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By the one-pounder amidships stood Ensign Bagley, the oiler, the two firemen, and the cook. The little boat gasped and throbbed and rolled helplessly from side to side. Lieutenant Bernadou did not stop for an examination. He knew his boat was uncontrollable. The Hudson was a short distance off still pounding away with her guns. It was hailed and asked to take the Winslow in tow.
Once a man had come through the village of the Berceau, a travelling hawker of cheap prints, a man with a wild eye and a restless brain, who told Bernadou that he was a downtrodden slave, a clod, a beast like a mule, who fetched and carried that the rich might fatten, a dolt, an idiot, who cared nothing for the rights of man and the wrongs of the poor.
Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of three colours, believed her, as indeed he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old lips ever uttered to him. He had never been in a city, and only once, on the day of his first communion, in the town four leagues away. He knew nothing more than this simple, cleanly, honest life that he led.
But of these noisy patriots Bernadou was never one. He had the instinctive conservatism of the French peasant, which is in such direct and tough antagonism with the feverish socialism of the French artisan. His love was for the soil a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually draining and devouring.
You are a bold man; you merit death. But still, you know the country well?" Bernadou smiled, as a mother might smile were any foolish enough to ask her if she remembered the look her dead child's face had worn. "If you know it well," pursued the Prussian, "I will give you a chance.
So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called, keeping watch by night over the safety of his village and by day doing all he could to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by tilling their ground for them and by tending such poor cattle as were left in their desolate fields.
“‘Can I do anything for you, John?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘No, Jack, I am dying; good-bye,’ and he asked me to grasp his hand. ‘Go help the rest,’ he whispered, gazing with fixed eyes toward where Captain Bernadou was still firing the forward gun. The next minute he was dead. “Ensign Bagley was lying on the deck nearly torn to pieces, and the bodies of the other three were on top of him.
Canst guess what it is? Say?" Margot coloured and then grew pale. True, Bernadou had never really spoken to her, but still, when one is seventeen, and has danced a few times with the same person, and has plucked the leaves of a daisy away to learn one's fortune, spoken words are not very much wanted.
Softly, on the little table next his comrade's bed, Salvette has placed a bottle of vin de Lunel and a loaf of bread, a pretty Christmas loaf, where the twig of holly is planted straight in the centre. Bernadou opens his eyes encircled with fever.
Bernadou was close beside them, watering and weeding those flowers that were at once his pride and his recreation, making the face of his dwelling bright and the air around it full of fragrance.
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