Old PÈre Bonot, sunning himself before the doors of a cafÉ by the minster, held the Courrier du Bas-Rhin in his hand, and vouchsafed to Rosenbad, the brewer, and to Hummel, the vintner, such particulars of the forthcoming wedding as he found to be good. A glass of coffee stood at PÈre Bonot’s elbow; his blue spectacles rested high upon a forehead where no wrinkles sat; the smoke from his cigarette hung in little white clouds about his iron-grey hair. He sat before the great cathedral of Strasburg; but the paper and its words carried him away to a little village of the mountains where, forty years ago, he had knelt at the altar with Henriette at his side, and an old priest had blessed him, and he had gone out to the sunny vineyards, hand in hand with his girl-wife to their home in a forest of the Vosges. There were tears in old Bonot’s eyes when he took up the Courrier again. “Nevertheless, my friends,” said he, covering his retreat with a great show of folding the paper and setting his glasses, “nevertheless—her mother was a French woman! Marry the devil to a good girl—and, as the saying goes, there is no more devil. I remember Marie Douay—twenty, twenty-two years ago. I saw her at GÖrsdorf with Madame HÉlÈne, a little brunette, always gay, always laughing; a bird to cage in Paris; a bird of the gardens and not of the mountains. When she married the Englishman, milord Hamilton, who had lived for two years in the Broglie here, was it for me to be surprised? Nom d’un gaillard, I was not surprised at all. The eagle to the mountains, the gold-breast to the cage. Certainly we were too sleepy for Marie Douay. She went to London with milord—et aprÈs—” He slapped the paper as though all were settled; but Rosenbad, the fat German brewer, took his pipe from his mouth and chuckled with a deep guttural note. “The aprÈs was Mademoiselle Beatrix—hein?” said he. “There were no more aprÈs’s, friend Bonot? That is for by-and-by—when the priest lÀ-bas is forgotten.” Old Hummel, the vintner, shook his head. “These things bring the white hairs,” he exclaimed dolefully; “when you are sixty you should not go to weddings or to funerals. I have seven children, and the priests are always in my house. Next week, the AbbÉ Colot baptises my tenth grandchild. When I see a lad at the altar I say to myself, ‘By-and-by he will drink his beer at the Stadt Paris, and will be in no hurry to go home again.’ I do not wish to look through the window while another man dances. If I cannot dance myself, I will sit here and forget the days when I could. Ah—that it should be so many years ago!” He struck a mournful note, a discord upon that sunny morning of July when there was a sky of azure above the minster spire of Strasburg, and some of the glory of summer hovered even in the well of her narrow streets. Old PÈre Bonot, called back again in thought to the village of the mountains, closed his eyes and listened to the musical bells pealing now in many a tower and steeple. By here and there, groups of well-dressed citizens crossed the open space before the western door of the vast church and passed from the sunshine to the soft lights of green, of red, of gold, of purple, which fell upon the pavements of the dim, mysterious aisles. Ever and anon, a carriage clattered over the flags, and men in gaudy uniforms, the white and silver of the cuirassiers, the green of the Empress’s dragoons, the blue of the lancers, added their gilt of colour to the swelling throngs. It was a soldier’s wedding, Strasburg said, and you must search many a city of Europe before you would find as pretty a bride as the stately English girl who went to the altar that morning, or a better lancer than Edmond Lefort, who was to take Beatrix Hamilton to the mountains presently. The bells rang in the steeples; the people gathered in the minster square and at the great western doors of the cathedral. Many were peasants, clattering in their sabots, peasants come down from the vineyards to witness the marriage of the grandchild of one whom they and their fathers before them had held in honour—that servant of charity and of love, HÉlÈne, Countess of GÖrsdorf. Flowers they carried to scatter upon the path which the mistress of their affections must tread; and those that had no flowers gave laughter and merry tongues, and it may even be a prayer, for the English girl who was Strasburg’s bride that day. And side by side with them were the louts of the hills, the vignerons, the moissonneurs, men of field and farm and orchard, red-cheeked all, with spotless blouses, and many a bon mot, and many a whisper of other marriages that might be when the harvesting was done. Such a crowd had not gathered at the church doors for twenty years, the people said. But then—it was Madame HÉlÈne’s grandchild. Old PÈre Bonot watched the people, and the smile came back to his contented face. “It is forty years ago,” he said, “forty to a day, ma foi. The seventh of July—” “Come, then—” interrupted Hummel, the melancholy vintner, “many things will happen to us before the seventh of July, mon vieux. The day is Tuesday, and Sunday was the third. It would be the fifth if I can add three and two.” Old Bonot assented grudgingly. “I married Henriette at Reichshoffen on the seventh day of July in the year 1830. To-day is the fifth then, and the year is 1870. It was on the twenty-fifth day of the month that Charles the Tenth signed the five ordinances which cost him his throne. On the next day le roi Guillaume came to the throne of England. Ah, mes enfants, the things that forty years can teach us, the joys we can forget, the griefs we can suffer. And there is always death—always, always—” He was thinking of little Henriette and the place where she slept in the green valley of Reichshoffen; but Rosenbad, the merry brewer, was all eyes for the wedding and the great throngs then crossing the square. “Oh! but you are gay this morning, old Bonot,” said he. “I shall go and tell them that there is a skeleton for their feast—the man in black who says that the bell can toll sometimes. Is not he a proper fellow to make their wine sour! And he has children of his own!” The vintner took up his long glass of Munich beer, and chimed in with his old complaint. “I will be as gay as ten grandchildren will let me—for the sake of the little English girl. Afterwards I must go home. PÈre Bonot shall call for some more beer and remember that we are Germans—” He spoke jestingly, but the Frenchman was up in arms in a moment. “Not so,” he cried fiercely. “I am the servant of my Emperor, and of no other. As for your beer, it is the drink of louts. I give it to my pigs. When the King of Prussia is crowned in the minster—I will drink your beer on that day.” He hammered upon the table with a blow which shook the glasses and brought a waiter hurrying to the place. But while his anger was still young, a great sound of cheering broke upon their ears, and all in the cafÉ stood up to see a great family coach, drawn by a pair of staid grey horses, roll in leisured dignity across the square. Within the coach there sat an old lady with hair as white as silver, and hollowed cheeks and kindly blue eyes, and such a nobility of manner and unassumed graciousness, that all the gentlest gifts of motherhood seemed united in her. “Wait—wait! there is the Countess herself with Mademoiselle Beatrix by her side. Sac À papier!—he is lucky, the lancer. I would even forget that I have seven—” “She has no eyes for winter, friend Hummel. They say that the English are an ugly nation, but, ma foi, there is one to give them the lie. And the lancer—there will be no King of Prussia in Strasburg while we have men like that. Mon Dieu—what shoulders!” A tremendous cheer greeted the three occupants of the old-world coach. HÉlÈne, Countess of GÖrsdorf, leant back upon the cushions of yellow satin, and there were tears of gladness in her eyes. Mademoiselle Beatrix, as the people called the English girl, looked neither to the right nor to the left, but timidly into the eyes of the young officer of lancers who sat before her, and whose blue uniform and scarlet breeches were a feast of colour in the gloom of the cathedral square. All that the peasants said of her was admitted readily by maturer critics. A brunette, she had nevertheless the blue eyes of the Saxon. Possessed of no particular features that made for any style of beauty, yet there was a winning sweetness of face and of expression which communicated itself instantly, and was not to be resisted. And she was Madame HÉlÈne’s grandchild! Strasburg asked no more even from the wife of one of the best of her soldiers. The carriage rolled by; the sun shone generously upon the glittering habiliments of the lancer, and upon the childish face of his English wife. Madame HÉlÈne’s white hairs were as threads of silver. In the morning light, the tears upon her cheek sparkled as drops of golden dew. They were going to leave her alone at last—those children of hers; alone in the great house, the home she had loved; in the city of her girlhood and the beloved sanctuary of maternity. She said that God had willed it so; and there was a prayer in her heart that the years of her loneliness might be few. Old PÈre Bonot, standing at the very edge of the causeway, raised his hat as the carriage passed, and when he cried “God bless them!” it may be that Madame HÉlÈne’s prayer was echoed unconsciously by him, and that he thought of a distant valley in the mountains, and of one who slept there, and of the precious years, so quick to pass, when the first and last words of his happy days had been spoken by the child-wife who had loved him. “Henriette—Henriette—I remember always!” So does Death ride upon the coach of Life—and so, in that sunny city of Strasburg, where the bells rang a merry note, and the people feasted, and the old cathedral trembled to the swelling notes of its mighty organ, were there those who thought of the aftermath of years and of the hands for ever still. And this thought they remembered at a later day, so soon to come, when the thunder of the guns made music for their ears, and the priests who had lifted their hands to bless the living went out to the homes of the dying and the dead.
CHAPTER II
AT THE PLACE KLEBER There had been a vast throng at the cathedral, but when the service was done, and the organist had played Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as a tribute to the English bride, and the congregation streamed again through the great western doors, only the very privileged and those who claimed some kinship with Madame HÉlÈne were invited to her great house on the Place Kleber. “It is a family wedding,” the old lady had said. “I have known Edmond so long that he is as my own son. Beatrix is more than a daughter to me. I do not want the whole world to see my tears. We will be alone my children—and I—when that ‘good-bye’ is said.” Such was her resolution, but the heart prevailing over the will, many persuaded her and claimed kinship with the house of GÖrsdorf; and there were others, portly canons from the minster, sleek presbyters from the Lutheran churches, officers of the garrison, the mayor of the city—even the governor, the great General Uhrich himself, with his splendid cocked hat and his dainty “imperial,” and his glory in the city of Strasburg and her wondrous past. All these came to felicitate the young people; all remembered that it was a soldier’s wedding. The people declared that an army had gone to the Place Kleber. Lancers in their light blue tunics, with a word of regret for the kurtkas they had lost last year; hussars, whose spurs clattered over the splendid parquet flooring of the salon; cuirassiers, whose breastplates shone as silver; officers of Turcos fresh from Africa; gunners, engineers—a very deputation from that glorious army of France in which, Beatrix said, in her own pretty way, she had now a place. Henceforth, all that concerned the army of France must be dear to her. For France had given her Edmond—and she was his wife. The day had been as a day of dreams to her. Now that it was nearly done, and she stood at grandmÈre HÉlÈne’s side in the great room of the old house, she had but few memories of all its momentous happenings. She knew not why—but yesterday seemed as a day of remote years. She could recollect waking that morning and hearing the voice of old HÉlÈne, who kissed her many times, and seemed already to be saying “good-bye.” She remembered her clumsiness when she had put on her splendid dress, and the coiffeur had come to weave the sprays of blossom into her rebellious hair; how her hands had trembled when she had clasped the diamond bracelet which was Edmond’s gift to her! And afterwards—what a whirl of sights and sounds and of familiar faces! “Felicitations!” All the city, surely, had come to the Place Kleber with that word on its lips. Men and women, friends and strangers, they had striven one with another to be the first in kindnesses to Strasburg’s guest, the daughter of Madame HÉlÈne’s daughter, the wife of one of the best of their soldiers. She asked herself if this was not, in one moment, the compensation for a girlhood which had earned many compensations; for a destiny which had bequeathed to her but a fitful memory of her father’s face, and had left her motherless when first she had learned to read the book of life through her mother’s eyes. What a pride of happiness that the bells should ring and the city should feast for her sake! She was no longer alone in the world, then. Ever the words “wife, you are his wife” echoed in her ears above the buzz of talk and the noises of the street without. Some change, indefinite, exquisite, seemed wrought within her mind. She heard no other voice but this—the voice of her heart telling her that the years of girlhood were for ever passed. She saw the future as through a mist of glad tears. The figures about her were shadowy figures moving, as it were, in some room of her dreams. Friends held her hand and spoke to her of the great ceremony in the cathedral. She answered them; yet knew not what she said. They called her “Madame Lefort.” How odd it seemed! “Madame, Madame!” She was Beatrix Hamilton no more. The hour had placed a great gulf between her and the old time. She did not mourn her girlhood nor regret it. Notwithstanding Madame HÉlÈne’s scruples, it was a brilliant gathering. All Strasburg bore witness to that. The city made the success of it an affair of its own, and sent a guard of honour to the Place Kleber, and the lancers’ band to play all the afternoon before the great house. AbbÉs and canons, generals and colonels raised their glasses and nodded their heads to the rhythm of the music. Sleeker Lutherans found dark corners wherein they could anticipate hunger without observation. Social leaders scanned the bride’s dress through critical glasses, and admitted that it was trÈs bien. “Her father was an English artist, hein? She has ideas, and they will help her by-and-by. If she were not so tall!—how can one be anything but gauche with a figure like that? And she wants style; certainly, she has a pretty gown, and that is something.” The old lady who spoke, a wizened dame, who had buried two husbands, raised her pince-nez and appealed for assent to a fat abbÉ who held a glass of sparkling wine in his hand. But the abbÉ answered her with a perpetual smile, and a voice which repeated again and again— “Ah, how pretty she is—how pretty!” Other men took up her cause and pleaded it with courage. Women assented grudgingly, and gathered together in shaded alcoves to remind each other of the mystery which had attended the life of her father, Sir Richard Hamilton. He had been a monster, as tradition said; yet few knew more or could add to the scant particulars which served for gossip in the salons of the city. They loved the suggestion of a scandal—as all the world loves it—these jewelled crones of Strasburg, and they feasted upon it and found it to be good, and sought therein a recompense for a beauty they could but half deny, and for a charm to which they would not submit. Beatrix herself, standing by her husband’s side, heard none of these words. When she could forget the past and the future, and remember where she was and what the day meant to her, it was a pleasure to see how many of her friends had come to the old house on the Place Kleber. Colot, the aged abbÉ, who loved her as a father; the merry General de Failly, who had sworn to make a little Frenchwoman of her; pretty gossiping little ThÉrÈse Lavencourt, who had schemed so incessantly to bring Edmond to Strasburg; Georgine, the friend of her girlhood, who thought so often of the young Englishman, Brandon North. Where was Brandon now, she asked? She saw him alone near the long windows of the balcony. Why was he not at Georgine’s side? He had been a year in Strasburg and yet had found no eyes to see how pretty Georgine was. That must be her business by-and-by when she had a house of her own, Beatrix thought. She realised her friendship for one of her own countrymen in that hour. Great as was the kindness which these people of Strasburg showed her, nevertheless she was a stranger among them. The fifteen years of her life she had spent in England had made her an Englishwoman beyond hope of change. She loved French things, yet did not love her own country the less because of them. She beckoned Brandon to her side, and he came with reluctant steps. His strange and truly English dislike of any self-assertion had followed him to Madame HÉlÈne’s house. Silently, in a corner by the window, he had listened to the parrot-like chatter of the women and the silly persiflage which passed among the men for the wit of Paris. When Beatrix beckoned him, he set down his cup and crossed the room slowly. He was one of the few there who wore a plain black coat and had no wealth of star and ribbon to apologise for a tongue but ill-equipped. He came and stood by her, with his fair hair tumbled upon his forehead and his hands ill at ease, and a strange, almost sardonic smile about his lips. “Well,” she said, and her splendid dress rustled as she spoke, “are you the only one—” He held her hand a moment in his. An odour of flowers and rare scents hovered about the place. He did not look into her eyes, but knew that hers were upon him. “The only one in a black coat—yes; that’s my qualification, Madame Lefort.” “Madame Lefort.” How odd it sounded! Yesterday he would have called her Mademoiselle Beatrix as the others did. He was one of her few friends. She would not have been cross if he had said “Beatrix,” as sometimes he had done when they went picnicing to the woods above GÖrsdorf. “You do not congratulate me,” she said, withdrawing her hand quickly. “I don’t believe you were at the church.” He turned and plucked a blossom of white rose from a vase. The petals were crumpled in his hand and scattered upon the carpet while he answered her. “Of course I congratulate you,” he said slowly, “if the congratulations of a man in a frock coat are worth anything. There are so many important persons in colours here that you must excuse me if I have my doubts.” And then he asked suddenly, “What made you think that I was not at the church?” She nodded her head to a fierce Turco on the other side of the room, and then said, as if it were a thing of no importance— “I did not see you there.” He continued to crumple the rose leaves. “I was hidden by the splendour of ThÉrÈse Lavencourt and of Colonel Poittevin. She spent her time saying her prayers and in begging him to stand upon a chair and tell her the names of the generals in the choir. I have learnt half the scandals of Strasburg this morning, and I shall learn the other half to-night when she dances with me. You know that she is giving a ball?” “She was just telling me so. She calls it in my honour. As I shall not be there, that is very good of her. And I am to dance in spirit—as if one could do that. But, of course, she is awfully kind.” “To herself, undoubtedly. She will dance into heaven some day and set the angels by the ears. How glorious to die to Strauss’s music with a dim suggestion of stairs and a conservatory—and, of course, a partner waiting. But these things do not interest you—now. You will be at the Niederwald while I am dressing.” She shook hands with old General Uhrich, who was going back to the citadel, before she answered him. “Oh, yes, we are going to GÖrsdorf, of course, but not to the castle. You remember our picnic there, when we had dinner in a vault? Some day Edmond will rebuild the house. We shall stay at the chÂlet for some time, and afterwards we go on to Metz. I think that I should like that. There is always something eerie about a place which you can’t get into and can’t get out of.” “A description applying to a prison, I imagine.” She shrugged her shoulders. “When one is in France one must think as France does. I am proud of Metz already; and, of course, a soldier’s wife should interest herself in the things that interest him.” “Especially when the marching orders carry him to the Rue de la Paix.” She laughed brightly. “We are going to Paris in January,” she said. “It will be Mecca to me. Imagine it, five years in France, and only one week to try on hats at Aines. I tell Edmond that I am not civilised. He owes it to himself to start an establishment on the Boulevard St. Germain and a box at the opera. Either that or a finishing school somewhere near the Bois. We could spend our holidays together—when he comes home from the wars.” A shadow crossed the man’s face. He looked down upon her for a moment and saw an exquisite vision of lace and flowers and satin, and dark eyes full of laughter, and cheeks flushed with excitement, and a little hand upon which a circle of diamonds glittered, and another ring of plain gold. Never in his life before had he understood why men could die for women; but he thought that he understood it in that instant. “You have taken the wars into consideration, then?” he said. She turned to him with a strange look of fear and wonder. “The wars—what wars?” He passed it off with a jest. “The social wars, of course; there could be no others.” She had ceased to laugh, and was looking round the room for her husband. “As if there could be,” she said determinedly. “Ask General de Failly. He says that we have only to whisper and all Europe will obey. How could there be any wars!” It was perverse of such an old friend as Brandon—and so like him—to speak of such a thing at such a time. The argument, nevertheless, fascinated her strangely, and she would have continued it had not her husband come up while the words were still upon her lips. He was there to tell her that the train for WÖrth left at half-past four. “Ah, mon vieux,” he said gaily to Brandon, “I thought that you had deserted us to-day. Were you in the church, then?” “I have just told Madame so.” “And you heard her answer the bishop? They all heard it, Beatrix. And the General has sent an escort of lancers. They are on the Place now, waiting. We must not keep them nor Guillaumette at the other end.” He spoke quickly and with unsuppressed excitement, and in his look there was that deep and unquestioning affection which marriage may wring for a day even from the worst of men. Dressed still in his brilliant blue uniform, with a shining czapska in his hand and his sword trailing upon the polished floor of wood, Beatrix thought that in all France there was no man worthy to stand by his side. Even the touch of his hand could make her tremble. She looked into his eyes and believed to read therein the whole story of his love for her. And she was his wife—his wife. “I am ready, dearest,” she said. “I will go and change now—and you?” “I shall want five minutes,” he said gaily; “after that the triumphal procession sets out.” She left the room, unobserved. The men turned to the buffet. “Shall we see you this winter here?” Lefort asked, while a sergeant filled him a glass of champagne. Brandon answered evasively. “I have no plans. I let the weather make them for me. If it is cold at Frankfort, you may hear of me in Nice. But you—you go to Paris, of course.” Lefort nodded his head. “There will be the manoeuvres first, and after that the other manoeuvres—at the bonnet shops. I am hoping that we shall be at ChÂlons next year. There are too many Germans in Strasburg, you see—and then, change is good for a bride. Beatrix is a stranger, and too much Vosges—but you do not drink. I am as thirsty as a trooper out of Baden. And to-morrow I shall wear a grey coat. Sac À papier, that will make me look like a German band.” He laughed as a boy at the idea, and pledged the other in a second glass of wine. “To your health, my friend.” Brandon, outwardly the same unimpressionable, stolid fellow that they had always known him, just touched the rim of the upraised glass with his own, but he did not say “À ta santÉ” in his turn. His thoughts had already left the Place Kleber. He was thinking of that old thatched farmhouse in the Vosges mountains to which the man at his side was about to take Beatrix Hamilton. What freak of destiny brought such a day? He did not realise it even then. Beatrix married! The words echoed in his ears as a peal of ribald laughter. He turned from the buffet and went to stand upon the balcony, and to look down upon the escort of lancers gathered in the square below. The brilliant blue of their uniforms, the scarlet plumes of the czapskas, the pennants of the lances, the music of bands; the glitter, the colour, the whirl of it all were truly French. Yet this bizarre display was for her sake, for the sake of little Beatrix—for the sake of her who yesterday was free. How distant the day seemed! It had become of the past, irrevocable now. He would never live yesterday again. The page was written and the book was closed. He did not enter the great salon again nor add himself to the number of those who surrounded the bride at the moment of farewell. When grandmÈre HÉlÈne took Beatrix in her arms, he heard the words she spoke, and they seemed an echo of his own thoughts. “The days will be so long, so weary, my dearest girl,” she cried again and again, while the tears of love fell fast; but to Lefort she said, “I am giving you myself—my child! God bless you, Edmond.” Brandon heard the words, yet did not move from his place upon the balcony. Others came out to stand with him, and saw that the strange, half-cynical smile was still upon his lips. In the great square the people began to cheer, the trumpets to blare again. He beheld an old family coach drawn up before the house. He watched the excited guests who remembered vague traditions of English weddings and scattered rice and flowers upon the English bride. For a long instant he saw Beatrix herself looking straight up at him. Then the carriage rolled away to the station; the lancers put their horses to a brisk trot. He heard no sound but that of weeping. The Countess was alone in the deserted salon. But Beatrix, with her husband’s hand held fast by hers, was asking herself why Brandon North had been the only one who had not said “good-bye” to her.
CHAPTER III
“A LOOMING BASTION” Brandon dined in his little room above the office near the Porte des Pierres; and when dusk fell he set out to walk to the Contades and to his favourite cafÉ there. The ball which ThÉrÈse Lavencourt was to give had no longer an interest for him. He sought to be alone and to forget the day. It was almost dusk when he reached the park, and he remembered, in spite of himself, that Beatrix would be already in the farmhouse on the hills above the Sauer. He had not wished to think of it, and had gone to the gardens that friends might help him to forget; but when a waiter had served him with coffee and he had read the papers from Paris, it seemed to him that a greater sense of solitude possessed him than he had ever known since he left Cambridge and came, at his father’s wish, to help his father’s business in Strasburg. One day had changed his view of life. While she was in the city, he could forget the reasons that kept him to a merchant’s desk and had expatriated him. He could forget the years of public-school life in the England he had left. He could forget his own ambitions buried in those vast and dusty cellars of Frankfort wherefrom his father, William North, sent the Rhine wine to the courts of Europe. But Beatrix was in Strasburg no more. He would not have believed yesterday that there was such a lonely place in all the world. There were many soldiers in the cafÉ—lancers and artillerymen, Turcos and zouaves. A band played, with rare intervals of silence, and its flippant music was an irritant to his ear. He heard pretty women chattering nonsense to officers of cavalry whose wit reached no higher point than assent incoherent. He beheld slipshod and rolling troopers, and remembered the hussars in Germany, and the strong hand which built there a house of steel for a nation’s safety. In such a moment as this he would almost forgive his father because he had wished to make a German of him. It was no glorious employment to sell so many bottles of wine per annum; no glorious employment, it is true, for a man who had written decent Greek prose, and had spoken of immortal things at the Union. He would have preferred a commission in a cavalry regiment at home; or, better still, that liberty which ties a man neither to city nor to country, but sends him to see and hear on the wide road of the world. But his father had other views. “The stool that I sat on should not be too high for my son,” he said; and Brandon took it, and found his consolation elsewhere.
“There were many soldiers in the cafe.”
He was the friend of Germany as much of necessity as of admiration. The French, as a people, fascinated him, yet won no allegiance from him. His own gifts of strength of will and purpose, of method, of physical capability, were just such gifts as he found wanting in all the Frenchmen he knew. The power to achieve by thought and years, that power which was the very heart of Germany, engrossed him always. He saw these men of Strasburg, and he knew that if ever the day should come when the hosts of Germany crossed the Rhine, not only a city but an empire and a kingdom would fall. There were moments even when the sordid nature of his own business made him reflect that war would not only change the current of his life in a day, but would open up for him those scenes of humanity militant which had been the study of his imagination in many a lonely hour. But war now—now that Beatrix had gone to the GÖrsdorf! He laughed at himself for thinking of it, and turned again to watch the unshapely troopers who slouched before the door of the cafÉ, and stood for all the glory of the glorious army of France. What would war mean to such men as these? Scorn of their deficiencies became almost anger sometimes. He had the impulse to get up and drill them—to straighten them with the flat of a sword he must borrow. There was no one in the cafÉ that he knew; but when he had been there a little while old PÈre Bonot, the cigar merchant, and with him Rosenbad, the brewer, came up to his table, and insisted, as was their wont, upon speaking of the one event which Strasburg recognised that day. He listened to them in spite of himself. A subtle fascination compelled him to join in the talk. “I was at the Gare; I saw her go,” said the brewer, triumphantly. “She sat upon the right side; he pulled down the blind. Donnerwetter—if it had been this hand! I would have pulled down that blind myself—et vous savez—I have fifty years!” Old Bonot stirred a glass of coffee vigorously. “For myself,” he said, “the little church in the mountains, the village priest, and the village cart. These things are not for every eye to see. The English are different. This was the English marriage. The Englander carries his boots on the top of his carriage—I have seen them in London. You know London, Monsieur? Ah, what a city—what people—and funerals everywhere. I counted them—one, two, twenty—every day. And everyone so sad—because of the funerals. When I am in London, I stop at your, what you say, Zoho Square. It is the centre of your society. Ma foi, what a world! And no one laughs. I have never seen anyone laugh in London. It is too big. You are afraid to laugh. You must come to France for that—to France and the vineyards. We shall marry you here, and you will carry your boots on your carriage—hein?” The old man gabbled on merrily, and took the cigar which Brandon offered him. “You English know a cigar,” he said, “but your wines—ah, you have no wines. This very morning I had a hundred of your English cigars sent to Captain Lefort. He will smoke them on the mountains when Madame is old enough to differ from him. There is nothing like a good cigar on the day when you discover that Madame has opinions. Our friend the Captain will learn his lesson quickly. You know Madame—without doubt? I have seen her every day since she came to Strasburg five years ago. And she has opinions. I read them in her eyes. She is not what you English call the ‘maid of all work.’ There is courage, verve, the animation. She will know how to say ‘I will not!’” Brandon surveyed him with curiosity and amusement. Rosenbad, the brewer, who was no philosopher, resented his philosophy. “You are gay again, old Bonot,” said he. “I said that you would be a fine skeleton for their feast. You must catch the last train to WÖrth and tell the Captain that he has married a wife who can say ‘I will not.’ He will be delighted to see you. As for me, she might say what she pleased if I were her husband.” “You, mon vieux, you are too fat. And in a lancer tunic, too! Ma foi, what a spectacle!” The brewer avoided the subject deftly. “They have spoiled our lancers,” said he; “the new tunic is as ugly as the colour of it. There was something to make a man when they wore the kurtka. The new coat is the coat of the Prussian; do you not think so, Monsieur?” He turned appealingly to a young sous-lieutenant of lancers, who had come up to the table and called for absinthe. But the lad scarcely heard the question. “To the news from Paris!” he cried, raising his glass excitedly. “There is news from Paris, then—” “The best. They are going to make a new king of Spain, and Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen is the man they have chosen.” He spoke with an excitement characteristic of the boy rather than the man. For a moment the significance of his words was lost both upon old Bonot and upon Rosenbad, the brewer. The latter continued to sip his beer, the former to smoke his English cigar. “Well,” exclaimed old Bonot at last, “and if he is the man, Monsieur—” The sous-lieutenant regarded him almost with contempt. “Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed, “you do not understand?” “I understand nothing.” The lad shrugged his shoulders. “Then I cannot teach you,” said he. He drank his absinthe at a draught and left the cafÉ. Brandon made some good excuse and followed upon his heels. “Forgive me,” he said, as they stood together for a moment at the gate of the gardens, “but you are sure of what you say?” “Sure of it? Absolutely. It is news from the Chambers—and it means but one thing, Monsieur. We shall be in Berlin in a fortnight.” “But they may withdraw—” “I am going to church to-morrow to pray that they will not.” He pulled his cloak about his shoulders and went swaggering away. But Brandon returned quickly to his house in the Rue des Pierres. It was as though a word had put fire into his veins.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE CHÂLET OF THE NIEDERWALD Beatrix was in the arbour of the chÂlet, filling a bowl with the pink roses which were the pride of her garden, when Edmond came up the road from the village of Elsasshausen and held up his letters triumphantly. Ten days had passed since the bells of Strasburg rang for Madame HÉlÈne’s grandchild. To Beatrix they had been as an unbroken hour of sunshine and of happiness. The hills and the valleys, the vineyards and farms of that pastoral scene were in keeping with the new sense of rest and of finality which had come upon her life. She wished for no friendship there, save the friendship which had been given her. The strange past, with its memories of strife and solitude and change unending, had been obliterated and forgotten. She had no longer the desire to return to England or to remember that she was an Englishwoman. A languorous indolence, bred of the mountains, possessed her as an ecstasy. She would have been content to hear that the chÂlet in the woods above the town of WÖrth was to be her home until the end. She was in the garden of the chÂlet, filling her bowl with roses, when Edmond returned with the letters which he had desired unceasingly. She could not understand that state of mind which hungered so greedily for all the dry bones of a soldier’s gossip. To know that old HÉlÈne was well, to hear of her horse and her dogs—and of old Susanne, who had been her mother’s servant—that was news enough. But to be told that the sun was shining, or that ThÉrÈse Lavencourt had gone to Dieppe, or that Lieutenant Jourda de Vaux had been seen on a new charger—what were such things to those who had the forests of the Vosges for their skyline, and in the valleys below them the trailing vines and the white houses of the villages, and the murmur of brooks, and the sleepy river warming itself in the glorious sunshine of the ripened summer? She wished to forget Strasburg. The chÂlet of the Niederwald, the chÂlet of the pines, the chÂlet above the old-world town of WÖrth—she would remember it always as the guest house of her dreams, the rose-girt cradle of her love. If all this childish enthusiasm of hers was very real to her, she could not complain when her husband did not attain similar altitudes of devotion to the chÂlet. The glitter and the movement of the cavalry life had become so much the mainspring of his thoughts and actions, that he did not always conceal his desire to fix a day when the hamlet of the Niederwald should become a memory of their holiday, and his old comrades of the “sixth” should congratulate him upon his return to them. Ready as he was to witness her childish delight in the solitude of the hills, yet he went every day to meet the facteur, who came from WÖrth with the letters; and he read these letters aloud to her, and dwelt again and again upon every trivial word of gossip that had amused his brother officers. When she ran to meet him at the garden gate on that morning of the fifteenth of July, she was glad, for his sake, to perceive that his letter hunger had been satisfied unduly. He carried a great white bundle in his hand, and he held it up triumphantly as a proud and well-earned possession. She remembered that day long afterwards—the sunshine on the woods, the white villages dotting the valley, the figure of her husband with his Tyrol hat and his knickerbocker suit. He had bought the Norfolk jacket in London as a compliment to her, and he called it a “Prince de Galles.” But it suited his fine figure to perfection; and there was laughter in his eyes and the bronze of the sun upon his cheeks, when he put his arm about her and kissed her many times as a prelude to his news. “Again, ma chÉrie—again for your letter—two for my letters. Wait, the Colonel writes himself, and Laroche and Giraud—and Bocheron; you know Bocheron, he is a sous-lieutenant—and Bouillie, he is the Capitaine TrÉsorier—and Gaudet, he is our Porte Étendard. Sac À papier! I shall have something to read for a week.” He gabbled on, full of the excitement of the news anticipated and of the goodwill toward him to which the letters bore witness. She would find no cause of complaint in that, but was full of proposals for their day and its delights. “You can read them as we go,” she said, holding his hand still and leading him toward the low door of the house. “I have told Jacob to have the pony ready at ten o’clock. We shall be at the Niederbronn by twelve, and you will be hungry. But we can breakfast in the wood, and that will be jolly. If one could always breakfast in a wood—upon pÂtÉ de foie-gras and strawberries. To be Phyllis always—with the last new novel, and a husband to cut the leaves. There’s the ideal life for you.” He nodded his head and pressed her arm affectionately. The letter which he read carried him back already in thought to Strasburg and his comrades. “Listen,” he said; “old Tripard is furious about the new tunics. He is petitioning for the kurtka again and the old colours. They will match your eyes, Beatrix. We are to have the jonquille collars and the white cloaks with capes and sleeves. They are all right, but the people at Paris must give us back the kurtka. I do not want to look like a Prussian—moi. And the old coat was more comfortable. These tunics are for policemen. The regiment will not be the same in them. How can you remember Jena in a tunic made for a sergent de ville? They are spoiling us, and they will find it out when the day comes.” She heard his complaint and laughed at it. Out there in the freshness of the garden, this talk of coat and cape was as some echo of a forgotten voice. She had eyes only for the green of the woods and the great red roses. “Oh,” she said philosophically, “what does it matter, Edmond, and who wants to remember anything at the Niederwald? Here is a Gloire de Dijon which is worth all the tunics in France. We will remember things when the roses fade. There is always winter for memories. But July—and the mountains!” She took a bud of a deep scarlet hue from her bowl and pinned it in his coat. The flush of a young girl’s health was upon the face which looked up at his own above the letter he was reading. He kissed her on the forehead, and forgave her because she did not condemn the tunic. “Of course,” he said, “it does not matter; but then tradition is a good deal. It is tradition in the army which enables one man to kill ten; ma foi, if you do away with tradition, Beatrix—” “The ten will live. Happy ten! And we are forgetting the sunshine to talk about them. What prodigals!” She turned toward the chÂlet with the bowl in her arms. He followed her with blind steps reading his letters as he went, and communicating their intelligence generously. “The Chevalier is still at Trouville; he says the gout is no better. I shall have to send him to England to try port wine. We are to see him in Paris when he is well enough to bear the journey. Pauvre papa! I would wager a Napoleon that he was at the Établissement last night. There is nothing like the valtz À trois temps for his complaint. You must dance with my father some day, Beatrix, and say that he is splendid. When you do that, you will forgive him for his one day in Strasburg.” “I hope so,” she said, with a little show of dignity. “I am sure he must have been very ill.” “Du tout,” he said, “he has never known a day’s illness in his life, though he calls himself a chronic invalid. There is not such a lazy man in France. He would not cross the street to save our country. You will never change him. But he will love you when he knows you well, as much—as much as I do!” “As much—your father!” He laughed and drew her toward him, crushing the letter and spilling the water from the bowl. “Impossible,” he said. “I forget what I am saying; not one half, one quarter, one hundredth part, chÉrie. There can be no love like mine for little Beatrix.” He had been annoyed that the Chevalier Lefort, his father, had declined the journey to Strasburg until the last moment, for this seemed to put some shadow of a slight upon his little wife. But the Chevalier, who did not by any means welcome an English girl to his house, was notoriously the laziest man in France. He had written his excuses regularly from the deck of his yacht Le Cygne pleading illness, the unfailing refuge of his indolence. There were other reasons on the yacht, less creditable and by no means to be presented to Beatrix. Edmond guessed those reasons, and found solace in the generous cheques which were the Chevalier’s atonement. “You will like my father,” he said to her, “you will forgive him as I do.” “I hope so,” she said lightly. “I could forgive anyone at the Niederwald—even you, dearest, for reading your ten letters when the pony is waiting.” She escaped his caress, and ran up the stairs lightly to set her hair straight and to put her roses in fresh water. She did not see that he had not her pleasure in the woods of Niederbronn, but hungered still for his comrades’ letters and their news of his regiment. He had not heard a man’s voice for ten days; peasants did not interest him. He could not tell one flower from another. He had no eye for the colour of glade and thicket. When he remembered that another ten days must pass before they left the chÂlet, he was even tempted to wish that he had chosen a city for his holiday. But of this he spoke no word to her. A sense of self-sacrifice pleased him. Her tenderness was a thing precious to see and to possess. He brushed the “Prince de Galles,” and was quite ready for her when she came singing down the stairs, and he helped her up to the driver’s seat. She drove so badly, and “Apollo,” surely, was the ugliest pony in the Vosges. He said that risk was a thing a soldier should face for love of it; and declared that she would lead a charge superbly. The shady road through the mountains, the