is only feebly approximate in date. Even the Bronze Epoch knew the

latticed hovel roofed with daub; perhaps the skin-clad builders took

lesson by the swallow’s bungalow, or the clay lining of the throstle’s

house. Or perhaps the prototypal hut was the tent made permanent, a

wigwam expressed in woven withies and caked mud? It must have been

general in Europe when Christ was born, for certain first-century

tombstones, dug up in Alsace, resemble the primal home in shape, and show

markings for timbers at the gables; most likely these were mimic copies

of the dead man’s earthly dwelling, meant to house his otherwise vagrant

soul; this is lichen of the greyest morning, though Egyptian funerary

chambers are older still. But it is lichen that lives on yet, for what is

a modern mausoleum but a mansion for the dead? A family vault at Woking

is as tribal as a patronymic; we are born thus lichened—the youngest are

grey with these spores from the past.

Such surnames as Dabb, Dauber, Dobb, and Dobbin descend from early

manipulators of viscous mud, I suppose, special craftsmen developed at

the very beginning of ‘division of labour,’ and there is a certain French

phrase for sturdiness—_bâti à chaux et à sable_—which must date as far

back as the earliest mixing of lime and sand in with mud. ‘Clay-dabber

Dick,’ a resented nickname for a brickmaker now, would begin as a proper

cognomen in some loamy county, where clay could be used flat between the

timberings, in place of wattle plastered with mud. Tyler would name the

artisan who posed ridge-tiles and pantiles, that Potter had moulded,

and baked perhaps in Robinson Crusoe’s outdoor way: Defoe, by the bye,

was once ‘secretary to a pantile works at Tilbury.’ Such craft names as

Mason and Quarrier would begin in stone counties first, very likely; but

Thatcher is as proved an ancient as Dobster or Dobbin—his lichen is as

old as any, I daresay. For dab and thatch must always have gone together,

and still in Wilts and Bucks garden-walls made of dab are thatched

lest they dissolve under rain. Ramblers along English road-trees see

this straw-weaving go on yet, thank goodness, as it surely always will

wherever people own taste as well as land. There are thatched churches

extant; one at Markby in Lincolnshire, near loamy cliffs that wall out

the sea. What warmth and simplicity of worship, under thatch!

Thatch ennobles—it can suggest the stately peruke; thatch is sporting—a

covert-coat for a cottage; thatch shades its serge into such tints of

khaki that it weaves the right ‘British warm.’ A thatcher can be an

artist, as much as any Dick Tinto who paints; and I will also claim that

Hedger and Ditcher are very ancient and skilled artisans. Thatch shapes

into such slopes, too, it so canopies and rounds off gables, dormers, and

porches, that for fitness and comeliness its motley is your hamlet’s only

wear. And as patentees in their advertisements do, I urge ‘Reject all

substitutes!’ and against metal roofs in particular, corrugated iron that

basely counterfeits pantiles, I launch the curse of the rambler; for upon

such hectic, crinkly awnings no lichen of loveliness ever gets hold. Let

roof-tree and road-tree grow ‘in beauty side by side,’ as Mrs. Hemans’

family did, say I, and the wig of the cottage be blonde.

Road-trees sprout hamlets, dwellings grouped in greenery as if they were

clusters of acorns or hazel-nuts, and these often are ripe old places,

turning brown as nuts and acorns do, and blest with beautiful baptisms,

names that a rambler reads upon slanting sign-posts or over rustical

post-office doors. Many old place-names relate their own exegesis: I

know a road that branches off at Headless Cross—the medieval picture

and _chiaroscuro_ of the past in that! One sees the Lollards in the

foreground of it, dourly hewing a saint’s head off the top of a stone

shaft, the thatched village looking sleepily on.

For six undulant miles or so this road from Headless Cross goes dandling

along to Tardebigg, through delightful Foxlydiate, and past the bald

summit of Muskott’s Way. ‘Tardebigg,’ more recondite than ‘Headless

Cross,’ I guess to have named the site of some manor-house or farmstead

built so dawdlingly as never to have been finished—a bachelor or

spinster bit of building that never made a home, and childless died into

the inane. Or ‘Tardebigg’ may have named some hill of late-harvesting

barley—there is always the delight of shies at the local truth for you,

one can seldom be quite sure of a hit. Yet who was Muskott, that he

should ever have owned a long strip of common-land which could never

belong to any particular body? It is fudge; I do not believe there ever

was such a Muskott—Onesimus, George, or Ebenezer as the case might be.

I’ll warrant that Muskott’s Way was known as Muskets Way in days when

Napoleon threatened invasion, for in days when Louis Napoleon’s colonels

threatened it, the Rifle Corps had their shooting-range up Muskott’s Way.

There magazine rifles are practised with at present, I do not doubt, and

there in Wat Tyler’s time bowmen would loose at the butts. The place is a

palimpsest, of our successive preparations for war.

As for the christening of Foxlydiate, the road-tree sways gracefully

down just there, and was not _hlidh_ Early English for ‘slope’? There

are other lyds and lydiates. ‘Foxlydiate’ may have meant the meet of

the hunters—there are kennels near it still; but I think the name was

anciently ‘Folks-lydiate,’ the hill of the ‘good folk’ or fays, and it is

a superstitious little village yet. No stretch of country road used to

live without its myth or chimera (of subtle contour often), its fable,

its dreaming escape from the actual; a myriad perennial annals, vouched

for by the affidavits of the aged, some of them puerile but some grim,

lichen our by-ways; there is hardly a great house but when you pass the

park-palings of split oak something romantical will come to mind, or be

told in your ear. Beginning gay-coloured, as lichens often do, these

sometimes darken; thus the legend at Foxlydiate is sombre and nocturnal

now. The road there hears an equipage sometimes, after sunset, and this

was once a fairy vehicle, I’ll warrant, perhaps a Cinderella’s coach;

but it has become a nightmare now—the terror of ‘the Flying Hearse.’

Elms in platoons and companies shadow the road there, and there the

bat of superstition flits through the twilight of the spirit; be there

in the mood, and you may think you hear wheels rush uphill; smack of

whip, snort of nag, clink of swingle-bar are heard, but no correspondent

forms are visible; and that is salutary, the tradition says, for whoso

_sees_ the Flying Hearse must die within the year. Many a time there I

as a lad, driving home in the twilight, listened with the delight of

half-sceptical terror, but I doubt if people harken for that fatal

omnibus now. Tilth and foison of ghost story, aged jest, and fine old

tradition no longer flourish; for towns and townsmen, spreading into the

country—lichen of a sort—bring the long age of romantic rural faiths to

an end.

Townsmen in Arcady are rarer of late, however. War-time depopulates

the country roads. The motor-car (itself a flying hearse sometimes) is

scarce there now. Solitary the rambler jogs along, alone with himself,

except for the flight of the mated thrush or other father bird on service

of commissariat; but in what ease of silence you may now pursue your

errantry, and into what delight of the unexpected! There are folk who

think they ramble, yet go nose in map, by rule and rote of road; but as

well employ a guide and an alpenstock—to ramble is not to ken whither,

and yet to home. There are plausible short-cuts that deceive you, I

know, and branches of road-trees bring you to sudden corners, hedged-in

dichotomies, curves and exfoliations that the Development Commissioners,

most leisurely of Government Trustees, had not even so much as begun to

think of improving away, some day, before the War. These may perplex

you, or even be perilous with storming petrels; but there are natural

dug-outs, trenches with high green banks.

Often from such elbows as these a lane goes trooping off, like a

truant from school. Dusky ways you come to, and bright ones, russet or

green tunnels over-arched that make noontide a twilight, or jolly and

titupping lanes that caper away from corner alehouses with merry, drunken

staggers. Or you pass between roofless colonnades, stately cloisters

with tree-trunks for mullions; these are lanes that once were avenues,

leading long ago to the gates and curtilage of some manor-house now

razed. It is by ways such as these that you pass the minuter Auburns,

deserted cottages which by the something maniac there is now about their

thatch make you think of Barnaby Rudge. And sometimes the raven croaks

above those ruined little atriums; oftener the curlew calls across lesser

lanes still, that were ancient pack-horse tracks, or were foot-worn in

the lang syne of some local trade now dead—the Salt-way, the Rush-way, or

the Keg-way leading up from some cove of contraband. The ring-dove coos

to narrower paths still—O Lubin and Chloe!—the recognised sweethearting

footways where every generation has loitered and whispered with the

erratic ache of love.

These divers cuts and tacks shorten apparent distance and cheat the

tiring foot, for the way itself seems to wander with you, and each new

corner to beckon you on. And this is a portion of that English form of

great art which lets things develop as if they were vegetal, into a

perfect beauty of anarchy, various and infinite; no Ordnance surveyor nor

planner of garden cities would invent such foot-beguiling roads as these.

Some of them can astound even the most experienced rambler, he almost can

hear them chuckle at his surprise when he rounds into a new vista, and

some of them seem to go about with the zeal of an antiquary, discovering

and reconnecting the tracks of some Titan who trapesed through the

quag there, before it had hardened after Noah’s flood. There are leafy

labyrinths, too, mazy suburbs, _faubourgs_ of silent green cities,

peopled by plants and shapes of leaves and scents so various, that in

June, the schoolboy month, a man may rest there bewitched, ‘Tarrying and

talked to by tongues aromatic,’ thinking himself a bodily translation,

resolved into a forested world.

I suppose the skin-clad explorer of spaces we now name counties found no

paths but the spoor of what a Boy Scout called ‘growly beasts.’ Between

dens and water-breaks these tracks would go, and I never came to a ford

without seeming to see some skin-clad explorer there before me, his

tongue lapping water and his furtive eyes swivelling left and right for

danger, since it was then always war-time for a man. In September, when

great fleets of swallows gather in ports of departure, I have noticed

them, myriad and midge-like in the air above and around—I cannot guess

why—a ford. Water brings back some of the old feeling of mystery and

danger into any journey, you spy the peril under the beauty as you come

to a ferry, or to a string of white posts and chains that fence off a

roadside burn.

