21IITHE GOVERNMENT INTERFERES
“There is a short cut across that meadow,” said the young girl, raising a rounded, sun-tinted arm, bare to the shoulder.
“You are very kind,” said I, looking at her steadily.
“And, after that, you will come to a thicket of white birches.”
“Thank you, mademoiselle.”
“And after that,” she said, idly following with her blue eyes the contour of her own lovely arm, “you must turn to the left, and there you will cross a hill. You can see it from where we stand—”
She glanced at me over her outstretched arm. “You are not listening,” she said.
I shifted a troubled gaze to the meadow which stretched out all glittering with moist grasses and tufts of rain-drenched wild flowers.
The girl’s arm slowly fell to her side, she looked up at me again, I felt her eyes on me for a moment, then she turned her head toward the meadow.
A deadened report shook the summer air—the sound of a cannon fired very far away, perhaps on the citadel of Strasbourg. It was so distant, so indistinct, that here in this peaceful country it lingered only as a vibration; the humming of the clover bees was louder.
Without turning my head I said: “It is difficult to22believe that there is war anywhere in the world—is it not, mademoiselle?”
“Not if one knows the world,” she said, indifferently.
“Do you know it, my child?”
“Sufficiently,” she said.
She had opened again the book which she had been reading when I first noticed her. From my saddle I saw that it was Molière. I examined her, in detail, from the tips of her small wooden shoes to the scarlet velvet-banded skirt, then slowly upward, noting the laced bodice of velvet, the bright hair under the butterfly coiffe of Alsace, the delicate outline of nose and brow and throat. The ensemble was theatrical.
“Why do you tend turkeys?” I asked.
“Because it pleases me,” she replied, raising her eyebrows in faint displeasure.
“For that same reason you read Monsieur Molière?” I suggested.
“Doubtless, monsieur.”
“Who are you?”
“Is a passport required in France?” she replied, languidly.
“Are you what you pretend to be, an Alsatian turkey tender?”
“Parbleu! There are my turkeys, monsieur.”
“Of course, and there is your peasant dress and there are your wooden shoes, and there also, mademoiselle, are your soft hands and your accented speech and your plays of Molière.”
“You are very wise for a hussar,” she said.
“Perhaps,” said I, “but I have asked you a question which remains parried.”
She balanced the hazel rod across her shoulders with a faintly malicious smile.
“One might almost believe that you are not a hussar, but an officer of the Imperial Police,” she said.
“‘ACROSS THAT MEADOW,’ SAID THE YOUNG GIRL”
“‘ACROSS THAT MEADOW,’ SAID THE YOUNG GIRL”
23
“If you think that,” said I, “you should answer my question the sooner—unless you come from La Trappe. Do you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh! And what do you do at the Château de la Trappe?”
“I tend poultry—sometimes,” she replied.
“And at other times?”
“I do other things, monsieur.”
“What things?”
“What things? Mon Dieu, I read a little, as you perceive, monsieur.”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“Oh, a mere nobody in such learned company,” she said, shaking her head with a mock humility that annoyed me intensely.
“Very well,” said I, conscious every moment of her pleasure in my discomfiture; “under the circumstances I am going to ask you to accept my escort to La Trappe; for I think you are Mademoiselle Elven, recently of the Odéon theatre.”
At this her eyes widened and the smile on her face became less genuine. “Indeed, I shall not go with you,” she said.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to insist,” said I.
She still balanced her hazel rod across her shoulders, a smile curving her mouth.
“Monsieur,” she said, “do you ride through the world pressing every peasant girl you meet with such ardent entreaties? Truly, your fashion of wooing is not slow, but everybody knows that hussars are headlong gentlemen—‘Nothing is sacred from a hussar,’” she hummed, deliberately, in a parody which made me writhe in my saddle.
“Mademoiselle,” said I, taking off my forage-cap, “your ridicule is not the most disagreeable incident24that I expect to meet with to-day. I am attempting to do my duty, and I must ask you to do yours.”
“By taking a walk with you, beau monsieur?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then,” said I, amiably, “I shall be obliged to set you on my horse.” And I dismounted and went toward her.
“Set me on—on that horse?” she repeated, with a disturbed smile.
“Will you come on foot, then?”
“No, I will not!” she said, with a click of her teeth.
I looked at my watch—it lacked five minutes to one.
“In five minutes we are going to start,” said I, cheerfully, and stood waiting, twisting the gilt hilt-tassels of my sabre with nervous fingers.
After a silence she said, very seriously, “Monsieur, would you dare use violence toward me?”
“Oh, I shall not be very violent,” I replied, laughing. I held the opened watch in my hand so that she could see the dial if she chose.
“It is one o’clock,” I said, closing the hunting-case with a snap.
She looked me steadily in the eyes.
“Will you come with me to La Trappe?”
She did not stir.
I stepped toward her; she gave me a breathless, defiant stare; then in an instant I caught her up and swung her high into my saddle, before either she or I knew exactly what had happened.
Fury flashed up in her eyes and was gone, leaving them almost blank blue. As for me, amazed at what I had done, I stood at her stirrup, breathing very fast, with jaws set and chin squared.
She was clever enough not to try to dismount, woman enough not to make an awkward struggle or do25anything ungraceful. In her face I read an immense astonishment; fascination seemed to rivet her eyes on me, following my every movement as I shortened one stirrup for her, tightened the girths, and laid the bridle in her half-opened hand.
Then, in silence, I led the horse forward through the open gate out into the wet meadow.
Wading knee-deep through soaking foliage, I piloted my horse with its mute burden across the fields; and, after a few minutes a violent desire to laugh seized me and persisted, but I bit my lip and called up a few remaining sentiments of decency.
As for my turkey-girl, she sat stiffly in the saddle, with a firmness and determination that proved her to be a stranger to horses. I scarcely dared look at her, so fearful was I of laughing.
As we emerged from the meadow I heard the cannon sounding again at a great distance, and this perhaps sobered me, for presently all desire of laughter left me, and I turned into the road which led through the birch thicket, anxious to accomplish my mission and have done with it as soon as might be.
“Are we near La Trappe?” I asked, respectfully.
Had she pouted, or sulked, or burst into reproaches, I should have cared little—in fact, an outburst might have relieved me.
But she answered me so sweetly, and, too, with such composure, that my heart smote me for what I had done to her and what I was still to do.
“Would you rather walk?” I asked, looking up at her.
“No, thank you,” she said, serenely.
So we went on. The spectacle of a cavalryman in full uniform leading a cavalry horse on which was seated an Alsatian girl in bright peasant costume appeared to astonish the few people we passed. One26of these foot-farers, a priest who was travelling in our direction, raised his pallid visage to meet my eyes. Then he stole a glance at the girl in the saddle, and I saw a tint of faded color settle under his transparent skin.
The turkey-girl saluted the priest with a bright smile.
“Fortune of war, father,” she said, gayly. “Behold! Alsace in chains.”
“Is she a prisoner?” said the priest, turning directly on me. Of all the masks called faces, never had I set eyes on such a deathly one, nor on such pale eyes, all silvery surface without depth enough for a spark of light to make them seem alive.
“What do you mean by a prisoner, father?” I asked.
“I mean a prisoner,” he said, doggedly.
“When the church cross-examines the government, the towers of Notre Dame shake,” I said, pleasantly. “I mean no discourtesy, father; it is a proverb in Paris.”
“There is another proverb,” observed the turkey-girl, placidly. “Once a little inhabitant of hell stole the key to paradise. His punishment was dreadful. They locked him in.”
I looked up at her, perplexed and irritated, conscious that she was ridiculing me, but unable to comprehend just how. And my irritation increased when the priest said, calmly, “Can I aid you, my child?”
She shook her head with a cool smile.
“I am quite safe under the escort of an officer of the Imperial—”
“Wait!” I said, hastily, but she continued, “of the Imperial Military Police.”
Above all things I had not wanted it known that the Imperial Police were moving in this affair at La Trappe, and now this little fool had babbled to a strange priest—of all people in the world!27
“What have the police to do with this harmless child?” demanded the priest, turning on me so suddenly that I involuntarily took a step backward.
“Is this the confessional, father?” I replied, sharply. “Go your way in peace, and leave to the police what alone concerns the police.”
“Render unto Cæsar,” said the girl, quietly. “Good-bye, father.”
Turning to look again at the priest, I was amazed to find him close to me, too close for a man with such eyes in his head, for a man who moved so swiftly and softly, and, in spite of me, a nervous movement of my hand left me with my fingers on the butt of my pistol.
“What the devil is all this?” I blurted out. “Stand aside, father. Do you think the Holy Inquisition is back in France? Stand aside then! I salute your cloth!”
And I passed on ahead, one hand on the horse’s neck, the other touching the visor of my scarlet forage-cap. Once I looked back. The priest was standing where I had passed him.
We met a dozen people in all, I think, some of them peasants, one or two of the better class—a country doctor and a notary among them. None appeared to know my turkey-girl, nor did she even glance at them; moreover, all answered my inquiries civilly enough, directing me to La Trappe, and professing ignorance as to its inhabitants.
“Why do all the people I meet carry bundles?” I demanded of the notary.
“Mon Dieu, monsieur, they are too near the frontier to take risks,” he replied, blinking through his silver-rimmed spectacles at my turkey-girl.
“You mean to say they are running away from their village of Trois-Feuilles?” I asked.28
“Exactly,” he said. “War is a rude guest for poor folk.”
