infantry, running.
Alixe caught his arm, her head turned towards the road where the
infantry were crowding past at double-quick, enveloped in a
whirling torrent of red dust.
"There is a cart there," she said. "Oh, Jack, find it quickly!
The driver is on the seat--and I can't leave Sir Thorald."
In his amazement he stood hesitating, looking from the girl to
Sir Thorald; but she drew him to the edge of the thicket and
pointed to the road, crying, "Go! go!" and he stumbled down the
pasture slope to the edge of the road.
Past him plodded the red-legged infantry; he saw, through the
whirlwind of dust, the vague outlines of a tumbril and horse
standing below in the ditch, and he ran along the grassy
depression towards the vehicle. And now he saw the driver,
kneeling in the cart, his blue blouse a mass of blood, his
discoloured face staring out at the passing troops.
As he seized the horse's head and started up the slope again,
firing broke out among the thickets close at hand; the infantry
swung out to the west in a long sagging line; the chassepots
began banging right and left. For an instant he caught a glimpse
of cavalry riding hard across a bit of stubble--Uhlans he saw at
a glance--then the smoke hid them. But in that brief instant he
had seen, among the galloping cavalrymen, a mounted figure,
bareheaded, wearing a white shirt, and he knew that Rickerl was
riding for his life.
Sick at heart he peered into the straight, low rampart of smoke;
he watched the spirts of rifle-flame piercing it; he saw it turn
blacker when a cannon bellowed in the increasing din. The
infantry were lying down out there in the meadow; shadowy gray
forms passed, repassed, reeled, ran, dropped, and rose again.
Close at hand a long line of men lay flat on their bellies in the
wheat stubble. When each rifle spoke the smoke rippled through
the short wheat stalks or eddied and curled over the ground like
the gray foam of an outrushing surf.
He backed the horse and heavy cart, turned both, half blinded by
the rifle-smoke, and started up the incline. Two bullets,
speeding over the clover like singing bees, rang loudly on the
iron-bound cartwheels; the horse plunged and swerved, dragging
Jack with him, and the dead figure, kneeling in the cart, tumbled
over the tail-board with a grotesque wave of its stiffening
limbs. There it lay, sprawling in an impossible posture in the
ditch. A startled grasshopper alighted on its face, turned
around, crawled to the ear, and sat there.
And now the volley firing grew to a sustained crackle, through
which the single cannon boomed and boomed, hidden in the surging
smoke that rolled in waves, sinking, rising, like the waves of a
wind-whipped sea.
"Where are you, Alixe?" he shouted.
"Here! Hurry!"
She stood on the edge of the brier tangle as he laboured up the
slope with the horse and cart. Sir Thorald's breathing was
horrible to hear when they stooped and lifted him; Alixe was
crying. They laid him on the blood-soaked straw; Alixe crept in
beside him and took his head on her knees.
"To Morteyn?" whispered Jack. "Perhaps we can find a surgeon
nearer--"
"Oh, hurry!" she sobbed; and he climbed heavily to the seat and
started back towards the road.
The road was empty where he turned in out of the fields, but,
just above, he heard cannon thundering in the mist. As he drew in
the reins, undecided, the cannonade suddenly redoubled in fury;
the infantry fire blazed out with a new violence; above the
terrific blast he heard trumpets sounding, and beneath it he felt
the vibration of the earth; horses were neighing out beyond the
smoke; a thousand voices rose in a far, hoarse shout:
"Hurrah! Preussen!"
The Prussian cavalry were charging the cannon.
Suddenly he heard them close at hand; they loomed everywhere in
the smoke, they were among the infantry, among the cannoneers; a
tall rider in silver helmet and armour plunged out into the road
behind them, his horse staggered, trembled, then man and beast
collapsed in a shower of bullets. Others were coming, too,
galloping in through the grain stubble and thickets, shaking
their long, straight sabres, but the infantry chased them, and
fell upon them, clubbing, shooting, stabbing, pulling horses and
men to earth. The cannon, which had ceased, began again; the
infantry were cheering; trumpets blew persistently, faintly and
more faintly. In the road a big, bearded man was crawling on his
hands and knees away from a dead horse. His helmet fell off in
the dust.
Jack gathered the reins and called to the horse. As the heavy
cart moved off, the ground began to tremble again with the shock
of on-coming horses, and again, through the swelling tumult, he
caught the cry--
"Hurrah! Preussen!"
The Prussian cuirassiers were coming back.
"Is Sir Thorald dying?" he asked of Alixe; "can he live if I lash
the horse?"
