peril to which these two faithful souls thus willingly exposed
themselves. She looked back on their serene faces as she passed through
the gate, and it was the last time she was to look on them in life. She
never saw them again, nor found them. They disappeared in the ruins of
La Royat as many had disappeared in other ruins, leaving no trace
behind. At the church, which was but a few paces off, they found the
Cure busy arranging shelter. It was a very tiny village, and the number
of those willing to accept the shelter he offered and, indeed, advised
was comparatively few. For though a simple they were a brave people, nor
could they conceive of a wickedness and barbarity that would seek to
destroy innocent souls who had naught to do with war. So they went about
their ordinary avocations as usual, a trifle more apprehensively
perhaps, but none the less bravely, and the morning wore on.
The Cure took his charges, about twenty souls in all, down the narrow
stairs to the crypt, where he had already provided light and such small
comforts as he could spare from his own store.
"Isn't it ripping, Biddy?" asked Rosalie, but perhaps her young voice
had lost a little of its gallant ring. But Biddy, who had the
imaginative temperament of her race, shivered a little, and burst into
tears. It was strange and ominous to come in out of the warm, hopeful
sunshine to this place of tombs, an adventure with which the child could
very well have dispensed. The church was very old, and many who had been
born in Coutane had never seen the crypt. Its very existence was unknown
to a large number, and the entrance to it was so cunningly arranged, and
so difficult of access, that it was of all hiding-places in the village
the most secure.
[Illustration]
Then there was always the belief, founded on all precedent of war, that
the sacred things would be respected, and sanctuary in God's house left
undesecrated. The hours seemed long down there and the stillness
profound. Not a sound from the upper air penetrated to that strange
hiding-place. Though sure of their sanctuary, it seemed natural to lower
their voices, to move softly, and even to watch apprehensively. Even the
two girls, usually so high-spirited, found themselves naturally becoming
quiet. It was only the very little children, of whom there were five,
who, unconscious of danger, crowed and laughed and babbled in their
usual glee. These little ones provided incessant interest and occupation
for the two girls, and Julie Ledru smiled as she watched their pretty
efforts to amuse and keep them quiet. She had brought her watch, and it
pointed to nine o'clock at the moment when they heard a dull thud
several times repeated, which caused them all to start and look at one
another in quick alarm.
"It is the guns," said old Monsieur Rollin, whose legs were twisted with
rheumatism, so that they had half-carried him down the steps of the
crypt. "They have come, and are starting their fiendish work."
[Illustration]
No one could gainsay him, and for the next half-hour they had to listen
to a repetition of the same sound gradually getting nearer and nearer.
Presently their terror was increased by the deafening roar of artillery
much nearer and the sound of falling masonry, indicating that the church
itself, cradle and sanctuary of the life of Coutane for centuries, had
not been respected. The two English girls, now thoroughly frightened,
clung together fearfully, and the whole little company, some of them on
their knees, did not exchange a word. After a time the firing ceased,
and they were left to absolute stillness. But none of them moved, or
offered to go up to discover what had actually happened in the village.
[Illustration]
After what seemed an interminable interval--in reality it was not more
than a couple of hours from the moment the din ceased overhead--the door
of the crypt was cautiously opened, and the Cure looked in. He was all
dishevelled, his face blackened with smoke, and his whole appearance
that of a man who had seen some terrible and haunting vision.
"Ah, there you are, my children," he cried as they crowded round him; "I
think you may come up presently, but be prepared to have your hearts
broken. A regiment of the enemy has passed through, and left nothing
behind. Mademoiselle, the Chateau is in flames, and the beautiful spire
of the church has been blown to pieces, and at the Mairie the
devastation is complete. But, above all, we mourn the death of so many
helpless people--I myself escaped by a miracle."
"Have they gone?" asked Mademoiselle, with a shivering breath.
"They have, and I think that they are pursued, and that this was the
hurried work of destruction prompted by hatred and revenge. Will you
come up now and see for yourselves, or remain here in safety through the
night? Alas! you will find no other refuge, Mademoiselle, for your home
is in ruins."
Such fear was upon them that with one accord they determined to remain
in the crypt until the dawn of another day.
