THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JOSEPH CONRAD. Джозеф КонрадЧитать онлайн книгу.

      His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General Feraud's stoicism.

      "Don't dawdle then, damn you for a coldblooded staff-coxcomb!" he roared out suddenly out of an impassive face held erect on a rigid body.

      General D'Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was observed with a sort of gloomy astonishment by the other general.

      "You missed me twice," he began 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 savagely.

      "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 this unreasonable being—a fellow soldier of the Grand Armée, his companion in the wonders and terrors of the military epic. "You don't set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do with what is 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."

      "I am! But sacrebleu! This is an absurd position for a general of the empire to be placed in," cried General Feraud, in the accents of profound and dismayed conviction. "It means for me to be 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 argumentatively 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 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 or even a little farther than 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, and 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, but it did not seem to him 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 even moments when by a marvellous illusion this love seemed to him already his and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost it special magnificence. It wore 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 of a duel, life appeared robbed of much of its charm simply because it was no longer menaced.

      Approaching the house from the back through the orchard and the kitchen gardens, he could not notice the agitation which reigned in front. He never met a single soul. Only upstairs, while walking softly along the corridor, he became aware that the house was awake and much more noisy than usual. Names of servants were being called out down below in a confused noise of coming and going. He noticed with some concern that the door of his own room stood ajar, though the shutters had not been opened yet. He had hoped that his early excursion would have passed unperceived. He expected to find some servant just gone in; but the sunshine filtering through the usual cracks enabled him to see lying on the low divan something bulky which had the appearance of two women clasped in each other's arms. Tearful and consolatory murmurs issued mysteriously from that appearance. General D'Hubert pulled open the nearest pair of shutters violently. One of the women then jumped up. It was his sister. She stood for a moment with her hair hanging down and her arms raised straight up above her head, and then flung herself with a stifled cry into his arms. He returned her embrace, trying at the same time to disengage himself from it. The other woman had not risen. She seemed, on the contrary, to cling closer to the divan, hiding her face in the cushions. Her hair was also loose; it was admirably fair. General D'Hubert recognised it with staggering emotion. Mlle. de Valmassigue! Adèle! In distress!

      He became greatly alarmed and got rid of his sister's hug definitely. Madame Léonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir, pointing dramatically at the divan:

      "This poor terrified child has rushed here two miles from home on foot—running all the way."

      "What on earth has happened?" asked General D'Hubert in a low, agitated voice. But Madame Léonie was speaking loudly.

      "She rang the great bell at the gate and roused all the household—we were all asleep yet. You may imagine what a terrible shock.... Adèle, my dear child, sit up."

      General D'Hubert's expression was not that of a man who imagines with facility. He did, however, fish out of chaos the notion that his prospective mother-in-law had died suddenly, but only to dismiss it at once. He could not conceive the nature of the event, of the catastrophe which could induce Mlle, de Valmassigue living in a house full of servants, to bring the news over the fields herself, two miles, running all the way.

      "But why are you in this room?" he whispered, full of awe.

      "Of course I ran up to see and this child... I did not notice it—she followed me. It's that absurd Chevalier," went on Madame Léonie, looking towards the divan.... "Her hair's come down. You may imagine she did not stop to call her maid to dress it before she started.... Adèle, my dear, sit up.... He blurted it all out to her at half-past four in the morning. She woke up early, and opened her shutters, to breathe the fresh air, and saw him sitting collapsed on a garden bench at the end of