“Nothing to speak of,” he answered, gruffly. “Will you sit down?”
She sat down, then. Through her veil he could not tell what her expression was, but he was uneasily conscious of the black pools that lurked there, searching his scarred soul to its depths, and finding it evil. He was in no condition to meet her, half drugged with stale alcohol, shaken to his inmost being by reaction against the poisoning of weeks, jumpy, imaginative, broken of mind and body.
His eyes did not meet hers squarely. They shifted, sidelong and bloodshot. But she might have read in them something of despair, something of sullenness, something of shame, but mostly she could have seen a plea for mercy, and perhaps she did.
If so, she did not yield to the plea—at first. In a cold, steely voice she told him what he was. In incisive French she rebaptized him a coward, a 135 beast, a low and disgusting thing. Her voice, curiously beautiful even in rage, cut and dissected him and laid him bare.
She painted for him what a gentleman and a soldier should be and contrasted with it what he was. She sketched for him all the glory and the fame of the men who had led the soldiers of France, neither sparing nor exalting, but showing them to be, at least, men who had courage and command of themselves or had striven for it. She contrasted them with his own weakness and supineness and degradation. Then, her voice softening subtly, she shifted the picture to what he had been, to his days of unutterable lowness in the Legion, the five years of brutal struggle, fiercely won promotion. His gaining of a commission, the cachet of respectability, his years of titanic struggle and study and work through the hardly won grades of the army.
She made him see himself as something glorious, rising from obscurity to respect and influence; made him see himself as he knew he was not; made him see his own courage, which he had; his ability, which he also had; and, what it had not, great pride, noble impulses, legitimate ambition. When she painted the truth, he did not respond, but when she pictured credits he did not deserve he winced and longed to earn them.
“And, after all this,” she said wearily, at last, “you descend—to this? It would seem that one might 136 even gauge the depths from which you rose by the length and swiftness of the fall. Is it that you have exhausted yourself in the effort that went before?”
De Launay stared at the floor with dull eyes.
“What would you expect of a légionnaire?” he muttered.
“Nothing!” she cried, angrily. “Nothing from the légionnaire! But, in the name of God, cannot one expect more than this from the man who wears the medaille militaire, the grand cross of the legion, who won a colonelcy in Champagne, a brigade at Verdun, a division at the Chemin des Dames, and who, as all know, should have had an army corps after the Balkan campaign? From such a man as that, from him, monsieur, one expects everything!”