delicious wooded glades, the little white farmhouses, the fresh green heaths were for him so many items from a soldier’s map. Some day the armies of France would cross the Vosges and enter Baden beyond the frontier. He talked of it always, even upon that early day of his happiness, when Beatrix drove him to the picnic in the thickets of the Niederbronn. “What a road for light cavalry,” he said, again and again; “with Pfalzburg at your back and Strasburg for your base, what a road to Berlin! We shall ride this road some day, chÉrie, and I shall show my comrades the old farmhouse, and tell them why I went there. You will be in Paris then, waiting for news of the victory. Ma foi! you will not wait long.” “But I shall be very old,” she suggested. “You will be a general, and wear feathers for me to steal. And we shall have our own home in England. That would be ideal—a little house in Kent with an orchard and a meadow.” He nodded his head indifferently. “There is no sun in England,” he said; “I was there once for a week, and never saw him. All the orchards are in Normandy. And your people do not like the French. They say that they do, but it is not true. Why should we go to London when there is Paris? You have forgotten already that your father was an Englishman, mignonne; why should we go there to remember it?” He was unconscious of that self which prompted his answer, nor would she think of it on such a day. “I shall never forget my father,” she said; “sometimes I try to think of all the men I know, and wonder which of them he must have been like. I was only five years old when he went to America. I cannot tell you why, yet I seem to remember him, though I have forgotten his face.” “I understand that,” he exclaimed, though with no suggestion of sympathy in his voice; “there are many men that I can remember, though I could not draw them upon paper for you to save my life. Old Giraud, for instance, who writes to me from Paris this morning. I had forgotten Giraud. He writes of news that might have been good, but is very bad. There was the devil to pay in Spain. A word to the King of Prussia put an end to it. That is like those Prussians. They bark until you show the whip, and then they run to kennel. But it is our misfortune—” She looked at him quickly. “Your misfortune!” He put his arm about her, and touched her ear with his lips. “I am thinking of the army always,” he said earnestly; “it is the heart, the life of France. You will learn to think of it as I do by-and-by; it will be all in all to us. When I speak of a misfortune it is for your sake as well as for my own. Nothing can give me my chance but war. And my chance means fortune and honour for us both. But, of course, I do not wish it—yet, Beatrix.” His mood became for the moment that mood of tenderness and of abandon to the impulse of love which had led him to make her his wife. It was a very real impulse in the instants of its recurrence; and when it betrayed him in look and voice, and she became conscious of it, the bond of the marriage vow seemed written anew, so that the twain were as one in heart and soul and affection. Strong in this assurance of devotion deep-rooted below the common interests of the daily life, Beatrix had no eyes to see those other things of self and will which might have been the omen of a new day when assurance should be less strong. She gave herself up in thought to him, yielding all to the sweet impulses of love unmeasured. She was his wife. Without him, life had no message for her. “I know that you do not wish it, dearest,” she said earnestly, lifting her lips to his; “your honour is my honour. What fortune could I have which is not yours?” He answered with an answer that a lover alone can give, and for some little while silence followed them up the slope of the mountain. Their way lay through woods odorous in pines, by hamlets green and red-roofed in the thickets of the heights. They found the glade of the Niederbronn, with its babbling brook and its shade of chestnut trees and its murmur of the life of summer; and it stood to them as some Eden set in the mountain’s heart to be the home of their affections. And in this glade they lunched as two children abroad upon a holiday. Remote brakes and dark places of the forest welcomed them when lunch was done, wandering hand in hand, lovers in a garden of their solitude. The health of the mountains shone in their eyes, or gave a new gift of youth to their cheeks. They spoke of no serious things. “You have taught me to see that the trees are green, chÉrie,” he said, when the sun had set and “Apollo” was in the shafts again, and the lights of home began to be a pleasant memory. “Some day, perhaps, I will turn farmer and wear a blouse, and you shall drive in the sheep. It would be good to come to WÖrth when one had earned the right to rest, and could say, ‘I have done my work for France.’ But I am not one of those men who could take the holiday first and the work after. Even here, and with you at my side, I do not play at doing nothing well. To live is to achieve. The man who has achieved must have the first place at the fireside. When we build our house in the woods, we will people it with all the old friends we have left in Strasburg and in Paris, and we shall remember how we came here at the very beginning of it—before there were wars and victories.” He did not mean to wound her. There was no thought in his mind but that of his old comrades of the barracks at Strasburg, and of the night just beginning for them. He saw them, in his imagination, in the cafÉs they haunted; he peeped into the great darkened stables, where the horses lay sleeping; he stood by his own charger; the vision showed him for an instant all the panoply and the glory of the service he loved. But she thought of none of these things. The smile of content left her face. The words which Brandon North had spoken in the salon of the old house were heard again in the murmur of the woods. The shadow of the night had fallen upon her pleasure. “If the end could be as the beginning, dear,” she said, laying her hand upon his arm gently. “Of course, I know that it cannot; I knew that from the first. But when I am at WÖrth, how can I help deceiving myself there? Should I love you if I did not? Why should we remember these things to-night, or even speak of them?” He read a note of sadness in her voice, and hastened to atone. “You shall not remember it, mignonne. I am a fool to talk so. There is home and dinner. When the day comes we shall be ready for it. But to-night—to-night I shall only tell you—ah, mon Âme, what can I tell you that I have not told you a thousand times? I love you. Do you weary of my book, Beatrix? I can write nothing else but that—I love you.” He pressed her to him, taking the reins from her hands and shielding her with his strong arm. The hour begat an exquisite tenderness. In the valley below them stars of lights shone out from many a farmhouse and many a village. Bells tinkled on the necks of the roving cattle. The breeze surged in the heights of the pines, scenting the air with sweet odours and the freshness of the night. Alone in that solitude of forest and upland they seemed as those drawn apart from the living world to the very citadels of rest and of love. Even the hamlets became towns to them. WÖrth itself, when they espied its lights between the descending spurs of the mountains, was as some great hive of men where love had no part or lot. The old farmhouse, welcoming them again, stood up as a home of their childhood. Guillaumette, the servant, was at the door of the farm, with a story of dinner ready to be served. To Beatrix she said some pretty word of welcome, but to Edmond she handed a telegram, and he stood in the aureole of light cast out from the open door to read it. Beatrix never forgot that picture of him as, with white face and quickening heart, he read the message, once, twice, thrice, and then crushed the paper quickly in his hand. He read the message and stood with pale face and trembling hand. A woman’s instinct seemed to tell her that some great hour of her life was at hand. Their eyes met, and she read in his an intensity of love and sympathy such as she had never seen before. “Edmond,” she said, almost in a whisper, “what is it?—why do you not tell me?” He would have answered her, but finding no word he handed her the crumpled paper, and she opened it with maladroit fingers and spread it out and read it many times as he had read it. There were but two words, yet she had no need of any question to comprehend their meaning. The cord of her life seemed to snap in that instant. She turned from him and ran up the stairs with dry eyes.
CHAPTER V
THE HERALD OF THE STORM She ran upstairs and closed the door of her bedroom behind her. For a little while he dare not intrude upon her, but stood at the foot of the stairs fearing, if he went up, to find her dying or dead in the room. A thousand thoughts, striking the whole gamut of a man’s emotions, held him to the place. War and the glory of war, death and the risk of death; France and the call she had sent to him; love and sorrow and the moment of farewell—each was the outcome in its turn of that slip of yellow paper, upon which those two fatal words “Report yourself” were written. That which was even cowardice kept him for an instant from the darkened room upstairs and from its secret. She suffered there. He would have given half the years of his life could he have gone to her and taken her in his arms and said, “I will not go—my home is here.” A great silence fell upon the house. Little Guillaumette, who had seen her mistress’s face, had run away to the kitchen and was crying her heart out there. An old wooden timepiece, which had ticked for the soldiers who, fought at Jena, struck the hour upon a crazy bell, and told them it was eight o’clock. Without, there was no sound but that of the leaves rustling and the murmur of the night. The man cast off the spell which the silence had put upon him, and called for Guillaumette when the clock struck. “Guillaumette! Guillaumette! I must go back to Strasburg to-night. Let Jacob bring the pony and make my valise. Madame will come with me—I hope so. Where are you, Guillaumette?” His voice sounded hollow and high-pitched. It echoed through the little rooms of the farm strangely. In his mind there were many confusing ideas, but only one impulse. He must return to his regiment at once. France had need of him. The day he had waited for was at hand. Beatrix would suffer now, but afterwards she would be glad. His courage was found in the idea; he ran up the stairs at last and entered the darkened room. She stood by the window. She had drawn the curtain back to look across the woods, down upon the lights of the villages. He saw that she had not taken off her hat, and that her left hand was still gloved. When he entered the room she turned her head wistfully, but did not speak to him. He crossed to her side and put his arm about her, and wished that he could see tears in her eyes. The mute restraint and self-possession frightened him. When he kissed her on the forehead and drew her close to him, her face seemed on fire; he could feel her heart beating beneath the thin muslin dress which she had worn for their picnic. “You will go with me,” he said in a low whisper. “I shall be in Strasburg to-morrow, and afterwards as the order comes. But it will be something to know that you are near. And grandmÈre HÉlÈne—but she is at Geneva. You would be alone in the house—until I come—” She laid her cheek upon his as though to cool it. Tenderness and love and sacrifice of self were conveyed in every gesture. Her restraint amazed him. She answered him as one who had no complaint nor even argument to make. “I could not go to Strasburg, Edmond. And you will not be there. HÉlÈne would not wish it, I am sure of it. Let me stop at WÖrth until you return. Jacob is here and Guillaumette. They will take care of me.” He released her from his embrace, for he wished to find the light in that hour of darkness. There were a hundred ways, but he could not see one of them distinctly. Desire to console, excitement, sorrow for her, gladness for himself, were mingled in an incoherency of thought and of perplexity. “It must have been yesterday,” he said. “The Colonel did not mention it in his letters. There has been a great trouble about Spain, and that telegram means that Leboeuf is calling out the reserves. Giraud said that it was finished; he did not mean to deceive me, and I understand. They would not spoil our holiday, mignonne, until they were compelled. Yesterday I heard things in the village, but would not tell you. They said that the King of Prussia had insulted us and wished for war. If that is the case, we shall be at Berlin in a fortnight. Everyone knew that it must come sooner or later; but that it should have come now! If it were not for your sake, Beatrix, I should be glad that it is so. There is nothing to fear for the armies of France. We shall fight across the Rhine, and you will not even hear the sound of the guns. I shall write every day, and a month will bring me back to you. Ah, my little wife, what a day to think of, when I shall hold you in my arms again and tell you of the battles! Is it not worth a month of waiting to have such a day as that? And you will get my letters every morning. Every morning I shall know that you are reading them. The time will pass before you dream of it. You will go to meet me at the station before the grapes are off the vines. It will still be summer, and we shall have another picnic at the Niederbronn, and I shall show you where the armies of France marched to Germany. Ah, if it were not so hard!” She had lit the lamp, mechanically and scarce knowing what she did, while he was speaking. The glow of light falling upon her face showed it as the face of one who had lived through a year of sorrows. His attempts to console her ended in a word that was half a sob. He realised that he loved her more than country or the ambitions of the old time. Pity for her surged up in his breast as an agony. She would be alone to think and to remember; and he knew already what those hours of loneliness must mean to her. “My love—my little wife; God guard and keep you,” he said. She pressed his hands linked in her own and began to speak of his journey. She did not wish him to see her face or to read the truth in her eyes. “I shall wait here at WÖrth, dearest,” she said; “it is better that I should, for there is no one in Strasburg now. The worst may not happen, after all. And I should not care to go back to them. You will write to me to-morrow and tell me where the regiment is. Perhaps I may see you again before you go to Germany. And I will write to you every day. It will be something to do even if you do not get the letters.” She made a brave show of bearing up; and he understood and was grateful to her. There was so much to do, a valise to pack, uniform to be put on, a hundred things to be spoken of. Neither thought of food, nor of the dinner Guillaumette had cooked. Silently and with method, and with dry eyes always, she began to help him. In the valley without, the mute heralds of rain and storm permitted all other sounds to be heard clearly. An engine whistled upon a distant railway; a dog barked in a garden at WÖrth; the grasses rustled fitfully as in the hour of coming tempest. Beatrix heard the sounds and was strangely conscious of them. She knew not why she suffered silently. Many times she had the desire to lay her head upon her husband’s shoulder and there to give freedom to her grief as a child at a mother’s breast. A voice said to her always, “You will be alone.” She clenched her hands, and turned her face from him again. “Little wife, give me courage such as yours.” It was his last farewell at the gate of the garden wherein her roses grew. For an instant, she remembered that she might be holding his hands and hearing his words for the last time. All the depth and intensity of her love compelled her so that she clung to him distractedly and with all her courage gone. He felt her tears upon his cheek, and was glad because of them. His strong arms crushed her dress and so held her that she seemed to stand heart to heart with him. “Good-bye, mignonne. To-morrow I will write; in a month I will be home again.” He stepped into the cart, and the pony began to trot down the hill to WÖrth. The little farm with its lighted windows stood out on the mountain side as a cluster of stars above the garden of his home. He saw her again for an instant, her white dress fluttering against the background of the forest. He dare not ask himself what the night would mean to her. He did not know that when a month had passed, an Empire would have fallen, and the armies of France be no more. From the valley, a blare of bugles echoed suddenly through the silent hills. Troops were moving already, then! The note thrilled him as with all the fire of battle and of war. To-morrow he would ride with his regiment again. But to Beatrix, listening at the gate of the garden, the trumpet’s note was as some call to the place of death and tears.