How Shakespeare delighted in fords! He played with the word’s meaning

again and again. Many a Warwickshire place he knew where ‘the shore

was shelvy and shallow,’ and he—perhaps he most of all as most human

of all—would be glad to get home to his shire. There was, and I hope

is yet, a ford at the ‘beggarly Broome’ which he knew of, where the

road pushed into the Avon abruptly, turned at a right angle midstream,

splashed axle-deep thirty yards, and emerged uphill. And this used to

be a place of delicious risk for a young palmer whose staff was a whip;

for at any moment the gig might become a cockleshell, floating. It was a

sacred water of danger to me; may Development Commissioners destroy it

never, and least of all with some iron bridge, kept painted against the

mollifying lichen of rust.

Splash went the fetlocks; or if you were afoot, under the lee of an old

mill a lichened old boat swayed hooked, and across the echoing flow your

cry went, ‘Ferry-oh!’ or ‘O-ver, miller!’—the very music of life. A

ferry-boat is but a moving span, stepping-stones are a kind of ford, and

bridges developed out of these, I think, for what were the piers at first

but stepping-stones for a giant’s stride? Bridges—but pages and pages

would not tell the rambler’s delight in those circumflex accents, those

brooding brows bent over grey eyes of water wherein reflections lie deep,

like thoughts that dream.

Such, Jean-Paul might have cried, in one of the conceits with which he

rejoiced a dead old Germany, are the flowers and honey of a road-tree,

with cottages like strawy hives, under linden-tresses murmurous of

clustered delight; these be the joys that wing the rambler, so that away

he goes bumbling tirelessly, as I do here, to the next blossoms, and the

next. Life itself climbs and descends a road-tree, I suppose—the tree

of Ygdrasil; but there can be continual breaking forth into new boughs

of living if one carries Spring on into Autumn, keeping pretty young

in spite of the impertinences of time. Has there not been grafting of

road-trees, budding of fertile young stems into lichened old branches of

ways?

But road-trees are deciduous, too, boughs and twigs of them withering

for lack of the sap of daily use; with some sense of pathos a rambler

obtrudes upon the hush of lanes long left unmetalled, where the latest

wheel-marks are wan. He thus comes into places of pastoral indolence

that once hummed with cultivation, where not even yet, in war-time,

have farmers wakened their Sleepy Hollows up. Some of the elderliest

by-roads are the loneliest, and seem to lie musing of their past; even a

summer breeze can blow bleakly there, and in the lulls of it the silence

waits, forlorn. There are very aged, lonesome ways which seem to shiver,

Lear-like, and then the rambler thinks how all the hurriers and loiterers

upon them in the past lie low. We too are in the tradition: ‘This great

world itself shall so wear out to naught.’

Lear wandered the Roman roads of Britain; they set one thinking of

strategic railways just now. In essence an old Latin militant broadway

and a German route to the extravasation of blood are the same, I suppose.

Both were pushed out like spears of offence, immense and excessive, and

neither was a pleasant causeway for neighbourliness. Therefore a curse

shall come upon the Prussian strategic paths, such as fell upon the Roman

thoroughfares here long ago. Even yet these seem to march in arms among

us, between the remains of sullen native forests—they are aliens still;

listen along one of them yet, and you shall think you hear the clink of

greaves or the centurion’s harsh command. These ancient roads can never

be homely, they have never been naturalised, the little townships hold

apart from them yet.

Follow Watling Street or the Fosse Way in rustic regions and you come

upon few villages: our old horror of the Latin power seems to persist.

British and Early-English field-folk huddled together in hamlets that

developed like social islands, at the centre of cultivable common lands,

connubial, away from forests of _ferae_ and thoroughfares of war. Even

in York and Lancaster days villagers would use the great old roads as

seldom as might be—they were marches for soldiery, stretches of savagery

that husbandman and maid had better avoid. They thus became bristling

frontiers, limits of peaceable excursion, confines of wapentakes or

counties; in days when people were

‘Parish-bound with hedgerows as with bars,’

it would be risky to quit your township, and almost armed invasion to

cross the great road. We English no more became Latin then than Teutonic

later; always we have gone our own ways. Between Newark and Nottingham

the Fosse marches straight, a noble Roman superb and haughty, but the

other road, the true Englishman, wends devious and unsystematic: it

developed as the British Empire did, out of paths and lanes of trade and

gossip: they never set out to be a main road or an empire at all.

Somewhere and sometime all roads end, as must this wandering gossip of

road-trees. It is good to jog on the footpath way and hent the stile even

in war-time; when skylarks are mounted, why not out and listen, though

from the same Sussex hill you faintly hear the great guns? The lyric

blaze above persists, in spite of war. Is it unfeeling to forget the

drumming streets, the drilling camps, and go listen how underwoods ring

with wild hyacinths? That Death is Life’s fierce, Prussian neighbour we

know more than ever, just now—but Life _has_ to be Death’s comrade in the

whirling dream. The war will pass, though thick the lichen of it gather

upon us meanwhile, sad-coloured and black. It is not heartless to look

round the corner and over the hill meantime, and it is wisdom to lift up

the heart in spite of all, as one plods towards the evening tent.

_MONSEIGNEUR._

(Suggested by a Provençal _conte_ of Alphonse Daudet’s.)

(_The scene is a bedchamber in MONSEIGNEUR’S palace in Provence, and the

time is a morning in early spring, towards the close of the fifteenth

century_.

_Behind the closely-drawn, heavily-embroidered curtains of his

vast state-bed, lies the little MONSEIGNEUR, most desperately ill.

Notwithstanding the gay and brilliant sunshine that floods the palace, in

the open fireplace of MONSEIGNEUR’S bedchamber there is a blazing scented

fire of logs piled; while all the windows, with their stained armorial

bearings, and all the heavy tapestry hangings over the narrow doorways

that lead to garde-robe and oratory and corridor, are mercilessly closed.

One would say, indeed, that the Doctor and Nurse who are in attendance

were bent on killing the child, if only by depriving him of the faintest

flutter of the revivifying spring air without. Yet they fully believe

they are doing the best for their patient, and now are giving him the

drink he cries for, faintly and fretfully, from within the tightly-drawn

bed-curtains, putting the cup into the thin little hand that closes on it

so feverishly._

_Then the heavy hangings at the back are drawn, rattling sharply on their

iron rings, and the Bishop of Langres enters. Behind him, in the blazing

sunshine of the corridor, BEPPO waits for permission to follow him; a

ragged, sunburnt, Spanish-looking little boy, who carries a bird’s-nest

with young thrushes in it, over which, as he stands there motionless, he

seems entirely absorbed._)

BISHOP (_as he enters_). Mother of God! The heat in this chamber!—Doctor

Mabrise! (_at which the Doctor merely shrugs his shoulders, as if to

say_: ‘What else can one do? In cases of fever!⸺’) But out of doors, my

good Doctor, it is spring; the sun is hot enough already to split the

stones. Is it really necessary?

DOCTOR (_severely_). Of course!

BISHOP (_in a low tone_). Tell me—how is the boy?

DOCTOR (_gloomily_). Very bad.

BISHOP. So?

DOCTOR. Passing rapidly, even beyond my skill! (_So he goes to the fire,

and stirs it ill-humouredly to an even more furious activity._)

BISHOP. Already? (_Murmurs._) Then we must make haste.

(_Meanwhile the Nurse, as a hot little hand returns the drinking cup

through the bed-curtains, softly asks_:)

NURSE. Is that better? (_To which the sick child within makes

inarticulate, fretful reply. So she closes the curtains again tightly._)

Try now to go to sleep again, and you will wake up quite well.

(_Soothingly._) Quite well!

(_Then, with a profound obeisance to the Bishop, she goes to the table at

the foot of the bed and replaces the cup among the many, many medicine

bottles and phials of drugs; while outside, in the sunshine of the

corridor, BEPPO chants tunefully and joyously over his birds’-nest._)

BEPPO. Mon-seig-neur!

(_He looks up startled as both Nurse and Doctor make angry, violent

gestures towards him of ‘’Ssh! ’Ssh!’, and then at his good friend, the

Bishop, wondering what wrong it is he has done. A slight pause, while no

sound comes from the bed. Then the Nurse goes up to him, beckoning him

angrily, and once he is within the chamber draws the heavy hangings again

over the corridor entrance._)

NURSE (_in an angry whisper_). Bawling and singing, like a drunken gipsy!

BEPPO (_faces her with an engaging smile_). Mind my pretty nestlings.

(_And chants over them, softly and melodiously._) They are for

Mon-seig-neur!

NURSE (_in his face, sharply_). ’Ssh! Vagabond!

BEPPO (_while the Nurse goes to the bed and peeps through the curtains,

chants again very softly over his birds’-nest_). For Mon-seig-neur!

NURSE (_turns towards them and whispers_). He is just off again. Fast

asleep. (_So she sits and resumes her sewing at the foot of the bed,

while the Bishop also glances through the curtains, and BEPPO, always

absorbed over the birds’-nest, goes to show it to the Doctor._)

BISHOP (_with a heavy sigh_). The last of his race! It would have killed

his father. (_Pause._)

BEPPO. Doctor Mabrise! Look!

DOCTOR. What are they?

BEPPO. Young thrushes. I found them this morning, in a great lilac-bush,

below the Black Dog bastion. See! There are five.

DOCTOR (_gloomily_). They will die.

BEPPO. In this hot chamber? Ah! Before Monseigneur can even see them?

