THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW
She returned to the Place Kleber at four o’clock; nor would she listen
to the old housekeeper’s entreaty to defer her departure until Richard
Watts came in with his news. The vague hope that some tidings of her
husband might be brought into the city at any moment put chains upon
her feet when she had to go abroad, and sent her always hurrying gladly
to her home again. For the danger in that northern quarter she had no
thought. Soldiers warned her as she crossed the streets which civilians
had forsaken. She thanked them, but did not pause. The crashing echoes
of terrible sounds could not affright her. She would have faced any
peril to read a word from the man she loved. The remembrance that
Edmond’s letter might be lying unopened in the lonely house could
compel her often to return there excitedly, as though her troubles
would be ended by a miracle. But there was no letter lying there when
she returned on that memorable day; and such news as Guillaumette
vouchsafed was news of the terror and of her own apprehensions.
“We cannot stay here, Madame; there is another house struck to-day.
Maître Bolot and his children have gone to the cellars. I shall die
of fright. All night long the boum, boum, boum. Ah, Madame, if one
were a rabbit to live under the ground! There will be no Place Kleber
soon--Henri says so. ‘Let your mistress go to the General’s house,’--he
says. _Mon Dieu_, there are men in the General’s house--but here--”
She wrung her hands distractedly and stood in the gloomy hall, a very
picture of woe. Through the shattered ceiling the cloudy sky was to
be seen far above; and drops of rain even then pattered upon the once
fine carpet. Beatrix stood an instant to look up at the broken walls
of that which a month ago was her little sanctuary. She could see her
pictures still hanging there, but the wind and the wet had soaked the
curtains, and plaster had hardened upon the pretty case of her cottage
piano. No one, the masons told her, must venture upon that staircase
now. The house was not safe, they said. If another shell were to strike
it, a crumbling heap of ruins would mark its site as they marked the
site of many a princely house in Strasburg that day. Yet to her it was
a home still. There, for the first time, Edmond had called her wife.
There was no nook of it that did not seem to whisper some story of her
love. Thither he would return for love of her. She was resolute in her
determination to keep her trust while one stone stood upon another.
“It will not be for long, Guillaumette. Monsieur will come back, and
then we shall go away. There are others in Strasburg who have not even
a roof to shelter them. Remember that when Henri tells you his tales.
Only children fear the darkness.”
“Not so, Madame. Henri does not fear the darkness at all. That is for
me. You cannot see their arms in the dark. _Ma foi!_ one prays God not
to send Gaspard back from the wars. You have had _déjeuner_, Madame?”
“All that I want, Guillaumette. There is no letter for me?”
“A letter--who should write a letter, Madame?”
“And no one has been to the house?”
“Henri came at twelve o’clock to say that you were to go to the
General’s house. He thinks about you always, Madame. There is no one
else.”
Beatrix entered the dreary dining-room with a sigh. Great beams
buttressed the ceiling of it; the windows were heavily boarded up so
that little rays of light, stealing in through many a chink, showed
lustrous dust as a room long barred to the sun. Everywhere about
the chamber were those necessaries of the daily life which spoke
eloquently of the dead. An open book with a note upon the margin in
old Hélène’s handwriting--a list of the ambulances with names of the
poorer sufferers; a half-written letter, a ball of wool, the last
copy of the _Courrier du Bas-Rhin_. Above the mantelshelf there was a
large oil painting of Marie Douay, old Hélène’s child. Her mother’s
was a plaintive, wayward face, Beatrix thought as she gazed upon it.
Her father had loved that face, but the mind behind it had never been
linked to his. His English prejudices had wrecked his life. Racial
antipathy, forgotten in the hour of passion, had revived in the sombre
atmosphere of domestic monotony. Beatrix remembered that she, too, had
married one who looked with contempt upon the England she loved. She
asked herself if, when these dreadful days were forgotten and peace
should build her a house again, the story of the father must be told
again by the child. It was but the reflection of a moment, a passing
thought born in that gloomy room. She put it away from her resolutely,
and, crossing the darkened chamber, she knelt before Edmond’s portrait
and kissed it passionately. The barrier which her own forebodings had
put between them was broken now that another shared her secret. She
desired her husband’s return ardently. She had nothing to conceal from
him. If only her friend were saved, she thought that she could remember
this war as some chastening epoch of her life, which had permitted her
to look into the book of her affections and to read there, without
fear, of that which was written--if only her friend were saved.
It was her secret no more, and yet it pursued her relentlessly,
even there at the Place Kleber. Alone in the silent room she almost
counted the seconds as the pendulum in the old clock numbered them.