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAST DAY OF JULY The sun had hardly begun to shine upon the glades of the Niederwald on the last day of July when Beatrix opened the window of her bedroom and looked over the woods and the green vineyards to the little white town of WÖrth and the glistening river in the hollow of the valley. It was her habit now to wake at dawn, for sleep had ceased to be her friend; and there was a morning hope of the sunshine as though the day would bring some news of Edmond or of his regiment. Sometimes in her dreams she would believe that the reality was but imagination, or that she would awake to hear her husband’s voice. Every step upon the road before the farmhouse quickened her heart, and sent her breathlessly to the garden gate. The ultimate hope, that all might yet be well, was the solace of many an hour. They told her in the village that peace must come before the grapes were ripe. “It will be a race,” the old curÉ said; “those Prussians will run to Berlin and we shall run after them. In a month Monsieur will be home again.” She listened to the old priest’s boast and loved him for it. The silence of the woodlands helped her to self-deception. What war could there be when the glades were sleeping in the sunshine, and the kingfisher hovered above the limpid pools, and the church bells sent their message to the heights, and all things were as yesterday in the homes of the simple people about her? The very word seemed an irony. Yet war had taken Edmond to Strasburg and to his regiment. War had left her alone in the first hour of happiness inexpressible! There had been rain all night, but the looming mists were scattered in the first hour of dawn on that last day of the month, and a surpassing freshness of the morning fell upon the glades and the gardens before her window. Every leaf had gathered its little gift of dew and husbanded the finest hues to give them out in a spectrum of violet and crimson, and the purest blues. Her roses shed their leaves upon the sparkling grass or lifted their heads to the dews in bursting blossoms and glossy petals. The very air seemed to rise up from a sea of the sweetest perfumes, and to fill the lungs with all the fulness of life realised. It was a scene of day glorified; a scene of Nature new-robed and awakened; of the apotheosis of solitudes. She gazed upon it, spell-bound and entranced. She could not remember yesterday in such an hour. Nevertheless, yesterday spoke to her—for there, upon the white road of the valley, the white road which the poplars fringed, was a regiment of chasseurs riding southward to Strasburg. Even at the window of her house she could hear the bugles blowing and the clatter of the waggons. The trumpet’s note thrilled her as a voice of war itself. She turned from the window and ran down to the kitchen of the house where Guillaumette was singing. “Good-day, Madame—you hear the soldiers! Oh, that is good—all day the music and at night the chasseurs. They are going to make the Prussians dance—hein? And then Monsieur will come home again. Do not doubt it at all, Madame. A month and there will be no more music. We shall all go to Strasburg and Monsieur will be a general. The curÉ says it, and he knows. A thousand horses in the village yesterday—and all night long the tramp, tramp, tramp! Oh, I can sleep well to the tramp, tramp, tramp—moi! I think of Gaspard, who has gone to bring me a mug from Berlin. There is nothing else in Berlin but mugs and sausages. That is why these Prussians are so fat. But they will run, run, run presently. The Emperor has gone to Metz—eh piff, pouf, boum, where is your Bismarck then!” Guillaumette was a wench of Grenoble, small of foot, relentless of tongue, with pretty hair and a young girl’s face against which the sun had warred in vain. To her, war and the rumour of war were an unbroken delight. There would be troopers in the hills all day. Why, then, should anyone be sad? She could not conceive that state of mind which brought tears to the eyes a second time for the lover who had gone to the wars. If he came home—it would be with gifts in his hand. If he did not come home—well, there were horsemen all day on the road to Strasburg. She spent her hours in the old kitchen, where the copper stove shone like a plate of gold; and when she was not singing “Allons, enfants de la patrie,” her ballad would be:— “Cent mille francs
Sont attrayants,
Morbleu, j’en conviens sans peine,
Mais ce tendron
Triple escadron
Fait flotter mon Âme incertaine.” Beatrix listened to her blithe words and took heart in spite of herself. This child of the people could teach her a lesson, she thought. It was a lesson of duty; a lesson which war may teach even to a woman. “Ah, Guillaumette,” she said, “if you were a prophetess—” “Chut, Madame, why should I be a prophetess to say that the Prussian louts are going to run? Look at the chasseurs lÀ bas—the horses, the gold and silver, the splendid fellows. It is the same everywhere. Gaspard tells me so. Everywhere, everywhere, the music and the colour and the big moustaches of the cuirassiers—and not a Prussian in all the mountains. Why are we here, drinking our coffee as yesterday? It is because of the chasseurs who go to Berlin on their horses. Ah, Madame, if there were any bonnets there! If there were anything over yonder but the mugs and the beer—” She raked the fire angrily, and poured the steaming milk and coffee into the basins. “Dame,” she said triumphantly, “look at that. No wonder the Prussians come to the Rhine for coffee, Madame. You will drink it in the garden. And afterward the post. Oh, the blessed post with news of Monsieur and the army. And the sunshine: Madame will ride her pony to-day? Certainly she will. I will tell Jacob. He sleeps all day, the lazy one. The Prussians are coming, he says! Oh, the poltroon! They are thousand miles away. The curÉ says so. As if there could be a blue coat at WÖrth! I laugh when I hear it. And the chasseurs in the village! It is splendid, this war!” She showed all her delight in her eyes—for war was a very carnival to her—a carnival which must people the hills with red breeches presently and awake the mountains to the martial music which quickened her steps and gladdened her heart. Hearing her, Beatrix could even tell herself that the supreme hour of her life had not been lived. How, if this little chatterer were right, and a month brought Edmond back to WÖrth, and France were victorious, and all his joy of victory were added to her joys of love! She could dream of such a day on that morning of sunshine and of rest. For the white road was deserted again when she carried her coffee to the arbour of roses. The old white houses slept once more. The woods echoed to no music but the music of the leaves. It was at seven o’clock when the postman came and brought her two letters—a long one from GrandmÈre HÉlÈne, who had left Geneva that day, and a short one from Edmond, who was at Strasburg still, but spoke of an immediate march northward to Hagenau. “You will be able to drive over, chÉrie,” he said, “and I shall tell you everything. Here it is all noise and dust and trumpets all day. I cannot believe the things I see—I cannot believe that France is at war. We wait always. We go to sleep at night, and torches guide us to our beds, and students sing our lullaby. I have heard the Marseillaise a thousand times since yesterday. There is no road to the north which the waggons do not block and the troops follow. Ah, mignonne, if I could ride upon one of those roads to a little white house and take a little white figure in my arms! But the day will not be distant. The end is near. France will justify herself. I shall be at Hagenau before the month is out—and then—what a harvest time for us. And the vines will still be green. A thousand messages of love to the little wife who is waiting for me, and who has forgotten already that there is any other country but France.” She held the letter long, gazing wistfully over the woods which thrust themselves up to blot out the view of distant Hagenau. The words of love and confidence brought tears to her eyes. Yet was it true? she asked. Had she indeed forgotten those green lanes of England wherein her girlhood had been spent? Was she heart and soul faithful to this new country which had given her a home—and Edmond? She could not answer those questions, but crushed the letter in the bosom of her dress and told herself gladly that to-morrow might bring him to her—to-morrow he would tell her again that he loved her and that she was all to him. Old HÉlÈne’s letter covered many pages. Beatrix skipped them, remembering what to-morrow would bring. Nevertheless, she could permit her imagination to see the beloved face, the trembling hand that wrote the wavering lines. The exhortation that she should return to Strasburg at once troubled her. She had no thought for the city, now that Edmond was to march out of it. The old farm had become a home like no other house which had ever received her. Every room seemed to whisper her lover’s name. A memory of him was written upon the most trifling ornament. The roses in her arbour were his roses. She treasured the very leaves of them. The woods retold her love in the murmur of brook and branches. She would not quit a house so dear to her, though all the armies of Germany had been at the gate of it. The facteur had brought the letters at seven o’clock, but eight o’clock struck before she left the arbour and returned to tell her news to Guillaumette. “Monsieur will be at Hagenau to-morrow, Guillaumette. He may be here on Tuesday. The regiment is to march; his letter says so. And, of course, he would wish to have his friends here. We must be ready against that—he will expect it of us. It would never do to disgrace the chÂlet after all the things he will have told them. I am going down to WÖrth now—” Guillaumette put her arms upon her hips and laughed loudly. “Vela, vela—we are going to WÖrth now, and we forget that it is Sunday!” She had forgotten it, indeed, and she stood with a rosy flush upon her cheeks and the old straw bonnet swinging by its ribbons in her hand. The excitement of the week had robbed her of any memory of days. She heard the bells of the village churches, and all her English reverence for Sunday came to reproach her. Guillaumette, on her part, did not love the priests. She began to bustle about the kitchen again. “We shall not go to WÖrth to-day,” she said. “We shall go to Mass to see if there are any soldiers there. That is what Sunday is for. There will be cuirassiers upon the road, and the hussars ride by to Bitche. I heard it in the village. If Monsieur comes back to-morrow and brings his friends, it will be the wine for which he will ask. It is always like that. Wine, wine, wine—and when the wine is all gone, bon jour! Oh, I know those fellows—I, Guillaumette. Do not think about them, Madame. They will drink us up—and then—to the wars!” There was no argument possible with Guillaumette when she had spoken. She was as imperious as a general of armies. Beatrix used to surrender at once, telling herself that Guillaumette was always right. And an idea came to her when she remembered that it was Sunday. She would ride her pony to that glade of the Niederbronn which had been the home of their picnic on the day that Edmond left her. She could not sit in a church, she thought. The deeper gifts of religious consolation were lost in the unrest and doubt of such an hour. The impulse to be doing something was irresistible. The sun was still shining when old Jacob brought the pony to the door, but scuds of grey and black cloud loomed above the valley, and the breeze had fallen away again until it was scarce a whisper in the trees. She heard the bells of WÖrth and of other villages, whose red roofs and white houses dotted the valley below her. But there were no soldiers upon the road, and everywhere it was as though the spirit of the God of peace had come upon the mountains.
CHAPTER VII
