The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the rear. The prophecy had been verified. He had not yet seen a battle or even a battlefield. But thousands of wounded men, displaying every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes. Ruined châteaux, farms and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered, villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead him home at last.
Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the scorching dust along in clouds.
The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him. By George! if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red underlip.... The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub. The fortune told him by the gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the end, when tute is jasing...."
"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so by a man who knew a bit of Romany. His imagination made a grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War Correspondent.—a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart having been irrevocably given in earlier days. Juliette—still young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity—Juliette in widow's weeds, would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his, gaunt and damp with approaching death. She would hear his story of faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long sleep. And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead face, she would realize that she loved—too late....
He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.
A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at Le Roi de la Prusse, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared unwinkingly before him. Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered, capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his Iron Chancellor by his side.
Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.
Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to the King?
No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five. The hard, somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping, aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache, precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and warm with kindliness.
This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce, prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun: