[Illustration: “Into the death-pit Lefort rode.”]
THE GARDEN
OF SWORDS
By Max Pemberton
_Author of “Kronstadt,” “The Iron Pirate,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED BY STANLEY L. WOOD
[Illustration]
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
PUBLISHERS: NEW YORK: 1902
_Copyright, 1898_
BY MAX PEMBERTON
_Sickle and reaper and harvest of sorrow;
Heavy the wagons that gather the dead;
Let there be dirge for the sun of the morrow!
God is the gleaner on fields ye have fled!_
CONTENTS
Book I
MAN AND WIFE
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PÈRE BONOT READS THE “COURRIER” 1
II. AT THE PLACE KLEBER 10
III. “A LOOMING BASTION” 25
IV. AT THE CHÂLET OF THE NIEDERWALD 33
V. THE HERALD OF THE STORM 49
VI. THE LAST DAY OF JULY 56
VII. “THOSE OTHERS” 67
VIII. OVER THE HEARTS OF FRANCE 83
IX. THE FUGITIVE 90
X. WAITING 102
XI. THE HUSSARS ARE AT GUNSTETT 108
Book II
BATTLE
XII. THE BLOOD-RED DAY OF WÖRTH 115
XIII. THE DEATH RIDE 131
XIV. NIGHT 148
XV. A BIVOUAC OF DRAGOONS 162
XVI. THE PROMISE 166
XVII. THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN MISTS 176
Book III
THE SIEGE
XVIII. THE FIRST DAYS 191
XIX. A FACE AT THE WINDOW 201
XX. THE BEGINNING OF THE TERROR 211
XXI. THE RUE DE L’ARC-EN-CIEL 220
XXII. “LA PAUVRE” 239
XXIII. THE NIGHT OF TRUCE 248
XXIV. AN ULTIMATUM 260
XXV. CONFESSION 268
XXVI. THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW 274
XXVII. ACCUSATION 287
XXVIII. “IF STRASBURG FALLS” 297
XXIX. THE LETTER 307
XXX. IN THE HOUSE OF LAROCHE 313
XXXI. “THERE IS NIGHT IN THE HILLS” 324
The Garden of Swords
BOOK I
Man and Wife
CHAPTER I
PÈRE BONOT READS THE “COURRIER”
Old Père Bonot, sunning himself before the doors of a café by the
minster, held the _Courrier du Bas-Rhin_ in his hand, and vouchsafed
to Rosenbad, the brewer, and to Hummel, the vintner, such particulars
of the forthcoming wedding as he found to be good. A glass of coffee
stood at Père Bonot’s elbow; his blue spectacles rested high upon a
forehead where no wrinkles sat; the smoke from his cigarette hung in
little white clouds about his iron-grey hair. He sat before the great
cathedral of Strasburg; but the paper and its words carried him away to
a little village of the mountains where, forty years ago, he had knelt
at the altar with Henriette at his side, and an old priest had blessed
him, and he had gone out to the sunny vineyards, hand in hand with his
girl-wife to their home in a forest of the Vosges. There were tears in
old Bonot’s eyes when he took up the _Courrier_ again.
“Nevertheless, my friends,” said he, covering his retreat with a great
show of folding the paper and setting his glasses, “nevertheless--her
mother was a French woman! Marry the devil to a good girl--and, as the
saying goes, there is no more devil. I remember Marie Douay--twenty,
twenty-two years ago. I saw her at Görsdorf with Madame Hélène, a
little brunette, always gay, always laughing; a bird to cage in Paris;
a bird of the gardens and not of the mountains. When she married the
Englishman, milord Hamilton, who had lived for two years in the Broglie
here, was it for me to be surprised? _Nom d’un gaillard_, I was not
surprised at all. The eagle to the mountains, the gold-breast to the
cage. Certainly we were too sleepy for Marie Douay. She went to London
with milord--_et après_--”
He slapped the paper as though all were settled; but Rosenbad, the fat
German brewer, took his pipe from his mouth and chuckled with a deep
guttural note.
“The _après_ was Mademoiselle Beatrix--hein?” said he. “There were no
more _après’s_, friend Bonot? That is for by-and-by--when the priest
_là-bas_ is forgotten.”
Old Hummel, the vintner, shook his head.
“These things bring the white hairs,” he exclaimed dolefully; “when you
are sixty you should not go to weddings or to funerals. I have seven
children, and the priests are always in my house. Next week, the Abbé
Colot baptises my tenth grandchild. When I see a lad at the altar I say
to myself, ‘By-and-by he will drink his beer at the Stadt Paris, and
will be in no hurry to go home again.’ I do not wish to look through
the window while another man dances. If I cannot dance myself, I will
sit here and forget the days when I could. Ah--that it should be so
many years ago!”
He struck a mournful note, a discord upon that sunny morning of July
when there was a sky of azure above the minster spire of Strasburg,
and some of the glory of summer hovered even in the well of her narrow
streets. Old Père Bonot, called back again in thought to the village
of the mountains, closed his eyes and listened to the musical bells
pealing now in many a tower and steeple. By here and there, groups of
well-dressed citizens crossed the open space before the western door
of the vast church and passed from the sunshine to the soft lights
of green, of red, of gold, of purple, which fell upon the pavements
of the dim, mysterious aisles. Ever and anon, a carriage clattered
over the flags, and men in gaudy uniforms, the white and silver of
the cuirassiers, the green of the Empress’s dragoons, the blue of the
lancers, added their gilt of colour to the swelling throngs. It was a
soldier’s wedding, Strasburg said, and you must search many a city of
Europe before you would find as pretty a bride as the stately English
girl who went to the altar that morning, or a better lancer than Edmond
Lefort, who was to take Beatrix Hamilton to the mountains presently.
The bells rang in the steeples; the people gathered in the minster
square and at the great western doors of the cathedral. Many were
peasants, clattering in their sabots, peasants come down from the
vineyards to witness the marriage of the grandchild of one whom they
and their fathers before them had held in honour--that servant of
charity and of love, Hélène, Countess of Görsdorf. Flowers they carried
to scatter upon the path which the mistress of their affections must
tread; and those that had no flowers gave laughter and merry tongues,
and it may even be a prayer, for the English girl who was Strasburg’s
bride that day. And side by side with them were the louts of the
hills, the _vignerons_, the _moissonneurs_, men of field and farm and
orchard, red-cheeked all, with spotless blouses, and many a _bon mot_,
and many a whisper of other marriages that might be when the harvesting
was done. Such a crowd had not gathered at the church doors for twenty
years, the people said. But then--it was Madame Hélène’s grandchild.
Old Père Bonot watched the people, and the smile came back to his
contented face.
“It is forty years ago,” he said, “forty to a day, _ma foi_. The
seventh of July--”
“Come, then--” interrupted Hummel, the melancholy vintner, “many things
will happen to us before the seventh of July, _mon vieux_. The day is
Tuesday, and Sunday was the third. It would be the fifth if I can add
three and two.”
Old Bonot assented grudgingly.
“I married Henriette at Reichshoffen on the seventh day of July in the
year 1830. To-day is the fifth then, and the year is 1870. It was on
the twenty-fifth day of the month that Charles the Tenth signed the
five ordinances which cost him his throne. On the next day _le roi
Guillaume_ came to the throne of England. Ah, _mes enfants_, the things
that forty years can teach us, the joys we can forget, the griefs we
can suffer. And there is always death--always, always--”
He was thinking of little Henriette and the place where she slept in
the green valley of Reichshoffen; but Rosenbad, the merry brewer, was
all eyes for the wedding and the great throngs then crossing the square.
“Oh! but you are gay this morning, old Bonot,” said he. “I shall go and
tell them that there is a skeleton for their feast--the man in black
who says that the bell can toll sometimes. Is not he a proper fellow to
make their wine sour! And he has children of his own!”
The vintner took up his long glass of Munich beer, and chimed in with
his old complaint.
“I will be as gay as ten grandchildren will let me--for the sake of the
little English girl. Afterwards I must go home. Père Bonot shall call
for some more beer and remember that we are Germans--”
He spoke jestingly, but the Frenchman was up in arms in a moment.
“Not so,” he cried fiercely. “I am the servant of my Emperor, and of
no other. As for your beer, it is the drink of louts. I give it to my
pigs. When the King of Prussia is crowned in the minster--I will drink
your beer on that day.”
He hammered upon the table with a blow which shook the glasses and
brought a waiter hurrying to the place. But while his anger was still
young, a great sound of cheering broke upon their ears, and all in
the café stood up to see a great family coach, drawn by a pair of
staid grey horses, roll in leisured dignity across the square. Within
the coach there sat an old lady with hair as white as silver, and
hollowed cheeks and kindly blue eyes, and such a nobility of manner
and unassumed graciousness, that all the gentlest gifts of motherhood
seemed united in her.
“Wait--wait! there is the Countess herself with Mademoiselle Beatrix by
her side. _Sac à papier!_--he is lucky, the lancer. I would even forget
that I have seven--”
“She has no eyes for winter, friend Hummel. They say that the English
are an ugly nation, but, _ma foi_, there is one to give them the lie.
And the lancer--there will be no King of Prussia in Strasburg while we
have men like that. _Mon Dieu_--what shoulders!”
A tremendous cheer greeted the three occupants of the old-world coach.
Hélène, Countess of Görsdorf, leant back upon the cushions of yellow
satin, and there were tears of gladness in her eyes. Mademoiselle
Beatrix, as the people called the English girl, looked neither to the
right nor to the left, but timidly into the eyes of the young officer
of lancers who sat before her, and whose blue uniform and scarlet
breeches were a feast of colour in the gloom of the cathedral square.
All that the peasants said of her was admitted readily by maturer
critics. A brunette, she had nevertheless the blue eyes of the Saxon.
Possessed of no particular features that made for any style of beauty,
yet there was a winning sweetness of face and of expression which
communicated itself instantly, and was not to be resisted. And she was
Madame Hélène’s grandchild! Strasburg asked no more even from the wife
of one of the best of her soldiers.
The carriage rolled by; the sun shone generously upon the glittering
habiliments of the lancer, and upon the childish face of his English
wife. Madame Hélène’s white hairs were as threads of silver. In the
morning light, the tears upon her cheek sparkled as drops of golden
dew. They were going to leave her alone at last--those children of
hers; alone in the great house, the home she had loved; in the city of
her girlhood and the beloved sanctuary of maternity. She said that God
had willed it so; and there was a prayer in her heart that the years of
her loneliness might be few.
Old Père Bonot, standing at the very edge of the causeway, raised his
hat as the carriage passed, and when he cried “God bless them!” it
may be that Madame Hélène’s prayer was echoed unconsciously by him,
and that he thought of a distant valley in the mountains, and of one
who slept there, and of the precious years, so quick to pass, when
the first and last words of his happy days had been spoken by the
child-wife who had loved him.
“Henriette--Henriette--I remember always!”
So does Death ride upon the coach of Life--and so, in that sunny
city of Strasburg, where the bells rang a merry note, and the people
feasted, and the old cathedral trembled to the swelling notes of its
mighty organ, were there those who thought of the aftermath of years
and of the hands for ever still. And this thought they remembered at
a later day, so soon to come, when the thunder of the guns made music
for their ears, and the priests who had lifted their hands to bless the
living went out to the homes of the dying and the dead.
CHAPTER II
AT THE PLACE KLEBER
There had been a vast throng at the cathedral, but when the service
was done, and the organist had played Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as
a tribute to the English bride, and the congregation streamed again
through the great western doors, only the very privileged and those who
claimed some kinship with Madame Hélène were invited to her great house
on the Place Kleber.
“It is a family wedding,” the old lady had said. “I have known Edmond
so long that he is as my own son. Beatrix is more than a daughter to
me. I do not want the whole world to see my tears. We will be alone my
children--and I--when that ‘good-bye’ is said.”
Such was her resolution, but the heart prevailing over the will, many
persuaded her and claimed kinship with the house of Görsdorf; and
there were others, portly canons from the minster, sleek presbyters
from the Lutheran churches, officers of the garrison, the mayor of the
city--even the governor, the great General Uhrich himself, with his
splendid cocked hat and his dainty “imperial,” and his glory in the
city of Strasburg and her wondrous past. All these came to felicitate
the young people; all remembered that it was a soldier’s wedding. The
people declared that an army had gone to the Place Kleber. Lancers in
their light blue tunics, with a word of regret for the kurtkas they
had lost last year; hussars, whose spurs clattered over the splendid
parquet flooring of the _salon_; cuirassiers, whose breastplates shone
as silver; officers of Turcos fresh from Africa; gunners, engineers--a
very deputation from that glorious army of France in which, Beatrix
said, in her own pretty way, she had now a place. Henceforth, all that
concerned the army of France must be dear to her. For France had given
her Edmond--and she was his wife.
The day had been as a day of dreams to her. Now that it was nearly
done, and she stood at _grandmère_ Hélène’s side in the great room
of the old house, she had but few memories of all its momentous
happenings. She knew not why--but yesterday seemed as a day of remote
years. She could recollect waking that morning and hearing the voice
of old Hélène, who kissed her many times, and seemed already to be
saying “good-bye.” She remembered her clumsiness when she had put on
her splendid dress, and the _coiffeur_ had come to weave the sprays of
blossom into her rebellious hair; how her hands had trembled when she
had clasped the diamond bracelet which was Edmond’s gift to her! And
afterwards--what a whirl of sights and sounds and of familiar faces!
“Felicitations!” All the city, surely, had come to the Place Kleber
with that word on its lips.
Men and women, friends and strangers, they had striven one with
another to be the first in kindnesses to Strasburg’s guest, the
daughter of Madame Hélène’s daughter, the wife of one of the best of
their soldiers. She asked herself if this was not, in one moment, the
compensation for a girlhood which had earned many compensations; for a
destiny which had bequeathed to her but a fitful memory of her father’s
face, and had left her motherless when first she had learned to read
the book of life through her mother’s eyes. What a pride of happiness
that the bells should ring and the city should feast for her sake! She
was no longer alone in the world, then. Ever the words “wife, you are
his wife” echoed in her ears above the buzz of talk and the noises of
the street without. Some change, indefinite, exquisite, seemed wrought
within her mind. She heard no other voice but this--the voice of her
heart telling her that the years of girlhood were for ever passed. She
saw the future as through a mist of glad tears. The figures about her
were shadowy figures moving, as it were, in some room of her dreams.
Friends held her hand and spoke to her of the great ceremony in the
cathedral. She answered them; yet knew not what she said. They called
her “Madame Lefort.” How odd it seemed! “Madame, Madame!” She was
Beatrix Hamilton no more. The hour had placed a great gulf between her
and the old time. She did not mourn her girlhood nor regret it.
Notwithstanding Madame Hélène’s scruples, it was a brilliant gathering.
All Strasburg bore witness to that. The city made the success of it an
affair of its own, and sent a guard of honour to the Place Kleber, and
the lancers’ band to play all the afternoon before the great house.
Abbés and canons, generals and colonels raised their glasses and nodded
their heads to the rhythm of the music. Sleeker Lutherans found dark
corners wherein they could anticipate hunger without observation.
Social leaders scanned the bride’s dress through critical glasses, and
admitted that it was _très bien_.
“Her father was an English artist, hein? She has ideas, and they will
help her by-and-by. If she were not so tall!--how can one be anything
but _gauche_ with a figure like that? And she wants style; certainly,
she has a pretty gown, and that is something.”
The old lady who spoke, a wizened dame, who had buried two husbands,
raised her pince-nez and appealed for assent to a fat abbé who held a
glass of sparkling wine in his hand. But the abbé answered her with a
perpetual smile, and a voice which repeated again and again--
“Ah, how pretty she is--how pretty!”
Other men took up her cause and pleaded it with courage.
Women assented grudgingly, and gathered together in shaded alcoves to
remind each other of the mystery which had attended the life of her
father, Sir Richard Hamilton. He had been a monster, as tradition said;
yet few knew more or could add to the scant particulars which served
for gossip in the salons of the city. They loved the suggestion of a
scandal--as all the world loves it--these jewelled crones of Strasburg,
and they feasted upon it and found it to be good, and sought therein a
recompense for a beauty they could but half deny, and for a charm to
which they would not submit.
Beatrix herself, standing by her husband’s side, heard none of these
words. When she could forget the past and the future, and remember
where she was and what the day meant to her, it was a pleasure to see
how many of her friends had come to the old house on the Place Kleber.
Colot, the aged abbé, who loved her as a father; the merry General
de Failly, who had sworn to make a little Frenchwoman of her; pretty
gossiping little Thérèse Lavencourt, who had schemed so incessantly
to bring Edmond to Strasburg; Georgine, the friend of her girlhood,
who thought so often of the young Englishman, Brandon North. Where
was Brandon now, she asked? She saw him alone near the long windows
of the balcony. Why was he not at Georgine’s side? He had been a year
in Strasburg and yet had found no eyes to see how pretty Georgine
was. That must be her business by-and-by when she had a house of her
own, Beatrix thought. She realised her friendship for one of her own
countrymen in that hour. Great as was the kindness which these people
of Strasburg showed her, nevertheless she was a stranger among them.
The fifteen years of her life she had spent in England had made her an
Englishwoman beyond hope of change. She loved French things, yet did
not love her own country the less because of them.
She beckoned Brandon to her side, and he came with reluctant steps. His
strange and truly English dislike of any self-assertion had followed
him to Madame Hélène’s house. Silently, in a corner by the window,
he had listened to the parrot-like chatter of the women and the silly
persiflage which passed among the men for the wit of Paris. When
Beatrix beckoned him, he set down his cup and crossed the room slowly.
He was one of the few there who wore a plain black coat and had no
wealth of star and ribbon to apologise for a tongue but ill-equipped.
He came and stood by her, with his fair hair tumbled upon his forehead
and his hands ill at ease, and a strange, almost sardonic smile about
his lips.
“Well,” she said, and her splendid dress rustled as she spoke, “are
_you_ the only one--”
He held her hand a moment in his. An odour of flowers and rare scents
hovered about the place. He did not look into her eyes, but knew that
hers were upon him.
“The only one in a black coat--yes; that’s my qualification, Madame
Lefort.”
“Madame Lefort.” How odd it sounded! Yesterday he would have called her
Mademoiselle Beatrix as the others did. He was one of her few friends.
She would not have been cross if he had said “Beatrix,” as sometimes he
had done when they went picnicing to the woods above Görsdorf.
“You do not congratulate me,” she said, withdrawing her hand quickly.
“I don’t believe you were at the church.”
He turned and plucked a blossom of white rose from a vase. The petals
were crumpled in his hand and scattered upon the carpet while he
answered her.
“Of course I congratulate you,” he said slowly, “if the congratulations
of a man in a frock coat are worth anything. There are so many
important persons in colours here that you must excuse me if I have my
doubts.” And then he asked suddenly, “What made you think that I was
not at the church?”
She nodded her head to a fierce Turco on the other side of the room,
and then said, as if it were a thing of no importance--
“I did not see you there.”
He continued to crumple the rose leaves.
“I was hidden by the splendour of Thérèse Lavencourt and of Colonel
Poittevin. She spent her time saying her prayers and in begging him to
stand upon a chair and tell her the names of the generals in the choir.
I have learnt half the scandals of Strasburg this morning, and I shall
learn the other half to-night when she dances with me. You know that
she is giving a ball?”
“She was just telling me so. She calls it in my honour. As I shall not
be there, that is very good of her. And I am to dance in spirit--as if
one could do that. But, of course, she is awfully kind.”
“To herself, undoubtedly. She will dance into heaven some day and set
the angels by the ears. How glorious to die to Strauss’s music with a
dim suggestion of stairs and a conservatory--and, of course, a partner
waiting. But these things do not interest you--now. You will be at the
Niederwald while I am dressing.”
She shook hands with old General Uhrich, who was going back to the
citadel, before she answered him.
“Oh, yes, we are going to Görsdorf, of course, but not to the castle.
You remember our picnic there, when we had dinner in a vault? Some day
Edmond will rebuild the house. We shall stay at the _châlet_ for some
time, and afterwards we go on to Metz. I think that I should like that.
There is always something eerie about a place which you can’t get into
and can’t get out of.”
“A description applying to a prison, I imagine.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“When one is in France one must think as France does. I am proud of
Metz already; and, of course, a soldier’s wife should interest herself
in the things that interest him.”
“Especially when the marching orders carry him to the Rue de la Paix.”
She laughed brightly.
“We are going to Paris in January,” she said. “It will be Mecca to me.
Imagine it, five years in France, and only one week to try on hats at
Aines. I tell Edmond that I am not civilised. He owes it to himself to
start an establishment on the Boulevard St. Germain and a box at the
opera. Either that or a finishing school somewhere near the Bois. We
could spend our holidays together--when he comes home from the wars.”
A shadow crossed the man’s face. He looked down upon her for a moment
and saw an exquisite vision of lace and flowers and satin, and dark
eyes full of laughter, and cheeks flushed with excitement, and a little
hand upon which a circle of diamonds glittered, and another ring of
plain gold. Never in his life before had he understood why men could
die for women; but he thought that he understood it in that instant.
“You have taken the wars into consideration, then?” he said.
She turned to him with a strange look of fear and wonder.
“The wars--what wars?”
He passed it off with a jest.
“The social wars, of course; there could be no others.”
She had ceased to laugh, and was looking round the room for her husband.
“As if there could be,” she said determinedly. “Ask General de Failly.
He says that we have only to whisper and all Europe will obey. How
could there be any wars!”
It was perverse of such an old friend as Brandon--and so like him--to
speak of such a thing at such a time. The argument, nevertheless,
fascinated her strangely, and she would have continued it had not her
husband come up while the words were still upon her lips. He was there
to tell her that the train for Wörth left at half-past four.
“Ah, _mon vieux_,” he said gaily to Brandon, “I thought that you had
deserted us to-day. Were you in the church, then?”
“I have just told Madame so.”
“And you heard her answer the bishop? They all heard it, Beatrix. And
the General has sent an escort of lancers. They are on the Place now,
waiting. We must not keep them nor Guillaumette at the other end.”
He spoke quickly and with unsuppressed excitement, and in his look
there was that deep and unquestioning affection which marriage may
wring for a day even from the worst of men. Dressed still in his
brilliant blue uniform, with a shining czapska in his hand and his
sword trailing upon the polished floor of wood, Beatrix thought that
in all France there was no man worthy to stand by his side. Even the
touch of his hand could make her tremble. She looked into his eyes and
believed to read therein the whole story of his love for her. And she
was his wife--his wife.
“I am ready, dearest,” she said. “I will go and change now--and you?”
“I shall want five minutes,” he said gaily; “after that the triumphal
procession sets out.”
She left the room, unobserved. The men turned to the buffet.
“Shall we see you this winter here?” Lefort asked, while a sergeant
filled him a glass of champagne.
Brandon answered evasively.
“I have no plans. I let the weather make them for me. If it is cold at
Frankfort, you may hear of me in Nice. But you--you go to Paris, of
course.”
Lefort nodded his head.
“There will be the manœuvres first, and after that the other
manœuvres--at the bonnet shops. I am hoping that we shall be at Châlons
next year. There are too many Germans in Strasburg, you see--and
then, change is good for a bride. Beatrix is a stranger, and too much
Vosges--but you do not drink. I am as thirsty as a trooper out of
Baden. And to-morrow I shall wear a grey coat. _Sac à papier_, that
will make me look like a German band.”