Even the natural gaiety and high spirits of youth were not proof against
the terror which all felt might swoop down upon them again at any
moment.
They had arranged themselves as comfortably as possible to pass the
night, when they were suddenly disturbed by the grating of a door and
the swinging of a lantern. All scrambled to their feet, some of them
shrieking and hiding their eyes, certain that there had been a fresh
arrival of the invaders, and that instant death would meet them.
But once more the Cure smiled upon them reassuringly.
"Courage, my children! Our trouble is for the moment at an end. Our own
brave soldiers have arrived. It is as I said--they are in pursuit, but
part of them will camp here to-night. Alas! we have little or no food to
offer them, for the barbarians stripped the village of everything."
Then Julie Ledru, hurriedly throwing on her cloak, said she would ascend
with the Cure and give what stores she could from the Chateau.
"But it is no more, my daughter. You have forgotten how I told you
yesterday that they have burned it to the ground."
"But my stores are hidden in the grotto in the garden, and there is a
secret passage to it. I think, Father, they had not time, or did not
take it, to explore, and we shall find things there. I have been putting
them away since the war began."
So in the pearly dawn, a strange sight was to be seen in the trampled,
desecrated garden of the Chateau behind its smoking ruins.
Led by Julie Ledru, the Commandant of the troops that had halted in the
village found stores sufficient to help assuage the hunger of his men.
He was profuse in his thanks.
"What can I do for you in exchange, Mademoiselle?" he asked, as he stood
at the salute. Instantly Mademoiselle pointed to her charges, who, still
shivering a little with fear, yet profoundly, poignantly interested in
the extraordinary scene of desolation, in what but a few hours ago was
one of the fairest spots in Belgium.
"These are my English children. Get them to their parents, Monsieur le
Capitaine, and I shall be amply repaid."
The officer shook his head.
"Easier said than done, Madame; but leave it, and I will see what can be
done. How is it you have been so indiscreet as to remain here? You ought
to have removed yourself, and them, while there was still time."
Mademoiselle shook her head.
"We imagined we were of no account, and we have had no news for several
days. We were assured that the tide of battle had flowed in a different
direction."
"It is everywhere, Mademoiselle--an evil flood, rolling over the whole
of our country. But, look you, I will see what can be done."
He was as good as his word, and that evening after dark, in an armoured
motor-car, Julie Ledru and her charges were driven for hours and miles
by tortuous ways which kept them out of danger, until they reached
Ghent, where it was still possible to get a train for Ostend.
Two days later, she landed in England with Rose and Biddy, herself
utterly ruined, her home gone, one of the most pitiful of the refugees.
But she was welcomed warmly and gratefully by Biddy's father, and in a
few days' time was safe in a warm, comfortable home on the Irish coast,
where Rose, too, was made welcome, until her own relatives in India
could be communicated with.
It was an experience the two girls would never forget, one which will
remain with them through life as a very poignant personal experience of
the Great War.
[Illustration
_Fleur de Lis_
[Illustration]
_by Kate Douglas Wiggin_
_Painting by_ Carlton A. Smith, _R.A._
_Drawings by_ Edmund J. Sullivan, _A.R.W.S._
_Copyright in the U.S.A. by the Century Company._
FLEUR-DE-LIS had been christened Marie Hortense Amelie Dupont: Marie for
her mother, Hortense and Amelie in honour of the two Vicomtesses de
Rastignac, sole survivors of the proud old Royalist family in whose
service Marie's mother and grandmother had lived, and into whose service
Marie herself had been born. But when _la petite_ Marie Hortense Amelie
was a mere blossom of babyhood she forsook the name that the priest had
given her as he touched her downy head with the holy water, and chose
instead to be called Fleur-de-lis--a name, in sooth, much better suited
to a noble daughter of the Rastignacs than to a child of Marie Dupont,
maker of tissue-paper flowers, and Pierre Dupont, street musician.
Fleur-de-lis had first opened her eyes in a very humble chamber, but it
was large enough to hold a deal of sweet content, which grew all the
sweeter when she came to share it. There were only two rooms for father,
mother, and child, and these were in a dreary tenement house, for Pierre
Dupont, a stranger in a strange land, was having a desperate struggle
with poverty. On being discharged from the hospital, where he had passed
through the dangerous illness that left him a maimed and broken man, he
had to begin the world all over again, and begin it single-handed, in
very truth. There were few things to which he could turn his one hand;
one of them was the crank of a street-piano, and in a modest example of
that modern instrument of torture he accordingly invested the last of
his savings. He was much too good for it, but by regarding it distinctly
as a hated object which should be discarded the moment something better
appeared, he mastered his aversion, and, by wheeling it through the
streets from morning till night, he managed to live, for there were
always people who wanted to hear it, and others who did not, so that
between the two classes he scraped together enough for his frugal
needs.
Marie was young and pretty and loyal, and when affairs were most
desperate she offered to take the baby Fleur-de-lis and accompany her
husband, gathering the pennies in a tambourine, while he ground
so-called music from the piano with the left arm, that grew so weary in
the monotonous service. But there was not a trace of the mountebank in
Pierre Dupont, nor a drop of beggar's blood in his veins. He was poor
and crippled, but he had still the self-respecting pride of the peasant
whose people had served noble families, and who know what true nobility
is. He could injure the dead-and-gone Rastignacs, if he must, by
trundling about a second-hand street-piano, but he could at least spare
them the insult of adding a monkey or a woman to the procession. So
Maman Marie, loving him more than ever for his chivalrous regard of her,
took up an almost forgotten pastime of her girlhood, and fell to making
artificial flowers, which she sold to an old woman who stood on the
street corners and offered them to the passers-by.
The two rooms in the tenement house were as neat as care and thrift
could make them. The windows opened only into the court, it is true, but
Pierre and Marie did not need to look out of doors to get a pleasant
view, for they could look at each other, and at the baby; besides, the
glass was spotlessly clean and hung with equally spotless curtains. The
floors were uncarpeted, but there was never a speck of dust on them. The
little kitchen where Marie worked had a not unappetising fragrance from
the _pot-au-feu_ that simmered on the stove; it had also a gleam of
sunshine in it for a few hours each day. Sometimes when Pierre left his
incubus for half an hour and ran home for a mouthful of bread and soup,
he looked at Maman Marie sitting by her table in the sunshine, her
scissors gleaming among the paper-flower petals, and at Fleur-de-lis,
sitting at her feet playing with the rainbow-coloured scraps, and then
he fell on his knees beside them, and, putting his arm about them both,
forgot that it was the only one he had, forgot that he was poor and
crippled, and that the future was all uncertain, remembering only that
he had home and wife and child, and that life, with all its hardships,
was inexpressibly dear to him. For it happens, sometimes, that a poet's
soul is lodged in a very humble tenement, and a love that would do
honour to a knight blossoms and flourishes in the midst of mean and
pitiful surroundings.
[Illustration]
Fleur-de-lis's cradle had curtains made of a bit of tricolour, and from
the centre of the canopy there hung a medal of the Virgin swinging on a
narrow ribbon of blue. The cradle itself was a wooden box, and Marie,
with a maternal ingenuity that surmounted the lack of ordinary
materials, had lined the inside of the hood with tissue-paper flowers;
white and blue fleurs-de-lis to match those on the faded satin coverlet,
a fragment of ancient grandeur where the Rastignac coat-of-arms was
intertwined with the Bourbon lilies of France. And when the baby's
vagrant gaze wandered to the flowery heaven above her head, and her pink
fingers reached to touch it and to stroke the soft counterpane, Maman
Marie would tell her the name of the posies; and so after a time, when
she discovered that people and things possessed names, Marie Hortense
Amelie, Mademoiselle Bebe, elected to call herself Fleur-de-lis. It was
the first word she lisped, and she attached it to herself with the
utmost complacency. It was appropriate enough, for she looked as if she
might have been originally intended for a flower, and then somehow a
soul had strayed into the flower, and it had fluttered down to earth as
a child--a curious blossom to come from lowly stock, a kind of tender
and beautiful miracle wrought out of common clay by the fashioning and
refining power of love. At times, when Marie sat at her work and looked
at Fleur-de-lis cooing and smiling under her tri-coloured curtains, she
forgot the strange land outside the windows, and the Babel of strange
tongues in the crowded tenement, and as her deft, brown fingers shaped
the tissue flowers, she saw in fancy the poppies and the wheat and the
lilies of her native Breton fields. She saw the sun shining on the old
chateau, her mother hanging a chaplet on the baron's tomb in the little
oratory, the aged baroness walking sadly in the pleasance. All, all were
gone. The chateau was dismantled. The proud old family, rooted for
centuries to the soil of Brittany, had gradually lost its land and its
riches, till now there was only one frail old dame, poor and childless,
to maintain the ancient title. All these memories, half sad, half sweet,
flitted in and out of Marie's mind as she snipped and trimmed and
twisted and shaped, her head on one side to view the result, like a
little brown pheasant regarding a berry; and if Fleur-de-lis slept, she
hummed a Breton lullaby as she twined her paper nosegays. What wonder,
then, that there was a French air about them that attracted purchasers?
