His first thought was for the dead man.  True, there had been little amity, little intimacy, between them; a negligent friendliness, whenever they had met, had been all that they had ever reached.  But in their childhood they had been carelessly kind to one another, and the memory of the boy who had once played beside him down the old galleries and under the old forests, of the man who had now died yonder where the southern sea-board lay across the warm, blue Mediterranean, was alone on him for the moment.  His thoughts had gone back, with a pang, almost ere he had read the opening lines, to autumn mornings in his youngest years when the leaves had been flushed with their earliest red, and the brown, still pools had been alive with water-birds, and the dogs had dropped down charging among the flags and rushes, and his brother’s boyish face had laughed on him from the wilderness of willows, and his brother’s boyish hands had taught him to handle his first cartridge and to fire his first shot.  The many years of indifference and estrangement were forgotten, the few years of childhood’s confidence and comradeship alone remembered, as he saw the words that brought him in his exile the story of his brethren’s fate and of his race’s fortunes.  His head sank, his face was still colorless, he sat motionless with the printed sheet in his hand.  Once his eyes flashed, his breath came fast and uneven; he rose with a sudden impulse, with a proud, bold instinct of birth and freedom.  Let him stand here in what grade he would, with the badge of a Corporal of the Army of Africa on his arm, this inheritance that had come to him was his; he bore the name and the title of his house as surely as any had ever borne it since the first of the Norman owners of Royallieu had followed the Bastard’s banner.

The vagabond throngs—­Moorish, Frank, Negro, Colon—­paused as they pushed their way over the uneven road, and stared at him vacantly where he stood.  There was something in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing none of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited fire in his eyes, that arrested all—­from the dullest muleteer, plodding on with his string of patient beasts, to the most volatile French girl laughing on her way with a group of fantassins.  He did not note them, hear them, think of them; the whole of the Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no place before him; he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier of the Empire; he saw nothing but the green wealth of the old home woods far away in England; he remembered nothing save that he, and he alone, was the rightful Lord of Royallieu.