That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one another’s throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command after command was ringing out in the street below. “Forward!” shouted a resonant voice, and “Forward! forward! forward!” echoed the voices of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.
The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their toug; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime—and nothing, save the immense monotone of the cannonade.
I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand, snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my shoulders, and cried, “Come in!”
A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to my senses under the surgeon’s probe. But at the touch of her fingers on the door outside, I knew her—I was certain that it could be nobody but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world. 71
She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.
“What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?” she whispered.
“No—oh no. I’m only a fool, and quite hungry, madame.”
She brought the broth and bread and a glass of the most exquisite wine I ever tasted—a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its liquid sunshine.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked, gravely.
“Oh yes—in Morsbronn.”