When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to
rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon the
grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonely
and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand
marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage
lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost
youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the
years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had
followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for
his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled
forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished,
unavenged! It seemed to him like murder--murder with which his own hand
was stained.
The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the
storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the
young goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the black
lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a
grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his
fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land
of his exile.
He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the
silence he heard a name whispered--the name of his childhood, of his
past.
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