He laughed as a boy at the idea, and pledged the other in a second
glass of wine.
“To your health, my friend.”
Brandon, outwardly the same unimpressionable, stolid fellow that they
had always known him, just touched the rim of the upraised glass with
his own, but he did not say “_à ta santé_” in his turn. His thoughts
had already left the Place Kleber. He was thinking of that old thatched
farmhouse in the Vosges mountains to which the man at his side was
about to take Beatrix Hamilton. What freak of destiny brought such a
day? He did not realise it even then. Beatrix married! The words echoed
in his ears as a peal of ribald laughter. He turned from the buffet
and went to stand upon the balcony, and to look down upon the escort
of lancers gathered in the square below. The brilliant blue of their
uniforms, the scarlet plumes of the czapskas, the pennants of the
lances, the music of bands; the glitter, the colour, the whirl of it
all were truly French. Yet this bizarre display was for her sake, for
the sake of little Beatrix--for the sake of her who yesterday was free.
How distant the day seemed! It had become of the past, irrevocable now.
He would never live yesterday again. The page was written and the book
was closed.
He did not enter the great _salon_ again nor add himself to the number
of those who surrounded the bride at the moment of farewell. When
_grandmère_ Hélène took Beatrix in her arms, he heard the words she
spoke, and they seemed an echo of his own thoughts.
“The days will be so long, so weary, my dearest girl,” she cried again
and again, while the tears of love fell fast; but to Lefort she said,
“I am giving you myself--my child! God bless you, Edmond.”
Brandon heard the words, yet did not move from his place upon the
balcony. Others came out to stand with him, and saw that the strange,
half-cynical smile was still upon his lips. In the great square the
people began to cheer, the trumpets to blare again. He beheld an old
family coach drawn up before the house. He watched the excited guests
who remembered vague traditions of English weddings and scattered rice
and flowers upon the English bride. For a long instant he saw Beatrix
herself looking straight up at him. Then the carriage rolled away to
the station; the lancers put their horses to a brisk trot. He heard
no sound but that of weeping. The Countess was alone in the deserted
_salon_.
But Beatrix, with her husband’s hand held fast by hers, was asking
herself why Brandon North had been the only one who had not said
“good-bye” to her.
CHAPTER III
“A LOOMING BASTION”
Brandon dined in his little room above the office near the Porte des
Pierres; and when dusk fell he set out to walk to the Contades and to
his favourite café there. The ball which Thérèse Lavencourt was to give
had no longer an interest for him. He sought to be alone and to forget
the day.
It was almost dusk when he reached the park, and he remembered, in
spite of himself, that Beatrix would be already in the farmhouse on the
hills above the Sauer. He had not wished to think of it, and had gone
to the gardens that friends might help him to forget; but when a waiter
had served him with coffee and he had read the papers from Paris, it
seemed to him that a greater sense of solitude possessed him than he
had ever known since he left Cambridge and came, at his father’s wish,
to help his father’s business in Strasburg. One day had changed his
view of life. While she was in the city, he could forget the reasons
that kept him to a merchant’s desk and had expatriated him. He could
forget the years of public-school life in the England he had left. He
could forget his own ambitions buried in those vast and dusty cellars
of Frankfort wherefrom his father, William North, sent the Rhine wine
to the courts of Europe. But Beatrix was in Strasburg no more. He would
not have believed yesterday that there was such a lonely place in all
the world.
There were many soldiers in the café--lancers and artillerymen, Turcos
and zouaves. A band played, with rare intervals of silence, and its
flippant music was an irritant to his ear. He heard pretty women
chattering nonsense to officers of cavalry whose wit reached no higher
point than assent incoherent. He beheld slipshod and rolling troopers,
and remembered the hussars in Germany, and the strong hand which built
there a house of steel for a nation’s safety. In such a moment as this
he would almost forgive his father because he had wished to make a
German of him. It was no glorious employment to sell so many bottles
of wine per annum; no glorious employment, it is true, for a man who
had written decent Greek prose, and had spoken of immortal things at
the Union. He would have preferred a commission in a cavalry regiment
at home; or, better still, that liberty which ties a man neither to
city nor to country, but sends him to see and hear on the wide road
of the world. But his father had other views. “The stool that I sat on
should not be too high for my son,” he said; and Brandon took it, and
found his consolation elsewhere.
[Illustration: “There were many soldiers in the cafe.”]
He was the friend of Germany as much of necessity as of admiration.
The French, as a people, fascinated him, yet won no allegiance from
him. His own gifts of strength of will and purpose, of method, of
physical capability, were just such gifts as he found wanting in all
the Frenchmen he knew. The power to achieve by thought and years, that
power which was the very heart of Germany, engrossed him always. He
saw these men of Strasburg, and he knew that if ever the day should
come when the hosts of Germany crossed the Rhine, not only a city but
an empire and a kingdom would fall. There were moments even when the
sordid nature of his own business made him reflect that war would not
only change the current of his life in a day, but would open up for
him those scenes of humanity militant which had been the study of his
imagination in many a lonely hour. But war now--now that Beatrix had
gone to the Görsdorf!
He laughed at himself for thinking of it, and turned again to watch the
unshapely troopers who slouched before the door of the café, and stood
for all the glory of the glorious army of France. What would war mean
to such men as these? Scorn of their deficiencies became almost anger
sometimes. He had the impulse to get up and drill them--to straighten
them with the flat of a sword he must borrow.
There was no one in the café that he knew; but when he had been there a
little while old Père Bonot, the cigar merchant, and with him Rosenbad,
the brewer, came up to his table, and insisted, as was their wont,
upon speaking of the one event which Strasburg recognised that day. He
listened to them in spite of himself. A subtle fascination compelled
him to join in the talk.
“I was at the Gare; I saw her go,” said the brewer, triumphantly. “She
sat upon the right side; he pulled down the blind. Donnerwetter--if it
had been this hand! I would have pulled down that blind myself--_et
vous savez_--I have fifty years!”
Old Bonot stirred a glass of coffee vigorously.
“For myself,” he said, “the little church in the mountains, the
village priest, and the village cart. These things are not for every
eye to see. The English are different. This was the English marriage.
The Englander carries his boots on the top of his carriage--I
have seen them in London. You know London, Monsieur? Ah, what a
city--what people--and funerals everywhere. I counted them--one, two,
twenty--every day. And everyone so sad--because of the funerals. When
I am in London, I stop at your, what you say, Zoho Square. It is the
centre of your society. _Ma foi_, what a world! And no one laughs.
I have never seen anyone laugh in London. It is too big. You are
afraid to laugh. You must come to France for that--to France and the
vineyards. We shall marry you here, and you will carry your boots on
your carriage--hein?”
The old man gabbled on merrily, and took the cigar which Brandon
offered him.
“You English know a cigar,” he said, “but your wines--ah, you have no
wines. This very morning I had a hundred of your English cigars sent to
Captain Lefort. He will smoke them on the mountains when Madame is old
enough to differ from him. There is nothing like a good cigar on the
day when you discover that Madame has opinions. Our friend the Captain
will learn his lesson quickly. You know Madame--without doubt? I have
seen her every day since she came to Strasburg five years ago. And she
has opinions. I read them in her eyes. She is not what you English
call the ‘maid of all work.’ There is courage, verve, the animation.
She will know how to say ‘I will not!’”
Brandon surveyed him with curiosity and amusement. Rosenbad, the
brewer, who was no philosopher, resented his philosophy.
“You are gay again, old Bonot,” said he. “I said that you would be a
fine skeleton for their feast. You must catch the last train to Wörth
and tell the Captain that he has married a wife who can say ‘I will
not.’ He will be delighted to see you. As for me, she might say what
she pleased if I were her husband.”
“You, _mon vieux_, you are too fat. And in a lancer tunic, too! _Ma
foi_, what a spectacle!”
The brewer avoided the subject deftly.
“They have spoiled our lancers,” said he; “the new tunic is as ugly as
the colour of it. There was something to make a man when they wore the
kurtka. The new coat is the coat of the Prussian; do you not think so,
Monsieur?”
He turned appealingly to a young sous-lieutenant of lancers, who had
come up to the table and called for absinthe. But the lad scarcely
heard the question.
“To the news from Paris!” he cried, raising his glass excitedly.
“There is news from Paris, then--”
“The best. They are going to make a new king of Spain, and Leopold of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen is the man they have chosen.”
He spoke with an excitement characteristic of the boy rather than the
man. For a moment the significance of his words was lost both upon old
Bonot and upon Rosenbad, the brewer. The latter continued to sip his
beer, the former to smoke his English cigar.
“Well,” exclaimed old Bonot at last, “and if he is the man, Monsieur--”
The sous-lieutenant regarded him almost with contempt.
“_Mon Dieu_,” he exclaimed, “you do not understand?”
“I understand nothing.”
The lad shrugged his shoulders.
“Then I cannot teach you,” said he.
He drank his absinthe at a draught and left the café. Brandon made some
good excuse and followed upon his heels.
“Forgive me,” he said, as they stood together for a moment at the gate
of the gardens, “but you are sure of what you say?”
“Sure of it? Absolutely. It is news from the Chambers--and it means but
one thing, Monsieur. We shall be in Berlin in a fortnight.”
“But they may withdraw--”
“I am going to church to-morrow to pray that they will not.”
He pulled his cloak about his shoulders and went swaggering away. But
Brandon returned quickly to his house in the Rue des Pierres. It was as
though a word had put fire into his veins.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE CHÂLET OF THE NIEDERWALD
Beatrix was in the arbour of the châlet, filling a bowl with the
pink roses which were the pride of her garden, when Edmond came up
the road from the village of Elsasshausen and held up his letters
triumphantly. Ten days had passed since the bells of Strasburg rang for
Madame Hélène’s grandchild. To Beatrix they had been as an unbroken
hour of sunshine and of happiness. The hills and the valleys, the
vineyards and farms of that pastoral scene were in keeping with the
new sense of rest and of finality which had come upon her life. She
wished for no friendship there, save the friendship which had been
given her. The strange past, with its memories of strife and solitude
and change unending, had been obliterated and forgotten. She had no
longer the desire to return to England or to remember that she was an
Englishwoman. A languorous indolence, bred of the mountains, possessed
her as an ecstasy. She would have been content to hear that the châlet
in the woods above the town of Wörth was to be her home until the end.
She was in the garden of the châlet, filling her bowl with roses, when
Edmond returned with the letters which he had desired unceasingly. She
could not understand that state of mind which hungered so greedily for
all the dry bones of a soldier’s gossip. To know that old Hélène was
well, to hear of her horse and her dogs--and of old Susanne, who had
been her mother’s servant--that was news enough. But to be told that
the sun was shining, or that Thérèse Lavencourt had gone to Dieppe, or
that Lieutenant Jourda de Vaux had been seen on a new charger--what
were such things to those who had the forests of the Vosges for their
skyline, and in the valleys below them the trailing vines and the white
houses of the villages, and the murmur of brooks, and the sleepy river
warming itself in the glorious sunshine of the ripened summer? She
wished to forget Strasburg. The châlet of the Niederwald, the châlet
of the pines, the châlet above the old-world town of Wörth--she would
remember it always as the guest house of her dreams, the rose-girt
cradle of her love.
If all this childish enthusiasm of hers was very real to her, she could
not complain when her husband did not attain similar altitudes of
devotion to the châlet. The glitter and the movement of the cavalry
life had become so much the mainspring of his thoughts and actions,
that he did not always conceal his desire to fix a day when the hamlet
of the Niederwald should become a memory of their holiday, and his old
comrades of the “sixth” should congratulate him upon his return to
them. Ready as he was to witness her childish delight in the solitude
of the hills, yet he went every day to meet the _facteur_, who came
from Wörth with the letters; and he read these letters aloud to her,
and dwelt again and again upon every trivial word of gossip that had
amused his brother officers.
When she ran to meet him at the garden gate on that morning of the
fifteenth of July, she was glad, for his sake, to perceive that his
letter hunger had been satisfied unduly. He carried a great white
bundle in his hand, and he held it up triumphantly as a proud and
well-earned possession. She remembered that day long afterwards--the
sunshine on the woods, the white villages dotting the valley, the
figure of her husband with his Tyrol hat and his knickerbocker suit.
He had bought the Norfolk jacket in London as a compliment to her, and
he called it a “Prince de Galles.” But it suited his fine figure to
perfection; and there was laughter in his eyes and the bronze of the
sun upon his cheeks, when he put his arm about her and kissed her many
times as a prelude to his news.
“Again, _ma chérie_--again for your letter--two for my letters. Wait,
the Colonel writes himself, and Laroche and Giraud--and Bocheron;
you know Bocheron, he is a sous-lieutenant--and Bouillie, he is the
_Capitaine Trésorier_--and Gaudet, he is our _Porte Étendard_. _Sac à
papier!_ I shall have something to read for a week.”
He gabbled on, full of the excitement of the news anticipated and of
the goodwill toward him to which the letters bore witness. She would
find no cause of complaint in that, but was full of proposals for their
day and its delights.
“You can read them as we go,” she said, holding his hand still and
leading him toward the low door of the house. “I have told Jacob to
have the pony ready at ten o’clock. We shall be at the Niederbronn by
twelve, and you will be hungry. But we can breakfast in the wood, and
that will be jolly. If one could always breakfast in a wood--upon _pâté
de foie-gras_ and strawberries. To be Phyllis always--with the last new
novel, and a husband to cut the leaves. There’s the ideal life for you.”
He nodded his head and pressed her arm affectionately. The letter which
he read carried him back already in thought to Strasburg and his
comrades.
“Listen,” he said; “old Tripard is furious about the new tunics. He is
petitioning for the kurtka again and the old colours. They will match
your eyes, Beatrix. We are to have the jonquille collars and the white
cloaks with capes and sleeves. They are all right, but the people
at Paris must give us back the kurtka. I do not want to look like a
Prussian--_moi_. And the old coat was more comfortable. These tunics
are for policemen. The regiment will not be the same in them. How can
you remember Jena in a tunic made for a _sergent de ville_? They are
spoiling us, and they will find it out when the day comes.”
She heard his complaint and laughed at it. Out there in the freshness
of the garden, this talk of coat and cape was as some echo of a
forgotten voice. She had eyes only for the green of the woods and the
great red roses.
“Oh,” she said philosophically, “what does it matter, Edmond, and who
wants to remember anything at the Niederwald? Here is a _Gloire de
Dijon_ which is worth all the tunics in France. We will remember things
when the roses fade. There is always winter for memories. But July--and
the mountains!”
She took a bud of a deep scarlet hue from her bowl and pinned it in his
coat. The flush of a young girl’s health was upon the face which looked
up at his own above the letter he was reading. He kissed her on the
forehead, and forgave her because she did not condemn the tunic.
“Of course,” he said, “it does not matter; but then tradition is a good
deal. It is tradition in the army which enables one man to kill ten;
_ma foi_, if you do away with tradition, Beatrix--”
“The ten will live. Happy ten! And we are forgetting the sunshine to
talk about them. What prodigals!”
She turned toward the châlet with the bowl in her arms. He followed
her with blind steps reading his letters as he went, and communicating
their intelligence generously.
“The Chevalier is still at Trouville; he says the gout is no better. I
shall have to send him to England to try port wine. We are to see him
in Paris when he is well enough to bear the journey. _Pauvre_ papa! I
would wager a Napoleon that he was at the _Établissement_ last night.
There is nothing like the _valtz à trois temps_ for his complaint.
You must dance with my father some day, Beatrix, and say that he is
splendid. When you do that, you will forgive him for his one day in
Strasburg.”
“I hope so,” she said, with a little show of dignity. “I am sure he
must have been very ill.”
“_Du tout_,” he said, “he has never known a day’s illness in his life,
though he calls himself a chronic invalid. There is not such a lazy
man in France. He would not cross the street to save our country. You
will never change him. But he will love you when he knows you well, as
much--as much as I do!”
“As much--your father!”
He laughed and drew her toward him, crushing the letter and spilling
the water from the bowl.
“Impossible,” he said. “I forget what I am saying; not one half, one
quarter, one hundredth part, _chérie_. There can be no love like mine
for little Beatrix.”
He had been annoyed that the Chevalier Lefort, his father, had declined
the journey to Strasburg until the last moment, for this seemed to
put some shadow of a slight upon his little wife. But the Chevalier,
who did not by any means welcome an English girl to his house, was
notoriously the laziest man in France. He had written his excuses
regularly from the deck of his yacht _Le Cygne_ pleading illness, the
unfailing refuge of his indolence. There were other reasons on the
yacht, less creditable and by no means to be presented to Beatrix.
Edmond guessed those reasons, and found solace in the generous cheques
which were the Chevalier’s atonement.
“You will like my father,” he said to her, “you will forgive him as I
do.”
“I hope so,” she said lightly. “I could forgive anyone at the
Niederwald--even you, dearest, for reading your ten letters when the
pony is waiting.”
She escaped his caress, and ran up the stairs lightly to set her hair
straight and to put her roses in fresh water. She did not see that he
had not her pleasure in the woods of Niederbronn, but hungered still
for his comrades’ letters and their news of his regiment. He had not
heard a man’s voice for ten days; peasants did not interest him. He
could not tell one flower from another. He had no eye for the colour
of glade and thicket. When he remembered that another ten days must
pass before they left the châlet, he was even tempted to wish that he
had chosen a city for his holiday. But of this he spoke no word to
her. A sense of self-sacrifice pleased him. Her tenderness was a thing
precious to see and to possess.
He brushed the “Prince de Galles,” and was quite ready for her when
she came singing down the stairs, and he helped her up to the driver’s
seat. She drove so badly, and “Apollo,” surely, was the ugliest pony
in the Vosges. He said that risk was a thing a soldier should face for
love of it; and declared that she would lead a charge superbly. The
shady road through the mountains, the delicious wooded glades, the
little white farmhouses, the fresh green heaths were for him so many
items from a soldier’s map. Some day the armies of France would cross
the Vosges and enter Baden beyond the frontier. He talked of it always,
even upon that early day of his happiness, when Beatrix drove him to
the picnic in the thickets of the Niederbronn.
“What a road for light cavalry,” he said, again and again; “with
Pfalzburg at your back and Strasburg for your base, what a road to
Berlin! We shall ride this road some day, _chérie_, and I shall show my
comrades the old farmhouse, and tell them why I went there. You will be
in Paris then, waiting for news of the victory. _Ma foi!_ you will not
wait long.”
“But I shall be very old,” she suggested. “You will be a general,
and wear feathers for me to steal. And we shall have our own home in
England. That would be ideal--a little house in Kent with an orchard
and a meadow.”
He nodded his head indifferently.
“There is no sun in England,” he said; “I was there once for a week,
and never saw him. All the orchards are in Normandy. And your people
do not like the French. They say that they do, but it is not true. Why
should we go to London when there is Paris? You have forgotten already
that your father was an Englishman, _mignonne_; why should we go there
to remember it?”
He was unconscious of that self which prompted his answer, nor would
she think of it on such a day.
“I shall never forget my father,” she said; “sometimes I try to think
of all the men I know, and wonder which of them he must have been like.
I was only five years old when he went to America. I cannot tell you
why, yet I seem to remember him, though I have forgotten his face.”
“I understand that,” he exclaimed, though with no suggestion of
sympathy in his voice; “there are many men that I can remember, though
I could not draw them upon paper for you to save my life. Old Giraud,
for instance, who writes to me from Paris this morning. I had forgotten
Giraud. He writes of news that might have been good, but is very bad.
There was the devil to pay in Spain. A word to the King of Prussia put
an end to it. That is like those Prussians. They bark until you show
the whip, and then they run to kennel. But it is our misfortune--”
She looked at him quickly.
“Your misfortune!”
He put his arm about her, and touched her ear with his lips.
“I am thinking of the army always,” he said earnestly; “it is the
heart, the life of France. You will learn to think of it as I do
by-and-by; it will be all in all to us. When I speak of a misfortune it
is for your sake as well as for my own. Nothing can give me my chance
but war. And my chance means fortune and honour for us both. But, of
course, I do not wish it--yet, Beatrix.”
His mood became for the moment that mood of tenderness and of _abandon_
to the impulse of love which had led him to make her his wife. It was
a very real impulse in the instants of its recurrence; and when it
betrayed him in look and voice, and she became conscious of it, the
bond of the marriage vow seemed written anew, so that the twain were
as one in heart and soul and affection. Strong in this assurance of
devotion deep-rooted below the common interests of the daily life,
Beatrix had no eyes to see those other things of self and will which
might have been the omen of a new day when assurance should be less
strong. She gave herself up in thought to him, yielding all to the
sweet impulses of love unmeasured. She was his wife. Without him, life
had no message for her.
“I know that you do not wish it, dearest,” she said earnestly, lifting
her lips to his; “your honour is my honour. What fortune could I have
which is not yours?”
He answered with an answer that a lover alone can give, and for some
little while silence followed them up the slope of the mountain.
Their way lay through woods odorous in pines, by hamlets green and
red-roofed in the thickets of the heights. They found the glade of the
Niederbronn, with its babbling brook and its shade of chestnut trees
and its murmur of the life of summer; and it stood to them as some Eden
set in the mountain’s heart to be the home of their affections. And in
this glade they lunched as two children abroad upon a holiday.
Remote brakes and dark places of the forest welcomed them when lunch
was done, wandering hand in hand, lovers in a garden of their solitude.
The health of the mountains shone in their eyes, or gave a new gift of
youth to their cheeks. They spoke of no serious things.
“You have taught me to see that the trees are green, _chérie_,” he
said, when the sun had set and “Apollo” was in the shafts again, and
the lights of home began to be a pleasant memory. “Some day, perhaps,
I will turn farmer and wear a blouse, and you shall drive in the sheep.
It would be good to come to Wörth when one had earned the right to
rest, and could say, ‘I have done my work for France.’ But I am not one
of those men who could take the holiday first and the work after. Even
here, and with you at my side, I do not play at doing nothing well. To
live is to achieve. The man who has achieved must have the first place
at the fireside. When we build our house in the woods, we will people
it with all the old friends we have left in Strasburg and in Paris, and
we shall remember how we came here at the very beginning of it--before
there were wars and victories.”
He did not mean to wound her. There was no thought in his mind but that
of his old comrades of the barracks at Strasburg, and of the night just
beginning for them. He saw them, in his imagination, in the cafés they
haunted; he peeped into the great darkened stables, where the horses
lay sleeping; he stood by his own charger; the vision showed him for an
instant all the panoply and the glory of the service he loved. But she
thought of none of these things. The smile of content left her face.
The words which Brandon North had spoken in the _salon_ of the old
house were heard again in the murmur of the woods. The shadow of the
night had fallen upon her pleasure.
“If the end could be as the beginning, dear,” she said, laying her hand
upon his arm gently. “Of course, I know that it cannot; I knew that
from the first. But when I am at Wörth, how can I help deceiving myself
there? Should I love you if I did not? Why should we remember these
things to-night, or even speak of them?”
He read a note of sadness in her voice, and hastened to atone.
“You shall not remember it, _mignonne_. I am a fool to talk so. There
is home and dinner. When the day comes we shall be ready for it. But
to-night--to-night I shall only tell you--ah, _mon âme_, what can I
tell you that I have not told you a thousand times? I love you. Do you
weary of my book, Beatrix? I can write nothing else but that--I love
you.”
