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I swore to sacredly fulfil his last wishes. My words, the emotion I showed touched him. Soon after that the soldiers came to take him again before the council of war. He was condemned to death. I am ignorant of the formalities that followed or accompanied this judgment, nor do I know whether the young surgeon defended his life or not; but he expected to be executed on the following day, and he spent the night in writing to his mother.

“We shall both be free to-day,” he said, smiling, when I went to see him the next morning. “I am told that the general has signed your pardon.”

I was silent, and looked at him closely so as to carve his features, as it were, on my memory. Presently an expression of disgust crossed his face.

“I have been very cowardly,” he said. “During all last night I begged for mercy of these walls,” and he pointed to the sides of his dungeon. “Yes, yes, I howled with despair, I rebelled, I suffered the most awful moral agony–I was alone! Now I think of what others will say of me. Courage is a garment to put on. I desire to go decently to death, therefore–“

A DOUBLE RETRIBUTION

“Oh, stop! stop!” cried the young lady who had asked for this history, interrupting the narrator suddenly. “Say no more; let me remain in uncertainty and believe that he was saved. If I hear now that he was shot I shall not sleep all night. To-morrow you shall tell me the rest.”

We rose from table. My neighbor in accepting Monsieur Hermann’s arm, said to him–

“I suppose he was shot, was he not?”

“Yes. I was present at the execution.”

“Oh! monsieur,” she said, “how could you–“

“He desired it, madame. There was something really dreadful in following the funeral of a living man, a man my heart cared for, an innocent man! The poor young fellow never ceased to look at me. He seemed to live only in me. He wanted, he said, that I should carry to his mother his last sigh.”

“And did you?”

“At the peace of Amiens I went to France, for the purpose of taking to the mother those blessed words, ‘He was innocent.’ I religiously undertook that pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption. It was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I was the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I see a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed those parting words cast between two graves, unknown to all creation, like the cry uttered in a desert by some lonely traveller whom a lion seizes.”

“And if,” I said, interrupting him, “you were brought face to face with a man now in this room, and were told, ‘This is the murderer!’ would not that be another drama? And what would you do?”

Monsieur Hermann looked for his hat and went away.

“You are behaving like a young man, and very heedlessly,” said my neighbor. “Look at Taillefer!–there, seated on that sofa at the corner of the fireplace. Mademoiselle Fanny is offering him a cup of coffee. He smiles. Would a murderer to whom that tale must have been torture, present so calm a face? Isn’t his whole air patriarchal?”

“Yes; but go and ask him if he went to the war in Germany,” I said.

“Why not?”

And with that audacity which is seldom lacking to women when some action attracts them, or their minds are impelled by curiosity, my neighbor went up to the purveyor.

“Were you ever in Germany?” she asked.

Taillefer came near dropping his cup and saucer.

“I, madame? No, never.”

“What are you talking about, Taillefer”; said our host, interrupting him. “Were you not in the commissariat during the campaign of Wagram?”

“Ah, true!” replied Taillefer, “I was there at that time.”

“You are mistaken,” said my neighbor, returning to my side; “that’s a good man.”