“THOSE OTHERS” She struck the road to the village of Reichshofen, and followed it upward through the forest. There were few abroad upon it, and such as she met were peasants going to Mass. An old woman, red-cheeked and hale, gave her good-day, and added that her son was at ChÂlons. A group of harvesters played dominoes upon a knoll of grass at the roadside, but stood up awkwardly when she passed. A farmer, driving a weedy brown horse, drew rein as he approached, and asked if there were any soldiers between him and the village. To such as these news of war was little more than news of that distant Paris which interested them so little. The Emperor was going to Berlin! What mattered it to men who were watching the ripening grape or husbanding the maize and the tobacco? It was dark in many of the thickets, and she rode impetuously, now galloping, now letting the pony go as he would. At the cross-roads, a little way from Reichshofen, she heard a clatter of hoofs behind her and turned her head to see a little old man on a great grey horse, whose outspread cloak and upturned elbows gave him the appearance of a flying mill. She recognised him as the kinsman of the Count of Durckheim, whose chÂteau lay beyond Froeschweiler, and she saw that he wished to speak to her. There was no greater gossip in the mountains. He would have the last news from Strasburg, she was sure. “Good-day, Madame; did you think that I was a Prussian? You ride like a hussar! I have seen your pony’s heels ever since you passed the white mill. And to church, too!” He took a gold snuff-box from his pocket and spilled the snuff upon his white breeches and his once fine vest. Exertion had brought drops of sweat to his forehead. He regarded the little English girl as some treasure of the forest sent by providence to reward him. She, in turn, was amused by his candour, and glad to hear a friendly voice. “Good-day, Monsieur Picard—and what makes you think that I am riding to church?” she asked. He dusted the snuff from his coat, and settled himself in the saddle, as though his way was, from that time, her way. “There are two roads, Madame,” he said with a flourish of his arm, “to church and to Berlin. As you are not upon the latter, there can only be the former. And you are wise. All France goes the other way—” His eccentricity always pleased her. “And you, yourself, Monsieur, you are on the same road?” “Impossible to take any other when Madame Lefort rides. I shall go to the church door. It will be an example to the people!” “But if I am not going to church—” “In that case there will be no example. We shall talk of Paris and the army.” He was full of self-content, and the heavy clouds which cloaked the sun, and sent the birds skimming low in the open places of the thickets, were not heeded by him. There was no one else upon the road to Niederbronn now; even the glades were hushed. Nature listened for the storm which was gathering above the pass. “Captain Lefort is at Strasburg with Duhesme’s brigade,” Beatrix said, seeing that he waited for her; “he may be at Hagenau to-morrow, and I shall ride there. He does not know where his regiment is going to—at least, he can only guess it is to be sent to the north. General MacMahon will meet the Emperor at SaarbrÜck. You have heard that, Monsieur?” “I have heard it all, Madame. Everyone in France guesses to-day. We have seven bodies in command of seven armies. When we find one head we shall begin. We are waiting for that. If the Prussians would only wait, too, it will be a great war. I have come from Paris, and I know. Ah, what enthusiasm in Paris, Madame, what torches, what songs, what a brave people. Our generals are moved to the very heart. They were all in the bonnet shops when I came away. We are a nation of courtiers. We do not leave our ladies at home when we go to the wars. Why should we—since the road to Berlin is open and our horsemen will ride there by-and-by, and we have waggons for the crinolines. You are an Englishwoman and you have married a Frenchman. You understand these things. The poor people we see around us—they understand them, too. War is far away from them to-day. It will be over there, oh, such a long way off, in Berlin, where the Prussians are. If it came here, to their homes, their fields, their villages—if they saw their children carried out to the graves in the woods—ah, if they saw their children, the children who have not made the war, who do not cry À Berlin, if they saw them—it would be different, Madame. But we shall not see it; the Emperor has said so; the seven bodies have said so. The head will come to us presently—and then, en avant!” He was a strange old man, Beatrix thought, while she watched him sitting there awkwardly upon the great horse, and lifting his hat as though commanding all the soldiers of France. The mingled earnestness and levity of his address moved her strangely. How true it was, that no one in all those villages and farms of Alsace had ever remembered that war might bring the soldiers of Germany across the Rhine even to the doors of their houses. While the sun shone, and the birds sang, and the vines ripened, how could they tell themselves that to-morrow might not be as yesterday? She, herself, was no wiser than the others. Edmond was coming to Hagenau! What else could she remember? “Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she exclaimed a little sadly, “you do not really believe what you say?” “I, Madame, I believe nothing. It is an easy creed which never leads you to contradictions. When I peep through the woods to the village down there and see the red roofs, and hear the Mass bells ringing, and watch the old folks going to church, I say—this is war, this is glory, here lies the road to Berlin. Why should I think otherwise? There are no Prussians here; there never will be any. Your husband is a soldier and what is he doing? He is thinking of a charming wife who is taking care of his chÂlet at the Niederwald. To-morrow he will see her. In a month he will cross the Rhine again and tell her how many Prussians he has killed. If the children die, they will be the children of Germany, not of France. Vive la France, then, and let us light some more torches. Paris is doing it all night. Why should we be behind-hand? Not at all—we will do as Paris does, and when we are hoarse with shouting we will go and drink the Rhine wine!” He did not see that his irony was lost upon her, and that she had begun to be very serious again. A little pattering of rain upon the great broad leaves troubled him exceedingly; he wrapped his cloak about his throat. “Madame,” he said suddenly, “I am old enough to be rheumatic. That is an age which moves youth either to ribaldry or to compassion. In your case it will be compassion. Let us shelter a moment and forget that there is a good dÉjeuner to be had in the inn at Niederbronn.” He turned abruptly into a little glade of the woods, and she recognised it as the glade to which Edmond had taken her—how long ago it seemed—on the day of his farewell. The very straw which had lined their basket was still upon the grass. She could have repeated every word of love he had whispered to her that day. An exquisite memory of his caress made her limbs tremble. Until old Picard spoke again she forgot that Edmond had left her. “Come,” he said, “there is a glade made to match your pretty dress, Madame. Let us shelter until the sun remembers that we have had no breakfast. As for those other fellows—!” He did not finish his sentence, for a sound as of horses at the gallop rang out above the murmur of the woods and the patter of the rain. For a little while they listened intently as the sounds magnified in approach. Beatrix thought at the first that it might even be Edmond’s lancers who had come from Hagenau. Old Picard put his hand to his ear and a curious expression settled upon his face. “As for those other fellows—you hear their horses, Madame?” “There is someone on the road behind us,” she answered quickly. “Ah,” he continued, “then I can still hear. When you are my age, you will begin to take your senses out of the cupboard and to see how many are left. I count mine every day. The eyes to see my friend Madame Lefort, the taste to admire her, the ears to hear her, the touch which tells me that her hand is the smallest in Alsace—ah, Madame, how rich I am. We shall tell those other fellows—if there are many of them—do you hear many horses, Madame?” She listened again. Whoever rode toward Niederbronn had urgent business to help him on the way. “It will be the chasseurs!” she said with some little excitement, born of the uncertainty. “I saw them this morning upon the road to Hagenau—” “Madame,” he exclaimed, “they are not chasseurs—they are—” Again his sentence was unfinished. He stopped abruptly and took his snuff-box from his pocket. When he had dusted his vest very deliberately, he continued— “They are Prussians, Madame Lefort—Uhlans from across the Rhine. Look at them well. We shall see many in France before the year is out!” He pointed dramatically with his finger as two horsemen rode suddenly into view; their presence was a vindication of his words. Beatrix had met few German soldiers before that day; and now when she saw these two Uhlans, who reined back their horses as much from curiosity as from prudence, she did not believe for a moment that they were not Frenchmen. Certainly their tunics of light blue, with the scarlet cuffs and shoulder-straps, and the eagles upon their helmets, were strange to her. It would be some regiment she had not met with either in Strasburg or in Paris, she thought. The Uhlans halted before the glade, but when they saw a harmless old man with a young girl at his side sheltering from the rain, broad smiles covered their faces, and they beckoned to others behind them. There were fifteen in all, Beatrix counted, sturdy fellows, splashed from head to foot with the mud, sunburnt, bearded, yet well horsed and full of ready activity. One who seemed to be a captain, and who spoke French with a guttural accent, bowed low to her and asked the way to an inn. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “si fou foulez m’indiquer une auberge par ici.” She knew not why it was, but a strange sense of fear and foreboding came to her when she heard the man speak. She did not realise that troopers out of Baden, for such they were, had ridden into France; but a vague consciousness of danger environing her was not to be avoided. Nevertheless, she would have answered the question if old Picard had not been before her. “Herr Captain,” he said, “there is an inn five miles from here. You turn to the right.” The Uhlan shrugged his shoulders. “Which means to the left,” he said; “and then, mon ancien!” Picard shut his snuff-box with a snap. “And then—you can go to the devil.” The German seemed amused. “I am on the right road, Monsieur,” he said; “this is the way to Paris, I believe.” He let his horse go, for one of the sergeants pointed out the red roofs of the buildings peeping up through the glade of the thicket. When he had observed them, he bowed again to Beatrix and addressed her, to her infinite surprise, in English as good as her own. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “beware of that old man. He does not tell the truth.” He was gone with the words, and she saw him a few moments later as he rode up to the farm and began to beat loudly upon the door. Old Picard, who was nodding his head and snuffing incessantly, vouchsafed no remark. She, on her part, had viewed the event as some scene of a play. Uhlans at Niederbronn! She did not believe it even then. “Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she said, turning her pony suddenly, “you do not mean it; they were not really Germans?” “Madame,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “what I mean or do not mean is of little account.” “But if they are Germans what are they doing upon the road to Niederbronn?” He stroked his chin. “They are doing what we should have done an hour ago—they are having their breakfasts, my child. Let us go home and imitate them. The sun does not shine any longer upon us. It will be a long time before the sun shines upon France again, dear Madame.” She saw that he was very thoughtful, and the sense of unrest and of danger on the road returned to her. If there were Prussian lancers at Niederbronn, would there not be others at WÖrth and Hagenau? In that instant the great truth that this war might, indeed, come to the homes of France was realised by her. Fear for Edmond, a fear she had not known before, began to possess her, and would not be quieted. She asked herself what she was doing there, so far from the chÂlet, when he might have need of her or even have sent a second message. “Oh! let us go,” she said, urging her pony to the road again; “our place is at home, Monsieur Picard.” He followed her reluctantly, and wished to allay her fears. “Chut, Madame—I would not have missed the spectacle for a bucket full of francs. We must get used to it. There will be Germans upon this road every day before the summer is gone. They will not often be so fortunate as those fellows lÀ-bas, who have just seen my little English friend in her pretty habit. And there will be others who will have something to say to them. My word—hark to that. The watch-dogs understand the German language, eh! Do they not speak it beautifully?” He halted his horse again and listened to the strange sounds of mingled voices and the baying of hounds. Those troopers, then, were arguing with the people of the house! He thought that he could see the horses of some of them through the network of leaf and branch. The road itself was deserted, and the rain began to fall again in heavy drops, which glistened upon the flat leaves and gave waves to the puddles. Beatrix herself could not understand his curiosity, but she feared now to be alone upon the road. “Oh, Monsieur Picard,” she said at last, “if I were not so cold—” He sighed at her impatience, and was about to ride on, when the report of a rifle shot rang out above the silence of the woods and the patter of the rain. Birds went winging from the trees as the echoes rolled from hill to hill and glade to glade. A loud shouting was heard at the farm—the cries of men who found themselves face to face with death. Two Uhlans came galloping wildly up the pass, with five horsemen pressing close upon them. They went by, a flash of blue and silver; but one of those who rode after them had a sabre in his hand, and he struck at the trooper before him. It was the vision of an instant: the vision of faces set in anger and ferocity; of eyes staring horribly at the images of death they saw; of horses foaming and accoutrements glittering and mud splashing. Yet so real was it that Beatrix cried out when the men passed her. She tried to hide the vision from her eyes, but could not. She feared to see the shining blade fall upon the neck of the Uhlan, who rode as though he raced with Death. No murder committed, there, at the roadside, could have filled her with a greater horror. “Oh, my God, he will kill him!” she cried again and again. She buried her face in her hands and would let her eyes follow the horsemen no more. Old Picard, on his part, did not try to help her. The spectacle was as wine to him. Blood coursed through the blue veins of his cheeks and forehead. He gripped the reins until his nails cut the flesh. He did not know that the rain fell upon his face or that the sun had ceased to shine. The story that he tried to tell her was almost incoherent. “The hussars from Bitche—eh, Madame? Do you not see that they give them their breakfast? They were in the house then—they were at the farm. Ma foi, what a meeting, what a dish! Keep close to me, child. Do not look at them. They are the hussars from Bitche. The splendid fellows!” He drove his horse before her and began to breathe quickly as a hunted animal. One of the Uhlans had ridden through the gates of the farm and a French hussar was at his heels. No race at Longchamps or Chantilly was like that race for life up the road of the pass. Old Picard saw that the pursued was the officer who had spoken to him at the glade. He did not bear him any grudge, yet wished to see him die. It was as though the troops of France had sounded the horn and started a fox from the thicket. The game must be killed; that was all. And the hussars would kill it. He read their ferocity in their faces. The hunted man was their prey. They were as beasts hungering for blood. All that they had learned in barracks and upon the field schooled them to this lust of blood. The very excitement of it sent them rolling in their saddles; the intoxication of it was almost delirium. “En avant, en avant!” The cry was hardly human. It was the scream of men who hasten to see another die.
“Fired wildly on the stooping figure before him.”
Twenty paces from the tree whereunder Beatrix stood, the end came. One of the Frenchmen, seeing that the Uhlan’s horse outpaced his own, drew a revolver and fired wildly at the stooping figure before him. There was no sign upon the instant that the bullet had hit its mark; but, when the doomed man had come up almost to the tree, he raised himself in his saddle and threw his arms above his head. Beatrix saw his face; a smile seemed to play upon it. For a moment the smile hovered there; then, suddenly, a white shadow crept up from chin to forehead, the eyes set to a wild stare, blood gushed from the mouth; the German fell headlong from his horse and lay dead at her feet. “La France, la France!” Twenty voices took up the cry in frenzied triumph. Other horses galloped by upon the road to WÖrth. The Uhlan lay, face downward, in the mud. Old Picard, hat in hand, paid his tribute to the dead. Beatrix heard him speak to her, but his voice seemed an echo of a voice far off. “My child,” he said, “the sun does not shine upon us any more. Let us go home.” His words awakened her as from a horrid sleep. The rain fell in torrents on the open road of the pass. She shuddered to her very heart, but it was not from the cold.