He pressed her to him, taking the reins from her hands and shielding
her with his strong arm. The hour begat an exquisite tenderness. In the
valley below them stars of lights shone out from many a farmhouse and
many a village. Bells tinkled on the necks of the roving cattle. The
breeze surged in the heights of the pines, scenting the air with sweet
odours and the freshness of the night. Alone in that solitude of forest
and upland they seemed as those drawn apart from the living world to
the very citadels of rest and of love. Even the hamlets became towns to
them. Wörth itself, when they espied its lights between the descending
spurs of the mountains, was as some great hive of men where love had
no part or lot. The old farmhouse, welcoming them again, stood up as a
home of their childhood.
Guillaumette, the servant, was at the door of the farm, with a story
of dinner ready to be served. To Beatrix she said some pretty word
of welcome, but to Edmond she handed a telegram, and he stood in the
aureole of light cast out from the open door to read it. Beatrix never
forgot that picture of him as, with white face and quickening heart,
he read the message, once, twice, thrice, and then crushed the paper
quickly in his hand.
He read the message and stood with pale face and trembling hand. A
woman’s instinct seemed to tell her that some great hour of her life
was at hand. Their eyes met, and she read in his an intensity of love
and sympathy such as she had never seen before.
“Edmond,” she said, almost in a whisper, “what is it?--why do you not
tell me?”
He would have answered her, but finding no word he handed her the
crumpled paper, and she opened it with maladroit fingers and spread
it out and read it many times as he had read it. There were but two
words, yet she had no need of any question to comprehend their meaning.
The cord of her life seemed to snap in that instant. She turned from
him and ran up the stairs with dry eyes.
CHAPTER V
THE HERALD OF THE STORM
She ran upstairs and closed the door of her bedroom behind her. For a
little while he dare not intrude upon her, but stood at the foot of the
stairs fearing, if he went up, to find her dying or dead in the room.
A thousand thoughts, striking the whole gamut of a man’s emotions,
held him to the place. War and the glory of war, death and the risk of
death; France and the call she had sent to him; love and sorrow and the
moment of farewell--each was the outcome in its turn of that slip of
yellow paper, upon which those two fatal words “Report yourself” were
written. That which was even cowardice kept him for an instant from
the darkened room upstairs and from its secret. She suffered there. He
would have given half the years of his life could he have gone to her
and taken her in his arms and said, “I will not go--my home is here.”
A great silence fell upon the house. Little Guillaumette, who had seen
her mistress’s face, had run away to the kitchen and was crying her
heart out there. An old wooden timepiece, which had ticked for the
soldiers who, fought at Jena, struck the hour upon a crazy bell, and
told them it was eight o’clock. Without, there was no sound but that of
the leaves rustling and the murmur of the night. The man cast off the
spell which the silence had put upon him, and called for Guillaumette
when the clock struck.
“Guillaumette! Guillaumette! I must go back to Strasburg to-night. Let
Jacob bring the pony and make my valise. Madame will come with me--I
hope so. Where are you, Guillaumette?”
His voice sounded hollow and high-pitched. It echoed through the little
rooms of the farm strangely. In his mind there were many confusing
ideas, but only one impulse. He must return to his regiment at once.
France had need of him. The day he had waited for was at hand. Beatrix
would suffer now, but afterwards she would be glad. His courage was
found in the idea; he ran up the stairs at last and entered the
darkened room.
She stood by the window. She had drawn the curtain back to look across
the woods, down upon the lights of the villages. He saw that she had
not taken off her hat, and that her left hand was still gloved. When he
entered the room she turned her head wistfully, but did not speak to
him. He crossed to her side and put his arm about her, and wished that
he could see tears in her eyes. The mute restraint and self-possession
frightened him. When he kissed her on the forehead and drew her close
to him, her face seemed on fire; he could feel her heart beating
beneath the thin muslin dress which she had worn for their picnic.
“You will go with me,” he said in a low whisper. “I shall be in
Strasburg to-morrow, and afterwards as the order comes. But it will be
something to know that you are near. And _grandmère_ Hélène--but she is
at Geneva. You would be alone in the house--until I come--”
She laid her cheek upon his as though to cool it. Tenderness and love
and sacrifice of self were conveyed in every gesture. Her restraint
amazed him. She answered him as one who had no complaint nor even
argument to make.
“I could not go to Strasburg, Edmond. And you will not be there. Hélène
would not wish it, I am sure of it. Let me stop at Wörth until you
return. Jacob is here and Guillaumette. They will take care of me.”
He released her from his embrace, for he wished to find the light in
that hour of darkness. There were a hundred ways, but he could not see
one of them distinctly. Desire to console, excitement, sorrow for her,
gladness for himself, were mingled in an incoherency of thought and of
perplexity.
“It must have been yesterday,” he said. “The Colonel did not mention
it in his letters. There has been a great trouble about Spain, and
that telegram means that Lebœuf is calling out the reserves. Giraud
said that it was finished; he did not mean to deceive me, and I
understand. They would not spoil our holiday, _mignonne_, until they
were compelled. Yesterday I heard things in the village, but would not
tell you. They said that the King of Prussia had insulted us and wished
for war. If that is the case, we shall be at Berlin in a fortnight.
Everyone knew that it must come sooner or later; but that it should
have come now! If it were not for your sake, Beatrix, I should be glad
that it is so. There is nothing to fear for the armies of France. We
shall fight across the Rhine, and you will not even hear the sound of
the guns. I shall write every day, and a month will bring me back to
you. Ah, my little wife, what a day to think of, when I shall hold you
in my arms again and tell you of the battles! Is it not worth a month
of waiting to have such a day as that? And you will get my letters
every morning. Every morning I shall know that you are reading them.
The time will pass before you dream of it. You will go to meet me at
the station before the grapes are off the vines. It will still be
summer, and we shall have another picnic at the Niederbronn, and I
shall show you where the armies of France marched to Germany. Ah, if it
were not so hard!”
She had lit the lamp, mechanically and scarce knowing what she did,
while he was speaking. The glow of light falling upon her face showed
it as the face of one who had lived through a year of sorrows. His
attempts to console her ended in a word that was half a sob. He
realised that he loved her more than country or the ambitions of the
old time. Pity for her surged up in his breast as an agony. She would
be alone to think and to remember; and he knew already what those hours
of loneliness must mean to her.
“My love--my little wife; God guard and keep you,” he said.
She pressed his hands linked in her own and began to speak of his
journey. She did not wish him to see her face or to read the truth in
her eyes.
“I shall wait here at Wörth, dearest,” she said; “it is better that I
should, for there is no one in Strasburg now. The worst may not happen,
after all. And I should not care to go back to them. You will write to
me to-morrow and tell me where the regiment is. Perhaps I may see you
again before you go to Germany. And I will write to you every day. It
will be something to do even if you do not get the letters.”
She made a brave show of bearing up; and he understood and was grateful
to her. There was so much to do, a valise to pack, uniform to be put
on, a hundred things to be spoken of. Neither thought of food, nor
of the dinner Guillaumette had cooked. Silently and with method, and
with dry eyes always, she began to help him. In the valley without,
the mute heralds of rain and storm permitted all other sounds to be
heard clearly. An engine whistled upon a distant railway; a dog barked
in a garden at Wörth; the grasses rustled fitfully as in the hour of
coming tempest. Beatrix heard the sounds and was strangely conscious of
them. She knew not why she suffered silently. Many times she had the
desire to lay her head upon her husband’s shoulder and there to give
freedom to her grief as a child at a mother’s breast. A voice said to
her always, “You will be alone.” She clenched her hands, and turned her
face from him again.
“Little wife, give me courage such as yours.”
It was his last farewell at the gate of the garden wherein her roses
grew. For an instant, she remembered that she might be holding
his hands and hearing his words for the last time. All the depth
and intensity of her love compelled her so that she clung to him
distractedly and with all her courage gone. He felt her tears upon his
cheek, and was glad because of them. His strong arms crushed her dress
and so held her that she seemed to stand heart to heart with him.
“Good-bye, _mignonne_. To-morrow I will write; in a month I will be
home again.”
He stepped into the cart, and the pony began to trot down the hill
to Wörth. The little farm with its lighted windows stood out on the
mountain side as a cluster of stars above the garden of his home. He
saw her again for an instant, her white dress fluttering against the
background of the forest. He dare not ask himself what the night would
mean to her. He did not know that when a month had passed, an Empire
would have fallen, and the armies of France be no more.
From the valley, a blare of bugles echoed suddenly through the silent
hills. Troops were moving already, then! The note thrilled him as with
all the fire of battle and of war. To-morrow he would ride with his
regiment again.
But to Beatrix, listening at the gate of the garden, the trumpet’s note
was as some call to the place of death and tears.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAST DAY OF JULY
The sun had hardly begun to shine upon the glades of the Niederwald
on the last day of July when Beatrix opened the window of her bedroom
and looked over the woods and the green vineyards to the little white
town of Wörth and the glistening river in the hollow of the valley.
It was her habit now to wake at dawn, for sleep had ceased to be her
friend; and there was a morning hope of the sunshine as though the day
would bring some news of Edmond or of his regiment. Sometimes in her
dreams she would believe that the reality was but imagination, or that
she would awake to hear her husband’s voice. Every step upon the road
before the farmhouse quickened her heart, and sent her breathlessly to
the garden gate. The ultimate hope, that all might yet be well, was the
solace of many an hour. They told her in the village that peace must
come before the grapes were ripe. “It will be a race,” the old curé
said; “those Prussians will run to Berlin and we shall run after them.
In a month Monsieur will be home again.”
She listened to the old priest’s boast and loved him for it. The
silence of the woodlands helped her to self-deception. What war could
there be when the glades were sleeping in the sunshine, and the
kingfisher hovered above the limpid pools, and the church bells sent
their message to the heights, and all things were as yesterday in the
homes of the simple people about her? The very word seemed an irony.
Yet war had taken Edmond to Strasburg and to his regiment. War had left
her alone in the first hour of happiness inexpressible!
There had been rain all night, but the looming mists were scattered in
the first hour of dawn on that last day of the month, and a surpassing
freshness of the morning fell upon the glades and the gardens before
her window. Every leaf had gathered its little gift of dew and
husbanded the finest hues to give them out in a spectrum of violet and
crimson, and the purest blues. Her roses shed their leaves upon the
sparkling grass or lifted their heads to the dews in bursting blossoms
and glossy petals. The very air seemed to rise up from a sea of the
sweetest perfumes, and to fill the lungs with all the fulness of life
realised. It was a scene of day glorified; a scene of Nature new-robed
and awakened; of the apotheosis of solitudes. She gazed upon it,
spell-bound and entranced. She could not remember yesterday in such an
hour. Nevertheless, yesterday spoke to her--for there, upon the white
road of the valley, the white road which the poplars fringed, was a
regiment of chasseurs riding southward to Strasburg. Even at the window
of her house she could hear the bugles blowing and the clatter of the
waggons. The trumpet’s note thrilled her as a voice of war itself. She
turned from the window and ran down to the kitchen of the house where
Guillaumette was singing.
“Good-day, Madame--you hear the soldiers! Oh, that is good--all day the
music and at night the chasseurs. They are going to make the Prussians
dance--hein? And then Monsieur will come home again. Do not doubt it
at all, Madame. A month and there will be no more music. We shall all
go to Strasburg and Monsieur will be a general. The curé says it, and
he knows. A thousand horses in the village yesterday--and all night
long the tramp, tramp, tramp! Oh, I can sleep well to the tramp, tramp,
tramp--_moi!_ I think of Gaspard, who has gone to bring me a mug from
Berlin. There is nothing else in Berlin but mugs and sausages. That is
why these Prussians are so fat. But they will run, run, run presently.
The Emperor has gone to Metz--eh piff, pouf, boum, where is your
Bismarck then!”
Guillaumette was a wench of Grenoble, small of foot, relentless of
tongue, with pretty hair and a young girl’s face against which the
sun had warred in vain. To her, war and the rumour of war were an
unbroken delight. There would be troopers in the hills all day. Why,
then, should anyone be sad? She could not conceive that state of mind
which brought tears to the eyes a second time for the lover who had
gone to the wars. If he came home--it would be with gifts in his hand.
If he did not come home--well, there were horsemen all day on the
road to Strasburg. She spent her hours in the old kitchen, where the
copper stove shone like a plate of gold; and when she was not singing
“_Allons, enfants de la patrie_,” her ballad would be:--
“Cent mille francs
Sont attrayants,
Morbleu, j’en conviens sans peine,
Mais ce tendron
Triple escadron
Fait flotter mon âme incertaine.”
Beatrix listened to her blithe words and took heart in spite of
herself. This child of the people could teach her a lesson, she
thought. It was a lesson of duty; a lesson which war may teach even to
a woman.
“Ah, Guillaumette,” she said, “if you were a prophetess--”
“_Chut_, Madame, why should I be a prophetess to say that the Prussian
louts are going to run? Look at the chasseurs _là bas_--the horses,
the gold and silver, the splendid fellows. It is the same everywhere.
Gaspard tells me so. Everywhere, everywhere, the music and the colour
and the big moustaches of the cuirassiers--and not a Prussian in all
the mountains. Why are we here, drinking our coffee as yesterday? It is
because of the chasseurs who go to Berlin on their horses. Ah, Madame,
if there were any bonnets there! If there were anything over yonder but
the mugs and the beer--”
She raked the fire angrily, and poured the steaming milk and coffee
into the basins.
“_Dame_,” she said triumphantly, “look at that. No wonder the
Prussians come to the Rhine for coffee, Madame. You will drink it in
the garden. And afterward the post. Oh, the blessed post with news of
Monsieur and the army. And the sunshine: Madame will ride her pony
to-day? Certainly she will. I will tell Jacob. He sleeps all day, the
lazy one. The Prussians are coming, he says! Oh, the poltroon! They are
thousand miles away. The curé says so. As if there could be a blue coat
at Wörth! I laugh when I hear it. And the chasseurs in the village! It
is splendid, this war!”
She showed all her delight in her eyes--for war was a very carnival to
her--a carnival which must people the hills with red breeches presently
and awake the mountains to the martial music which quickened her steps
and gladdened her heart. Hearing her, Beatrix could even tell herself
that the supreme hour of her life had not been lived. How, if this
little chatterer were right, and a month brought Edmond back to Wörth,
and France were victorious, and all his joy of victory were added to
her joys of love! She could dream of such a day on that morning of
sunshine and of rest. For the white road was deserted again when she
carried her coffee to the arbour of roses. The old white houses slept
once more. The woods echoed to no music but the music of the leaves.
It was at seven o’clock when the postman came and brought her two
letters--a long one from Grandmère Hélène, who had left Geneva that
day, and a short one from Edmond, who was at Strasburg still, but
spoke of an immediate march northward to Hagenau. “You will be able to
drive over, _chérie_,” he said, “and I shall tell you everything. Here
it is all noise and dust and trumpets all day. I cannot believe the
things I see--I cannot believe that France is at war. We wait always.
We go to sleep at night, and torches guide us to our beds, and students
sing our lullaby. I have heard the Marseillaise a thousand times since
yesterday. There is no road to the north which the waggons do not block
and the troops follow. Ah, _mignonne_, if I could ride upon one of
those roads to a little white house and take a little white figure in
my arms! But the day will not be distant. The end is near. France will
justify herself. I shall be at Hagenau before the month is out--and
then--what a harvest time for us. And the vines will still be green. A
thousand messages of love to the little wife who is waiting for me, and
who has forgotten already that there is any other country but France.”
She held the letter long, gazing wistfully over the woods which thrust
themselves up to blot out the view of distant Hagenau. The words
of love and confidence brought tears to her eyes. Yet was it true?
she asked. Had she indeed forgotten those green lanes of England
wherein her girlhood had been spent? Was she heart and soul faithful
to this new country which had given her a home--and Edmond? She could
not answer those questions, but crushed the letter in the bosom of
her dress and told herself gladly that to-morrow might bring him to
her--to-morrow he would tell her again that he loved her and that she
was all to him.
Old Hélène’s letter covered many pages. Beatrix skipped them,
remembering what to-morrow would bring. Nevertheless, she could permit
her imagination to see the beloved face, the trembling hand that wrote
the wavering lines. The exhortation that she should return to Strasburg
at once troubled her. She had no thought for the city, now that Edmond
was to march out of it. The old farm had become a home like no other
house which had ever received her. Every room seemed to whisper her
lover’s name. A memory of him was written upon the most trifling
ornament. The roses in her arbour were his roses. She treasured the
very leaves of them. The woods retold her love in the murmur of brook
and branches. She would not quit a house so dear to her, though all the
armies of Germany had been at the gate of it.
The _facteur_ had brought the letters at seven o’clock, but eight
o’clock struck before she left the arbour and returned to tell her news
to Guillaumette.
“Monsieur will be at Hagenau to-morrow, Guillaumette. He may be here on
Tuesday. The regiment is to march; his letter says so. And, of course,
he would wish to have his friends here. We must be ready against
that--he will expect it of us. It would never do to disgrace the châlet
after all the things he will have told them. I am going down to Wörth
now--”
Guillaumette put her arms upon her hips and laughed loudly.
“_Vela, vela_--we are going to Wörth now, and we forget that it is
Sunday!”
She had forgotten it, indeed, and she stood with a rosy flush upon her
cheeks and the old straw bonnet swinging by its ribbons in her hand.
The excitement of the week had robbed her of any memory of days. She
heard the bells of the village churches, and all her English reverence
for Sunday came to reproach her. Guillaumette, on her part, did not
love the priests. She began to bustle about the kitchen again.
“We shall not go to Wörth to-day,” she said. “We shall go to Mass to
see if there are any soldiers there. That is what Sunday is for. There
will be cuirassiers upon the road, and the hussars ride by to Bitche.
I heard it in the village. If Monsieur comes back to-morrow and brings
his friends, it will be the wine for which he will ask. It is always
like that. Wine, wine, wine--and when the wine is all gone, _bon jour_!
Oh, I know those fellows--I, Guillaumette. Do not think about them,
Madame. They will drink us up--and then--to the wars!”
There was no argument possible with Guillaumette when she had spoken.
She was as imperious as a general of armies. Beatrix used to surrender
at once, telling herself that Guillaumette was always right. And an
idea came to her when she remembered that it was Sunday. She would ride
her pony to that glade of the Niederbronn which had been the home of
their picnic on the day that Edmond left her. She could not sit in a
church, she thought. The deeper gifts of religious consolation were
lost in the unrest and doubt of such an hour. The impulse to be doing
something was irresistible.
The sun was still shining when old Jacob brought the pony to the door,
but scuds of grey and black cloud loomed above the valley, and the
breeze had fallen away again until it was scarce a whisper in the
trees. She heard the bells of Wörth and of other villages, whose red
roofs and white houses dotted the valley below her. But there were no
soldiers upon the road, and everywhere it was as though the spirit of
the God of peace had come upon the mountains.
CHAPTER VII
“THOSE OTHERS”
She struck the road to the village of Reichshofen, and followed it
upward through the forest. There were few abroad upon it, and such as
she met were peasants going to Mass. An old woman, red-cheeked and
hale, gave her good-day, and added that her son was at Châlons. A group
of harvesters played dominoes upon a knoll of grass at the roadside,
but stood up awkwardly when she passed. A farmer, driving a weedy brown
horse, drew rein as he approached, and asked if there were any soldiers
between him and the village. To such as these news of war was little
more than news of that distant Paris which interested them so little.
The Emperor was going to Berlin! What mattered it to men who were
watching the ripening grape or husbanding the maize and the tobacco?
It was dark in many of the thickets, and she rode impetuously, now
galloping, now letting the pony go as he would. At the cross-roads, a
little way from Reichshofen, she heard a clatter of hoofs behind her
and turned her head to see a little old man on a great grey horse,
whose outspread cloak and upturned elbows gave him the appearance
of a flying mill. She recognised him as the kinsman of the Count of
Durckheim, whose château lay beyond Froeschweiler, and she saw that he
wished to speak to her. There was no greater gossip in the mountains.
He would have the last news from Strasburg, she was sure.
“Good-day, Madame; did you think that I was a Prussian? You ride like a
hussar! I have seen your pony’s heels ever since you passed the white
mill. And to church, too!”
He took a gold snuff-box from his pocket and spilled the snuff upon
his white breeches and his once fine vest. Exertion had brought drops
of sweat to his forehead. He regarded the little English girl as some
treasure of the forest sent by providence to reward him. She, in turn,
was amused by his candour, and glad to hear a friendly voice.
“Good-day, Monsieur Picard--and what makes you think that I am riding
to church?” she asked.
He dusted the snuff from his coat, and settled himself in the saddle,
as though his way was, from that time, her way.
“There are two roads, Madame,” he said with a flourish of his arm, “to
church and to Berlin. As you are not upon the latter, there can only be
the former. And you are wise. All France goes the other way--”
His eccentricity always pleased her.
“And you, yourself, Monsieur, you are on the same road?”
“Impossible to take any other when Madame Lefort rides. I shall go to
the church door. It will be an example to the people!”
“But if I am not going to church--”
“In that case there will be no example. We shall talk of Paris and the
army.”
He was full of self-content, and the heavy clouds which cloaked
the sun, and sent the birds skimming low in the open places of the
thickets, were not heeded by him. There was no one else upon the road
to Niederbronn now; even the glades were hushed. Nature listened for
the storm which was gathering above the pass.
“Captain Lefort is at Strasburg with Duhesme’s brigade,” Beatrix said,
seeing that he waited for her; “he may be at Hagenau to-morrow, and
I shall ride there. He does not know where his regiment is going
to--at least, he can only guess it is to be sent to the north. General
MacMahon will meet the Emperor at Saarbrück. You have heard that,
Monsieur?”
“I have heard it all, Madame. Everyone in France guesses to-day. We
have seven bodies in command of seven armies. When we find one head
we shall begin. We are waiting for that. If the Prussians would only
wait, too, it will be a great war. I have come from Paris, and I
know. Ah, what enthusiasm in Paris, Madame, what torches, what songs,
what a brave people. Our generals are moved to the very heart. They
were all in the bonnet shops when I came away. We are a nation of
courtiers. We do not leave our ladies at home when we go to the wars.
Why should we--since the road to Berlin is open and our horsemen will
ride there by-and-by, and we have waggons for the crinolines. You are
an Englishwoman and you have married a Frenchman. You understand these
things. The poor people we see around us--they understand them, too.
War is far away from them to-day. It will be over there, oh, such a
long way off, in Berlin, where the Prussians are. If it came here, to
their homes, their fields, their villages--if they saw their children
carried out to the graves in the woods--ah, if they saw their children,
the children who have not made the war, who do not cry _À Berlin_, if
they saw them--it would be different, Madame. But we shall not see it;
the Emperor has said so; the seven bodies have said so. The head will
come to us presently--and then, _en avant!_”
He was a strange old man, Beatrix thought, while she watched him
sitting there awkwardly upon the great horse, and lifting his hat as
though commanding all the soldiers of France. The mingled earnestness
and levity of his address moved her strangely. How true it was, that no
one in all those villages and farms of Alsace had ever remembered that
war might bring the soldiers of Germany across the Rhine even to the
doors of their houses. While the sun shone, and the birds sang, and the
vines ripened, how could they tell themselves that to-morrow might not
be as yesterday? She, herself, was no wiser than the others. Edmond was
coming to Hagenau! What else could she remember?
“Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she exclaimed a little sadly, “you do not really
believe what you say?”
“I, Madame, I believe nothing. It is an easy creed which never leads
you to contradictions. When I peep through the woods to the village
down there and see the red roofs, and hear the Mass bells ringing, and
watch the old folks going to church, I say--this is war, this is glory,
here lies the road to Berlin. Why should I think otherwise? There are
no Prussians here; there never will be any. Your husband is a soldier
and what is he doing? He is thinking of a charming wife who is taking
care of his châlet at the Niederwald. To-morrow he will see her. In a
month he will cross the Rhine again and tell her how many Prussians he
has killed. If the children die, they will be the children of Germany,
not of France. _Vive la France_, then, and let us light some more
torches. Paris is doing it all night. Why should we be behind-hand? Not
at all--we will do as Paris does, and when we are hoarse with shouting
we will go and drink the Rhine wine!”
He did not see that his irony was lost upon her, and that she had begun
to be very serious again. A little pattering of rain upon the great
broad leaves troubled him exceedingly; he wrapped his cloak about his
throat.
“Madame,” he said suddenly, “I am old enough to be rheumatic. That is
an age which moves youth either to ribaldry or to compassion. In your
case it will be compassion. Let us shelter a moment and forget that
there is a good _déjeuner_ to be had in the inn at Niederbronn.”
He turned abruptly into a little glade of the woods, and she recognised
it as the glade to which Edmond had taken her--how long ago it
seemed--on the day of his farewell. The very straw which had lined
their basket was still upon the grass. She could have repeated every
word of love he had whispered to her that day. An exquisite memory of
his caress made her limbs tremble. Until old Picard spoke again she
forgot that Edmond had left her.
“Come,” he said, “there is a glade made to match your pretty dress,
Madame. Let us shelter until the sun remembers that we have had no
breakfast. As for those other fellows--!”
He did not finish his sentence, for a sound as of horses at the gallop
rang out above the murmur of the woods and the patter of the rain.
For a little while they listened intently as the sounds magnified in
approach. Beatrix thought at the first that it might even be Edmond’s
lancers who had come from Hagenau. Old Picard put his hand to his ear
and a curious expression settled upon his face.
“As for those other fellows--you hear their horses, Madame?”
“There is someone on the road behind us,” she answered quickly.
“Ah,” he continued, “then I can still hear. When you are my age, you
will begin to take your senses out of the cupboard and to see how many
are left. I count mine every day. The eyes to see my friend Madame
Lefort, the taste to admire her, the ears to hear her, the touch which
tells me that her hand is the smallest in Alsace--ah, Madame, how rich
I am. We shall tell those other fellows--if there are many of them--do
you hear many horses, Madame?”
She listened again. Whoever rode toward Niederbronn had urgent business
to help him on the way.
“It will be the chasseurs!” she said with some little excitement, born
of the uncertainty. “I saw them this morning upon the road to Hagenau--”
“Madame,” he exclaimed, “they are not chasseurs--they are--”
Again his sentence was unfinished. He stopped abruptly and took
his snuff-box from his pocket. When he had dusted his vest very
deliberately, he continued--
“They are Prussians, Madame Lefort--Uhlans from across the Rhine. Look
at them well. We shall see many in France before the year is out!”
He pointed dramatically with his finger as two horsemen rode suddenly
into view; their presence was a vindication of his words. Beatrix had
met few German soldiers before that day; and now when she saw these
two Uhlans, who reined back their horses as much from curiosity as
from prudence, she did not believe for a moment that they were not
Frenchmen. Certainly their tunics of light blue, with the scarlet cuffs
and shoulder-straps, and the eagles upon their helmets, were strange to
her. It would be some regiment she had not met with either in Strasburg
or in Paris, she thought.
The Uhlans halted before the glade, but when they saw a harmless old
man with a young girl at his side sheltering from the rain, broad
smiles covered their faces, and they beckoned to others behind them.
There were fifteen in all, Beatrix counted, sturdy fellows, splashed
from head to foot with the mud, sunburnt, bearded, yet well horsed and
full of ready activity. One who seemed to be a captain, and who spoke
French with a guttural accent, bowed low to her and asked the way to an
inn.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “_si fou foulez m’indiquer une auberge par
ici_.”
She knew not why it was, but a strange sense of fear and foreboding
came to her when she heard the man speak. She did not realise that
troopers out of Baden, for such they were, had ridden into France; but
a vague consciousness of danger environing her was not to be avoided.
Nevertheless, she would have answered the question if old Picard had
not been before her.
“Herr Captain,” he said, “there is an inn five miles from here. You
turn to the right.”
The Uhlan shrugged his shoulders.
“Which means to the left,” he said; “and then, _mon ancien_!”
Picard shut his snuff-box with a snap.
“And then--you can go to the devil.”
The German seemed amused.
“I am on the right road, Monsieur,” he said; “this is the way to Paris,
I believe.”
He let his horse go, for one of the sergeants pointed out the red roofs
of the buildings peeping up through the glade of the thicket. When he
had observed them, he bowed again to Beatrix and addressed her, to her
infinite surprise, in English as good as her own.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “beware of that old man. He does not tell the
truth.”
He was gone with the words, and she saw him a few moments later as he
rode up to the farm and began to beat loudly upon the door. Old Picard,
who was nodding his head and snuffing incessantly, vouchsafed no
remark. She, on her part, had viewed the event as some scene of a play.
Uhlans at Niederbronn! She did not believe it even then.
“Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she said, turning her pony suddenly, “you do not
mean it; they were not really Germans?”
“Madame,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “what I mean or do not
mean is of little account.”
“But if they are Germans what are they doing upon the road to
Niederbronn?”
He stroked his chin.
“They are doing what we should have done an hour ago--they are having
their breakfasts, my child. Let us go home and imitate them. The sun
does not shine any longer upon us. It will be a long time before the
sun shines upon France again, dear Madame.”
She saw that he was very thoughtful, and the sense of unrest and of
danger on the road returned to her. If there were Prussian lancers at
Niederbronn, would there not be others at Wörth and Hagenau? In that
instant the great truth that this war might, indeed, come to the homes
of France was realised by her. Fear for Edmond, a fear she had not
known before, began to possess her, and would not be quieted. She asked
herself what she was doing there, so far from the châlet, when he might
have need of her or even have sent a second message.
“Oh! let us go,” she said, urging her pony to the road again; “our
place is at home, Monsieur Picard.”
He followed her reluctantly, and wished to allay her fears.
“_Chut_, Madame--I would not have missed the spectacle for a bucket
full of francs. We must get used to it. There will be Germans upon
this road every day before the summer is gone. They will not often be
so fortunate as those fellows _là-bas_, who have just seen my little
English friend in her pretty habit. And there will be others who will
have something to say to them. My word--hark to that. The watch-dogs
understand the German language, eh! Do they not speak it beautifully?”
He halted his horse again and listened to the strange sounds of mingled
voices and the baying of hounds. Those troopers, then, were arguing
with the people of the house! He thought that he could see the horses
of some of them through the network of leaf and branch. The road itself
was deserted, and the rain began to fall again in heavy drops, which
glistened upon the flat leaves and gave waves to the puddles. Beatrix
herself could not understand his curiosity, but she feared now to be
alone upon the road.
“Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she said at last, “if I were not so cold--”
He sighed at her impatience, and was about to ride on, when the report
of a rifle shot rang out above the silence of the woods and the patter
of the rain. Birds went winging from the trees as the echoes rolled
from hill to hill and glade to glade. A loud shouting was heard at the
farm--the cries of men who found themselves face to face with death.
Two Uhlans came galloping wildly up the pass, with five horsemen
pressing close upon them. They went by, a flash of blue and silver; but
one of those who rode after them had a sabre in his hand, and he struck
at the trooper before him.
It was the vision of an instant: the vision of faces set in anger and
ferocity; of eyes staring horribly at the images of death they saw; of
horses foaming and accoutrements glittering and mud splashing. Yet so
real was it that Beatrix cried out when the men passed her. She tried
to hide the vision from her eyes, but could not. She feared to see the
shining blade fall upon the neck of the Uhlan, who rode as though he
raced with Death. No murder committed, there, at the roadside, could
have filled her with a greater horror.
“Oh, my God, he will kill him!” she cried again and again.
She buried her face in her hands and would let her eyes follow the
horsemen no more. Old Picard, on his part, did not try to help her. The
spectacle was as wine to him. Blood coursed through the blue veins of
his cheeks and forehead. He gripped the reins until his nails cut the
flesh. He did not know that the rain fell upon his face or that the sun
had ceased to shine. The story that he tried to tell her was almost
incoherent.
“The hussars from Bitche--eh, Madame? Do you not see that they give
them their breakfast? They were in the house then--they were at the
farm. _Ma foi_, what a meeting, what a dish! Keep close to me, child.
Do not look at them. They are the hussars from Bitche. The splendid
fellows!”
He drove his horse before her and began to breathe quickly as a hunted
animal. One of the Uhlans had ridden through the gates of the farm and
a French hussar was at his heels. No race at Longchamps or Chantilly
was like that race for life up the road of the pass. Old Picard saw
that the pursued was the officer who had spoken to him at the glade.
He did not bear him any grudge, yet wished to see him die. It was as
though the troops of France had sounded the horn and started a fox from
the thicket. The game must be killed; that was all. And the hussars
would kill it. He read their ferocity in their faces. The hunted man
was their prey. They were as beasts hungering for blood. All that they
had learned in barracks and upon the field schooled them to this lust
of blood. The very excitement of it sent them rolling in their saddles;
the intoxication of it was almost delirium. “_En avant, en avant!_”
The cry was hardly human. It was the scream of men who hasten to see
another die.
[Illustration: “Fired wildly on the stooping figure before him.”]
Twenty paces from the tree whereunder Beatrix stood, the end came. One
of the Frenchmen, seeing that the Uhlan’s horse outpaced his own, drew
a revolver and fired wildly at the stooping figure before him. There
was no sign upon the instant that the bullet had hit its mark; but,
when the doomed man had come up almost to the tree, he raised himself
in his saddle and threw his arms above his head. Beatrix saw his face;
a smile seemed to play upon it. For a moment the smile hovered there;
then, suddenly, a white shadow crept up from chin to forehead, the
eyes set to a wild stare, blood gushed from the mouth; the German fell
headlong from his horse and lay dead at her feet.
“_La France, la France!_”
Twenty voices took up the cry in frenzied triumph. Other horses
galloped by upon the road to Wörth. The Uhlan lay, face downward, in
the mud. Old Picard, hat in hand, paid his tribute to the dead. Beatrix
heard him speak to her, but his voice seemed an echo of a voice far off.
“My child,” he said, “the sun does not shine upon us any more. Let us
go home.”
His words awakened her as from a horrid sleep. The rain fell in
torrents on the open road of the pass. She shuddered to her very heart,
but it was not from the cold.
CHAPTER VIII
OVER THE HEARTS OF FRANCE
She did not ride to Hagenau on the morrow, for the _facteur_ brought
a letter saying that the regiment was still waiting to complete
its numbers, and had need of many things. Three days of suspense
intolerable passed, but on the morning of the fourth a trooper, who had
been in the saddle half the night, galloped to the châlet at dawn and
brought the great news that the “Sixth” were upon the road to Wörth,
and would be camped on the Niederwald before the sun set. MacMahon’s
army was on the march at last, the fellow said. He would join de
Failly at Bitche and thereafter unite with Bazaine to give battle to
the Prussians who were marching to the Rhine. “Madame would see the
Captain that evening. He was bringing four of his brother officers to
dinner. To-morrow the regiment would rest, but the next day it would
march again. He, himself, must ride into the village of Elsasshausen
and billet the others who would come after. But he could drink a bottle
of wine--and he had not eaten for twenty hours.”
Guillaumette took the trooper to the kitchen, and kept him there until
the bell for Mass was ringing. Already, on the high-road below, the
signs of the coming invasion were many. Jaded infantrymen, gunners with
mud upon their very faces, weary horses stumbling through the mire,
heavy waggons rolling in the ruts, horsemen crying out for food and
wine, companies of Turcos and zouaves, the outposts of cuirassiers,
staff officers, who rode at the gallop--all these began to block the
road from Hagenau and even the by-paths through the woods. The rolling
of the drums and the blare of the bugles were incessant. Rain fell
pitilessly, so that the very brooks were as muddy rivers, and all the
thickets droned to the babbling music of the swollen torrents. Far away
towards the south the sky was an unbroken envelope of mist. The gloom
of the day was intense and infectious, so that men marched listlessly
and with heavy feet which squelched in the clinging mud. Many a cottage
had been already deserted. The women fled to the hills before the
advancing hosts. The armies of France marched on over the hearts of
France.
Beatrix spent the day in a work of love which brought colour to her
cheeks again, and the light to her eyes. She would see Edmond that
night, if it were but for an instant. The link which the fatal day
had broken would for an hour be welded again. That sense of utter
loneliness, which had been with her always since he had left her, was
forgotten in the new thought of his return. The sight which she had
seen upon the road to Niederbronn, the dead Uhlan lying face downward
in the mud--the first blood offering to those who cried, “Let there be
war,” had taken so grim a hold upon her imagination that she thought
death alone would obliterate the memory. Fear for herself, whom all had
forsaken, fear for the house and her home, dread of the solitude of the
hills which war had awakened was hers no more. Edmond was coming back.
She would show him that she had learned the lesson; that she could
suffer, if need be, for the country wherein she had found so great a
happiness.
It was a busy day, and she tried to see nothing, to hear nothing of
those sights and sounds upon the high-roads. There were roses to gather
from her garden, and dinner to be thought of, and rooms to be made
bright, and a hundred little things to do. Even Guillaumette’s despair
could not trouble her. Edmond was coming back. There was a moment when
she said to herself that she could wish he was coming alone; but she
rebuked her own selfishness, and went on with her work.
“We must do our best, Guillaumette. They will not expect too much now.
Captain Chandellier comes and Major de Selay. We must put them in the
white room. If Lieutenant Giraud is with them he must sleep in the
nursery--”
Guillaumette clapped her hands.
“Oh, I know Giraud, Madame--what a man! He is the great big boy--like
that. He eats the soup with the sabre--hein? He will eat us up, Madame.
And the Capitaine Chandellier--what an appetite, and we have but two
pigeons and a cabbage for the _soupe_--!”
“Jacob shall ride to the village,” Beatrix said; “they will have eggs
and poultry at the farm. I will go there myself--”
“But, Madame--! Look at the road and say how you shall go. Red and
blue, red and blue--and the cannons everywhere, and the great fellows
who know a pretty face, and the little fellows who must stand on tiptoe
to kiss you--oh, I know those fellows. And I shall be the Captain
in this house. Monsieur has wished it. Do not fear for me, Madame.
Guillaumette knows the chasseurs. I shall go to the farm and the
sergeants will stand upon the tiptoes. To me it is nothing. I box the
face--oh, I have done it often.”
Beatrix found the merry voice tuned to her own new-gotten gaiety.
Since that day of her pilgrimage to Niederbronn the burden of the
hours had been a heavy one, but now she cast it off, and had forgotten
that to-morrow she must take it up again. Everything in her home
reminded her of Edmond. Sometimes she would stand before her glass to
ask herself if he would find her changed, with eyes less bright and
cheeks that lacked their colour. But the mirror told no such tale.
There was laughter upon the pretty face it showed to her; a flush of
pink suffused the clear white skin; the glossy black hair curled about
the open forehead, and fell bewitchingly over the little ears. And she
had put on the muslin gown and the sunbonnet he loved. Those who saw
her at the door of the châlet, where she stood waiting for him, would
have named her as some pretty school-girl, returned to her home from a
convent. Yesterday, they would have said that she was a woman who had
learned some of the lessons which life can teach.
The pitiless rain had ceased early in the afternoon, and for a little
while the sun shone warm and clear upon the woods. Down there, upon
the road to Strasburg, all the armies of France seemed to be blocked
in confusion inextricable. Cuirassiers with dulled breastplates,
hussars with bedraggled shakoes, artillerymen lashing their horses,
aides-de-camp roaring oaths, waggons locked together, gun-carriages
stuck in the ditches, staff officers threatening, peasants mad with
terror--all these poured in toward Wörth, and the camps which MacMahon
had found for them there. Even on the height above the valley, the
woodland scene had quickened to the note of music and the tramping of
the squadrons. Watch-fires sent their smoke curling above the shading
trees; troopers stood at the cottage doors and clamoured loudly for
bread and wine; horsemen passed the châlet riding wildly to Reichshofen
and to Bitche. The very air seemed full of unrest; the birds winged
upward fearing the cries they heard in the woods below them.
From sunset onward Beatrix never left the watching place by the
garden gate. Every little pennant fluttering upon a lance down there
on the high-road could make her heart tremble and bring blood to her
cheeks. She was surprised that all this stress and toil of war moved
her so little. The red fires burning in the woods, the echoes of the
drums, the flying horsemen--all seemed in harmony with that hour of
expectation. Edmond was coming home. Those who had no home, begging of
her for the children’s sake as they fled to the mountains, moved her
to an infinite pity. She saw their little wealth of home piled upon
carts and waggons; she saw the children, hungry and outcast, before
this wave of war, and her heart bled for them. If she had been an
outcast with them, holding a child in her arms and knowing not whether
to-morrow would give life or death! But she was all blest. Edmond was
coming back to her.
[Illustration: “He came at sunset, galloping up the high road.”]
He came at sunset, galloping up the high-road on his heavy charger. The
mud had whitened his boots and found its way even to the dark blue
tunic and the red plumes of his helmet. Fitful as the sunshine of the
week had been, it had bronzed his face and robbed his hands of their
whiteness. His moustache drooped with the damp, but his eyes were
lighted with all the fires of excitement and of love, and she heard his
loud cry of salutation even while she was asking herself if, indeed, he
had come.
And so she ran to meet him, and holding her in his arms and whispering
her name again and again, he crushed her pretty dress against the
buttons of his tunic and covered her face with kisses, and seemed as
though nevermore would he release her. In that moment she had her
recompense for all the weary hours of waiting and distress.
CHAPTER IX
THE FUGITIVE
He released her lips, but with fingers still locked in his he led her
to the house and began to tell her all his news. She did not think it
strange that he had no question concerning her own welfare during the
days that had intervened. He had seen so much since then; the fires of
war burnt him as a fever. She was content to listen and to know that
she held his hand and heard his voice again.
“I have been twenty hours in the saddle, little one,” he said, “twenty
hours upon a biscuit and a glass of white wine at an _auberge_. How
good it is to get home again! _Ma foi!_ it seems a hundred years. I
cannot think that it is only twenty days--twenty days since we went to
Niederbronn and you taught me to see that the leaves were green. If we
had known that morning! And you said that you would be an old woman!”
“I should have been if you had not come back,” she exclaimed, speaking
for the first time.
He put his arm about her and pressed her close to his heart again.
“It could not be,” he said decisively, “for me you are always the
little girl of Strasburg I saw at the convent gate five years ago. And
to-night--ah, if you could see yourself to-night, _chérie_.”
She flushed for pleasure of his words and opened the door of their
little drawing-room.
“It has been a year of days, Edmond,” she said uncomplainingly, “yet I
knew that you would come. And the roses have been ready every morning.
Yesterday I would have ridden to Hagenau, but Jules Picard met me and
said he had news of you. He has been very good to us. I rode with him
to Niederbronn on Sunday. It was a dreadful day. They killed a German
soldier--he died almost at my feet--”
His merry laugh ran through the little house.
“How--you call it a dreadful day, Beatrix! A dreadful day because
a Prussian was killed! What will you say when I tell you that at
Saarbrück on Tuesday General Bataille killed four thousand of them? The
tale is everywhere. It was a victory for the Emperor and the Prince.
The Prussians ran like deer. They will run every day when we begin. And
we shall begin to-morrow, _chérie_; to-morrow we go to the north.”
She could see his spirit waxing hot at the very thought of it; and his
forgetfulness of all else but this consuming passion of the war was
unmistakable from the first. He wished to hear of nothing, to speak
of nothing but the troops of France then marching northward to their
victory.
“You shall tell me the story at dinner, _petite_,” he said. “I have
asked Chandellier and Giraud, and the Colonel himself may come. It is
only for to-morrow, for we march again on Saturday. Duhesme is with
us, and Michel; Douay goes forward to Weissenburg. We shall be very
strong when de Failly reports. He has two divisions at Bitche, and
Frossard is before Saarbrück. We have the cuirassiers and the Turcos
and ninety-six guns besides the mitrailleuse. That is the medicine for
the Prussians--the mitrailleuse. You should hear the tales they tell of
the Prince’s baptism. Whole regiments mowed down as wheat by the wind.
Not a man left to go to Berlin and tell the others about it. It was a
triumph, a procession. Those that could run were the lucky ones. Ah,
_mignonne_, did I not promise you that before the vines had ripened I
would be home again?”
She took both his hands and looked up into his face very seriously, as
one whose love wished more for him even than his own ambitions.
“God grant it!” she ejaculated fervently.
He kissed her for the words, but could not spare any praise for
her pretty room or for the roses with which she had decked out the
mantelpiece and the little windows. His thoughts were all of his
comrades who were coming to dinner at the châlet. He talked incessantly
of all that had happened in Strasburg and upon the march afterwards.
“Old Hélène is at the Place Kleber,” he said; “she wants you back
there, but I said that you would not go. There may be danger on the
road, and while the army is about here you will be safe. We shall not
leave the frontier until we ride to Berlin, and then I will write
again. If it were not for those ‘others,’ Beatrix, I would take you
with me. But our friends _là-bas_ are merry fellows, and I do not wish
you to meet the people who have come from Paris to our picnic. The
Colonel says we have as many bonnet-boxes as waggons. It is his way of
speaking, and, of course, soldiers are soldiers always. When the day
comes, they will not fight less well because they know a pretty bonnet
and a pretty face beneath it. I do not like that--but then, you know, I
have someone to wait for me. Was it long to wait, _mignonne_--were you
very lonely?”
She was glad that he should have asked the question, though it came to
him as an afterthought.
“I counted the hours,” she said, “yet I knew that it must be, Edmond!”
“Ah, the ‘must be’ will soon be a word of yesterday,” he said gaily;
“you shall hear what the Colonel says, Beatrix. Giraud comes with him,
but the Major is busy after horses, and Chandellier is to dine with
Mademoiselle Serres of the Opéra Comique. You will hear her when we go
to Paris in the autumn. She has come here to learn how Marguerite feels
when Valentine has gone to the wars. It is a splendid idea, and Serres
amuses me always. She has ridden with the regiment from Strasburg, and
is now at the inn with the others. I am going down there by-and-by to
arrange for to-morrow. If the Marshal is wise, he will not hurry us.
The men are coming in every day, and we shall have our full numbers
before the week is out. It does not matter, of course, for we have an
army here that could fight all the Germans on the Rhine. And Saarbrück
will have demoralised them. Our spirit is splendid. You do not know
what magnificent fellows we lead, Beatrix. There are no finer troops
in the world. I would risk the safety of France a hundred times with
such men as our lancers at my back. I would stake my own life on the
victory which they will win if only those Prussians will make haste and
show themselves. But they know better. They wait for us, and they will
not wait long. It will be like a storm in summer, _petite_--a little
darkness, and then the sunshine and my home!”
