Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P.
C. Breagh believed her asleep. Twilight showed nothing but a black
shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....
Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his. She said, following
up some previous train of thought:
"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless. I speak of
the face of my country's enemy.... See you well, Monsieur Breagh ...
if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord
had saved France!..."
"What would save France?" Carolan asked her. She answered, turning
in her rustling couch of leaves:
"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her.... Death,
freezing the brain that plans her fall.... Death, overtaking the
merciless giver of Death to her children.... Nothing else could now
save France!..."
He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of
madness. She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:
"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness. Frenchwomen
are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.' Yet France has twice
been saved by the courage of her daughters.... Remember the holy
Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday
also, Monsieur!--the courageous citizeness of Caen.... At school I
learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal....
'_Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!..._' Why has
not France a Charlotte Corday now?"
There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of
lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack. That a creature so
frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible.
One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde
type. To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the
conversation was impossible. The only thing to do was to feign to
doze.
He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut
his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire. Oblivion
descended on him. Pretense became reality. He sank into a very gulf
of sleep.
Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was
wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the
deepening dusk. Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock
claimed her as a victim. She was far more near to madness than
Carolan had dreamed.
It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent
contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black
silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows
and ravines. Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the
southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest
sculpturesque shapes.... An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure
on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks,
bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect;
lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of
genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of
cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.
But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a
heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and
cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war. In other vaporous
pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from
some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes
counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.
Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure,
slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the
watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of
Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.
He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a
pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a
daïs-table in a banqueting hall--she served him a golden cup of wine
iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the
frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He
dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept
near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.
The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the
eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had
fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking
of the battlefield....
What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the
thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the
myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?
Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life
from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the
trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips,
and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in
Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be
sure to know, because their murderer would be there....
"_Ting...._"
What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer
through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images
that crowded in her brain? It loosed the iron band that was bound
about her aching temples. It melted the icy armor that was riveted
about her torn and sorrowful heart....
"_Ting-ting!_"
She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened,
breathing quickly. Again came the silvern tinkle.
"_Ting-ting-ting! ..._"
Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear
fell from her like a pall all snow-wet. She rose up among the
rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the
sleeper, and roused him cautiously. He awakened, and said through
the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:
"Who is it?..." And then instantly remembered, and passionately
kissed the warning hand.
"_Ting-ting, ting-ting!..._"
"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.
She snatched away the hand. He rose to his knees and listened....
Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray.
White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:
"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"
No more was said. They took hands and went out of the hovel, and
passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the
littered street of Petit Plappeville.
At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a
lantern-flame, moved toward them. Their shadows were thrown sidewise
upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls. The bell
tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World.
The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping
of wooden-soled country shoes.
Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense
umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides. The stout
figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta,
wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.
At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left
hand. His right arm was folded over his breast. As Juliette sank
down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt
down beside the girl.
The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them
in silence. His round face looked puckered and anxious. He said, as
his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young
woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:
"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this
unhappy village?"
Juliette was praying. P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:
"Yes, my Father. The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left
their houses.... There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of
Madame Guyot. He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through
with one of their lances. He lies within there! May his soul rest
in peace!"
The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death.
Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:
"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am
going. A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord.
Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case
any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."
He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered
with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots
preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl
came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But
presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.
"_Ting!_"
They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter
morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the
bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving
fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through
their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked
before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered,
murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.
Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was
setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background
of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding
the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there
hung one star of blazing emerald.
When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended
upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian
watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the
low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the
ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an
archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered
in.
"_Ting!_"
As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway.
He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a
strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself,
then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes
questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the
lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said
to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his
companions:
"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here.
Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than
one light!"
Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a
sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down
one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at
this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved
forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine
bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own
boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère
Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her
Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.
A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement
windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were
broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off.
Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose
trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and
everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from
Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered
after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence
was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said
to her in a whisper:
"This is the Château Malakoff. Perhaps you remember?... And all
those broken bottles.... The soldiers drank the wine...."
Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the
Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went.
Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the
front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster
of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to
ascend.
They went upstairs.
The door of the death chamber stood open. From within, came the
murmuring sound of the priest's voice. Red-eyed servants knelt in
prayer about the threshold. The master of the house was just within
the door. His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry
and wrathful. Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned
her to kneel beside her:
"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit.... They were only married a year!"
Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers
vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber
pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present
when the priest elevated the Host. A little later she broke down
again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the
baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened
by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after
administering the Viaticum. And then in a gray pool of quiet that
ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with
astonishment and terror and anger in it:
"_Mon mari!... Mon mari!... Au secours!... Les Prussiens----_"
And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a
momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and
sorrowful. He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the
women. And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering
flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a
white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face
of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed,
clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace. Only two
great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman
glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering
candlelight. And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the
scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine
spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.
And then--they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered
gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence,
was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin
Boisset.
"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of
Seulvent. They will not return until the Prussians have left the
neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these
men when they are full of wine.... We will stop as we pass, and tell
them what has happened.... Then you had better come back with me to
my presbytery. The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be
coffee and bread!"
"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there
would not be even bread and coffee. But I have my hiding holes of
which I tell nobody. And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could
not say where they were!"
That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had
somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down. It stood
next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square
belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two
recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good
Curé's heart. After _déjeuner_ he explained that he was going to
visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether
they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.
He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand. P.
C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little
ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked
bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.
Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen.
The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered,
staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty
black. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand
with something shining in it. The piece of gold given him by
Juliette.
He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see
the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry
tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place. He followed, to
find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap
hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry--a ladder
that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against
the whitewashed wall.
"Couldn't I do that? I'm a good deal stronger than, you are....
Halloa!... Lucky I was there!"
P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who
had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder. He said quite
reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit
of timber:
"Why have you followed me? Is it that you wish to speak to me
privately? If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is
sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the
nerves!"
P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been
given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.
"But certainly she shall have a Mass. Though five francs will be
more than sufficient. Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find
the necessary francs of change. You see, we are poor in this
neighborhood ... it is to be expected!" The good Curé smiled, and
added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my
_confrères_--even richer than some of my superiors. Therefore, if
you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the
Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer
Mass." He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his
features. Describe his person, if you can!" ...
P. C. Breagh recalled and described. When he had done, the Curé
said, in a tone of quiet conviction:
"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is
not only my superior.... He ranks above the angels.... Monsieur has
spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"
Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C.
Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into
the worn flagstones. He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue
were stiff. The priest went on:
"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars. As a Catholic, Monsieur has
learned of him. But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur
does not know?... A year before his holy death.... Since it has
happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited
the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered.... He
has succored the wounded.... He has appeared, just as he was when
alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have
departed in joy and peace.... In the world this will not be
credited. It does not matter!... What matters is, that those who
perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of
desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now
dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on
behalf of souls.... He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that
smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure
that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven----"
He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was
unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started
on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:
"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!... How could I be
so forgetful!... No! it is not to be replaced against the wall. It
is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the
edge of that trap-door.... Since Monsieur has been favored with a
vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence.
Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and
then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"
And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came
back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic
wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet
slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.
It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and
sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom
of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning
sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed
it in.
"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle
of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.
"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in
the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the
church below him at the earliest break of day.
Said the Curé:
"My child, it was I. A member of my parish was dying--I came to the
church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle.... I
forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence
here had been betrayed!... But all is well! and a cart of brushwood
will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its
load when it is driven on. It is going to a farm near Audun--from
there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence
rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed. It is said
that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor,
now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan." He added as white teeth
flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully:
"You will please yourself as to serving again! You have already
suffered greatly for our country!"
The soldier said roughly:
"I would die for her with a good heart!... But I will not fight
again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold
and betrayed!"
"Well, well!... _Au revoir_, my child, and may Our Lord protect
you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down
the ladder. "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence,
and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke. The curls of vapor
can be seen rising between the shingles. I observed it when we had
workmen here in Spring!"
Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder,
unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear
bright autumn air.
"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped
to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust
where use did not maintain its brightness. "He was taken prisoner in
yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift
for himself, with others in the same condition. One of them--in
whose company this man was--had concealed a pistol, and had the
daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck--or General Moltke--I am
not sure which! But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all
those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were
massacred in cold blood. This man by a miracle--escaped!... How, I
know not! He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there
expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover
his resurrection from the grave."
They went back into the presbytery. The priest went to look for the
fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece. She came out
of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed
herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no
longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to
dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little
queenly head.
Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her
friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:
"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot
M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded.... See you well, I would like
to meet that man!"
"Why, Mademoiselle?"
"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"
He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood,
throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed
between their narrowed lids.
"See you well--if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to
the man who saved France!"
Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist
came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that
gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that
pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip
was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper
disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice
say with a sigh in it:
"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but
were!..."
She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the
amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw
thrust out savagely, she thought:
"There is something of my mother in me--more than a little! How
dared I scorn her--I, who can speak and look like this?" And she
repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I
but were!"
For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman
bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump
of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its
nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she
remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher
of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of
men.
This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her
earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.
Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly
wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by
their covert of black lashes.... Her will bent heavily on his,
weakened by his worship of her. In another instant he would have
asked what she wanted him to do.
But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy
stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been
drifting. In another moment the Curé came into the room. He had a
knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat
heavily. He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the
knots, and took out a little pile of silver:
"Here behold my savings bank! Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"
He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was
as earnest that the coins should not be given back.... But she could
not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:
"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the
health of your soul!"
Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his
cassock, and asked them:
"Where are you journeying together, my children? I have a reason for
wishing to know!"
He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of
that strange look Juliette had cast upon him. The young man
answered, glowing through his sunbrown:
"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"
The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots
clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:
"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more
'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and
folks by their right names!"
There was a terrible pause. Juliette was enduring agonies. The Curé
pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed
spectacles. Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:
"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old
friend's only son. She told me that when we were washing up the
coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there.... When the Prussians came
to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother. '_To
celebrate my marriage,_' she told me, '_because M. What's-his-name
was there!_'"
P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the
stomach. His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly.
His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was
utterance. "_Married!..._" kept on ticking inside his head.
"_Married!..._" and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper
of a tolling bell. "_You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the
time!_"
His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so
wooingly. It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath
their heavy fringes of black. The eyebrows were knitted, the pale
lips set rigidly. The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked,
plump and plain:
"You are really married? My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving
herself?"
Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and
raised clear, sorrowful eyes.
"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage. Now that I
have returned, I shall await my husband here in France. My father
esteemed him highly. He is M. Charles Tessier. He lives in the Rue
de Provence, in the town of Versailles."
Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined
to ask. We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle
had crashed into dust and brickbats. One glance at his face, sharp
as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and
sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought. But if he had
seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied
again, defiantly. Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed
so.... She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of
Charles Tessier. Ah, Heaven!... The thought was more unwelcome than
ever it had been.
Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave
young Englishman. Would he have been in such haste to break his
daughter's heart?... And--ah, Heaven!--again, if this burning of her
boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?
He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity. He was so
straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart. When he
had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette!
Juliette!..." When she had crept from under the bed the lance had
plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and
caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had
known a wonderful thrill....
"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to
his broad breast. Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly
bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been
taken by storm in those moments of desolation--to have dreamed since
then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!... If our
very own!... Never anyone's but yours...."?
Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts,
was she not now punished? She had dealt with her own slight arm the
blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his....
She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother;
never--against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial
affairs of a young French girl of good family--be hugged in that
rude, possessive, British way. But what loneliness, what terror,
what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded.... Besides,
she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier. A tepid future passed
by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her....
She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she
mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned
it, she would embrace such a future with resignation.... It flashed
upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future
be embraced, but the man....
"_Tear the picture.... Forget the dream!_" The words; of de
Bayard's letter came back to her.
Ah, well!--she had done with pictures and dreams.... For her,
realities. The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him
smashingly. She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered
to some leading question put by the Curé:
"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame. It would be
risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."
She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded. She bent
her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded
dignity:
"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable. I will accept his offer with
gratitude. When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will
thank him. Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."
She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected. For a
whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful
eyes.
She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout
person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them,
and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed.... The priest beckoned Breagh from the
study. They were going to make arrangements for the journey.
Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled
over the prone, abandoned head.... Madame was going to start early
to-morrow morning.... Allowing for the disorganization of the
railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same
day. The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her
waiting for him. Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous
reunion. Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of
St. Christopher, patron of all travelers. The first little male
cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would
naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.