CHAPTER VIII
OVER THE HEARTS OF FRANCE She did not ride to Hagenau on the morrow, for the facteur brought a letter saying that the regiment was still waiting to complete its numbers, and had need of many things. Three days of suspense intolerable passed, but on the morning of the fourth a trooper, who had been in the saddle half the night, galloped to the chÂlet at dawn and brought the great news that the “Sixth” were upon the road to WÖrth, and would be camped on the Niederwald before the sun set. MacMahon’s army was on the march at last, the fellow said. He would join de Failly at Bitche and thereafter unite with Bazaine to give battle to the Prussians who were marching to the Rhine. “Madame would see the Captain that evening. He was bringing four of his brother officers to dinner. To-morrow the regiment would rest, but the next day it would march again. He, himself, must ride into the village of Elsasshausen and billet the others who would come after. But he could drink a bottle of wine—and he had not eaten for twenty hours.” Guillaumette took the trooper to the kitchen, and kept him there until the bell for Mass was ringing. Already, on the high-road below, the signs of the coming invasion were many. Jaded infantrymen, gunners with mud upon their very faces, weary horses stumbling through the mire, heavy waggons rolling in the ruts, horsemen crying out for food and wine, companies of Turcos and zouaves, the outposts of cuirassiers, staff officers, who rode at the gallop—all these began to block the road from Hagenau and even the by-paths through the woods. The rolling of the drums and the blare of the bugles were incessant. Rain fell pitilessly, so that the very brooks were as muddy rivers, and all the thickets droned to the babbling music of the swollen torrents. Far away towards the south the sky was an unbroken envelope of mist. The gloom of the day was intense and infectious, so that men marched listlessly and with heavy feet which squelched in the clinging mud. Many a cottage had been already deserted. The women fled to the hills before the advancing hosts. The armies of France marched on over the hearts of France. Beatrix spent the day in a work of love which brought colour to her cheeks again, and the light to her eyes. She would see Edmond that night, if it were but for an instant. The link which the fatal day had broken would for an hour be welded again. That sense of utter loneliness, which had been with her always since he had left her, was forgotten in the new thought of his return. The sight which she had seen upon the road to Niederbronn, the dead Uhlan lying face downward in the mud—the first blood offering to those who cried, “Let there be war,” had taken so grim a hold upon her imagination that she thought death alone would obliterate the memory. Fear for herself, whom all had forsaken, fear for the house and her home, dread of the solitude of the hills which war had awakened was hers no more. Edmond was coming back. She would show him that she had learned the lesson; that she could suffer, if need be, for the country wherein she had found so great a happiness. It was a busy day, and she tried to see nothing, to hear nothing of those sights and sounds upon the high-roads. There were roses to gather from her garden, and dinner to be thought of, and rooms to be made bright, and a hundred little things to do. Even Guillaumette’s despair could not trouble her. Edmond was coming back. There was a moment when she said to herself that she could wish he was coming alone; but she rebuked her own selfishness, and went on with her work. “We must do our best, Guillaumette. They will not expect too much now. Captain Chandellier comes and Major de Selay. We must put them in the white room. If Lieutenant Giraud is with them he must sleep in the nursery—” Guillaumette clapped her hands. “Oh, I know Giraud, Madame—what a man! He is the great big boy—like that. He eats the soup with the sabre—hein? He will eat us up, Madame. And the Capitaine Chandellier—what an appetite, and we have but two pigeons and a cabbage for the soupe—!” “Jacob shall ride to the village,” Beatrix said; “they will have eggs and poultry at the farm. I will go there myself—” “But, Madame—! Look at the road and say how you shall go. Red and blue, red and blue—and the cannons everywhere, and the great fellows who know a pretty face, and the little fellows who must stand on tiptoe to kiss you—oh, I know those fellows. And I shall be the Captain in this house. Monsieur has wished it. Do not fear for me, Madame. Guillaumette knows the chasseurs. I shall go to the farm and the sergeants will stand upon the tiptoes. To me it is nothing. I box the face—oh, I have done it often.” Beatrix found the merry voice tuned to her own new-gotten gaiety. Since that day of her pilgrimage to Niederbronn the burden of the hours had been a heavy one, but now she cast it off, and had forgotten that to-morrow she must take it up again. Everything in her home reminded her of Edmond. Sometimes she would stand before her glass to ask herself if he would find her changed, with eyes less bright and cheeks that lacked their colour. But the mirror told no such tale. There was laughter upon the pretty face it showed to her; a flush of pink suffused the clear white skin; the glossy black hair curled about the open forehead, and fell bewitchingly over the little ears. And she had put on the muslin gown and the sunbonnet he loved. Those who saw her at the door of the chÂlet, where she stood waiting for him, would have named her as some pretty school-girl, returned to her home from a convent. Yesterday, they would have said that she was a woman who had learned some of the lessons which life can teach. The pitiless rain had ceased early in the afternoon, and for a little while the sun shone warm and clear upon the woods. Down there, upon the road to Strasburg, all the armies of France seemed to be blocked in confusion inextricable. Cuirassiers with dulled breastplates, hussars with bedraggled shakoes, artillerymen lashing their horses, aides-de-camp roaring oaths, waggons locked together, gun-carriages stuck in the ditches, staff officers threatening, peasants mad with terror—all these poured in toward WÖrth, and the camps which MacMahon had found for them there. Even on the height above the valley, the woodland scene had quickened to the note of music and the tramping of the squadrons. Watch-fires sent their smoke curling above the shading trees; troopers stood at the cottage doors and clamoured loudly for bread and wine; horsemen passed the chÂlet riding wildly to Reichshofen and to Bitche. The very air seemed full of unrest; the birds winged upward fearing the cries they heard in the woods below them. From sunset onward Beatrix never left the watching place by the garden gate. Every little pennant fluttering upon a lance down there on the high-road could make her heart tremble and bring blood to her cheeks. She was surprised that all this stress and toil of war moved her so little. The red fires burning in the woods, the echoes of the drums, the flying horsemen—all seemed in harmony with that hour of expectation. Edmond was coming home. Those who had no home, begging of her for the children’s sake as they fled to the mountains, moved her to an infinite pity. She saw their little wealth of home piled upon carts and waggons; she saw the children, hungry and outcast, before this wave of war, and her heart bled for them. If she had been an outcast with them, holding a child in her arms and knowing not whether to-morrow would give life or death! But she was all blest. Edmond was coming back to her.
“He came at sunset, galloping up the high road.”
He came at sunset, galloping up the high-road on his heavy charger. The mud had whitened his boots and found its way even to the dark blue tunic and the red plumes of his helmet. Fitful as the sunshine of the week had been, it had bronzed his face and robbed his hands of their whiteness. His moustache drooped with the damp, but his eyes were lighted with all the fires of excitement and of love, and she heard his loud cry of salutation even while she was asking herself if, indeed, he had come. And so she ran to meet him, and holding her in his arms and whispering her name again and again, he crushed her pretty dress against the buttons of his tunic and covered her face with kisses, and seemed as though nevermore would he release her. In that moment she had her recompense for all the weary hours of waiting and distress.
CHAPTER IX
THE FUGITIVE He released her lips, but with fingers still locked in his he led her to the house and began to tell her all his news. She did not think it strange that he had no question concerning her own welfare during the days that had intervened. He had seen so much since then; the fires of war burnt him as a fever. She was content to listen and to know that she held his hand and heard his voice again. “I have been twenty hours in the saddle, little one,” he said, “twenty hours upon a biscuit and a glass of white wine at an auberge. How good it is to get home again! Ma foi! it seems a hundred years. I cannot think that it is only twenty days—twenty days since we went to Niederbronn and you taught me to see that the leaves were green. If we had known that morning! And you said that you would be an old woman!” “I should have been if you had not come back,” she exclaimed, speaking for the first time. He put his arm about her and pressed her close to his heart again. “It could not be,” he said decisively, “for me you are always the little girl of Strasburg I saw at the convent gate five years ago. And to-night—ah, if you could see yourself to-night, chÉrie.” She flushed for pleasure of his words and opened the door of their little drawing-room. “It has been a year of days, Edmond,” she said uncomplainingly, “yet I knew that you would come. And the roses have been ready every morning. Yesterday I would have ridden to Hagenau, but Jules Picard met me and said he had news of you. He has been very good to us. I rode with him to Niederbronn on Sunday. It was a dreadful day. They killed a German soldier—he died almost at my feet—” His merry laugh ran through the little house. “How—you call it a dreadful day, Beatrix! A dreadful day because a Prussian was killed! What will you say when I tell you that at SaarbrÜck on Tuesday General Bataille killed four thousand of them? The tale is everywhere. It was a victory for the Emperor and the Prince. The Prussians ran like deer. They will run every day when we begin. And we shall begin to-morrow, chÉrie; to-morrow we go to the north.” She could see his spirit waxing hot at the very thought of it; and his forgetfulness of all else but this consuming passion of the war was unmistakable from the first. He wished to hear of nothing, to speak of nothing but the troops of France then marching northward to their victory. “You shall tell me the story at dinner, petite,” he said. “I have asked Chandellier and Giraud, and the Colonel himself may come. It is only for to-morrow, for we march again on Saturday. Duhesme is with us, and Michel; Douay goes forward to Weissenburg. We shall be very strong when de Failly reports. He has two divisions at Bitche, and Frossard is before SaarbrÜck. We have the cuirassiers and the Turcos and ninety-six guns besides the mitrailleuse. That is the medicine for the Prussians—the mitrailleuse. You should hear the tales they tell of the Prince’s baptism. Whole regiments mowed down as wheat by the wind. Not a man left to go to Berlin and tell the others about it. It was a triumph, a procession. Those that could run were the lucky ones. Ah, mignonne, did I not promise you that before the vines had ripened I would be home again?” She took both his hands and looked up into his face very seriously, as one whose love wished more for him even than his own ambitions. “God grant it!” she ejaculated fervently. He kissed her for the words, but could not spare any praise for her pretty room or for the roses with which she had decked out the mantelpiece and the little windows. His thoughts were all of his comrades who were coming to dinner at the chÂlet. He talked incessantly of all that had happened in Strasburg and upon the march afterwards. “Old HÉlÈne is at the Place Kleber,” he said; “she wants you back there, but I said that you would not go. There may be danger on the road, and while the army is about here you will be safe. We shall not leave the frontier until we ride to Berlin, and then I will write again. If it were not for those ‘others,’ Beatrix, I would take you with me. But our friends lÀ-bas are merry fellows, and I do not wish you to meet the people who have come from Paris to our picnic. The Colonel says we have as many bonnet-boxes as waggons. It is his way of speaking, and, of course, soldiers are soldiers always. When the day comes, they will not fight less well because they know a pretty bonnet and a pretty face beneath it. I do not like that—but then, you know, I have someone to wait for me. Was it long to wait, mignonne—were you very lonely?” She was glad that he should have asked the question, though it came to him as an afterthought. “I counted the hours,” she said, “yet I knew that it must be, Edmond!” “Ah, the ‘must be’ will soon be a word of yesterday,” he said gaily; “you shall hear what the Colonel says, Beatrix. Giraud comes with him, but the Major is busy after horses, and Chandellier is to dine with Mademoiselle Serres of the OpÉra Comique. You will hear her when we go to Paris in the autumn. She has come here to learn how Marguerite feels when Valentine has gone to the wars. It is a splendid idea, and Serres amuses me always. She has ridden with the regiment from Strasburg, and is now at the inn with the others. I am going down there by-and-by to arrange for to-morrow. If the Marshal is wise, he will not hurry us. The men are coming in every day, and we shall have our full numbers before the week is out. It does not matter, of course, for we have an army here that could fight all the Germans on the Rhine. And SaarbrÜck will have demoralised them. Our spirit is splendid. You do not know what magnificent fellows we lead, Beatrix. There are no finer troops in the world. I would risk the safety of France a hundred times with such men as our lancers at my back. I would stake my own life on the victory which they will win if only those Prussians will make haste and show themselves. But they know better. They wait for us, and they will not wait long. It will be like a storm in summer, petite—a little darkness, and then the sunshine and my home!” His mood was one which would brook no contradiction. Much as she wished to talk of many things, she saw that he would have no mind for them; and she hid away those little secrets of her love which at any other time she would have whispered joyously. His hope and happiness were very dear to her; and when by-and-by Colonel Tripard himself came to the house, and Lieutenant Giraud with him, she welcomed them as friends who could talk of things which were more fitting and momentous at such an hour. Simple as their dinner was, they had the music of the drums and the tramp of squadrons marching to make the music of a feast. And Edmond was at home again. The little house seemed full of bright lights as of the radiance of her own happiness. The watchfires on the hills were the beacons of her happiness. Colonel Tripard, a veteran soldier, with a pleasing voice and a gentle manner, spoke little but spoke well. Lieutenant Giraud, a flÂneur without brains, babbled always of the victory at SaarbrÜck. Lefort himself was proud of the little wife who sat at the foot of his table—proud of her prettiness and of the gentle welcome she gave to his friends. “I will not let her go back to Strasburg, my Colonel,” he said, when SaarbrÜck had been forgotten for an instant. “Am I not right? Is she not better with the army?” “While you are here, yes. And the army should be grateful to you. But, of course, Madame will return when we are gone.” “To tell them of your victory, Colonel. Is there any other reason?” Beatrix asked. He curled his moustache, and shook his head thoughtfully. “There will be many soldiers here, Madame Lefort. They are not always the friends of women. And we have the Algerians with us. They are splendid fellows, but—” He shrugged his shoulders. A shadow of anxiety crossed her face. “You are not going to say, ‘Save us from our friends,’ Colonel.” Lieutenant Giraud chimed in: “Save them from their friends’ wine cellars, Madame Lefort. That is what the Colonel would say. They are the devil, those Turcos. A plague of locusts is better. If you have any wine in your cellars, give it to them and go out to the hills while they drink it. There will be nothing but empty bottles in Germany a month from now. They are always thirsty—the camels!” Beatrix ignored him. “There were Baden troopers here on Sunday,” she said quietly; “they paid for what they had and robbed none. If I am to run away, it must not be from the soldiers of France, Colonel.” Lefort heard her with pleasure. “She is right,” he said; “we will leave the Prussians to do the running, my Colonel. And this house is not upon the high-road. If a soldier comes here to ask for a glass of wine, he shall have one!” “He is coming now, then,” exclaimed Giraud; “hark how the fellow gallops. You will have to look for a bucket for a rascal who rides like that.” All listened for a moment and heard a dull heavy sound, as of the thunder of hoofs muted by the wet of the road, without. Some trooper was galloping towards Reichshofen, and galloping as though for his life. When he came up to the chÂlet he reined back his horse and began to shout like one possessed— “Save yourselves, save yourselves; the Prussians are coming.” The Colonel filled his glass and sipped it. The others looked at each other incredulously. “The man is mad,” said Giraud. “Or drunk,” said Tripard; “a gallop in the hills will do him good. Apropos, Captain, where does your road lead to? We have twenty maps of Germany lÀ-bas but none of France. That is the way our people do things.” “They fear you will lose the road to Berlin, Colonel,” suggested Beatrix; but Edmond said— “It is the road to Reichshofen and Niederbronn. Those who join de Failly will go that way to-morrow, my Colonel. There is plenty of cover for an ambush if ever the Germans this way—” “If the Germans—” ejaculated Giraud with irony that was almost indignation. “They were here on Sunday, Monsieur Giraud,” Beatrix said quietly. The laugh was turned against the lieutenant, and they were still merry over it when a second trooper was heard galloping up the road. He rode feebly, as one upon a weary horse; and when he came to the garden gate they could hear him crying for help in a weak and trembling voice. “Another,” said the lieutenant. “Sacre bleu—the whole regiment is drunk to-night, then.” A little while they waited in silence, for Guillaumette ran to the door. She came bustling into the room presently with a white face and lips which could scarcely articulate her news. “Monsieur, Monsieur,” she said wildly, “there is a man dying in the garden—come then!” Her news was so unlooked for that all rose to their feet at once; but Edmond put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and held her back. “It is nothing,” he said; “stay here, and we will see.” He went into the hall with the two men at his heels. Through the open door there came a fresh wind of the night to set the candles guttering in their sticks and to blow petals from the roses she had picked. The empty chairs and the food still upon the plates seemed ominous, in some way, of disaster. She heard the men all talking together, and to their voices was added the moaning voice of a stranger. When she could restrain her impatience no longer and went a little way into the hall, she beheld a spectacle so terrible that she sickened before it and would have fallen if Edmond had not put his arm about her. One of the hussars of Douay’s brigade stood in the lobby; he had a great gash upon his face, and the clotted blood had stained his tunic a deep brown. The pitiful eyes of the man, his wan cheeks, his failing voice told her that death had ridden with him upon the road. “Messieurs,” he said hoarsely, “it is a defeat—a rout at Weissenburg. The general is killed; the chasseurs are cut to pieces. I have ridden all day with Uhlans at my heels. Save yourselves, Messieurs, for they are coming here!” He spoke with a sympathetic earnestness, as though their safety was of great concern to him; but the effort was too much for his strength, and of a sudden he put both hands upon his forehead and reeled forward among them. “Oh, my God, Messieurs, what pain I have!” he cried. The Colonel’s strong arm was about him in a moment. “Mon pauvre,” he exclaimed, “you shall rest here—a glass of wine quick, Captain; he will tell us his story afterwards.” Beatrix had stood mute in her distress while the man spoke; but now, when she heard his cry of pain, a woman’s instinct released her will, and she was first in the room for the wine they sought. When she had filled a glass of it and returned to the hall, the huzzar lay full length upon the carpet, his hands still clasping his head as though to crush the pain of the mortal wound he carried. “Here—here is the wine, Colonel.” Tripard thrust her back gently. “Not now,” he said. “His story is told, my child.”