_Malheur!_ (_As if at once to take them into the open air._)

BISHOP. Beppo! (_BEPPO pauses and looks up at him with a smile._) My poor

boy! Thou art seeming very ragged and dirty this morning.

BEPPO. Truly? (_As he looks himself over._)

BISHOP. If thou art to play once more with Monseigneur, we must have thee

washed.

BEPPO (_troubled_). Washed?

BISHOP. It will not hurt thee; it may even do thee some good. Nurse! Take

our young friend here and wash him. Wash him well!

NURSE (_pleased with the commission, rises_). Ah!

BEPPO. Not with soap?

NURSE (_menacingly_). With soap and with pumice-stone. Come!

BISHOP. Leave me thy birds’-nest. And, Nurse, let him at the same time be

neatly dressed. Perhaps in some old suit of Monseigneur’s.

BEPPO (_annoyed_). Old suit?

BISHOP. They are of the same age and height. And to play with Monseigneur

in those rags!—(_As BEPPO still lingers._) Go, my child.

NURSE. Come! I will give thee the best washing!—

BEPPO (_with recovered spirits_). I am not afraid. Thou art only an old

woman!

NURSE. Ah! Sayest thou?

BEPPO (_whispers, shaking a finger in her face_). ’Ssh, old woman! ’Ssh!

(_So they leave the chamber, the Nurse angrily pushing him out in front

of her._)

BISHOP (_tenderly, over BEPPO’S birds’-nest_). Little, hungry, weak

birds! There is something infinitely pathetic, Doctor, in these young

things of Nature.

DOCTOR (_gloomily_). So many of them die.

BISHOP. It seems so; even without the aid of a surgeon. (_He hands the

Doctor the nest, who, not knowing what else to do with it, nor how to

reply to the Bishop’s impertinence, places it on the ledge of the high

and sloping couvre-feu over the fireplace._)

DOCTOR. There! The heat will do them good; nourish them. For heat is

life. _Calor est vita optima._ (_Mumbling and muttering to himself._)

Galen hath said it.—Galen!—

BISHOP (_after a long pause, softly_). Doctor Mabrise—tell me—is there no

way, no hope, of keeping Monseigneur alive?

DOCTOR (_warming his thin brown hands in front of the fire_). My science

knows none; she is at her wits’ end. And when science is at her wits’ end⸺

BISHOP (_drily_). Methinks she hath but a short road to travel!

DOCTOR (_piqued_). Then let the Church try, my good Bishop; let the

Church try. For if ever there were need for one of your miracles⸺

BISHOP (_gravely_). Ah!

DOCTOR (_points to the bed_). There is your subject, ready for you;

waiting. A dying child. You have my authority to begin.

BISHOP (_drily_). Then we will begin by opening the windows; we will

admit some of this soft spring air. (_He unlatches and throws wide open

one of the few windows of the bedchamber; while the Doctor, himself a

poor consumptive, shivers and cowers over the fire._) You don’t like it?

DOCTOR (_angrily_). Seeing that all diseases enter by the mouth!

BISHOP (_amused_). What? In springtime? In Provence?

DOCTOR (_grumbles_). Especially in springtime. Always! (_Mumbling, with

cloak drawn over his mouth._) Plague and fever!

BISHOP. At any rate, Doctor, you will agree with me that if Monseigneur

dies it means ruin for the Duchy.

DOCTOR (_scornfully_). If?

BISHOP. There will infallibly be civil war here all through the summer.

There will be neither harvest nor vintage!

DOCTOR (_shortly_). I agree.

BISHOP. And in the autumn, here, in the very palace of Monseigneur, will

most surely be found securely seated that dangerous ruffian, the Comte de

Poix. An infidel; a pronounced foe to Holy Church! While you and I, my

good friend⸺

DOCTOR (_drily_). All the more reason, Bishop, for you to set to work at

once with your miracle. You have my full permission—_plena auctoritas_—to

begin.

BISHOP (_with a glance at the bed_). After all, Beppo is Monseigneur’s

brother. You knew that, Doctor?

DOCTOR. Doubtless. What of it?

BISHOP. Beppo and he are of precisely the same age. They are not

unlike—at a distance. And at a distance, for some few years, it will be

that the people will always see him.

DOCTOR (_scoffs_). You don’t call that a miracle? To substitute one boy

for the other?

BISHOP (_gently_). Not if it succeeds?

DOCTOR. Bishop! And Beppo? What will the people think has become of Beppo?

BISHOP. Only that he has run away again somewhere, and got lost.

DOCTOR. Lost!

BISHOP. Why, who is there ever gives him a moment’s thought here? Is he

not a gipsy—a vagabond?

DOCTOR. And you propose to place him—in a palace?

BISHOP (_whispers_). ’Ssh! Monseigneur is waking. (_Goes to the bed and

draws the curtains._) But how is this, Doctor? The boy is not undressed?

DOCTOR. He refused. He said that if he had to die he would die as his

father did, in his clothes.

BISHOP. Brave lad! (_So he seats himself on the edge of the bed, outside

of which the little MONSEIGNEUR lies, fully dressed, propped up by

pillows. And after a while, as the Bishop leans forward and gently places

his large peasant’s hand on the poor child’s small and scorching palm,

MONSEIGNEUR turns towards him, feebly and languidly, and looks at him

with wide-open, frightened eyes. Soothingly._) Well, Monseigneur? And how

are we?

MONSEIGNEUR (_murmurs_). Bishop of Langres! Tell me—am I really going to

die?

BISHOP (_gently_). To die! After all, what is it to die? It is only to go

from one room to another. And to another, better!

MONSEIGNEUR (_fretfully_). I would rather stay here. Here are all my

friends, and my soldiers, and my new cannon. Besides, to die in spring!

So early in the year, when there is so much to do; when my people want

me. (_Raising himself slightly._) Where is Beppo?

BISHOP. He will be here directly. He is only being washed.

MONSEIGNEUR (_smiles faintly_). Poor Beppo! That is not one of his

favourite amusements.

BISHOP. You are fond of Beppo? Is it not so, Monseigneur?

MONSEIGNEUR. Very fond.

BISHOP. You would like to do something for him? How shall I say? Assure

his future? (_On MONSEIGNEUR’S silence._) You understand what I mean, by

assuring Beppo’s future?

MONSEIGNEUR. Of course! It means seeing that he has always somewhere to

sleep, that he does not go so often hungry, and, in the winter, fireless;

that he keeps himself clean. The difficulty will be to make him accept.

(_Smiles._) He is such a vagabond.

BISHOP. Hitherto, no one has shown him any care.

MONSEIGNEUR. And yet—he is my brother.

BISHOP (_while the Doctor, who is listening, starts_). Monseigneur! You

knew? But how? Since when?

MONSEIGNEUR. Since one day—a long time ago—when I was quite a child, and

my father and my mother were quarrelling.

BISHOP. So?

MONSEIGNEUR. It seems, Messire, that when people quarrel—even before

their own children—they will tell each other unpleasant truths.

BISHOP (_nods, gravely_). Sometimes.

MONSEIGNEUR. So it was that my mother told my father he ought to be

ashamed of himself. He had so many little bastards.

BISHOP (_shocked, with raised hands_). Monseigneur!

MONSEIGNEUR. I did not understand. I had never heard the word. Therefore,

one day I asked Lorrain, the big man-at-arms⸺ (_Pauses._)

BISHOP. And he told your lordship?

MONSEIGNEUR. He told me nothing. He only laughed. So did my father, when

my mother charged him.—Aie! how well I remember!

BISHOP. But _Madame la Duchesse_, your mother? She did not laugh?

MONSEIGNEUR (_simply_). Not at all. She was very angry. She said it

was a scandal; particularly, with poor Beppo. Do you know why, Bishop?

(_Confidentially._) Because it seems he was born on the same day, the

very same day, as I. Yet, somehow, she was not his mother. That was why

she was so angry, I suppose?

BISHOP. Very likely. (_Pause, while the Doctor, after exchanging glances

with the Bishop, resumes his seat by the fire_).

MONSEIGNEUR. Bishop!

BISHOP. Monseigneur?

MONSEIGNEUR. Do you think that if I gave my brother Beppo money—a great

deal of money—he would die instead of me? Do you think the good God would

mind?

BISHOP (_guardedly_). It would be difficult.

MONSEIGNEUR (_proudly_). After all, the good God is my cousin. Dukes are

all cousins of the Almighty God, Bishop. Are they not?

BISHOP. They very often make the claim, Monseigneur. I do not know

whether it has ever been allowed.

MONSEIGNEUR (_with dignity_). At least, Messire, I trust that in heaven

I shall keep my proper rank? I shall not be required to mix with all the

common people?

BISHOP. Common people, Monseigneur? It is not the common people, believe

me, who rise to heaven at all. Indeed, one must have uncommon qualities!⸺

MONSEIGNEUR (_eagerly_). And then my fine clothes; my ermine and my

velvet? Doubtless I shall be allowed to wear them?

BISHOP. Alas, my child, in heaven there are no distinctions; neither of

rank nor of clothes. Sometimes I doubt whether even the sacred order of

Bishops⸺

MONSEIGNEUR (_angrily_). Then what good to me is my birth? If I am to

keep neither my rank nor my clothes, if I am not to be treated with

proper respect, I might as well be Beppo! I will not die! I will not! I

will not!

BISHOP. Monseigneur!

MONSEIGNEUR (_leaning on his elbow, screams_,) Lorrain! Lorrain! (_And

while the Bishop rises, LORRAIN, the big man-at-arms, comes clanking in

through the hangings from the corridor._)

LORRAIN (_hoarsely_). Monseigneur?

MONSEIGNEUR. Lorrain—listen! I have a duty for thee—at once!—a solemn

duty!

