The great Tsar died. Marshal Boisrobert retired, and was succeeded by Grandguerrier, the hot, fierce, stout little warrior of whom we know. When Dalgan breathed his last—when the gallant gray head sank under its overwhelming burden of overwork, exertion, grief, and anxiety—that is an unforgettable picture of the French Marshal standing by the deathbed in the bare room of the wooden farmhouse, his broad shoulders heaving—his swarthy, convulsed face hidden in the thick stout hands—weeping and sobbing unrestrainedly as a child for the friend who was no more.
He had a tender heart, that little, fiery man who had become Commander-in-Chief of France’s Imperial Army. Henriette might have been happy, had she married him.... And how exquisitely she would have played her part as Madame la Maréchale one may imagine, had not Fate stepped in, in the person of a little drummer of the Line.
For she visited the military hospitals of Kamiesch a few days subsequently to her arrival. As she was leaving the last ward, one of the Sisters of Mercy in charge pointed out to her this youth of eighteen, who had been blinded in both eyes by the explosion of a shell. And Henriette, glancing pitifully at the swollen, bandaged face upon the pillow, said with a shudder:
“Poor young man! How sad that he should suffer so cruelly! Ah! if his mother could only see him now!”
Some tone of the speaker’s seemed to reach the consciousness of the fevered sufferer upon the narrow pallet. He stretched out yellow, bony arms, groping towards the unseen sweetness. He turned his bandaged head towards it, and said, in a voice between a rattle and a gasp:
“Mother, mother, mother! They have brought you to me at last! Come and hold me, mother, my mother! Come and kiss me, and I shall get quite well!”
The nun in charge would have dissuaded Henriette, saying that the patient was not only wounded, but was suspected to be suffering from a malignant kind of fever, the true character of which had not yet declared itself. But Henriette was obstinate. She felt so strangely happy that day—it seemed to her that she must do something for somebody. And she ran to the squalid pallet and knelt beside it, saying, as though the little drummer had been a child indeed:
“Yes, yes!—I am your mother!... Come, now, be good! You disturb the other little ones. Be patient!—be quiet!—by-and-by you shall get well!”
She had never been so tender to one of the little pig-tailed girls who had been brought up by the market-gardener’s wife at Bagnères—but you will remember that Henriette could never say No! to a man. So, as the drummer still moaned to be held and kissed and cosseted, Henriette yielded, and touched with her own lips the poison-breathing lips of the pestilence-stricken—and laid the bandaged head upon her beautiful bosom—and hushed and soothed it there. She coaxed the drummer into taking food and medicine. She sang a cradle-rhyme and she rocked the dying lad to rest. Not the naughty little witch-song about the Archbishop’s cupboard, but a vague, tender lullaby, dealing with Our Lady, lilies, roses, angels and stars.