Disgusted with the cowardice of the hamlet of Trois-Feuilles, I passed on without noticing the man’s sneer. In a moment, however, he repassed me swiftly, going in the same direction as were we, toward La Trappe.
“Wait a bit!” I called out. “What is your business in that direction, monsieur the notary?”
He looked around, muttered indistinctly about having forgotten something, and started on ahead of us, but at a sharp “Stop!” from me he halted quickly enough.
“Your road lies the other way,” I observed, and, as he began to protest, I cut him short.
“You change your direction too quickly to suit me,” I said. “Come, my friend the weather-cock, turn your nose east and follow it or I may ask you some questions that might frighten you.”
And so I left him also staring after us, and I had half a mind to go back and examine his portfolio to see what a snipe-faced notary might be carrying about with him.
When I looked up at my turkey-girl, she was sitting more easily in the saddle, head bent thoughtfully.
“You see, mademoiselle, I take no chances of not finding my friends at home,” I said.
“What friends, monsieur?”
“My friends at La Trappe.”
“Oh! And ... you think that the notary we passed might have desired to prepare them for your visit, monsieur?”
“Possibly. The notary of Trois-Feuilles and the Château de la Trappe may not be unknown to each other. Perhaps even mademoiselle the turkey-girl may number the learned Trappists among her friends.”29
“Perhaps,” she said.
Walking on along the muddy road beside her, arm resting on my horse’s neck, I thought over again of the chances of catching Buckhurst, and they seemed slim, especially as after my visit the house at La Trappe would be vacant and the colony scattered, or at least out of French jurisdiction, and probably settled across the Belgian frontier.
Of course, if the government ordered the expulsion of these people, the people must go; but I for one found the order a foolish one, because it removed a bait that might attract Buckhurst back where we stood a chance of trapping him.
But in a foreign country he could visit his friends freely, and whatever movement he might ultimately contemplate against the French government could easily be directed from that paradise of anarchists, Belgium, without the necessity of his exposing himself to any considerable danger.
I was sorry that affairs had taken this turn.
A little breeze began blowing; the scarlet skirt of my turkey-girl fluttered above her wooden shoes, and on her head the silk bow quivered like a butterfly on a golden blossom.
“They say when the Lord fashioned the first maid of Alsace half the angels cried themselves ill with jealousy,” said I, looking up at her.
“And the other half, monsieur?”
“The sterner half started for Alsace in a body. They were controlled with difficulty, mademoiselle. That is why St. Peter was given a key to lock them in, not to lock us poor devils out.”
After a silence she said, musing: “It is a curious thing, but you speak as though you had seen better days.”
“No,” I said, “I have never seen better days. I30am slowly rising in the world. Last year I was a lieutenant; I am now inspector.”
“I meant,” she said, scornfully, “that you had been well-born—a gentleman.”
“Are gentlemen scarce in the Imperial Military Police?”
“It is not a profession that honors a man.”
“Of all people in the world,” said I, “the police would be the most gratified to believe that this violent world needs no police.”
“Monsieur, there is another remedy for violence.”
“And what may that remedy be, mademoiselle?”
“Non-resistance—absolute non-resistance,” said the girl, earnestly, bending her pretty head toward me.
“That is not human nature,” I said, laughing.
“Is the justification of human nature our aim in this world?”
“Nor is it possible for mankind to submit to violence,” I added.
“I believe otherwise,” she said, gravely.
As we mounted the hill along a sandy road, bordered with pines and with cool, green thickets of broom and gorse, I looked up at her and said: “In spite of your theories, mademoiselle, you yourself refused to accompany me.”
“But I did not resist your violence,” she replied, smiling.
After a moment’s silence I said: “For a disciple of a stern and colorless creed, you are very human. I am sorry that you believe it necessary to reform the world.”
She said, thoughtfully: “There is nothing joyless in my creed—above all, nothing stern. If it be fanaticism to desire for all the world that liberty of thought and speech and deed which I, for one, have assumed, then I am, perhaps, a fanatic. If it be fanaticism to detest violence and to deplore all resistance to violence,31I am a very guilty woman, monsieur, and deserve ill of the Emperor’s Military Police.”
This she said with that faintly ironical smile hovering sometimes in her eyes, sometimes on her lips, so that it was hard to face her and feel quite comfortable.
I began, finally, an elaborate and logical argument, forgetting that women reason only with their hearts, and she listened courteously. To meet her eyes when I was speaking interrupted my train of thought, and often I was constrained to look out across the hills at the heavy, solid flanks of the mountains, which seemed to steady my logic and bring rebellious thought and wandering wisdom to obedience.
I explained my theory of the acceptance of three things—human nature, the past, and the present. Given these, the solution of future problems must be a different solution from that which she proposed.