His mood was one which would brook no contradiction. Much as she wished
to talk of many things, she saw that he would have no mind for them;
and she hid away those little secrets of her love which at any other
time she would have whispered joyously. His hope and happiness were
very dear to her; and when by-and-by Colonel Tripard himself came to
the house, and Lieutenant Giraud with him, she welcomed them as friends
who could talk of things which were more fitting and momentous at such
an hour. Simple as their dinner was, they had the music of the drums
and the tramp of squadrons marching to make the music of a feast. And
Edmond was at home again. The little house seemed full of bright lights
as of the radiance of her own happiness. The watchfires on the hills
were the beacons of her happiness.
Colonel Tripard, a veteran soldier, with a pleasing voice and a gentle
manner, spoke little but spoke well. Lieutenant Giraud, a _flâneur_
without brains, babbled always of the victory at Saarbrück. Lefort
himself was proud of the little wife who sat at the foot of his
table--proud of her prettiness and of the gentle welcome she gave to
his friends.
“I will not let her go back to Strasburg, my Colonel,” he said, when
Saarbrück had been forgotten for an instant. “Am I not right? Is she
not better with the army?”
“While you are here, yes. And the army should be grateful to you. But,
of course, Madame will return when we are gone.”
“To tell them of your victory, Colonel. Is there any other reason?”
Beatrix asked.
He curled his moustache, and shook his head thoughtfully.
“There will be many soldiers here, Madame Lefort. They are not always
the friends of women. And we have the Algerians with us. They are
splendid fellows, but--”
He shrugged his shoulders. A shadow of anxiety crossed her face.
“You are not going to say, ‘Save us from our friends,’ Colonel.”
Lieutenant Giraud chimed in:
“Save them from their friends’ wine cellars, Madame Lefort. That is
what the Colonel would say. They are the devil, those Turcos. A plague
of locusts is better. If you have any wine in your cellars, give it
to them and go out to the hills while they drink it. There will be
nothing but empty bottles in Germany a month from now. They are always
thirsty--the camels!”
Beatrix ignored him.
“There were Baden troopers here on Sunday,” she said quietly; “they
paid for what they had and robbed none. If I am to run away, it must
not be from the soldiers of France, Colonel.”
Lefort heard her with pleasure.
“She is right,” he said; “we will leave the Prussians to do the
running, my Colonel. And this house is not upon the high-road. If a
soldier comes here to ask for a glass of wine, he shall have one!”
“He is coming now, then,” exclaimed Giraud; “hark how the fellow
gallops. You will have to look for a bucket for a rascal who rides like
that.”
All listened for a moment and heard a dull heavy sound, as of the
thunder of hoofs muted by the wet of the road, without. Some trooper
was galloping towards Reichshofen, and galloping as though for his
life. When he came up to the châlet he reined back his horse and began
to shout like one possessed--
“Save yourselves, save yourselves; the Prussians are coming.”
The Colonel filled his glass and sipped it. The others looked at each
other incredulously.
“The man is mad,” said Giraud.
“Or drunk,” said Tripard; “a gallop in the hills will do him good.
_Apropos_, Captain, where does your road lead to? We have twenty maps
of Germany _là-bas_ but none of France. That is the way our people do
things.”
“They fear you will lose the road to Berlin, Colonel,” suggested
Beatrix; but Edmond said--
“It is the road to Reichshofen and Niederbronn. Those who join de
Failly will go that way to-morrow, my Colonel. There is plenty of cover
for an ambush if ever the Germans this way--”
“If the Germans--” ejaculated Giraud with irony that was almost
indignation.
“They were here on Sunday, Monsieur Giraud,” Beatrix said quietly.
The laugh was turned against the lieutenant, and they were still merry
over it when a second trooper was heard galloping up the road. He rode
feebly, as one upon a weary horse; and when he came to the garden gate
they could hear him crying for help in a weak and trembling voice.
“Another,” said the lieutenant. “_Sacre bleu_--the whole regiment is
drunk to-night, then.”
A little while they waited in silence, for Guillaumette ran to the
door. She came bustling into the room presently with a white face and
lips which could scarcely articulate her news.
“Monsieur, Monsieur,” she said wildly, “there is a man dying in the
garden--come then!”
Her news was so unlooked for that all rose to their feet at once; but
Edmond put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and held her back.
“It is nothing,” he said; “stay here, and we will see.”
He went into the hall with the two men at his heels. Through the open
door there came a fresh wind of the night to set the candles guttering
in their sticks and to blow petals from the roses she had picked. The
empty chairs and the food still upon the plates seemed ominous, in
some way, of disaster. She heard the men all talking together, and
to their voices was added the moaning voice of a stranger. When she
could restrain her impatience no longer and went a little way into
the hall, she beheld a spectacle so terrible that she sickened before
it and would have fallen if Edmond had not put his arm about her. One
of the hussars of Douay’s brigade stood in the lobby; he had a great
gash upon his face, and the clotted blood had stained his tunic a deep
brown. The pitiful eyes of the man, his wan cheeks, his failing voice
told her that death had ridden with him upon the road.
“Messieurs,” he said hoarsely, “it is a defeat--a rout at Weissenburg.
The general is killed; the chasseurs are cut to pieces. I have ridden
all day with Uhlans at my heels. Save yourselves, Messieurs, for they
are coming here!”
He spoke with a sympathetic earnestness, as though their safety was of
great concern to him; but the effort was too much for his strength,
and of a sudden he put both hands upon his forehead and reeled forward
among them.
“Oh, my God, Messieurs, what pain I have!” he cried.
The Colonel’s strong arm was about him in a moment.
“_Mon pauvre_,” he exclaimed, “you shall rest here--a glass of wine
quick, Captain; he will tell us his story afterwards.”
Beatrix had stood mute in her distress while the man spoke; but now,
when she heard his cry of pain, a woman’s instinct released her will,
and she was first in the room for the wine they sought. When she had
filled a glass of it and returned to the hall, the huzzar lay full
length upon the carpet, his hands still clasping his head as though to
crush the pain of the mortal wound he carried.
“Here--here is the wine, Colonel.”
Tripard thrust her back gently.
“Not now,” he said. “His story is told, my child.”
CHAPTER X
WAITING
They carried the body of the dead hussar to the coach-house and laid
it there upon a mattress, with candles set on either side of it. Death
for France was new to them then. This man, whom night had sent to their
doors, might have been one of their own servants stricken by some
accident of farm or field. The day was to come when the dead would be
no more to them than the blades of grass their horses trod. But that
day was not yet.
Though they had hardly begun their dinner when the wounded man came
to the door, no one thought now of food. Beatrix herself, white and
silent, in her little drawing-room, heard them passing to and fro, now
out to the gate to hear if other troopers rode that way; now to the
stables to saddle their horses. Blank incredulity marked all their
words. Abel Douay, the intrepid, ever-zealous Douay, surprised! His
division cut to pieces--he who was to march by Weissenburg to their
support on the morrow. They could not believe it. The troopers had
been the victims of some skirmish; they had fled in panic from some
marauding Uhlans. In any case, those at the châlet must ride down to
headquarters to learn the truth. The very solitude of the Niederwald
had become intolerable to them. Even Lefort had his excuses for the
journey. His curiosity burned him as a fire.
“I shall not be away an hour, Beatrix,” he said. “It is necessary that
I go. We shall send some troopers to see to that poor fellow yonder,
and the Colonel will make this house his headquarters and have a
sentry here. You must be brave, little one. I do not believe a word
of the story, but it is for us to be prudent. If there are Germans at
Weissenburg I must send my little wife to Strasburg, after all. I did
not believe that it could happen so. I will not believe it until the
news is confirmed down yonder.”
“You must not think of me, dearest,” she said quietly. “I shall not go
back to Strasburg while you are here. If the worst happens, no one will
trouble about the châlet. You do not wish me to go--Edmond?”
“I--I wish it, Beatrix, God forbid! After all, the army is here, and
that is enough. But I did not think that it would come to this. Germans
at Weissenburg! How can they be there? Our vedettes rode over the very
ground yesterday. They did not see a single trooper. They are not
blind, and those others were not telling the truth. I shall come back
in an hour and be sure of it. You will wait up for me--_mignonne_!”
His ideas were changing and strangely excited. In one moment he would
speak of her safety, in the next of the orders for to-morrow. They were
to follow Douay to the north; de Failly was coming down from Bitche;
the Marshal was at Hagenau. There would be a great battle on the
Sunday, and the Germans would be driven back far beyond the Rhine. That
would be the beginning and the end of the war. MacMahon would march
into Baden; the Emperor would enter Germany by Restall, and go straight
to Berlin. There would be no more war in Europe for half a century. He
would take her to Paris, and this trouble should make their holiday a
holiday indeed.
It was nine o’clock when the three rode away from the châlet. In the
aureole of light, cast out from the window of her drawing-room, she saw
the anxious face of Colonel Tripard, the laughing eyes of Lieutenant
Giraud, the restless haunting look which Edmond turned toward her. She
heard their excited talk as they turned from the gate to the high-road,
and went cantering down to Wörth. None of them looked back. The moon
shone fitfully upon the dripping trees and puddles in the lanes.
She could see the candles guttering by the body of the dead man; far
away she heard the rumble of waggons and the rolling of the drums.
Guillaumette and a little group of farm servants discussed the terror
of the night over there in the stables. A realisation, not of her own
peril, but of her solitude, overwhelmed her. The presence of the dead
haunted her. She ran up to her bedroom, and sitting in the unlighted
room she opened her window and looked out over the awakened vineyards.
France had poured its very life into that valley. Watchfires glowed red
in the woods as a thousand stars of good omen. She could see regiments
of cuirassiers with the moonbeams glowing upon their helmets and their
breastplates while they march northward to the villages by the river.
The brooks shone as rivulets of molten silver. The silence of the
thickets about the house was weird and terrifying. She thought to see
those woods quicken to life and pour from their heart the hosts of the
enemy. The memory of the dead hussar’s face was with her always.
She sat at the window of her room, and her strange life came back in
many pictures of her childhood. She remembered her mother’s face;
there was, far back in the years, the dim recollection of another--of
that father who had died in America and left her to become the child
of France, and the wife of one of France’s best soldiers. It was odd
that in such an hour a memory of the gardens of her own England would
trouble her and set her longing for them. The first fruits of her
happiness had been garnered there. Nevertheless, the years she had
lived in Strasburg had given her Edmond. It had been old Hélène’s
dearest wish always that “her children,” as she called them, should be
man and wife. Now that wish was realised--yet to what purpose? What
irony of destiny had chosen this hour of the consummation of their
love to put them asunder? If she had known nothing of the meaning of
war until that day, the night of the day taught her generously. This
outpouring of the sons of France, this fleeing of peasants to the
mountains, these endless squadrons upon the high-road, this fever of
life, this shutting of the doors upon the homes of France--this was
war. She did not know the truth a month ago, but now she knew for all
time. None the less, courage, her dead father’s gift to her, was ready
to console her for the knowledge. She was the wife of one of France’s
soldiers, she told herself. For his sake she would show a laughing face
to all the world to-morrow. Yet, if he should die--! For the first time
since the day of the ultimate calamity she knelt at her bedside and
sent a fervent prayer to heaven that God would give her the life of the
man she loved.
In distant Normandy another woman prayed at the same hour for the
hussar, who lay still and white between the guttering candles they had
set up in the coach-house.
CHAPTER XI
THE HUSSARS ARE AT GUNSTETT
It fell wet upon the morrow, a heavy soaking rain, which quenched
the watchfires and wet the shivering troopers to their very skins.
All day long, weary infantrymen and gunners sleeping upon their guns
came listlessly down the valley road; even the woodland heights were
solitudes no more. Beatrix, worn with anxiety and waiting, saw the
dark faces of the Algerians as they lurked about the garden gate and
bandied words with the sentry who had been posted there. She beheld
the aides-de-camp dashing wildly down toward the hollow or away to
Reichshofen or Bitche. The ground trembled as the rolling guns were
dragged upward to the heights. The horsemen, splashed from head to
foot with mud, went by doggedly to their camp in the valley. A great
sound, rising and falling, as the murmur of an angry sea, was heard all
day, even in the thickets of the heights. The drenching rain could not
check the sound, nor any door shut it out. The very air quivered with
the echoes of turmoil and of movement. Men turned from camp to camp as
though no place of rest was anywhere to be found. Peasants fled to
remote glades of the mountains, with children clinging to their knees;
women wept for the homes which would be homes to them no more.
It was nearly dark when Edmond returned to the châlet. The rain had
soaked through his cloak, and his weary horse could scarce stand upon
its legs. He met his child-wife at the gate and led her quickly to the
house. She saw that the day had changed him strangely. He was thinking
of something else even while he greeted her.
“The Colonel will not come,” he said. “He has gone to join de Failly.
I am left at Wörth with a squadron. We have ridden all day on a
reconnaissance towards Seltz, but there are no Germans there. God
knows, I wish you were not here, _mignonne_--I blame myself, but how
can you go now? There is not a road which is free--not any one to whom
I can trust you. The troops come in every hour and the battle is for
Sunday. My God--if it should be here!”
He stood for a moment holding both her hands and looking with earnest
eyes upon her laughing face. The scarlet plumes drooped, wet and
sodden, over the dulled brass of his czapska. The silver epaulettes
were tarnished; there was mud even upon his tunic; but, more than all,
his sunken cheeks and weary step spoke eloquently of his fatigue. A
great pity for him came upon her, and she drew him into the brightly
lighted room, and would not hear of his apprehensions.
“Dearest,” she said, “of course I shall not go away. As if it mattered.
And Guillaumette is here. She has been giving wine to the troopers all
day. When her Gaspard goes to Berlin he is to bring her a mug. There
will be nothing to drink in Wörth by that time. We shall have to go
to Paris or die of thirst. As if it were not enough to have you home
again.”
She was talking and laughing all the time, and with deft fingers
helping him to change his sodden clothes. She did not ask him if the
news of yesterday were true, for she feared his answer to her question.
Every effort of hers was one to remind him that he had come home again.
The bright lights in her drawing-room, the fire Guillaumette quickly
kindled there, the little dinner they had thought so much about, the
hundred gestures of affection and of love compelled him to forget the
grim scenes without. He shut them from his memory for a short hour,
and thought only of the childish face lifted to his, of the days of
happiness which the mountains had given to him.
“It is good to have you to myself, _mignonne_,” he said when dinner was
done and she had rolled his cigarette, and lay curled up on the rug at
his feet. “I feared that Tripard would come, and the others, but they
are gone by to Bitche. Michel has all the cavalry he wants for anything
we are likely to do here. There are the two cuirassier regiments under
Bonnemain, and Septueil has the light brigade. You remember Septueil
at Strasburg--the man who always told you that you were a Prussian at
heart and would never marry a French soldier. He rode in to-day, and
Duhesme is with him. I am sorry for the people down below--there are
no more vineyards now, and you could not find an empty house in the
villages if you offered ten thousand francs for it. I met old Mère
Bartres as I was coming up. The Turcos have turned her out of the
cottage with the little ones--she was going to sleep in the woods, but
I sent her to the stables. We must do what we can for all these poor
people now. If the worst comes to the worst and we are beaten--”
She laughed at him, and put her arms about his knees.
“If we are beaten, dear--ah! if the mountains fly. Who is coming to
Wörth when the army is here, and you are here, and--I am here! The ride
has tired you. I know what it is--oh, so well--to be tired with all the
world, and to think that everything is against you, and that to-morrow
will be the deluge. But when to-morrow comes you get up early, and
the sun shines, and you forget what it was all about, and there is
no deluge. I used to be like that often when I was at the convent in
Strasburg. The bells were an enemy; I hated the old man who sat at the
gate; but when the gate opened and old Hélène was there, and I went to
the Place Kleber and saw you upon your horse, and all the lances of
the regiment, and heard the music everywhere--I was glad that there
had been those other days. If the sun shone every day, there would
be no summer. And our summer is to come. It will not matter when or
where--but we shall tell each other about to-night, and that will make
the sun shine for us.”
She talked bravely, but her words were vain. That spirit of hope which
had animated him yesterday was his friend no more. He was telling
himself, though he whispered no word of it to her, that Douay had been
defeated at Weissenburg, and that his division fled, panic-stricken,
through the hills. The same army which had defeated Douay might be
at the gates of Wörth to-morrow. What answer would MacMahon give to
it--ah, what?
“I do not fear for the men,” he said, when she had rolled him another
cigarette, and he had listened a moment to the thunder of that mighty
human avalanche in the valley below; “it is those who lead. Why do
we want biscuit even here on our side of the frontier? Why are the
magazines at Strasburg empty? Why does no one know anything of the
Emperor’s plans? They tell us that Douay was surprised, yet whose fault
was that? There are no finer fellows than the troops down yonder in all
the world. If they are beaten, then God help France and us!”
She refused to respond to his earnestness, and still wished to lead him
to other thoughts.
“Oh! We are in the convent to-night,” she exclaimed impulsively, “the
bell will ring presently, and grandmère Hélène will come. To-morrow
there will be the feast, and I shall see the lances go by and hear the
music. And Edmond will be there--he will have forgotten the deluge.”
The note of it was jest, but she changed it on an impulse and spoke of
her own great love for him.
“We have always ourselves, dearest,” she said; “nothing can change us.
There will always be our home--and our love.”
There would always be her love! Ay, indeed, as he looked down upon the
little face, and the watching eyes, and the pitiful mouth, down at the
long hair falling upon his knees, and the white hands of the child-wife
that destiny had sent to him, he said that love should ever be his
recompense. And he slept with his arms about her and forgot that the
enemies of France were upon the fields of France, and that to-morrow
the dead would be numbered and many a home would mourn a son, and many
a wife would listen for a voice she nevermore would hear.
At dawn a trooper, riding madly up from the camp, awoke him with an
urgent message.
“The Prussians are in the town; the hussars are at Gunstett--for God’s
sake come quickly, Captain--the battle is to-day!”
[Illustration: “‘The Prussians are in the town!’”]
BOOK II
Battle
CHAPTER XII
THE BLOOD-RED DAY OF WÖRTH
A figure as of the blood-red day seemed to pass through the sleeping
woods and to awaken them with a voice that terrified and a command
which quickened the laggard’s heart. Above the murmur of leaves and the
babbling of the brooks the cry “_Aux armes!_” brought men staggering
to their feet from the stupor of dreams now broken, from victories,
perchance, that sleep had numbered. There was still the shivering
woodland life, the dark places of the thickets, the merry splash of
streams, the note of birds; but these were things apart. The herald of
the breaking day had breathed upon the passions of those who slept;
the rising sun shone upon the faces of fifty thousand whose pulses
quickened already with the ferocity of combat. As fire leaping from
brake to brake and dell to dell, that spirit of the battle moved.
Children ran from it to their homes as before the outposts of a spectre
army. Women pressed babes to their breasts and prayed to the saints.
From the height of Froeschweiler in the north to the marshy brookland
by Gunstett in the south that thunder of the new day rolled. To arms!
The very sky, in changing lights of crimson and of purple and of
grey-black cloud, gave canopies of storm to the tumult that it looked
upon.
To Beatrix, standing at the gate of the châlet as the night merged
into day, the torrent of sounds was as some cataclysm which swept away
all thought of self, of her own life and her own safety. She saw the
things about her; she beheld men running wildly through the woods; she
could have touched the mud-stained horses of the cuirassiers; the dark
faces of the Africans looked into her own; the swinging, impetuous
march of infantry delighted her--yet the meaning of these things, the
reality of it all, the import of it was not realised. There stood her
own little house with its girdle of tree and thicket; there below were
the vineyards and the rivers. War and battle must be something far
distant from the homes of these children that she knew. And Edmond! The
jeopardy of her husband’s life she dared not contemplate. An irony of
fate which had given her this good measure of happiness that she might
suffer through the years was not to be believed in.
Edmond had exhorted her to leave the châlet instantly and ride westward
to Saverne. It had been his last word to her as he lifted her to his
saddle for a lover’s farewell. She gave him half a promise; and when he
turned at the bend of the road to repeat his wish, her laughing face
answered it. He did not see that other look, the tears lingering in
the pretty eyes, the girl’s true self written there in lines of grief
untold. The road hid the aftermath of farewell from his sight. “We
shall drive the Prussians to the Rhine, and you will see me to-night,”
he had said with a new courage of the morning. She knew not that many
days of grief must pass before she heard his voice again, and that when
he came back to her it would be to turn from her caress and to tell her
that love was no more.
All her thought was of the moment; of the awakening in the woods, of
the news that the trooper had brought. The Germans were at Gunstett.
Then there would be a battle beyond the river! Men would die. A nation
would hear of victory to-morrow. That mighty host of armed men, whose
voice was the thunder of the hills, stood sentinel of the homes of
France. She had a great pride in the thought that Edmond was one of
those to whom the children looked so confidently. And he would return
victorious at sunset. The sword of France was drawn. It would never be
sheathed until the honour of France was saved.
Day had not broken when the trooper waked them from their sleep,
nor was the sun lifted above the hills when Edmond rode down to his
regiment. She watched the spreading light while it showed her the
rain-drops glistening upon the leaves, and the little pools which the
showers of the night had filled again. After the first mad awakening
a hush fell upon the forest; the flowers lifted their heads anew, the
trembling leaves made their voices heard--it was the Niederwald of the
old home, the Niederwald of solitude remote and the haven of rest.
She lingered at the gate, hoping she knew not what. When Guillaumette
came to tell her that the coffee was ready, she did not hear her. Her
thoughts were away in Strasburg, at the altar of the Minster where her
love-vow had been spoken.
“You called me, Guillaumette?”
“If I called you, Madame--when the coffee spoils and the bread is hot
and the clock strikes six!--”
“Six o’clock--is it six o’clock? Then I have been here an hour,
Guillaumette.”
A strange voice chimed in with the answer:
“To the tick, Madame. I have watched you from my windows--it is
impossible to look another way when Madame Lefort stands at her garden
gate. And pardon me--I have said, ‘She is waiting for her pony; she is
going to Saverne when that rascal Jacob is ready.’”
She turned to see old Jules Picard, snuff-box in hand, astride his
great weedy horse. He had ridden up from the château at her husband’s
request, and he began already to take fatherly possession of her.
“Madame,” he continued, shutting his golden box with a snap,
“Guillaumette is right. We will take a cup of coffee and then we will
ride to Saverne. Those fellows _là-bas_ are going to fight. The glory
will come afterwards. We shall return for that--you and I. There is
always the glory for those who know how to come back. And we shall find
Monsieur a colonel. I have just passed him on the road and told him
so. ‘Madame and I are going to Saverne while you send those Prussians
to the devil,’ I said. He is of my opinion. He has confidence in me,
Monsieur _votre mari_. And Madame will share it. I have no doubt of it.
She has ordered her pony already. She will give old Jules Picard a cup
of coffee--and then, _en avant_. Oh, my child, what a cry is that when
your back is towards the enemy and the guns are beyond the hills!”
He climbed from his horse laboriously and stood beside her, his
enormous sombrero hat in his hand. There was no braver man in France,
and she knew it, but she laughed at his assumption of her assent and
did not seek to hide that laughter from him.
