"Thunder! It is the chaunt of the Old Guard!" He was scarce aware he had spoken aloud, until the inspector caught up his words in a high key of excitement.
"There," he cried, turning with a sort of feminine frenzy upon his friend, "even that blockhead hears it! I tell you, General, we must out of this. And the woman must go too. ’Tis his will, the big tyrant."
He paused for a moment; and then resumed, well-nigh dancing in his exasperation:
"The carriage, the carriage at once! D’Albignac! Leave that gun alone!" he shrieked. "I won’t have the fellow touched. Last time, last time——" he paused again and shook his head.
"I dare not," he said in a low voice. "It is not wholesome!"
Steven opened heavy eyes and stared vacantly at the creeping light, indigo between the wisps of yellow straw; at the large square of shimmering mists and flickering leaves where the barn door stood open to the dawn. He turned his head and found that it lay on a fragrant linen pillow, and also that it ached vaguely in spite of this luxury.
A vulgar, absurd tune was still dancing in his brain. Then he caught within his range of vision the figure of a man sitting cross-legged, putting a fresh string to a fiddle. And memory came back slowly.
"It was the fault of the music, you know," he said.
Geiger-Hans shot a look at him from under his quizzical eyebrows.
The young man sat up, quite inspirited by the recollection, and discovered that, with the exception of some dizziness and stiffness, there was nothing much amiss with him.
"But some one very nearly got his hunting-knife into you," said Geiger-Hans, dryly, "and there would have been an end of your learning to be young. Nevertheless, you have capabilities—yes, some capabilities." He wound up his string, twanged it, and nodded over it.
A cock crew in the forest farmyard. A robin was singing somewhere amid a babel of chirping birds. The breeze, balm-scented, flew straight in from the pines and fanned Stephen’s head and throat. He lifted his hand to his open shirt and looked inquiringly at the musician, who nodded again.
"You were stunned by the fall," said Geiger-Hans, "with that brute on the top of you. Fortunate for you that I caught his hand at the right moment! And thereupon the little man, the Herr Inspector, you know, ran out screaming, ’No bloodshed, d’Albignac!’ ... It is his one good point: he is merciful of life."