At moments the solemn absurdity of it all came over me—the turkey-girl, with her golden head bent, her butterfly coiffe a-flutter, discussing ethics with an irresponsible fly-by-night, who happened at that period of his career to carry a commission in the Imperial Police.
The lazy roadside butterflies flew up in clouds before the slow-stepping horse; the hill rabbits, rising to their hindquarters, wrinkled their whiskered noses at us; from every thicket speckled hedge-birds peered at us as we went our way solemnly deciding those eternal questions already ancient when the Talmud branded woman with the name of Lilith.
At length, as we reached the summit of the sandy hill, “There is La Trappe, monsieur,” said my turkey-girl, and once more stretched out her lovely arm.
There appeared to be nothing mysterious about the house or its surroundings; indeed, a sunnier and more peaceful spot would be hard to find in that land of32hills, ravines, and rocky woodlands, outposts of those cloudy summits soaring skyward in the south.
The house itself was visible through gates of wrought iron, swinging wide between pillars of stone, where an avenue stretched away under trees to a granite terrace, glittering in the sun. And under the terrace a quiet pool lay reflecting tier on tier of stone steps which mounted to the bright esplanade above.
There was no porter at the gate to welcome me or to warn me back; the wet road lay straight in front, barred only by sunbeams.
“May we enter?” I asked, politely.
She did not answer, and I led the horse down that silent avenue of trees towards the terrace and the glassy pool which mirrored the steps of stone.
Masses of scarlet geraniums, beds of living coals, glowed above the terrace. As we drew nearer, the water caught the blaze of color, reflecting the splendor in subdued tints of smothered flame. And always, in the pool, I saw the terrace steps, reversed, leading down into depths of sombre fire.
“And here we dismount,” said I, and offered my aid.
She laid her hands on my shoulders; I swung her to the ground, where her sabots clicked and her silver neck-chains jingled in the silence.
I looked around. How intensely still was everything—the leaves, the water! The silent blue peaks on the horizon seemed to be watching me; the trees around me were so motionless that they also appeared to be listening with every leaf.
This quarter of the world was too noiseless for me; there might have been a bird-note, a breeze to whisper, a minute stirring of unseen life—but there was not.
“Is that house empty?” I asked, turning brusquely on my companion.33
“The Countess de Vassart will give you your answer,” she replied.
“Kindly announce me, then,” I said, grimly, and together we mounted the broad flight of steps to the esplanade, above which rose the gray mansion of La Trappe.
34IIILA TRAPPE
There was a small company of people gathered at a table which stood in the cool shadows of the château’s eastern wing. Towards these people my companion directed her steps; I saw her bend close to the ear of a young girl who had already turned to look at me. At the same instant a heavily built, handsome man pushed back his chair and stood up, regarding me steadily through his spectacles, one hand grasping the back of the seat from which he had risen.
Presently the young girl to whom my companion of the morning had whispered rose gracefully and came toward me.
Slender, yet with that charming outline of body which youth wears as a promise, she moved across the terrace in her flowing robe of crape, and welcomed me with a gesture and a pleasant word, which I scarcely heard, so stupidly I stood, silenced by the absolute loveliness of the girl. Did I say loveliness? No, not that, but something newer, something far more fresh, far sweeter, that made mere physical beauty a thing less vital than the colorless shadow of a crystal.
She was not only beautiful, she was Beauty itself, incarnate, alive, soul and body. Later I noticed that she was badly sun-burned under the eyes, that her delicate nose was adorned by an adorable freckle, and that35she had red hair.... Could this be the Countess de Vassart? What a change!
I stepped forward to meet her, and took off my forage-cap.
“Is it true, monsieur, that you have come to arrest us?” she asked, in a low voice.
“Yes, madame,” I replied, already knowing that she was the Countess. She hesitated; then:
“Will you tell me your name? I am Madame de Vassart.”
Cap in hand I followed her to the table, where the company had already risen. The young Countess presented me with undisturbed simplicity; I bowed to my turkey-girl, who proved, after all, to be the actress from the Odéon, Sylvia Elven; then I solemnly shook hands with Dr. Leo Delmont, Professor Claude Tavernier, and Monsieur Bazard, ex-instructor at the Fontainebleau Artillery School, whom I immediately recognized as the snipe-faced notary I had met on the road.
“Well, sir,” exclaimed Dr. Delmont, in his deep, hearty voice, “if this peaceful little community is come under your government’s suspicion, I can only say, Heaven help France!”
“Is not that what we all say in these times, doctor?” I asked.
“When I say ‘Heaven help France!’ I do not mean Vive l’Empereur!’” retorted the big doctor, dryly.
Professor Tavernier, a little, gray-headed savant with used-up eyes, asked me mildly if he might know why they all were to be expelled from France. I did not reply.
“Is thought no longer free in France?” asked Dr. Delmont, in his heavy voice.
“Thought is free in France,” I replied, “but its expression is sometimes inadvisable, doctor.”36
“And the Emperor is to be the judge of when it is advisable to express one’s thoughts?” inquired Professor Tavernier.
“The Emperor,” I said, “is generous, broad-minded, and wonderfully tolerant. Only those whose attitude incites to disorder are held in check.”
“According to the holy Code Napoléon,” observed Professor Tavernier, with a shrug.
“The code kills the body, Napoleon the soul,” said Dr. Delmont, gravely.
“It was otherwise with Victor Noir,” suggested Mademoiselle Elven.
“Yes,” added Delmont, “he asked for justice and they gave him ... Pierre!”
“I think we are becoming discourteous to our guest, gentlemen,” said the young Countess, gently.
I bowed to her. After a moment I said: “Doctor, if you do truly believe in that universal brotherhood which apparently even tolerates within its boundaries a poor devil of the Imperial Police, if your creed really means peace and not violence, suffering and patience, not provocation and revolt, demonstrate to the government by the example of your submission to its decrees that the theories you entertain are not the chimeras of generous but unbalanced minds.”
“We never had the faintest idea of resisting,” said Monsieur Bazard, the notary, otherwise the Chevalier de Grey, a lank, hollow-eyed young fellow, already marked heavily with the ravages of pulmonary disease. But the fierce glitter in his eyes gave the lie to his words.
“Yesterday, Madame la Comtesse,” I said, turning to the Countess de Vassart, “the Emperor could easily afford to regard with equanimity the movement in which you are associated. To-day that is no longer possible.”
The young Countess gave me a bewildered look.37
“Is it true,” she asked, “that the Emperor does not know we have severed all connection with the Internationale?”
“If that is so,” said I, “why does Monsieur Bazard return across the fields to warn you of my coming? And why do you harbor John Buckhurst at La Trappe? Do you not know he is wanted by the police?”
“But we do not know why,” said Dr. Delmont, bending forward and pouring himself a glass of red wine. This he drank slowly, eating a bit of black bread with it.
“Monsieur Scarlett,” said Mademoiselle Elven, suddenly, “why does the government want John Buckhurst?”
“That, mademoiselle, is the affair of the government and of John Buckhurst,” I said.
“Pardon,” interrupted Delmont, heavily, “it is the affair of every honest man and woman—where a Bonaparte is concerned.”
“I do not understand you, doctor,” I said.
“Then I will put it brutally,” he replied. “We free people fear a family a prince of which is a common murderer.”
I did not answer; the world has long since judged the slayer of Victor Noir.
After a troubled silence the Countess asked me if I would not share their repast, and I thanked her and took some bread and grapes and a glass of red wine.
The sun had stolen into the corner where we had been sitting, and the Countess suggested that we move down to the lawn under the trees; so Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier lifted the table and bore it down the terrace steps, while I carried the chairs to the lawn.
It made me uncomfortable to play the rôle I was playing among these misguided but harmless people; that I showed it in my face is certain, for the Countess38looked up at me and said, smilingly: “You must not look at us so sorrowfully, Monsieur Scarlett. It is we who pity you.”
And I replied, “Madame, you are generous,” and took my place among them and ate and drank with them in silence, listening to the breeze in the elms.
Mademoiselle Elven, in her peasant’s dress, rested her pretty arm across her chair and sighed.
“It is all very well not to resist violence,” she said, “but it seems to me that the world is going to run over us some day. Is there any harm in stepping out of the way, Dr. Delmont?”
The Countess laughed outright.
“Not at all,” she said. “But we must not attempt to box the world’s ears as we run. Must we, doctor?”
Turning her lovely, sun-burned face to me, she continued: “Is it not charming here? The quiet is absolute. It is always still. We are absurdly contented here; we have no servants, you see, and we all plough and harrow and sow and reap—not many acres, because we need little. It is one kind of life, quite harmless and passionless, monsieur. I have been raking hay this morning. It is so strange that the Emperor should be troubled by the silence of these quiet fields—”
The distress in her eyes lasted only a moment; she turned and looked out across the green meadows, smiling to herself.
“At first when I came here from Paris,” she said, “I was at a loss to know what to do with all this land. I owe much happiness to Dr. Delmont, who suggested that the estate, except what we needed, might be loaned free to the people around us. It was an admirable thought; we have no longer any poor among us—”
She stopped short and gave me a quick glance. “Please understand me, Monsieur Scarlett. I make39no merit of giving what I cannot use. That would be absurd.”
“The world knows, madame, that you have given all you have,” I said.
“Then why is your miserable government sending her into exile?” broke in Monsieur Bazard, harshly.
