"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."
She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.
It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust. But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have known....
Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted again—never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee—but I could not help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come. For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."
She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.
"Help! Some drink! Donner! how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.
P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough Teutonic gutturals:
"Hereabouts or near. Begin this—widening the way until carts can get through to be loaded.... Kreuzdonnerwetter! is that a dog up there?"
Another voice answered: