"It didn't matter a bra.s.s farden!" I hastened to a.s.sure her, for she had paused and was gazing at me, large-eyed and pale. "Don't think of that any more. Suppose we skip to Paris! Blenheim followed you there, hoping he was on the scent of the vanished papers; and when you arrived at the rue St.-Dominique, there was still no news of the duke."

"No news," she mourned; "not a word. And Enid was ill and hopeless; from the very first she had felt sure that Jean was dead. But I wouldn't admit it. I said we must try to find him. All the way over in the steamer I had been making a sort of plan.

"You see, one of the papers had described how the French had found Jean's airship lying in the forest of La Fay, as if he had abandoned it from choice. That was considered proof of his treason; but of course I knew that it wasn't. I remembered that the Marquis of Prezelay, Jean's cousin, had a castle on the forest outskirts; I had been to visit it with Jean and Enid. I wondered if he might be there.

"The more I thought of it, the likelier it seemed. If he had been wounded and had wanted to hide his papers, he would have remembered the castle and the secret panel in the wall. Even if he were--dead, which I wouldn't believe, it would clear his name if I found the proof of it. So I told Enid I would go to Prezelay."

I was resting my arms on my knees and groaning softly.

"Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!" I murmured, wishing I could stop my ears. When I thought of that brave venture of the girl's and its perils and what had nearly come of it I found myself shuddering; and yet I was growing prouder of her with every word.

"What comes next," she confessed, "is terrible. I can hardly believe it. As I look back, it seems to me that we were all a little mad. To get through the war zone to Prezelay I had to have certain papers; and I got them from an American girl, an old friend of Enid's and of mine, Marie Le Clair. The morning I arrived in Paris she came to say good-bye to Enid. She was acting as a Red Cross nurse, and they were sending her to the hospital at Carrefonds to take the first consignment of the great new remedy for burns and scars. Carrefonds is very near Prezelay. It all came to me in a moment. I told her how matters stood and how Enid was dying little by little, just for lack of any sure knowledge. She gave me the papers she had for herself and her chauffeur, Jacques Carton, and I used them for myself and for Georges, Jean's foster-brother, who was at home from the Front on leave and was staying in his old room at the house."

"Great Caesar's ghost!" I sputtered. "You didn't--you don't mean to say that--Why, good heavens, didn't you know--?"

Then I petered off into silence; words were too weak for my emotions.

She had seen the risk of course, and so had the girl who had helped her; but with the incredible bravery of women, they had acted with open eyes.

"Yes," she faltered; "I told you I felt mad, looking back at it. But Marie is safe now; Jean has worked for her, and his relatives and friends have helped, and the minister of war. It was the only way. Under my own name I could never have got leave to enter the war zone while Jean was missing and suspected--What is the matter, Mr. Bayne?" For once more I had groaned aloud.

"Simply," I cried stormily, "that I can't bear thinking of it! The idea of your taking risks, of your daring the police and the Germans--you who oughtn't to know what the word danger means! I tell you I can't stand it. Wasn't there some man to do it for you? Well, it's over now; and in the future--See here, Miss Falconer, I can't wait any longer. There is something I've got to say."

But I was not to say it yet, for, behold! just as my tongue was loosened, I became aware of a most distinguished galaxy approaching us round the lake. All save one of its members--Dunny, to be exact--were in uniform; and the personage in the lead, walking between my guardian and the duke of Raincy-la-Tour, was truly dazzling, being arrayed in a blue coat and spectacularly red trousers and wearing as a finishing touch a red cap freely braided with gold. Miss Falconer had risen.

"Why," she exclaimed, "it is General Le Cazeau!"

"Then confound General Le Cazeau!" was my inhospitably cry.

He was, I saw when he drew close, a person of stately dignity, as indeed the hero who had saved Merlancourt and broken that last furious, desperate, senseless onslaught of the Boches ought by rights to be.

Perhaps his splendor made me nervous. At any rate, my conscience smote me. I remembered with sudden panic all my manifold transgressions, beginning with the hour when I had chucked reason overboard and had deliberately concealed a murdered man's body beneath a heap of straw.

"I believe," I gasped, "that this is an informal court martial. n.o.body could do the things I have done and be allowed to live. Still, I don't see why they cured me if they were going to hang or shoot me."

I struggled up with the help of my crutches and stood waiting my doom.

The group had paused before us, and presentations followed, throughout which the master of ceremonies was the Firefly of France. Then the gray-headed general fixed me with a keen, stern gaze rather like an eagle's.

"Your affair, Monsieur, has been of an irregularity," he said.

As with kaleidoscopic swiftness the details of my "affair" pa.s.sed through my memory, it was only by an effort that I restrained an indecorous shout. He was correct. I could call to mind no single feature that had been "regular," from the thief who was not a thief and had flown out of my window like a conjurer, to the fight in Prezelay castle where I had vanquished four husky Germans, mostly by the aid of a wooden table, of all implements on earth.

"It is too true, _Monsieur le General_," I a.s.sented promptly. My humility seemed to soften him; he relaxed; he even approached a smile.

"Of an irregularity," he repeated. "But also it was of a gallantry. With a boldness and a resource and a scorn for danger that, permit me to say, mark your compatriots, you have unmasked and handed over to us one of our most dangerous foes. For such service as you have rendered France is never ungrateful. And, moreover, there have been friends to plead your cause and to plead it well."

As he ended he cast a glance at the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour and one at Dunny, whereupon I was enlightened as to the purpose of my guardian's three trips to Paris the preceding week. I believe I have said before that Dunny knows every one, everywhere; in fact, I have always felt that should circ.u.mstances conspire to make me temporarily adopt a life of crime, he could manage to pull such wires as would reinstate me in the public eye. But the general was stepping close to me.

