He begged her not to pelt him with his own rash words to his undoing. Winter clothing—stores of all kinds, huts for the troops, were even then on their way up the Bosphorus en route for the Black Sea.
“And,” he went on, dexterously changing the topic of conversation, “you spoke of ‘flurry and confusion’ just now, in connection with the Commander-in-Chief. He was cool enough to perpetrate a clever epigram at the very moment when he must have realized that the order was disastrous. After all was over, it appears—a French chef d’escadron attached to his Staff got down from horseback, and—not to put too nice a point upon it! was violently sick. When he had somewhat recovered, he said to Lord Dalgan: ‘Monseigneur, I entreat your pardon for my weakness. I have been in action many times, but this is the first massacre I ever saw!’ And he raised his eyebrows and said in his charming French: ‘Really, Major? I had imagined that you, with your regiment, played rather a prominent part in clearing the streets of Paris at the time of the coup d’État!’ Not bad for a ‘flurried’ man, was it? And he was cool enough two hours later, when he rode up to me, and said, almost in the words he had used to the Chief of the Division: ‘Do you know what you have done, Lord Cardillon? You have thrown away the Light Brigade!’”
“If Lord Dalgan be sometimes guilty of an injustice,” she said, looking full at him with her clear gray eyes, “he has never shirked his share of privation and hardship.”
The hit told. For the Brigadier had clung to the comforts of his yacht in Varna Bay and Balaklava Harbor. He had never tasted the discomforts, and knew nothing of the hardships, of the campaign.
“You are in pain?” she asked, for he had winced and thrown up his hand with the gesture of a hit fencer, and the hot color had mounted to his reddish hair.
“No, no!” He stooped to pick up her forgotten work, without concealing the twinge that the bullet gave him, for Fate had bestowed the title of the bravest upon one of the vainest of men. He added, as he laid the mass of coarse white calico back upon her knee; “Do say what this is you have been sewing at? It looks like—dare I say?—a nightshirt?”
“It looks as it ought,” she answered, placidly threading a gold-eyed needle. “And Ada will applaud me. Your recognition of the garment should lend it value in her eyes.”
“It is for the Hospital?” He added as she signified assent:
“How is Miss Merling, by the way? She got in yesterday morning, I understand, with her staff of nursing ladies—of all denominations, according to the newspapers.... One hopes they exaggerate?”
She answered: