Max Pemberton

The French fled from WÖrth, and the passes of the Vosges were open to the victorious armies of the invader. Villages, which knew not why war had come to the vineyards, beheld the advancing hosts that carried the sword into the gardens of France. People said that no man might number them, no general withstand them. For a nation armed had gone out against those who had betrayed a nation. Old men spoke of Austerlitz and of Jena, and told one another that never again would the shame of the new day be forgotten nor its humiliations avenged. Peasants fled from their homes to the shelter of the cities; the wounded crawled to the churches and lay side by side with the forgotten dead. Everywhere the devastating hand withered the fields and gave payment of their ashes. The curse was upon France, men said. The day of hope had passed. Out there upon the hill lands the spiked helmets glistened and the Uhlans rode triumphantly; the hope, the courage of Paris seemed a mockery beyond words. For the children cried for bread; the dirge for the dead was the daily prayer.

Westward and southward from WÖrth MacMahon’s hosts had fled to tell the tale in all the towns, and even to proclaim it at the gates of Strasburg and in the cafÉs by the great cathedral there. The wounds the soldiers showed, the enduring fear of those mighty forces crossing the mountains so swiftly, moved the city to belief and to activity. Men would not stop to ask why this had been, this betrayal surpassing belief, this wreck of the glory of a century. The Germans were coming to the gates of the city they loved. All that life could give in defence of that city should be their offering to France. Whatever else of shame and of defeat contributed to their country’s harvest of the war, Strasburg at least would play her part with honour. Never, while one stone stood upon another, would she open her gates to the Prussian king. The few of German heart and birth, who remained indifferent to the issues, found themselves silenced by the greater voice of patriotism. Citizens congregated in all the cafÉs to tell the good story. “To the last brick, comrades—our general has said so.” And that watchword became their own from the first.

The news came to the city on the seventh day of August. The eighth day had not dawned before the great work began. Old and young, civilians and soldiers—no longer was there to be any distinction of age or class or fitness for the task. Even the women went to gaze upon the mighty citadel, and to tell each other that those glistening guns were greater than all the hosts of Germany. In the squares and public places the National Guards and francs-tireurs drilled incessantly. The whole city was full of the sounds of war—of squadrons tramping, of the blaring music of the bands, of the rumbling of the great guns, of the brisk word of command and of encouragement. Even little children were taught to honour the general who had said that Strasburg should not open her gates while one stone was left upon another.

While all this was the talk of the open places of the city, there was to be found in the privacy of their houses a determination as real, as faithful, as unwavering as the creed of the multitude or the gospel of the cafÉs. In the Place Kleber itself, Madame HÉlÈne, that mistress of gentleness and of love, spoke of courage always; of courage and of patience, and of a woman’s work for France. People who passed the great house in the Place Kleber would point up to the windows where the beloved face was to be seen, and would tell each other that there was the mother of the city, ever giving good counsel with a mother’s heart and inspiring them to that self-sacrifice which is the truest gift of motherhood. Beatrix herself, listening to that gentle voice, would forget her own regrets and all that had been since Edmond left the chÂlet at Niederwald. There, in the streets of the city, were those who called for her pity and her help. Wan men, hobbling upon crutches; great fellows hugging terrible wounds; lads robbed for ever of the joy of youth; old soldiers with tears upon their cheeks because they could fight for France no more—WÖrth had sent such as these in their thousands to Strasburg. She saw them sunning themselves in the square before her house. Often she listened to the pathetic story of their flight. She knew not why destiny had so done to them yet had spared the man she loved.

“If one could only be grateful enough!” she said to HÉlÈne on the morning of the seventh day after her return. “I feel sometimes that I have lost the power to be thankful for anything. It will be different when Edmond comes home. And one can only wait, wait, wait.”

But grandmÈre shook her head in kindly rebuke.

“Of ourselves always, dear child! Is there no one else but a poor old woman and an impatient little wife in Strasburg to-day? Do not the streets teach us their lesson? Ah, the brave hearts in the streets, Beatrix; the brave men who would save our homes for us! What are we doing for them—we, the women of France? What help shall we give them when the need comes and the children suffer? And we must help them. What can we ask of the poor when the rich give nothing? Let us give abundantly, dear child, as it has been given to us.”

There was a noble courage in her voice; but to Beatrix that voice was as a sound from afar. She believed no longer in France or the armies of France. The mighty impotence of WÖrth remained her abiding message. The doom of the city and of her home seemed already written. The childish fear, that this lack of faith put a bond upon her love, grew day by day. She was not worthy of the man who had whispered his ambitions to her in the chÂlet of the Niederwald and had sealed his vow of faith in France with a lover’s caress. Her very belief in the might and the glory of the Saxon stood against her as a sin. The future lay through a valley of shadows which gathered quickly about her path, and enveloped her in the gloom of foreboding and of doubt. She was not a Frenchwoman; she never would understand—never, never.

“Dear HÉlÈne, how good you are,” she said impulsively. “I feel guilty when I listen to you. All that I see here makes me think of Edmond. If only one could write to him. If only one were sure that the prison meant nothing to him but four square walls and a German jailor. It would have been different, perhaps, a year ago—but now! Ah, mamma, you were never married in the Minster, and you never went to the Niederwald for your honeymoon. My life has changed since that day they came for him. I don’t think I have any heart left. I try to remember other things, but every day the question is, Will he come this morning—will it be next month, next year—or never, never again until the end?”

She lifted a white face to the kindly eyes, and felt old HÉlÈne’s arms about her neck.

“I cannot lose him, even for France,” she said very pitifully; “you are not angry with me, HÉlÈne?”

“Angry my child, God forbid! A thousand women’s hearts are heavy as yours to-day. We must not let them see our tears, we to whom they look for hope and courage. When Edmond comes, our hands must not be empty. Oh, think of it, Beatrix—there are Germans at Schiltigheim, Germans at the gates of our own city. To-morrow—ah, God knows what we shall see and hear to-morrow!”

There were tears upon her cheeks as this doubt for the city of her childhood came to trouble her. Beatrix knew well of what she was thinking. The armies of France had not saved them yesterday. Who should say that to-morrow would find those armies victorious?

“If all were as you, dear HÉlÈne,” she said tenderly, “we need fear for nothing. And we shall know how to suffer for Edmond’s sake if the day comes. Sometimes I think that I should be glad for it to come. It is hard to be a woman when those in whom you trust have ceased to be men. At WÖrth I believed that nothing in all the world could defeat the armies of France. I dare not tell you all I saw there. Strasburg cannot be like that. Nothing will ever be like that again.”

“It will be as our destiny writes it, my child. And we must have faith, faith always. It is all a woman can offer—her whole heart and soul and sympathy for those who suffer that she may have a home. Let us give unstintingly while we may.”

They went together to the windows of the house to watch the marching of a regiment, which went by with banners flying and drums rolling, and all the glorious panoply of war. It was a sunny Sabbath morning of August, and in all the steeples the bells were calling the citizens to Mass. When the troops had passed and the cheering for the “Mother of the City,” whose white hairs the soldiers had seen at the window, had died away, Beatrix quitted the house and went alone toward the Minster; for thither the citizens now turned, and there the great service of the day was to be held. She had never seen so many people abroad in the streets of Strasburg before; nor did they wear the air of those who feared for themselves or their houses. Women anticipated coming victories in colours which would not mourn the past irrevocable. Men walked in groups and spoke of the brave General Uhrich. Bands played everywhere. The cafÉs were scenes of mirth and excitement. In the churches themselves priests spoke of a nation fighting God’s battles, and moved their flocks to a frenzy of applause. Old soldiers told of Jena and of Italy. Little children carried long swords at their belts, and their watchword was “Aux armes.”

By these she passed quickly, for the bells told her that the service was about to begin. In the cathedral square she found a great concourse of people moved by some savage impulse she could not at first understand. Ferocious cries were raised; she heard the smashing of glass in the doors of a cafÉ, and saw bludgeons and sticks raised threateningly above the heads of the people. A man at her side told her that they had caught a spy and were about to kill him. They had taken him in the Minster itself. He had run to the cafÉ for shelter, but they would settle his affair, and he would go back to Germany no more. Had it been possible, she would have drawn back from the crowd; but the human wave engulfed her and carried her forward, almost to the doors of the house. Half fainting in the press, unable to make her voice heard, she became unwillingly the spectator of that tragedy of the Sabbath. She saw the white-faced man in the porch of the house; she heard his frenzied appeals for mercy. Foam dripped from his lips, his hair was dishevelled, his coat torn, his hands upraised to protect his face; but no one thought of pity or of justice. Men struck at him with their fists; a drunkard threw a glass at him and cut his forehead; the blows of canes fell upon his face as whips that strike a board; blood flowed from his nostrils. He fell fainting, and those about him beat out his brains as he lay senseless upon the floor.

The people swept by with clamorous shouts. The spy was dead. Strasburg had settled with him. For an instant, Beatrix reeled back against the window of the cafÉ. Everything in the cathedral square swam before her eyes. She thought that she would fall, but a strong arm was placed suddenly about her waist, and a voice that she knew whispered a word in her ear.

“Silence,” was the word; “I have brought the news I promised you.”

She looked up at the man’s face and read it through his disguise. Brandon North himself was at her side.

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CHAPTER XIX
A FACE AT THE WINDOW

He was dressed as a Frenchman, with a polished silk hat and a big bow carelessly tied. For the rest, his disguise was of the slightest, yet so skilfully done that a friend would have passed him in the street. But he gave her no opportunity to express surprise at his presence there, nor at his new appearance.

“Let us go where there are not so many interesting people,” he said. “I have much to say to you.”

She was dizzy still, and pale and trembling. He called a waiter from a cafÉ and ordered a little glass of brandy. When she had drunk it, he began to lead her away from the cathedral towards the Rue de Kehl. Her curiosity amused him.

“You see, I have no business in Strasburg,” he said lightly. “People might misunderstand me as they misunderstood that poor fellow yonder. It would be quite wrong of them—but then, I have a regard for my bones.”

She shuddered.

“They would kill you, Brandon!” she exclaimed.

“Exactly; they would kill me. It is one of the follies of war. You beat out a man’s brains because he might be a spy. Afterwards you are sorry, but you cannot put his brains back again. Forgive me, I am only talking in general terms. We had better not particularise until we are in safer quarters.”

She stopped suddenly. The peril in which he stood, and which she must in some measure share, was not to be overlooked. Many, both civilians and soldiers, were passing on their way to the Minster square. A regiment of Gardes Mobiles went by with swinging step and merry music. She knew that a word whispered to them, a word that a Prussian dragoon had entered Strasburg, would bring instant death to the man who had come into the city because of his promise to her.

“You were wrong to come; I was wrong to ask you,” she said quickly. “They would never understand—never.”

He laughed lightly and lit a cigarette.

“We will not consult them, Beatrix,” he said; “I came here because I knew you would be anxious. You must give me your word that you will not tell one man, woman, or child in all Strasburg. It’s my only chance. Even old HÉlÈne must not know. What isn’t known cannot be misunderstood. Don’t think I have come on my own business at all. If I was that sort of person I would not be at your side now. All that we want to learn about this place we learnt a year ago—and, of course you have been to church, Madame Lefort?”

His voice and manner changed quickly as an officer of the guard elbowed him from the pavement. When the man was out of hearing he began again:

“That is old Gatelet; he has dined with me at the Maison Rouge many a day. I wonder what he would say if he knew where I had been since we saw each other? It is astonishing how you forget your liking for a man when he’s on the other side, especially when the other side is winning.”

Again she checked her pace to question him.

“Brandon,” she said, “where are you going to now?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Anywhere, where there are no listeners. I am lodging for to-day with Madame Venier, over at the little white house there. She has one of the ministers from St. Thomas’s with her, and enough daughters to chaperone a regiment. If you would walk into her parlour—”

She stamped her foot angrily.

“You know that I cannot go.”

“Very well, then; I’ll forget that I suggested it. But you can’t write to Edmond here at the gate.”

“You think that I could write to him?”

“I know that you could, for I’ll send the letter myself.”

She breathed quickly, debating it. Some of the men whom she had seen in the cafÉ when the spy was struck down were coming up the street. She entered the house when she saw them, and he followed her quickly.

“I have no right to come,” she protested. “Edmond would never forgive me.”

“Oh, now—that’s nonsense. Why should he not forgive you? I will tell him all about it myself—when the proper time comes. Meanwhile, he is at Ulm, and will not give his parole. Persuade him to, and you may have him back in Strasburg in a week’s time. But I wouldn’t if I were you. It’s dangerous, and might lead to the unexpected. He’s living like a prince where he is, and there aren’t any bullets. There will be plenty if he comes back to Strasburg.”

“I do not understand,” she said helplessly. “What is the parole he must give, and why?”

He pointed to an arm-chair, and drew it up to the table for her.

“It’s just this way,” he said—“but will you let me smoke? I have been about the streets all day in this Sunday best, and it’s a little heavy for the nerves.”

She nodded her head quickly, while he filled the pipe and lighted it deliberately. The sense of their danger was more sure every moment that she lingered there. The horrid scene at the doors of the Minster still haunted her eyes. This man at her side might make another scene such as that—and for her sake.

“I am waiting to hear about the parole,” she said.

“Well,” he answered bluntly, “it’s this way. If he will promise not to bear arms against Germany for the rest of the war, they’ll send him back to you. I know Edmond well. He won’t give that promise unless you ask it. And if he gives it, and comes back to Strasburg, a week will find him on the fortifications.”

“In which case?”

“In which case they will shoot him when we take the city.”

He did not speak boastfully, but there was behind his words a soupÇon of that arrogance which victory may give even to a man incapable of common emotions. She heard him as one who neither counselled nor dissuaded her, but left everything to her own judgment. Never had she been asked to decide a question so momentous.

“You know that I cannot write it,” she exclaimed hotly; “he would think I did not wish him to return.”

“Very well; but you know what you are risking. He will certainly be shot when we come in.”

“Oh, my God,” she said; “what a cruel thing war is!”

“To the vanquished, of course. The mischief is that our French friends never know when they are vanquished. Edmond will be like the others. He will give his word—and break it.”

“I don’t believe it,” she exclaimed emphatically; “when he comes to the Place Kleber he will listen to me. I shall make it a point of honour between us. He may break his word to you, but he never will to me.”

“Then write the letter now. It shall go to Ulm to-morrow. I don’t hunger for the sights of Strasburg, you may be sure. To-night will see me on the other side of the river and thankful to be there.”

“Brandon,” she exclaimed, “how much I owe to you!”

He laughed.

“I should be a poor man if all my ledger accounts were like yours, Beatrix.”

He began to pace the room that she might write uninterruptedly. For a long while she sat contemplating the white paper before her. Though she had combated his assertions, she knew in her heart that he spoke the truth, and that the letter which brought her husband back to Strasburg might also be his death-warrant. Edmond would never resist the spirit then prevailing in the city. He would go to the fortifications, and the Prussians would take him there. They would shoot him as one who had broken his parole, and hers would be the word which called him back to his doom. She could not write that word; she must leave it to his judgment, she thought. Nor could she tell him why she hesitated. Impossible to say “I fear that you will break your oath.” Rather, she wrote words of love and sympathy, narrating all that had happened at Strasburg—her meeting with her old friend, Brandon North, on the evening of the battle, the strange companion she had found upon the road, the anticipations of a siege, the news that the Prussians were at Schiltigheim. But she did not say, “Come back to me,” and there were tears in her eyes when she sealed the letter.

“Well,” said Brandon, who had watched her closely, “you have finished it.”

She turned away sadly.

“I have flattered you by taking your opinion.”

“Oh, I don’t count in the matter. But I am sure you are wise, Beatrix. Another month will finish this business. Better for him to come home then with whole bones than now—to God knows what. And you—of course, you are leaving Strasburg?”

“Leaving Strasburg—why?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Because the Prussians are at Schiltigheim.”

“Is that all?”

He laughed—almost brutally, she thought.

“Not at all; it is only the beginning. In a month there will be no Strasburg to remain in. Forgive me if I am too frank. One seems able to talk to you as one talks to no one else. I suppose it’s because we’re both English, Beatrix.”

She thought that the confession was an indirect sneer at her husband; her cheeks crimsoned in resentment.

“There is no other country but England?” she exclaimed ironically.

“I think so,” he said simply.

The great pride of his belief appealed to her. She held out her hands to him.

“Edmond is your friend,” she exclaimed; “you will except him always. And I am very grateful to you, Brandon—more grateful than I can say.”

He pooh-poohed her expression of thanks, and was about to take leave of her when a face, thrust close to the window, made them both draw back. It was the face of Gatelet, the officer of the National Guard, whom they had passed in the street an hour ago. Visible for an instant, it disappeared at once as Brandon turned with a startled exclamation and took a step to the window.

“Gatelet—by all that’s unlucky,” he said, standing irresolute and concealing from her all that moment meant to him. She, in turn, was conscious of a tremor of excitement and a dread unlike anything she had ever known.

“Oh, my God, Brandon—if he should have recognised you!”

He forced a laugh, but took up his hat as he spoke.

“Well,” he said, feigning merriment, “it would certainly be unpleasant, Beatrix.”

“But you will leave Strasburg—now, this moment.”

“Not at all—I am going for a walk to the cafÉ of the Contades.”

“To tell all the city that you are here.”

He began to put on his gloves.

“Gatelet certainly recognised me, or he would not have come back. As he does not know my business and will not trouble himself to guess it, the odds are that he takes me for a spy. In that case I am going to give them a run for their money, Beatrix. Once the sun does me the favour to set, I shall get to Schiltigheim without trouble. Meanwhile I prefer the open—you understand.”

They left the house together. There was no one before its doors. She watched him striding along the road to the gardens. She knew that he had come to the city for her sake, and she trembled when she contemplated the position in which his friendship for her had placed him.

Nor could she hide it from herself that she was helping one who yesterday was, and to-morrow would be, the enemy of that country which had given her a lover and a home.

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CHAPTER XX
THE BEGINNING OF THE TERROR

Many fled from the city in the week that followed that memorable Sunday; but old HÉlÈne remained in the Place Kleber. No word or argument would turn her from her purpose. The people looked to her for example. She would not fail them. Even the Bishop himself, who came daily to her house to counsel flight, could not persuade her.

“I have lived here for fifty years,” she said; “am I to run away now because the gates are closed to the enemies of France? Is that your advice, monseigneur? Shall we leave the sick in their beds and the wounded to die in the streets? Shall we say, ‘Good-bye, brave fellows; when the war is done we will come back from Geneva to thank you’? Is this our trust in the God of France? Ah, you do not think so, my good friend—you do not wish it.”

The Bishop shook his head, but could not gainsay her.

“You do not know what is about to happen to us,” he said gently; “every day there are more Prussians in the Ruprecht’s Au. Guns are coming always from Coblentz and Wesel and Magdeburg. They will not leave one stone upon another—I tremble for you and yours, my daughter. Yet, God knows, we should be grateful for your courage.”

There was no braver man in Strasburg, and he would leave the Place Kleber with a glad heart after such a talk as this. To all who doubted, or were craven or of little faith, he said—

“Go to Madame HÉlÈne, my son. She is a woman, and she will protect you. While one stone stands upon another, the Mother of the City prays for her children. Go to her, and tell her that you wish the General to open the gates.”

They turned away ashamed, and went abroad to spread the good tidings. Everywhere the placid life of the great house was an example for the city. And never was example needed so sorely by a people. Day by day the news was more grave, the situation more hopeless. Now tidings of von Werder’s march, now news of the Prussian guns, now of the fall of villages—every hour added to the dismay and the panic. Unwillingly men and women began to realise that their mighty citadel, their ramparts, which had stood up during the centuries, were powerless to break the girdle of iron which cut them off from France and liberty and even the common things of life. They spoke of courage, of endurance, of resistance to the last man; yet this talk was for the cafÉ and the market-place. At home, with their children about them, they began to forget even the vocations which gave them bread. Unrest and doubt were everywhere. When the first of the guns was heard, and men knew that at last the hour was at hand, they went bravely through the streets; but the thought of each one was for the house which sheltered him, for the safety of those whom it had been his life’s task to foster.

Beatrix was often abroad in the streets of the city after the day of her meeting with Brandon North; but she did not fear as the others about her, nor share their apprehensions. The safety of Strasburg was no longer of moment to her. She counted the days which should bring her some news of Edmond or of her letter. There was always in her mind the thought that Brandon might come again, and that her secret would be discovered. She could imagine a guilt of that secrecy which others, perchance, would not lay to her charge. The doubt that Edmond might not approve, might even blame her for the friendship, was not to be satisfied. She did not know if Brandon had escaped again after his flight from the Rue de Kehl. Wherever, in the public places, she saw a concourse of people, then her heart faltered and her step trembled. She could not forget that white face in the cafÉ—the blood that trickled upon it, the merciless canes which beat it down. If that man had been her English friend!

Night and day she thought of these things, sleeping little, walking abroad for the very sake of solitude. It was a strain to eat at the great table, and to hear old HÉlÈne’s brave words, and to realise how little she shared that enduring belief in the glory of France and the hopes for the days to come. Sometimes she had the impulse to tell all, to say, “I have seen Brandon in the Rue de Kehl, and he has taken my letter to Ulm.” Her promise remained, however. A whisper might endanger the life of the man who had risked so much to save her. She could satisfy her own conscience, but not the reason of others, she thought.

There were few of her friends in the city, but such as braved the siege she saw every day; and forgot her own care in the babble of news and scandal. Pretty ThÉrÈse Lavencourt and Georgine took her to the gardens often; and it was in the gardens, just ten days after Brandon’s flight, that she first met the man Gatelet again, and found herself face to face with him. She knew that her cheeks flushed crimson, and she could hear her heart beating; but she was smiling when she took his hand, and she realised what part she must play.

“Ah,” he said gaily, “then the guns do not keep you from the gardens, ladies?”

ThÉrÈse Lavencourt laughed in that high key which was the terror of amateur pianists who played often at her mother’s house.

“Oh, but you are here, monsieur,” she said.

He bowed at the compliment, and other officers, hussars, and francs-tireurs came up to the place.

“Here is Mademoiselle Lavencourt, come to dance to the music of the guns,” he exclaimed; “we shall make a set of quadrilles, eh, Duvisne!”

A very thin lancer, thus appealed to, answered:

“The set would only be complete when the Captain comes back. Have you any news of your husband, Madame Lefort?”

Beatrix looked at Gatelet in spite of herself, but answered frankly—

“I believe he is at Ulm, Monsieur. He will not give his parole, and we must wait for your dance until the war is over.”

“Bravo, bravo!” cried several voices together, but Gatelet said—

“If only the Germans would wait also! There is too much brass in their band for my taste. Yesterday they played all day upon the Porte Saverne. You can hear the music now if you will listen—”

They waited a moment, and a low booming report seemed to shake the very ground beneath their feet. ThÉrÈse Lavencourt laughed again, but Georgine, a plump blonde from Rouen, feigned alarm, and leaned heavily upon the young lancer’s arm.

“Oh, Monsieur,” she cried, “how silly of me! And I have no husband at Ulm!”

ThÉrÈse Lavencourt took up the theme as they all began to walk slowly toward a stand where the band played a military march with all that fervour which marked the faith of Strasburg in the first days of her isolation.

“That is the worst of husbands,” she exclaimed, with a glance at a captain of hussars which was unmistakable; “first you want them to show themselves; then you want them to go away. When they are gone, you shed tears. How silly it all is! And, of course, one pretends to be sorry, and all that. As if there was nothing else in life but marriage!”

“Nevertheless, marriage is decidedly amusing,” exclaimed the captain of hussars. It was the very subject he desired to speak about.

Light wit and shallow talk drew the little group away from the music to the shelter of the shrubberies. Beatrix found herself suddenly alone with Gatelet. She was sure that he had contrived the rendezvous, and he took up the conversation at once.

“You hear that, Madame Lefort. But you do not agree with it, of course. If she had said that marriage was exciting—”

“Exciting, Monsieur?”

He laughed brutally.

“Certainly; I said exciting.”

She answered him very coldly:

“I have never thought about the question.”

“Naturally—you leave others to think. Your friends, for instance. Pray count me among the number.”

The very suggestion was an insult—a subtle insult; but she realised that in some way this man shared a secret momentous to her happiness, and she restrained her just resentment.

“You were my husband’s friend, Monsieur Gatelet; I am sure you are mine.”

“Do not doubt it. It is pleasant to see the faces one knows when so many are missing. I think often of our old acquaintances—of Tripard, and Giraud, and Chandellier, and the Englishman. Ah, you remember the Englishman, Brandon North, Madame?”

She doubted no longer that he knew the truth. Hot blood flushed her cheeks crimson. This man shared her secret, then—this man who had twice insulted her in as many minutes.

“I remember Mr. Brandon North, certainly,” she exclaimed, making a supreme effort to retain her self-control; “he was one of my husband’s friends.”

The man nodded his head cunningly.

“I am sure of it—as he is a friend of yours, Madame. You will be glad on that account to know that he is still in Strasburg.”

She was not actress enough to restrain the cry which came to her lips.

“Still in Strasburg, Monsieur—Mr. North in Strasburg!”

He took her by the arm and began to speak with a familiarity which he claimed of his knowledge.

“Listen,” he said; “you can trust me. When he left you last Sunday—do not mind that I know—I am a man of honour—when he left you last Sunday he meant to go back to his German friends. But a little accident happened, Madame—you never thought of that. He wished to leave us, but he was not able. At the corner of the Rue de Kehl a gun-carriage crushed his ankle. He fell fainting, but it was I who helped him up. ‘He is the good friend of Madame Lefort,’ I said; ‘he shall suffer nothing at my hands, for I am sure he is not here to spy out our secrets. And he is in Strasburg now, at the house of Madame Clairon in the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. He waits for you to go there; you will not disappoint him.”

He released her hand, and with a familiar salute, the meaning of which was unmistakable, he left her. His words were as a blow upon her face. She knew that the life of her friend was in this man’s keeping—the gift of one who had put upon her the ultimate insult.

CHAPTER XXI
THE RUE DE L’ARC-EN-CIEL

He had left her at the gate of the gardens; but she did not seek her friends again, nor think of going home. Conscious of no guilt, her own silence was in itself as the accusation of a crime. In this man’s eyes she was condemned. He believed the worst; she had permitted him to believe it. All her surpassing love for Edmond had brought her but this as its reward—that a stranger should have the right thus to charge her. And she could not defend herself. A word would sacrifice the life of him who had laughed at the perils of the city that she might have news of her husband. The ultimate penalty of her folly—if folly it were—must be paid. Gatelet had spared the life of her friend because he believed the worst of their friendship. Any motive less strong would not have sealed his lips. Even her confusing logic taught her that. If Brandon were not to die as that other before the gates of the Minster, she must suffer the shame which his presence in Strasburg had put upon her. The very thought of it burned her as a fever. She passed through the city, heedless of the sights and sounds around her. She felt that she had no longer a home in that place. She shrank from men’s gaze and the touch of women.

It was growing late in the afternoon when she left the gardens. A new and strange activity was to be observed in the streets around her. By here and there groups of men discussed the great news, how that General von Werder himself was at Hausberge with two hundred field-pieces and many mortars to shell the northern ramparts of the city. Officers of the staff galloped recklessly through the narrow thoroughfares with despatches from the Governor to the citadel. Shopkeepers stood at the doors of their houses, and bewailed each other’s misfortunes. In the air above was a tremulous suggestion of distant sounds, of the roar of heavy artillery and the intervals of silence attendant. Once a man touched her upon the shoulder and counselled her to walk beneath the eaves of the houses.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “they have killed a woman to-day in the Rue du Bain aux Plantes. Take my advice, and do not walk in the open.”

She thanked him, and passed on. It was odd to be told that there was danger in the streets of that great city, to which she had fled for safety; yet neither the peril nor the warning remained in her thoughts. Again and again she heard the words which had been spoken—“he is still in Strasburg; he waits for you; go to him.” Her quick imagination depicted Brandon lying there, in the darkened room, helpless, alone, perchance even suffering. For her sake he had come to Strasburg; for her sake, to gratify her impatience, he had put his life into the hands of the man who had insulted her. And she could not reward the sacrifice. She must leave him alone still. She dare not go to the house. He had sealed her lips; she could ask counsel of none.

This reflection of her own helplessness and of Brandon’s peril pursued her without mercy. She feared to return to the Place Kleber, where she must hear old HÉlÈne’s platitudes, and be questioned upon the trivial events of a trivial day. She would be alone, face to face with the change that a word had brought into her life. How different, she thought, were all things yesterday. Her secret had been her own then. She had looked upon Strasburg as a refuge and a home until Edmond should return to her. The city would never be that again. All the gathering terror of the siege affrighted her. The regiments marching, the rumbling guns, the galloping horses deafened her as with crashing noises. She shrank from the excited throngs; she feared every cry, every impulse of the crowds lest they should tell of a new spy brought to justice. Yet, in her own mind, she did not doubt for an instant the fidelity or the honour of the man who wished to serve her. Brandon was no spy. He was one who had recklessly staked his own life that he might keep his promise to her. And he was in peril. She repeated the word always. An hour might bring discovery and death. She was the one friend who knew of his presence in the city; and she might not see him. What woman’s logic made such a law for her she could not explain. But she held to her idea tenaciously, and, maintaining it, she turned into the square before the Minster and entered the great church itself.

There were many in the nave and chapels of the cathedral, praying at the altars for those who served France, or had died in her service. Fantastic lights streamed down through the glorious windows, and shed a lustre of crimson and green and violet upon the sunbeams which lingered yet in the first hour of evening. From without, a murmur was to be heard, as of squadrons tramping and the voices of many men. Ever and anon, even those mighty walls trembled as the thunder of the cannonade rolled heavily upon the distant horizon of hill and vineyard. But no voice was raised to mar the majestic silence within the splendid church; and it seemed to Beatrix, as she knelt for a few moments in the chapel of St. John, that here, at least, was the abiding place of God’s peace, here the haven which the city gave her no longer.

“Oh, my God, help me—help me to save him!”

She had no other prayer. The vulgar dictates of prudence and the customs could not prevail in that sanctuary, where the counsel of love and sacrifice was the daily word. Gradually, as her mind began to gather up its little threads of argument, her woman’s nature conquered her. She told herself that she was a coward for deserting the man whose peril was of her own making. No love, she argued, would justify a requital so base. And Brandon was an Englishman, alone there, lamed, helpless among those who would consider themselves his enemies. Well she knew that if her husband were in the city, he would be the first to go to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. He had no friend in all Strasburg whom he had trusted as he trusted Brandon North, the Englishman. When he heard her story, he might well charge her with the betrayal and desertion of his friend and comrade. And, she asked herself, was her own love to be the sport of every coward who chose to spy upon her? She had shame of the thought that Gatelet’s innuendos had been anything but a matter of scornful indifference to her. She would tell Edmond, when he returned, would tell him all; the debt should be repaid. And she would go to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. She was determined upon that now. Brandon must have a friend to help him. He might even lack common necessaries. A woman’s pity for one who suffered was the final argument. She left the church with beating heart, and turned her face toward the house which harboured her friend.

It was almost dark then. A lurid glow of wavering crimson light hovered in the sky to the northward and the eastward. She knew that the shells were falling there, that there lay the terror of which men spoke in hushed voices. Everywhere the people were seeking the shelter of house or cafÉ; soldiers alone moved in the deserted streets. Many of them black with powder, many fresh from the ramparts, a few drunk and reeling, they gave her coarse greeting or even laid rough hands upon her. But she continued unflinchingly, thinking always that Brandon was waiting for her, or, it might be, accusing that ingratitude which detained her. When, some little way from the cathedral, a shell struck a house above her with a great crash, and masonry fell heavily upon the pavement at her very feet she shrank back terrified into the porch of the house, but abated nothing of her resolution. She could hear the screams of the people in the rooms upstairs; she beheld a wrecked apartment, the walls shattered, the roof pierced, the fire raging in the dÉbris—but no thought of sorrow for the people or of their necessity detained her. Rather she fled from the gaping crowd that gathered quickly in the street, for she feared that someone would follow her—some word of hers betray her errand. When she entered the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel she was trembling still with the excitement of her own escape; but a new courage came to her, and it was born of the sure knowledge that Brandon North was there, and that she was about to hear his voice again.

There was a great throng of people in the narrow street, all gathered about the shop of a chemist into which a little child had been carried some few minutes before she came there. A gossip elbowing a road for himself through the press, told her that a shell had fallen in that place, and that the child had been struck on the arm by a fragment of it.

“We shall have to go to the cellars to-morrow,” the man said grimly; “they shoot the little ones, these Prussians; they have no hearts, Mademoiselle. I have children of my own, and I can speak for the fathers. It is not war which covers a child’s frock with blood. It is the slaughter-house full of devils in blue coats. Be advised of me and return to your house, Mademoiselle.”

“She shrank back terrified into the porch.”

She thanked him and asked boldly for the house of Madame Clairon. He looked at her, astonished. Her fine clothes, her grand air, the sweet girlish face she lifted when she asked the question were not to be reconciled with such a request.

“The house of Madame Clairon; but she is an aubergiste—she keeps the wine shop yonder. You cannot have business there, Mademoiselle.”

His curiosity was now thoroughly aroused. Everyone suspected his neighbour in Strasburg at that day. What had this delicate girl to do with Madame Clairon and her house? Beatrix, on her part, found an excuse quickly.

“We have news of one of her relations in a letter from Metz, Monsieur. I did not know that it was such a house. Of course, I cannot go there.”

She turned abruptly and disappeared in the throng. The questioning eyes of the man followed her as she went. She seemed to be conscious of his searching gaze as though it pursued her to read her secret and to betray it. But she saw him no more, and, as she passed the chemist’s house, they carried out the child, a wan little thing with eyes very wide open and bandaged arm, and blood upon the frock. She turned from the place sick at heart. An infinite pity for the children drove the thought of her own troubles from her mind. That those little ones should suffer! The lights of the wine shop were dancing before her eyes. She saw the child’s face still when she passed on into the darkness of the street.

The crowd dispersed slowly, leaving but a few idlers upon the pavement. She could not see the man who had questioned her, but suspicion of him remained. Nearly an hour passed before she returned to the auberge, and then she had no courage to enter it. Burly troopers, grimed with powder and half drunk, lolled everywhere about its doors. The odour of dregs and of stale tobacco, wafted even to the pavements without, made her sick and faint. She passed the doors again and again until she began to fear that her very presence was a danger to the man she would have befriended. And he was there—in that den of drink and brutality. She knew that she could not leave him in such a place.

A young girl came out of the auberge, singing. Her arms were bare, her hair unkempt; but she gave the troopers wit for brutality, and there was a smile upon her bright face as she ran from the house. When she saw Beatrix standing there, as though about to question her, she stopped abruptly and uttered a startled exclamation.

“Ah, Mademoiselle, it is you, then!”

She turned and looked up and down the street, and then continued quickly:

“He has asked for you, oh, so many times every day. He is very ill, Mademoiselle, and has no friends in Strasburg. If anyone knew that he was an Englishman from across the Rhine, he could not stay here. But you will see him now. The door is to the right there, the first past the corner. I will let you in myself: I have done what I could, but these others—they keep me always on my feet. It is ‘Jeannette’ here and ‘Jeannette’ there, and ‘Jeannette will do it’—and, oh, Mademoiselle, how tired I am!”

She made a gesture as of one very weary of her life, but a moment afterwards was in the cafÉ again with smiling face and with ready words for the brutes who bandied their wit against hers. When she opened the side door to Beatrix she had a candlestick in her hand, and she raised her finger warningly.

“We must have a care, Mademoiselle. They are not all his friends as you and I. And he will be so pleased! Ah, it is good to be loved when you are ill!”

She did not see the flush on the other’s face, the flush of shame and doubt and of denial, which could not well be spoken in that place. Indeed, she did not wait for assent or protest, but ran up the stairs with a child’s foot, and opened the door of a garret upon the third floor. And so the friends came face to face again.

“Ah, Monsieur—here is Mademoiselle at last. No more loneliness now, Monsieur; no more Jeannette. We are going to change all that. Shall we come in, Monsieur?”

A deep voice, clear and musical, replied to them. Beatrix entered the room with hesitating step, and stood for a little while, breathing quickly in the close atmosphere. That was the friendship of Louis Gatelet, then—that den of dirt, that hovel in the auberge; that garret from which even a trooper below might have turned scornfully. The very windows she saw were broken and mended with paper. The couch upon which the wounded man lay was but a bed of rags. A single candle in a dirty iron stick gave him light. The flickering rays of it showed her the pallor of his face, the thin hands, the unshaven chin. And he had been there for days, waiting for her to come to him. His friend had left him there in that garret of the city, which even a beggar would have passed by. She blamed herself that she had delayed even for an hour.

“Oh, my God, Brandon, what a place! You cannot stop here.”

He pressed her hand lightly, and made an effort to raise himself from the couch.

“That’s what I’ve been telling my leg every day for the last two days. But it differs from me. I say ‘go;’ the leg says ‘stop.’ Who is to decide when the limbs disagree?”

Jeannette set down the candle and sighed.

“Ah, Mademoiselle, if you could have seen him when he came here. That was a dreadful day. I went from the house and found him lying in the road—ah, mon Dieu, the dreadful wound, the pale face, the blood upon the pavement! But he will get better now. You will cure him, Mademoiselle. And you will not want Jeannette to help you. Oh—ah—I know how it is, Mademoiselle, and I will come back in an hour.”

She slipped from the room, and closed the door quietly behind her. The room possessed but one cane-seated chair, and that but half a back. Beatrix drew it to the side of the couch, while Brandon began to speak to her about his accident.

“I don’t like your coming here, and yet I am glad that you came,” he said, with a look which implied the disappointment he had suffered. “Of course, you must tell somebody now, and must not come alone again. Old HÉlÈne will be best. She is a good old soul, and may be prevailed upon to hold her tongue. If only I knew where Richard Watts was living, I would ask you to go to him. He has a better head than most, and would help me out of a tight place. It just shows you, Beatrix, what fools men can be sometimes. Bobbie Burns was right after all. The best laid schemes don’t always hit it. There was nothing I left out of my calculations that you could think of. I had even got a safe-conduct to help me back to German lines. And then, just at the crossing here, an artillery waggon crushes my foot, and down I go like a nettle. Was there ever such a cursed piece of luck?”

He sank back again upon the pillow of rags, and a spasm of pain drew down the muscles of his mouth and made him clench his hands. She thought how greatly the wound had changed him. His coat hung limply upon his chest; the hand that he stretched out showed awkward knuckles, and skin drawn tight; his eyes were very bright, as the eyes of one who needed sleep. But his manner was the manner of the old time. He was angry with himself because he could not conceal from her the fact that he was in pain.

“It’s nothing,” he said, when he saw her eyes fill with tears, and guessed how heavy was her self-reproach. “If you wouldn’t mind pouring me out a glass of that wine—a hundred thanks; you’re curing me already, you know. And, of course, I dare not send to my old rooms. Antoine, there, has a tongue as long as the Minster spire. He would give me away in five minutes. You see, there’s not much chance of disguise now, Beatrix. Gatelet says he got me in here only just in time. One of the curates of St. Thomas’s, who knew me well, came to the door just as they were carrying me upstairs. The fellow would have put it all over Strasburg in five minutes. It’s their business to talk, and they don’t neglect it. Gatelet, on the other hand, will hold his tongue just as long as it suits him. How long it will suit him I really don’t know. It’s a case of trusting in Providence and a fifth-rate Italian quack he unearthed from somewhere. Perhaps it will be better now that you have come. And you might find Richard Watts, eh?”

She had been very silent until that moment, for pity and dismay checked her utterances. All her impulse was to flee the house and return with someone who would carry him from that dreadful place. His very life, she thought, depended upon her, and upon her alone. She knew not what enemies of his watched this den. Even as they talked, she listened for any sound of footsteps on the stairs. The cries and oaths in the wine shop below brought back to her that picture of a man fighting for his life in the cathedral square. If it should come to that? If Gatelet should betray them?

“Brandon,” she said, ignoring his question, “what did your friend mean by leaving you in this place?”

He laughed satirically.

“Oh, his magnanimity—nothing else—that’s what brought me here. You could fill an eggcup with it. By-and-by the honour of France will compel him to win glory by introducing me to the gentlemen below. They are the fellows who ran away from us at WÖrth. They showed us the soles of their boots, which are made of brown paper, I believe. Here, in Strasburg, they are the very devil. When Gatelet tells them that there is a Prussian dragoon in the garret, they will come up, three stairs at a time, with sabres in their hands. I fancy I hear them sometimes when I try to sleep. It isn’t quite a cure for insomnia, and, yet, what can I do? There’s no man in Strasburg, except Richard Watts, that I could trust—and, well, Watts may not be in Strasburg. Besides, the place is watched. I have seen men in the house opposite, and there is always some blackguard at the front door below. If I charged Gatelet with it, he would swell out with indignation. And, fancy owing anything to a rat like that! If only it had been someone else! Of course, he told you I was here.”

“To-day,” she said absently, for her brain was working quickly now; “I came straight here from the Minster. He insulted me, Brandon. I cannot speak of it. I am going now to tell HÉlÈne. It would not be right to keep the secret any longer. If Mr. Watts is in the city, he shall know to-night. We cannot leave you one hour longer in this dreadful place. Oh, I pray God that I shall find him! My folly brought you here—nothing else, nothing else!”

She stood up and the tears fell fast and glistened upon her burning cheeks. The man thought that her tenderness for him was the sweetest thing in all the world; his love for her surged up in his heart as a consuming passion. Yet he would sooner have cut off his right hand than that she should have guessed the heavy secret of his lonely life. The unbending honour of a man who had been honour’s servant from his boyhood answered her almost brusquely.

“It was not your fault at all,” he said; “you don’t drive artillery waggons, my dear Beatrix. And I am glad that you are going to tell old HÉlÈne. She is the best woman alive when anyone is down. Perhaps she’ll smuggle in some soup or something. The food here is not exactly on the restaurant scale. But don’t let her trouble if she can’t do it safely—and remember we are all going to write to Edmond and to tell him about this business directly it’s possible. Your other letter went, I need not say. I smuggled it out all right, and he’s on his way home by this time.”

She looked at him, half glad, half fearful.

“You sent the letter?”

“Of course I sent it. The girl here gave it to one of the German gentlemen who are visiting Strasburg just now to take the waters—and anything else they can pick up. Edmond will give his parole, although you don’t ask him. He’ll be back here just as the fun is beginning. I should imagine my appearance will amuse him. You must tell him all about it; that goes without saying. And you won’t return here until he is in the Place Kleber. I insist on that, Beatrix. If anyone is to come, it must be Watts. By Jove, I should be glad to see his face, and I don’t think he’d mind seeing mine.”

It was the third time he had mentioned the name of the old Bohemian, and she began to see how great he believed the peril of his environment to be. There, in that wretched hovel, with the dim light of a guttering candle playing upon his haggard face, and strangers about him, and the very scum of France’s soldiers in the tavern below, lamed, helpless, alone—she knew that his life hung upon a thread indeed; and she gave him of that pity which ever she bestowed upon the weak and suffering.

“They shall come and help you, Brandon. I will go and tell old HÉlÈne. God grant that we shall not be too late.”

“Amen to that, Beatrix—and a thousand thanks.”

She pressed his hand lightly and left the room, groping her way down the rotting stairs to the light and voices of the city below. She told herself that she was going to save the life of her friend. But the man sank back upon his bed of rags, and, seeing the vision of her long afterwards, he thought that the sun shone upon him still; and he forgot the place and the hour, and seemed to walk with her in a house of dreams, which he had built in the years gone by.

CHAPTER XXII
“LA PAUVRE”

There were eighteen francs in her purse. She emptied them into Jeannette’s hand as she left the tavern.

“You are a good girl,” she said; “do what you can for him. He cannot eat the food here. Go to the house of Hummel, the vintner, and buy brandy for him. We shall send to-morrow. If you think that we should come sooner, you will find me at the house of the Countess of GÖrsdorf in the Place Kleber. I am Madame Lefort. You may have heard my name!”

The girl raised her hands in wonder.

“Ah, Madame, if I remember! Was I not at the wedding in the Minster? Ma foi! what silk, what satin—and the gold of the officers. Of course, I shall be his friend. You will sleep to-night and say, ‘She is watching him.’ I have loved myself, Madame—even I, Jeannette.”

Again the scarlet flush dyed the pretty cheeks, and the heart of the girl beat fast.

“He is my kinsman,” she said earnestly; “his friends do not wish him to be in Strasburg. I count upon you to help him. We shall not forget your kindness. And my husband will come here himself when he returns from Ulm.”

Jeannette stood with eyes wide open. The romance of her guest was gone, then. In a sense the truth was unpleasant to her. And yet, after all, she had no rival in the house. When she mounted the quaking stairs again, she went gladly and singing. The English stranger was very handsome. He should not want a friend there.

Beatrix left the house quickly, almost furtively. The errand she had set herself was an errand of life or death. The drunken troopers in the tavern stood to her for so many savage jailors of the lonely man in the garret above. The noises in the streets echoed as the cries of the doomed in a stricken city. Strange lights flared in the sky. She heard men say that they were lights of the houses which burned by the northern gates. The low booming of the artillery was incessant. It acted upon men’s nerves as an irritant, moving them to frenzies of rage and despair. By here and there the chink of a cellar door showed her whole families, accustomed yesterday to the common luxuries of life, now huddled together on a bed of straw for very terror of the falling death. Others were heaping up bags full of clay before the shutters of the shops. In the Broglie itself a man ran to and fro crying out to all that they had killed his son. He took her by the arm roughly and would have told her his story; but she tore herself away and heard the laughter of the maids of a great house, who had watched the man and found amusement in his distress. Some way further on, a child played with a paper lantern and a little tin sword while a company of half-drunken artillerymen drilled him incoherently. The men shouted after her to come and see the new Governor, who was going to open the gates to the Prussians.

She passed them by quickly, and turned into the square by the New Church. There were a great many soldiers here, both officers and privates, and they stood to watch a looming crimson cloud which quivered as with the iridescence of tremulous flame, and cast back upon the houses a golden wave of fantastic lights that showed her even the faces of the men who were gathered there. Amongst them she distinguished Gatelet, in his uniform of the National Guard. He recognised her at once, and crossed the road to speak to her. She knew that she trembled as he came, but she answered him quite frankly.

“I was coming to the Place Kleber to call upon you to-night,” he said in a low voice; “of course, you have been to see him. They told me so when I called just now.”

She looked up quickly. The man had followed her from the tavern, then—had watched, she thought, while she was in the room.

“Yes,” she responded with an effort; “I went there, Monsieur. Brandon was always our friend, I am under the greatest obligations to him, as is my husband—”

He made a little gesture as though the explanation was entirely supererogatory.

“Of course you went. If I had not thought that you would go, he would not be in the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel at this moment. And you will advise him to be prudent—if you are wise. They tell me that his German friends have been there. I am grieved to hear it, for, of course, we must not have complications. As far as I can be your friend, I will be so, Madame Lefort. And you will not forget that I am leaving him there for your sake.”

He laid his hand upon her arm familiarly, and she could see his little eyes twinkling as the eyes of an animal. In one instant, the whole truth stood revealed to her. This man hoped to profit of his insult. She had not misread his words. The gesture, the tone of voice were those of one who deemed that he possessed already a right indisputable thus to speak to her as no one else but her husband might in honour speak. An intense loathing of his presence came upon her. She wondered afterwards that she did not strike him upon the face. But she restrained herself for her friend’s sake. The keys of life and death were in the hands of the man whose fingers touched her arm, whose breath she felt upon her cheek.

“I shall forget nothing, Monsieur,” she said quietly; “while you serve my friend you serve me. Captain Lefort will tell you so when he returns.”

She released herself, and, with a curt nod to him, ran across the square to the Place Kleber. The new indignity sent her hurrying as a hurt child to its home. She had never thought or argued with such a possibility as that which was now revealed to her. It was as though her destiny had plunged her into some maelstrom of shame and darkness, from which she never might emerge again. The desire to tell someone was uncontrollable. She pictured to herself, as she went, how she would kneel at old HÉlÈne’s side and confess all, even to her infidelity to the armies of France, and her belief, which was almost a pride, in that irresistible might of the Saxon of which her friend Brandon was the type. Words of love and sympathy and help would reward her, she was sure. That sweet face would not be turned from her; that hand, which had raised the lowliest, would dry up the tears which had already dimmed the eyes of HÉlÈne’s child. There was a new hope in her heart when she turned into the square, and for the first time became aware of the terror there. The secret was done with. She was going to leave her burden in a mother’s keeping.

She was hastening when she entered the square; but she stopped abruptly as her own house came to view, and chains of lead seemed to fetter her limbs. She had expected to find the Place Kleber deserted, as usually it was at such an hour; had thought to see the brightly-lighted windows, and a glimpse of her own little boudoir behind them, and of old HÉlÈne as she sat before her writing-table in the great drawing-room. But even before she had crossed the road by the New Church she heard the clamorous voice as of a great throng, and beheld men running swiftly, and saw others who cried for ladders and for water; and, going on a little way, she was caught up as on a human wave and pressed forward to the scene until she stood before the very doors of her home, and learned, with a woman’s instinct, the truth which nevermore she might forget. For the great house had been struck by a shell, and from its upper windows flames were vomited; and in that very boudoir, where she had found the sanctuary of life, she beheld firemen with axes, and soldiers, who tore the draperies madly, and even the women servants of the house wailing in their terror.

She had been carried to the scene swiftly, and moments went by before she could reason about it, or even ask of the people around her for news of those within the house. The little things of the instant occupied her and held her voiceless. She saw that the walls of the upper rooms had fallen to the street, leaving strange wreckage in their path. A bed hung sideways, wedged between the shattered rafters; a cabinet in one of the rooms was smashed to atoms, but a bracket, with a vase upon it, was untouched, at the very side of the cabinet. In her own boudoir the plaster had fallen, leaving the rafters bare and splintered. She saw a man throw water from a bucket against the hangings of the alcove, and she had the impulse to run in and stay his hand. But while her eyes surveyed the whole scene swiftly, she became aware that the lower floors of the house were in darkness—and then, as in an overwhelming instant of self-reproach, she thought of HÉlÈne.

“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur, what has happened—what are they doing in the house?”

She forced her way now through the people, struggling as if for life itself. A sergent de ville, hearing her voice, began to answer her brusquely; but when he saw her face he stretched out his hand to her, and thrust the people back.

“It is Madame HÉlÈne’s daughter,” he said, and they made way for her, with words of sympathy uttered in low voices.

“There has been an accident, Madame—those cursed Prussians, they have destroyed your house. I would not go if I were you. There is Monsieur the CurÉ, he will tell you.”

One of the ministers of the Lutheran Church of St. Thomas came up at the moment, and recognised her.

“My poor child!” he exclaimed; “they have told you.”

“I know nothing,” she cried wildly; “take me to HÉlÈne! Let me go to her!”

He put his hand upon her shoulder, and tried to hold her back.

“You must not go,” he said; “if you will wait a moment—”

A vague consciousness of the whole truth suddenly came to her.

“Oh, my God, HÉlÈne is dead!” she cried.

He did not answer her. She read assent in his averted face. The sound of voices magnified in her ears. She saw the troubled faces, the shattered rooms, the looming crimson cloud above. They merged into a misty whirling scene, and so to darkness.

“La pauvre,” said one of those who looked on; “she is alone in the city now.”

HÉlÈne of Strasburg was dead, the Mother of the City, the queenly woman who had helped the city so often to courage and self-sacrifice. Though Strasburg suffered then, though her people lived no longer in the light of day but burrowed to the cellars and the vaults where no Prussian shells could harm them, they came forth as a great army of the children of night into the sunshine which hovered about the open grave. For they had loved the mistress of the house of GÖrsdorf, and to many of them she was as one of their own, ever to be held in the high place of memory where all that has made for the sweetness and the truth of life should be stored up.

HÉlÈne was dead. The news went quickly as tidings of the ultimate misfortune. The soldiers on the ramparts heard it, and told each other that the day of the cataclysm was at hand. The brave men of the city took a new resolution of endurance. “We shall avenge the shell that struck down her house,” they said. In the churches the priests spoke of Christian love and of the divine truth that in motherhood all love is born. When the body was at length carried forth and the drums rolled and the bells tolled, it was as though the whole city came out for that cortÉge. Even the children cast flowers upon the path. The Governor himself, the dauntless Uhrich whose name was honoured then almost above any name in France, was first at the graveside and last to leave the stricken house when the people had gone to the darkness again.

“You must not stay here an hour, my child,” he said to Beatrix; “my house is open to you; you must be my guest. I am afraid that it is only the beginning. Their guns are reaching this quarter every day, and it is not safe even in your cellars. Besides, you are alone—”

She thanked him, but would not go.

“HÉlÈne would have wished it,” she said. “I cannot leave her work to others. If she had lived, we should have stayed here until the end. And Edmond will expect to find me here when he returns. I could not play a coward’s part, General.”

Her resolution pleased him. Day by day it was his duty to teach the men of Strasburg the meaning of their debt to France. Here was a little English girl who needed no lesson.

“Ah,” he said, “if the others would talk like that! I shall tell your story at the Council to-day. Madame Lefort remains in the Place Kleber! They will be ashamed, my child, and you—you will not do anything foolish. I will send some men up to make your house safe. After all, we are becoming night birds now. And there is no Madame HÉlÈne to tell us our duty. I am grateful to you for doing wrong, Madame, but if you wish it—”

“HÉlÈne would have wished it,” she repeated; “how could I meet my husband when he comes back if I were faithless to her memory? And I shall be less alone here, General, than in another house. If it is possible for the dead to counsel us, HÉlÈne will help me still. I seem to hear her voice always in my sleep. I know that she hears me when I speak to her!”

He shook his head. The philosophy of life was of less concern to him than the facts of life.

“I will not gainsay HÉlÈne’s wish,” he exclaimed, “but it will be a life in the cellars, my child. Don’t forget that. If we are to save Strasburg, all must suffer, even the women.”

“Do the women complain, then, General?”

“Complain—God send that the men show half their courage!”

“Then do not let me be the exception to your rule. If Edmond should come back—”

He laughed doubtingly.

“He will never give his parole, Madame, even for the sake of the bravest heart in Strasburg. And you would not wish it. It is a dishonour. There have been too many victims of that shame already. I would cut off my right hand before setting my name to such a promise as that. When your husband comes back, the war will be over and the Prussians across the Rhine. You help me to that day by remaining at the Place Kleber.”

He left her with the promise, alone in the great house with the shattered rooms and the bulging walls and the roof of tarpaulin which builders had dared to carry for old HÉlÈne’s sake. In the streets about her the crash of bursting shell and falling building ceased not by night or day. Even from the great deserted rooms through which she passed as a figure of solitude, she could see the dÉbris of ruined houses and forgotten homes. But the city’s distress was not her distress. For her own life she had ceased to care. The lonely man in the tavern of the troopers was always in her thoughts. Her secret had become a burden intolerable. When, on that night of terror, she ran from them into the burning house and knelt at the side of her whose voice she nevermore would hear, the prayer on her lips was a prayer of that confession she had wished so ardently to make. There was no other in all the city to whom she could go and say—Help me to save my friend. It was left to her to give Brandon life or death. Her own folly and thoughtlessness had brought this as her recompense.

She was alone in the great house, alone with her secret. Few came to her, for there was peril to life in the streets, and ever arose that deafening music of the guns, that thunder of tumultuous sounds which spoke of a city crumbling to the dust, of a people living below the ground, of flames leaping to the crimson heavens, of passion and death and a nation’s despair. There was scarce another voice that she heard save the voice of Guillaumette, who trembled in the cellars and shrieked aloud as the shells fell with a great flame of light and the homes of the children for their victory. Her friends—they had all found shelter of the darkness and the earth, or had fled Strasburg to give the story to the valleys and the lakes of Switzerland. None whose business was not of the city’s safety ventured then to look upon the sun or even to tell the stars in the quivering sky. Troopers alone passed her when she ventured from the lonely house. Yet venture she must, for the dead seemed to walk the empty rooms; and often in the silence she heard her friend’s voice reproaching her.

Seven days had passed now since she had seen Brandon, or heard the news of him. The death of HÉlÈne (of heart disease, the doctors said, and charged it to the devastation of the house) had forbidden all thought of her errand of mercy and of friendship. She had desired so greatly to confess her friend’s peril, and to send a message of hope to the house; but this new blow stunned her mentally and physically. She knew not even whether Brandon were in the city or no. She thought sometimes that his presence must have been discovered; and she would see him, in her troubled sleep, as she had seen that other in the cafÉ by the Minster. The suspense was an agony almost insupportable. She prayed every day that Edmond would come back; and yet she judged instinctively that he would never come until the end. When the General confirmed her view she was glad to hear him. Edmond might judge her afterwards for that which she had done of her own free will. She remembered that she had not asked him to give his parole, and therein found content.

There was a great sortie from the city on the morning of the 1st of September, and all day she heard the booming artillery, and the moan of the shells as they hurtled above the now doomed northern quarter. Towards noon the stragglers came in, and told of many dead at Kronburg and KÖnigshofen. She saw the waggons of the ambulance passing through the square to the military hospital, and anon the AbbÉ Colot came to tell her that there was to be a short truce while the burial parties went out. Soon the news of the truce went abroad as tidings of day, and men and women crept from the cellars and came gladly into the sunlight; and even the cafÉs were filled, and the accustomed movement of a city was to be observed again. She watched the people for a little while, and then put on her hat and cloak and went some way towards the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. She must know the truth, she thought; must know if Brandon were still in Strasburg.

Dusk had come down when she entered the street. Hordes of ragged soldiers told the story of the unsuccessful sortie of the morning. Every alley had its philosopher. Some cursed the General for the city’s tribulations. Others said that France was justified of her army; that further resistance was a crime against the army. All were too excited by their own needs and creeds to observe her as she stood at the corner and looked up at the window behind which she hoped to see her friend’s face. But there was no light or sign there; the house had no message for her.

An hour passed all too slowly. She returned to her watching place to find the auberge again in darkness. Anticipations of the worst troubled her. She remembered how curtly she had left the man Gatelet, when last he met her by the New Church. If he had told them! But, after all, Brandon might have escaped. His German friends might have helped him to cross the river and regain his own lines. She was just telling herself that this was possible when the girl Jeannette came out of the house, and, observing her, crossed the road with furtive steps.

“Ah, Madame, it is you, then. And he has waited so. Every day, every hour, he has asked for you! You cannot be his friend, Madame, to leave him there—”

“He is still in your house, then, Jeannette?”

“If he is in the house, Madame! Listen: there have been many to ask for him, but I have told none. He has enemies in Strasburg. They watch us often from the windows lÀ-haut. He does not light his lamp, because they can see him at the blind. It is darkness, always, always. And I have spent the money. Every franc, and for myself not a sou, Madame. He will tell you so when you go up. Ah, if he were my friend, the steps would not be many. You are going up, Madame?”

For an instant she hesitated; but the thought of the lonely man up there in the darkness prevailed above the last argument of prudence.

“I am going up, Jeannette,” she said.

The girl took her hand, as though to lead her to the house. She pressed it in her own fingers, so thin and cold.

“Ah, Madame, you have a brave heart. Wait until I light the candle. And we will not mind those others to-night. Oh, how glad he will be, Madame!”

Together they climbed the tortuous dirty staircase and stood at the broken door. Some instants passed before their knock was answered, and when they entered, the prisoner started up as though from a fitful sleep. There was the pallor of death upon his face, but he smiled as he held out his hand to her.

“Well,” he said; “I thought that I told you not to come.”

“You knew that I must come,” she said quietly. “HÉlÈne is dead, or I should have been here before. A shell struck our house; she died of fright and grief.”

He took her hand and pressed it.

“My poor child!” he said.

They sat in silence for a little while, until Jeannette had covered the windows with a heavy cloth, which shut out the memory of those who watched the house. Beatrix was the first to speak, and her words came quickly, as the words of one who had no time to lose.

“You know that they are watching you here, Brandon?”

“I have known it from the first.”

“And you must find some other house.”

He answered with an assumed indifference. “My foot says no, and my landlady agrees. Why do you think of me when you have troubles of your own, Beatrix?”

“Because I must. You cannot stay here, Brandon. I had hoped that Edmond would come back, but I know that he will not come. What he would have done for you I must do. If there is any friend of yours in Strasburg, he must help you. There can be no secrets now. Your life may depend upon to-morrow.”

He listened to her eagerly.

“Antoine, my clerk,” he explained, “has become a franc-tireur. If I sent to him for money, he would shoot me. Mardon, the banker, would go straight to the citadel with my story if I told him. You know what the others are, men in blue coats mostly, who prate about the honour of the army, and have no honour to spare for their friends. If money were to be had, that would make one difficulty the less. It’s no good mincing matters, Beatrix. I haven’t a shilling to my name. The old woman here will turn me out into the street, bag and baggage, to-morrow, if I don’t pay. Of course, Gatelet knows that. He whines about friendship, and will come and remind you of that friendship when his fellows below have cut my throat. He knows that I have no money, and that is his trump card. If only old Watts could be found, the game would go well enough. But I don’t think you’ll find him now. If your friendship for me prompts you to settle with that hag downstairs, that will be a real service, and I can settle with Edmond when he comes in. Meanwhile, there is no time to lose.”

He sank back on his couch exhausted. She saw that there was not even water upon the table, and she sent Jeannette hurrying for wine and brandy. His words had been an inspiration to her. If money could save him, her task was indeed a light one.

“Why did you not ask me before?” she said. “You know that I have never wanted money. Of course, we will pay the woman at once. It has been such a dreadful week, Brandon; even death does not seem the sorrow it should be when there are so many terrible things happening every day. While you are here I shall know no rest. If you could find one friend—”

“There are many, Beatrix, but they don’t come to Strasburg to see me. Their business is of another kind. I would not let you enter this room if I were on that errand. You know why I ventured in, and you may tell Edmond when he returns.”

“I pray God that he will understand,” she said gently.

He turned his face away. When she left him, ten minutes later, she said that she would not rest night or day until she found someone to befriend him. But he buried his face in the pillow of rags, and alone and in the darkness he thought that none had come between them; and he seemed to hold her in his strong arms and to tell her that his life was nothing to him, because he might not speak of his surpassing love for her.

CHAPTER XXIV
AN ULTIMATUM

She slept but fitfully that night, nor did she take any thought of rest. The new silence which had fallen upon the city in the hour of truce was for her an armistice of the mind. No longer might she hope for help or consolation from another. Brandon’s life was in her keeping. Her own friendship for him was not to be analysed or weighed up at such a time. She must save him, she said, and dawn must lead her to the task.

It was strangely silent in the city, and heavy black clouds loomed where the crimson pall had been. She heard the rain pattering upon the boards which defended the windows of the house; and ever and anon a distant bugle reminded her of those who watched in the fields of the unburied dead. But sleep was far from her eyes. Pacing that lonely room, her thoughts were not for Strasburg or those who suffered there. Sometimes she would recall those happy hours in the Niederwald when Edmond had held her in his arms and they had known the sweetest first-fruits of love unquestioning. How long ago that day seemed! Yet she could kneel still at her bedside and witness before God the truth and fidelity of the love she had given. A great longing to be taken back to her husband’s arms was the supreme thought of her night. She loved him so faithfully. He would never fail to understand her. If only he were in Strasburg, they would go to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel together, and there would be no more peril for her friend. She was sure that she owed all she had done to her friendship for a fellow-countryman who had risked his life that she might have news of Edmond’s safety. She could not conceive the ingratitude which would leave her friend to the death of the streets, the death which she had witnessed in the cafÉ of the Minster.

The passionate desire for Edmond’s return was, indeed, ever joined to that ceaseless thought for Brandon’s safety. The terrible week, which had struck down the one being in Strasburg at whose side she might have knelt to tell her strange story, had made of her, she remembered, a rich woman almost beyond her knowledge. That was no day for the thought of bequests and wealth; yet even during the stress and distraction of siege, old Dolomot, the advocate, had come to speak of her inheritance, and had dwelt upon the new position she soon must take in the city. She had not reflected upon the power of money before that day, but now a great idea came to her—the idea of a woman who sees no side-issues but rejoices already in a scheme new-made. She would purchase Brandon’s life, she resolved. She cared not what price, she must pay. The men who lurked about the tavern—their lips should be sealed. She would buy silence and help—even from Gatelet, who was as poor as any captain of National Guards might be. And to that end she must have money. Old Dolomot would find it for her, and she would go to his house when day came. The morrow must send messengers to every quarter of the city for Richard Watts. Hope had saved Brandon already. She slept at dawn with hope for her dreams.

The truce of night was over when she quitted her house very early in the morning and set out to find MaÎtre Dolomot. She could hear the guns booming again, and often a terrible sound of buildings falling, so that the very ground quaked beneath her feet and the whole city quivered with the impact. The fresh breezes of the day came to her choked with dust and sour with the acrid odours of gunpowder. She could see the smoke of fires against which the summer rain had warred in vain. Few civilians trod the streets of the northern suburbs, nor was there any sign of life except in the churches, towards which women turned tremblingly, as though the houses of God might defy the terror. At intervals some scene of surpassing desolation compelled her to remember the German oath that not one stone of Strasburg should stand upon another. She beheld acres of rubbish and dust which yesterday had been mansions of renown. Vast ruins vomited flame and smoke as though funnels of the very pit of hell. Ambulances passed her only to give visions of stricken faces and bloody clothes.

From this place of death and darkness she passed quickly to the safer streets and the southern arrondissement. There were people abroad here—timorous men who denounced the folly of the siege and cursed the name of Uhrich the brave; women, who spoke of their troubles and their hunger; little children, playing in the gutter, oblivious of the peril hurtling above them. One poor creature, driven from her home by a shell, ran to and fro distractedly with her babe in her arms. She called God to witness that the babe was dead; but the onlookers laughed at her, for they could hear the little one’s voice, and for the frenzy of fear they had no pity. Such gunners and mobiles as walked the streets were begging drink-money of the people. Beatrix sought to pass through them unobserved; but they swarmed about her threateningly, and when she threw down her purse they fought for it, with savage cries and bayonets drawn. She could still hear their voices when she turned into the Rue St. Thomas and rang at MaÎtre Dolomot’s door.

Twice she rang at the great brass bell, but no one answered her. A lad, playing in the street before the solicitor’s door, told her there was no one in the house. She rang a third time, and knocked loudly and repeatedly. Slow to believe that fortune had played her this new trick, she lingered about the place, gazing up at gloomy blinds and the smokeless chimneys. Her great idea ebbed away while she waited. In a sudden rush of fear, she remembered that Brandon must settle with the woman to-night. And she must have money. His life was the price of defeat.

Again and again she repeated the truth, as quick steps carried her back to the Place Kleber and to her house. Child-like, she began to say that surely there was one man in Strasburg who would take pity upon her. The AbbÉ Colot, she knew, was her friend. She would go to him now, on the instant, and tell him her story. He would help her. He was a priest and would keep her secret. She remembered that his house was not a stone’s throw from that very church of St. Thomas whose roof she could see above the buildings. Thither she turned with new hope, but had gone but a little way upon her errand when a hand was laid lightly upon her shoulder, and, hesitating, she found herself face to face with the last man in all Strasburg she would have wished to meet. For Gatelet stood before her; and there was that on his face which betrayed a knowledge of her errand.

“Ah,” he said curtly, “you are surprised, Madame.”

“And why, Monsieur?”

“Because of many things. MaÎtre Dolomot, for instance, has gone to Geneva.”

“Is not that my business?”

“Not at all. It is the business of those who safeguard the honour of the city, Madame. We must have a little talk, you and I. Let us sit at the cafÉ, here. There is too much noise in Strasburg to fear eavesdroppers. And I want to talk to you very much, little Beatrix—”

She turned on him, flushing at his unabashed familiarity.

“How dare you?” she said.

He ignored her anger, and stalked into the cafÉ, setting a chair for her at one of the little marble tables. A waiter came up and asked for orders.

“Let me prescribe a glass of brandy. You are not well this morning, Madame.”

She shook her head, but sat down, pulling excitedly at her glove. She knew that she must listen to this man. He, in turn, gauged exactly the measure of his power over her.

“Come,” he said, “do not be angry with me. We are friends together, in a good cause. If I were not your friend, I should not be here this morning. On the contrary, I should be in the Rue—but no names, my dear, they are not necessary—let us say that I should be telling my friends to go and see the young man whose foot was crushed by an artillery waggon. You would not like that—eh? Well, be reasonable, then, and listen to what I have to say.”

A murmur of assent escaped her lips. The pallor of death was on her face. The ungloved hands showed blue veins outstanding as upon a hand of clay.

“What do you want me to do, Monsieur?” she asked in a low voice.

He bent over the table, and whispered the words in her ear.

“To be my friend, little Beatrix.”

She rose from the table.

“The Frenchman ... reeled back across the table.”

“You are a coward,” she said quickly.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“There is no cowardice in love. Do not agitate yourself, my dear. I will give you time to think it over. You shall tell me to-night. To-day they want me at the barracks; but I am coming back by-and-by, and if you do not wish to be my friend, we shall go to the Rue—ah, no names, Madame, no names yet—”

He rose also, for he thought that she was about to faint. The touch of his hand seemed to burn her wrist. She uttered a loud cry, and strove to release herself.

“Do not make a scene, Madame; and remember, I must have your answer to-night.”

She had no voice to respond; but another, a man who crossed the road quickly when he heard her cry, answered for her.

“Take that, and be damned to you,” he said.

The Frenchman, struck heavily upon the face, reeled back across the table. But Beatrix fell sobbing into the arms of Richard Watts.

CHAPTER XXV
CONFESSION

The arm which now held her was an arm of iron. She was conscious of a great hubbub going on about her: of angry voices and hurrying feet, and a gabble of words which deafened her. Once she saw Gatelet, held back by strong hands; she heard Richard Watts telling those who came up to the cafÉ that the daughter of Madame HÉlÈne had been insulted in the place. But of the rest she remembered little, except that the same strong arm led her quickly from the scene, and that she passed through narrow streets, unfamiliar to her, and was taken at length into some house, and into a little sitting-room there. When she asked where she was, an English voice answered her, and an English hand held a glass of wine to her lips.

“In the house of those that will take care of you, my dear—and, not a word until you have drunk every drop; not a word, lady.”

She obeyed willingly, and looked up to see a kindly old dame, in a white cotton dress, spotlessly clean, and wearing a bonnet which recalled the lanes of England. Richard Watts himself, standing at the dame’s side, watched her approvingly. Everything in that light and airy room was English—the substantial buffet, the guns on the walls, the pictures of hunting scenes, the great flagons of silver. But the gentle face of the woman was the most typical English thing of all.

“How good you are to me!” Beatrix said, again and again; “how good it is to hear an English voice!”

Old Richard Watts cried “Bravo!”

“English voices, English hands—that’s it, young lady. Stand by that and you’ll never come to any harm. Eh, Anne Brown, is the little passenger to stand by that? English voices and English hands—gad’s truth, it’s there in a sentence—the whole of it.”

He walked to and fro, cracking his fingers excitedly; but the old dame continued to say, “God bless me!” as she had said ever since her master brought so strange a guest to the house.

“In a cafÉ? My word! And a Frenchman insulting her; oh, my dear, my dear, that we should hear such things!”

Richard Watts took up the story, and told it again enthusiastically.

“I was going to see if there was anything left to eat in this city of half-bricks except pÂtÉ de foie gras, child. If you hadn’t cried out, I’d never have seen you, for I’m as blind as a bat. Then I heard your voice, and looked up. ‘It’s the little passenger, by gad,’ I said. The rest concerned the Frenchman. He was insulting you, eh? Listen to that, Anne Brown; he insulted her. He asked for her answer. I gave it him, old girl—he is reading it now. And lucky I thought of her name. They would have torn us to pieces, the pair of us. But I remembered. Trust old Dick Watts, who has the devil of a memory for names. He remembered. ‘It’s old HÉlÈne’s daughter,’ he said. And they stood by us—gad’s truth, they stood by us.”

He helped himself to a glass of wine, and drank it at a gulp. Beatrix, still hot and flushed, and scarce knowing what she did, rose and thanked him once more.

“I can never be grateful enough,” she said; “and I must not intrude upon you.”

Richard Watts laughed heartily.

“Intrude—listen to that, Anne Brown; the little passenger intrudes.”

“’Twould be a poor house where you could intrude, miss,” said the old housekeeper decisively. “Let the master send a word to your home, and tell your friends what has happened. We are not going to part with you yet. You’re in no fit state to walk anywhere, I’m sure, and as for carriages, God bless me, how many days is it since I saw one in this street?”

Beatrix answered them in a low voice.

“I have no friends,” she said; “there is no one to be anxious about me. It is something else—I cannot tell you—I wish to God I could.”

A great sense of loneliness and of her own terrible day overcame her, and she sank into one of the chairs by the table and burst into a flood of passionate weeping. That which no Frenchman in Strasburg could wring from her was to be told in this room, where English friends watched her with tears in their eyes, and everything recalled the home she had lost and the faces in that England she would look upon no more.

“I cannot tell you—I must not tell you,” she repeated again and again as the gentle arms of the woman were about her neck and a mother’s voice besought her to trust them. But she told them in the end, word by word, confessing all—Brandon’s danger, his presence in the city; Gatelet’s threat that he would betray him that very night. And when she had done, it was as though some great load of her life had been transferred suddenly to another’s shoulders, and must be borne, as a feather-weight, henceforth, by this giant Englishman, who had come out of the city’s night in the hour of her necessity.

Richard Watts heard the story, sentence by sentence, often taking her back a little way in the narrative; always ready with his word of sympathy and encouragement. A quick thinker, he grappled with the situation instantly. It was not her friend that he was called upon to save, but his own—the man he had left at WÖrth; the man whose father he had known at Frankfort twenty years ago.

“It was like the mad scamp to come here,” he said, when she told him of Brandon’s first visit; “he shouldn’t have done it. The news would have waited. But war breeds folly. We must save him from that folly, little lady. Do you think that the scoundrel down yonder has told anyone else?”

She shook her head, smiling through her tears.

“I have been too frightened to think, Mr. Watts.”

“Of course you have. It was his game to frighten you. I don’t suppose he’s taken anyone into partnership, all the same. That wouldn’t suit him. But he’ll tell all he knows about Brandon now, be sure of it. And we haven’t much time to lose, my child.”

She could see that he was very thoughtful. For a little while she did not venture to speak to him, as he paced the room silently, often taking up his hat, and as often setting it down again. She knew that the danger of that which he undertook was not hidden from him.

“If anything should happen to you!” she exclaimed suddenly.

“To me, young lady. Oh, don’t bother your head about that. I’m an Englishman; they won’t hurt me.”

“And you think that you can save Brandon?”

“Ah, that’s another question.”

She shuddered.

“My God, if they should discover him—those men who killed the German in the cafÉ.”

“We must see that they do not, little passenger.”

He put on his hat and went to the door; but upon the threshold he turned and asked her yet another question:

“I shall find you at the Place Kleber to-night?”

“Yes; I am going home now.”

“Then, if the news is good, I will come there at six o’clock.”

He closed the door behind him and went out. The old dame brought her a bowl of soup. She took a few sups of it, and made some excuse. Already she had begun to count the minutes of waiting.

CHAPTER XXVI
THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW

She returned to the Place Kleber at four o’clock; nor would she listen to the old housekeeper’s entreaty to defer her departure until Richard Watts came in with his news. The vague hope that some tidings of her husband might be brought into the city at any moment put chains upon her feet when she had to go abroad, and sent her always hurrying gladly to her home again. For the danger in that northern quarter she had no thought. Soldiers warned her as she crossed the streets which civilians had forsaken. She thanked them, but did not pause. The crashing echoes of terrible sounds could not affright her. She would have faced any peril to read a word from the man she loved. The remembrance that Edmond’s letter might be lying unopened in the lonely house could compel her often to return there excitedly, as though her troubles would be ended by a miracle. But there was no letter lying there when she returned on that memorable day; and such news as Guillaumette vouchsafed was news of the terror and of her own apprehensions.

“We cannot stay here, Madame; there is another house struck to-day. MaÎtre Bolot and his children have gone to the cellars. I shall die of fright. All night long the boum, boum, boum. Ah, Madame, if one were a rabbit to live under the ground! There will be no Place Kleber soon—Henri says so. ‘Let your mistress go to the General’s house,’—he says. Mon Dieu, there are men in the General’s house—but here—”

She wrung her hands distractedly and stood in the gloomy hall, a very picture of woe. Through the shattered ceiling the cloudy sky was to be seen far above; and drops of rain even then pattered upon the once fine carpet. Beatrix stood an instant to look up at the broken walls of that which a month ago was her little sanctuary. She could see her pictures still hanging there, but the wind and the wet had soaked the curtains, and plaster had hardened upon the pretty case of her cottage piano. No one, the masons told her, must venture upon that staircase now. The house was not safe, they said. If another shell were to strike it, a crumbling heap of ruins would mark its site as they marked the site of many a princely house in Strasburg that day. Yet to her it was a home still. There, for the first time, Edmond had called her wife. There was no nook of it that did not seem to whisper some story of her love. Thither he would return for love of her. She was resolute in her determination to keep her trust while one stone stood upon another.

“It will not be for long, Guillaumette. Monsieur will come back, and then we shall go away. There are others in Strasburg who have not even a roof to shelter them. Remember that when Henri tells you his tales. Only children fear the darkness.”

“Not so, Madame. Henri does not fear the darkness at all. That is for me. You cannot see their arms in the dark. Ma foi! one prays God not to send Gaspard back from the wars. You have had dÉjeuner, Madame?”

“All that I want, Guillaumette. There is no letter for me?”

“A letter—who should write a letter, Madame?”

“And no one has been to the house?”

“Henri came at twelve o’clock to say that you were to go to the General’s house. He thinks about you always, Madame. There is no one else.”

Beatrix entered the dreary dining-room with a sigh. Great beams buttressed the ceiling of it; the windows were heavily boarded up so that little rays of light, stealing in through many a chink, showed lustrous dust as a room long barred to the sun. Everywhere about the chamber were those necessaries of the daily life which spoke eloquently of the dead. An open book with a note upon the margin in old HÉlÈne’s handwriting—a list of the ambulances with names of the poorer sufferers; a half-written letter, a ball of wool, the last copy of the Courrier du Bas-Rhin. Above the mantelshelf there was a large oil painting of Marie Douay, old HÉlÈne’s child. Her mother’s was a plaintive, wayward face, Beatrix thought as she gazed upon it. Her father had loved that face, but the mind behind it had never been linked to his. His English prejudices had wrecked his life. Racial antipathy, forgotten in the hour of passion, had revived in the sombre atmosphere of domestic monotony. Beatrix remembered that she, too, had married one who looked with contempt upon the England she loved. She asked herself if, when these dreadful days were forgotten and peace should build her a house again, the story of the father must be told again by the child. It was but the reflection of a moment, a passing thought born in that gloomy room. She put it away from her resolutely, and, crossing the darkened chamber, she knelt before Edmond’s portrait and kissed it passionately. The barrier which her own forebodings had put between them was broken now that another shared her secret. She desired her husband’s return ardently. She had nothing to conceal from him. If only her friend were saved, she thought that she could remember this war as some chastening epoch of her life, which had permitted her to look into the book of her affections and to read there, without fear, of that which was written—if only her friend were saved.

It was her secret no more, and yet it pursued her relentlessly, even there at the Place Kleber. Alone in the silent room she almost counted the seconds as the pendulum in the old clock numbered them. Every sound in the street was the omen of message for her. She could find no employment to which she might put her hand. The open piano mocked her as she listened to the rolling music of the shells and the shivering chords of the great guns’ victories. When she looked out from the staircase window of the house the same melancholy scene ever rewarded her eyes. Whole acres, which were streets and churches and markets a month ago, were now but rubble for the builder’s cart. She could see the wind-tossed flames rising up above the ruined north; her imagination depicted for her a people living below the earth for fear of the death which was everywhere above them. Hunger, want, poverty, terror, anger—the whole gamut of the passions might be struck in such an hour. And yet Strasburg did not yield. Black and bloody, mourning its dead every day, shaken to its very foundations, threatening soon to become the dust of that earth from which it had arisen—the heart of the city remained its own. “Until the last stone,” the Governor had said. That day could not be distant, Beatrix thought.

Richard Watts had promised to bring her news of Brandon at six o’clock, but the bells struck the hour, and again the half-hour, and there was no message from him. For a long while she waited, the victim of doubt intolerable, and of a presentiment she could not seek to justify. As the minutes passed, her conviction became more sure. The old Bohemian had failed her, she said. He had gone to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel to find that Brandon was no longer there—perhaps even to learn of his death. The man Gatelet was not one to forgive. There was no reason why he should not have betrayed her friend. She hoped for no clemency for him. At seven o’clock she told herself that Brandon certainly was dead, and that Watts feared to come with an admission of his failure. She could endure the doubt no longer, but putting on her hat, and caring nothing for the heavy rain which hissed upon the burning city, she ran to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel, and did not pause until she stood at the tavern door.

There were few in the street, for the storm had driven even the troops to shelter. In the tavern itself the bright light shone upon many faces—the faces of men weary with service at the guns; the faces of countrymen sodden with wine and wet; the faces of traitors declaiming in drunken frenzy against those who did not drive the Germans from the gates. A few women, whose coarse finery was as some dissolute echo of the forgotten day of peace, laughed in discordant keys, or gave the notes of ribald songs. Everywhere the enormity of the night appeared to have driven such as ventured from their homes to riot and debauchery. Men struck each other in the tavern and were applauded by their comrades. A loutish gunner, whom wine had robbed of his wits, was thrown into the gutter, and lay there with the rain beating upon his face. Mob orators stood upon stools and prated of the glories of the siege. A fiddler struck up the notes of the “Mourir pour la Patrie,” while a hussy bawled incessantly, “Vive l’armÉe—l’armÉe!” Presently the “Marseillaise” was sung by many throats hoarse and discordant. A man threw a wine flask through one of the glass windows. The cafÉ would have been wrecked but for the appeals of an old soldier, who had lost an arm at WÖrth, and whose voice spoke as eloquently as his wound.

Such was the scene upon the ground floor of the auberge—a scene in striking contrast to the dark and gloomy windows above. There was no light in any bedroom of the house, nor any sign of life there. Beatrix even could take heart when she beheld the unlighted windows of the garret wherein Brandon had been a prisoner. After all, Richard Watts had good news for her. She did not doubt that he had contrived her friend’s escape. Possibly Brandon was at that moment a prisoner in his house, with old Anne Brown for his jailor, and an English home for his cell. She took great courage of the conviction, and was about to return to the Place Kleber, full of the expectancy of good tidings, when a window in the house by which she stood was opened suddenly, and the head of a soldier peered out into the night. Instinctively she crouched back against the shutters of the shop; and so standing she observed the man; while he, in turn, gazed steadfastly at the unlighted windows opposite, and then answered a question asked by someone invisible in the room behind him.

“The Englishman has left, FranÇois?”

“There is no light there, M’sieur.”

“Of course, there would be no light. We shall catch the pair of them. Why does not he come? It was for eight o’clock.”

“Well, they are ready in the cafÉ. Shall I send for BenoÎt, M’sieur?”

He did not wait for the response, but shut the window with a crash. To Beatrix the few words were as a sentence of doom pronounced against her friends. Richard Watts had failed, then. He and Brandon were over there in the garret together. The house was watched. Those who watched it were waiting for some signal to begin their work. She imagined readily that Gatelet was the one who delayed. She remembered that he had spoken of the need of his presence at the citadel. They must have detained him there, she thought. It was an intolerable, enduring agony to stand out there in the wet and the cold, and to tell herself that the last two friends she possessed in Strasburg might die when a few minutes had passed. What to do she knew not. Her first impulse was to enter the house by the side door and to confess all she had heard and seen. But when she emerged from the shadows and crossed the street, she found a sentry pacing the alley, and his bayonet was fixed upon his rifle. She saw the man without surprise, for she expected to find him there. But the reality of his presence was as some final crushing blow. She did not move from the place where first she had perceived him. The vision of that scene in the cafÉ before the Minster doors came to her with a vividness as of the moment of its happening. Brandon was to die, then, as that other had died. This was the end of their folly.

The sentry paced the alley with slow steps. Sometimes he would lean wearily against the door of the house; at other times he went a little way out into the street to look up at the unlighted windows above. He did not see that the girl watched him, for she stood at the corner of the street, and he had eyes only for the tavern. Once, indeed, an exclamation escaped his lips, and he crossed the alley and remained for quite a long time gazing up at the attics. A light, appearing suddenly in Brandon’s room, warned him to the action. Beatrix saw the light, too, and the shadows it cast upon the blind. They were the shadows of Brandon and of Richard Watts. She had no longer a doubt. Her friends were in the house. She was impotent to help them. A cry of hers would bring the drunkards from the cafÉ leaping as devils to the work. She could but stand and wait—God knew for what horror of that September night.

The light remained in the window, it may have been for twenty minutes; but the shadows of the men vanished instantly. It seemed to Beatrix that hours of suspense passed before there was any new movement in the street; yet she knew that she had waited there but a little time, for she heard the church clock strike nine, and she could see that the candle in the room above had burned down but a little way in its stick. As the moments passed and the suspense became almost insupportable, she began to pace the street again; telling herself that now the end was coming; or listening for footsteps upon the pavement; or seeking to read some message of hope upon the golden blind. Always with her was the sure and torturing knowledge that she could do nothing for those who had done so much for her. In all Strasburg there was no friend who would help those friends of hers. The very blinding rain which still fell upon her burning face was as some truth of the pitiless night. Brandon must die—there in the garret. She did not ask herself why the peril in which this man stood could move her to such agonies of distress. He was to die. She had seen another die at the Minster doors, and he had been a stranger. But this man was her friend, almost her brother—one of her own race. In that moment she knew that her heart lay wholly in the England she had left, and that never again would a sentiment born of passion mislead her to a hope in France and a desire for kinship with its people.

As ten o’clock was struck by all the bells of Strasburg, a man riding a black horse came down the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel at a canter. She recognised him as Gatelet, and she saw him enter the house where the watchers were concealed. Anon, three men came out of the house together and crossed over to the tavern. She knew why they had gone, and she stood as a figure of stone while their loud talking was heard even in the street. Presently a roar of voices answered their appeal. Troopers in a frenzy of drunken passion came running out of the house to cry that there was a spy in the garret above. A woman, with a besom dipped in resin for a torch, began to sing the “Marseillaise.” Others who had not been in the tavern were drawn from the neighbouring houses to make a great press now swarming before the doors of the auberge. A young officer of artillery climbed a pillar and cried incessantly “À la lanterne.” Others demanded that the tavern should be fired. Inside the house itself a terrible uproar was to be heard. Men fought upon the narrow stairs as dogs for a bone. Windows were opened in the street, and new cries for tidings swelled the clamour. Mounted troopers rode up to the alley and besought those inside to throw the spy down to them. In the garret itself there were many lights, and many figures upon the blind until a strong hand tore it down and an elbow shivered the glass behind it. The very pit of hell seemed opened there. The mob swayed to and fro, delirious with anger and the desire of death.

Beatrix had been caught up in the press, and was thrust forward toward that door which she had passed with such hesitation but a few days ago. The roar of the multitude was as the song of the sea in her ears. She saw a vision of devilish faces upturned; of savage men brandishing knives and swords and any weapons that came to their hand; of a window bright with many lights, and of figures moving there. She heard men say that the German was taken; terrible sounds of glass-breaking and of the oaths of the frenzied troopers rent her ears as the voices of tempest. She tried to utter an appeal for mercy, but no words left her lips. Her friend was dead, she thought. He had paid with his life for their jest upon the field of WÖrth.

And so she ran from the place as the flames of the burning tavern added their mite to the sea of fire which surged above the doomed city, and warned those who looked upon Strasburg from afar that the day of waiting was drawing to its end.

CHAPTER XXVII
ACCUSATION

Guillaumette opened the door to her, and stood exclaiming upon the threshold—

“Madam—oh, Madame!”

“Let me pass, Guillaumette—I am very ill and my clothes are wet.”

“But—Madame—oh, mon Dieu! and Monsieur has come back.”

Beatrix shut the door quietly. The draughts through the broken ceiling of the hall played with the gas-jet there, and cast a garish, fitful light upon the faces of the women. From the dining-room there came the echo of voices. Men were talking in the room, and one of them was Edmond Lefort.

“He came back an hour ago, Madame; he would not eat or sit until you were here. And now the Captain Gatelet is with him—and you—Holy Virgin!”

She wrung her hands, and tears came into her eyes as she looked upon the pale face and trembling hands and sodden clothes of her mistress. But Beatrix did not hear her. For an instant she hesitated, cold and faint and dizzy in the hall. The words “Edmond is here” were exquisite beyond any words she had spoken in all her life. Out of the darkness and the place of death she had come back there to this reward—to her lover’s arms.

Maladroitly, yet with eager fingers, she put off her cloak and hat. In shadow as the mirror was, it yet enabled her to see her own white face and straightened hair and disordered frock. A woman’s vanity, even in such an hour, gave the wish that Edmond might see her otherwise. But her thought of self was momentary; and when she had stood an instant, combating an agitation which threatened to unnerve her utterly, she opened the door and entered the room.

He was standing with his back to the table, listening earnestly to Gatelet, who told him the story of the night. He had not heard her knock, for the narrative absorbed him entirely, and when she entered all unexpectedly an exclamation burst from his lips, and he stood regarding her awkwardly. She had thought that he would hold out his arms to her, or give her some warm word of welcome even before another; but no word was uttered, nor did he make any movement. She, in turn, was as one struck dumb. The lights danced before her eyes. She tried to utter his name, but her lips would not help her.

Lefort was the first to speak. There was no anger in his voice, but rather the tone of one who must pronounce some judicial and impartial sentence. She knew, when she heard him, that no event of the past week remained to be told.

“I am glad that you have come, Beatrix,” he said; “the Captain has been telling me about to-night, and it is right that you should hear him. All this is news to me, and I wait until you speak. Of course, you must have much to say to us?”

He paused, regarding her curiously. She stood against the wall, a wan and desolate figure facing her accuser—for this she knew that Gatelet was.

“If this man has spoken, he has told you that our friend is dead,” she exclaimed angrily. “I went to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel to-night, but could not save him. He died in the tavern there because I did not wish to be Monsieur Gatelet’s friend. Is not that your news, Monsieur?”

A new courage, born of the danger, came to her as she confronted them. Impossible for her to realise that her husband had ceased to be her lover. She had only to speak, she thought. Gatelet, in his turn, was quick to pursue an advantage of her words.

“Madame,” he said, “I will leave you to explain everything to your husband. He will judge of the rest by what you have just told us. The spy did not die in the city to-night, Madame, because you and your confederates were before us in the house. If I wished you to be my friend, it was to save your husband’s name from disgrace. It will be for him to say to-morrow, if not to-night, whether I have done my duty or have failed in it.”

He bowed curtly to them both and left the house. They heard the door shut and still were silent. The news of Brandon’s escape dumfounded her. She could not believe that Edmond, her lover, stood before her, silent, stern, unpitying. The desire to put her arms about his neck and to be held in his embrace and there to tell her story was such a desire as might well have broken down all her pride and cast her prostrate at his feet. But some chain of her destiny held her back. He had listened to the slander—he, the man she had loved with all her heart and soul. She set her heart against any thought of love when he began to speak again.

“Beatrix,” he exclaimed, when minutes of angry silence had elapsed, “I have signed away my honour to return to you to-night. God help me if these things I hear are true. Let us have no misunderstanding. They say that you left WÖrth with Brandon North. Is that a lie?”

“It is no lie. I left there with our friend—with your friend. They burned our house, and there was no one in WÖrth to help me. Brandon found an Englishman who drove me to Strasburg. Was that a crime against your honour?”

She spoke in a voice grown hard and satirical. He bit his lips and pursued the question.

“There can be no friendship in war,” he said quietly; “this man has chosen to be the enemy of France. He is, therefore, my enemy, and should have been yours. Admitting that danger led you to forget these things—and I see the possibility of that—how came it that you met him in Strasburg and went to his house there?”

“I went that he might carry my letter to you. I knew that he had come here out of pure friendship to me. There was no news of you except the news that he brought into Strasburg. Cannot you understand that, Edmond? When he was wounded, my honour and gratitude compelled me to befriend him. Would you have done less, had you been here? You know that you would not—”

“We are not discussing my actions but your own, Beatrix. If I had gone to a woman’s house, a Frenchwoman’s, under such circumstances as you went to the house of Brandon North, I should have known beforehand what you would think of me. Do you not see that you have dishonoured me in the eyes of every man who hears of these things? And are you child enough to believe that the Englishman came to Strasburg simply with the desire to serve you? My God, Beatrix, are you child enough to believe that?”

She looked up at him defiantly.

“Brandon is an Englishman,” she said. “He does not lie as your friends lie. I know that he came here to serve me. I am glad that my friends saved him to-night. If your love of me is such a little thing that every word of slander can influence it, believe what you will. I have told you my story. Do not think that I shall appeal to you to accept it, Edmond.”

He began to walk up and down the room restlessly. In the intervals of silence the thunder of the German cannon could be heard as a dreadful tocsin of the night. The old house quivered at every savage discharge.

“Your friend is an Englishman,” he said, deliberating his words. “Your heart was never in France nor for me, Beatrix. From the first day you spoke of England and not of my country. The army I serve has meant nothing to you. My honour was in your keeping, and you sold it to this man—because he was your fellow country-man. If it had been otherwise, you would have died in our home at WÖrth before a German bivouac should have protected you. I cannot conceal these things from myself. God knows it was for love of you, to hear your voice again, that I gave my word and came back to this house ashamed to show my face to men. You have rewarded me by harbouring the enemies of France and saving them from justice. I can never forgive that, Beatrix. There must be no more talk of love between us. We have both made a mistake—let it begin and end with that, and God help me to deal with the man who has made my home desolate.”

She answered him with a little nervous laugh, which the intense emotion of the moment provoked. Nor was there wanting a certain contempt for his threat.

“Your home is desolate if you choose to make it so,” she said, looking him full in the face. “The folly will be yours. As for your honour, I am sorry you value it so lightly. Does honour betray a friend because he is wounded and helpless? Oh, you will deal with Brandon very easily—his foot is crushed, and he cannot stand. It was crushed because he wished to bring me news of you, Edmond.”

“As he has told you. And you are simple enough to believe it? He, a German soldier, comes into Strasburg to help me, a French hussar. It is a story for a fairy book. I do not read books like that. I tell myself that when a man risks his life to see a woman, she is not as other women to him. A true wife would not have spoken to such a man. You have seen him every day; you have been to his rooms; you have helped him to-night to get back to the German lines and to tell them that Strasburg is at death’s door, a burning city, a city which can no longer help France. Is that the work that my wife should do? God help me—my wife!”

He stood before her, white now with anger, as thus he weighed the evidence and seemed to judge her story for himself. She did not utter any word nor seek to defend herself. If he, Edmond, her lover, could believe that, then, indeed, would she be for ever silent. But he continued relentlessly:

“You love this man; why do you deny it?”

A cry which was half a moan came to her lips.

“Oh, my God—my God!”

“But I shall kill him, Beatrix. My honour can wait for that. He is in the city still. No other now shall pay that debt. It is mine—you hear, mine. All your acting will not save him. And I shall see you suffer as I must suffer, because I thought you were the best—the truest woman in France!”

Her face was tearless when she lifted it to answer him.

“I am glad that you do not think so now,” she said.

He ground his heel into the carpet, for all his self-control had gone, and an empty vanity compelled him more and more to think of the shame which would fall upon him personally when the story of these things was known.

“Your confession is unnecessary,” he exclaimed. “I was a fool to ask you to explain. Your father left your mother because she was a Frenchwoman; you have betrayed my country because I am a Frenchman. It is useless to lie to me. You are judged out of your own mouth. My country means nothing to you. The sufferings of my country give you pleasure. You are the friend of those who have brought this suffering upon us. I do not want to hear more. Henceforth I will forget your name—I will forget, when this man is dead, that you ever came to Strasburg to dishonour me in the eyes of those who have loved me. You shall hear my name no more—never again, as God is my witness, will I enter the house which shelters you. Do not seek to turn from that; do not seek to find me out. The past is irrevocable; I will begin a new page, and your name shall not be written upon it. If they say of me, ‘He was a coward,’ they shall say it no more when your lover is dead. Do not make any mistake, Beatrix. I will not sleep until I have found him out. I will watch his house night and day until he has answered with the only answer a liar can give—his life. That is my farewell to you—oh, my God, that I should be here in Strasburg to utter it!”

He paused suddenly and looked at her. She stood white-faced and mute against the wall by the door. Her eyes were as stars in the dim light. Her hands were locked together, and she tapped the boards nervously with her little foot. And she was still standing so when he left the room and passed out to the darkness of the terrible city.

But at dawn Guillaumette found her senseless upon the floor, and hours passed before it was known whether she were alive or dead.

CHAPTER XXVIII
“IF STRASBURG FALLS”

There followed upon her illness a week of dreams, which were the delirium of a brain overwrought, and of the burden she had carried for so many days. She knew not where she was or whose were the voices which spoke to her, but seemed to be living in a world apart—in a dreadful valley of shadows and of constant turmoil. Faces came to her fitfully in her dreams, the faces she had known in childhood—her mother’s face and the face of Edmond bending over her while she slept. To him she stretched out her arms, but could not touch his hand before the vision passed. No finality even of the dream was permitted to that burning brain. As in a whirlpool of the mind she was tossed hither and thither in thought; now battling with the flames, which gave a golden radiance to the city of doom; now living through the night of WÖrth again; now at her husband’s feet imploring him, for love of her, to save the life of their friend. A thousand voices spoke to her, but she could recognize none of them. She did not know that Strasburg, minute by minute, crumbled to the dust. Sleep gave her nought but this prompting to labour unceasing of the mind, to this unending battle of the flame and smoke and faces of her visions.

Reason came back to her at last; but ten days had passed, and she was in the Place Kleber no longer. When she opened her heavy eyes and sought to raise herself upon her bed, she saw that they had carried her to a strange house and laid her in a strange room. So bare and gloomy and vault-like was that chamber that she might well have been in the tombs. Even the pillars which carried the arches of the vaulted ceiling suggested an abiding place of the dead. The candles burning at her bedside were as watch-lights to her eyes. She heard no sound of any voice, but only the thunder of the cannon rolling distantly over the city above. Her weakness was beyond expression. She could not lift a hand from the coverlet of the bed. She thought that she was dying, and the rest of death seemed to come upon her as the sweetest gift of God.

Guillaumette came into the room presently walking upon tiptoe and carrying a basin of soup in her hand. When she saw that her mistress was awake, she set down the bowl quickly, and ran from the room crying, “Monsieur, Monsieur!” The cry brought the aged AbbÉ Colot to the place, and he entered in haste, uttering, as he did so, a prayer of thanks that his little patient lived.

“Ah! my child; you are awake, then. Glory be to God for this hour.”

Beatrix pressed her hands to her eyes.

“Whose house is this?” she asked.

“It is my house—you have been very ill here. They brought you to me from the Place Kleber. Ah, mon enfant, there is no more Place Kleber—no more Strasburg. We live in the vaults; we do not see the sun. You are very weak, Madame.”

She sighed, and laid her pretty head upon the pillow.

“If I only could remember, Monsieur!” she said. “I have seen so many things. It is all night—night.”

“But it will be day soon, my child.”

Guillaumette chimed in with her word.

“And here is the beautiful soup, Madame. Oh! Madame, what soup it is. And nothing soon to eat but the fat geese’s livers and the horses’ bones. I do not love the geese—not at all, Madame. And you have been so ill, so ill. Every day I said, ‘She will die to-day.’ Was it not so, Monsieur? Is she not to drink the beautiful soup?”

A poor wan smile crossed the pale face as Beatrix listened to the odd confession. Her awakened mind was busy already at the point where its chord of right reason had snapped.

“Has my husband been here?” she asked them suddenly.

The abbÉ shook his head. He had not heard of Lefort’s return, and he set down her question to the delirium which had left her.

“He is not in Strasburg, surely, my child. He will come presently. Your friends do not forget you. Monsieur Watts is here twice a day. He was here this morning; he will come again to-night.”

She listened to him as to one who spoke of strange things. Her weakened brain sought to grapple with the threads. Why did Richard Watts come there? Why had Edmond not been to the house? Ah, she remembered. That dreadful night of farewell—the threat, almost the curse upon her.

“Has Mr. Watts left any message for me?” was her next question.

“That you are to get well, my child. That is the message of us all. We cannot lose Madame HÉlÈne’s daughter; we are not going to lose her. And she must not talk. That is the doctor’s command. Silence, silence, until the little head is well again.”

“And the beautiful soup! Ah! Monsieur forgets the beautiful soup. We can live in the cellars, Madame, when we have the soup like that. It is I who made it—I, Guillaumette. Will you not taste it, Madame—just for Guillaumette’s sake?”

She held her mistress in her arms and began to feed her as a little child. The abbÉ watched approvingly. He did not know why her husband had not been to the house. The Captain’s duty as a soldier had kept him from the city, he thought. And so he spoke of Strasburg’s sufferings in a low and gentle voice soothing as a lullaby.

“Ah, we should give thanks to God that we have even the cellars of our house, my child. There are others who have not straw to cover them. But we have taught France her duty, and France will remember. The brave General, I do not know how to find words to speak of him. Day and night, day and night he refuses to listen to the cowards. We are a city of fire and dust, and yet we remain a city. We have little food to eat, yet God feeds our hearts. And we shall resist until the end, though there be not one stone upon another. Yesterday, they tell me, six hundred shells fell upon bastion eleven. Six hundred shells! Think of it! These Germans are devils—the house of God even is not sacred to them. But they are facing a brave people, my child. We know how to suffer. Even the women do not complain. Ah! God be thanked for the brave women who give us their prayers to-day.”

Beatrix seemed to listen to him, but found no interest in his words. She was glad when he left her to sleep again, but no sleep rewarded her busy brain. Line by line her own story came back to her. She was alone, then! Edmond had left her forever. She would never know his kiss again. He deemed her unfaithful to his country. The punishment of her folly seemed bitter beyond words. She felt as some outcast, lacking country, friends, and knowing not so much as one in all the world who would speak a word of love to her.

Guillaumette watched at her bedside that afternoon and told her many things in fragments of reluctant gossip. She had been very ill after “Monsieur” left the house. Few buildings remained unharmed in the Place Kleber. In the northern suburbs of the city the people lived in their cellars. This room was one of the old vaults under the presbytery of the abbÉ’s church in the Rue Nationale. Richard Watts had come to their house when she was ill, and had insisted upon her removal. The abbÉ, who slept in the sacristy of his church, and had loved “Madame” as one of his own children, could not do enough for her. There were many in Strasburg to condole with Madame HÉlÈne’s daughter even at such a time. General Uhrich himself had called at the house. No one knew anything of the story, except that she was very ill, and that the abbÉ had taken her there for safety. They had done all they could to make the place comfortable—but there was no choice. Upstairs the iron death was everywhere. Children had been killed at their mothers’ breasts. The great library of Strasburg burned still, as some vast flambeau bidding the Germans to look upon the unyielding heart of the city. There was a party that wished to yield, but the General would not listen to it. Monsieur Watts said that the General was a madman who had been weaned on pÂtÉ de foie gras. The American, Dr. Forbes—ah, how clever he was! He would return at sunset, and bring Monsieur Watts with him. They came together always.

Beatrix heard the gossip greedily. Ten days had passed, then, since Edmond left her. She trembled to think what those ten days might have meant to Brandon. Richard Watts’s anxiety to see her she could construe only as some desire that she should have news of her friend. Whether it were ill or good news she dare not ask. In one way a vague sense of relief succeeded the remembrance that Edmond knew her secret. She did not believe, in her gentler moods, that his love for her could not brook so womanly a folly as that of which he found her guilty. He would come to reason when he had reflected upon all that she had told him.

Richard Watts presented himself at the house at five o’clock, and when they brought his message she asked eagerly that she might see him. It was good to look upon that burly figure; good to hear that cheery English voice congratulating her. And he had so much to tell her.

“And so the little passenger is getting well again. Bravo, bravo! I shall have rare news for old Anne Brown to-night. Eh, young lady, you will send your love to old Anne Brown?”

He had the little hand in his for a moment and pressed the burning fingers.

“You are kind to come,” she said.

“Kind, young lady—why, hark to that. Your father’s oldest friend kind to come and see that little Beatrix is getting well again. What nonsense!”

She thought upon his words.

“You knew my father, then?”

“Ay, better than them all; knew his heart, his very soul. Some day we will talk of it—not now. You must get well again first, and have done with this nonsense about Master Brandon. Oh, don’t be anxious about him. The rogue can walk again, almost as well as I can.”

A sigh of relief escaped her lips. She told him, as shortly as she might, the story of her husband’s return. He listened with grave face, which could not cloak his anxiety.

“I feared from the first that this would happen,” she said. “Edmond would not believe. He chose to misunderstand me. He has not been here all these days. He threatened Brandon. It is a relief to know that they have not met.”

Watts feigned to laugh at the idea. His assumption of a confident indifference was none the less a failure.

“Strasburg cannot hold out three days,” he said. “It was lucky I went to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel when I did. We bribed their own man and got over the roofs to Dr. Forbes’s house. He has been attending you, you know—a right good fellow, though he was born in San Francisco. Brandon is in his house now—about the last place they would look for him. The American flag will protect him. When the city falls, men will be reasonable again, and all this will be forgotten. We must wish the city to open its gates, little passenger. That’s the only chance for all of us. Meanwhile, trust me to keep those two fellows apart. I’ll have no cut-throat business, if I can help it. What are they fighting about? Devil take the rogues if they know. And why is Dick Hamilton’s daughter lying here like a pretty spoiled dove in a cage? Because two fools have been playing the fool’s game together. But we shall stop that. Trust old Richard Watts and the Germans who make the music at the gates.”

Thus he sought to give her courage, and fearing to excite her, he left her with an echo of his own self-reliance in her heart. She knew that she had one friend working for her; and when she slept that night her prayer was this—that the gates of Strasburg might be opened to the enemy.

CHAPTER XXIX
THE LETTER

She slept heavily and without dreams. Exhausted nature drank at the well of sleep, and, thus refreshed, gave her new gifts of strength and thought when the dawn came. She had suffered from no malady but malady of the mind; and now that the crisis was past and all the long days of anxiety ended in this day of sure calamity, her mind came back to her and taught her to reason as she had not reasoned since the day of WÖrth. Calmly, quietly she reckoned with her position. There were facts she would hide no longer from herself—the fact of her estrangement from France; of the pity she gave to the soldiers of France when pride of them should have been her impulse; of her affection for the country she had left and for the English friends she had made in Strasburg. That affection demanded no loosening of the bonds which bound her still in love to Edmond. She knew that her love was stronger than all else, just as it was independent of all else. She did not believe that the misfortunes of their lives were irreparable. Misfortune, indeed, should be to them the beginning of a new understanding and a truer comradeship. Edmond would have need of her when Strasburg fell. She would give of her pity a generous offering.

If thus she could reason calmly, none the less was her anxiety unceasing. The very doubt as to what was happening to those she thought of in that city of fire and terror aided her to a recovery of her bodily strength. She rose from her bed by the very desire to rise. The week that succeeded her recovery was a week of questions unceasing to those who visited her—the abbÉ, the American doctor, old Richard Watts. They evaded her questions or answered them to no purpose. Even old Watts could bring her no tidings to satisfy her.

“You are to get better, little passenger,” he said always. “The rest is my business. I shall see that two foolish fellows do not make fools of themselves any more. Tell yourself that, when you think about it, and do not worry. Say that old Richard Watts is more than a match for them. We cannot hold out much longer here, and when we open the gates common-sense will come in. We mustn’t expect any common-sense while the Germans are sending a thousand shells a day as a pleasant token of their good intentions. But it will come by-and-by, and then that rascal, Edmond, will be on his knees to you. If he doesn’t come of his own free will, I’ll bring him here by the scruff of his neck. We’ll laugh at his threats, and Brandon shall join in. Trust Brandon to keep his head if these French maniacs let him. He’s at the American consulate now, and I don’t suppose they’re going to give him up. So you make your mind easy, little Beatrix. I’m your friend if you’ll have me for that. God knows it’s something to have the friendship of a little girl like you.”

She thanked him from her heart.

“It is I who should be grateful,” she exclaimed, holding out her hand to him; “as if I could ever forget the friend who saved my friend’s life. And you see I’m well again already. I shall go out and hear about things for myself to-morrow.”

“Indeed, and you will do nothing of the sort, young lady. Go out—the little passenger go out, when the shells fall like hail and there are dead at every corner. The idea of it!”

“But you have come out to see me?”

“Oh, I don’t count. There’s no one would miss old Dick Watts. If I smoke a few pipes more or less, it doesn’t matter much to anyone, you be sure.”

“It would matter to me.”

He squeezed her little hand in his great fist.

“Ah,” he said, “there’s news for old Anne Brown. The little passenger cares. And because she cares she won’t show her pretty face in Strasburg until the gates are open. I may say that, young lady.”

She turned away with a sigh.

“My husband does not come—how can I remain here?”

“He will come when the Germans enter. Pity is much to a man. He will need your pity, then. You will forgive, and he will forget the rest.”

She was silent a moment, and then she said very earnestly, “How I wish that the end was to-day!”

“As all sensible men wish it. To-day or to-morrow, what does it matter? We have done enough for an idea. The rest is a cheap love for heroics.”

She turned to him smiling.

“You will never love France,” she said.

“I love it with your love, young lady.”

She was silent, for she knew that this man read the truth which had haunted her now many a weary night and day. No longer was it possible to look upon herself as a Frenchwoman loyal to France in heart and thought. The defeat of France’s army had changed her—perchance had driven her to that very pride in Saxon might which she deplored but could not modify. The belief was in itself an infidelity to the man who loved her. She tried to thrust it from her, but it returned every hour and would be heard. “You are an Englishwoman,” the voice said. Her love of England was never so great as in that hour.

Richard Watts left her at six o’clock that night, and at seven the abbÉ returned from one of his daily visits to the hospital. He came in with many expressions of delight at the progress she was making, and, much to her surprise, had a letter for her in a handwriting she did not recognise.

“It will be from Monsieur, no doubt,” the old man said, as he handed her the dainty missive. “These Germans allow their prisoners to write, they say. I would have believed no good of them if I had not carried the letter myself. You must tell us that he is well, Madame. Ah! if there could be roses on your cheeks when he comes home again!”

She did not contradict him, but opened her letter with trembling hands. There was no address upon the paper that she could see, nor was the letter signed. She read it with swimming eyes which scarce could decipher the wavering lines.

“At dawn to-morrow,” the letter said, “in the gardens of Laroche, the surgeon, your English friend will die.”

Beatrix read the letter twice, then crumpled it in her hand. The abbÉ, watching her curiously, saw the blood rush to her cheeks; but she did not gratify his curiosity. When he had waited a little while and knew that her silence was final, he bade her good-night and left the room.

An hour later Guillaumette ran into the darkened church, where he was praying for the stricken city, to tell him that her mistress had quitted the presbytery, and was gone she knew not whither.

“She has left us, Monsieur, she who is so ill. The good God help us! we shall never see my mistress again!”

Beatrix had quitted the abbÉ’s house, indeed; yet her purpose was not clear to her; nor did she know, as she crept up the stone stairs, and stood once more in the streets of the city, whither her distress should carry her, or to what end. She must prevent her husband committing this crime, she thought. She must save the men from themselves. God alone could help her to do that.

She was very weak of her illness still, and she shivered as she drew her cloak about her and stood gazing up at the wondrous world of stars above and at the gaunt shapes of the mediÆval houses, which had leaned upon the abbÉ’s church for three centuries, and yet could conjure up the romance and colour of forgotten ages. There had been rain all day; but the air of evening was sweet and fresh upon her face; and the very solitude about her gave a charm to the sense of freedom which was beyond all her experience. Not until she had walked a little way and stood where she could overlook the Place Kleber, and the ground where her home had been, did her mind recur to the dangers of the city, and to the stories which they had told her in the haven of the cellars. But, suddenly, out of the night the truth came. The northern quarters of Strasburg were no more. A terrible desert of rubble and ashes and fire confronted her. Distant buildings caught the quivering iridescence, and were incarnadined with the play of crimson light. Shells of houses vomited flame and smoke, and brilliant sparks burning brightly in the clear night air. An unceasing crash of artillery was the horrible music of the hour. She could see the golden paths of the destroyer as the trail of falling stars bearing a message of doom. The picture was grand beyond any her eyes had looked upon. She stood spell-bound, unconscious of her peril.

Save for such troopers as were seeking to quell the fires, she saw no one in the streets through which her journey carried her. By here and there, a light shone in a cellar, and she could hear the voices of those who lived there. A priest passed her at the New Church, carrying the Host to the dying. He turned curious eyes upon her as she knelt, but did not speak to her. A little way farther on a group of men with lanterns were about a great waggon, which a shell had struck and shattered; the blood of the dead horses still flowed fresh in the gutters. She sought to pass unobserved; but as she drew near a terrible report deafened her, and the whole street was illumined by a blinding flash of light. She heard the shouts of the men as they ran to safety. There was the thunder of falling masonry, a choking cloud of dust hiding the stars—then darkness intolerable. She stood alone in the street, and when she could see the way, she ran on again—she knew not whither.

She must save her husband—must save Brandon. That was her watchword always. Those who had befriended her must not commit this crime. She had guessed that the malignity of Gatelet dictated the letter which she had received. She would defeat that malignity. There were moments when she thought of going to Richard Watts again; but reflection seemed to say that hers must be the voice to save Edmond and her friend. She did not know how it was that her footsteps carried her unconsciously to the Rue de Kehl; but thither she went, and anon found herself before the house of the American Consul. Brandon was there, in that house. She determined, cost what it might, that she would hear the truth from his own lips.

Many minutes passed before she could find courage to pull the great brass handle, and when she did so the sonorous echoes of the bell frightened her. But the man who opened the door, after he had spoken a few words to her, admitted that she could see Mr. North. A moment later Brandon himself—the old Brandon—with his quiet, calm voice, was reasoning with her as he would have reasoned with a child.

“Beatrix,” he said gently, “could you not have trusted me?”

“You do not know what I have suffered, Brandon,” she exclaimed; “and this—my God! tell me that it is not true?”

He made a little gesture of indifference.

“No harm will come to Edmond. I swear it on my honour. He has acted with little sense—but that is the habit of the French soldier. He is a good man at heart, and will love you none the less when this is over—”

“Promise me,” she exclaimed desperately, “you will not go to Laroche’s house to-morrow.”

“If I go, it will not be to make a fool of myself.”

“But he will kill you.”

“I must trust to the help of a befriending Providence. There will be some way out, and I shall find it. He must listen to me. He is listening to our friend Watts at this moment. Possibly there will be a method which does not occur to either of us at this moment. In any case, no harm will come to him.”

“But you—how can I leave you to the alternative? Oh, my God, if he should kill you, Brandon!”

He started and looked at her closely. She did not know that such words were sweeter than life to him. His voice was colder and discouraging when next he spoke.

“It will not come to that,” he said. “One man with a sword in his hand does not fight another with a medicine bottle. I am still half an invalid. Besides, is there no hope of common-sense?”

She buried her face in her hands, and the tears trickled through her fingers. The sacrifice which this man contemplated was not to be hidden from her. He would give his life that her husband might live.

“You shall not go,” she exclaimed earnestly. “Brandon, have I no right of our friendship? You will not meet my husband to-morrow.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Would you have them say that the Englishman is a coward, Beatrix?”

The answer frightened her. The culminating hour of her suffering was there in that room. Her tears, falling fast upon her white face, seemed to burn Brandon’s fingers. He would have given his life to bring laughter to those eyes he loved.

“Let us be sensible,” he continued, with a great effort to control himself. “What can I do? What other course is there? If your husband will make it a question of my honour, am I to let that, the honour of an Englishman, be the sport of every fool in Strasburg? Of course, I must go. The rest is in God’s hands. I shall do my best for your sake and my own.”

He could give her no other answer. She might take from the house nothing but this truth, that the destiny of him for whom she would have made the ultimate sacrifice was in God’s keeping.

“I shall never forget, Brandon—never to my life’s end,” she said as she left him.

“I trust there will be nothing to remember, Beatrix. You are the brave one to come through the city at such a time; you must go back at once. I ought to send one of our fellows with you, but under the circumstances I suppose it’s best not. Perhaps Watts will bring good news before morning. If you are going to his house now, you will hear what he has to say and might let me know. I can’t believe that your husband is serious—it would be too grotesque.”

She did not answer him, but at the door she stooped suddenly and kissed his hand.

It was ten o’clock when she left the house and stood again in the silent street, whose roof was of golden fire mingling with the stars, and the radiance of the mirrored flames on many a spire and many a dome. Nothing now, either of the scene or of her own peril, mattered to her. The jibes of besotted gunners, the warnings of officers who passed by to the citadel, the deafening roar of guns, even the dead in the streets—she went on heedless of these things. Brandon was to give his life for her lover’s. He would die at dawn, because he had been her friend. Well she knew that Edmond would not heed the words which could be spoken. That birthright of fallacy, which made of honour a god, was far above logic or reason. He would kill Brandon for honour’s sake.

This intolerable thought of one man’s sacrifice for another man’s folly was the culminating distress of that strange hour. While she told herself again and again that such a sacrifice must never be, the futility of her resolutions appeared in a clearer light with every step she took. The gulf between Edmond and herself was never to be bridged again. She knew that she could neither hope nor believe in France as she had hoped and believed on the day when her destiny sent her to the Niederwald. One by one these events recurred to her imagination—the occasion of their picnic, the call to arms, the dreadful day of battle, the weakening of the cords of faith, the lost glory of the army which was to protect the children of France. How few were the weeks since she had regarded her lover as one sent to her unmistakably to be that link in the chain of her love which death alone might break. And now! Doubt, suspicion, separation, above all, the contemplation of this crime, were her fruits of war. She saw that they were fruits surpassing all agony of death and battle, and even the pity of the children’s grief.

Until this time, and the hour was now eleven, there had been no thought in her mind of making such an appeal to her husband as she had made to Brandon. Her common-sense told her that her own concern for the life of her English friend would be a new provocation to the crime. Edmond would rejoice in her distress. It would prompt him to find a better excuse, a new insult to his honour. Turn where she would, she could see no way. Often there came to her lips the prayer that the gates of Strasburg might be opened to the enemy before the sun should shine again upon that scene of desolation and of death. Defeat, the shame of France, alone could turn the peril from her doors. She knew well that the end could not be distant; that whatever heroism the brave Uhrich still might contemplate could but postpone the inevitable hour when the white flag must fly from the citadel, and the roar of the guns be heard no more. Perchance the superb heroism, the unbroken courage, the splendid faith of Strasburg would, under other circumstances, have won back that allegiance to France of which war had robbed her. But the thought of to-morrow ever prevailed above such a hope as that. Brandon would die at dawn. He would pay the penalty of his friendship for her.

She could pray, in truth, that the gates of Strasburg might be opened, but there was no message of the night to answer her prayer. Everywhere now the people sought the fitful sleep which the cellars and the caverns of the city might give them. Those that were abroad battled anew with the raging fire and the smoking dÉbris. She seemed to be imprisoned in some Inferno, where the air was hot and stifling, and the voices were the moaning shells and the crash of the great guns and the thunder of houses falling, or of the fire’s new victory. Nothing affrighted her; she passed in and out to the dangerous places; among the groups of blackened pompiers; through companies of artillerymen; by scenes of death and agony; yet was not witness of the men or of their work. If Strasburg would surrender! If the end would come! If she could save Brandon! Never had she known such suffering of suspense, never such a burden of excitement and of fear. The night was as a year of terror enduring. She prayed to God that she might not live until day dawned.

It was after midnight then, and she knew that she had been walking aimlessly, without destination or desire of rest, for two hours. A sudden faintness, the due of her illness, warned her at last that she must seek some asylum and abandon a quest so futile. For a little while, she rested upon a bench at the door of a deserted cafÉ; but when her strength came back to her, she remembered the promise which old Richard Watts had made, and once more she returned to his house. He met her at the door. His grave face betrayed the tidings of which he was the bearer.

“I have been expecting you for the last hour, child,” he said as he led her into his English room; “they have told you, of course—”

“They have told me—yes,” she answered almost in a whisper.

“Are you going to your husband?”

“Why should I go?”

“Because he has need of you.”

She started back with a cry of terror.

“Oh, my God!” she cried, “what is it—what do you hide from me?”

“I hide nothing. It is best that you should know. I thought that you did know when you came here. Your husband was struck by a fragment of a shell in the Broglie to-night, and is now lying in the house of Laroche, the surgeon.” For an instant she stood with eyes wide open and hands trembling upon her breast.

“Take me to Edmond,” she said.

CHAPTER XXXI
“THERE IS NIGHT IN THE HILLS”

It seemed that Strasburg could suffer no more; and yet she continued unyieldingly to suffer. Hours became days, and days weeks, and still no white flag floated over her citadel; nor were the voices of her brave men silent. Down below in the cellars the timid wailed and cried for light and bread. Mighty lanterns, the shells of her great buildings, gave to the night the crimson beacons which seemed dyed with the very blood of the dead. Faint hearts told each other that the Hotel de Ville, the theatre, the New Church, the Governor’s house, the Library, were but ashes upon barren wastes. Two thousand dead the city mourned; and yet, mourning them, prepared to die. The ultimate woe of despair was upon a helpless people. Their homes crumbled to the very dust. The open grave became their offering to France and the children of France.

It had been upon the nineteenth day of September that Edmond Lefort fell wounded by the fragment of a shell at the very door of the surgeon Laroche’s house in the Broglie. He lay in the same house upon the morning of the twenty-seventh; and those about him knew that he was dying. Since the grey light of dawn winged into that room of death and shone upon the haggard face, swathed still in its bloody bandages, his little wife had not moved from his bedside nor released his hot fingers from her own. She sat there as some angel of sleep comforting him. The tragedy of the weeks bygone, the hope, the fear of them had vanished as the mists of an autumn night. No other name, no other voice, no other scene stood between her and her lover now. Clinging as to some supreme faith in the God who had given her love, she could not believe that the supreme calamity was at hand. Edmond was dying, they said. She would not hear them.

He lay upon a soldier’s bed, a curtain shielding his eyes, one white hand clasping the hot fingers which had never left his own; the other stroking the coverlet as men, sick unto death, will in the last hours that life may give them. Once only since fate struck him down had he opened his eyes to the sunlight, or recognised who it was that stood with him at the end; but that instant of recognition was never to be forgotten. Beatrix remembered, through the years, the voice that uttered her name then in a transport of pity and love. What a light of joy was on his face! Again and again he whispered the beloved name as she covered his hands and face with kisses which were the gift of her very heart. No other came between them then. The angel of death had linked their souls, to be forever thus through the infinite ages of their being.

She knew that he was dying, though she sought to hide the truth from herself. The stertorous breathing, the pallor of the face, the burning hands, the cold sweat of night upon his forehead, the agony even of the conscious moments, were there perpetually to warn her of that instant when the heart would beat no more, and the day of suffering draw to its end. But the flame of her hope was not to be quenched. She reeled before the power of death, and yet would not admit that power. The God who had sent her to WÖrth to know the whole blessedness and sweetness of a young girl’s love would not, could not take this love from her. She clung to her husband with an intensity born of frenzy and despair. She longed to lift him from the bed, and to say, “Arise and live.” She prayed, as she had never prayed before, that he might be given back to her. Through that long September day, that day when Strasburg at last was to cry for the mercy it had not wished, she never stirred from his bed, nor ceased to listen for the words that should be to her precious beyond all the words their love had spoken.

There had been a cessation of the cannon early in the afternoon, but she knew nothing of the reasons which brought the unaccustomed silence and filled the streets again with those who had almost forgotten the sun and the life of day. In the darkened room she heard her lover talking, now of WÖrth, now of their happy days in the Niederwald; again of the battle and of the death ride there. Once, indeed, he raised himself upon his elbow and seemed to call for his comrades; but the next moment he had fallen back with a froth of blood upon his lips. An anger against the destiny which thus could make him suffer closed her lips and dried her eyes. She would save him—she would close the open grave; they should not take him from her. In her distress she even withdrew her hand from his, and he opened his eyes once more and began to speak to her.

“Beatrix—it is you, little Beatrix.”

“It is I, dearest husband.”

“You have forgiven me, my wife—ah, God, how precious!-you have forgiven me that I made you suffer?”

She knelt at his bedside, and burying her face upon the outstretched arm she made anew the child-wife’s vow that he had heard in the golden days of old time.

“I love you—Edmond—I love you—I love you.”

The white hand rested upon her hair; the eyes of the man were looking over the city he had loved.

“There is nothing in the world but love, Beatrix,” he said, speaking in a voice so low that her ears must almost touch his lips; “all else that we live for, fame, glory, ourselves, money—they are nothing. If I had remembered my love for you, little wife—if I had remembered—”

He began to breathe with dreadful rapidity. She could feel his heart throbbing beneath her cheeks.

“Dearest,” she said, “let us remember nothing but the days to come. Oh, I will love you always, always—I have none but you, Edmond.”

He sought to kiss her lips, but could not raise his head from the pillow.

“I do not fear death,” he said very slowly, “if one might sleep upon the field with a cloak about the face and a sword in the hand. The grave is all dark. You will not let them lay me in the grave, Beatrix.”

“Oh, Edmond—oh, for God’s sake—how can I bear it?”

“You will come to me, little wife. I shall hear your voice in the loneliness of death. For that we love and are loved. Not to be alone through the eternal night! Ah, if you will remember then, beloved, when there is none to hear and my eyes are blinded! Ah, if you will come to me in that sleep! I have no right to ask. All that I would live for is here in my arms. They shall not take you from me, Beatrix—if you forgive!”

A great silence, broken only by the voice of tears, reigned in that abode of death. Without, in the awakened streets, great throngs flocked to the cathedral and the citadel. The white flag floated above the city. The agony of Strasburg was no more. To the dying man, the silent cannon sent the last message of life.

“Beatrix,” he said, “you will go to England with Richard Watts. I wish it. Remember that I have loved you, little one. Think well of my country. Think well of France. If our child should live, tell him of WÖrth. If my son—ah, God! why do I speak of him?”

He fell back exhausted and closed his eyes. For many minutes no word was spoken. When he uttered her name again, she knew that it was for the last time.

“There is night in the hills,” he said; “give me light, oh God, that I may see her face again.”

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

• This text has been preserved as in the original, including archaic and inconsistent spelling, punctuation and grammar, and hyphenation except as noted below.
• Obvious printer’s errors have been silently corrected.
• Page 160. Text is within the curly brackets. {“_VÀ la_--we shall breakfast} changed to {“_Va lÀ_--we shall breakfast}
• Illustrations have been moved to below any enclosing paragraphs.