50IVPRISONERS
Instantly I recognized in him the insolent priest who had confronted me on my way to La Trappe that morning. I knew him, although now he was wearing neither robe nor shovel-hat, nor those square shoes too large to buckle closely over his flat insteps.
And he knew me.
He appeared admirably cool and composed, glancing at the Countess for an instant with an interrogative expression; then he acknowledged my presence by bowing almost humorously.
“This is Monsieur Scarlett, of the Imperial Military Police,” said the Countess, in a clear voice, ending with that slightly rising inflection which demands an answer.
“Mr. Buckhurst,” I said, “I am an Inspector of Military Police, and I cannot begin to tell you what a pleasure this meeting is to me.”
“I have no doubt of that, monsieur,” said Buckhurst, in his smooth, almost caressing tones. “It, however, inconveniences me a great deal to cross the frontier to-day, even in your company, otherwise I should have surrendered with my confrères.”
“But there is no question ofyourcrossing the frontier, Mr. Buckhurst,” I said.
His colorless eyes sought mine, then dropped. They were almost stone white in the lamp-light—white as his delicately chiselled face and hands.51
“Are we not to be exiled?” he asked.
“Youare not,” I said.
“Am I not under arrest?”
I stepped forward and placed him formally under arrest, touching him slightly on the shoulder. He did not move a muscle, yet, beneath the thin cloth of his coat I could divine a frame of iron.
“Your creed is one of non-resistance to violence,” I said—“is it not?”
“Yes,” he replied. I saw that gray ring around the pale pupil of his eyes contracting, little by little.
“You have not asked me why I arrest you,” I suggested, “and, monsieur, I must ask you to step back from that table—quick!—don’t move!—not one finger!”
For a second he looked into the barrel of my pistol with concentrated composure, then glanced at the table-drawer which he had jerked open. A revolver lay shining among the litter of glass tubes and papers in the drawer.
The Countess, too, saw the revolver and turned an astonished face to my prisoner.
“Who brought you here?” asked Buckhurst, quietly of me.
“I did,” said the Countess, her voice almost breaking. “Tell this man and his government that you are ready to face every charge against your honor! There is a dreadful mistake; they—they think you are—”
“A thief,” I interposed, with a smile. “The government only asks you to prove that you are not.”
Slowly Buckhurst turned his eyes on the Countess; the faintest glimmer of white teeth showed for an instant between the gray lines that were his lips.
“Soyoubrought this man here?” he said. “Oh, I am glad to know it.”
“Then you cannot be that same John Buckhurst52who stands in the tribune of the Château Rouge and promises all Paris to his chosen people,” I remarked, smiling.
“No,” he said, slowly, “I cannot be that man, nor can I—”
“Stop! Stand back from that table!” I cried.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, coolly.
“Madame,” said I, without taking my eyes from him, “in a community dedicated to peace, a revolver is an anachronism. So I think—if you move I will shoot you, Mr. Buckhurst!—so I think I had better take it, table-drawer and all—”
“Stop!” said Buckhurst.
“Oh no, I can’t stop now,” said I, cheerfully, “and if you attempt to upset that lamp you will make a sad mistake. Now walk to the door! Turn your back! Go slowly!—halt!”
With the table-drawer under one arm and my pistol-hand swinging, I followed Buckhurst out into the hall.
Daylight dazzled me; it must have affected Buckhurst, too, for he reached out to the stone balustrade and guided himself down the steps, five paces in front of me.
Under the trees on the lawn, beside the driveway, I saw Dr. Delmont standing, big, bushy head bent thoughtfully, hands clasped behind his back.
Near him, Tavernier and Bazard were lifting a few boxes into a farm-wagon. The carriage from Trois-Feuilles was also there, a stumpy Alsatian peasant on the box. But there were yet no signs of the escort of gendarmes which had been promised me.
As Buckhurst appeared, walking all alone ahead of me, Dr. Delmont looked up with a bitter laugh. “So they found you, too? Well, Buckhurst, this is too bad. They might have given you one more day on your experiments.”53
“What experiments?” I asked, glancing at the bottles and retorts in the table-drawer.
“Nitrogen for exhausted soil,” said the Countess, quietly.
I set the table-drawer on the grass, rested my pistol on my hip, and looked around at my prisoners, who now were looking intently at me.
“Gentlemen,” said I, “let me warn you not to claim comradeship with Mr. Buckhurst. And I will show you one reason why.”
I picked up from the table-drawer a little stick about five inches long and held it up.
