For Love of a Bedouin Maid

by Voleur

Presently he started to his feet, and then could be seen the havoc wrought upon his countenance by grief and disappointment. The bloom of health was gone, and his cheeks were pale and sunken, the bones above them bulging over the cavities below; the flesh hung down in leathery folds; deep lines scored his forehead, and his eyes, dim and lusterless, were seated far back in their sockets. Nothing in his appearance recalled the gay lieutenant of the Directory.

He began to pace his narrow cell with rapid steps, as though he hoped thereby to thrust away from him the thought of his impending fate. Backwards and forwards, like a caged animal, he tramped the straitened chamber; but, though he speeded his footsteps till they approached a run, he could put no space between his thoughts and him; he knew that hope had flown; their plot had failed, and he was lost.

With a sigh, so deep and loud that it sounded like a groan, he checked his restless pacing, and sank once more wearily on to the wooden stool.

Then, like the fugitive figures in a kaleidoscope, the late occurrences, that had followed each other in a rush, arranged themselves in changing pictures before his mental eye, and thought moved with them.

The picture of his wife came first, standing in the pavilion in the garden of Hartford House, her lovely face glowing with excitement at Cadoudal's news and the prospect of the speedy success of their conspiracy. He had taken leave of her and the Comte d'Artois and Cadoudal there and then, and started forthwith on his mission to the heads of the conspiracy. What was she doing now? By her obstinacy and vindictiveness she had wrought his ruin. Not intentionally, but it had been the necessary sequence of her conduct. Despite his passion for her, the anger raged so fiercely in him, that, for the moment, he felt he almost hated her; that, if she then had stood before him, he could have struck her down. He cursed the mad infatuation that had merged his life in hers.

Then he followed in imagination his movements in that fateful journey, from the moment of his leaving her; his drive that night by poste chaise to the little town of Alfriston in Sussex, and the breakfast that followed at the Star Inn there. Then his embarkation, at the mouth of the Cuckmere River, upon Captain Wright's sloop, and the midnight landing below the cliff at Bévile. He could almost feel himself now being hauled up that cliff with a swinging him round and round and bruising him against protruding lumps of chalk; he could almost hear the screaming of the gulls disturbed by him in his ascent.

He recalled the days of terror that had followed, when each conspirator (traveling for the most part without papers) sometimes as a beggar, sometimes as a pedlar, secretly and swiftly as he could, tramped his way along the country that lay between the sea and Paris. He thought of the many perils of discovery he had undergone from barking dogs at country houses on his way, and the espionage, and suspicions of some of the Government officials; of his manner of getting into Paris, hidden, as he had been, under the tarpaulin of a hay-wagon, whose driver he had hoodwinked into the belief that he was a deserter.

Then onward marched his thoughts and he found himself at Ettenheim with the Duc d'Enghien. He remembered that that visit had been rendered futile by the Duc's mistress, who had besought her lover not to risk his life in France, but to abide where he then was; and that her arguments had prevailed.

At this, he had gone on to Paris to report the failure of his mission to the Duc; and there had been a period of awful waiting, of terrible suspense. Then, when everything had seemed ripe for action, still no active steps had been taken; everyone had seemed afraid to make the plunge into the whirlpool of revolt. And, while they had hesitated, whispers of treachery had been heard, at first vague and contradictory; gradually they had gathered strength, and, at last, the news had thundered on them that Moreau and Pichegru had been arrested, and that the Comte d'Artois had fled precipitately to the coast.

Their leaders gone, the others had feared to rise; and he himself had hurried again to Ettenheim to warn the Duc d'Enghien of his danger.