"
I had remained respectfully standing at a little distance from
him. Now he suddenly came to me, and, pressing my hand, said
quickly, "You have trouble, Mr. Moray. I am sorry for you. But
maybe it is for better things to come."
I thanked him stumblingly, and a moment later left him, to serve
him on the morrow, and so on through many days, till, in divers
perils, the camp at Montmorenci was abandoned, the troops were got
aboard the ships, and the general took up his quarters on the
Sutherland; from which, one notable day, I sallied forth with him
to a point at the south shore opposite the Anse du Foulon, where he
saw the thin crack in the cliff side. From that moment instant and
final attack was his purpose.
The great night came, starlit and serene. The camp-fires of two
armies spotted the shores of the wide river, and the ships lay like
wild fowl in convoys above the town from where the arrow of fate
should be sped. Darkness upon the river, and fireflies upon the
shore. At Beauport, an untiring general, who for a hundred days had
snatched sleep, booted and spurred, and in the ebb of a losing game,
longed for his adored Candiac, grieved for a beloved daughter's
death, sent cheerful messages to his aged mother and to his wife,
and by the deeper protests of his love foreshadowed his own doom.
At Cap Rouge, a dying commander, unperturbed and valiant, reached
out a finger to trace the last movements in a desperate campaign of
life that opened in Flanders at sixteen; of which the end began
when he took from his bosom the portrait of his affianced wife,
and said to his old schoolfellow, "Give this to her, Jervis, for
we shall meet no more.
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