The Firefly of France Part 25

Well, she wouldn't misjudge me, I felt sure; and neither would Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier. He would know that I was acting as, in my place, he would have acted, that I didn't mean to let Franz von Blenheim defy France and go off untouched.

The whole world seemed mysteriously to have narrowed to one girl, Esme.

How I had lived before I saw her; how, having seen her, I could ever have lived without her,--I didn't know. But the sound of grinding brakes roused me. We were slowing up in obedience to a signal from a canvas-covered, half-demolished shelter filled with men in blue uniforms; we were coming to a standstill. Blenheim leaned out, and for a moment I saw his face in the beam of light from the sentry's lantern. It looked thin and set. He was giving beneath the strain.

"Behold my comrade!" He thrust our papers into the hands of the sentry.

"And make haste, for the love of heaven! We are waited for _la-bas_."

I cast a quick glance at my body-guard, whose anxious eyes were on the sentinel. His pistol still lay against my side, but his thoughts were far away. It was the moment. With the rapidity of lightning I knocked his arm up, caught his wrist, and clung to it, calling out simultaneously in a voice of crisp command.

"My friends," I cried in French, "I order you to arrest these persons!

They are agents of the kaiser! They are German spies!"

The pistol, clutched between us, exploded harmlessly into the air.

I head shouts, saw men running toward us. Then I caught sight of Blenheim's face, dark and oddly contorted; he had turned and was leveling his revolver at me, resting one knee on the driver's seat as he took deliberate aim.

"I say," I cried again, struggling for the weapon, "that this is Franz von Blenheim, that these are men of the kaiser, spying, in disguise--"

It seemed to me that some one caught Blenheim's arm from behind just as he fired; but I was not certain. For suddenly that same whistling shriek sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm. Blackness enveloped me, and I dropped into a bottomless pit.

CHAPTER XXV

AT RAINCY-LA-TOUR

When I opened my eyes it was with a peculiarly reluctant feeling, for my eyelids were so heavy that they seemed to weigh a ton. My head was unspeakably groggy, and I had quite lost my memory. I couldn't, if suddenly interrogated, have replied with one intelligent bit of information about myself, not even with my name.

Flat on my back I was lying, gazing up at what, surprisingly, seemed to be a ceiling festooned with garlands of roses and painted with ladies and cavaliers, idling about a stretch of greensward, decidedly in the Watteau style. Where was I? What had happened to make me feel so helpless? It reminded me of an episode of my childhood, a day when my pony had fallen and rolled upon me, and I had been carried home with two crushed ribs and a broken arm.

Coming out at that time from the influence of the ether, I had found Dunny at my bedside. If only he were here now! I looked round. Why, there he was, sitting in a brocaded chair by the window, his dear old silver head thrown back, dozing beyond a doubt.

To see him gave me a warm, comforted, homelike feeling. Nor did it surprise me, but my surroundings did. The room, a veritable Louis Quinze jewel in its paneling, carving, and gilding, might have come direct from Versailles by parcel post; my bed was garlanded and curtained in rose-color. Where I had gone to sleep last night I couldn't remember; but it hadn't, I was obstinately sure, been here.

What ailed me, anyhow? I began a series of cautious experiments, designed to discover the trouble. My arms were weak and of a strange, flabby limpness, but they moved. So did my left leg; but when I came to the right one I was baffled. It wouldn't stir; it was heavily encased in something. Good heavens! now I knew! It was in a plaster cast.

The shock of the discovery taught me something further, namely, that my head was liable to excruciating little throbs of pain. I raised a hand to it. My forehead was swathed in bandages, like a turbaned Turk's.

Oh, to be sure, in the castle at Prezelay, as we were retreating up the staircase, Schwartzmann had fired at me; but, then, hadn't that been a pin p.r.i.c.k, the merest scratch?

The name Prezelay served as a key to solve the puzzle. The whole fantastic, incredible chain of happenings came back to me in a rush; the gray car, the inn, the murder, the night in the castle, Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier.

"Dunny!" I heard myself quavering in a voice utterly unlike my own.

The figure in the chair started up and hurried toward me, and then Dunny's hands were holding my hands, his eyes looking into mine.

"There, Dev, there! Take it easy," the familiar voice was soothing me.

"Hold on to me, my boy, You are safe now. You're all right!"

My safety, however, seemed of small importance for the time being.

"Dunny," I implored, "listen! You have got to find out for me about a girl. How am I to tell you, though? If I start the story, you'll think I'm raving."

