miniature.”
“I don’t know how to account for it–do you?”
“Yes–without any trouble at all–that is, I think I do.”
No‰l was surprised at that, and glanced up quickly, as if to see if I
was in earnest. He said:
“I thought you couldn’t be in earnest, but I see you are. If you can
make me understand this puzzle, do it. Tell me what the
explanation is.”
“I believe I can. You have noticed that our chief knight says a good
many wise things and has a thoughtful head on his shoulders. One
day, riding along, we were talking about Joan’s great talents, and
he said, ‘But, greatest of all her gifts, she has the seeing eye.’ I said,
like an unthinking fool, ‘The seeing eye?–I shouldn’t count on that
for much–I suppose we all have it.’ ‘No,’ he said; ‘very few have it.’
Then he explained, and made his meaning clear. He said the
common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that,
but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul,
finding there capacities which the outside didn’t indicate or
promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn’t detect. He said
the mightiest military genius must fail and come to nothing if it
have not the seeing eye–that is to say, if it cannot read men and
select its subordinates with an infallible judgment. It sees as by
intuition that this man is good for strategy, that one for dash and
daredevil assault, the other for patient bulldog persistence, and it
appoints each to his right place and wins, while the commander
without the seeing eye would give to each the other’s place and
lose. He was right about Joan, and I saw it. When she was a child
and the tramp came one night, her father and all of us took him for
a rascal, but she saw the honest man through the rags. When I
dined with the governor of Vaucouleurs so long ago, I saw nothing
in our two knights, though I sat with them and talked with them
two hours; Joan was there five minutes, and neither spoke with
them nor heard them speak, yet she marked them for men of worth
and fidelity, and they have confirmed her judgment. Whom has she
sent for to take charge of this thundering rabble of new recruits at
Blois, made up of old disbanded Armagnac raiders, unspeakable
hellions, every one? Why, she has sent for Satan himself–that is to
say, La Hire–that military hurricane, that godless swashbuckler,
that lurid conflagration of blasphemy, that Vesuvius of profanity,
forever in eruption. Does he know how to deal with that mob of
roaring devils? Better than any man that lives; for he is the head
devil of this world his own self, he is the match of the whole of
them combined, and probably the father of most of them. She
places him in temporary command until she can get to Blois
herself–and then! Why, then she will certainly take them in hand
personally, or I don’t know her as well as I ought to, after all these
years of intimacy. That will be a sight to see–that fair spirit in her
white armor, delivering her will to that muck-heap, that rag-pile,
that abandoned refuse of perdition.”
“La Hire!” cried No‰l, “our hero of all these years–I do want to see
that man!”
“I too. His name stirs me just as it did when I was a little boy.”
“I want to hear him swear.”
“Of course, I would rather hear him swear than another man pray.
He is the frankest man there is, and the na‹vest. Once when he was
rebuked for pillaging on his raids, he said it was nothing. Said he,
‘If God the Father were a soldier, He would rob.’ I judge he is the
right man to take temporary charge there at Blois. Joan has cast the
seeing eye upon him, you see.”
“Which brings us back to where we started. I have an honest
affection for the Paladin, and not merely because he is a good
fellow, but because he is my child–I made him what he is, the