“I will tell you,” I said, surprised at his tone and manner. “The colony at La Trappe is the head and centre of a party which abhors war, which refuses resistance, which aims, peacefully perhaps, at political and social annihilation. In time of peace this colony is not a menace; in time of war it is worse than a menace, monsieur.”
I turned to Dr. Delmont.
“With the German armies massing behind the forest borders yonder, it is unsafe for the government to leave you here at La Trappe, doctor. You aretoo neutral.”
“You mean that the government fears treason?” demanded the doctor, growing red.
“Yes,” I said, “if you insist.”
The Countess had turned to me in amazement.
“Treason!” she repeated, in an unsteady voice. “Is it treason for a small community to live quietly here in the Alsatian hills, harming nobody, asking nothing save freedom of thought? Is it treason for a woman of the world to renounce the world? Is it treason for her to live an unostentatious life and use her fortune to aid others to live? Treason! Monsieur, the word has an ugly ring to me. I am a soldier’s daughter!”
There was something touchingly illogical in the last words—this young apostle of peace naïvely displaying her credentials as though the mere word “soldier” covered everything.
“Your government insults us all,” said Bazard, between his teeth.40
Mademoiselle Elven leaned forward, her blue eyes shining angrily.
“Because I have learned that the boundaries of nations are not the frontiers of human hearts, am I a traitor? Because I know no country but the world, no speech but the universal speech that one reads in a brother’s eyes, because I know no barriers, no boundaries, no limits to human brotherhood, am I a traitor?”
She made an exquisite gesture with half-open arms; all the poetry of the Théâtre Français was in it.
“Look at me! I had all that life could give, save freedom, and that I have now—freedom in thought, in speech, in action, freedom to love as friends love, freedom to love as lovers love. Ah, more! freedom from caste, from hate and envy and all suspicion, freedom to give, freedom to receive, freedom in life and in death! Am I a traitor? What do I betray? Shame on your Emperor!”
The young Countess, too, had risen in her earnestness and had laid one slender, sun-tanned hand upon the table.
“War?” she said. “What is this war to us? The Emperor? What is he to us? We who have set a watch on the world’s outer ramparts, guarding the white banner of universal brotherhood! What is this war to us!”
“Are you not a native of France?” I asked, bluntly.
“I am a native of the world, monsieur.”
“Do you mean to say that you care nothing for your own birthland?” I demanded, sharply.
“I love the world—all of it—every inch—and if France is part of the world, so is this Prussia that we are teaching our poor peasants to hate.”
“Madame,” said I, “the women of France to-day think differently. Our Creator did not make love of country a trite virtue, but a passion, and set it in41our bodies along with our other passions. If in you it is absent, that concerns pathology, not the police!”
I did not mean to wound her—I was intensely in earnest; I wanted her to show just a single glimmer of sympathy for her own country. It seemed as though I could not endure to look at such a woman and know that the primal passion, born with those who had at least wept for their natal Eden, was meaningless to her.
She had turned a trifle pale; now she sank back into her chair, looking at me with those troubled gray eyes in which Heaven itself had set truth and loyalty.
I said: “I do not believe that you care nothing for France. Train and curb and crush your own heart as you will, you cannot drive out that splendid earth-born humanity which is part of us—else we had all been born in heaven!”
“Come,” said Bazard, in a rage-choked voice, “let it end here, Monsieur Scarlett. If the government sends you here as a spy and an official, pray remember that you are not also sent as a missionary.”
My ears began to burn. “That is true,” I said, looking at the Countess, whose face had become expressionless. “I ask your pardon for what I have said and ... for what I am about to do.”
There was a silence. Then, in a low voice, I placed them under formal arrest, one by one, touching each lightly on the shoulder as prescribed by the code. And when I came to the Countess, she rose, without embarrassment. I moved my lips and stretched out my arm, barely touching her. I heard Bazard draw a deep breath. She was my prisoner.
“I must ask you to prepare for a journey,” I said. “You have your own horses, of course?”
Without answering, Dr. Delmont walked away towards the stables; Professor Tavernier followed him, head bent.42
“We shall want very little,” said the Countess, calmly, to Mademoiselle Elven. “Will you pack up what we need? And you, Monsieur Bazard, will you be good enough to go to Trois-Feuilles and hire old Brauer’s carriage?” Turning to me she said: “I must ask for a little delay; I have no longer a carriage of my own. We keep two horses to plough and draw grain; they can be harnessed to the farm-wagon for our effects.”
Monsieur Bazard’s hectic visage flushed, he gave me a crazy stare, and, for a moment, I fancied there was murder in his bright eyes. Doubtless, however, devotion to his creed of non-resistance conquered the impulse, and he walked quickly away across the meadows, his skeleton hands clinched under his loose sleeves.
Mademoiselle Elven also departed tip-tap! up the terrace in her coquettish wooden shoes, leaving me alone with the Countess under the trees.