“Come,” she said, “we will have our coffee in the garden. We shall see
the valley from there. And we can talk about Saverne afterwards. You
will stay to _déjeuner_, Monsieur Picard?”
The old man raised his hands melodramatically.
“Madame,” he asked, “do I hear you aright?”
“I hope so.”
“And you will not ride to Saverne?”
“Not for all the soldiers in Prussia.”
“Then God be praised for His mercies.”
“You mean--”
“I mean, my child, that here is a brave heart, and wherever a brave
heart beats there is the love of old Jules Picard.”
He bent and kissed her hand. His bantering mood had passed. From
the valley below there came the dull echoing roar of artillery. An
aide-de-camp, with mud even upon his face, went by at a gallop, and
disappeared in the hither wood. Some Turcos came down the hill at a
double, crying to each other that the Prussians were crossing the
river. In the wood at the bend of the road they could distinguish
between the trees the red trousers and blue coats of infantrymen.
A bivouac had been broken up there. Fires still smoked, but the
cooking-pots were overturned, and the grass trampled in the haste of
assembly. A pair of horses drawing a battery caisson overpowered their
driver and dashed blindly down the hill to the Strasburg road. The
thunder of their hoofs was to be heard for a long time. Then silence
fell again upon the thickets.
Old Jules Picard was gaily dressed that morning. A coat of dark blue
carried the button of an order; his vest was in the old style, with
embroidery upon it. He wore smart gaiters and white breeches; a diamond
circlet sparkled about his cravat. The excitement that he suffered
betrayed itself in gesture alone. He talked incessantly, that the
others might share his confidence. And Beatrix, in her turn, listened
to him wonderingly. This, then, was the day of battle! The unchanging
forest seemed to mock the thought. The distant roar of the awakening
artillery was as an echo of ill speaking beyond the river.
They took their coffee in the arbour of the roses. Looking down thence
over the woods and the vineyards they could see the river at Gunstett,
the mill in the marsh, the distant heights whereon the Prussians
lurked, the white villages and the fields of maize. Everywhere the eye
could find a panorama of wood and hill land. Such troops as were to be
perceived appeared neither hasting nor active. A few puffs of smoke
hung above the opposing heights. The horses of cavalry, even the sturdy
figures of cuirassiers passed in and out between the trees. But there
was no panoply of war--no charge and countercharge. The interval of
waiting had come; the hush before the storm.
“Monsieur is _là-bas_, in the wood,” said old Picard, as Beatrix,
with trembling hand, filled him a cup of coffee; “we shall see him
presently, and he will take _déjeuner_ with us. I do not account this a
day of any importance. You were wise to remain, Madame--wise and brave.”
She smiled at his compliment.
“I am brave because there is no danger. You think that there is none,
then, Monsieur Picard?”
There was a note of anxiety in the question which she could not hide
from him. No moment spared her. A voice said always that Edmond might
never return to the châlet.
Old Picard observed it and turned to banter again.
“I think it, Madame?--I think nothing. That is for the generals of
France, who will begin presently. Why should I do their work when there
is good coffee at the Niederwald, and Madame Lefort is happy there? I
am the man in the fauteuil. When the play begins I will applaud or hiss
as the mood takes me.”
He dipped his bread into the bowl and made a pretence of eating
ravenously. But her own cup was unlifted. She gazed over the valley
with eyes full of pity for France and her people, and the children of
the woods.
“I cannot believe it,” she said earnestly. “I cannot believe that men
are to die to-day--”
“Do not think of it, my child. They die every day. Is our coffee less
good for that? Ask Monsieur when he comes home to-night--”
She buried her face in her hands.
“God grant that he will come home, Monsieur Picard!”
The old man stood up and bared his head to the generous sunshine.
“Amen to that, my child--God save all dear to us.”
For a little while there was silence between them, but anon, a
thunderous report of cannon began to resound on their own side of the
stream, and at the first discharge both rose to their feet. When the
smoke from the guns had rolled away they could see the river again.
Little dark figures, the figures of Bavarians, were on its banks now.
All about the old mill in the marsh, puffs of white smoke were making
clouds for the cloudless day.
Old Jules Picard watched the scene with devouring eyes. The lid of his
snuff-box snapped incessantly.
“They are Prussians, my child,” he exclaimed; “they are crossing the
river to kill those who defend our homes. Some of them will not go
back. I count ten--eleven--twelve. Ah, one is up again! And it is at
the mill, then. _Ma foi_, if my eyes were not so old!”
He stood quite still with his excitement for a moment, and then turned
eagerly to her.
“It would be a mile from here where we could see it, Madame. A mile
nearer to Monsieur, _votre mari_. He has forbidden it, but you may wish
it. Ah, Madame, if you should wish it!”
A strange light filled her eyes. Woman that she was, a desire of battle
was already in her heart. She would see Edmond’s victory. She would be
nearer to him.
“Where you will,” she said quickly, “if only the day could end--now. If
only one could know--”
He led her by the hand from the garden, and they brought her pony to
the gate.
“I prescribe knowledge, Madame,” said he. “It is those who wait that
suffer.”
Side by side the old man encouraging her, the girl very silent, yet
with courage in her heart, they passed through the woods towards that
height above the Sauer where the battle-field would reward them. For
some way the thickets muffled all sounds to their ears. They met a
regiment of the line marching quickly. Here and there in the woods
infantry stood waiting; some busy with their rifles, some white with
fear, some with prayers upon their lips. Artillery waggons thundered
down the road to the valley. Where the woods were riven apart by
gully and chasm the vineyards could be seen, green and golden in the
sunlight. The roar of battle burst upon them in such moments. It was
lost once more when again they entered the glade. And the path carried
them upward now. They struck upon a woodland track so narrow that old
Picard must follow her at hazard, complaining of his horse. At the end
of it the thickets terminated abruptly in a little plateau of grass
land. The battle-field of Wörth was before them. They looked down upon
it as from a watch-tower of the heights.
The valley spread out below them as a golden river in the heart of the
hills intensely green. They could see the town of Wörth, the river
winding through it, the great outstanding mount at Froeschweiler.
Villages stood up as little white pictures against the background
of maize and vines. There were brooks and mills at the foot of the
slope before them--but, everywhere along those miles of valley road,
the blue tunics and the red breeches of the soldiers of France were
visible. Now dashing forward at the charge; now deploying and seeking
the shelter of mound and hill; now marching through the villages; those
little blue and red figures were as men that moved upon some mighty
board. Impossible to believe that they were to slay and be slain; that
the destinies of a nation followed the puffs of white smoke and the
concatenation of terrible sounds which marked their path. For those
upon the heights, distance put a mask upon the face of death. The
girl’s heart beat fast, but it was with hope. The eyes of the old man
were lighted as the eyes of an animal which hunts its prey.
“Did not I say that I prescribed knowledge, Madame?” he cried, pointing
joyfully with his lean finger to the spectacle below; “and here is the
medicine. Look well at it, for you will never see its like. The army
of France--it is there. The glory of France--it is there also. You
cannot understand that, my child, you who are not a Frenchwoman. You
do not know why an old man’s cheeks are red. _Ma foi_--that I must sit
here--I, whose father was at Jena.”
She did not hear him. There was a hard expression upon her face very
foreign to it.
“Where is the cavalry?” she asked. “Where is Edmond?”
He pointed southward to a thicket distant from them a mile or more.
“Lartigue is there with the eighth and ninth cuirassiers and two
squadrons of the lancers. Your husband is with him, be sure of it.
He could not find a safer place. There will be nothing for him to do
to-day. Look how those black fellows run. _Ma foi!_--they are crossing
the river again--those that have the legs. They fall like the trees--I
count fifty. Ah, what a thing to tell your children, Madame, that the
Prussians ran at Wörth.”
She had been looking at the wood wherein the lancers stood, but now she
turned, and down at the valley’s heart the spectacle rewarded her. A
great veil of smoke was lifted from the mill in the marsh, and beneath
it she beheld the red and blue line advancing and still advancing,
while black figures were seen to stumble and to fall, and the roar of
the guns upon the height was as a crash of doom. A surpassing joy of
the glory of France came to her. These men who advanced with terrible
cries and bayonets brandished, they were driving the enemy from the
place where Edmond stood. She cared not that dead and dying lay in
their path. The faint cries of ultimate agony which were heard at the
watching place were nothing to her. Edmond was not there. The victory
was being won. He would come back to her.
Old Jules Picard talked always, but she did not listen to him. The
wavering lines, retreating, advancing, fascinated her beyond any
spectacle she had ever beheld. A battery of artillery, crashing through
the wood behind them, seemed a new tribute to the glory of her new
country. She did not quail when the guns belched flame and the shot
hurtled toward the distant hills. The answering note from the German
guns beyond the Sauer inspired her to an emotion as of defiance. A
shell of theirs cutting the branches of a tree and sending a shower of
brown leaves upon her pony left her with flaming cheeks and laughter in
her eyes.
“They run away--they run from Wörth,” she cried delightedly, “and
they are firing at us! Is it not splendid, Monsieur Picard? Do you not
understand now why men can say that war is a noble thing? Oh, I do.
If one could remember the children and the homes of France and forget
everything else. Who could be a coward then?”
She sat with glistening eyes and fast-beating heart, and he applauded
her.
“Ah,” he said, “if it were the children of France and not the
adventurers! If one were quite sure that the Prussians ran, Madame.”
“But I see them!”
“As the tide of the sea, my child--now a little way receding, now
surging again; but the tenth wave, that is the fellow. Look well at
Wörth and tell me what you make of it. Those black helmets were beyond
the river an hour ago. Now they are coming through the vineyards--they
creep up inch by inch; the dead lie thick, but the living do not heed
them. Is the battle won because our soldiers are brave, because there
are blue coats and red breeches in the valleys? Ah!--if the wish could
help us.”
A strange gloom took possession of him. He sat very still upon his
horse, and she, in turn, began for the first time to experience a
vague doubt which she had not known before, even when Edmond left her
at the châlet. How, indeed, if a nation should rejoice upon a victory
to-morrow and that nation should not be France? How, if the Prussians
really were creeping up those declivities towards the woods and her
home? The belching guns, which made the earth tremble about her, were
no longer living forces for the glory of her country. She began to
fear them. She started when a spent bullet brought down a branch from
the tree beside her. She was conscious of danger, and it appalled her.
“Monsieur Picard,” she said, “let us go--I believe I am afraid.”
He awoke from his lethargy.
“You are right to be afraid, my child; nevertheless--”
He half wheeled his horse and then turned him back again.
“Nevertheless, Madame, there is Captain Lefort with his regiment. They
are about to charge. Do you wish to go now?”
She did not speak. An icy chill crept over her. She feared to look, yet
dare not turn her eyes away. The ambulance passed close by her, with a
wounded gunner, his breast open and bleeding, to be seen in the winding
sheet. A great pity for the man brought tears to her eyes. If they
should carry her lover as that brave fellow was being carried!
Trumpets were blaring then in the valley below. It was the crisis of
the day. The cuirassiers, and with them the squadrons of the lancers,
rode out from the shelter of the woods to charge the Prussians who were
swarming in the gardens above the villages.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DEATH RIDE
General Michel had been in the woods of the Niederwald since dawn. Two
regiments of cuirassiers were at his command, and those squadrons of
lancers which Tripard had left for scouting duty. The General did not
doubt that all the work he would have to do would be to engage the
few daring hussars who had appeared above the village of Gunstett and
thence opened fire on the valley land below. Imitating MacMahon, his
chief, he believed that the army of the Vosges had encountered no other
enemy than the outposts of the Crown Prince’s army. The day undeceived
him, but not until twelve o’clock had struck and the sun was hot upon
the vineyards.
All morning the troopers were in the saddle waiting. Around them the
overturned pans and scattered fires spoke of breakfast interrupted and
of hunger continuing. Their _moral_ was beyond question. They asked
only that they might charge those spiked helmets and drive them across
the Rhine. They thought that no infantry the world had ever seen could
withstand the cuirassiers of France. The lesson to be learned was
bitter--the first of many they must master.
It was just light when Lefort joined his men, and found the laughing
Giraud full of the good news, and of those promises of hope which
youth can give abundantly. The boyish voice and unquestioning belief
were a tonic of the morning. His own night had been such a night of
foreboding. Fear for France and for his child-wife at the châlet had
pursued him even in his sleep. But here, in the green wood, with the
big fellows on their fine horses; here, where the helmets shone like
gold and the chargers pawed the glistening grass, and all the talk was
of victory, he drank in a great draught of courage, and remembered the
purpose of his life, and all that his life’s task demanded of him.
Those friends of his, they would drive the Prussians to the Rhine!
Beatrix would go to Saverne with old Jules Picard and Jacob. He would
write to her that night and tell her of the victory. And Giraud gave
him such a welcome:
“Ah, Captain--you come, then, in good time. And Madame, she is up there
still? Well, it is good to fight like that. She will stay, of course!
She does not fear all the hussars in Germany--she told me so. If only
those others were like her! But they run--they have been running since
yesterday, the sheep. There is not a woman in Gunstett now. Have you
breakfasted, Captain?”
A trooper took his horse, and Lefort began to pace the wood with the
lieutenant. The cuirassiers were all about, figures of white and gold
against the ripe green of the leaves. Rifle shots crepitated in the
distance. There was a loom of smoke above Gunstett, and those with
strong eyes could distinguish the black figures of the Prussians, or
count the daring Uhlans who rode out upon the heights to scan the
opposing camps.
“The outposts of the eleventh, Captain,” exclaimed Giraud impulsively,
as he pointed to the figures on the hills; “we must have missed them
when we rode out yesterday. The General speaks of the heads of columns,
and he is right. There will be no army corps here to-day. They say
that the Bavarians are in force at Görsdorf, but Ducrot is there and
Raoult holds Froeschweiler. It will be a strong division which takes
Froeschweiler! Look at the slopes of it. And the engineers have been
at work. If the battle must be, to-day is our time. We shall find no
better position. And we have sixty thousand men in the hills.”
“I doubt that,” said Lefort quickly. “We were short in Strasburg,
and our numbers cannot have been completed here. Why do the gunners
not begin? The men are falling yonder; look at the ambulances, busy
already. It is a good position, certainly, for those who defend. But
why are we the defenders always? It was so at Weissenburg, they tell
me. You cannot keep up the _moral_ of troops who must always stand for
targets. Believe me, Giraud, I cannot help seeing these things. No man,
who is not blind, can fail to see that we have neither the men nor the
generals to do any of those things which France is asking us to do.”
The lieutenant, his oldest friend, laid his hand upon his arm in a
gesture of affection.
“_Mon ami_,” he said, “if it is as you say, our work is to alter it.
But is it? I repeat, look at Froeschweiler. You could hold it against
a nation. When the time for advance comes, it will be the cavalry who
will send the answer to Paris. I know well how you feel this morning.
Madame is up there in your home. You will go back to-night to tell her
all about it. She can see Froeschweiler almost from your gardens. She
will count the Prussians who die. Let us go and breakfast and pledge
her in a bottle of champagne. I have two on my holsters now. There is
nothing like champagne when you feel that way. I know it--and I have
not a little wife waiting for me.”
The hard expression passed from the face of Lefort.
“Confess,” he said, “how many wait in Paris, Giraud--to how many did
you write yesterday?”
The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, then,” he said, “why do we fight if it is not to tell those
others about it? Applause is the food of glory--I do not want to grow
thin. Let us breakfast, _mon ami_, and drink to all the pretty ones in
France.”
The lancers were bivouacked almost upon the north-west edge of the
wood. Lefort, having exchanged cheery words with the men of his own
company, sat down upon a log beneath a vast chestnut tree and took the
biscuits and the wine his young comrade offered generously. Away upon
his left hand was the steep hill of Froeschweiler, its wooded slopes
running down sharply toward the town of Wörth. He could see Raoult’s
brigade already busy upon it; the blue tunics and the red breeches of
infantry soldiers flashed beneath the trees; even the quaint uniforms
of the zouaves, and the black Turcos, were to be seen. From the
extreme north there came an echo of rifle shots, even of artillery; and
it was there, Giraud said, that Ducrot was driving back the Bavarians.
Fitfully, indeed, along the whole line of the valley, the firing was
now sustained. Yet few fell. Lefort believed with an effort only that
this was battle, this the working of a nation’s destiny.
“Look,” he said, “how odd it is! A strip of valley land, vineyards and
villages in the sunlight, the birds still singing in the woods, who
knows, even the labourer in the fields. And yet to-morrow all Europe
will hear of it. A great battle will have been fought. We are fighting
it now. Men are looking at the sky who will never see another sun. Do
you realise it yourself, Giraud; do you understand it all?”
“I, Captain? I realise nothing except that the champagne is good. Men
must die, it is true, but will they die less well because I am thirsty?
_Nom d’un chien_, let us wait until our time comes, and then remember
that it is for France.”
He lifted the glass to his lips, but set it down again quickly. One of
the lancers, who had been leading a troop horse, turned suddenly with a
sharp cry on his lips and came quickly toward them. A curious pallor,
tinged with green, spread over his face. He pressed his hand to his
head, and a crimson stain dyed his fingers.
“Monsieur,” he said very quietly, “they have killed me.”
There were three men at his side in a moment, but, even as they stooped
over him, a shell hurtled through the trees and pitched in the very
centre of the bivouac. For an instant Lefort beheld a leaping flame of
crimson fire. He saw horses rearing upon their haunches; heard cries
of agony; was conscious of a ringing sensation in his ears as though
someone were beating a drum there. Then an acrid taste of gunpowder
filled his mouth; he could not see for the blinding smoke; he pressed
his hands to his eyes, which pained him intolerably. When Giraud spoke
to him the voice came as from afar.
“You are all right, Captain?”
“Yes; and you?”
“I don’t know--I seem to have only one hand. Where is the ambulance?
You are going to fall back, of course? How those devils fire! And we
are silent. What folly!”
He babbled incessantly, while the loom of smoke lifted and showed them
the death it had cloaked. Three of the troopers lay prone at their
feet. A horse, pawing the ground in agony, turned to them pitiful eyes.
One of the sergeants of Lefort’s company ran up and down with blood
upon his tunic. Others of the horses were galloping, blind with terror,
up and down the glade. Lieutenant Giraud hugged his left arm--there
were tears of rage and pain in his eyes. They had shot away his hand.
“What pain! what pain!” he cried, as a child that is hurt. “I am maimed
for life, Captain. At the beginning, too. Oh, my God, where is the
ambulance?”
He ran to and fro as one distracted, and fell anon in a dead faint.
Lefort, stupefied for a moment, began to remember his duty. This was
battle, then--these agonising cries, this maiming of youth and courage,
these eyes looking to his so pitifully. And he must face these things
that his country might be saved. In that moment he awoke to the spirit
of combat. He forgot even the child-wife waiting on the distant hills
for him who had taught her the meaning of love.
The ambulance entered the wood now, and Giraud was the first to be
lifted on it. He lay as one asleep, his mangled hand nursed as a babe
nurses a little wounded limb. Lefort bent over him. He wondered how
many of his friends would sleep like that before the sun set. And he
himself--would he see the dawn again, the home he loved, or her who
had made it a home to him? A burning hatred of those who had made the
war steeled his heart to action and to courage. He would fight for his
little wife--for the homes of France and the children waiting there.
The cavalry fell back into the heart of the wood, but, without, the
sounds of battle magnified and came nearer. Bullets sang among the
trees always. Shells came hurtling over the thickets, or fell in the
open places of the vineyards. A little while, and men laughed at those
fellows. You could see them afar, black specks, as comets, with tails
of steam, hissing through the air. The bullets were more to be feared,
the song of death wailing in flight, the unseen blow ending in a gasp
and a stagger and a crimson stain upon the earth. And the delay was
intolerable to those troops of horsemen who must be spectators while
their comrades fell in the open places of the fields and marsh lands.
Brave horses pawed the ground or became restive at the thunder of
sounds. Old troopers, who had been in Africa, and had won triumphs
at Masena, shrugged their shoulders and asked what sort of a general
that was who forgot his cavalry. They watched the batteries spitting
fire from the trenches below them and mocked the spectacle. Every
aide-de-camp galloping by, every driver of a waggon who passed them
was followed by a hundred questions.
“How goes it, comrade? Do they fall back? When are we to ride?”
Lefort heard the questions of his fellows and did not rebuke them. He
shared their impatience. Sitting there idly upon his horse with that
old fire-eater Captain Quirat by his side, he thought how odd it was to
see those glittering ranks of motionless troopers and to know that men
were falling by thousands in the vineyards below. What held them back?
The Prussians were in the villages now. Those cursed guns were putting
a girdle of fire about the heights. Was this the victory of which an
aide-de-camp, dashing up to Froeschweiler, spoke as he went by? The
very word seemed an irony.
“What a tale,” he said to Quirat savagely; “we hold them at all points.
How does Morsbronn burn them? And look at the mill. We had it an hour
ago. Where are our fellows now?”
Quirat pulled his long moustache fiercely.
“The men are saying that von Kirchback is through Wörth with the fifth
corps. That would be the eleventh corps yonder. We are fighting the
heads of columns, _mon ami_--two hundred thousand men if I have any
eyes to see. Why do we sit here like fools? Is the cavalry for an
autumn manœuvre, then? It’s nonsense to hear them. A charge would
settle it; but we are more ornamental. We shall remain in this wood to
applaud when the Germans ride through to Paris.”
Lefort took a cigar from his case and lighted it.
“If we were at the opera, I would say bravo,” he exclaimed ironically.
“As we are not, we must count our fingers until the time comes. There
is plenty to see, at least. They are burning the farmhouse now to amuse
the poor fellows up in the wood. _Ma foi_, what flames! If the weather
were not so hot, the farmer could warm himself at his own fireside.
As it is, he is probably saying to himself that the army knows how to
protect the people. You let the Prussians burn their houses, Quirat,
and then they have no anxieties.”
A great white farmhouse, the Albrechtshauser, situated upon the edge
of the wood, burst into flames as he spoke. Smoke curled above its
thatch; tongues of fire licked its gables, and spread from barn to barn
and rick to rick. All about the house the shrieks of the dying were to
be heard. Red breeches and blue gave colour to every yard. Bayonets
flashed in the sunlight; the spiked helmets were everywhere. Foot by
foot the Prussians drove those others before them. The din of battle,
resounding as a crash of thunder, mingled with voices of woe and cries
of agony and the blaring of trumpets and the baying of the guns.
Through the whole length of the valley the French were retreating.
Up the rugged slopes, leaping from trench to trench, Vorwärts, their
song of battle, on their lips, von Werder’s men came on. It was the
culminating hour. The cavalry would wait idling no longer.
The command came to the woods when the Prussians were already in the
outstanding thickets. Lefort heard it, and scarce believed his ears.
They were to charge then! They must drive those spiked helmets from the
vineyards or their own right would be turned. He rode up to his troops
and spoke a good word of encouragement. It was odd to draw his sword
for the first time in earnest and to know that he must kill wherever
the enemies of France were to be seen. The danger of the charge was
never in his thoughts. It was dreadful ground; the obstacles were
many--but for this day all his life had been the school.
“We go to save our comrades down yonder,” he said. “You will win
honour for us, _mes enfants_--for me and for France. You will remember
our fathers who fought at Jena!”
Ringing cheers greeted his words. At last, at last, the weary hours of
waiting were done with. The woods quickened to the awakening impulses.
