The boy, scarlet to the ears, met the kindly, almost quizzical look that responded. My lord said, and condescension and hauteur mingled in his tone:
“I am obliged to you, my dear Foltlebarre, but rest will come for me in the due course of things. At present there is duty to be done.”
He opened a telegraphic message from the War Office. It read:
“Communicate whether Captain Cronan Hundredth Fusiliers has been bitten by a snake or a centipede? Family urgently desirous to know.”
A second telegram repeated this message with the addition of the words: “Highly urgent.” Amidst the innumerable interrogations, advices, demands, orders and counter-orders that had reached my lord that day, the casualty of Captain Cronan—who was son-in-law to a personage high in power at the Horse Guards, had figured prominently. My lord, with a stifled sigh of weariness, crossed the room and added the telegram to a file of others, as the orderly sergeant-major ushered in the person who had so urgently sought an interview, and saluted and retired, on the heels of the aide-de-camp.
We know who the stranger was. The interview was brief, and as Ada Merling had prophesied, fruitless. Dunoisse had no sooner made the purport of his visit plain, than my lord said, gently but authoritatively, checking him with a gesture of the hand:
“No more, sir! You have sought me, it may be, in all sincerity, but the obligations of my post forbid me to hear you to the end. You have suffered imprisonment—possibly ill-usage—and your views have become distorted. My sympathy for your evident suffering induces me to be lenient. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to hand you over to the representatives of your country, who would deal with you, harshly, it might be....”
He added: “Do you not suppose that reports and accusations of treachery have not already reached me, as they probably have the French Commander-in-Chief! You must have little experience if you doubt this!... Yet I tell you, that were these accusations true, I should not alter, by one single hair’s-breadth, my method of procedure. For it would be better that the British Army of the East should perish to a man in the trenches before Sevastopol than that England should stoop to show suspicion of her Ally. Our interview is over.... Sir, good-night to you!”
And my lord struck upon a bell that stood upon his portable writing-table, and consigned the dismissed visitor to the guidance of the orderly. So, with a burning brain, and dazed eyes and unsteady feet, Dunoisse passed out into a frosty night, bitten in with cold, white, twinkling stars—and went down, stumbling over the deep ruts of the snow-covered road, towards the lights of the Khutor Farm.