They carried the body of the dead hussar to the coach-house and laid it there upon a mattress, with candles set on either side of it. Death for France was new to them then. This man, whom night had sent to their doors, might have been one of their own servants stricken by some accident of farm or field. The day was to come when the dead would be no more to them than the blades of grass their horses trod. But that day was not yet. Though they had hardly begun their dinner when the wounded man came to the door, no one thought now of food. Beatrix herself, white and silent, in her little drawing-room, heard them passing to and fro, now out to the gate to hear if other troopers rode that way; now to the stables to saddle their horses. Blank incredulity marked all their words. Abel Douay, the intrepid, ever-zealous Douay, surprised! His division cut to pieces—he who was to march by Weissenburg to their support on the morrow. They could not believe it. The troopers had been the victims of some skirmish; they had fled in panic from some marauding Uhlans. In any case, those at the chÂlet must ride down to headquarters to learn the truth. The very solitude of the Niederwald had become intolerable to them. Even Lefort had his excuses for the journey. His curiosity burned him as a fire. “I shall not be away an hour, Beatrix,” he said. “It is necessary that I go. We shall send some troopers to see to that poor fellow yonder, and the Colonel will make this house his headquarters and have a sentry here. You must be brave, little one. I do not believe a word of the story, but it is for us to be prudent. If there are Germans at Weissenburg I must send my little wife to Strasburg, after all. I did not believe that it could happen so. I will not believe it until the news is confirmed down yonder.” “You must not think of me, dearest,” she said quietly. “I shall not go back to Strasburg while you are here. If the worst happens, no one will trouble about the chÂlet. You do not wish me to go—Edmond?” “I—I wish it, Beatrix, God forbid! After all, the army is here, and that is enough. But I did not think that it would come to this. Germans at Weissenburg! How can they be there? Our vedettes rode over the very ground yesterday. They did not see a single trooper. They are not blind, and those others were not telling the truth. I shall come back in an hour and be sure of it. You will wait up for me—mignonne!” His ideas were changing and strangely excited. In one moment he would speak of her safety, in the next of the orders for to-morrow. They were to follow Douay to the north; de Failly was coming down from Bitche; the Marshal was at Hagenau. There would be a great battle on the Sunday, and the Germans would be driven back far beyond the Rhine. That would be the beginning and the end of the war. MacMahon would march into Baden; the Emperor would enter Germany by Restall, and go straight to Berlin. There would be no more war in Europe for half a century. He would take her to Paris, and this trouble should make their holiday a holiday indeed. It was nine o’clock when the three rode away from the chÂlet. In the aureole of light, cast out from the window of her drawing-room, she saw the anxious face of Colonel Tripard, the laughing eyes of Lieutenant Giraud, the restless haunting look which Edmond turned toward her. She heard their excited talk as they turned from the gate to the high-road, and went cantering down to WÖrth. None of them looked back. The moon shone fitfully upon the dripping trees and puddles in the lanes. She could see the candles guttering by the body of the dead man; far away she heard the rumble of waggons and the rolling of the drums. Guillaumette and a little group of farm servants discussed the terror of the night over there in the stables. A realisation, not of her own peril, but of her solitude, overwhelmed her. The presence of the dead haunted her. She ran up to her bedroom, and sitting in the unlighted room she opened her window and looked out over the awakened vineyards. France had poured its very life into that valley. Watchfires glowed red in the woods as a thousand stars of good omen. She could see regiments of cuirassiers with the moonbeams glowing upon their helmets and their breastplates while they march northward to the villages by the river. The brooks shone as rivulets of molten silver. The silence of the thickets about the house was weird and terrifying. She thought to see those woods quicken to life and pour from their heart the hosts of the enemy. The memory of the dead hussar’s face was with her always. She sat at the window of her room, and her strange life came back in many pictures of her childhood. She remembered her mother’s face; there was, far back in the years, the dim recollection of another—of that father who had died in America and left her to become the child of France, and the wife of one of France’s best soldiers. It was odd that in such an hour a memory of the gardens of her own England would trouble her and set her longing for them. The first fruits of her happiness had been garnered there. Nevertheless, the years she had lived in Strasburg had given her Edmond. It had been old HÉlÈne’s dearest wish always that “her children,” as she called them, should be man and wife. Now that wish was realised—yet to what purpose? What irony of destiny had chosen this hour of the consummation of their love to put them asunder? If she had known nothing of the meaning of war until that day, the night of the day taught her generously. This outpouring of the sons of France, this fleeing of peasants to the mountains, these endless squadrons upon the high-road, this fever of life, this shutting of the doors upon the homes of France—this was war. She did not know the truth a month ago, but now she knew for all time. None the less, courage, her dead father’s gift to her, was ready to console her for the knowledge. She was the wife of one of France’s soldiers, she told herself. For his sake she would show a laughing face to all the world to-morrow. Yet, if he should die—! For the first time since the day of the ultimate calamity she knelt at her bedside and sent a fervent prayer to heaven that God would give her the life of the man she loved. In distant Normandy another woman prayed at the same hour for the hussar, who lay still and white between the guttering candles they had set up in the coach-house.
CHAPTER XI
THE HUSSARS ARE AT GUNSTETT It fell wet upon the morrow, a heavy soaking rain, which quenched the watchfires and wet the shivering troopers to their very skins. All day long, weary infantrymen and gunners sleeping upon their guns came listlessly down the valley road; even the woodland heights were solitudes no more. Beatrix, worn with anxiety and waiting, saw the dark faces of the Algerians as they lurked about the garden gate and bandied words with the sentry who had been posted there. She beheld the aides-de-camp dashing wildly down toward the hollow or away to Reichshofen or Bitche. The ground trembled as the rolling guns were dragged upward to the heights. The horsemen, splashed from head to foot with mud, went by doggedly to their camp in the valley. A great sound, rising and falling, as the murmur of an angry sea, was heard all day, even in the thickets of the heights. The drenching rain could not check the sound, nor any door shut it out. The very air quivered with the echoes of turmoil and of movement. Men turned from camp to camp as though no place of rest was anywhere to be found. Peasants fled to remote glades of the mountains, with children clinging to their knees; women wept for the homes which would be homes to them no more. It was nearly dark when Edmond returned to the chÂlet. The rain had soaked through his cloak, and his weary horse could scarce stand upon its legs. He met his child-wife at the gate and led her quickly to the house. She saw that the day had changed him strangely. He was thinking of something else even while he greeted her. “The Colonel will not come,” he said. “He has gone to join de Failly. I am left at WÖrth with a squadron. We have ridden all day on a reconnaissance towards Seltz, but there are no Germans there. God knows, I wish you were not here, mignonne—I blame myself, but how can you go now? There is not a road which is free—not any one to whom I can trust you. The troops come in every hour and the battle is for Sunday. My God—if it should be here!” He stood for a moment holding both her hands and looking with earnest eyes upon her laughing face. The scarlet plumes drooped, wet and sodden, over the dulled brass of his czapska. The silver epaulettes were tarnished; there was mud even upon his tunic; but, more than all, his sunken cheeks and weary step spoke eloquently of his fatigue. A great pity for him came upon her, and she drew him into the brightly lighted room, and would not hear of his apprehensions. “Dearest,” she said, “of course I shall not go away. As if it mattered. And Guillaumette is here. She has been giving wine to the troopers all day. When her Gaspard goes to Berlin he is to bring her a mug. There will be nothing to drink in WÖrth by that time. We shall have to go to Paris or die of thirst. As if it were not enough to have you home again.” She was talking and laughing all the time, and with deft fingers helping him to change his sodden clothes. She did not ask him if the news of yesterday were true, for she feared his answer to her question. Every effort of hers was one to remind him that he had come home again. The bright lights in her drawing-room, the fire Guillaumette quickly kindled there, the little dinner they had thought so much about, the hundred gestures of affection and of love compelled him to forget the grim scenes without. He shut them from his memory for a short hour, and thought only of the childish face lifted to his, of the days of happiness which the mountains had given to him. “It is good to have you to myself, mignonne,” he said when dinner was done and she had rolled his cigarette, and lay curled up on the rug at his feet. “I feared that Tripard would come, and the others, but they are gone by to Bitche. Michel has all the cavalry he wants for anything we are likely to do here. There are the two cuirassier regiments under Bonnemain, and Septueil has the light brigade. You remember Septueil at Strasburg—the man who always told you that you were a Prussian at heart and would never marry a French soldier. He rode in to-day, and Duhesme is with him. I am sorry for the people down below—there are no more vineyards now, and you could not find an empty house in the villages if you offered ten thousand francs for it. I met old MÈre Bartres as I was coming up. The Turcos have turned her out of the cottage with the little ones—she was going to sleep in the woods, but I sent her to the stables. We must do what we can for all these poor people now. If the worst comes to the worst and we are beaten—” She laughed at him, and put her arms about his knees. “If we are beaten, dear—ah! if the mountains fly. Who is coming to WÖrth when the army is here, and you are here, and—I am here! The ride has tired you. I know what it is—oh, so well—to be tired with all the world, and to think that everything is against you, and that to-morrow will be the deluge. But when to-morrow comes you get up early, and the sun shines, and you forget what it was all about, and there is no deluge. I used to be like that often when I was at the convent in Strasburg. The bells were an enemy; I hated the old man who sat at the gate; but when the gate opened and old HÉlÈne was there, and I went to the Place Kleber and saw you upon your horse, and all the lances of the regiment, and heard the music everywhere—I was glad that there had been those other days. If the sun shone every day, there would be no summer. And our summer is to come. It will not matter when or where—but we shall tell each other about to-night, and that will make the sun shine for us.” She talked bravely, but her words were vain. That spirit of hope which had animated him yesterday was his friend no more. He was telling himself, though he whispered no word of it to her, that Douay had been defeated at Weissenburg, and that his division fled, panic-stricken, through the hills. The same army which had defeated Douay might be at the gates of WÖrth to-morrow. What answer would MacMahon give to it—ah, what? “I do not fear for the men,” he said, when she had rolled him another cigarette, and he had listened a moment to the thunder of that mighty human avalanche in the valley below; “it is those who lead. Why do we want biscuit even here on our side of the frontier? Why are the magazines at Strasburg empty? Why does no one know anything of the Emperor’s plans? They tell us that Douay was surprised, yet whose fault was that? There are no finer fellows than the troops down yonder in all the world. If they are beaten, then God help France and us!” She refused to respond to his earnestness, and still wished to lead him to other thoughts. “Oh! We are in the convent to-night,” she exclaimed impulsively, “the bell will ring presently, and grandmÈre HÉlÈne will come. To-morrow there will be the feast, and I shall see the lances go by and hear the music. And Edmond will be there—he will have forgotten the deluge.” The note of it was jest, but she changed it on an impulse and spoke of her own great love for him. “We have always ourselves, dearest,” she said; “nothing can change us. There will always be our home—and our love.” There would always be her love! Ay, indeed, as he looked down upon the little face, and the watching eyes, and the pitiful mouth, down at the long hair falling upon his knees, and the white hands of the child-wife that destiny had sent to him, he said that love should ever be his recompense. And he slept with his arms about her and forgot that the enemies of France were upon the fields of France, and that to-morrow the dead would be numbered and many a home would mourn a son, and many a wife would listen for a voice she nevermore would hear. At dawn a trooper, riding madly up from the camp, awoke him with an urgent message. “The Prussians are in the town; the hussars are at Gunstett—for God’s sake come quickly, Captain—the battle is to-day!”
“‘The Prussians are in the town!’”
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