“Madame,” said I, “before I affix the government seals to the doors of your house I must ask you to conduct me to the roof of the east wing.”
She bent her head in acquiescence; I followed her up the terrace into a stone hall where the dark Flemish pictures stared back at me and my spurred heels jingled in the silence. Up, up, and still up, winding around a Gothic spiral, then through a passage under the battlements and out across the slates, with wind and setting sun in my face and the sighing tree-tops far below.
Without glancing at me the Countess walked to the edge of the leads and looked down along the sheer declivity of the stone facade. Slender, exquisite, she stood there, a lonely shape against the sky, and I saw the sun glowing on her burnished red-gold hair, and her sun-burned hands, half unclosed, hanging at her side.43
South, north, and west the mountains towered, purple as the bloom on October grapes; the white arm of the semaphore on the Pigeonnier was tinted with rose color; green velvet clothed the world, under a silver veil.
In the north a spark of white fire began to flicker on the crest of Mount Tonnerre. It was the mirror of a heliograph flashing out across leagues of gray-green hills to the rocky pulpit of the Pigeonnier.
I unslung my glasses and levelled them. The shining arm of the semaphore fell to a horizontal position and remained rigid; down came the signal flags, up went a red globe and two cones. Another string of flags blossomed along the bellying halliards; the white star flashed twice on Mount Tonnerre and went out.
Instantly I drew a flag from my pouch, tied it to the point of my sabre, and stepped out along the projecting snout of a gargoyle. Below, under my feet, the tree-tops rustled in the wind.
I had been flagging the Pigeonnier vigorously for ten minutes without result, when suddenly a dark dot appeared on the tower beneath the semaphore, then another. My glasses brought out two officers, one with a flag; and, still watching them through the binoculars, I signalled slowly, using my free hand: “This is La Trappe. Telegraph to Morsbronn that the inspector of Imperial Police requires a peloton of mounted gendarmes at once.”
Then I sat down on the sun-warmed slates and waited, amusing myself by watching the ever-changing display of signal flags on the distant observatory.
It may have been half a minute before I saw two officers advance to the railing of the tower and signal: “Attention, La Trappe!”
Pencil and pad on my knee, I managed to use my field-glasses and jot down the message:44
“Peloton of mounted gendarmes goes to you as soon as possible. Repeat.”
I repeated, then raised my glasses. Another message came by flag: “Attention, La Trappe. Uhlans reported near the village of Trois-Feuilles; have you seen them?”
Prussian Uhlans! Here in the rear of our entire army! Nonsense! And I signalled a vigorous:
“No. Have you?”
To which came the disturbing reply: “Be on your guard. We are ordered to display the semaphore at danger. Report is credited at headquarters. Repeat.”
I repeated. Raising my glasses again, I could plainly see a young officer, an unlighted cigar between his teeth, jotting down our correspondence, while the other officer who had flagged me furled up his flags and laid them aside, yawning and stretching himself to his full height.
So distinctly did my powerful binoculars bring the station into range that I could even see the younger officer light a match, which the wind extinguished, light another, and presently blow a tiny cloud of smoke from his cigar.
The Countess de Vassart had come up to where I was standing on the gargoyle, balanced over the gulf below. Very cautiously I began to step backward, for there was not room to turn around.
“Would you care to look at the Pigeonnier, madame?” I asked, glancing at her over my shoulder.
“I beg you will be careful,” she said. “It is a useless risk to stand out there.”
I had never known the dread of great heights which many people feel, and I laughed and stepped backward, expecting to land on the parapet behind me. But the point of my scabbard struck against the battlements,45forcing me outward; I stumbled, staggered, and swayed a moment, striving desperately to recover my balance; I felt my gloved fingers slipping along the smooth face of the parapet, my knees gave way with horror; then my fingers clutched something—an arm—and I swung back, slap against the parapet, hanging to that arm with all my weight. A terrible effort and I planted my boots on the leads and looked up with sick eyes into the eyes of the Countess.
“Can you stand it?” I groaned, clutching her arm with my other hand.
“Yes—don’t be afraid,” she said, calmly. “Draw me toward you; I cannot draw you over.”
“Press your knees against the battlements,” I gasped.
She bent one knee and wedged it into a niche.
“Don’t be afraid; you are not hurting me,” she said, with a ghastly smile.
I raised one hand and caught her shoulder, then, drawn forward, I seized the parapet in both arms, and vaulted to the slate roof.
A fog seemed to blot my eyes; I shook from hair to heel and laid my head against the solid stone, while the blank, throbbing seconds past. The Countess stood there, shocked and breathless. I saw her sleeve in rags, and the snowy skin all bruised beneath.
I tried to thank her; we both were badly shaken, and I do not know that she even heard me. Her burnished hair had sagged to her white neck; she twisted it up with unsteady fingers and turned away. I followed slowly, back through the dim galleries, and presently she seemed to remember my presence and waited for me as I felt my way along the passage.
