The Adventures of Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle

“It is you, you villain!” he cried. “You French coxcomb. You shall pay me for the wrong which you have done me.”

But the next instant he saw the pallor of my face and the blood which was still pouring from my head.

“What is this?” he asked. “How come you to have lost your ear?”

I shook off my weakness, and pressing my handkerchief to my wound I rose from my couch, the debonair colonel of Hussars.

“My injury, sir, is nothing. With your permission we will not allude to a matter so trifling and so personal.”

But Lucia had burst through from her cell and was pouring out the whole story while she clasped Lorenzo&csq;s arm.

“This noble gentleman–he has taken my place, Lorenzo! He has borne it for me. He has suffered that I might be saved.”

I could sympathise with the struggle which I could see in the Italian&csq;s face. At last he held out his hand to me.

“Colonel Gerard,” he said, “you are worthy of a great love. I forgive you, for if you have wronged me you have made a noble atonement. But I wonder to see you alive. I left the tribunal before you were judged, but I understood that no mercy would be shown to any Frenchman since the destruction of the ornaments of Venice.”

“He did not destroy them,” cried Lucia. “He has helped to preserve those in our palace.”

“One of them, at any rate,” said I, as I stooped and kissed her hand.

This was the way, my friends, in which I lost my ear. Lorenzo was found stabbed to the heart in the Piazza of St. Mark within two days of the night of my adventure. Of the tribunal and its ruffians, Matteo and three others were shot, the rest banished from the town. Lucia, my lovely Lucia, retired into a convent at Murano after the French had left the city, and there she still may be, some gentle lady abbess who has perhaps long forgotten the days when our hearts throbbed together, and when the whole great world seemed so small a thing beside the love which burned in our veins. Or perhaps it may not be so. Perhaps she has not forgotten. There may still be times when the peace of the cloister is broken by the memory of the old soldier who loved her in those distant days. Youth is past and passion is gone, but the soul of the gentleman can never change, and still Etienne Gerard would bow his grey head before her and would very gladly lose his other ear if he might do her a service.

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II

How the Brigadier Captured Saragossa

Have I ever told you, my friends, the circumstances connected with my joining the Hussars of Conflans at the time of the siege of Saragossa and the very remarkable exploit which I performed in connection with the taking of that city? No? Then you have indeed something still to learn. I will tell it to you exactly as it occurred. Save for two or three men and a score or two of women, you are the first who have ever heard the story.

You must know, then, that it was in the Second Hussars–called the Hussars of Chamberan–that I had served as a lieutenant and as a junior captain. At the time I speak of I was only twenty-five years of age, as reckless and desperate a man as any in that great army. It chanced that the war had come to a halt in Germany, while it was still raging in Spain, so the Emperor, wishing to reinforce the Spanish army, transferred me as senior captain to the Hussars of Conflans, which were at that time in the Fifth Army Corps under Marshal Lannes.

It was a long journey from Berlin to the Pyrenees. My new regiment formed part of the force which, under Marshal Lannes, was then besieging the Spanish town of Saragossa. I turned my horse&csq;s head in that direction, therefore, and behold me a week or so later at the French headquarters, whence I was directed to the camp of the Hussars of Conflans.

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