"Look at him, Jack," she muttered.
"I see; he cannot live. I shall drive slowly. You--you are
wounded, are you? there--on the neck--"
"It is his blood on my breast."
XXI
THE WHITE CROSS
At ten o'clock that night Jack stepped from the ballroom to the
terrace of the Château Morteyn and listened to the distant murmur
of the river Lisse, below the meadow. The day of horror had ended
with a dozen dropping shots from the outposts, now lining the
banks of the Lisse from the Château de Nesville to Morteyn. The
French infantry had been pouring into Morteyn since late
afternoon; they had entered the park when he entered, driving his
tumbril with its blood-stained burden; they had turned the river
into a moat, the meadow into an earthwork, the Château itself
into a fortress.
On the concrete terrace beside him a gatling-gun glimmered in the
starlight; sentinels leaned on their elbows, sprawling across the
parapets; shadowy ranks of sleeping men lay among the shrubbery
below, white-faced, exhausted, motionless.
There were low voices from the darkened ballroom, the stir and
tinkle of spurred boots, the ring of sabres. Out in the hard
macadamized road, cannon were passing into the park by the iron
gate; beyond the road masses of men moved in the starlight.
After a moment Jack turned away and entered the house. For the
hundredth time he mounted the stairs to Lorraine's bedroom door
and listened, holding his breath. He heard nothing--not a
cry--not a sob. It had been so from the first, when he had told
her that her father lay dead somewhere in the forest of Morteyn.
She had said nothing--she went to her room and sat down on the
bed, white and still. Sir Thorald lay in the next room, breathing
deeply. Alixe was kneeling beside him, crying silently.
Twice a surgeon from an infantry regiment had come and gone away
after a glance at Sir Thorald. A captain came later and asked for
a Sister of Mercy.
"She can't go," said Jack, in a low voice. But little Alixe rose,
still crying, and followed the captain to the stables, where a
dozen mangled soldiers lay in the straw and hay.
It was midnight when she returned to find Jack standing beside
Sir Thorald in the dark. When he saw it was Alixe he led her
gently into the hall.
"He is conscious now; I will call you when the time comes. Go
into that room--Lorraine is there, alone. Ah, go, Alixe; it is
charity!--and you wear the white cross--"
"It is dyed scarlet," she whispered through her tears.
He returned to Sir Thorald, who lay moving his restless hands
over the sheets and turning his head constantly from side to
side.
"Go on," said Jack; "finish what you were saying."
"Will she come?"
"Yes--in time."
Sir Thorald relapsed into a rambling, monotonous account of some
military movement near Wissembourg until Jack spoke again:
"Yes--I know; tell me about Alixe."
"Yes--Alixe," muttered Sir Thorald--"is she here? I was wrong; I
saw her at Cologne; that was all, Jack--nothing more."
"There is more," said Jack; "tell me."
"Yes, there is more. I saw that--that she loved me. There was a
scene--I am not always a beast--I tried not to be. Then--then I
found that there was nothing left but to go away--somewhere--and
live--without her. It was too late. She knew it--"
"Go on," said Jack.
Suddenly Sir Thorald's voice grew clear.
"Can't you understand?" he asked; "I damned both our souls. She
is buying hers back with tears and blood--with the white cross on
her heart and death in her eyes! And I am dying here--and she's
to drag out the years afterwards--"
He choked; Jack watched him quietly.
Sir Thorald turned his head to him when the coughing ceased.
"She went with a field ambulance; I went, too. I was shot below
that vineyard. They told her; that is all. Am I dying?"
Jack did not answer.
"Will you write to Molly?" asked Sir Thorald, drowsily.
"Yes. God help you, Sir Thorald."
"Who cares?" muttered Sir Thorald. "I'm a beast--a dying beast.
May I see Alixe?"
"Yes."
"Then tell her to come--now. Soon I'll wish to be alone; that's
the way beasts die--alone."
He rambled on again about a battle somewhere in the south, and
Jack went to the door and called, "Alixe!"
She came, pallid and weeping, carrying a lighted candle.
Jack took it from her hand and blew out the flame.
"They won't let us have a light; they fear bombardment. Go in
now."
"Is he dying?"
"God knows."
"God?" repeated Alixe.
Jack bent and touched the child's forehead with his lips.
"Pray for him," he said; "I shall write his wife to-night."
Alixe went in to the bedside to kneel again and buy back two
souls with the agony of her child's heart.
"Pray," she said to Sir Thorald.
"Pray," he repeated.