“Every little shadow is a yawning gulf,” I said. “My nerve is gone, madame. The banging of my own sabre scares me.”46
I strove to speak lightly, but my voice trembled, and so did hers when she said: “High places always terrify me; something below seems to draw me. Did you ever have that dreadful impulse to sway forward into a precipice?”
There was a subtle change in her voice and manner, something almost friendly in her gray eyes as she looked curiously at me when we came into the half-light of an inner gallery.
What irony lurks in blind chance that I should owe this woman my life—this woman whose home I had come to confiscate, whose friends I had arrested, who herself was now my prisoner, destined to the shame of exile!
Perhaps she divined my thoughts—I do not know—but she turned her troubled eyes to the arched window, where a painted saint imbedded in golden glass knelt and beat his breast with two heavy stones.
“Madame,” I said, slowly, “your courage and your goodness to me have made my task a heavy one. Can I lighten it for you in any manner?”
She turned towards me, almost timidly. “Could I go to Morsbronn before—before I cross the frontier? I have a house there; there are a few things I would like to take—”
She stopped short, seeing, doubtless, the pain of refusal in my face. “But, after all, it does not matter. I suppose your orders are formal?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Then it is a matter of honor?”
“A soldier is always on his honor; a soldier’s daughter will understand that.”
“I understand,” she said.
After a moment she smiled and moved forward, saying:
“How the world tosses us—flinging strangers into47each other’s arms, parting brothers, leading enemies across each other’s paths! One has a glimpse of kindly eyes—and never meets them again. Often and often I have seen a good face in the lamp-lit street that I could call out to, ‘Be friends with me!’ Then it is gone—and I am gone—Oh, it is curiously sad, Monsieur Scarlett!”
“Does your creed teach you to care for everybody, madame?”
“Yes—I try to. Some attract me so strongly—some I pity so. I think that if people only knew that there was no such thing as a stranger in the world, the world might be a paradise in time.”
“It might be, some day, if all the world were as good as you, madame.”
“Oh, I am only a perplexed woman,” she said, laughing. “I do so long for the freedom of all the world, absolute individual liberty and no law but that best of all laws—the law of the unselfish.”
We had stopped, by a mutual impulse, at the head of the stone stairway.
“Why do you shelter such a man as John Buckhurst?” I asked, abruptly.
She raised her eyes to me with perfect composure.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I have come here from Paris to arrest him.”
She bent her head thoughtfully and laid the tips of her fingers on the sculptured balustrade.
“To me,” she said, “there’s no such thing as a political crime.”
“It is not for a political crime that we want John Buckhurst,” I said, watching her. “It is for a civil outrage.”
Her face was like marble; her hands tightened on the fretted carving.48
“What crime is he charged with?” she asked, without moving.
“He is charged with being a common thief,” I said.
Now there was color enough in her face, and to spare, for the blood-stained neck and cheek, and even the bare shoulder under the torn crape burned pink.
“It is brutal to make such a charge!” she said. “It is shameful!—” her voice quivered. “It is not true! Monsieur, give me your word of honor that the government means what it says and nothing more!”
“Madame,” I said, “I give my word of honor that no political crime is charged against that man.”
“Will you pledge me your honor that if he answers satisfactorily to that false charge of theft, the government will let him go free?”
“I will take it upon myself to do so,” said I. “But what in Heaven’s name is this man to you, madame? He is a militant anarchist, whose creed is not yours, whose propaganda teaches merciless violence, whose programme is terror. He is well known in the faubourgs; Belleville is his, and in the Château Rouge he has pointed across the river to the rich quarters, calling it the promised land! Yet here, at La Trappe, where your creed is peace and non-resistance, he is welcomed and harbored, he is deferred to, he is made executive head of a free commune which he has turned into a despotism ... for his own ends!”
She was gazing at me with dilated eyes, hands holding tight to the balustrade.
“Did you not know that?” I asked, astonished.
“No,” she said.
“You are not aware that John Buckhurst is the soul and centre of the Belleville Reds?”
“It is—it is false!” she stammered.
“No, madame, it is true. He wears a smug mask here; he has deceived you all.”49
She stood there, breathing rapidly, her head high.
“John Buckhurst will answer for himself,” she said, steadily.
“When, madame?”
For answer she stepped across the hall and laid one hand against the blank stone wall. Then, reaching upward, she drew from between the ponderous blocks little strips of steel, colored like mortar, dropping them to the stone floor, where they rang out. When she had flung away the last one, she stepped back and set her frail shoulder to the wall; instantly a mass of stone swung silently on an unseen pivot, a yellow light streamed out, and there was a tiny chamber, illuminated by a lamp, and a man just rising from his chair.