“I leave her in your care for one hour. Bear in mind that you must die
sooner than let any one, no matter whom, come near the carriage!”
The major seized a handful of the lady’s diamonds, drew his sabre, and
violently battered those who seemed to him to be the bravest among the
sleepers. By this means he succeeded in rousing the gigantic grenadier
and a couple of men whose rank and regiment were undiscoverable.
“It is all up with us!” he cried.
“Of course it is,” returned the grenadier; “but that is all one to me.”
“Very well then, if die you must, isn’t it better to sell your life for
a pretty woman, and stand a chance of going back to France again?”
“I would rather go to sleep,” said one of the men, dropping down
into the snow; “and if you worry me again, major, I shall stick my
toasting-iron into your body.”
“What is it all about, sir?” asked the grenadier. “The man’s drunk. He
is a Parisian, and likes to lie in the lap of luxury.”
“You shall have these, good fellow,” said the major, holding out a
riviere of diamonds, “if you will follow me and fight like a madman. The
Russians are not ten minutes away; they have horses; we will march up to
the nearest battery and carry off two stout ones.”
“How about the sentinels, major?”
“One of us three--” he began; then he turned from the soldier and looked
at the aide-de-camp.--“You are coming, aren’t you, Hippolyte?”
Hippolyte nodded assent.
“One of us,” the major went on, “will look after the sentry. Besides,
perhaps those blessed Russians are also fast asleep.”
“All right, major; you are a good sort! But will you take me in your
carriage?” asked the grenadier.
“Yes, if you don’t leave your bones up yonder.--If I come to grief,
promise me, you two, that you will do everything in your power to save
the Countess.”
“All right,” said the grenadier.
They set out for the Russian lines, taking the direction of the
batteries that had so cruelly raked the mass of miserable creatures
huddled together by the river bank. A few minutes later the hoofs of two
galloping horses rang on the frozen snow, and the awakened battery fired
a volley that passed over the heads of the sleepers; the hoof-beats
rattled so fast on the iron ground that they sounded like the hammering
in a smithy. The generous aide-de-camp had fallen; the stalwart
grenadier had come off safe and sound; and Philip himself received
a bayonet thrust in the shoulder while defending his friend.
Notwithstanding his wound, he clung to his horse’s mane, and gripped him
with his knees so tightly that the animal was held as in a vise.
“God be praised!” cried the major, when he saw his soldier still on the
spot, and the carriage standing where he had left it.
“If you do the right thing by me, sir, you will get me the cross for
this. We have treated them to a sword dance to a pretty tune from the
rifle, eh?”
“We have done nothing yet! Let us put the horses in. Take hold of these
cords.”
“They are not long enough.”
“All right, grenadier, just go and overhaul those fellows sleeping
there; take their shawls, sheets, anything--”
“I say! the rascal is dead,” cried the grenadier, as he plundered the
first man who came to hand. “Why, they are all dead! how queer!”
“All of them?”
“Yes, every one. It looks as though the horseflesh _a la neige_ was
indigestible.”
Philip shuddered at the words. The night had grown twice as cold as
before.
“Great heaven! to lose her when I have saved her life a score of times
already.”
He shook the Countess, “Stephanie! Stephanie!” he cried.
She opened her eyes.
“We are saved, madame!”
“Saved!” she echoed, and fell back again.
The horses were harnessed after a fashion at last. The major held his
sabre in his unwounded hand, took the reins in the other, saw to his
pistols, and sprang on one of the horses, while the grenadier mounted
the other. The old sentinel had been pushed into the carriage, and lay
across the knees of the general and the Countess; his feet were frozen.
Urged on by blows from the flat of the sabre, the horses dragged the
carriage at a mad gallop down to the plain, where endless difficulties
awaited them. Before long it became almost impossible to advance without
crushing sleeping men, women, and even children at every step, all of
whom declined to stir when the grenadier awakened them. In vain M. de
Sucy looked for the track that the rearguard had cut through this dense
crowd of human beings; there was no more sign of their passage than the
wake of a ship in the sea. The horses could only move at a foot-pace,
and were stopped most frequently by soldiers, who threatened to kill
them.
“Do you mean to get there?” asked the grenadier.
“Yes, if it costs every drop of blood in my body! if it costs the whole
world!” the major answered.
“Forward, then!... You can’t have the omelette without breaking eggs.”
And the grenadier of the Garde urged on the horses over the prostrate
bodies, and upset the bivouacs; the blood-stained wheels ploughing that
field of faces left a double furrow of dead. But in justice it should be
said that he never ceased to thunder out his warning cry, “Carrion! look
out!”
“Poor wretches!” exclaimed the major.
“Bah! That way, or the cold, or the cannon!” said the grenadier, goading
on the horses with the point of his sword.
Then came the catastrophe, which must have happened sooner but for
miraculous good fortune; the carriage was overturned, and all further
progress was stopped at once.
“I expected as much!” exclaimed the imperturbable grenadier. “Oho! he is
dead!” he added, looking at his comrade.
“Poor Laurent!” said the major.
“Laurent! Wasn’t he in the Fifth Chasseurs?”
“Yes.”
“My own cousin.--Pshaw! this beastly life is not so pleasant that one
need be sorry for him as things go.”
But all this time the carriage lay overturned, and the horses were only
released after great and irreparable loss of time. The shock had been
so violent that the Countess had been awakened by it, and the subsequent
commotion aroused her from her stupor. She shook off the rugs and rose.
“Where are we, Philip?” she asked in musical tones, as she looked about
her.
“About five hundred paces from the bridge. We are just about to cross
the Beresina. When we are on the other side, Stephanie, I will not tease
you any more; I will let you go to sleep; we shall be in safety, we can
go on to Wilna in peace. God grant that you may never know what your
life has cost!”
“You are wounded!”
“A mere trifle.”
The hour of doom had come. The Russian cannon announced the day. The
Russians were in possession of Studzianka, and thence were raking the
plain with grapeshot; and by the first dim light of the dawn the major
saw two columns moving and forming above the heights. Then a cry of
horror went up from the crowd, and in a moment every one sprang to his
feet. Each instinctively felt his danger, and all made a rush for the
bridge, surging towards it like a wave.
Then the Russians came down upon them, swift as a conflagration. Men,
women, children, and horses all crowded towards the river. Luckily for
the major and the Countess, they were still at some distance from the
bank. General Eble had just set fire to the bridge on the other side;
but in spite of all the warnings given to those who rushed towards the
chance of salvation, not one among them could or would draw back. The
overladen bridge gave way, and not only so, the impetus of the frantic
living wave towards that fatal bank was such that a dense crowd of human
beings was thrust into the water as if by an avalanche. The sound of a
single human cry could not be distinguished; there was a dull crash as
if an enormous stone had fallen into the water--and the Beresina was
covered with corpses.
The violent recoil of those in front, striving to escape this death,
brought them into hideous collision with those behind then, who were
pressing towards the bank, and many were suffocated and crushed. The
Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The
horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed and
trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which eddied from
the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the grenadier.
They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human faces and
living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left the bank
of the Beresina clear for a few moments. The multitude had hurled
themselves back on the plain. Some few men sprang down from the banks
of the river, not so much with any hope of reaching the opposite shore,
which for them meant France, as from dread of the wastes of Siberia.
For some bold spirits despair became a panoply. An officer leaped from
hummock to hummock of ice, and reached the other shore; one of the
soldiers scrambled over miraculously on the piles of dead bodies and
drift ice. But the immense multitude left behind saw at last that the
Russians would not slaughter twenty thousand unarmed men, too numb
with the cold to attempt to resist them, and each awaited his fate
with dreadful apathy. By this time the major and his grenadier, the
old general and his wife, were left to themselves not very far from
the place where the bridge had been. All four stood dry-eyed and silent
among the heaps of dead. A few able-bodied men and one or two officers,
who had recovered all their energy at this crisis, gathered about them.
The group was sufficiently large; there were about fifty men all told.
A couple of hundred paces from them stood the wreck of the artillery
bridge, which had broken down the day before; the major saw this, and
“Let us make a raft!” he cried.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the whole group hurried
to the ruins of the bridge. A crowd of men began to pick up iron clamps
and to hunt for planks and ropes--for all the materials for a raft, in
short. A score of armed men and officers, under command of the major,
stood on guard to protect the workers from any desperate attempt on the
part of the multitude if they should guess their design. The longing for
freedom, which inspires prisoners to accomplish impossibilities, cannot
be compared with the hope which lent energy at that moment to these
forlorn Frenchmen.
“The Russians are upon us! Here are the Russians!” the guard shouted to
the workers.
The timbers creaked, the raft grew larger, stronger, and more
substantial. Generals, colonels, and common soldiers all alike bent
beneath the weight of wagon-wheels, chains, coils of rope, and planks of
timber; it was a modern realization of the building of Noah’s ark. The
young Countess, sitting by her husband’s side, looked on, regretful that
she could do nothing to aide the workers, though she helped to knot the
lengths of rope together.
At last the raft was finished. Forty men launched it out into the river,
while ten of the soldiers held the ropes that must keep it moored to
the shore. The moment that they saw their handiwork floating on
the Beresina, they sprang down onto it from the bank with callous
selfishness. The major, dreading the frenzy of the first rush, held back
Stephanie and the general; but a shudder ran through him when he saw the
landing place black with people, and men crowding down like playgoers
into the pit of a theatre.
“It was I who thought of the raft, you savages!” he cried. “I have saved
your lives, and you will not make room for me!”
A confused murmur was the only answer. The men at the edge took up stout
poles, trust them against the bank with all their might, so as to shove
the raft out and gain an impetus at its starting upon a journey across a
sea of floating ice and dead bodies towards the other shore.
“_Tonnerre de Dieu_! I will knock some of you off into the water if
you don’t make room for the major and his two companions,” shouted the
grenadier. He raised his sabre threateningly, delayed the departure, and
made the men stand closer together, in spite of threatening yells.
“I shall fall in!... I shall go overboard!...” his fellows shouted.
“Let us start! Put off!”
The major gazed with tearless eyes at the woman he loved; an impulse of
sublime resignation raised her eyes to heaven.
“To die with you!” she said.
In the situation of the folk upon the raft there was a certain comic
element. They might utter hideous yells, but not one of them dared to
oppose the grenadier, for they were packed together so tightly that
if one man were knocked down, the whole raft might capsize. At this
delicate crisis, a captain tried to rid himself of one of his neighbors;
the man saw the hostile intention of his officer, collared him, and
pitched him overboard. “Aha! The duck has a mind to drink. ... Over with
you!--There is room for two now!” he shouted. “Quick, major! throw your
little woman over, and come! Never mind that old dotard! he will drop
off to-morrow!”
“Be quick!” cried a voice, made up of a hundred voices.
“Come, major! Those fellows are making a fuss, and well they may.”
The Comte de Vandieres flung off his ragged blankets, and stood before
them in his general’s uniform.
“Let us save the Count,” said Philip.
Stephanie grasped his hand tightly in hers, flung her arms about, and
clasped him close in an agonized embrace.
“Farewell!” she said.
Then each knew the other’s thoughts. The Comte de Vandieres recovered
his energies and presence of mind sufficiently to jump on to the raft,
whither Stephanie followed him after one last look at Philip.
“Major, won’t you take my place? I do not care a straw for life; I have
neither a wife, nor child, nor mother belonging to me--”
“I give them into your charge,” cried the major, indicating the Count
and his wife.
“Be easy; I will take as much care of them as of the apple of my eye.”
Philip stood stock-still on the bank. The raft sped so violently towards
the opposite shore that it ran aground with a violent shock to all on
board. The Count, standing on the very edge, was shaken into the stream;
and as he fell, a mass of ice swept by and struck off his head, and sent
it flying like a ball.
“Hey! major!” shouted the grenadier.
“Farewell!” a woman’s voice called aloud.
An icy shiver ran through Philip de Sucy, and he dropped down where he
stood, overcome with cold and sorrow and weariness.
“My poor niece went out of her mind,” the doctor added after a brief
pause. “Ah! monsieur,” he went on, grasping M. d’Albon’s hand, “what
a fearful life for a poor little thing, so young, so delicate! An
unheard-of misfortune separated her from that grenadier of the Garde
(Fleuriot by name), and for two years she was dragged on after the army,
the laughing-stock of a rabble of outcasts. She went barefoot, I
heard, ill-clad, neglected, and starved for months at a time; sometimes
confined to a hospital, sometimes living like a hunted animal. God alone
knows all the misery which she endured, and yet she lives. She was shut
up in a madhouse in a little German town, while her relations, believing
her to be dead, were dividing her property here in France.
