The chevalier De Noyan

It was an odd position, a heartless caprice of fate. I felt the full measure of its strangeness, yet the thought never occurred to me of shrinking back from duty, nor slightest dream of realizing a personal victory through any act of baseness. I was not there for his sake, or my own, but to redeem my pledged word to her whose slightest wish was law, whose pleading face forever rose before me. Nevertheless, as I stood fronting him for the first time, there was little except bitter hatred in my heart--hatred which, no doubt, burned for the instant within my eyes,--but a hatred which never returned, to curse my memory, from that day unto this. I may have found much to test my patience, much to dislike about him in those weary weeks which followed, much of weakness and of fickle spirit, but naught ever gave birth anew to the deep resentment I buried there.

The room in which I found myself was long and narrow, dimly lighted by an oil lamp screwed fast into a blackened beam overhead. Along one side was the bare wall, unrelieved in its plain planking except for a small cracked mirror and a highly colored picture of the Virgin in a rude frame. Opposite, two berths were arranged one above the other, both partially concealed by a dingy red curtain extending from ceiling to floor. The only other furniture I noted in my hasty survey consisted of a rough stool chair, and a huge iron-bound, wooden sea-chest, the last so bulky as almost completely to block the narrow space between the lower berth and the opposite wall. Seated upon the stool, which was tilted back upon two legs, his shoulders resting comfortably on a pillow pressed against the wall, his long limbs extended in posture of supreme contentment and laziness, upon the chest, was the man of my desperate search, the gallant soldier of France, the leader of rebellion, condemned to die before the rifles within four short hours.