[Illustration]
So "hope clad in April green" made life worth living for father and
mother; and, as for Fleur-de-lis, she was a child; and she had love, and
that was enough, and it is sad when we grow so old that it does not
suffice for us. But these days, so full of care and anxiety, of
weariness and self-denial tinged with happiness, came to an end; for
when Fleur-de-lis was two years old, Maman Marie, young and strong,
passionately in love with life, desperately needed by husband and
child, had to leave them, to journey on alone to another far country,
having just grown wonted to this.
Then the light went out of the two little rooms that had been home;
indeed, it seemed to go out of the world altogether. Hard times and yet
harder ones descended upon poor Pierre Dupont. Marie's earnings no
longer helped to swell the slender income, and there were no willing
woman's hands to cut and plan and save, to contrive and embellish. Added
to this, the piano suddenly grew uncertain, and subject to grave musical
lapses, attacks of aphasia in the middle of some tunes, and of asthma in
the middle of others; so that the hoot of the stony-hearted bystander
and the ruffianly small boy became familiar to Pierre's ears; for he
could not afford to buy new cylinders to fit into the old instrument,
and to keep it up to the demands of the street, which is always
delighted if you "cannot sing the old songs," and wishes the latest
melody to the exclusion of everything else.
[Illustration]
Fleur-de-lis had been left in the care of a woman for many weeks after
Marie's death, but the sight of her tear-stained face at night, the
tender frenzy with which she lifted her arms to her father when he came
in, the sob of joy with which she buried her head in his coat, the sigh
of content with which she stroked his cheek between every mouthful of
bread and milk as she sat on his knee eating her meagre supper--all this
was too much for his loving heart. He had a small sum of money that he
had been hoarding to attach "Annie Rooney" and "Comrades" to his
unfashionable instrument, that he might appease the public by the
gratification of its darling wishes, and withdraw the Boulanger march
from its sated ears. This money he took and went to a carpenter's shop
in the neighbourhood. After many explanations in his broken English, and
many diagrams rudely drawn on paper, the carpenter succeeded in building
a primitive sort of baby-carriage on one end of the street-piano. It had
two wheels of its own, and moved somewhat in harmony with the ancient
instrument, which had its difficulties of locomotion nowadays, as well
as its musical weaknesses. It had a drawer in which Fleur-de-lis's
playthings were kept--a battered doll, and boxes of her favourite scraps
of bright tissue-paper, the top of an old cotton umbrella, and a square
of rubber cloth like that which covered the piano when it rained. Here
Fleur-de-lis sat for many hours each day, happy and content. Pierre
would often take her out, and let her toddle by his side until she was
tired, when she would ascend her throne again. She wore a faded corduroy
jacket and an old woollen cap, but the flower-face that smiled above
the one, and the shower of chestnut hair that fell from beneath the
other, made you forget the poverty of her raiment. She was always clean
and sweet and comfortable, for Pierre, with the gentleness and patience
of a woman, washed and even mended, in a rough sort of a way, that the
child might not wholly miss a mother's care.
[Illustration]
Matters were going on in this way, rather from bad to worse, when one
November day father and child turned off a side-street, and trundled
into one of the fashionable avenues of the city. Pierre did not often
wheel his piano in front of brown-stone houses; it was too old and
wheezy to commend itself to localities accustomed to Seidl's orchestra
and the Hungarian band; but he scarcely knew to-day whither his aimless
feet were carrying him. For two weeks he had gone out in the early
morning and evening, leaving Fleur-de-lis asleep, and had spent an hour
or two in a vain quest for employment. But his speech was broken, and he
had only one arm--small wonder that he failed when hundreds of men with
two arms and nimbler tongues were seeking the same thing and failing.
