LITMIR.BIZ

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be said, too, that General D’Hubert’s turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead. General Feraud expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but, from what he felt to be an excessive scrupulousness, refrained for a while.

      “I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet,” he mumbled to himself, leaving carelessly the shelter of his tree. This move was immediately perceived by the resourceful General D’Hubert. He concluded it to be another shift, but when he lost the boots out of the field of the mirror he became uneasy. General Feraud had only stepped a little out of the line, but his adversary could not possibly have supposed him walking up with perfect unconcern. General D’Hubert, beginning to wonder at what had become of the other, was taken unawares so completely that the first warning of danger consisted in the long, early-morning shadow of his enemy falling aslant on his outstretched legs. He had not even heard a footfall on the soft ground between the trees!

      It was too much even for his coolness. He jumped up thoughtlessly, leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of an average man (unless totally paralyzed by discomfiture) would have been to stoop for his weapons, exposing himself to the risk of being shot down in that position. Instinct, of course, is irreflective. It is its very definition. But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing whether in reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of instinct are not affected by the customary mode of thought. In his young days, Armand D’Hubert, the reflective, promising officer, had emitted the opinion that in warfare one should “never cast back on the lines of a mistake.” This idea, defended and developed in many discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain, had become a part of his mental individuality. Whether it had gone so inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply because, as he himself declared afterwards, he was “too scared to remember the confounded pistols,” the fact is that General D’Hubert never attempted to stoop for them. Instead of going back on his mistake, he seized the rough trunk with both hands, and swung himself behind it with such impetuosity that, going right round in the very flash and report of the pistol-shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud. This last, completely unstrung by such a show of agility on the part of a dead man, was trembling yet. A very faint mist of smoke hung before his face which had an extraordinary aspect, as if the lower jaw had come unhinged.

      “Not missed!” he croaked, hoarsely, from the depths of a dry throat.

      This sinister sound loosened the spell that had fallen on General D’Hubert’s senses. “Yes, missed — a bout portant,” he heard himself saying, almost before he had recovered the full command of his faculties. The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury, resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of a lifetime. For years General D ‘Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by an atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by this man’s savage caprice. Besides, General D’Hubert had been in this last instance too unwilling to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape of a desire to kill. “And I have my two shots to fire yet,” he added, pitilessly.

      General Feraud snapped-to his teeth, and his face assumed an irate, undaunted expression. “Go on!” he said, grimly.

      These would have been his last words if General D’Hubert had been holding the pistols in his hands. But the pistols were lying on the ground at the foot of a pine. General D’Hubert had the second of leisure necessary to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man, but as a lover; not as a danger, but as a rival; not as a foe to life, but as an obstacle to marriage. And behold! there was the rival defeated! — utterly defeated, crushed, done for!

      He picked up the weapons mechanically, and, instead of firing them into General Feraud’s breast, he gave expression to the thoughts uppermost in his mind, “You will fight no more duels now.”

      His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General Feraud’s stoicism. “Don’t dawdle, then, damn you for a cold-blooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared out, suddenly, out of an impassive face held erect on a rigidly still body.

      General D’Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was observed with mixed feelings by the other general. “You missed me twice,” the victor said, coolly, shifting both pistols to one hand; “the last time within a foot or so. By every rule of single combat your life belongs to me. That does not mean that I want to take it now.”

      “I have no use for your forbearance,” muttered General Feraud, gloomily.

      “Allow me to point out that this is no concern of mine,” said General D’Hubert, whose every word was dictated by a consummate delicacy of feeling. In anger he could have killed that man, but in cold blood he recoiled from humiliating by a show of generosity this unreasonable being — a fellow-soldier of the Grande Armee, a companion in the wonders and terrors of the great military epic. “You don’t set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do with what’s my own.”

      General Feraud looked startled, and the other continued, “You’ve forced me on a point of honour to keep my life at your disposal, as it were, for fifteen years. Very well. Now that the matter is decided to my advantage, I am going to do what I like with your life on the same principle. You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I choose. Neither more nor less. You are on your honour till I say the word.”

      “I am! But, sacrebleu! This is an absurd position for a General of the Empire to be placed in!” cried General Feraud, in accents of profound and dismayed conviction. “It amounts to sitting all the rest of my life with a loaded pistol in a drawer waiting for your word. It’s — it’s idiotic; I shall be an object of — of — derision.”

      “Absurd? — idiotic? Do you think so?” queried General D’Hubert with sly gravity. “Perhaps. But I don’t see how that can be helped. However, I am not likely to talk at large of this adventure. Nobody need ever know anything about it. Just as no one to this day, I believe, knows the origin of our quarrel. . . . Not a word more,” he added, hastily. “I can’t really discuss this question with a man who, as far as I am concerned, does not exist.”

      When the two duellists came out into the open, General Feraud walking a little behind, and rather with the air of walking in a trance, the two seconds hurried towards them, each from his station at the edge of the wood. General D’Hubert addressed them, speaking loud and distinctly, “Messieurs, I make it a point of declaring to you solemnly, in the presence of General Feraud, that our difference is at last settled for good. You may inform all the world of that fact.”

      “A reconciliation, after all!” they exclaimed together.

      “Reconciliation? Not that exactly. It is something much more binding. Is it not so, General?”

      General Feraud only lowered his head in sign of assent. The two veterans looked at each other. Later in the day, when they found themselves alone out of their moody friend’s earshot, the cuirassier remarked suddenly, “Generally speaking, I can see with my one eye as far as most people; but this beats me. He won’t say anything.”

      “In this affair of honour I understand there has been from first to last always something that no one in the army could quite make out,” declared the chasseur with the imperfect nose. “In mystery it began, in mystery it went on, in mystery it is to end, apparently.”

      General D’Hubert walked home with long, hasty strides, by no means uplifted by a sense of triumph. He had conquered, yet it did not seem to him that he had gained very much by his conquest. The night before he had grudged the risk of his life which appeared to him magnificent, worthy of preservation as an opportunity to win a girl’s love. He had known moments when, by a marvellous illusion, this love seemed to be already his, and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost its special magnificence. It had acquired instead a specially alarming aspect as a snare for the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous illusion of conquered love that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the night, which might have been his last on earth, he comprehended now its true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit. Thus to this man, sobered by the victorious issue

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