Jack closed the door.
Up and down the dark hall he wandered, pausing at times to listen
to some far rifle-shot and the answering fusillade along the
picket-line. Once he stopped an officer on the stairway and asked
for a priest, but, remembering that Sir Thorald was Protestant,
turned away with a vague apology and resumed his objectless
wandering.
At times he fancied he heard cannon, so far away that nothing of
sound remained, only a faint jar on the night air. Twice he
looked from the window over the vast black forest, thinking of
the dead man lying there alone. And then he longed to go to
Lorraine; he felt that he must touch her, that his hand on hers
might help her somehow.
At last, deadly weary, he sat down on the stairs by her door to
try to think out the problems that to-morrow would bring.
His aunt and uncle had gone on to Paris; Lorraine's father was
dead and her home had been turned into a fort. Saint-Lys was
heavily occupied by the Germans, and they held the railroad also
in their possession. It seemed out of the question to stay in
Morteyn with Lorraine, for an assault on the Château was
imminent. How could he get her to Paris? That was the only place
for her now.
He thought, too, of his own danger from the Uhlans. He had told
Lorraine, partly because he wished her to understand their
position, partly because the story of his capture, trial, and
escape led up to the tragedy that he scarcely knew how to break
to her. But he had done it, and she, pale as death, had gone
silently to her room, motioning him away as he stood awkwardly at
the door.
That last glimpse of the room remained in his mind, it
obliterated everything else at moments--Lorraine sitting on her
bedside, her blue eyes vacant, her face whiter than the pillows.
And so he sat there on the stairs, the dawn creeping into the
hallway; and his eyes never left the panels of her door. There
was not a sound from within. This for a while frightened him, and
again and again he started impulsively towards the door, only to
turn back again and watch there in the coming dawn. Presently he
remembered that dawn might bring an attack on the Château, and he
rose and hurried down-stairs to the terrace where a crowd of
officers stood watching the woods through their night-glasses.
The general impression among them was that there might be an
attack. They yawned and smoked and studied the woods, but they
were polite, and answered all his questions with a courteous
light-heartedness that jarred on him. He glanced for a moment at
the infantry, now moving across the meadow towards the river; he
saw troops standing at ease along the park wall, troops sitting
in long ranks in the vegetable garden, troops passing the
stables, carrying pickaxes and wheeling wheelbarrows piled with
empty canvas sacks.
Sleepy-eyed boyish soldiers of the artillery were harnessing the
battery horses, rubbing them down, bathing wounded limbs or
braiding the tails. The farrier was shoeing a great black horse,
who turned its gentle eyes towards the hay-bales piled in front
of the stable. One or two slim officers, in pale-blue fur-edged
pelisses, strolled among the trampled flower-beds, smoking cigars
and watching a line of men shovelling earth into canvas sacks.
The odour of soup was in the air; the kitchen echoed with the din
of pots and pans. Outside, too, the camp-kettles were steaming
and the rattle of gammels came across the lawn.
"Who is in command here?" asked Jack, turning to a handsome
dragoon officer who stood leaning on his sabre, the horse-hair
crinière blowing about his helmet.
"Why, General Farron!" said the officer in surprise.
"Farron!" repeated Jack; "is he back from Africa, here in
France--here at Morteyn?"
"He is at the Château de Nesville," said the officer, smiling.
"You seem to know him, monsieur."
"Indeed I do," said Jack, warmly. "Do you think he will come
here?"
"I suppose so. Shall I send you word when he arrives?"
Another officer came up, a general, white-haired and sombre.
"Is this the Vicomte de Morteyn?" he asked, looking at Jack.
"His nephew; the vicomte has gone to Paris. My name is Marche,"
said Jack.
The general saluted him; Jack bowed.
"I regret the military necessity of occupying the Château; the
government will indemnify Monsieur le Vicomte--"
Jack held up his hand: "My uncle is an old soldier of France--the
government is welcome; I bid you welcome in the name of the
Vicomte de Morteyn."
The old general flushed and bowed deeply.
"I thank you in the name of the government. Blood will tell. It
is easy, Monsieur Marche, to see that you are the nephew of the
Vicomte de Morteyn."
"Monsieur Marche," said the young dragoon officer, respectfully,
"is a friend of General Farron."
"I had the honour to be attached as correspondent to his
staff--in Oran," said Jack.
The old general held out his hand with a gesture entirely
charming.
"I envy General Farron your friendship," he said. "I had a
son--perhaps your age. He died--yesterday." After a silence, he
said: "There are ladies in the Château?"