“What is that, doctor? You don’t know? Oh, you think it might be some sample of fertilizer containing concentrated nitrogen? You are mistaken, it is not nitrogen, but nitro-glycerine.”
Buckhurst’s face changed slightly.
“Is it not, Mr. Buckhurst?” I asked.
He was silent.
“Would you permit me to throw this bit of stuff at your feet?” And I made a gesture.
The superb nerve of the man was something to remember. He did not move, but over his face there crept a dreadful pallor, which even the others noticed, and they shrank away from him, shocked and amazed.
“Here, gentlemen,” I continued, “is a box with a German label—‘Oberlohe, Hanover.’ The silicious earth with which nitro-glycerine is mixed to make dynamite comes from Oberlohe, in Hanover.”
I laid my pistol on the table, struck a match, and deliberately lighted my stick of dynamite. It burned quietly with a brilliant flame, and I laid it on the grass and let it burn out like a lump of Greek fire.
“Messieurs,” I said, cocking and uncocking my pistol, “it is not because this man is a dangerous, political criminal and a maker of explosives that the54government has sent me here to arrest him ... or kill him. It is because he is a common thief,... a thief who steals crucifixes,... like this one—”
I brushed aside a pile of papers in the drawer and drew out a big gold crucifix, marvellously chiselled from a lump of the solid metal.... “A thief,” I continued, “who strips the diamonds from crucifixes,... as this has been stripped,... and who sells a single stone to a Jew in Strasbourg, named Fishel Cohen,... now in prison to confront our friend Buckhurst.”
In the dead silence I heard Dr. Delmont’s heavy breathing. Tavernier gave a dry sob and covered his face with his thin hands. The young Countess stood motionless, frightfully white, staring at Buckhurst, who had folded his arms.
Sylvia Elven touched her, but the Countess shook her off and walked straight to Buckhurst.
“Look at me,” she said. “I have promised you my friendship, my faith and trust and support. And now I say to you, I believe in you. Tell them where that crucifix came from.”
Buckhurst looked at me, long enough to see that the end of his rope had come. Then he slowly turned his deadly eyes on the girl before him.
Scarlet to the roots of her hair, she stood there, utterly stunned. The white edges of Buckhurst’s teeth began to show again; for an instant I thought he meant to strike her. Then the sudden double beat of horses’ hoofs broke out along the avenue below, and, through the red sunset I saw a dozen horsemen come scampering up the drive toward us.
“They’ve sent me lancers instead of gendarmes for your escort,” I remarked to Dr. Delmont; at the same moment I stepped out into the driveway to signal the riders, raising my hand.55
Instantly a pistol flashed—then another and another, and a dozen harsh voices shouted: “Hourra! Hourra! Preussen!”
“Mille tonnerre!” roared Delmont; “the Prussians are here!”
“Look out! Stand back there! Get the women back!” I cried, as an Uhlan wheeled his horse straight through a bed of geraniums and fired his horse-pistol at me.
Delmont dragged the young Countess to the shelter of an elm; Sylvia Elven and Tavernier followed; Buckhurst ran to the carriage and leaped in.
“No resistance!” bellowed Delmont, as Bazard snatched up the pistol I had taken from Buckhurst. But the invalid had already fired at a horseman, and had gone down under the merciless hoofs with a lance through his face.
My first impulse was to shoot Buckhurst, and I started for him.
Then, in front of me, a horse galloped into the table and fell with a crash, hurling his rider at my feet. I can see him yet sprawling there on the lawn, a lank, red-faced fellow, his helmet smashed in, and his spurred boots sticking fast in the sod.
Helter-skelter through the trees came the rest of the Uhlans, shouting their hoarse “Hourra! Hourra! Preussen!”—white-and-black pennons streaming from their lance-heads, pistols flashing in the early dusk.
I ran past Bazard’s trampled body and fired at an Uhlan who had seized the horses which were attached to the carriage where Buckhurst sat. The Uhlan’s horse reared and plunged, carrying him away at a frightful pace, and I do not know whether I hit him or not, but he dropped his pistol, and I picked it up and fired at another cavalryman who shouted and put his horse straight at me.56
Again I ran around the wagon, through a clump of syringa bushes, and up the stone steps to the terrace, and after me galloped one of those incomparable cossack riders—an Uhlan, lance in rest, setting his wiry little horse to the stone steps with a loud “Hourra!”