“In 1816 the grenadier Fleuriot recognized her in an inn in Strasbourg.
She had just managed to escape from captivity. Some peasants told him
that the Countess had lived for a whole month in a forest, and how that
they had tracked her and tried to catch her without success.
“I was at that time not many leagues from Strasbourg; and hearing the
talk about the girl in the wood, I wished to verify the strange facts
that had given rise to absurd stories. What was my feeling when I beheld
the Countess? Fleuriot told me all that he knew of the piteous story.
I took the poor fellow with my niece into Auvergne, and there I had the
misfortune to lose him. He had some ascendancy over Mme. de Vandieres.
He alone succeeded in persuading her to wear clothes; and in those days
her one word of human speech--_Farewell_--she seldom uttered. Fleuriot
set himself to the task of awakening certain associations; but there
he failed completely; he drew that one sorrowful word from her a little
more frequently, that was all. But the old grenadier could amuse her,
and devoted himself to playing with her, and through him I hoped; but--”
here Stephanie’s uncle broke off. After a moment he went on again.
“Here she has found another creature with whom she seems to have
an understanding--an idiot peasant girl, who once, in spite of her
plainness and imbecility, fell in love with a mason. The mason thought
of marrying her because she had a little bit of land, and for a whole
year poor Genevieve was the happiest of living creatures. She dressed in
her best, and danced on Sundays with Dallot; she understood love; there
was room for love in her heart and brain. But Dallot thought better of
it. He found another girl who had all her senses and rather more land
than Genevieve, and he forsook Genevieve for her. Then the poor thing
lost the little intelligence that love had developed in her; she can do
nothing now but cut grass and look after the cattle. My niece and the
poor girl are in some sort bound to each other by the invisible chain of
their common destiny, and by their madness due to the same cause. Just
come here a moment; look!” and Stephanie’s uncle led the Marquis d’Albon
to the window.
There, in fact, the magistrate beheld the pretty Countess sitting on the
ground at Genevieve’s knee, while the peasant girl was wholly absorbed
in combing out Stephanie’s long, black hair with a huge comb. The
Countess submitted herself to this, uttering low smothered cries that
expressed her enjoyment of the sensation of physical comfort. A shudder
ran through M. d’Albon as he saw her attitude of languid abandonment,
the animal supineness that revealed an utter lack of intelligence.
“Oh! Philip, Philip!” he cried, “past troubles are as nothing. Is it
quite hopeless?” he asked.
The doctor raised his eyes to heaven.
“Good-bye, monsieur,” said M. d’Albon, pressing the old man’s hand. “My
friend is expecting me; you will see him here before long.”
“Then it is Stephanie herself?” cried Sucy when the Marquis had spoken
the first few words. “Ah! until now I did not feel sure!” he added.
Tears filled the dark eyes that were wont to wear a stern expression.
“Yes; she is the Comtesse de Vandieres,” his friend replied.
The colonel started up, and hurriedly began to dress.
“Why, Philip!” cried the horrified magistrate. “Are you going mad?”
“I am quite well now,” said the colonel simply. “This news has soothed
all my bitterest grief; what pain could hurt me while I think of
Stephanie? I am going over to the Minorite convent, to see her and speak
to her, to restore her to health again. She is free; ah, surely, surely,
happiness will smile on us, or there is no Providence above. How can
you think she could hear my voice, poor Stephanie, and not recover her
reason?”
“She has seen you once already, and she did not recognize you,” the
magistrate answered gently, trying to suggest some wholesome fears to
this friend, whose hopes were visibly too high.
The colonel shuddered, but he began to smile again, with a slight
involuntary gesture of incredulity. Nobody ventured to oppose his plans,
and a few hours later he had taken up his abode in the old priory, to be
near the doctor and the Comtesse de Vandieres.
“Where is she?” he cried at once.
“Hush!” answered M. Fanjat, Stephanie’s uncle. “She is sleeping. Stay;
here she is.”
