“Are we not all assembled,” she asked, “to honor the brave unfortunate? And, if I could not support tragic, or grim, or squalid spectacles, should I be now upon my journey to the scene of war?”
“Must you go there? Is Grandguerrier so exigent? Have you really set your hearts upon being married amidst the tragic spectacles to which you refer?”
She told him, with her shadowy smile:
“I go, not because I desire to, but because I am destined to.... All my life long I have done what I wished not to do, at the bidding of an inexorable Fate....”
He did not know how true it was. But the sensual fever she had kindled in his veins abated. He looked at her with more sympathy and less desire. She went on:
“Besides, I must tell you that I have campaigned with my first husband’s regiment in Algeria, and helped to nurse the wounded. Recently at Toulon and Marseilles I visited the transports that had brought in our invalided soldiers from the War-Hospitals of the Levant. Now I would cry, ‘Bravo, mes amis!’ and wave my handkerchief to your wounded heroes of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman.... Listen, Milord! Surely that was a salute of guns!”
XCIV
She did not err. The south-westerly breeze had shifted. Sky and water darkened, a cold north wind blew, scattering some sleety drops of rain. And as the squall broke, and the awnings tugged at their reevings, came the splitting crack of the old brass Turkish cannon from the batteries of Deli Talian, and the deeper, more sonorous boom of ships’ guns answering back again.
Eighteen guns. They were coming! they were coming! The quays of Pera and the landing-places of Tophaneh and Scutari were crowded with eager, many-colored sightseers. On the balconies and roofs of houses, on the gardenwalls bordering the Bosphorus, on the decks and in the rigging of the warships anchored in the roadsteads, human figures thronged and clustered. A susurration of excitement—a hum of expectation, quickened into a clamor—broadened into a roar. For they were coming—they were coming! the men of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman, whom their country and the nation they had fought for could never praise and honor enough.
They had passed Therapia, for from the nearer fortresses of Europe and Asia the salute crashed deafeningly. Columns of white smoke rose beyond the promontory, slanted and came down upon the wind. As nervous ladies stopped their ears, expectant of an answering salute, the gorgeous king-dolphin, followed by the flying cloud of variegated parrot-fish, darted round the promontory that as yet hid the first of the approaching ships from view, and fled downstream towards Seraglio Point.