As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down heavily. A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a gasp. The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart. All was over. The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and overtook him, crying:
"My Father..." And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:
"Surely, my child. Do you need my poor assistance?"
A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent. And with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic—the face of Voltaire.
There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts. The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there. The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry. In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....
"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"
"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare soutane. And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman. Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the Absolution, the Libera me, Paternoster and Collects, and with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the De Profundis that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:
"My poor prayers are for all my children. Now kneel and make your confession. No one will hear you—it is as though we were together in my poor little church."
"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.
The old man said, looking at him penetratingly: