-slopes of Scutari, near the great Cemetery where the wild dogs and the nightingales sang all the night through, a little blue striped tent had sprung up on the flank of the Cut Red Feathers. Between 2 and 6 a. m., Tussell, War Correspondent of The Thunderbolt, was occasionally to be found inside, writing, upon a saddle, and by the light of a tallow dip stuck in an empty whiskey-bottle, the letters that were presently to wake all England up.