LORRAIN. Name it, Monseigneur. It shall be done.

MONSEIGNEUR (_feverishly_). Lorrain—thou knowest Death, dost thou not?

Thou hast often seen him?

LORRAIN. Death and I have often looked at each other, Monseigneur—many

times!—straight in the eyes. I know him well.

MONSEIGNEUR. Good! Then take thy comrades, Lorrain—forty, fifty of thy

stoutest men-at-arms—my Lansquenets! Post them at every door of this my

palace; and if Death tries to enter, tell them to fire on him and kill

him. My strictest orders!

LORRAIN. Monseigneur, it shall be done. He shall not enter. We ourselves

will die first. (_Salutes and is going._)

MONSEIGNEUR (_faintly, as he lies back_). And, Lorrain⸺

LORRAIN. Monseigneur?

MONSEIGNEUR. Fill the courtyard with cannon. Our new cannon. The villain

might come on horseback—and try to storm—the great staircase.

LORRAIN (_gravely_). Monseigneur, before Death enters the palace

precincts, either on horseback or on foot, we will fire all the _grosses

pièces_ on him and blow him back to hell. It shall be done! (_Whereupon

MONSEIGNEUR, lying back on the pillows with closed eyes, makes a feeble

little gesture of dismissal, and LORRAIN salutes and disappears. From

outside in the corridor is heard the clank of armour; then LORRAIN’S

hoarse voice ‘En avant, la garde! Mar-r-chez!’—while the Bishop returns

to the bedside._)

BISHOP (_whispers_). Doctor! (_As the Doctor joins him and feels the

child’s pulse._) How much longer?

DOCTOR. _Moriturus!_⸺Perhaps an hour.

BISHOP. Ah!

DOCTOR. If your miracle is to succeed!⸺

BISHOP. Beppo is coming. Let us leave them alone together. Come, Doctor,

come.

DOCTOR. And the miracle? The famous miracle!

BISHOP. We shall see. Only give them time. Come.

DOCTOR (_with a scornful shrug_). Time?

(_So they go out into the corridor, and after a pause BEPPO enters,

washed and combed, smartly dressed in one of Monseigneur’s discarded

suits, out of which he seems indeed to swell, it being somewhat too small

for him, with pride and satisfaction. For it is the first time in all his

life that he has worn anything but rags; and for the first time, also, he

looks like what in fact he is, MONSEIGNEUR’S brother._)

BEPPO (_as he swaggers gaily in_). Monseigneur enters! Monseigneur

salutes with condescension the gay and gallant company assembled to

welcome him! Monseigneur turns to the Court Physician, and in haughty

tones⸺_Tiens!_ Where is the Court Physician? Doctor Mabrise? Where the

plague have they put my birds’-nest? (_Screams._) Mabrise!—You old

fool! (_Then he sees the nest on the ledge of the couvre-feu._) Ah! So

near the fire? (_He jumps up on the footstool and takes the nest, while

MONSEIGNEUR gradually recovers, and, raising himself on the pillows,

watches him._) Dead! Every one of them dead! (_As he jumps off the

footstool._) The wretch has killed my thrushes! My sweet, beautiful,

living thrushes! _Ah, ça!_ (_As he draws his dagger_) Mabrise! Mabrise!

(_and runs towards the corridor._)

MONSEIGNEUR. Beppo!

BEPPO. But he has killed my thrushes; the thrushes I brought thee! Look!

MONSEIGNEUR (_as he takes the nest_). So much the better. They will be

all ready for me to play with—in heaven.

BEPPO (_crying with rage_). I did not bring them for thee to play with in

heaven; but here, with me.

MONSEIGNEUR. Perhaps they have only swooned, as I did just now. Take

them, Beppo, place them in the sunshine, by the window. It is very likely

they will recover.

BEPPO (_whimpering_). Nay, I know they are dead. But, by Heaven, they

shall be revenged!

MONSEIGNEUR. Beppo!

BEPPO (_as he places the nest in the sun on the window-ledge_). I will

lie in wait for their murderer; and one night when he is crawling about

the streets—like an old cat in the dusk, as I have so often seen him—I

will creep up behind, and I will stab him in the back.

MONSEIGNEUR (_struggling to rise_). In the back? Beppo! Dost thou think

that the action of a knight?

BEPPO. I am not a knight, but, like my mother, a gipsy, and I will stab

him where I can.

MONSEIGNEUR (_feebly, on the edge of the bed_). Help me. Help me to the

chair.

BEPPO (_as he helps him down off the bed, and into the Nurse’s chair_).

One—two—three! So! (_Laughing._) Why, one would say thou wert drunk!

MONSEIGNEUR (_with a wan little smile_). Nay, Beppo! (_and lies back in

the chair with closed eyes._)

BEPPO. Ah! Listen!

MONSEIGNEUR (_languidly_). Well?

BEPPO. In the courtyard! (_Running to the open window, he looks out._)

Philippe! Cannon! The courtyard is full of cannon.

MONSEIGNEUR. I know. I ordered it.

BEPPO. But is there some attack? The Comte de Poix? Already?

MONSEIGNEUR. One never knows. The times are troublous.

BEPPO. But who will lead them, if thou art so ill?

MONSEIGNEUR (_smiles_). Why not thou? My brother?

BEPPO (_radiant_). To battle? Philippe!

MONSEIGNEUR. Sit, Beppo, and I will give thee charge. Sit at my feet

here, like a scholar, and I will teach thee.

BEPPO. Monseigneur Philippe! (_And looks up at him, breathless with

interest, admiration, and attention._) Go on now; teach me! I am ready.

MONSEIGNEUR (_gently_). Thou knowest thou art my brother? (_As BEPPO

nods._) Who has told thee?

BEPPO (_laughs_). Everyone.

MONSEIGNEUR. Not in scorn?

BEPPO. Nay! They know better.

MONSEIGNEUR. My mother was a wronged lady, Beppo.

BEPPO. So was mine. Yet she never complained. She was too proud.

MONSEIGNEUR. Where is she now?

BEPPO. She is dead.

MONSEIGNEUR. Ah?

BEPPO. They killed her.

MONSEIGNEUR. Killed her?

BEPPO. The tribe. They said she had disgraced them. She was a princess.

MONSEIGNEUR. Then thou art indeed alone in the world, Beppo; for thy

father, thy father and mine, is dead, too.

BEPPO (_stoutly_). I think it is a good thing to be alone in the world.

One is all the stronger.

MONSEIGNEUR. To be hungry? Homeless? Friendless? Is that to be stronger?

BEPPO. It seems so. Am not I stronger than thou?

MONSEIGNEUR (_sighs_). Indeed!

BEPPO (_patronisingly_). If only they had let thee alone, Philippe; sent

thee out hungry to play in the fields, sometimes to sleep there; kept

thee away from that foolish book-learning; thou would’st not be so weak

and languid. So childish! Thou would’st be strong like me. Strong as a

mule!

MONSEIGNEUR (_tearfully_). Thou art a knave to say I am childish—a

knave!—and when I am well again⸺

BEPPO (_boastfully_). See, Philippe, how strong I am, and how active.

See how I can jump! (_As he jumps on to the settle by the fireplace,

and vaults over the back._) _Holà_, there! _Holà!_ And I can dance—and

run—and swim!

MONSEIGNEUR (_feebly and vindictively, drawing his dagger_). If I could

only reach thee—with my dagger!

BEPPO. And I can fight, too! (_Laughing._) Why, thou dost not even hold

thy weapon rightly. See, Philippe, it is so!—the point upwards! Not so!

That is how women fight, with bodkins. This is how men fight. (_Stabbing

at an imaginary foe._) Ha! Thou rapscallion! Thou mountebank! I will show

thee!

MONSEIGNEUR. Beppo!

BEPPO. Let me but reach thee, thou coward! I will split thee!

MONSEIGNEUR (_screams_). Beppo! Beppo! (_As the Bishop hurries in from

the corridor._)

BISHOP. Children! Children! Quarrelling? With daggers drawn?

(_Severely._) Beppo?

BEPPO (_rather alarmed, explains_).} I was only just showing him—

} (_Together._)

MONSEIGNEUR (_crying with rage_). } He was teasing me!—teasing me.

BISHOP (_angrily_). Beppo!

BEPPO. I will not do it again. It was only to amuse him.

BISHOP (_aside, as he takes BEPPO by the ear_). Senseless! Dost not know

he is dying?

BEPPO (_startled_). Dying?

BISHOP. Tease him no more, Beppo. Go; make friends with him; comfort him.

BEPPO (_distressed_). Dying? Oh, my Philippe! (_So he goes and throws

himself on his knees before MONSEIGNEUR, huddled up, crying, in the

Nurse’s chair._)

BISHOP. I shall be here, within earshot, in the oratory. And if I so much

as hear thee!⸺Remember! (_And disappears through the hangings into the

oratory._)

BEPPO (_gently_). Give me thy dagger, Philippe; let us be friends again.

So! (_as he throws the daggers on the bed._) And if thou wilt, I will

cure thee. (_Winningly._) Shall I, Philippe?

MONSEIGNEUR (_feebly_). When I am well again, brute, I will knock thy

head.

BEPPO (_soothingly_). Thou shalt! Thou shalt! (_as he puts his head on

MONSEIGNEUR’S lap._) Knock it now, if it pleases thee. (_MONSEIGNEUR

gives him a feeble, vindictive little slap._) There! Is that better?

Do it again. (_MONSEIGNEUR pushes him fretfully away._) And now I will

cure thee; make thee one day as strong as I. Only thou must obey me. Art

ready—to obey me? Thou art still crying, Philippe? Nay, but why?

MONSEIGNEUR. To think how I leave my poor Duchy! Defenceless! Ah, if only

thou wert my true brother!—if only there were not the bar!

