The pain was intolerable to-night,—almost too bad to bear without shrieking. Dunoisse set his old face into an ivory mask of stern resistance, and his white mustache and arched and still jet-black eyebrows bristled fiercely, and the cold drops of anguish gathered upon the sunken purple-veined temples upon which the silky silver hair was growing sparse and thin. Ouf!... what unutterable relief it would have been to clench his fists, even!... But the poor hands, helpless as a wax doll’s or a wooden puppet’s, refused to obey his will.
He lay rigid and silent, but his brain worked with vivid, feverish activity, and his glance roved restlessly round the white-papered walls of the airy, cleanly room. Shabby frames containing spotted daguerreotypes and faded old cartes-de-visite of friends long dead; some water-color portraits and engravings of battle-scenes, hung there; with some illuminated addresses, a few more modern photographs, a glazed case of Orders and Crosses, a cheap carved rack of well-smoked pipes, and—drawn up against the painted wainscot—an imposing array of boots of all nationalities, kinds and descriptions, in various stages of wear. His small library of classics filled a hanging shelf, while a pair of plain deal bookcases were stuffed with publications in half-a-dozen European languages, chiefly well-known reference-works upon Anatomy and Physiology, Surgery and Medicine; whilst a row of paper-bound, officially-stamped Government publications—one or two of these from his own painstaking, laborious pen—dealt with the organization, equipment and sanitation of Military Field Hospitals, Hospital Ships and Hospital Trains, the clothing, diet and care of sick and wounded, and, in relation to these, the Laws and Customs of grim and ghastly War. And a traveling chest of drawers, a bath, and a portable secretary, battered and ink-stained by half a century of honorable use; with the scanty stock of antique garments hanging in the white-pine press; a meager store of fine, exquisitely darned and mended old-world linen; an assortment of neckties, wonderfully out of date; some old felt wideawakes, and three black velvet caps, with a camel’s hair bournous, that had served for many years as a dressing-gown; and the bust of a woman, in marble supported on a slender ebony pedestal set between the windows, completed the inventory of the worldly possessions of old Hector Dunoisse.
All that he owned on earth, these few shabby chattels, these dimmed insignia, with their faded ribbons—this man who had once been greatly rich, and prodigally generous, subsisted now in his helpless age upon a small annuity, purchased when he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. What bitter tears had been wrung from the bright black eyes when he was compelled to accept this charity! But it had to be; the burden of his great humanitarian labors had exhausted his last energies and his remaining funds; and Want had risen up beside his bed of sickness, and laid upon him, who had cheered away her specter from so many pallets, her chill and meager hand.
Ah, how he loved the glaring daguerreotypes, the spotty photographs, the old cheap prints! Far, far more dearly than the Rembrandts and Raphaels, the Watteaus and the three superb portraits by Velasquez that he had sold to the Council of the Louvre, and the Austrian Government and the Trustees of the National Gallery. The cabinets of rare and antique medals, the collection of Oriental porcelain and Royal Sèvres that had been bequeathed to him with the immense private fortune of Luitpold, the long-deceased Prince-Regent of Widinitz, that had also been disposed of under the hammer to supply his needs for funds,—always more funds,—had never possessed one-tenth of the preciousness of these poor trifles. For everything was a memento or token of something done or borne, given or achieved towards the fulfillment of the one great end.
The chibuk with the bowl of gilded red clay, the cherry-stick stem and the fine amber mouthpiece, an officer of the English Guards had forced upon Dunoisse at Balaklava. The inkstand, a weighty sphere of metal mounted on three grape-shot, with a detached fourth for the lid—that was a nine-pound shell from the Sandbag Battery. And the helmet-plate with a silver-plated Austrian Eagle and the brass device like a bomb, with a tuft of green metal oak-leaves growing out of the top, that was a souvenir of the bloody field of Magenta. It had been pressed upon Dunoisse by a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Ensign of Austrian Infantry, whom he had rescued from under a hecatomb of dead men and horses, still living, but blackened from asphyxia, the colors of his regiment yet clutched in his cramped and blackened hands.
Even the bournous, the voluminous long-sleeved, hooded garment of gray-white camel’s hair, bordered with delicate embroideries of silver and orange-red floss silk—that had its touching history; that had been also the legacy of one who had nothing else to give.
“He was an Arab of pure blood, a pious Moslem, Sergeant-Major in the First Regiment of Spahis, a chief in his own right. He fell in the assault upon the Hill of Cypres. Towards the end of the day, when the sun had set upon Solferino’s field of carnage, and the pale moon was reflected in the ponds of blood that had accumulated in every depression of the ravaged ground, we found him, riddled with bullets, pierced with wounds, leaning with his back against a little tree, his bleeding Arab stallion standing by him as he prayed in the words of the Prophet: ‘Lord, grant me pardon, and join me to the companionship on high!...’ He died two nights later upon a heap of bloody straw in the Church of Santa Rosalia at Castiglione. This had been strapped in the roll behind his saddle—his young bride had embroidered the gold and silken ornaments; in the field it had served him as a covering, and until the dead-cart came to remove the corpse,—as a pall.”
More relics yet. The broken lock of a Garibaldian musket from Calatifimi. The guard of a Papal soldier’s saber from Castel Fidardo, brown with Sardinian blood.
More still.... The gilded ornament from the staff-top of a Prussian Eagle—a souvenir of Liebenau, or was it Hühnerwasser? A Uhlan lance-head from Hochhausen. An exploded cartridge gathered on the field of Alcolea, where the Spanish Royalists were beaten in 1868. And a French chassepot and a Prussian needle-gun, recalling the grim tragedy of 1870 and the unspeakable disaster of Sedan. While a fantastically chased cross of Abyssinian gold, and a Bersagliere’s plume of cocks’ feathers, their glossy dark green marred with dried blood, were eloquent of the massacre of the Italian troops at Dagoli, in ’87.