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Page 2
Briefly they inspected each other, as strangers will, carelessly, with
annoyance and amusement interplaying in their eyes and on their lips,
all in a trifling moment. Then each raised his hat and proceeded, as
tranquilly and unconcernedly as though destiny had no ulterior motive
in bringing them thus really together. And yet, when they had passed
and disappeared from each other's view, both were struck with the fact
that somewhere they had met before.
Fitzgerald went into the tomb, his head bared. The marble underfoot
bore the imprint of many shoes and rubbers and hobnails, of all sizes
and--mayhap--of all nations. He recollected, with a burn on his
cheeks, a sacrilege of his raw and eager youth, some twelve years
since; he had forgotten to take off his hat. Never would he forget the
embarrassment of that moment when the attendant peremptorily bade him
remove it. He, to have forgotten! He, who held Napoleon above all
heroes! The shame of it!
To-day many old soldiers were gathered meditatively round the heavy
circular railing. They were always drawn hither on memorable
anniversaries. Their sires and grandsires had carried some of those
tattered flags, had won them. The tides of time might ebb and flow,
but down there, in his block of Siberian porphyry, slept the hero.
There were some few tourists about this afternoon, muttering over their
guide-books, when nothing is needed on this spot but the imagination;
and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down
sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the
high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the
sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue was as
effective as moonshine.
Napoleon had always been Fitzgerald's ideal hero; but he did not
worship him blindly, no. He knew him to have been a brutal,
domineering man, unscrupulous in politics, to whom woman was either a
temporary toy or a stepping-stone, not over-particular whether she was
a dairy-maid or an Austrian princess; in fact, a rascal, but a great,
incentive, splendid, courageous one, the kind which nature calls forth
every score of years to purge her breast of the petty rascals, to the
benefit of mankind in general. Notwithstanding that he was a rascal,
there was an inextinguishable glamour about the man against which the
bolts of truth, history, letters, biographers broke ineffectually. Oh,
but he had shaken up all Europe; he had made precious kings rattle in
their shoes; he had redrawn a hundred maps; and men had laughed as they
died for him. It is something for a rascal to have evolved the Code
Napoleon. What a queer satisfaction it must be, even at this late day,
nearly a hundred years removed, to any Englishman, standing above this
crypt, to recollect that upon English soil the Great Shadow had never
set his iron heel!
Near to Fitzgerald stood an elderly man and a girl. The old fellow was
a fine type of manhood; perhaps in the sixties, white-haired, and the
ruddy enamel on his cheeks spoke eloquently of sea changes and many
angles of the sun. There was a button in the lapel of his coat, and
from this Fitzgerald assumed that he was a naval officer, probably
retired.
The girl rested upon the railing, her hands folded, and dreamily her
gaze wandered from trophy to trophy; from the sarcophagus to the
encircling faces, from one window to another, and again to the porphyry
beneath. And Fitzgerald's gaze wandered, too. For the girl's face was
of that mold which invariably draws first the eye of a man, then his
intellect, then his heart, and sometimes all three at once. The face
was as lovely as a rose of Taormina. Dark brown were her eyes, dark
brown was her hair. She was tall and lithe, too, with the subtle hint
of the woman. There were good taste and sense in her garments. A
bunch of Parma violets was pinned against her breast.
"A well-bred girl," was the grateful spectator's silent comment. "No
new money there. I wish they'd send more of them over here. But it
appears that, with few exceptions, only freaks can afford to travel."
Between Fitzgerald and the girl was a veteran. He had turned eighty if
a day. His face was powder-blown, an empty sleeve, was folded across
his breast, and the medal of the Legion of Honor fell over the Sleeve.
As the girl and her elderly escort, presumably her father, turned about
to leave, she unpinned the flowers and offered them impulsively to the
aged hero.
"Take these, _mon brave_," she said lightly; "you have fought for
France."
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