It was too steep a grade for the gallant horse. I flung my pistol in the animal’s face and the poor brute reared straight up and fell backward, rolling over and over with his unfortunate rider, and falling with a tremendous splash into the pool below.
“In God’s name stop that!” roared Delmont, from below. “Give up, Scarlett! They mean us no harm!”
I could see the good doctor on the lawn, waving his handkerchief frantically at me; in a group behind stood the Countess and Sylvia; Tavernier was kneeling beside Bazard’s body; two Uhlans were raising their stunned comrade from the wreck of the table; other Uhlans cantered toward the foot of the terrace above which I stood.
“Come down, hussar!” called an officer. “We respect your uniform.”
“Will you parley?” I asked, listening intently for the gallop of my promised gendarmes. If I could only gain time and save Buckhurst. He was there in the carriage; I had seen him spring into it when the Germans burst in among the trees.
“Foulez-fous fous rendre? Oui ou non?” shouted the officer, in his terrible French.
“Eh bien,... non!” I cried, and ran for the château.
I heard the Uhlans dismount and run clattering and jingling up the stone steps. As I gained the doorway they shot at me, but I only fled the faster, springing up the stairway. Here I stood, sabre in hand, ready to stop the first man.
Up the stairs rushed three Uhlans, sabres shining in the dim light from the window behind me; I laid57my forefinger flat on the blade of my sabre and shortened my arm for a thrust—then there came a blinding flash, a roar, and I was down, trying to rise, until a clinched fist struck me in the face and I fell flat on my back.
Without any emotion whatever I saw an Uhlan raise his sabre to finish me; also I saw a yellow-and-black sleeve interposed between death and myself.
“No butchery!” growled the big officer who had summoned me from the lawn. “Cursed pig, you’d sabre your own grandmother! Lift him, Sepp! You, there, Loisel!—lift him up. Is he gone?”
“He is alive, Herr Rittmeister,” said a soldier, “but his back is broken.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
“Herr Je!” muttered the Rittmeister; “an eel, and a Frenchman, and nine long lives! Here, you hussar, what’s the matter with you?”
“One of them shot me; I thought it was to be sabres,” said I, weakly.
“And why the devil wasn’t it sabres!” roared the officer, turning on his men. “One to three—and six more below! Sepp, you disgust me. Carry him out!”
I groaned as they lifted me. “Easy there!” growled the officer, “don’t pull him that way. Now, young hell-cat, set your teeth; you have eight more lives yet.”
They got me out to the terrace, and carried me to the lawn. One of the men brought a cup of water from the pool.
“Herr Rittmeister,” I said, faintly, “I had a prisoner here; he should be in the carriage. Is he?”
The officer walked briskly over to the carriage. “Nobody here but two women and a scared peasant!” he called out.58
As I lay still staring up into the sky, I heard the Rittmeister addressing Dr. Delmont in angry tones. “By every law of civilized war I ought to hang you and your friend there! Civilians who fire on troops are treated that way. But I won’t. Your foolish companion lies yonder with a lance through his mouth. He’s dead; I say nothing. For you, I have no respect. But I have for that hell-cat who did his duty. You civilians—you go to the devil!”
“Are not your prisoners sacred from insult?” asked the doctor, angrily.
“Prisoners!Myprisoners! You compliment yourself! Loisel! Send those impudent civilians into the house! I won’t look at them! They make me sick!”
The astonished doctor attempted to take his stand by me, offering his services, but the troopers hustled him and poor Tavernier off up the terrace steps.
“The two ladies in the carriage, Herr Rittmeister?” said a cavalryman, coming up at salute.
“What? Ladies? Oh yes.” Then he muttered in his mustache: “Always around—always everywhere. They can’t stay there. I want that carriage. Sepp!”
“At orders, Herr Rittmeister!”
“Carry that gentleman to the carriage. Place Schwartz and Ruppert in the wagon yonder. Get straw—you, Brauer, bring straw—and toss in those boxes, if there is room. Where’s Hofman?”
“In the pool, Herr Rittmeister.”
“Take him out,” said the officer, soberly. “Uhlans don’t abandon their dead.”
Two soldiers lifted me again and bore me away in the darkness. I was perfectly conscious.
And all the while I was listening for the gallop of my gendarmes, not that I cared very much, now that Buckhurst was gone.59
“Herr Rittmeister,” I said, as they laid me in the carriage, “ask the Countess de Vassart if she will let me say good-bye to her.”
