A Splendid Hazard | Page 2

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."
The old man was confused and his faded eyes filled. "For me,
mademoiselle?"
"Surely!"
"Thanks, mademoiselle, thanks! I saw him when they brought him back
from St. Helena, and the Old Guard waded out into the Seine. Those
were days. Thanks, mademoiselle; an old soldier salutes you!" And the
time-bent, withered form grew tall.
Fitzgerald cleared his throat, for just then something hard had formed
there. Why, God bless her! She was the kind of girl who became the
mother of soldiers.

With her departure his present interest here began to wane. He
wondered who she might be and what part of his native land she
adorned when not gracing European capitals. Well, this was no time for
mooning. He had arrived from London the day proceeding, and was
leaving for Corfu on the morrow, and perforce he must crowd many
things into this short grace of time. He was only