BEPPO (_laughs_). Why, then I might one day be duke. A droll duke; one

that would need a deal of washing. Nay, I would not be duke, to be

washed every day. (_Gravely._) But if duke I ever were—there are things I

should know. (_With a wise nod._) Ah!

MONSEIGNEUR. What things?

BEPPO. About the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the old. It does not

matter so much for me; I am young and can bear it. But the old!—To be old

is dreadful; but to be old and hungry, in autumn without a roof, without

a fire in winter! If I were duke, Philippe, dost thou know what I would

do? (_As MONSEIGNEUR, lying back in the chair, feebly shakes his head._)

In winter I would have all the old people here to live with me in the

palace; feed them, and keep them warm.

MONSEIGNEUR. Ah? And in summer?

BEPPO. They should come here, too, and rest all day in the shade of the

corridors, to keep them cool. And I would go about among them and fulfil

all their wants, and make them laugh with my antics and gay stories. Not

pity them! The poor do not like to be pitied.

MONSEIGNEUR (_wearily_). Thou art very ignorant, Beppo.

BEPPO. It is possible. Yet there are things I know one cannot learn from

books. And of book-learning, Philippe, it seems to me that thou hast had

too much.

MONSEIGNEUR. How can one have too much, if one is one day to be duke?

BEPPO (_laughs_). Nay!

MONSEIGNEUR. Call me the Bishop, Beppo.

BEPPO (_troubled_). The Bishop? But why?

MONSEIGNEUR (_fretfully_). Call him. (_So BEPPO rises, grumbling and

muttering, and goes to the oratory doorway._)

BEPPO (_shouts ill-humouredly through the hangings_). Bishop of Langres!

BISHOP (_as he enters_). Monseigneur?

(_While BEPPO seizes the opportunity to steal away from them on tiptoe

back to the open window and his birds’-nest. He almost screams with

rapture to find that in the fresh air and broad, genial sunshine the

nestlings are recovering, faintly stirring, ravenously opening their soft

yellow beaks for food. Over them he is soon absorbed, touching them here

and there and singing to them one of his many tuneful peasant songs._)

MONSEIGNEUR. Bishop of Langres—I have a charge for thee, a sacred

charge.—Beppo, my brother.

BISHOP. Monseigneur?

MONSEIGNEUR. Let him be taught. Only see to it, Bishop, that they do not

try to teach him too much. Weary him not with lessons, as they have so

often wearied me.

BISHOP. And what would Monseigneur have him? A priest?

MONSEIGNEUR. I would have him a soldier and a gentleman; a leader of men.

Bad times are ahead of us, Bishop, and it is possible—that one day—(_he

pauses, and then calls._) Beppo! (_But BEPPO is too absorbed to hear

him._)

BISHOP (_angrily_). Beppo! (_And BEPPO turns, startled, and on the

Bishop’s gesture drags himself down to them unwillingly._)

MONSEIGNEUR. Beppo, I have determined to⸺(_He pauses; then, puzzled, to

the Bishop._) What was it?

BISHOP. Assure his future.

MONSEIGNEUR. Yea, assure thy future. Thou shalt be taught to read (_at

which BEPPO shifts his feet uneasily_)—and, if God will, some day to

write. Thou shalt learn history, statecraft, poetry; to dance, to ride.

BEPPO (_defiantly_). I can do both already, to perfection.

MONSEIGNEUR (_fretfully_). To perfection!—when I myself have seen thee,

lumping about like a servitor. Best of all, thou shall be taught courtly

behaviour; to consider others; to be just and merciful, to speak the

truth.

BEPPO (_shiftily_). I never lie.

MONSEIGNEUR. I hope not, but I do not altogether believe it. Even I have

lied—I!—who have been taught so much.

BEPPO (_mutters_). There are certain things I do not call lies.

MONSEIGNEUR. Thou seest, Bishop, how ignorant he is? Take him, Messire,

and teach him, and one day—doubtless—he will be all I might have been⸺

BISHOP. Monseigneur!

MONSEIGNEUR. If only they had not killed me, by teaching me so much. So

many lessons; so little play! Promise me, Beppo, thou wilt always do thy

best.

BEPPO (_lightly_). I promise.

MONSEIGNEUR (_fiercely_). Nay, not like that! Swear it! Or, by the Blood,

I will come to thee at nightfall in thy bed—ride on thy throat—choke thee!

BEPPO (_terrified_). Philippe! I swear!

MONSEIGNEUR. Good Beppo! Kiss me!

BEPPO (_tearfully_). Willingly! Beloved Philippe! (_And while the boys

affectionately embrace, to hide his emotion, the good Bishop leaves them

and disappears through the hangings out into the corridor. Then BEPPO

kneels lovingly at his brother’s feet._) And now it is my turn.

MONSEIGNEUR. To teach me?

BEPPO. To cure thee, as I said I would.

MONSEIGNEUR. And how?

BEPPO. Out there, in the sunshine. It has cured the thrushes, and why not

thee?

MONSEIGNEUR (_languidly_). Ah! Out there?

BEPPO. It is the place I always go to, when I myself am feeling

wretchedly.

MONSEIGNEUR. Wretchedly? Thou?

BEPPO. Sometimes.

MONSEIGNEUR (_tenderly_). Hungry?

BEPPO. Hunger is nothing. But to be restless, dissatisfied; not often,

but still sometimes. To feel oneself a beggar, an outcast, friendless;

to be neither of the palace nor the hovel, yet to know oneself a part of

each. In a word, Philippe, to feel oneself nothing; just the foam on the

surface of the river, the bubble that breaks and vanishes even before the

broad stream is aware of its existence.

MONSEIGNEUR. Thou hast such feelings? Thou?

BEPPO. Sometimes. But when they come I take them where they always pass,

and I am cured—as I will cure thee.

MONSEIGNEUR (_smiles_). And where is it?—this wonderful healing-place of

thine.

BEPPO. Out there—not far—on the warm slope below the Black Dog bastion.

Thou knowest it; beneath the great lilac bush, where this morning I found

for thee the baby thrushes.

MONSEIGNEUR (_dreamily_). I know it well. Thence one can see for many,

many leagues.

BEPPO (_eagerly_). Is it not so? The wandering river that looks like

milk and steals away, a ribbon fading in the mist. The woods, the farms,

the little towers of the châteaux; the distant steeple that points a

finger for the country folk to God! And here and there the bright glint

of sunlight one fancies striking on the spears of some brave knight’s

company, riding and singing through the meadows; yet ’tis only gleaming

on the window of some lonely, peaceful manor.

MONSEIGNEUR (_gently_). I think thou art a poet, Beppo.

BEPPO (_offended_). I hope not. I only tell thee what there is to see.

MONSEIGNEUR. I know it well. I saw it last in summer with my mother.

BEPPO. Now shalt thou see it in springtime, and with me; with all the

orchard blossom, white and gay as brides with their bouquets. Come!

MONSEIGNEUR. Thou wilt take me there?

BEPPO. Aye! and cure thee of thy sickness. Thou wilt come?

MONSEIGNEUR (_yearningly_). If only thou wilt help me.

BEPPO. Walk but through the corridor, and I will carry thee down the

great staircase and through the street and up the hill upon my back. And

once there—under the lilac!—Come! (_As he helps MONSEIGNEUR to struggle

to his feet._) Now, then! Give me thine arm. So! Thine round my neck, and

mine around thy body—so!—like girls who love each other. (_Laughing._)

Only we are men! _En avant! Marche!_

(_So they turn, laughing gaily, towards the hangings that mask the

corridor; when suddenly is heard sharply and faintly from the courtyard

below the brisk challenge of a sentinel—‘Qui va là?’ The boys pause and

listen, while gradually nearer and louder each sentinel in turn rapidly

repeats it—‘Qui va là?—Qui va là?’—until close outside, at the end of the

corridor, a rough, hoarse voice shouts—‘On ne passe pas!’ Follows the

dash of steel, and a short, sharp cry of terror. Then complete silence._)

MONSEIGNEUR (_in a frightened whisper_). Beppo!

BEPPO. But what is it? An alarm? Some thief? A gipsy?

MONSEIGNEUR (_trembling_). Nay, it is Death—for me!

BEPPO (_with his arms tightly round him_). Death?

MONSEIGNEUR. He hath broken into the palace. Ah, Lorrain! Lorrain!—false

soldier! Beppo! I can feel him—drawing nearer, ever nearer! He is there,

behind the hanging. It is Death!

BEPPO (_whispers_). Art thou sure? Shall I look?

MONSEIGNEUR. Aye, look. I dare not. (_And while BEPPO stands there,

shaken and undecided_:) Darest thou not?

BEPPO. Yea, I dare! (_With fear in his heart, he marches boldly to the

hanging and swiftly withdraws it, the iron rings rattling and rippling

sharply backwards along the rod; and behold! the wall of the corridor

that faces them appears wondrously illuminated and transfigured into

the faint vision of a chapel; and there on a throne, under the dim

high altar, the Angel of Death is seated, an austere and lonely figure,

just visible under the mild and steady gleam of many a tall candle and

hanging sanctuary lamp. There he sits waiting, as though the youthful

Michelangelo had carved him there, with the dreadful dart!—And BEPPO sees

it and screams._) Monseigneur Death! Nay, take me—I beseech thee! Take

me—in my brother’s place. I am useless, friendless—a gipsy!—a vagabond!

MONSEIGNEUR. Nay, Beppo! I am still the duke here, and I do not permit

it. It is for me he has come.

BEPPO. Philippe!

MONSEIGNEUR. Out of my way, brother; wouldst disgrace me before Him?

BEPPO. Philippe!