“With pleasure,” said the officer, promptly. “Madame, here is a polite young gentleman who desires to make his adieux. Permit me, madame—he is here in the dark. Sepp! fall back! Loisel, advance ten paces! Halt!”
“Is it you, Monsieur Scarlett?” came an unsteady voice, from the darkness.
“Yes, madame. Can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you? My poor friend, I have nothing to forgive. Are you badly hurt, Monsieur Scarlett?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered.
Suddenly the chapel bell of La Trappe rang out a startling peal; the Prussian captain shouted: “Stop that bell! Shoot every civilian in the house!” But the Uhlans, who rushed up the terrace, found the great doors bolted and the lower windows screened with steel shutters.
On the battlements of the south wing a red radiance grew brighter; somebody had thrown wood into the iron basket of the ancient beacon, and set fire to it.
“That teaches me a lesson!” bawled the enraged Rittmeister, shaking his fist up at the brightening alarm signal.
He vaulted into his saddle, wheeled his horse and rode up to the peasant, Brauer, who, frightened to the verge of stupidity, sat on the carriage-box.
“Do you know the wood-road that leads to Gunstett through the foot-hills?” he demanded, controlling his fury with a strong effort.
The blank face of the peasant was answer enough; the Rittmeister glared around; his eyes fell on the Countess.
“You know this country, madame?”60
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Will you set us on our way through the Gunstett hill-road?”
“No.”
The chapel bell was clanging wildly; the beacon shot up in a whirling column of sparks and red smoke.
“Put that woman into the carriage!” bellowed the officer. “I’m cursed if I leave her to set the whole country yapping at our heels! Loisel, put her in beside the prisoner! Madame, it is useless to resist. Hark! What’s that sound of galloping?”
I listened. I heard nothing save the clamor of the chapel bell.
An Uhlan laid a heavy hand on the shoulder of the listening Countess; she tried to draw back, but he pushed her brutally into the carriage, and she stumbled and fell into the cushions beside me.
“Uhlans, into your saddles!” cried the Rittmeister, sharply. “Two men to the wagon!—a man on the box there! Here you, Jacques Bonhomme, drive carefully or I’ll hang you higher than the Strasbourg clock. Are the wounded in the straw? Sepp, take the riderless horses. Peloton, attention! Draw sabres! March! Trot!”
Fever had already begun to turn my head; the jolting of the carriage brought me to my senses at times; at times, too, I could hear the two wounded Uhlans groaning in the wagon behind me, the tramping of the cavalry ahead, the dull rattle of lance butts in the leather stirrup-boots.
If I could only have fainted, but I could not, and the agony grew so intense that I bit my lip through to choke the scream that strained my throat.
Once the carriage stopped; in the darkness I heard somebody whisper: “There go the French riders!” And I fancied I heard a far echo of hoof-strokes along61the road to La Trappe. It might have been the fancy of an intermittent delirium; it may have been my delayed gendarmes—I never knew. And the carriage presently moved on more smoothly, as though we were now on one of those even military high-roads which traverse France from Luxembourg to the sea.
Which way we were going I did not know, I did not care. Absurdly mingled with sick fancies came flashes of reason, when I could see the sky frosted with silver, and little, bluish stars peeping down. At times I recognized the mounted men around me as Prussian Uhlans, and weakly wondered by what deviltry they had got into France, and what malignant spell they cast over the land that the very stones did not rise up and smite them from their yellow-and-black saddles.
Once—it was, I think, very near daybreak—I came out of a dream in which I was swimming through oceans of water, drinking as I swam. The carriage had stopped; I could not see the lancers, but presently I heard them all talking in loud, angry voices. There appeared to be some houses near by; I heard a dog barking, a great outcry of pigs and feathered fowls, the noise of a scuffle, a trampling of heavy boots, a shot!
Then the terrible voice of the Rittmeister: “Hang that man to his barn gate! Pig of an assassin, I’ll teach you to murder German soldiers!”
A woman began to scream without ceasing.
“Burn that house!” bellowed the Rittmeister.
Through the prolonged screaming I heard the crash of window-glass; presently a dull red light grew out of the gloom, brighter and brighter. The screaming never ceased.
“Uhlans! Mount!” came the steady voice of the Rittmeister; the carriage started. Almost at the word the darkness turned to flame; against the raging62furnace of a house on fire I saw the figure of a man, inky black, hanging from the high cross-bar of the cow-yard gate, and past him filed the shadowy horsemen, lances slanting backward from their stirrups.
