Jeff Hyde continued half apologetically for his comrade: "That comes
natural to Gaspe Toujours--I guess it always does to papists. But I never
had any trainin' that way, and I had to turn the thing over and over, and
I fell asleep on it. And when I wake up three days after, here's my eyes
as fresh as daisies, and you back, sir, and the thing done that we come
to do."
He put the Book into Hume's hands and at that moment Gaspe Toujours said:
"See!" Far off, against the eastern horizon, appeared a group of moving
figures.
That night the broken segments of the White Guard were reunited, and
Clive Lepage slept by the side of Jaspar Hume.
VI
Napoleon might have marched back from Moscow with undecimated legions
safely enough, if the heart of those legions had not been crushed. The
White Guard, with their faces turned homeward, and the man they had
sought for in their care, seemed to have acquired new strength. Through
days of dreadful cold, through nights of appalling fierceness, through
storm upon the plains that made for them paralysing coverlets, they
marched. And if Lepage did not grow stronger, life at least was kept in
him.
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