(_And the little MONSEIGNEUR draws himself to his full height, and, as

though proudly entering the court and presence of some great rival power,

bravely steps some of the few paces still left him towards the faint

line, on the other side of which, only that he must cross it, there lies

he knows not what. Only this he knows, that neither rank, nor ermine,

nor soldiers, nor cannon will now avail him. So he boldly demands of the

Figure that seems to look at him so kindly, full in the face_:)

MONSEIGNEUR. Thou wilt suffer me to kiss my brother first? To say

good-bye? (_And as BEPPO still tries to hold him fast_:) Farewell,

brother!—and remember! Nay, Beppo! (_And so he turns willingly towards

the Angel, who now slowly rises to receive him._)

BEPPO (_as he beats the air passionately with his hands_). Philippe!

Don’t leave me! Beloved Philippe!

MONSEIGNEUR. But see, Beppo! He knows my quality; after all, he rises to

receive me! Ah, now—it is easy! See, Beppo; how easy it is! (_And the

little MONSEIGNEUR passes into the Angel’s arms with a smile on his face

and the happy laugh of a tired child who at last finds rest, and the

vision fades; while BEPPO, with a desolating cry, tries to follow him,

but his forces fail and he falls there in a swoon._

_The cry is so loud, so bitter, that the Nurse comes hurrying in._)

NURSE (_angrily_). Who is it, screaming so? (_She sees BEPPO._) Ah!

Monseigneur! See!—he has fainted! Doctor! (_as the Doctor and the Bishop

come quickly in from the corridor._) Monseigneur! (_Then she sees it is

not MONSEIGNEUR, but BEPPO._) Nay! it is⸺

BISHOP (_with authority_). Monseigneur! Beppo has gone. I saw him. This

time he has run away—for good.

NURSE (_puzzled_). Ah? (_As she helps the Doctor to carry BEPPO to the

chair._)

BISHOP (_gaily_). He is better, Doctor, is he not? The crisis hath

passed; he will recover?

DOCTOR (_doubtfully, bending over the inanimate BEPPO in the chair_). I

think so—with care.

BISHOP. Ah! (_So he goes back into the corridor and shouts_:) The

trumpets, Lorrain!—the trumpets! Sound a fanfare! A miracle! Monseigneur

recovers. The Duchy is safe!

NURSE (_after a glance at the Doctor_). A miracle, indeed! (_And as

the trumpets peal joyously and defiantly, she crosses herself and

murmurs_:)—Monseigneur!

WALTER FRITH.

_THE CALL OF THE WEST._

_A SKETCH OF AN INDIAN REGIMENT._

Through the ‘Kutcha’[7] of the Derajat runs the Indus: it is a shifting

river and its tremendous sword of water carves now this channel, now

that, on its way to the sea. In 1914 many acres of trees fell before its

silver blade in the wood of Turton’s Folly that skirts the approach to

the cantonment of Dera Ismail Khan. The road to the railhead at Darya

Khan ever shifts with the river’s whims, and is but a track across the

drifting sand dunes of the desert. The Indus is a mighty traveller, and

the bridge of boats is flung across her in a new place every autumn so

that the road travels far from the obliterated line of the previous year.

The folk whom one meets upon the road are nomads, or those persistent

travellers the Powindahs, who pass over the desert and river in their

thousands to leave no more trace than the clouds that travel with the

wind. The history of the region is the history of hawk-like travellers;

of Alexander the Great who came down the grim passes, horse, foot, and

man; of raiders who travel right swiftly and of cavalry that pursues, to

this very day. Only the city and the mountains speak of permanence, for

the cantonment with its lines and its bungalows is but a halting ground

for the soldier folk, who have no abiding place, but travel always like

the shifting river and the sands and the winds of the Derajat.

In August 1914 every Sahib gripped his sword when he thought of home, but

in the Derajat Brigade the declaration of war did little more than recall

its officers from leave, and they came back many hundreds of miles to

look at the mountains, whose tribesmen only respect a frontier that is

held against them by armed men, as frowning follies that kept them back

from real war. September saw a Punjab regiment marching towards those

dark hills to take over the Gumal outposts, and another regiment marched

back on relief into the cantonment. Very early in October the great

conflict levied its first contribution; some sepoys and sowars of a Sikh

regiment and a cavalry regiment left Dera Ismail Khan as reinforcements

for other corps; leaves from the tree blown by the breeze to the war’s

whirlwind. But the cantonment still only stood sentry over the lawless

of the frontier hills, nor could move to the war. Then, on October 11, a

summons came, and ran along the wires to the Punjabis’ headquarters at

Tank, and to Khajuri Kach, and Jandola, and the smaller outposts, that

for the first time in the history of the frontier a regiment was to march

away from the hills to war, to travel like the Indus to the sea, and

cross the pathless ocean to the West.

Now those birds of passage, the Sahibs, go home by that familiar

waterway, but for the man of the Punjab it was a summons to ‘Active

Service Overseas’ and a strange land. Yet death is the strangest land of

all to both Sahibs and sepoys, and in its vast region lies the eternal

home of every traveller, so that they faced the way to the unknown

right gladly together, and the reservists hastened to join them. There

were as many rumours as there were men in the ranks, and each rumour

was an enemy. To the Dogras there was the suggestion of violated caste

in foreign lands; to the Sikh the pleasant whisper that the Raj feared

the Khalsa and was carting the Sikhs away in ships to sink them; to

the Pathan the assertion that the German Emperor and his Army were of

the Mahomedan faith. But little cared the sepoys in the outposts—where

doubtless they knew of the order before their officers, for the wires

whisper many things well understood by the babus e’er ever they give

official utterance—as they made haste to hand over to the Mahomedan

regiment that marched hot foot to relieve them, while a regiment from

down-country was railed north with all speed to keep the frontier

cantonment at full strength. The Punjab regiment tramped into Dera Ismail

Khan in little brown detachments that crossed the wide pale desert to the

jingle of mules and the rumble of transport carts, and encamped on a bare

parade ground awaiting orders. The General commanding the Derajat Brigade

had his orders by then for the great war, so that the cantonment knew yet

one more change. The Punjab regiment was extraordinarily busy; all the

paraphernalia wherewith each human being encumbers himself, multiplied by

one thousand, had to be dealt with. Mess trophies and treasures had to be

packed; the regimental office had to be packed; all surplus kit had to be

packed. Officers’ bungalows found new tenants; officers’ dogs found new

owners; officers’ wives stood ready for their voyage to England on such

dates and in such ships as the embarkation officer’s wire should direct.

Very quickly the armed host shook itself free of encumbrance and stood

equipped for war, the while post-cards from the sepoys’ homes fluttered

into their camp, pleading ‘Come to me. Don’t go.’ And the voices that

answered this pleading of hidden wives, the voices that replied to the

hundred rumours—deep voices of sepoys speaking in the vernacular—will

ring in my heart till I die. Thus, a Sikh, speaking to his officer’s wife

of his ‘house’: ‘Nay, Huzur, I have not written. What profit to write?

She will but say, “Take leave and come, I am ill,” and at this hour what

man can get leave? This is without doubt no hour for leave. She will

say, “Do not go,” having no understanding, but the Presence knows that

there is an Order to go. Therefore from Karachi I will send a post-card

saying, “I have gone. _Bǎs!_”[8]’ Yet it took thought for the welfare of

its wives, this regiment of married men, and there was satisfaction in

their tones when they announced to the Englishwoman,—‘The Colonel Sahib

says that the Government will make provision for them, and that it will

be in no man’s power to take it from them. _That_ money will be no one’s

“hukh,”[9] Protector of the Poor.’ Some hundred husbands knew content

at the word of one man,—‘the Colonel Sahib says.’ And thus the Indian

officers, very courteously,—‘We have eaten your salt and we fear nothing:

it is good that we go.’ The Hindus spoke ever of the King, ‘Our King

calls us,’ but the Mahomedan looked to his officer, ‘My Sahib is pleased

to go; I also am pleased.’ All ranks spoke of the regiment’s name: ‘It is

good for the name of the regiment that we go.’

A stripling rose up from among the hot shadows on the veranda, ‘Huzur,

I am now the Sahib’s orderly. When the regiment went to Somaliland my

father was the Sahib’s orderly. My father is dead, but I am the orderly

of the Sahib.’ Something more here than the vow taken on enlistment: some

vow this of the heart’s own making. And in the camp a spirit stirring

among the menials: a young sweeper, son of a line sweeper, salaaming low

to his Memsahib, ‘I am known to all men of the regiment, I go with the

regiment.’ Surely they go upward as they go onward, these armed hosts of

men who lift such humble beings out of the dust of themselves?

The club in the evenings was very gay, as though the fierceness of man

was forged from bright metal. The comradeship was deep; ‘brothers in

arms’ meant much to those soldier folk; the unspoken word was expressed

in every handgrip, ‘Honorary member of my table, you give me orders,

or take mine, but both serve King and Country—here’s luck to you.’ And

when, on October 27, the Punjab regiment went forth to the war of the

world, the courtesy and the tremendous sentiment which the Army feels

for the Army was written plain by the cantonment for the city to see.

And the city watched in little groups that drifted out through its

narrow gates and took up positions where the desert breaks away from the

military roads, and the piety of a Hindu has built a bathing place for

such pilgrims as desire to perform orthodox ablutions in the waters of

the hurrying river. Balu Ram’s Ghat was bleached by vivid sunshine, and

an old Brahman accepted the respectful greetings of such as were not

thrice-born. The portly tradesman of the cantonment, Beli Ram, whisked up

on his bicycle and waited to watch them pass—those Sahibs who jested with

him and paid his big bills when promotion worked miracles. Fat and lazy,

yet not without shrewd enterprise; plausible and intriguing, but keeping

faith in much; charitable, good-natured, indulgent to little children, he

was well known to every man, woman, and child in the throng, and those

sacrificial men of war, about to set forth on their perilous way, would

carry him with them in their memories as ‘not half a bad fellow, old Beli

Ram.’

