The hand of a broad-chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on
his shoulder, and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust toward
him with the proffered drink. It startled him and recalled him to the
consciousness of where he was. He stared one moment absently in the
trooper's amazed face, and then shook him off with a suddenness that
tossed back the cup to the ground; and, holding the journal clinched
close in his hand, went swiftly through the masses of the people--out
and away, he little noted where--till he had forced his road beyond the
gates, beyond the town, beyond all reach of its dust and its babble and
its discord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, where to the north
the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships riding
at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet
the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with the conical houses of hair,
and desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there to lay
them waste.
Reaching the heights he stood still involuntarily, and looked down once
more on the words that told him of his birthright; in the blinding,
intense light of the African day they seemed to stand out as though
carved in stone; and as he read them once more a great darkness passed
over his face--this heritage was his, and he could never take it up;
this thing had come to him, and he must never claim it. He was Viscount
Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and he
was dead forever in the world's belief; he must live, and grow old, and
perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his name and his
rights buried, and his years passed as a private soldier of France.
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