“Oh, my beloved! I will deserve so much of God, that one day He will give me even you!”
“Hush—hush!” she said, and touched his lips with her cool hand to bid them silence. He kissed the hand, glanced downwards and stooping, disentangled from the soft material of her dress a trailing branch of delicate, vividly-green creeper, hardly larger in leaf than the climbing rose, and set with long sharp thorns.
“What is that? How beautiful and how unusual!” she commented. Then—as he twisted the dewy green leaves and the sharp prickles into a rough circlet and offered it to her, she took it from him silently—saying to herself: “It is always the hand we love that gives us the crown of thorns!”
And then she called the nun, and bade him good-night, and went back to the little painted wooden villa standing in its nightingale-haunted garden on the main road to Ismid.
And Dunoisse knew a mad impulse to follow the tall, lightly moving figure, clutch at the softly flowing garments—stay her with desperate prayers not to leave him without one more kiss or at least a word of tenderness. But he fought it down, and went by the northern avenue back to his narrow, stuffy quarters at the Hospital, said farewell to his fellow-workers, and left next morning for the seat of war.
CIII
“French Headquarters, “Before Sevastopol, “December, 1854.
To His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces. Staff Headquarters, near Balaklava.
“My Lord,
“I have to inform your Lordship that a person, passing under the alias of M. Cain, and who is known to have left Scutari en route for the Crimea, is an ex-Brigadier General of His Imperial Majesty’s private staff, named von Widinitz-Dunoisse, who was employed upon Survey in Bulgaria a few years previously, and upon his return to Paris, in May last, committed a gross outrage upon the person of the Emperor, and was consequently deprived of his rank in the French Army, and imprisoned in the Fortress of Ham. Of exceptional ability—this officer—who was released by the clemency of his Imperial Master—rendered excellent service to his Majesty, who has attributed his fantastic conduct and the strange suspicions that apparently possess him, to an intermittent fever contracted in the Dobrudja, the effects of which have permanently unhinged his mind.