A TALE OF THE FRANCO-ENGLISH WAR NINETY YEARS AGO.
By AGNES GIBERNE, Author of “Sun, Moon and Stars,” “The Girl at the Dower House,” etc.
THE RELEASE OF ONE.
Jack’s uneasiness grew as days went by. Denham was certainly in a condition by no means satisfactory. This last heavy blow—the death of his adored Chief, of the man who had been to him as a guiding star from boyhood—seemed to have shaken his hold on life, and the old courage and energy were gone. Though he struggled on, it was in a listless fashion.
Even the assurance as to Polly’s constancy could not arouse him. The lassitude which oppressed him was unconquerable.
“It is so much the worse for her,” he said dejectedly to Jack. “If she could forget me, she at least might be happy. She is wasting the best years of her life in this miserable waiting. I may be out here another ten years. Or I may never go home.”
“You don’t wish her to forget you, my dear fellow.”
“For her sake I could be glad. Not for my own.”
“Fact is, there’s no manner of use in expecting you to take reasonable views of things, while your head is in this state,” said Jack.
But he became so troubled that he confided his cares to Lucille. He could not worry the Colonel or Mrs. Baron, who were anxious enough already.
“I’m not at all happy about him, and that’s the solemn truth,” Jack declared confidentially a fortnight or so after his arrival. “I don’t like the look in his eyes, or here,” drawing a finger across his brow. “And as for strength, just see him this afternoon. He’s utterly floored by that stroll on the ramparts. Why, in old days he’d do his twenty or thirty miles at a stretch, and get back as fresh as he started. He didn’t know what it was to be done up.”
Lucille had not the least idea why, at this point, she should find herself to be confiding to Jack a secret which she had told to nobody else. She and he were becoming extremely good friends. Jack had taken to Lucille on the spot, when they were first introduced, and the feeling was returned. Still Lucille had not meant to let anybody know what she had done. Somehow it slipped out.
She had long wondered whether it might not be possible to obtain leave for Denham to return home. Some few among the détenus had been permitted by the Emperor to do so, under exceptional circumstances. And Captain Ivor was a soldier. It was well known that, if Napoleon were chivalrous to anybody, he would be so first of all to a soldier. He was always harder upon civilians.
At the Emperor’s Court an old friend of hers moved—one who had been formerly a Royalist, and who now for some years had attached himself to the fortunes of Buonaparte. Lucille had found it hard to pardon this change of front in her old friend—more strictly her parents’ friend—and intercourse between the two had been almost dropped. Yet Lucille had heard of him from time to time, and she knew that he was not one to forget the past, the more so in her case since that past included a heavy debt of gratitude from him to Lucille’s father.
It had one day occurred to her that she might write to this friend, explaining about Captain Ivor’s failing health, and begging him to intercede with the Emperor for permission for Ivor to go home. Lucille did not tell Jack—it was not needful—how many days she had held out against this notion. Not for Denham’s sake, but for her own. He had been so long the main centre of thought in her quiet existence, that she could hardly now picture life at Verdun without him. Not that she was exactly in love with Ivor, because from the very beginning she had always known him to be Polly’s, and she had not permitted him to become to her what he might easily have become. But she was very much his friend.
So she hesitated, till one day the selfishness of her own hesitation broke upon her, awakened by some fresh view of his altered looks. Then at once she acted. She wrote to the friend, putting the matter before him, frankly stating her own belief that Ivor was in point of fact slowly dying of captivity, and entreating him, in memory of old days, to interest himself in the matter, and, if possible, to get permission for Ivor’s return to England.
The friend, whose name Lucille did not mention to Jack, had answered her letter. He had written kindly, cordially, promising to take an opportunity sooner or later to lay the matter before the Emperor. He might or might not meet with success; but, at least, Mademoiselle de St. Roques could depend upon him to do his best for her English friend.
“And you think there is the smallest hope?” Jack said incredulously. He did not know that, at this very time or soon after, Major Charles Napier, taken prisoner in the Battle of Coruña, was generously released by Marshal Ney and sent to England, because he had there an old blind mother. The proviso was made only that he should count himself a prisoner on parole, debarred from fighting, until an exchange had been arranged for him, which in the course of a few months was done. Ney took this step on his own responsibility out of sheer kindliness of heart, not knowing whether the Emperor might not be seriously angry with his action. But the Emperor endorsed his decision with a readiness hardly to have been expected from that man of fire and blood. Even Napoleon was not so utterly bad in all respects as he was painted by some of his contemporaries. He might and did hate with a virulent hatred the British nation as a whole, he could be harsh to civilian détenus, and he was brutal to women; but to the individual English soldier he was quite capable of showing generosity.
“I cannot tell. There is no certainty—none,” Lucille answered. “But, until I hear from my friend that all is hopeless, I will not give up hope. You will not say one word to the Colonel or to Mrs. Baron—least of all to Captain Ivor?”
