The day was intensely still; there was not a sound except when, here
and there, the movement of a lizard under the dry grasses gave a low,
crackling rustle. He wondered almost which was the dream and which the
truth: that old life that he had once led, and that looked now so far
away and so unreal; or this which had been about him for so many years
in the camps and the bivouacs, the barracks and the battlefields. He
wondered almost which he himself was--an English Peer on whom the title
of his line had fallen, or a Corporal of Chasseurs who must take his
chief's insults as patiently as a cur takes the blows of its master;
that he was both seemed to him, as he stood there with the glisten of
the sea before and the swelling slopes of the hillside above, a vague,
distorted nightmare.
Hours might have passed, or only moments--he could not have told; his
eyes looked blankly out at the sun-glow, his hand instinctively clinched
on the journal whose stray lines had told him in an Algerine trattoria
that he had inherited what he never could enjoy.
"Are they content, I wonder?" he thought, gazing down that fiery blaze
of shadowless light. "Do they ever remember?"
He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what he was.
The distant, mellow, ringing notes of a trumpet-call floated to his ear
from the town at his feet; it was sounding the rentree en caserne. Old
instinct, long habit, made him start and shake his harness together and
listen.
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