In an empty bungalow among the litter of packing-cases, one young bearer

was weeping shamefacedly. For many days he had protested his wish to

follow his Sahib’s fortunes, but the night before departure the unknown

had assumed a terrific aspect: the landsman dreaded the sea, the servant

feared the bloody service of war—the spirit failed. His small bundles

swayed aloft on a laden camel towards Darya Khan, but he stayed behind.

In one of the city dwellings two low-caste men, a syce and his brother,

argued through the drowsy noon. Family debt, family affection cried

‘Stay,’ and so the charger was led to the door by an orderly who,

saluting, announced ‘The syce has run away, what can be done? Nothing can

be done. He has entirely departed, the son of Satan.’

The General and his Staff rode through the troops and took up a position

beyond the Ghat. The band of a Sikh regiment sent its music rolling out

over the river and the dunes. The wives of the officers made a little

knot close to the shrine.

The disciplined wheat-coloured companies rippled out on to the

dusty road, and those waiting by Balu Ram’s Ghat heard a shout rise

deep-throated from its ranks, heard a cheer rise from the troops, horse,

foot and guns, that lined its route, and heard the echoes die away across

the desert sands, to rise and fall again and again.

In England regiments were marching through London Town, and the traffic

was being held back at the crossings, while the housemaids threw open

the upper windows and waved handkerchiefs; but by October crowds were

silent, having grown weary of cheering the new warlike pageant of their

thronged streets. In the hearts of the watching wives, and in the hearts

of the British officers, the thoughts were of that hour at home, and not

a little of the verdict which the people of those busy streets would pass

on these Indian soldiers marching out of Dera Ismail Khan: men of strange

faiths, men of diverse tongues, men of no education save for that stern

schooling of war decreed by David the soldier poet—‘Thy right hand shall

teach thee _terrible_ things.’ Doran had raised this clan in 1857 at

the urgent bidding of Lawrence, and it had crossed the seas in turn to

China, Burma, and Somaliland, but never with so ill a wind, blowing no

man aught of good, as is brewed to-day in Germany’s poisonous cauldrons.

It had fought its way to Kabul, and been taken out of victorious action

by a subaltern at Ali Masjid, but no mine nor shell had laid its young

men low. It had nursed a British regiment that was sick unto death with

cholera, and knew no white man by name, or sight, who would slay women,

children, and the wounded. Long ago, in November 1858, it had passed from

the service of stout John Company to the great service of the Crown, and

for fifty-three years it served Empress and Emperors before it laid eyes

on the person of its Sovereign, what time each Hindu officer and sepoy,

among the millions of Calcutta folk, accounted that sacred privilege of

beholding King George more favourable to the soul than three pilgrimages

piously performed. In all its history only one man had set foot in

England, an Afridi subadar, who attended the Coronation and returned

full of mighty tales of the fabulous amount of milk given by our cows,

of the work of scavengers done by Jews only, and many things hard to

credit. But it was familiar with things strange to the far-off British

Isles, this Indian regiment; earthquakes had tossed the villages of

the Dogras to rubbish heaps in the spring of 1905, and for weary years

plague had stricken the homes of Sikhs and Punjabi Mahomedans, while

the neighbours of the Khattaks and Afridis ever held finger to rifle

trigger. Neither pestilence, famine, battle, murder, nor sudden death

were unknown to the men whose footsteps the knot of watchers by the Ghat

could hear approaching, though months of sunless skies and sodden ground,

bitter poverty of European slums, flowers tossed to the man of the East

by white women, vast lands without mosque or temple or breath of the

thronged bazaar, were things outside their experience, and beyond their

imagination, on that October noonday.

The lay mind may fear or favour a regiment’s violence, but it is

extraordinarily prone to lose sight of a regiment’s vocation. Now it

had been brought home to one of the Englishwomen watching that regiment

go forth to war that its strength was dedicated; for on a cold November

morning in the Punjab she had seen a line of recruits drawn up opposite

the battalion, and had heard the oath and affirmation taken in the

vernacular which appointed each recruit a soldier and not a mere public

executioner. Roughly translated, this is what she had heard,—‘I do

swear,’ the Hindu youngster vowed; ‘I do swear by the holy Granth,’

declared the Sikh stripling; ‘I do solemnly affirm in the presence of

Almighty God,’ the youthful Punjabi Mahomedan and Pathan said;—‘that

I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty the King

Emperor, his heirs, and successors, and that I will as in duty bound

honestly and faithfully serve in His Majesty’s Indian Forces, and go

wherever I am ordered by land or by sea. And that I will observe and obey

all commands of any officer set over me, _even to the peril of my life_.’

Thus, all the lusty yeomen of the northern plains and hills, among whom

the Hindus added, ‘So help me God.’ Whereupon, very impressively, the

battalion paid its highest honour, and gave its most profound welcome,

to its sworn men by presenting arms to them. Moreover, in this matter

of vocation, the handful of British officers, who, from the day of

the regiment’s birth, had guided it in the way it should go through

succeeding generations, held a mandate that invoked supreme authority:

‘_By the Grace of God ... Defender of the Faith_ ... to our

trusty and well beloved ... Gentleman, greeting. We, reposing

special trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and good

conduct, do by these presents constitute and appoint you to be

an Officer ... and you are at all times to exercise and well

discipline in arms, both the inferior officers and men serving

under you, and use your best endeavours to keep them in good

order and discipline. And We do hereby command them to obey you

as their superior officer, and you to observe and follow such

orders and directions, as from time to time you shall receive

from Us or any your Superior Officer, according to the rules

and discipline of war in pursuance of the trust hereby reposed

in you.’

And so when, across the shadeless parade ground where only the clouds

threw shadows, the shouting ranks approached the Ghat, it was plain that

each soldier felt with the Israelites of old that it is better to trust

in the Lord than to put confidence in princes or in man, for the Dogras

were calling on Kali, the Sikhs on their Gurus, and the Mahomedans on

Allah the God of Battles.

Only a bugler was given to frivolity. Some weeks before, in the pride of

his schooling, he had questioned a Memsahib eagerly, ‘Can the Presence

read? Can the Presence write?’ and was crestfallen at meeting his match.

Yet a professional hope remained. ‘Can the Presence beegle?’[10] he

challenged, and established complete superiority. His mother had stood

by his side that day; a tall, dignified, strictly secluded woman of the

purdah, but neither she, nor any Indian wife or mother of the sepoy folk,

stood watching the regiment depart. Only the Englishwomen bade all God

speed, while the happy little bugler went forth to war and cheered his

own performance.

The British officers wheeled their chargers up to the group of their

countrywomen; and the Indian officers left the shouting companies to step

aside, salute, and shake hands. Then all passed on. The Sikh band struck

up ‘For Auld Lang Syne,’ and many thought of the gallant comrade who

would never be forgotten by his regiment, now leaving his lonely grave

behind. It was a strangely dramatic chance that turned this regiment of

all regiments away from the hills of the Mahsuds, for scarce six months

were gone since that day when, with reversed arms, it had laid to rest

the great Dodd, soldier, ruler, and friend of the frontier where he fell,

foully murdered, amid the false peace of his own border garden. On the

day of his burial the thunder roared from the treacherous hills, the Last

Post bade him sleep well, the solemn volleys promised stern remembrance,

and every officer and man of his regiment longed to avenge him according

to the Rules of War. But the orders and directions ran otherwise, and so

‘Doran Sahib-ki-Paltan’ marched away from Waziristan, through Balu Ram’s

Ghat, with all the officers of the brigade bearing it good company as

far as the bridge of boats across the Indus, whence it set forth to a

destination unknown, with the trusty and well-beloved Gentlemen leading.

That night the young bearer realised suddenly that his Sahib had gone,

and, like a dog that misses his master and gives chase, he stood up

and clamoured to the officer’s wife, ‘Huzur, get me an ekha that I may

now drive to Darya Khan while there is yet time. Without doubt I must

of necessity go with my Sahib.’ Half an hour later a scarecrow wrapped

in a blanket stood at her door, and a syce’s voice insisted, ‘Memsahib!

Memsahib! get me an ekha and I will go to the Sahib and Moti the mare.

And give no money to my brother, Huzur, for he has taken all my clothes

so that I should not go. But I go now very swiftly. There is four annas

to pay to the khansamah, if the Presence will give it? Salaam!’

And over the dim desert, through the starless night, by the groping light

of little crazy oil lamps, with endless joltings and bumpings, to where

the sleeping regiment waited to entrain at dawn, there drove urgently

Burgwan Das, bearer, and Bhagu, syce.

JOHN TRAVERS.

FOOTNOTES

[7] _I.e._ alluvial plain.

[8] ‘Enough!’

[9] Perquisite.

[10] Bugle.

_THE DAY._

As the cathedral chimes struck eleven, Hubert Quality raised the corner

of the blind and looked into the street.

A deep peace reigned; the cobbles of the road glistened from recent rain;

wet wads of yellowed leaves padded the pavements. Very far away on the

horizon, a fitful red quiver told of heathen fires lighted to the dark

god Thor.

No human form was visible in the street. Yet Quality shrank from the

uneasy sensation that some one was spying upon him.

Bracing himself with an effort, he looked up furtively into the indigo

vault of the heavens—knowing the while that he was about to be subjected

to some fresh demonstration of trickery on the part of his nerves.

Instantly, he started back with a stifled cry.

A face was watching him from the moon.

For several full seconds it bleached him, the unhuman stare of

century-old eyes, before it blended again into the blank silver disc.

With shaking fingers, Quality dropped the curtain—the pallor of his face

and the twitching of his features testifying to the cumulative effect of

oft-repeated shocks.