A fever of excitement lighted eyes dull and savage with delay. The
breastplates of the cuirassiers glittered as the golden shields of a
mighty host, moving apace in the sunshine. _En avant! En avant!_ The
bugle’s blast was as some call to judgment and to victory. Onward--if
to death, it mattered not. Onward--it was good to be out there where
the bullets fell as hail and the shells dug graves for the living.
Onward--for the sake of France, if you wished it so; for the sake of
movement and of life, as the dull truth went.
In columns of squadrons, the eighth cuirassiers leading, the ninth
following, the lancers last of all, General Michel led his brigade
through the stubble of the wood to the steeper slopes beyond it. From
shadow they passed to the glare of the fuller day. Whatever quaking
hearts the white tunics covered, no sign there was of hesitation or of
delay. The troopers were to charge those Prussians and to send them
back across the river. Prayer, death, the morrow--Lefort himself had
no thought for any of them. He seemed to pass through some door to
a mighty amphitheatre beyond. The thunder of battle crashed in his
ears. His horse stumbled over the terrible ground, leaped the trenches,
snorted with the delight of it--yet never faltered. Hills and valleys,
crested helmets, golden trappings, houses aflame, rivers glistening in
the sun’s rays--he saw them all as things far off. The very danger was
a delight inexplicable. Down and yet down into the very pit of death.
Onward--over the living and the dead.
As the slopes became steeper, so the ferocity of that death-ride was
the greater. Men and horses fell together in blinding clouds of dust.
Troopers hung limp from their stirrups; blood gushed from their mouths
and ears. Or stiff figures, with swords upraised, sat rigidly in their
saddles, where Death had chained them sardonically. The trail they left
was a trail of mangled beasts and men--a trail of glittering cuirasses
and battered helmets and bloody shapes. The living knew nothing of it.
They swept on in a delirium of slaughter. “For France,” they said. Yet
France was far from their thoughts. Life--for that their hunger was.
Out into the sunny fields, over the ripened crops, into the mazes of
the vineyards, downward always toward the shimmering river and the
valley’s heart. The Prussians heard their cheers and answered them with
rifles at their shoulders and bayonets fixed. Coiled as black snakes
behind every sheltering furrow or outstanding ridge, they were there to
prove that the glorious cavalry of France was invincible no more. It
mattered not that lances cleaved the hearts of some; that swords struck
upturned faces; that screams of pain and rage followed the horses’
path. The rifle would avenge their comrades. The mighty human cataract
pouring about them did not envelop or dismay them. Even the coward
forgot his cowardice and struck a blow for his very life. The lowliest
trooper among them remembered the General’s word, “I must do my duty.”
Behind him lay the Fatherland. The cities of France were beyond the
hills--the goal of victory and of duty vindicated.
Into the death-pit Lefort rode; sword in hand, a cry that was almost
incoherent upon his lips. He saw the shimmer of the light, the burning
houses, the black figures in the grass; but of his own acts he carried
no memory. Once he remembered asking himself what Beatrix was doing
at that moment--but all thoughts of her were far from him when, at
length, the woods were passed and the great shock of encounter fired
his very heart with all the impulse of deed and of desire. To slay!
He had no other wish but that. To slash the life from the upturned
faces, to hack and cut, to strike a good blow for France, to avenge
the dead upon the hills. Bayonets glistened at his very breast, the
smoke of the rifles enveloped him, the acrid taste of gunpowder was in
his mouth always. He knew not what power enabled him to ignore these
things. A madness of the death-ride possessed him. The thunder of his
horse’s hoofs was as a melody recurring again and again or singing in
his ears defiantly. He was aware that half his men lay dead on the
slopes behind him; he understood that General Michel’s great attack had
failed and that the chosen cavalry of France had been annihilated that
day. But still he rode on. There was neither wish nor thought to regain
the shelter of his own camp. The Prussians lay before him. His way
lay there to the guns upon the heights. Fatigue intolerable could not
tighten his hand upon the rein. He had no longer the power to lift his
sword.
* * * * *
When the sun set, a regiment of Prussian hussars, riding through the
hills of Baden, found him alone upon the road, far from Wörth and the
battle there. He sat with haggard face and dizzy head and tears upon
his cheeks beside the horse which never more would hear his voice or
stretch its neck at his caress.
“Messieurs,” he said to them pitifully, “if you could save my horse--?”
The troopers nodded their heads significantly. One of them, with a good
heart, put a flask of brandy to his lips.
“Come,” he said, “you will catch cold here, Monsieur, and your horse
is dead.”
CHAPTER XIV
NIGHT
Night fell upon the field of Wörth, upon the bloody scenes and the
upturned faces of the dead, and all the horrid sights of woe and
desolation! Through the dark places of the hills the French were flying
to Saverne; or even southward to the city of Strasburg itself. In the
valley, where at dawn the whole glory of the day had shone, the wounded
cried for succour and for death. Burning villages, beacon-fires, the
lanterns of the human vultures gave light for the hour. A mighty host
crossed the mountains, cavalrymen on foot, infantry upon horses,
peasants mad with fear--the pursuing Uhlans everywhere.
Beatrix heard the murmur of retreat; she did not quail before it. All
her friends were fleeing from the doomed city; but she remained. Down
there by the river where the vanquished had fallen, she searched,
lantern in hand, for the body of her lover. Never once did she doubt
that he was dead. She had watched the glittering horsemen as they rode
from the woods; she had seen them fall as corn before the sickle.
There could be no hope that Edmond lived, they told her. Above, on
the heights, the home which was dear to her sent tongues of flame to
illumine the darkness of the woods wherein her love-dream had been
given. The Prussians had burned it. She had seen Frenchmen dead in the
rooms of her house; she had listened to the fierce shouts of anger and
of despair when the Prussians came up through the woods and drove their
enemies before them. The stress of battle had closed about her with a
mighty roar as of some stupendous storm raging in the hills. Hidden in
a dark place, the trembling Guillaumette at her side, she had waited
and had watched for help and for the tidings. But old Jules Picard, who
had ridden down toward Wörth at sunset, returned no more. The day had
willed the death even of this bent old man, she thought.
“They will not harm old Jules Picard, Madame,” he had said. “I
shall go to Morsbronn and bring the news. Those fellows do not
shoot there any longer. The Captain will come back with me. He is
down there somewhere; be sure of it. In one hour, in two, we will
return--together. _Ma foi_, there is little life in this old body. Why
should the Prussians want what is left? There will be dead enough to
count by-and-by. Run to the woods, my child, and wait for me. It will
not be long.”
He went away as though his were the lightest errand in the world; but
he did not deceive himself, and he said that Edmond Lefort must lie
with those others, the cuirassiers, who nevermore would see the sun
or hear a comrade’s voice. His real mission was to go up to the great
château on the hill, the home of the Count of Durckheim, and to ask if
any shelter were possible there for the girl-wife Lefort had entrusted
to his keeping. Well he knew what the roads to Strasburg or to Saverne
would be like that night. The maddened, despair-driven, flying hosts;
the rolling waggons, the plunging horses; the throngs of fugitives
become as devils--what hope for any woman abroad on such a journey? Far
better that she should wait in her own woods. The storm would blow over
to-morrow. All report said that the Germans knew how to treat the women
of France.
In the shadow of the woods Beatrix watched the advancing Prussians as
they drove the French from the thickets and came upward, ever upward
toward her home. She saw them in the sacred rooms of her own house;
she was a witness of the last fierce onslaught when the Turcos fell
in heaps before the arbour she had loved and the flames burst from
those very windows which had shown her the white villages and the
havens of silence. Some terrible judgment of God seemed to have fallen
upon her. It was as though a sea of fire surged about her, lapping
her with molten ripple, tossing in upon its terrible waves the bloody
victims of war and passion. Ever in her ears a voice said: “He is
dead; Edmond is dead.” She did not complain; she did not move from her
watching place. She thought that surely she must die in the woods; that
her eyes must be for ever closed to the terror of those sights and
sounds; that in death she would hear her lover’s voice again.
[Illustration: “The Turcos fell in heaps before the arbour.”]
At sunset the wave of battle was broken; the thunder of the human surf
beat upon the distant villages, upon the remoter passes of the Vosges.
There were Prussians everywhere; but such of the soldiers of France as
remained were mute and heartbroken prisoners. Lights began to shine
on the slopes now; she heard strange voices singing the _Wacht am
Rhein_, or the hymn which Luther wrote. German troopers went by at the
gallop; but there were Prussians no longer at the châlet. The silence
helped her to recollection. She crept from her hiding place, holding
Guillaumette’s hand; and the greater truth of the night began to be
known to her.
“Oh, my God,” she said, “where shall we find a friend to-night,
Guillaumette?”
Guillaumette, afraid no longer since the storm of battle had passed,
began to play the better part.
“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if Monsieur had sent a man to us and not a bundle
of bones upon a silly horse! What is the good of an old rat like that
when the Prussians come? _Ma foi!_ it would have been different if
Gaspard were here! Do not cry for the house, Madame. We shall build
another when the spring comes--and Monsieur will be back again. He will
come to-night. I should not wonder--ah, Madame, if there were not tears
in your eyes!”
She clasped her hands; her own tears fell for the house which was but
ashes, for the garden where the roses had bloomed; for all that had
made their home.
“Oh, the animals--to destroy our roses, Madame, to burn our house! As
if it were our word which made the war! But Monsieur will come back.
Oh, God, send him back to us this very night!”
They stood together, brave women looking for the first time upon the
face of war; and all the pity of war was in their hearts. A flicker
of flame still played about the ruins of their house; the odour
of burning wood and cloth was intolerable. In the left wing, where
her boudoir had been, Beatrix could see the pictures shrivelled in
their frames; the open piano black and scarred; even burnt paper upon
the writing table. Elsewhere all had fallen. The garden was a muddy
swamp. The horses were gone from the stables. Old Jacob had fled to
Niederbronn at the dawn of the day. They stood alone, and all the
dreadful omen of the night was about them.
“We shall sleep in the woods, Madame--to-morrow Monsieur will come!
Ah, if he should come to-morrow, and the news should be good, and we
should go to Strasburg with him! Who could harm us in Strasburg, where
the great guns roar, and the great forts rise up, and the soldiers are
everywhere? _Sainte Vierge_--what a dream to dream! No Germans, no
cannon, no hunger--are you not very hungry, dear Madame?”
Beatrix answered as one who speaks in sleep.
“I am not hungry, Guillaumette,” she said. “Monsieur will not come
to-night. He is in Wörth. We are going to meet him. You will get
a lantern and come with me. None will harm us. Are you afraid,
Guillaumette?”
“Afraid? I--Madame? Afraid of the _vilains Prusses_. As if one could
be afraid! But we shall not go to-night. We are hungry, and we will
beg our supper somewhere. Ah, Madame, the pity of it--our beautiful
house--our home!”
Beatrix did not heed her. Her eyes were dry. Her lips burned as the
lips of one in a fever. A fixed idea was in her mind. She would find
Edmond. She would seek him down there where the dead slept in the heart
of the vineyards. He might be lying wounded and waiting for her, she
thought. She could imagine his upturned face, his vigil of suffering,
the kisses with which she would nurse him back to life again. A woman’s
deepest sympathy, the sympathy of love, quickened her resolution. She
was angry in her impatience.
“Why do we wait, Guillaumette? Why do we stand here when Monsieur is
expecting us? We cannot save the house now. There are lanterns in the
stable--oh, my God, if we should be too late!”
She drew her cloak close about her head and went quickly towards the
ruins of the house. Guillaumette, watching her for a moment, dried up
her tears. After all, there were men down there at Wörth, and someone
would give them supper.
“I will find the lantern, Madame--do not dirty your beautiful shoes.
There are Prussians down yonder--the animals. And you are brave,
Madame--oh, so brave. If those others had been like you!”
She babbled on, taking a lantern from the shelf of the tottering
stables and groping for matches there. In its way, the dreadful day
had been welcome to her as the changing event of an unchanging life.
She had a terrible fear of the woods, and she held her mistress’s hand
when they began to go down towards the village, and the darkness of
the thickets closed about their path. What sights that forest cloaked!
A cry escaped her lips when the lantern showed her a Bavarian trooper
sitting with his back against a tree, but quite dead in spite of the
ghastly laugh about his lips. The bodies were everywhere. She saw in
fancy the spirits of the dead hovering above the place of battle.
The moan of a wounded chasseur, who crawled upon his hands and knees
towards them, was a wail as of some evil thing hidden in the brake. She
had no pity for the man. She craved for light--the lights of a city,
the voices of men.
Beatrix passed through the woods unconscious of their secrets. She went
on with eyes half closed and lips compressed. Edmond was waiting for
her in the vineyards where the dead lay. She did not see the terrible
figures of the brake, the dying, or those that followed, ghoul-like,
the path of the destroyer. Once, indeed, a man with bloody hands and
the eyes of a hawk sprang up from the path before her and disappeared
into the undergrowth, believing that men and not women came to watch
him. The face of the man made her heart stand still. She stepped back
as one who had seen a figure from the very pit of hell. Guillaumette
had fallen upon her knees to sob an hysterical prayer.
“_Sainte Vierge_--what sights! Oh, God help us, Madame. Did you see the
man? Did you see his face? There was blood upon it. I cannot go on. You
will not leave me alone here--Jesus help me--I cannot go.”
Beatrix took her hand and dragged her up.
“Come,” she said, “Monsieur is waiting for us in the vineyards. Who
will harm two women? Do you not hear the soldiers, Guillaumette?”
A strange sound, the echo of guttural voices raised in merriment, came
to them from the copse below. Men were singing a weird song of victory;
lights danced in the interstices of the trees--cheering was heard, and
the excited exclamations of the masqueraders. It would be the Prussians
rejoicing by some bivouac fire, Beatrix thought. They would respect her
errand. Even the trembling Guillaumette took heart when she knew that
there were soldiers there.
“The _vilains Prusses_, Madame--hark to them,” she cried, forgetting
her tears in a moment, “they have the voices of pigs, Madame. And they
will give us supper, perhaps. Ah, if there should be supper there--”
She stumbled on, and at the turn of the road they beheld the bivouac
and the watch-fire burning brightly. A regiment of Uhlans made merry
there; and never did troopers wear a uniform so strange. For these
were the hussars who had broken open the baggage of the great MacMahon
himself--strange baggage for a man and for those who followed the
man. Dainty corsets were there, and hose of silk, and gowns which
famous costumiers had made, and little white shoes of satin and bows
of many hues, and even bonnets with gay feathers in them. The Uhlans,
half drunk with the excitement of victory, greeted the treasures
hilariously. Some of them had put on the cap of “Madame”; some wore
the rustling skirts spangled with fine embroidery; some capered in the
hats which had been the glory of the Bois. Ribald shouts greeted their
pantomime. Officers looked on and spoke no word of rebuke. Bottles were
raised to the absent owners. A very saturnalia heralded the night of
victory.
Guillaumette was all for seeking help of the Germans. They were merry
fellows, as their antics showed. She had seen no such spectacle since
the marionettes were at Wörth a year ago.
“Oh, the fine gowns, the silver and the gold, Madame! They will not
harm us. The brutes--to dance such things in the mud. Are you not going
to speak to them, to ask about Monsieur? Look at the splendid fellow in
the yellow silk. He would be a Würtemberger! All the Würtembergers are
animals--shall I go and ask him, Madame?”
Beatrix ran on appalled. This carnival of ribaldry seemed as some
picture from the nether world. That men should sing and dance, with the
dying and the dead for their audience, was an infamy passing belief.
Henceforth she avoided the beacon fires as she would have avoided the
lamps of hell itself. The forest became a place of terror. She scarcely
breathed until she had left it, and stood in the fields with the lamps
of Wörth twinkling below, and the heaven of stars looking down upon the
faces of those who cried to heaven for sleep and death.
“We shall find Monsieur now, Guillaumette,” she said simply; “he will
be waiting for us. Afterwards we will come to these poor people. If
one only had the power to help them--the balm which would give them
sleep! Is it not strange that we can walk here at all? Yesterday, when
the dead man was in our stables, we dared not pass the door. To-night
the dead are everywhere! There is no pity left in the world. Even the
children are forgotten.”
She spoke as one uttering thoughts which no other shared; but
Guillaumette admitted none of her philosophy.
“The Virgin be praised that I have no children this night!” she
exclaimed. “And do not think that we shall find Monsieur here. He has
gone to Strasburg with the others. Ask Monsieur the Curé, and he will
tell you so. There would be shelter for you in the house of the curé,
Madame. They do not eat the priests, those animals--and we are hungry,
oh, so hungry!”
They stood above the high-road to Strasburg at the moment and could see
the patrols upon it, the glistening bayonets and the unresting Uhlans.
Lights were moving in all the neighbouring villages. Watch-fires flamed
upon the hills; the bugles blared incessantly. Everywhere the German
cordon of possession was being drawn tight. Beatrix, in spite of
herself, found her awe of this mighty, invincible host rapidly becoming
a subtle fascination. Pity for France was there; but it gave place to
an overmastering realisation of victory unrelenting, to a surpassing
sympathy with the dying who heard no word of grace, with the wounded
whose wounds were still unbound--with those alone and friendless in
the terrible night. The army, the glorious army of yesterday--it was
a rabble now, fleeing through the mountains impotently. That which
amounted almost to contempt for its impotence was among her thoughts.
It had left the bones of France to the enemy--it had left those
children of France dying there in the darkness of the hills. For her it
was a glorious army no more. Edmond alone remained to her. She saw that
she would not eat nor sleep until she held his hand again.
“Guillaumette,” she said, “go to the curé and tell him that I am here.
If he will help me--”
“But you will be alone, Madame.”
“I shall be with Monsieur.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“_Va là_--we shall breakfast to-morrow, and I can wait. Let us go on,
Madame.”
She knew that her mistress’s hallucinations were the outcome of that
dreadful day; nor did she quarrel with them. There could be nothing
worse than the sights the woods cloaked. The dead around her--she would
not look upon their faces. The wounded--she put her fingers to her ears
that she might not hear their cries! And they were drawing near to the
houses of her own people now. The physical craving dominated her. She
was hungry, and all else was secondary to that.
It was nearly midnight, and those who buried the dead were still at
work in the open fields by the river. Beatrix saw their lanterns as
changing clusters of stars upon the hillside. The pity in her heart
was ever growing. A wounded horse came up and thrust its hot nose into
her hand. She laid her cheek upon its face, and her tears fell fast.
Fatigue had begun to master her. She had not eaten for many hours.
No real belief that she would find her husband drove her on; only a
pursuing idea, the idea that she must go out into the world, wandering,
until she heard his voice again. Nor could she pick her way any longer.
From field to field and road to road she went with heavy steps and
a great pain at her heart, and pity--that unceasing pity--always
prevailing above her own grief and sorrow for herself.
And so she came at last to the watch-fires of a Prussian regiment of
dragoons, and men, hearing a woman’s voice, sprang up and greeted her
with a ribald welcome, and strong arms dragged her to the light. But
the first coherent word spoken was the word of a friend; and looking up
timidly she beheld Brandon North, the Englishman.
CHAPTER XV
A BIVOUAC OF DRAGOONS
He had recognised her voice at once, and he came forward and took her
hand and drew her toward the blazing fire.
“Good God, it is Beatrix!” he exclaimed, forgetting that the right thus
to call her had passed to another. She answered him with a responding
word of surprise.
“You, here at Wörth, Brandon--then you have seen Edmond?”
He released her hand and turned from the fire.
“No,” he said quietly, “and, of course, it is a surprise to you. I
served my time with the Hessian dragoons before I came to Strasburg.
None of you knew that, and I did not wish it to be known. A man must
have some employment besides telling people that his wine is good. But
you are cold and ill. Come to my cottage. The others are there--and we
will get a glass of wine. Some of them will have news of the lancers. I
was very sorry to see them hurt your house, but war is war, and it goes
without saying that people must suffer. Have you any friends in Wörth?”
He tried to assume a certain nonchalance, as though he were discussing
the common things of the day. She was not deceived by it; nor had the
surprise of seeing him there, a fine figure in the dark green tunic,
yet passed.
“You forget,” she said simply. “I cannot go with you now. And Edmond
is waiting for me. He should be in Wörth, or perhaps at Gunstett
across the river. I waited till sunset, and when he did not come back,
Guillaumette and I ran down. They have burned our house, Brandon. All
the things that he loved are destroyed. And we were so happy there!”
She spoke with no design, hiding nothing of her love. There were tears
in her eyes when she thought of the little house now a heap of ashes.
He saw the tears, and they seemed to fall upon his heart.
“My poor child,” he exclaimed--and was half ashamed that she heard the
words.
“Brandon,” she said very seriously, “I must find Edmond--I must go now.”
“That would be foolishness, Beatrix. Wörth is no place for a woman
to-night. I wonder that you came so far without insult. We must find
some shelter for you till you start again. I will send a trooper now
at once to see if they have any lists. It is wonderful the way our
people do things. We shall know at dawn exactly what the lancers did,
and that will mean news of your husband. Meanwhile, if you won’t come
to the cottage, you must warm your hands at this fire, and I will get
a glass of wine. Believe me, I am very sorry. If there is anything to
be done, you have only to ask me. There is no reason that I can see why
our friendship should be broken. You do not believe all the things said
about us, I am sure. We have our duty to do--to men and women. And we
are not the scoundrels your people make us out.”
She smiled up at him, with the look of one who had been his friend for
many years.
“As if it were necessary to tell me all this--you!”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Then we will take it for granted,” he exclaimed, and added--“Come,
here is a cloak. It will make a little soldier of you. I will send the
man for the news at once, and you must drink a glass of wine. These
nights fall cold, and the damp makes them worse. If we had known in
Strasburg how we should meet again--”
He stopped abruptly when he saw the shadow steal over her face. He
had begun to forget, he thought, that she was another man’s wife.
Yet every act, every word of his was full of a strong man’s pity for
her--the little helpless girl out there amid that saturnalia of death
and of defeat. She, on her part, did not ask herself why she remained
with him. No fear of his friendship drove her from the camp. She did
not know that he would have laid down his life for her, that he loved
her as few men love women. It was an odd meeting, that was all; a lucky
meeting. And how Edmond would laugh to see her sitting there with a
Prussian cloak about her shoulders and Prussians offering her wine, and
Guillaumette drinking the troopers’ beer, and joining in a crescendo of
laughter, high-pitched and piercing.
News of the lancers came in an hour. She read in Brandon’s face the
truth of it, and started up from the seat of logs they had found her
with beating heart and a face that was very wan and white.
“Oh, my God,” she cried, “he is dead!”
“Not so, Beatrix--he is unharmed--”
“At Wörth--?”
“No; they will send him to Mainz.”
“He is a prisoner, then?”
He did not answer her. She stood gazing into the fire as one who sees
pictures there. Guillaumette was still amusing the troopers.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PROMISE
They found a haven of refuge for her in the house of the curé of
Morsbronn, and she slept there until the sun was shining upon Wörth
again. It was odd to wake in that little white bedroom, and to find
herself wrapped about with the cloak of a Hessian dragoon, and to hear
the voices of men busy in the rooms below, and those other sounds of
squadrons marching and of guns rolling by to Strasburg and the West.