Every sound in the street was the omen of message for her. She could
find no employment to which she might put her hand. The open piano
mocked her as she listened to the rolling music of the shells and the
shivering chords of the great guns’ victories. When she looked out
from the staircase window of the house the same melancholy scene ever
rewarded her eyes. Whole acres, which were streets and churches and
markets a month ago, were now but rubble for the builder’s cart. She
could see the wind-tossed flames rising up above the ruined north; her
imagination depicted for her a people living below the earth for fear
of the death which was everywhere above them. Hunger, want, poverty,
terror, anger--the whole gamut of the passions might be struck in such
an hour. And yet Strasburg did not yield. Black and bloody, mourning
its dead every day, shaken to its very foundations, threatening soon
to become the dust of that earth from which it had arisen--the heart
of the city remained its own. “Until the last stone,” the Governor had
said. That day could not be distant, Beatrix thought.
Richard Watts had promised to bring her news of Brandon at six o’clock,
but the bells struck the hour, and again the half-hour, and there was
no message from him. For a long while she waited, the victim of doubt
intolerable, and of a presentiment she could not seek to justify. As
the minutes passed, her conviction became more sure. The old Bohemian
had failed her, she said. He had gone to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel to
find that Brandon was no longer there--perhaps even to learn of his
death. The man Gatelet was not one to forgive. There was no reason why
he should not have betrayed her friend. She hoped for no clemency for
him. At seven o’clock she told herself that Brandon certainly was dead,
and that Watts feared to come with an admission of his failure. She
could endure the doubt no longer, but putting on her hat, and caring
nothing for the heavy rain which hissed upon the burning city, she ran
to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel, and did not pause until she stood at the
tavern door.
There were few in the street, for the storm had driven even the troops
to shelter. In the tavern itself the bright light shone upon many
faces--the faces of men weary with service at the guns; the faces of
countrymen sodden with wine and wet; the faces of traitors declaiming
in drunken frenzy against those who did not drive the Germans from
the gates. A few women, whose coarse finery was as some dissolute
echo of the forgotten day of peace, laughed in discordant keys, or
gave the notes of ribald songs. Everywhere the enormity of the night
appeared to have driven such as ventured from their homes to riot and
debauchery. Men struck each other in the tavern and were applauded by
their comrades. A loutish gunner, whom wine had robbed of his wits, was
thrown into the gutter, and lay there with the rain beating upon his
face. Mob orators stood upon stools and prated of the glories of the
siege. A fiddler struck up the notes of the “Mourir pour la Patrie,”
while a hussy bawled incessantly, “Vive l’armée--l’armée!” Presently
the “Marseillaise” was sung by many throats hoarse and discordant. A
man threw a wine flask through one of the glass windows. The café would
have been wrecked but for the appeals of an old soldier, who had lost
an arm at Wörth, and whose voice spoke as eloquently as his wound.
Such was the scene upon the ground floor of the _auberge_--a scene in
striking contrast to the dark and gloomy windows above. There was no
light in any bedroom of the house, nor any sign of life there. Beatrix
even could take heart when she beheld the unlighted windows of the
garret wherein Brandon had been a prisoner. After all, Richard Watts
had good news for her. She did not doubt that he had contrived her
friend’s escape. Possibly Brandon was at that moment a prisoner in his
house, with old Anne Brown for his jailor, and an English home for his
cell. She took great courage of the conviction, and was about to return
to the Place Kleber, full of the expectancy of good tidings, when a
window in the house by which she stood was opened suddenly, and the
head of a soldier peered out into the night. Instinctively she crouched
back against the shutters of the shop; and so standing she observed
the man; while he, in turn, gazed steadfastly at the unlighted windows
opposite, and then answered a question asked by someone invisible in
the room behind him.
“The Englishman has left, François?”
“There is no light there, M’sieur.”
“Of course, there would be no light. We shall catch the pair of them.
Why does not he come? It was for eight o’clock.”
“Well, they are ready in the café. Shall I send for Benoît, M’sieur?”