“Trust me—I’m staunch!” declared Jack. “Never do to raise his hopes for nothing.” Jack himself had not the faintest expectation of any result from Lucille’s efforts. None the less, he was gratified to be treated as her confidant. He liked her immensely and increasingly.
As a matter of course Jack had taken up his abode under the same roof with the Barons. Roy’s former room was given to him, and he made a markedly cheerful addition to the family circle.
One evening, some ten days later, they were together after dinner. Jack was dictating a letter to Molly, having pressed Lucille into his service as amanuensis. Whether the letter would ever reach its destination was doubtful; but Jack had resolved to send it off, and his right arm was still incapable. The Colonel was reading, his wife was working, and Denham for an hour past had not stirred or spoken. They all knew what this meant, and mercifully left him alone, speaking themselves in subdued tones. Jack’s glance wandered often towards the motionless figure in the sofa corner, and in the midst of his dictation he paused to murmur—
“Head as bad as ever.”
“Oui!” Lucille said with a sigh. “All day; and now he is quite ‘done,’ and can keep up no longer. It is always so. What am I to write next? Ah, I am called! Somebody wants me. Will you excuse—till I come back?”
Jack amused himself during her absence by scrawling caricatures with his left hand upon the unfinished sheet. Then Lucille came swiftly in, running, as if with joy, while her eyes were full of tears. Her face seemed to shine, and a suppressed sob could be heard in her voice as she panted—
“Something for Captain Ivor!”
Denham looked up slowly as she came to his side; and, though he received the packet from her hand, he would have put it aside without attention.
“Ouvrez-le, ouvrez-le, vîte!” she urged impatiently.
“Who brought it?”
“A gentleman travelling from Paris. Ouvrez-le!”
Denham roused himself with difficulty to obey.
“A passport!” he said with listless surprise and a slight laugh. “Not the passport for Roy surely? Rather late in the day.”
“But read—read!” implored Lucille; and he made an effort to do so. Then a rush of colour came, and he looked at Lucille, a strange gleam in his eyes.
“This!—What does it mean?”
“It means that you are free! Free to go home.”
From the others broke a chorus of exclamations.
“Buonaparte’s signature! It must be all right!” Ivor spoke in a bewildered tone. “But what can have made him choose me? Why not Colonel Baron?”
“Are you not glad?”
“Glad!” The word was too absurdly inadequate. He walked across to Colonel Baron. “Will you read this, sir? Tell me if I understand it rightly.”
Colonel Baron complied, then passed the papers on to his wife and Jack, while he grasped Ivor’s hand.
“I congratulate you with all my heart,” he said. “Nothing could have given me greater delight. For your sake, not for ours.”
“But to leave you all here still——”
“Don’t think of that. Your duty is to go. Your being here does not make our captivity easier. No”—decidedly, in answer to a glance—“not when you look as you have done lately.”
“What are the conditions? I can’t read to-day.”
“Not to bear arms against the French Army for twelve months from the date of your reaching England, unless an exchange is arranged sooner. It will not be, of course! There is no exchange for détenus. That only means that for one year you will be still a prisoner on parole; only in England instead of in France. It will take you some months to grow strong enough for fighting.”
“I am strong already,” was the answer; and even in those few minutes it was remarkable how his face had changed, gaining a healthier tint and losing its languor, while the very hollows seemed to be already filling up. “One year from the day I arrive in England! Then I must be off at once—not lose a day.”
“Next week,” suggested Jack.
“To-morrow. But I cannot understand. What can have induced the Emperor to free me? Why me more than any other détenu?”
“Ask Mademoiselle de St. Roques,” said Jack; and this brought upon Lucille a flood of questions. She related simply, and in few words, what she had done, not specifying, as she had specified to Jack, the precise manner of description given of Ivor’s health.
Denham lifted her hand to his lips.
“It is you, then, whom I have to thank!” he said, much moved. “But no thanks could repay what you have done. I can never forget this debt.”
Then he turned to Mrs. Baron.
“You have said nothing yet!”
“Dear Denham, how can I not be pleased—for you?” she asked tearfully. “You would not wish me to pretend that we shall not miss you terribly—every hour! But indeed I am thankful. I know how you have suffered. And this will do you good. He is better even now, is he not, Lucille?”
“Jack seems to have come in time to take my place,” remarked Denham, which Jack declared to be “a truly heartless observation.”
“Mademoiselle de St. Roques will have to petition the Emperor next on my behalf! Eh, Mademoiselle?”
One grey shadow lay on Ivor’s happiness, of which Jack alone was allowed a glimpse, when the two were together late at night.
“If it had but been to serve once more under him!” broke from Denham, in a tone which Jack too well understood. The sorrow of that loss, to those who had known John Moore personally, could end only with life itself.
(To be continued.)