She could not, for a little while, recall the means by which she had
come to the house; neither was there any clear memory of yesterday, nor
of its events. When she looked from the window, out upon the high road,
she could see a red cross flying from the pillar of the garden gates,
and everywhere, on the heights above and in the valley below, the
spiked helmets glistened in the sunshine. These indomitable Prussians
were the masters of Wörth, then! The glorious army of yesterday--that
army which was to defend the homes of France--it was an army no more.
A sense of her utter helplessness took possession of her anew. She
remembered, one by one, the circumstances she had forgotten. They had
burned her house. Edmond was a prisoner. Brandon North had brought her
to the priest’s cottage, and would come again at dawn to put her on the
road to Strasburg. She must return to her friends, he had said. Wörth
was no longer a fit place for her.
He came at eight o’clock, and waited for her in the garden of the
cottage. She could hardly believe, even yet, that this great fellow, in
the dark green uniform, was the same Brandon who had been her English
friend in Strasburg. A new dignity was the soldier’s gift to him. The
invincible might of Germany, the victory of the Saxon, were so many
sops to his own ambition. He spoke to her almost as a brother, and, for
the first time, she had a certain awe of him.
“I’m sorry to be troublesome,” he said, when he saw her at the window
of the room; “we march in half an hour, and if you can be ready, an
Englishman here, who is driving to Hagenau, will take you in his cart.
Do you think you can manage it?”
“You still believe that I ought to go?”
“Well--it’s for you to say. If you want to stop at Wörth an hour longer
than you can help, I shall be surprised. That’s all.”
She nodded her head, and began to make a hurried toilet. Upon going
downstairs, she found the priest standing before the door of his
sitting-room, and barring it to her. A forgotten candle guttered in a
stick upon a table; and there were bloody bandages and a tumbler of
water beside it. Low moaning sounds came from the apartment, and even
there, in the hall, a dark crimson stain gave sanctity to the boards.
She knew then that some of the wounded men were in the house; and even
while she stood they carried in a dying cuirassier, and she could look
for an instant into that charnel-house, where the living sat with the
dead, and the aftermath of war was being reaped.
“This way, Madame, this way,” the old man cried imploringly; “those
poor fellows--we can help them only with our prayers. They have been
coming here all night. Ah, that we should see such sights; that God
should permit men to do these things!”
He took her by the hand and led her through the kitchen of the house.
There were German officers there, a merry party, hardened to the
scenes about, and careless in its talk of victory and of advance. The
men bowed to her as she passed, for they understood that she was the
English friend of the “Herr Major.” In the garden she found Brandon
waiting by his horse. The thought came to her that it was good to have
such a friend in such a place. There was no question of the “might be”
where the Prussians stood.
“Oh,” she said, shuddering still with horror of the house, “how good it
is to breathe again! Have you been waiting long, Brandon?”
“I was up here at six, but they told me you were asleep. You must be
tired enough after yesterday, and you’ll have a long day. I didn’t
want to wake you, but it was necessary if you are to come with us. Of
course you will come. There’s not a house in Wörth fit for a dog just
now. We can make a road if you’ll go in Watts’s cart. He’s an eccentric
old fellow, attached to one of the New York papers--though he’s an
Englishman for all that. I told him that you were an Englishwoman and
had friends in Strasburg, and he’s only too pleased to help. I dare say
he’ll drive you right into the town. Don’t mind his bluntness. He’s a
regular old Bohemian, and not a sham one made in an alehouse. It will
be best for you to stay there with Madame Hélène, or to go down into
Switzerland, as you please; but, if you take my advice, Beatrix, you
won’t stop a day longer in the Place Kleber than you can help. You see
for yourself what’s going to happen. And Strasburg won’t be a pleasant
place when von Werder calls there.”
He spoke to her with a certain intimacy of friendship, as though they
two stood apart from this quarrel of nations, and had a common interest
elsewhere, in their nationality and their circumstances. She heard him
in that spirit; but her own future was no concern to her. At Strasburg,
among her friends--at Madame Hélène’s house--all would be well there.
“Of course I shall go,” she said; “it’s very good of you to trouble so
much, and Edmond will be grateful. He would not look for me anywhere
else when he comes back. If I could only be sure that they are treating
him well.”
She laughed at herself for the naïve confession, and corrected it
instantly.
“You are a Prussian,” she said. “I forgot that. And you never told us--”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“My father made his home in Germany. I offered myself for the service.
A man cannot always look at life through empty wine-bottles. Buying and
selling are not altogether intellectual pursuits, you will admit. If
I had thought that there was any backbone on the other side, I might
have gone there on a sporting impulse. All that appealed to me--order,
method, strength, iron will--is the property of the Saxon. We may not
like it, but we must not dispute it. And I ought not to say such things
to you, who are waiting for breakfast. Have you ever breakfasted in
camp before, Beatrix?”
He began to lead his horse away from the priest’s cottage to the
bivouac of dragoons, and put the question as he went. This half-hour of
a subtle and satisfying intimacy might never return. He rejoiced in the
comradeship, but from other motives than those which gave her pleasure
in it. And she would remember only that she had found a friend.
“No,” she said, looking up to him frankly. “I am a soldier’s wife, and
I know nothing about soldiers. If your order and your method and your
iron will could help some of these poor people who die in the fields,
I would think more of the Saxon. You can never make good the evil of
yesterday, never, never, Brandon. What is it in us all that makes
us callous to suffering as we are now? When a trooper was killed at
Niederbronn a week ago, it was as though one of my own servants had
died in our garden. I thought of the poor fellow all night, and prayed
for him. Yesterday the dead were everywhere, and we passed them by as
though they had been stones. Is it ‘backbone’ that gives us the courage
to look at things always through the glasses of self? Why, at this very
minute, ought not I to be asking myself how I can help Edmond, and not
how I can get to Strasburg?”
He laughed at the unconscious conceit of her thought.
“You can help your husband best by keeping out of harm’s way,” he said.
“We are not savages, Beatrix, nor cannibals either, for that matter.
Edmond is all the better where he is. He won’t be killed, anyway, and
everyone is talking of his fellows and their charge yesterday. Whatever
may happen to the rank and file, the officers will be well treated, be
sure of that. I wouldn’t mind being in their place at all. They’ll have
good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink. When the war’s over--and
that’s a matter of a few weeks at the most--they’ll come back whole
men, and not as those poor fellows yonder. Is there anything to make
you sorry in that prospect?”
They had entered the field of the bivouac then, and he pointed to a row
of wounded infantrymen, sitting beneath a tottering wall, which was the
last upstanding mark where, yesterday, a prosperous farm had been. All
the men were badly hurt, yet all bore their sufferings with unflinching
patience. War had obliterated a memory of their nationality. A great
Würtemberger nursed the head of a maimed chasseur, and a gunner of
France did his best to bind up the shattered hand of one of von
Werder’s men. Faint and wan and unattended, these poor fellows made a
brave attempt to salute when the officer approached them; nor did one
of them utter so much as a single word of complaint.
“Come,” said Brandon, desiring to put a bright face upon it, “and who
is looking after your breakfasts, my poor fellows?”
“Ah, Herr Major, if it were so much as a drink of water! I have been
here since one o’clock yesterday--since one o’clock! My God, it is
nearly twenty hours, and my lips are glued together.”
Another opened his vest and showed a jagged wound upon which the blood
had congealed.
“They are slow up yonder, but then they are not in pain, Herr Major. As
for me, I do not count. I shall never stand again.”
“Do not talk so,” cried an old sergeant, whose arm had been scarred and
broken by a shell from Froeschweiler; “we have our duty to do, and all
this is nothing. The doctor will laugh at us for troubling him. A cigar
would cure me, Herr Major--ah, you are all too kind to a useless old
man.”
Brandon distributed his cigars among them, and called to a trooper to
fetch them water from the village and to send the ambulance. The place
wherein they lay was a very pit of blood and agony; he turned from it
quickly when he saw the white face of the girl at his side. He knew
that she had all the desire and pity to serve them, and he understood
the helplessness she realised and blamed.
“It is a doctor’s work, Beatrix--you would only make things worse. The
ambulance will be here just now, and they have already been looked
after in some sort of way, as you see. You need a lot of training to
stand this sort of thing, and remember you have had none at all--”
He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes.
“Brandon,” she said quickly, “do you not despise me--”
“Because you are not a doctor? Certainly not--”
“No, not for that, but for all that I have been talking about. As
if anything mattered when those poor fellows suffer! And I am doing
nothing, nothing. I have never done anything all my life--”
“You can begin now by going back to Madame Hélène. She is alone in
Strasburg. She will have need of you in the days to come. I am afraid
they will be terrible days, Beatrix.”
“Why should they be, Brandon?”
“Because we march to-day.”
Something of the strange circumstance of their association came in that
moment to both of them. For the first time she read a suspicion of the
whole truth in the look he turned upon her, but she would not think of
it nor debate it in her mind lest that should be in itself a dishonour.
After all, he was her husband’s friend. She would trust her life to
him, and Edmond would applaud her confidence.
“I will go to Strasburg now,” she said quickly. “If only I can hear of
Edmond there!”
“If that is all,” he said, “I will bring you the news myself.”
She laughed.
“They would shoot you for a spy,” she said.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN MISTS
A burly man, with a great black beard and a sunburnt face, drove
up to the place as she spoke and exchanged words with Brandon. He
had obtained a little pony-cart, by some occult means of which old
travellers are the master; and he sat in it, smoking contentedly, as
one who found nothing remarkable either in his presence at Wörth or
in the circumstances which brought him there. When he was introduced
to her as “Richard Watts,” he took his china pipe from his mouth, and
lifted the brim of a vast sombrero hat stuck carelessly upon the very
back of his curly black hair. He would be a man of sixty years, Beatrix
thought--a man of many cities, yet the servant of none.
“Is this the lady?” he asked laconically.
“This is Madame Lefort,” said Brandon; “her servant is with her, but
she can go behind.”
The stranger nodded his head and put his pipe into his mouth again.
“Two, then,” he exclaimed, and asked immediately, “Anything more?”
Brandon laughed.
“Mr. Watts is not accustomed to this kind of luggage, Beatrix,” he
said; “but he’ll see you into Strasburg, and he’s a safer escort than a
squadron of hussars.”
She turned to him a little anxiously.
“But you ride to Hagenau?”
“Certainly--if your people do not say no.”
Guillaumette climbed into the cart laboriously.
“_Va là_,” she said, “here goes a fine fat goose to market. You will
not eat me, Monsieur!”
She sat jauntily, her arms crossed and her eyes upon the trooper who
had helped her to her seat; but the great man in the cart did not
notice her. He had thrust out a huge hand to grip Beatrix by the wrist;
and now he began to address her as he would have addressed a child.
“Sit there and hold the rail. The road is rough, and the pony stumbles.
Have you had your breakfast?--eh, yes. Well, that’s all right. You
wouldn’t get any if you hadn’t.”
She turned to Brandon.
“You are not coming with us, after all, then.”
“Indeed, and we are--there goes the bugle.”
Richard Watts shrugged his tremendous shoulders.
“The pretty soldiers,” he said; “can’t you do without them to-day,
Madame?”
She looked up at him, angry at the blunt speech. There was something
kind in his big eyes, but his manner was that of a boor.
“If we are a trouble to you, sir--”
“A trouble! God bless me--an Englishwoman! Geeho! Geeho!”
He lashed the pony, and they began to jog across the fields. She
gazed--it might be for the last time--up at the forest land where her
home had been; and she saw burning houses, and churches which were
but quaking walls, and black ruins of the homesteads of yesterday.
In the vineyards by the river the labourers were burying the dead.
Rusted cuirasses, broken helmets, twisted swords, rags which had been
uniforms, rifles in the ditches, horses stiff and stark with their feet
pointing upward to the sky--these were the emblems of battle around
her. But the sun shone warm upon the pastures; there were gay tunics
in all the valleys; she heard the music of the drums; the romance of
war put a cloak upon the reality of war. And the way lay to a city
and to a home. She desired with all the intensity of which she was
capable to turn from that place of death to the light and life of
Strasburg. Edmond would come to her there. She thanked God that he was
a prisoner, and that war could not harm him now.
They had struck the great southern road to the city; but the way was
laborious, for troops followed it everywhere, and no turn of it but
showed them the wavering lines of spiked helmets or the lances of
the Uhlans. And here the story of the flight was to be read in all
its fulness. Dead men with glassy eyes stared up at them from the
fœtid ditches. Masterless horses galloped by the roadside whinnying
pitifully; or stood in wondering troops, saddles still upon their
backs, and even their own wounds to show. No man could have numbered
the rifles cast aside by the flying hosts of yesterday. Broken
caissons, gun-carriages lacking wheels, empty wagons shattered and
plundered, field-glasses, even letters and pocket-books, and little
tokens whereby the names of those who fled were to be learned--these
things bore witness to the living as the graves upon the hillside bore
witness to the dead. But they provoked Beatrix no longer to despair
or pity. If, of the aftermath, she should reap her lover’s life, she
would crave no other grace. And she was all fortunate. She thought of
the children asking to-day for those who nevermore would stoop to lift
them to their lips. How many there were in the very city to which this
strange Englishman was taking her! How many women prayed in the silent
churches for those who lay in the vineyards she was leaving! It was not
selfishness, but gratitude, which turned her thoughts to such a channel.
Their way lay to the south; and many a hamlet was numbered before
her companion spoke a word or took his pipe from his mouth. The
exclamations of Guillaumette fell upon deaf ears. It was odd to
be there on the road with one she had never seen before; but the
kaleidoscope of her life had been turning swiftly for many hours. She
accepted the present as it came to her, and found content therein.
“You are going to Strasburg, Monsieur?” she asked, for the very sake of
speaking.
Richard Watts took his pipe from his mouth very slowly and answered her
by another question.
“What’s that?” he exclaimed. “Monsieur! Bless you, child, I’m no
‘monsieur.’ I was born within sound of Bow Bells.”
“Oh,” she said, “one gets into the habit of it here. You are Mr. Watts,
are you not?”
He nodded his head.
“Richard Watts, young lady--as much at your service as your French
friends will let me be.”
“Do you think we shall have any difficulty in getting into Strasburg,
then?”
“No difficulty at all--and God help us when we’re there.”
He smoked contemplatively for a little while, and then continued:
“There is nothing good in France to-day, young lady. I have been
fighting all my life, and I know what I say. Your German friends will
be at the gates of Strasburg in a week and then the fruit will fall.
It rots on the trees already. It has been rotting since the day that
knaves began to pluck it. Look at that fellow in the ditch there.
Yesterday he was all gold lace and glory. To-day he is dead, and you
cannot see the gold lace for mud. The glory has gone up to the hills,
where the Prussians burn the farms. You have married a Frenchman,
and you do not believe me, as a matter of course. Twenty years ago I
thought as you did. It’s a long time, twenty years, Madame--a long
time. France was the first nation in Europe twenty years ago. In twenty
years hence, she may be so again. These poor fellows could not wait,
you see.”
A dead chasseur lay in the ditch at the roadside. His head was pillowed
upon his arm as one who slept a child’s sleep; but his splendid uniform
had been washed by the mud of the fields, and the pillagers had cut
off two of his fingers for the sake of the rings he wore. Beatrix
closed her eyes that she might not see the dead man’s face. To what new
scenes of peril and of death was that strange journey carrying her? The
cities in danger! She could not believe it possible.
“I am going to Strasburg because my husband will come there when
they release him. I could not go anywhere else, for I have no other
friends in France. If the Germans follow, it will not matter. They are
gentlemen, I am sure. Even you admit that?”
He nodded his head approvingly.
“You are quite right to go,” he said, “and they are gentlemen,
as I admit. If war is like a good dinner and our gentlemen dine
sometimes--that doesn’t concern you. Strasburg will suffer, but you
have English friends--ah, your friends are English, Madame?”
She smiled.
“And if they are not?”
“In that case we must make the most of a bad job,” he said bluntly.
She looked up at him quickly to read a face hardened in a gravity very
foreign to it. But he did not speak, and they had left the high-road
now and were in the heart of the forest of Hagenau. In and out, by
woodland paths, through avenues of chestnuts, past little churches
which spoke of God’s peace and of all the primitive forest life, the
cross-road carried them. All the hubbub and turmoil of the great
highway was hushed here. Impossible to believe, as the wind stirred the
trees to a murmur of song and the glades opened their golden hearts to
the wayfarer, that the things of yesterday had been truths. War was an
hallucination of their sleep. There had been no battle. Such contrasts
were beyond the possibilities.
“Who could realise that we were at Wörth this morning?” she exclaimed,
as a turn of the road opened to their view scenes of a remoter and
even more sylvan beauty. “Is there anyone in these woods who would
understand that a great army is all around us, and that those poor
fellows lie dying in the vineyards? I don’t believe, I cannot believe--”
Richard Watts smoked on doggedly, but presently he pulled up the pony
suddenly.
“Look there, young lady,” he said, as he jerked his whip in the
direction of a great tree; “there is something to help your
incredulity.”
Her eyes turned toward the place, and she shuddered at that which the
glade had hidden from her.
They had taken a Uhlan in the forest and hanged him from a tree. The
body swayed gently in the breeze, and showed gaping wounds upon the
hands and throat. A group of hags, their faces dark with the ferocity
of anger unsatiated, stood in the shade of the tree and greeted their
own work triumphantly.
“He was taken at Berdot’s Farm, Monsieur--he rode up at daybreak and
Henriette found him. Ah! she is brave, Henriette. She let the dogs
loose, the droll. He will not go back to his Bismarck to-day, Monsieur.
And it is our work--our work!”
They screeched together as creatures of the fables; but the man whipped
up the pony and was soon in the heart of the silent forest again. For
a long time now he puffed at his great pipe stoically; but it was not
lost upon Beatrix that he skirted the town of Hagenau, and began to go
faster as he approached the city of Strasburg.
“Is not Mr. North to meet us there?” she asked a little anxiously.
He answered her brusquely.
“After the war, young lady--we will learn patience. I cannot wait
to-day. I am flying from the defenders of France--as good a Frenchman
as any of them.”
“But there are no soldiers here?”
“Glory be to God for that! The fewer the better. See as few of them as
you can, girl.”
She thought upon it for a little while, and then exclaimed, as though
she read his thoughts--
“My husband will be very grateful to Mr. North.”
The idea amused him. She could hear him chuckling to himself.
“Will be grateful, young lady?” he asked presently--“you said grateful?”
“And why not?”
“No reason at all. We are always grateful when the man who knocks us
down is the very good friend of our wife. Would not you be under the
circumstances?”
Never, until that moment, had there come to her the thought that Edmond
might not understand the circumstances which had compelled her to seek
Brandon’s friendship. She sat debating it very silently. She would not
believe that her companion’s words were aught but a jest; and yet,
as the cart jogged on, a sense of unrest and foreboding displaced
the content with which she had quitted Wörth. If Edmond should not
think as she did! If he should hold that war had made that friendship
impossible! She blamed herself that she had not thought of it before.
“Of course he will understand,” she said, rather as one uttering her
thoughts aloud. “They were old friends in Strasburg. And he will know
why I went to the camp. I shall tell him all about it when he comes
back to Strasburg.”
“Tell him nothing, child. A tale untold is not to be criticised. There
is always the off-chance. I am an old man and have the right to advise
you. Go to your friends in Strasburg and keep your own secrets. Too
much confidence has ruined many a man, and woman too. Your husband will
know nothing unless you tell him. Why should you make him unhappy?”
“I will tell everything--he has the right to know.”
He would not agree with her; but he watched her with kindly eyes, and
when, long hours afterwards, the city of Strasburg, lying in purple and
golden mists of the evening light, came to their view, he said to her
almost earnestly--
“If ever you want a friend yonder, young lady, remember old Richard
Watts. Any Englishman in Strasburg will show you where he lives. Come
and tell him all about it. He understands women and he understands men.
You will find him alone; he has been alone all his life.”
She thought that he spoke with an infinite tenderness; her own heart
was heavy, and the sympathy he offered her touched a plaintive chord
of melancholy which the hour, and the scene, and the city of the golden
mists helped to linger in her path. She had come home, indeed--the
bride of yesterday--yet she knew not whether to-morrow would permit the
house of her affections to stand, or would leave her one true friend in
all France. The hosts of Germany were about to cross that plain, above
which rose up the spires and pinnacles of Strasburg. The very silence
of the night was as of some herald of storm and tempest raging in the
hearts of men. But it was fear for herself that dominated her when
they entered the city by the northern gate, and the pony began to trot
toward the Broglie Platz. If Edmond should not understand!
“I know that you wish to be kind to me,” she said, “and I will not
forget. I have many friends here, for I am Madame Hélène’s grandchild.
Everyone knows the Countess of Görsdorf. She lives in the Place Kleber.”
Richard Watts pulled the pony back upon its haunches.
“Eh, what’s that?” he exclaimed. “The Countess of Görsdorf--you know
her?”
“She is my grandmother.”
“Then you are the daughter of Marie Douay--impossible!”
The exclamation burst from him involuntarily. He sat quite still for
some minutes, regarding her very curiously. All about them was the life
of Strasburg, the music of the bands, the glare of the lamps before
the cafés, the buzz of tongues, and the rumbling wheels. The man saw
nothing of this life. He had eyes only for his little companion, who
had just told him that she was Madame Hélène’s granddaughter. She, in
her turn, sat wondering at his astonishment.
“You do not know Madame Hélène?” she asked presently, for he continued
to let the pony stand.
“Know her, child--how should I know her?”
“You are a stranger to Strasburg, then?”
He laughed hardly.
“An utter stranger.”
The words seemed to please him. He repeated them as though in emphasis.
“An utter stranger, young lady--without a home anywhere.”
A great idea, one of pity for his loneliness, came to her. She could
not account for her friendship, yet friendship she gave to this rugged
acquaintance instinctively.
“If you would come to the Place Kleber, they would be very grateful
to you,” she said. “I am sure Madame Hélène would like to thank you
herself.”
Again he looked at her with a curiosity he could not cloak.
“Marie Douay’s daughter--so you are Marie Douay’s daughter!” he
continued to mutter, as one who has recalled forgotten names and
places. “Well, the world is small indeed. Do you know your way to the
Place Kleber from here, child?”
She laughed at the doubt.
“Every inch of it.”
“Then I will say good-night.”
It was an abrupt invitation for her to leave him, and she did not
misunderstand it. There was nothing odd in such a man telling her that
here was the parting of the ways.
“I am sorry you will not come with me,” she repeated, when she stood at
last upon the pavement. “Madame Hélène would have been so glad. Perhaps
you will call to-morrow?”
He thrust his hand over the side of the cart and held hers for a moment
in a clasp which almost crushed her fingers.
“God bless you, little passenger,” he said, ignoring her question.
“Don’t forget old Richard Watts. And mind you keep your secrets.”
He was gone with the words, away into the shadows of the great city.
She turned quickly toward her own home, for the bells of the churches
were striking midnight. As the musical chimes rang out, they seemed to
say, “Secrets, secrets--keep your secrets.”
Was it true, then, that some thought, born of the impotence of France
and of yesterday’s defeat, had come into her own life, and that it
must be hidden from Edmond? She would listen to no such suggestion of
shame, but hurried on to the old home and the beloved voices, and the
arms outstretched to hold the little wanderer. And through the forests
and over the mountains of France, by many roads and woodland paths, the
hosts of Germany marched on toward the city whose doom the finger of
fate already had written.
BOOK III
The Siege