His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the stretcher. Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:
"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry. His horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another. I saw him ride off all right with a wounded comrade behind him. That's all. Goodnight!"
The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling. The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door, stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on either side. They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy staircase. A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went through the kitchen on his way to the door. Then he was in the yard, loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern. An instant, and three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a significant cackling and squawking. The surgeon, now fitting the cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:
"His Excellency is having a little sport. All the same, without water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."
Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans, accelerating their movements with prods of the lance. A general officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at Mariaville. This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of his King.
XLVI
He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after their tremendous charge. The King was reading dispatches, seated on a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire. The farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by which to read.
Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet, of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled about. A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood embers furnished his supper. Water fit for drinking being unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by shot and shell.
The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their holster-cases. The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging. Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting, lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.