People generally told him that he ought to have stayed at home in his
own country, where he belonged; but that, as he had not done that, his
next best plan was to get back there at the earliest possible moment. If
they had had time to hear his justification for cumbering the earth of
this free country, he might have told them that he left France a strong
young man, with a strong young wife, and nearly fifteen hundred francs
for the inevitable rainy day; but that the rainy day had turned out to
be a continual downpour. He was wondering in a dull, vague sort of way,
as they rattled along over the cobblestones, why there was not bread for
the mouths that needed it. He wondered why, through no fault of his own,
he should have been maimed and crippled, why the loss of wife should
have followed the loss of limb, why there was not enough work in the
world for the people who were willing to do it, why the children in the
luxurious carriages that swept past him should be swathed in furs while
Fleur-de-lis's hands were blue in her ragged mittens.
The universe was a mystery to Pierre Dupont. Search it as he might, he
could find no key to its curious distribution of miseries and
injustices. It seemed to him that, if some people would be content to
take a little less, there might be a little more for him; but he was by
no means certain of the soundness of this comfortable theory. A little
less gold plate on that harness, for instance, a yard less of lace on
the gown of that lady just stepping into her brougham, a single diamond
from her marquise ring--no, that superficial and snarling philosophy
did not help Pierre; there was neither envy nor rage in his heart as
yet; only a dull despair, a groping in the dark for a reason. Many of
these fortunate people, he supposed, deserved their fortunes, and had
earned them. They were cleverer than he, and had friends and
opportunities not vouchsafed, perhaps, to him. But why, since he was not
clever, and since he had neither friends nor opportunities, should he
have been deprived first of his principal means of self-support, and
then of his consolation, his courage, his other and braver self?
[Illustration]
And now it was the anniversary of Marie's death. That made the day even
harder to bear; for in some subtle way the remembrance of certain hours
or moments in a dear dead past is always more bitter when we say to
ourselves with a sigh, "It was just a year ago." Nature was in no
buoyant mood. A cold, drizzling rain, which ought to have been snow,
fell from time to time. The chill dampness made people draw their wraps
closer, and look drearily at the sky. Even the children appeared less
joyous than usual. Men turned up the bottoms of their trousers and the
collars of their coats, and hurried past one another with a gruff nod
that would have been a smile on a sunny day. The bare branches of the
trees shivered in the wind, and a few snowbirds huddled themselves
together cheerlessly here and there, as if even they wished themselves
farther south.
Pierre took out the rubber-cloth to cover his piano, and as he did so he
saw two children at the second story of a fine house near by. He
expected to be ordered away by a butler in livery at the moment he
disclosed the limitations of his musical instrument, but one could never
tell, the butler might be wooing the parlour-maid, so he drew up in
front of the drive-way. Fleur-de-lis had just walked several blocks,
and, on being lifted into her carriage, hoisted the dilapidated cotton
umbrella and wrapped her doll in an extra bit of calico. Pierre turned
the crank; the piano began on "Love's Young Dream." It seemed to him
that, with every revolution of the handle, he twisted the chords of his
aching heart, and that presently it would break, as the battered old
cylinders threatened to do, and for the same reason; because, alas! too
many tunes had been played upon them. When ill-fortune descends too
thick and fast upon the human spirit, unless it can draw fresh
accessions of strength from within, from without, from above, it sinks
inevitably into despair. Man may be conscious that he is made in the
image of God, fitted to endure, to conquer, all things, but for the time
he is common human clay, he faints and dies, or falls into a cowardly
lethargy that is worse than death. Such a moment had come to Pierre
Dupont. In his first crushing blow he had had a wife to stand shoulder
to shoulder with him. He had now his passionate devotion to his child;
but in cold and weariness, in hunger and friendlessness, ill-fortune and
despair, would love be able to keep itself pure, noble, self-denying,
hopeful? There were ways of forgetting, of dulling one's self, of
blotting out memory for hours together.