"I know all about it, Dev," my guardian rea.s.sured me. "I've seen Miss Falconer. She's absolutely safe."

If that were so, I could relax, and I did with fervent thankfulness. Not for long, however; my brain had begun to work.

"See here! I want to know who has been playing football with me," was my next demand, which Dunny answered obligingly, if with a slightly dubious face.

"That French doctor, nice young chap, said you weren't to talk," he muttered, "but if I were in your place I'd want to know a few things myself. It was this way, Dev. A fragment of a sh.e.l.l struck you--"

"A fragment!" I raised weak eyebrows. "I know better. Twenty sh.e.l.ls at least, and whole!"

"--and didn't strike your Teuton friends," he charged on, suddenly purple of visage. "It was a true German sh.e.l.l, my boy, the devil looking after his own. The man in the seat with you was cut up a bit; the other two were thrown clear of the motor. If you hadn't already given the alarm, they would probably have got off scot-free. As it was, the French held a drumhead court martial a little later, and all three of the fellows--well, you can fill in the rest."

I was silent for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim's dark, grim face. No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of the hall at Prezelay.

"As for you," Dunny was continuing, "you seem to have puzzled them finely. There you were in a French uniform, at your last gasp apparently, and with an American pa.s.sport, that you seem to have clung to through thick and thin, inside your coat. They took a chance on you, though, because you had made them a present of the Franz von Blenheim; and by the next day, thanks to Miss Falconer and the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour, you were being looked for all over France.

"So that's how it stands. You're at Raincy-la-Tour now, at the duke's chateau. The place has been a hospital ever since the war began. Only you're not with the other wounded. You are--well--a rather special patient in the pavilion across the lake; and you're by way of being a hero. The day I landed, the first paper I saw shrieked at me how you had tracked the kaiser's star agent and outwitted him and handed him over to justice."

"The deuce it did!" I exclaimed. "You must have been puffed up with pride."

My guardian's jaw set itself rigidly. "I was too busy," was his grim answer. "You see, the end of the statement said there was no hope that you could survive. And when I got here I found you with fever, delirium, one leg shot up, four bits of sh.e.l.l in your head, a fine case of brain concussion. That was nearly three weeks ago, and it seems more like three years!"

An idea, at this point, made me fix a searching gaze on him.

"By the way," I asked accusingly, "how did you happen to arrive so opportunely on this side? It seemed as natural as possible to find you settled here waiting for my eyes to open; but on second thoughts I suppose you didn't fly?"

He looked extraordinarily embarra.s.sed.

"Why," he growled at length, "I had business. I got a cablegram soon after you left New York. The thing was confoundedly inconvenient, but I had no choice about it."

"Dunny," I said weakly, but sternly, "you didn't bring me up to tell whoppers, not bare-faced ones like that, anyhow, that wouldn't deceive the veriest child. What earthly business could you have over here in war-time? Own up, now, and take your medicine like a man."

His guilty air was sufficient answer.

"Well, Dev," he acknowledged, "it was your cable. That Gibraltar mess was a nasty one, and I didn't like its looks. I'm getting old, and you're all I've got; so I took a pa.s.sport and caught the _Rochambeau_.

Not, of course, that I doubted your ability to take care of yourself, my boy--"

"Didn't you? You might have," I admitted with some ruefulness, "if you had known I was bucking both the Allied governments and the picked talent of the Central powers. It was too much. I was riding for a fall, and I got it. But I don't mind saying, Dunny, I'm infernally glad you came."

He wiped his eyes.

"Well, you go to sleep now," he counseled gruffly. "You've got to get well in a hurry; there's work for you to do! All sorts of things have been happening since that _obus_ knocked you out. Just a week ago, for instance, the President went before Congress and--"

"What's that you say? Not war?"

"Yes, war, young man! We're in it at last, up to our necks; in it with men and s.h.i.+ps and munitions and foodstuffs and everything else we have to help with, praise the Lord! You'll fight beneath the Stars and Stripes, instead of under the Tricolor. I say, Dev, that's positively the last word I'll utter. You've got to rest!"

In a weak, quavering fas.h.i.+on, but with sincere enthusiasm, I tried to celebrate by singing a few bars of the "Star-Spangled Banner" and a little of the "Ma.r.s.eillaise." Dunny was right, however; the conversation had exhausted me. In the midst of my patriotic demonstration I fell asleep.