For the past two weeks, his terror-maddened nerves had rent him with the

strength of lunatic devils—making every heart-beat leap like a bead of

quicksilver, and chopping up each breath into demi-semiquavers of panting

panic. Only the consciousness of one supreme fact held them back from

their objective—the wreck of Quality’s sanity.

On the morrow, their victim was going home.

It was his day.

The most cursory glance at his face proclaimed him the predestined prey

of his imagination. His dreamy eyes, sensitive mouth, and delicate

physique denoted him student—or visionary—rather than man of action, and,

as such, averse from any act or form of violence.

During the siege and occupation of the town by the enemy, in his rôle of

spectator, he had been plunged into a super-hell, in which he groped in

a red delirium—fire-flecked and blood-smudged. His razor-keen sympathies

supplying the lack of experience, he had died, by proxy, many deaths a

day. He had seen human faces blasted by the red-hot touch of the Martian

hand, and the sight had not been good to see. Above all, his ears were

deafened by the constant terrific speech of great guns that spoke.

Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And to-morrow that peace would be

his.

Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back

again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim,

mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and

crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly polished

walnut-wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.

Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build,

clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad

hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in

a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by

the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her

full lips were pencilled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical

enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and

now the wife of a small tradesman.

This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul.

When he had first rented her apartment, she had reminded him of a woman

in a fairy-tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under

her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that

often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female,

who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant,

who changed nightly into a were-wolf.

It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however,

which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with

the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of

humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither

pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical

precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her

boarder was connected with the weekly note.

It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his

fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings,

carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her

instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his

country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment

is summary death.

Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion.

How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign

of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, biding her time to pounce?

Yet through the shifting mists of those dream-days of doubt and fear—when

rustling leaves tracked him homewards, and his own shadow slipped away to

denounce him—one fact remained real and potent. He knew that all appeal

to madame’s feminine compassion would be vain. If she possessed his

secret, she would certainly betray him.

Again he looked at her, marking, with strong dislike, the rust-red grain

of her skin over her cheek-bones, the tight tartan-silk blouse, the

stiff linen collar that made her neck appear so dirty by contrast. The

room, with its hideous-patterned paper seemed to wall him in alive; the

charcoal fumes from the stove to suffocate him.

Then, suddenly, he smiled. All this, too, would pass away. Next week,

he would rub his eyes and wonder if—somewhere—on some alien planet,

there really existed a strange, hostile room, tenanted by an unhuman,

sawdust-stuffed woman. Both would dwindle down to a name on an

envelope—merely an address.

In the reaction of spirits, he stooped to pick up madame’s ball of

worsted.

‘The last time I shall do this for you, madame!’

Even as he spoke, his morbid mind quarrelled with his sentence; it seemed

as though its finality left a loophole for sinister interpretation.

‘_Bien!_’

‘Shall you miss me, madame?’

‘Yes.’ Her ‘_si_’ was emphatic. ‘As one misses all men. Less work, but,

unfortunately, less money.’

The speech, typical of the frugal housekeeper of grasping spirit, was

reassuring. He smiled once more as he looked at the clock.

‘You’re late to-night, madame! You should save your eye-sight—or, better

still, your oil and fuel. Aren’t you going to bed at all?’

She shook her head vehemently.

‘For me, I have no stomach for bed, at all, at all. To sleep would be

but to see again that which I have, this day, seen. What? Have you not

heard?’

He shook his head.

‘Ah! What misfortune! To-day, at noon, they shot M. Lemoine!’

M. Lemoine—the prominent citizen and advocate! Quality could not credit

the news. His mind conjured up a vivid picture of that portly form and

plum-coloured face, as madame proceeded.

‘Yes, m’sieur, I saw it. It was horrible. Two soldiers ran him down the

steps of the hotel—quick, quick! yet, at every step, one saw him shrink.

It was as though a hole had been pierced in him, so that the _man_ came

leaking through. At the top, there was the fine figure—so brave, so big;

at the bottom, only a shrunken stranger, with eyes that ran, ran, and

fingers that picked, and little bubbles around his lips, rising, rising.

He—_himself_—was gone. There was no longer any M. Lemoine!’

Told in her native tongue, with pantomimic gesture to point her words,

the recital was ghastly.

Breathing heavily, Quality cleared his throat to ask a question.

‘What was the charge?’

Surely the woman must notice the treacherous quiver of his voice! Her

answer seemed to be delayed for an eternity.

‘The charge, m’sieur?—He was a spy!’

‘_Ah!_’

Quality sank down upon a bristly horsehair chair, the crocheted

antimacassar slipping down behind his back. He looked around him

with eyes of sick loathing. The clicking sound of madame’s needles

maddened him; he had watched the incessant flash of steel for so many

long-drawn-out evenings of strain.

The flawed mirror, set above the marble console table, reflected the

room, duplicating the gilt clock on the mantelshelf and the pallid waxen

fruit, cherished under crystal shades. Presently, however, the hateful

vision blurred and faded away, and the home-sick man saw, in its stead,

the picture that was engraved upon his mind.

Somewhere, far away from this place of thunder, bloodshed, and cold

fears—geographical facts non-existent—was an isle that rocked gently,

like an ark of safety, on the grey-green seas. And tucked away, within

its very heart, approached only by grass-grown ruts, was a long, grey

house. Sentinelled by age-old oaks, there brooded over it the very spirit

of security and peace.

Again he sat in his own familiar study, surrounded by the good company

of his books, while the fire burned red in the grate and his old hound

dozed upon the rug at his feet. This was his proper place—his own

_milieu_—of which he thought by day and dreamed by night.

His longings to escape magnified these nightly dreams into passions. He

was always trying to get home. He took abortive railway journeys, when

the train broke down and changed into inadequate rubbish, leaving him

stranded in unfriendly country. Sometimes he boarded a steamer, which

ploughed its way through fields and streets, ever seeking a far-receded

sea. These nightmares were varied by the nerve-racking experience of

ceaseless preparations for a journey, which ended in the poignant pang of

reaching the station only to see the express dash through, its lighted

windows merging into one golden streak.

Often, too, he tried to fly home—even as a bird—swooping from his bedroom

window in vain essay at flight, and sinking lower into the darkness at

each impotent stroke.

His distraught mind, flashing its S.O.S. signals across the sea, must

have stirred the rest of those who slumbered safely in that lamppost-lit,

policeman-guarded isle. For influence began its wire-pulling work, its

efforts resulting in the promise of the special train that was to convey

certain refugees homewards by way of neutral territory.

To-morrow would be the day.

‘I am going home—to-morrow!’

He silently repeated the words with a thrill of joyful anticipation,

fingering his papers and passport the while, to assure himself of their

truth. Thus fortified, he nerved himself for another question.

‘By the way, madame, speaking of poor M. Lemoine. Who—who gave

information?’

‘A woman betrayed him.’

Involuntarily, Quality started. He had not before noticed the grating

rasp of madame’s voice. It irritated him to unreasonable resentment and

disgust.

‘A woman? Damnable!’

‘_Plaît-il?_’ Madame raised her brows in interrogation. ‘But why? M.

Lemoine sold his secrets for gold. The woman sold her secret for gold.

_C’est égal!_’

How furiously her needles flew! In just such manner must her forbears

have sat, knitting and counting in the blood-sodden days of the

Revolution.

‘But, madame’—Quality’s voice was vibrant with horror—‘how can you

call it _equal_? It is inconceivable that a woman, with a woman’s heart

beating within her breast, should sell a life merely for money!’

‘Ah, m’sieur!’—Madame laughed mirthlessly—‘it is easy to see that all

your life you have had more than enough. For the others, though—What will

they not do for gold?’

She proceeded to answer her own question by illustration.

‘My young brother killed the farmer that he worked for, the farmer’s

wife, four children, and a farm-hand—all for the sake of the gold that

was in the house. Alone he did it, with a hatchet—and he but a child of

fifteen! Such a good lad, and regular with his Mass. It was merely the

gold that maddened him, and yet they imprisoned him—_le pauvre!_’

At last Quality had heard the thrill of emotion in her voice. Looking

up, he detected a bead of moisture in her eyes. The sight of her sorrow

only added to the horror. On top of her calm recital of the crime, such

sympathy for the juvenile monster was nauseating.

‘Your young brother must be a unique specimen,’ he said stiffly, speaking

with an effort.

‘Not at all. Like all the rest of us. Like you, perhaps. Certainly, like

me!’

A pleasant family history. To steady his nerves, Quality fingered his

papers feverishly, repeating the while his magic formula: ‘To-morrow, I

go home.’

Even as his lips silently framed the words, he started back, blinking

his eyes, and momentarily stunned and deafened. For it seemed to him

that a lighted express had shot, shrieking, through the room, like a

rocket—thundering past him in a long golden streak.

It was only a fresh manifestation of infamous buffoonery on the part of

his nerves, yet it left Quality utterly shaken. He felt suddenly stranded

and abandoned. All his vague fears and doubts of the past days sharpened

into a definite pang of fear.

_Was_ he, in actual fact, going home to-morrow? Or was he called upon

to undergo the supreme anguish of cheated hope? To see his prison-bars

opening—only to slam again in his face?

As, still unstrung from shock, he looked round the room, he was a prey

of minor optical delusions. Madame seemed to have swollen in bulk—the

apartment to have grown distinctly smaller. He hated it with the savage

hatred of a convict for his concrete cell.

Inaction became unendurable, and he pushed back his chair.

‘I’m going out, madame.’

‘No, m’sieur. No, _no_!’

‘Why not?’

Suspicion stabbed him anew at madame’s vehement outcry. Yet her next

words were reassuring by reason of their sound common sense.