"Yes," replied Jack, soberly.
The general turned with a gesture towards the woods. "It is too
late to move them; we are, it appears, fairly well walled in. The
cellar, in case of bombardment, is the best you can do for them.
How many are there?"
"Two, general. One is a Sister of Mercy."
Other officers began to gather on the terrace, glasses
persistently focussed on the nearer woods. Somebody called to an
officer below the terrace to hurry the cannon.
Jack made his way through the throng of officers to the stairs,
mounted them, and knocked at Lorraine's door.
"Is it you--Jack?"
"Yes."
"Come."
He went in.
Lorraine lay on the bed, quiet and pale; it startled him to see
her so calm. For an instant he hesitated on the threshold, then
went slowly to the bedside. She held out one hand; he took it.
"I cannot cry," she said; "I cannot. Sit beside me, Jack. Listen:
I am wicked--I have not a single tear for my father. I have been
here--so--all night long. I prayed to weep; I cannot. I
understand he is dead--that I shall never again wait for him,
watch at his door in the turret, dream he is calling me; I
understand that he will never call me again--never again--never.
And I cannot weep. Do you hate me? I am tired--so tired, like a
child--very young."
She raised her other hand and laid it in his. "I need you," she
said; "I am too tired, too young, to be so alone. It is myself I
suffer for; think, Jack, myself, in such a moment. I am selfish,
I know it. Oh, if I could weep now! Why can I not? I loved my
father. And now I can only think of his little machines in the
turret and his balloon, and--oh!--I only remember the long days
of my life when I waited on the turret stairs hoping he would
come out, dreaming he would come some day and take me in his arms
and kiss me and hold me close, as I am to you. And now he never
will. And I waited all my life!"
"Hush!" he whispered, touching her hair; "you are feverish."
Her head was pressed close to him; his arms held her tightly; she
sighed like a restless child.
"Never again--never--for he is dead. And yet I could have lived
forever, waiting for him on the turret stairs. Do you understand?"
Holding her strained to his breast he trembled at the fierce
hopelessness in her voice. In a moment he recognized that a
crisis was coming; that she was utterly irresponsible, utterly
beyond reasoning. Like a spectre her loveless childhood had risen
and confronted her; and now that there was no longer even hope,
she had turned desperately upon herself with the blank despair of
a wounded animal. End it all!--that was her one impulse. He felt
it already taking shape; she shivered in his arms.
"But there is a God--" he began, fearfully.
She looked up at him with vacant eyes, hot and burning.
He tried again: "I love you, Lorraine--"
Her straight brows knitted and she struggled to free herself.
"Let me go!" she whispered. "I do not wish to live--I can't!--I
can't!"
Then he played his last card, and, holding her close, looked
straight into her eyes.
"France needs us all," he said.
She grew quiet. Suddenly the warm blood dyed her cheeks. Then,
drop by drop, the tears came; her sweet face, wet and flushed,
nestled quietly close to his own face.
"We will both live for that," he said; "we will do what we can."
For an hour she lay sobbing her heart out in his arms; and when
she was quiet at last he told her how the land lay trembling
under the invasion, how their armies had struggled and dwindled
and lost ground, how France, humbled, drenched with blood and
tears, still stood upright calling to her children. He spoke of
the dead, the dying, the mutilated creatures gasping out their
souls in the ditches.
"Life is worth living," he said. "If our place is not in the
field with the wounded, not in the hospital, not in the prisons
where these boys are herded like diseased cattle, then it is
perhaps at the shrine's foot. Pray for France, Lorraine, pray and
work, for there is work to do."
"There is work; we will go together," she whispered.
"Yes, together. Perhaps we can help a little. Your father, when
he died, had the steel box with him. Lorraine, when he is found
and is laid to rest, we will take that box to the French lines.
The secret must belong to France!"
She was eager enough now; she sat up on the bed and listened
with bright, wet eyes while he told her what they two might do
for her land of France.
"Dear--dear Jack!" she cried, softly.
But he knew that it was not the love of a maid for a man that
parted her lips; it was the love of the land, of her land of
Lorraine, that fierce, passionate love of soil that had at last
blazed up, purified in the long years of a loveless life. All
that she had felt for her father turned to a burning thrill for
her country. It is such moments that make children defenders of
barricades, that make devils or saints of the innocent. The maid
that rode in mail, crowned, holding aloft the banner of the
fleur-de-lys, died at the stake; her ashes were the ashes of a
saint. The maid who flung her bullets from the barricade, who
carried a dagger to the Rue Haxo, who spat in the faces of the
line when they shoved her to the wall in the Luxembourg, died too
for France. Her soul is the soul of a martyr; but all martyrs are
not saints.