He did not wait for the response, but shut the window with a crash. To
Beatrix the few words were as a sentence of doom pronounced against her
friends. Richard Watts had failed, then. He and Brandon were over there
in the garret together. The house was watched. Those who watched it
were waiting for some signal to begin their work. She imagined readily
that Gatelet was the one who delayed. She remembered that he had spoken
of the need of his presence at the citadel. They must have detained him
there, she thought. It was an intolerable, enduring agony to stand out
there in the wet and the cold, and to tell herself that the last two
friends she possessed in Strasburg might die when a few minutes had
passed. What to do she knew not. Her first impulse was to enter the
house by the side door and to confess all she had heard and seen. But
when she emerged from the shadows and crossed the street, she found a
sentry pacing the alley, and his bayonet was fixed upon his rifle. She
saw the man without surprise, for she expected to find him there. But
the reality of his presence was as some final crushing blow. She did
not move from the place where first she had perceived him. The vision
of that scene in the café before the Minster doors came to her with a
vividness as of the moment of its happening. Brandon was to die, then,
as that other had died. This was the end of their folly.
The sentry paced the alley with slow steps. Sometimes he would lean
wearily against the door of the house; at other times he went a little
way out into the street to look up at the unlighted windows above. He
did not see that the girl watched him, for she stood at the corner
of the street, and he had eyes only for the tavern. Once, indeed, an
exclamation escaped his lips, and he crossed the alley and remained for
quite a long time gazing up at the attics. A light, appearing suddenly
in Brandon’s room, warned him to the action. Beatrix saw the light,
too, and the shadows it cast upon the blind. They were the shadows of
Brandon and of Richard Watts. She had no longer a doubt. Her friends
were in the house. She was impotent to help them. A cry of hers would
bring the drunkards from the café leaping as devils to the work. She
could but stand and wait--God knew for what horror of that September
night.
The light remained in the window, it may have been for twenty minutes;
but the shadows of the men vanished instantly. It seemed to Beatrix
that hours of suspense passed before there was any new movement in
the street; yet she knew that she had waited there but a little time,
for she heard the church clock strike nine, and she could see that the
candle in the room above had burned down but a little way in its stick.
As the moments passed and the suspense became almost insupportable, she
began to pace the street again; telling herself that now the end was
coming; or listening for footsteps upon the pavement; or seeking to
read some message of hope upon the golden blind. Always with her was
the sure and torturing knowledge that she could do nothing for those
who had done so much for her. In all Strasburg there was no friend who
would help those friends of hers. The very blinding rain which still
fell upon her burning face was as some truth of the pitiless night.
Brandon must die--there in the garret. She did not ask herself why
the peril in which this man stood could move her to such agonies of
distress. He was to die. She had seen another die at the Minster doors,
and he had been a stranger. But this man was her friend, almost her
brother--one of her own race. In that moment she knew that her heart
lay wholly in the England she had left, and that never again would a
sentiment born of passion mislead her to a hope in France and a desire
for kinship with its people.
As ten o’clock was struck by all the bells of Strasburg, a man riding
a black horse came down the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel at a canter. She
recognised him as Gatelet, and she saw him enter the house where the
watchers were concealed. Anon, three men came out of the house together
and crossed over to the tavern. She knew why they had gone, and she
stood as a figure of stone while their loud talking was heard even in
the street. Presently a roar of voices answered their appeal. Troopers
in a frenzy of drunken passion came running out of the house to cry
that there was a spy in the garret above. A woman, with a besom dipped
in resin for a torch, began to sing the “Marseillaise.” Others who
had not been in the tavern were drawn from the neighbouring houses to
make a great press now swarming before the doors of the _auberge_. A
young officer of artillery climbed a pillar and cried incessantly “_À
la lanterne_.” Others demanded that the tavern should be fired. Inside
the house itself a terrible uproar was to be heard. Men fought upon the
narrow stairs as dogs for a bone. Windows were opened in the street,
and new cries for tidings swelled the clamour. Mounted troopers rode up
to the alley and besought those inside to throw the spy down to them.
In the garret itself there were many lights, and many figures upon the
blind until a strong hand tore it down and an elbow shivered the glass
behind it. The very pit of hell seemed opened there. The mob swayed to
and fro, delirious with anger and the desire of death.
Beatrix had been caught up in the press, and was thrust forward toward
that door which she had passed with such hesitation but a few days
ago. The roar of the multitude was as the song of the sea in her ears.
She saw a vision of devilish faces upturned; of savage men brandishing
knives and swords and any weapons that came to their hand; of a window
bright with many lights, and of figures moving there. She heard men say
that the German was taken; terrible sounds of glass-breaking and of the
oaths of the frenzied troopers rent her ears as the voices of tempest.
She tried to utter an appeal for mercy, but no words left her lips. Her
friend was dead, she thought. He had paid with his life for their jest
upon the field of Wörth.
And so she ran from the place as the flames of the burning tavern added
their mite to the sea of fire which surged above the doomed city,
and warned those who looked upon Strasburg from afar that the day of
waiting was drawing to its end.