"Monsieur," he was saying, "we are now allies, my country and the great nation of which you are a son. Very soon your troops are coming. You will fight on our soil, beneath your own banner. But your first blood was shed for France, your first wounds borne for her, Monsieur; and in grat.i.tude she offers you this medal of her brave."

He was pinning something to my coat, a bronze-colored, cross-shaped something, a decoration that swung proudly from a ribbon of red and green. I knew it well; I had seen it on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of generals, captains, simple poilus, all the picked flower of the French nation.

With a thrill I looked down upon it. It was the Cross of War.

CHAPTER XXVII

A THUNDERBOLT OF WAR

The great moment had arrived. General Le Cazeau and his staff were on their way back to Paris. The duke and d.u.c.h.ess were at the chateau talking with the _blesses_; for the second time Dunny had tactfully disappeared. The approach of evening had spurred my faltering courage.

As the first rosiness of sunset touched the skies beyond Raincy-la-Tour and lay across the water, I sat at the side of the only girl in the world and poured out my plea.

"It isn't fair, you know," I mourned. "I've only a few minutes. I shouldn't wonder if we heard your car honking for you in half an hour. To make a girl like you look at a man like me would take days of eloquence, and, besides, who would think of marrying any one with his head bound up Turkish fashion as mine is now?"

She laughed, and at the silvery sound of it I plucked up a hint of courage; for surely, I thought, she wasn't cruel enough to make game of me as she turned me down. Still, I couldn't really hope. She was too wonderful, and my courtship had been too inadequate. Despondent, arms on my knees, I harped upon the same string.

"I've never had a chance to show you," I lamented, "that I am civilized; that I know how to take care of you and put cushions behind you and slide footstools under your feet, and--er--all that. We've been too busy eluding Germans and racing through forbidden zones and rescuing papers from behind secret panels, for me to wait on you. Good heavens! To think how I've done my duty by a hundred girls I shouldn't know from Eve if they happened along this moment! And I've never even sent you a box of _marrons glaces_ or flowers."

She shot a fleeting glance at me.

"No," she agreed, "you haven't! If you don't mind my saying so, I think they would have been out of place. At Bleau, for instance, and at Prezelay I hadn't much time for eating bonbons; but after all you did me one or two more practical services, Mr. Bayne."

"Nothing," I maintained, my gloom unabated, "that amounted to a row of pins. Though I might have shone, I'll admit; I can see that, looking back. The opportunity was there, but the man was lacking. I might have been a real movie hero, cool, resourceful, dependable, clear-sighted, a tower of strength; and what I did was to muddle things up hopelessly and waste time in suspecting you and seize every opportunity of trusting people who positively spread their guilt before my eyes."

"I don't know." She was looking at the lake, not at me, and she was smiling. "There were one or two little matters that have slipped your mind, perhaps. Take the very first night we met, when you tracked your thief to my room and wouldn't let the hotel people come in to search it.

Don't you think, on the whole, that you were rather kind?"

"I couldn't have driven them in," I declared stubbornly, "with a pitchfork. I couldn't have persuaded them to make a search if I had prayed them on my bended knees. Their one idea was to help the fellow in what the best criminal circles call a getaway; and when I think how I must have been wool-gathering, not to guess--"

"Well, even so,"--Miss Falconer was still smiling--"weren't you very nice on the steamer? About the extra, I mean. And at Gibraltar, too, when they asked you what you had thrown overboard--do you remember how you kept silent and never even glanced my way?"

"No," I groaned, "I don't; but I remember our trip to Paris. I remember marching you into the wagon-restaurant like a hand-cuffed criminal, and sitting you down at a table, and bullying you like a Russian czar. I gave you three days to leave France. Have you forgotten? I haven't. The one thing I omitted--and I don't see how I missed it--was to call the gendarmes there at Modane and denounce you to them. It's more than kind of you to glide over my imbecilities; I appreciate it. But when I think of that evening I want a nice, deep, dark dungeon, somewhere underground, to hide."

"I think," she murmured consolingly, "that you made amends to me later."

Her face was averted, but I could see a distracting dimple in her cheek. "You mustn't forget that I haven't been perfect, either. When you followed me to Bleau, and I came down the stairs and saw you, I misunderstood the situation entirely and was as unpleasant as I could be."

"Naturally," I acquiesced with dark meaning. "How could you have understood it? How could any human being have fathomed the mental processes that sent me there? I only wonder that instead of giving me what-for, you didn't murder me. Any United States jury would have acquitted you with the highest praise."

She turned upon me, flushed and spirited.

"Mr. Bayne, you are incorrigible! Why will you insist on belittling everything that you have done? I suppose you will claim next that you didn't risk imprisonment or death every minute of a whole day, just to help me, and that at Prezelay you didn't fight like a--a--yes, like a paladin!--to save me from being tortured by Herr von Blenheim and his men!"

I started up and then sank back.

"As a special favor," I begged her, "would you mind not mentioning that last phase of the affair? When you do, I go berserker; I'm a crazy man, seeing red; I'm honestly not responsible. It was when our friend Blenheim developed those plans of his that I swore in my soul I'd get him; and I thank the Lord that I did and that he'll never trouble you or any other woman again.

"Still, Miss Falconer, what does all that amount to? Any man would have helped you, wouldn't he? A nice sort of fellow I should have been to do any less! Whereas for a girl like you I ought to have accomplished miracles. I ought to have made the sun stop moving, or got you the stars to play with, or whisked the moon out of the skies."

She was laughing again.