When I got back to Horta from Cayenne and saw the “Anarchist” again, he did not look well.  He was more worn, still more frail, and very livid indeed under the grimy smudges of his calling.  Evidently the meat of the company’s main herd (in its unconcentrated form) did not agree with him at all.

It was on the pontoon in Horta that we met; and I tried to induce him to leave the launch moored where she was and follow me to Europe there and then.  It would have been delightful to think of the excellent manager’s surprise and disgust at the poor fellow’s escape.  But he refused with unconquerable obstinacy.

“Surely you don’t mean to live always here!” I cried.  He shook his head.

“I shall die here,” he said.  Then added moodily, “Away from them.”

Sometimes I think of him lying open-eyed on his horseman’s gear in the low shed full of tools and scraps of iron—­the anarchist slave of the Maranon estate, waiting with resignation for that sleep which “fled” from him, as he used to say, in such an unaccountable manner.

A MILITARY TALE

THE DUEL

I

Napoleon I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army.  The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.

Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars.  To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage.  They were officers of cavalry, and their connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men into battle seems particularly appropriate.  It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two officers of infantry of the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise, and whose valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind.  As to gunners or engineers, whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it is simply unthinkable.

The names of the two officers were Feraud and D’Hubert, and they were both lieutenants in a regiment of hussars, but not in the same regiment.

Feraud was doing regimental work, but Lieut.  D’Hubert had the good fortune to be attached to the person of the general commanding the division, as officier d’ordonnance.  It was in Strasbourg, and in this agreeable and important garrison they were enjoying greatly a short interval of peace.  They were enjoying it, though both intensely warlike, because it was a sword-sharpening, firelock-cleaning peace, dear to a military heart and undamaging to military prestige, inasmuch that no one believed in its sincerity or duration.

Under those historical circumstances, so favourable to the proper appreciation of military leisure, Lieut.  D’Hubert, one fine afternoon, made his way along a quiet street of a cheerful suburb towards Lieut.  Feraud’s quarters, which were in a private house with a garden at the back, belonging to an old maiden lady.