He answered Madame St. Auge in French, holding up his hands as if horrified; and to me he added, in English: “I forbid! That poor lady is so helpless that she would sicken at excitement—oh, very dangerous! I am a doctor. You must go away now. It is bad for her, even, to hear your voice.”

The sound of the drum came more plainly to my ears. There must be two drums, I realized, or even three. “You’re a doctor?” I asked. “You live here in Iberville? I didn’t know there was a doctor in this place.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Many people know nothing of doctors until they have need of one.”

“If you live here,” I said, “what were you doing in Montreal two weeks ago?”

He looked at me with an air of compassion. “Young man, you are sleepless and hungry. It has made a fire in your head. You imagine things, I think. Two weeks ago I am in Montreal, of course; yes! To ask that care be exercised, lest our people take the smallpox from your soldiers. Is there something wrong in that?” He spoke more gravely. “You must go somewhere for food, and sleep well.”

He and Madame St. Auge stood staring at me steadily. I whispered the words—“food, and sleep well.” Both of them nodded.

The distant drum-beats throbbed in my brain. I might find some sort of help with those drums, whereas I could look for nothing in the Château de St. Auge—nothing.

I turned from them and stumbled down the steps, repeating the words to myself, over and over—“food, and sleep well; food, and sleep well.” There was something ludicrous about them. What in God’s name did such people know about it, I thought: they who had food, and gave it to no one: they who spoke about sleeping well when they had never had a brother who was going to marry a girl like Ellen, and had taken her out of a safe refuge into a broken and retreating army—to protect her!

I got back to the river somehow, and rowed myself across. Along the road, in twos and threes, shambled an unceasing procession of ragged, emaciated soldiers. They paid no attention to me when I stumbled among them, to walk with them. I felt empty; limp. Something seemed to have hit me in the head. I had no mind of my own. Whatever these silent, dirty, tattered soldiers might at that moment have done, I would also have done unquestionably. If they had run, I, too, would have run. If they had fallen, I might have fallen as well.