Philip saw the poor distraught sleeper crouching on a stone bench in
the sun. Her thick hair, straggling over her face, screened it from the
glare and heat; her arms dropped languidly to the earth; she lay at ease
as gracefully as a fawn, her feet tucked up beneath her; her bosom
rose and fell with her even breathing; there was the same transparent
whiteness as of porcelain in her skin and complexion that we so often
admire in children’s faces. Genevieve sat there motionless, holding a
spray that Stephanie doubtless had brought down from the top of one of
the tallest poplars; the idiot girl was waving the green branch above
her, driving away the flies from her sleeping companion, and gently
fanning her.
She stared at M. Fanjat and the colonel as they came up; then, like
a dumb animal that recognizes its master, she slowly turned her face
towards the countess, and watched over her as before, showing not
the slightest sign of intelligence or of astonishment. The air was
scorching. The glittering particles of the stone bench shone like sparks
of fire; the meadow sent up the quivering vapors that hover above
the grass and gleam like golden dust when they catch the light, but
Genevieve did not seem to feel the raging heat.
The colonel wrung M. Fanjat’s hands; the tears that gathered in
the soldier’s eyes stole down his cheeks, and fell on the grass at
Stephanie’s feet.
“Sir,” said her uncle, “for these two years my heart has been broken
daily. Before very long you will be as I am; if you do not weep, you
will not feel your anguish the less.”
“You have taken care of her!” said the colonel, and jealousy no less
than gratitude could be read in his eyes.
The two men understood one another. They grasped each other by the hand
again, and stood motionless, gazing in admiration at the serenity that
slumber had brought into the lovely face before them. Stephanie heaved
a sigh from time to time, and this sigh, that had all the appearance of
sensibility, made the unhappy colonel tremble with gladness.
“Alas!” M. Fanjat said gently, “do not deceive yourself, monsieur; as
you see her now, she is in full possession of such reason as she has.”
Those who have sat for whole hours absorbed in the delight of watching
over the slumber of some tenderly-beloved one, whose waking eyes will
smile for them, will doubtless understand the bliss and anguish that
shook the colonel. For him this slumber was an illusion, the waking must
be a kind of death, the most dreadful of all deaths.
Suddenly a kid frisked in two or three bounds towards the bench and
snuffed at Stephanie. The sound awakened her; she sprang lightly to her
feet without scaring away the capricious creature; but as soon as she
saw Philip she fled, followed by her four-footed playmate, to a thicket
of elder-trees; then she uttered a little cry like the note of a
startled wild bird, the same sound that the colonel had heard once
before near the grating, when the Countess appeared to M. d’Albon for
the first time. At length she climbed into a laburnum-tree, ensconced
herself in the feathery greenery, and peered out at the _strange man_
with as much interest as the most inquisitive nightingale in the forest.
“Farewell, farewell, farewell,” she said, but the soul sent no trace
of expression of feeling through the words, spoken with the careless
intonation of a bird’s notes.
“She does not know me!” the colonel exclaimed in despair. “Stephanie!
Here is Philip, your Philip!... Philip!” and the poor soldier went
towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the
Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her
eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and
thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough to bough with marvelous
dexterity.
“Do not follow her,” said M. Fanjat, addressing the colonel. “You would
arouse a feeling of aversion in her which might become insurmountable; I
will help you to make her acquaintance and to tame her. Sit down on the
bench. If you pay no heed whatever to her, poor child, it will not be
long before you will see her come nearer by degrees to look at you.”
“That _she_ should not know me; that she should fly from me!” the
colonel repeated, sitting down on a rustic bench and leaning his back
against a tree that overshadowed it.
He bowed his head. The doctor remained silent. Before very long the
Countess stole softly down from her high refuge in the spruce-fir,
flitting like a will-o’-the-wisp; for as the wind stirred the boughs,
she lent herself at times to the swaying movements of the trees. At
each branch she stopped and peered at the stranger; but as she saw him
sitting motionless, she at length jumped down to the grass, stood a
while, and came slowly across the meadow. When she took up her position
by a tree about ten paces from the bench, M. Fanjat spoke to the colonel
in a low voice.
“Feel in my pocket for some lumps of sugar,” he said, “and let her see
them, she will come; I willingly give up to you the pleasure of giving
her sweetmeats. She is passionately fond of sugar, and by that means you
will accustom her to come to you and to know you.”