It had all occurred so quickly and suddenly that no
one had realised it all, until it was over, and the
lad was lying prone on the ground, his elegant blue
satin coat stained with red, and his antagonist bending
over him.
There was nothing more to be done. Etiquette
demanded that Deroulede should withdraw. He was
not allowed to do anything for the boy whom he had
so unwillingly sent to his death.
As before, no one took much notice of him. Silence,
the awesome silence caused by the presence of the
great Master, fell upon all those around. Only
in the far corner a shrill voice was heard to say:
“I hold you at five hundred louis, Marquis.
The parvenu is a good swordsman.”
The groups parted as Deroulede walked out of the room,
followed by the Colonel and M. de Quettare, who stood
by him to the last. Both were old and proved
soldiers, both had chivalry and courage in them, with
which to do tribute to the brave man whom they had
seconded.
At the door of the establishment, they met the leech
who had been summoned some little time ago to hold
himself in readiness for any eventuality.
The great eventuality had occurred: it was beyond
the leech’s learning. In the brilliantly
lighted saloon above, the only son of the Duc de Marny
was breathing his last, whilst Deroulede, wrapping
his mantle closely round him, strode out into the
dark street, all alone.
The head of the house of Marny was at this time barely
seventy years of age. But he had lived every
hour, every minute of his life, from the day when
the Grand Monarque gave him his first appointment as
gentleman page in waiting when he was a mere lad, barely
twelve years of age, to the moment—some
ten years ago now—when Nature’s relentless
hand struck him down in the midst of his pleasures,
withered him in a flash as she does a sturdy old oak,
and nailed him— a cripple, almost a dotard—to
the invalid chair which he would only quit for his
last resting place.
Juliette was then a mere slip of a girl, an old man’s
child, the spoilt darling of his last happy years.
She had retained some of the melancholy which had
characterised her mother, the gentle lady who had
endured so much so patiently, and who had bequeathed
this final tender burden—her baby girl—to
the briljant, handsome husband whom she had so deeply
loved, and so often forgiven.
When the Duc de Marny entered the final awesome stage
of his gilded career, that deathlike life which he
dragged on for ten years wearily to the grave, Juliette
became his only joy, his one gleam of happiness in
the midst of torturing memories.
In her deep, tender eyes he would see mirrored the
present, the future for her, and would forget his
past, with all its gaieties, its mad, merry years,
that meant nothing now but bitter regrets, and endless
rosary of the might-have-beens.