For another hour they sat there, planning, devising, eager to
begin their predestined work. They spoke of the dead, too, and
Lorraine wept at last for her father.
"There was a Sister of Mercy here," she said; "I saw her. I could
not speak to her. Later I knew it was Alixe. You called her?"
"Yes."
"Where is she?"
"Shall I speak to her?"
He went out into the hall and tapped at the door of the next
room.
"Alixe?"
"Yes--Jack."
He entered.
Sir Thorald lay very still under the sheets, the crucifix on his
breast. At first Jack thought he was dead, but the slight motion
of the chest under the sheets reassured him. He turned to Alixe:
"Go for a minute and comfort Lorraine," he whispered. "Go, my
child."
"I--I cannot--"
"Go," said Sir Thorald, in a distinct voice.
When she had gone, Jack bent over Sir Thorald. A great pity
filled him, and he touched the half-opened hand with his own.
Sir Thorald looked up at him wistfully.
"I am not worth it," he said.
"Yes, we all are worth it."
"I am not," gasped Sir Thorald. "Jack, you are good. Do you
believe, at least, that I loved her?"
"Yes, if you say so."
"I do--in the shadow of death."
Jack was silent.
"I never loved--before," said Sir Thorald.
In the stillness that followed Jack tried to comprehend the good
or evil in this stricken man. He could not; he only knew that a
great love that a man might bear a woman made necessary a great
sacrifice if that love were unlawful. The greater the love the
more certain the sacrifice--self-sacrifice on the altar of
unselfish love, for there is no other kind of love that man may
bear for woman.
It wearied Jack to try to think it out. He could not; he only
knew that it was not his to judge or to condemn.
"Will you give me your hand?" asked Sir Thorald.
Jack laid his hand in the other's feverish one.
"Don't call her," he said, distinctly; "I am dying."
Presently he withdrew his hand and turned his face to the wall.
For a long time Jack sat there, waiting. At last he spoke: "Sir
Thorald?"
But Sir Thorald had been dead for an hour.
When Alixe entered Jack took her slim, childish hands and looked
into her eyes. She understood and went to her dead, laying down
her tired little head on the sheeted breast.
XXII
A DOOR IS LOCKED
Lorraine stood on the terrace beside the brass gatling-gun, both
hands holding to Jack's arm, watching the soldiers stuffing the
windows of the Château with mattresses, quilts, and bedding of
all kinds.
A stream of engineers was issuing from the hallway, carrying
tables, chairs, barrels, and chests to the garden below, where
other soldiers picked them up and bore them across the lawn to
the rear of the house.
"They are piling all the furniture they can get against the gate
in the park wall," said Jack; "come out to the kitchen-garden."
She went with him, still holding to his arm. Across the vegetable
garden a barricade of furniture--sofas, chairs, and wardrobes--lay
piled against the wooden gate of the high stone wall. Engineers were
piercing the wall with crowbars and pickaxes, loosening the cement,
dragging out huge blocks of stone to make embrasures for three cannon
that stood with their limbers among the broken bell-glasses and
cucumber-frames in the garden.
A ladder lay against the wall, and on it was perched an officer,
who rested his field-glasses across the tiled top and stood
studying the woods. Below him a general and half a dozen
officers watched the engineers hacking at the wall; a long,
double line of infantry crouched behind them, the bugler
kneeling, glancing anxiously at his captain, who stood talking to
a fat sub-officer in capote and boots.
Artillerymen were gathered about the ammunition-chests, opening
the lids and carrying shell and shrapnel to the wall; the
balconies of the Château were piled up with breastworks of rugs,
boxes, and sacks of earth. Here and there a rifleman stood, his
chassepot resting on the iron railing, his face turned towards
the woods.
"They are coming," said a soldier, calling back to a comrade, who
only laughed and passed on towards the kitchen, loaded down with
sacks of flour.
A restless movement passed through the kneeling battalion of
infantry.
"Fiche moi la paix, hein!" muttered a lieutenant, looking
resentfully at a gossiping farrier. Another lieutenant drew his
sword, and wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket.
"Are they coming?" asked Lorraine.
"I don't know. Watch that officer on the wall. He seems to see
nothing yet. Don't you think you had better go to the rear of the
house now?"
"No, not unless you do."
"I will, then."
"No, stay here. I am not afraid. Where is Alixe?"