The last I remember was seeing the dead man’s naked feet—for they hanged him in his night-shirt—and the last I heard was that awful screaming from the red shadows that flickered across the fields of uncut wheat.
For presently my madness began again, and again I was bathed to the mouth in cold, sweet waters, and I drank as I swam lazily in the sunshine.
My next lucid interval came from pain almost unendurable. We were fording a river in bright starlight; the carriage bumped across the stones, water washed and slopped over the carriage floor. To right and left, Prussian lancers were riding, and I saw the water boiling under their horses and their long lances aslant the stars.
But there were more horsemen now, scores and scores of them, trampling through the shallow river. And beyond I could see a line of cannon, wallowing through the water, shadowy artillerymen clinging to forge and caisson, mounted men astride straining teams, tall officers on either flank, sitting their horses motionless in mid-stream.
The carriage stopped.
“Are you suffering?” came a low voice, close to my ear.
“Madame, could I have a little of that water?” I muttered.
Very gently she laid me back. I was entirely without power to move below my waist, or to support my body.
She filled my cap with river water and held it while I drank. After I had my fill she bathed my face, passing her wet hands through my hair and over my eyes. The carriage moved on.
“TO RIGHT AND LEFT, PRUSSIAN LANCERS WERE RIDING”
“TO RIGHT AND LEFT, PRUSSIAN LANCERS WERE RIDING”
63
After a while she whispered.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, madame.”
“See the dawn—how red it is on the hills! There are vineyards there on the heights,... and a castle,... and soldiers moving out across the river meadows.”
The rising sun was shining in my eyes as we came to a halt before a small stone bridge over which a column of cavalry was passing—Prussian hussars, by their crimson dolmans and little, flat busbies.
Our Uhlan escort grouped themselves about us to watch the hussars defile at a trot, and I saw the Rittmeister rigidly saluting their standards as they bobbed past above a thicket of sabres.
“What are these Uhlans doing?” broke in a nasal voice behind us; an officer, followed by two orderlies and a trumpeter, came galloping up through the mud.
“Who’s that—a dead Frenchman?” demanded the officer, leaning over the edge of the carriage to give me a near-sighted stare. Then he saw the Countess, stared at her, and touched the golden peak of his helmet.
“At your service, madame,” he said. “Is this officer dead?”
“Dying, general,” said the Rittmeister, at salute.
“Then he will not require these men. Herr Rittmeister, I take your Uhlans for my escort. Madame, you have my sympathy; can I be of service?”
He spoke perfect French. The Countess looked up at him in a bewildered way. “You cannot mean to abandon this dying man here?” she asked.
There was a silence, broken brusquely by the Rittmeister. “That Frenchman did his duty!”
“Did he?” said the general, staring at the Countess.64
“Very well; I want that carriage, but I won’t take it. Give the driver a white flag, and have him drive into the French lines. Herr Rittmeister, give your orders! Madame, your most devoted!” And he wheeled his beautiful horse and trotted off down the road, while the Rittmeister hastily tied a handkerchief to a stick and tossed it up to the speechless peasant on the box.
“Morsbronn is the nearest French post!” he said, in French. Then he bent from his horse and looked down at me.
“You did your duty!” he snapped, and, barely saluting the Countess, touched spurs to his mount and disappeared, followed at a gallop by his mud-splashed Uhlans.
65VTHE IMMORTALS
When I became conscious again I was lying on a table. Two men were leaning over me; a third came up, holding a basin. There was an odor of carbolic in the air.
The man with the basin made a horrid grimace when he caught my eye; his face was a curious golden yellow, his eyes jet black, and at first I took him for a fever phantom.
Then my bewildered eyes fastened on his scarlet fez, pulled down over his left ear, the sky-blue Zouave jacket, with its bright-yellow arabesques, the canvas breeches, leggings laced close over the thin shins and ankles of an Arab. And I knew him for a soldier of African riflemen, one of those brave children of the desert whom we called “Turcos,” and whose faith in the greatness of France has never faltered since the first blue battalion of Africa was formed under the eagles of the First Empire.
“Hallo, Mustapha!” I said, faintly; “what are they doing to me now?”
The Turco’s golden-bronze visage relaxed; he saluted me.
“Macache sabir,” he said; “they picked a bullet from your spine, my inspector.”
An officer in the uniform of a staff-surgeon came around the table where I was lying.66
“Bon!” he exclaimed, eying me sharply through his gold-rimmed glasses. “Can you feel your hind-legs now, young man?”
I could feel them all too intensely, and I said so.
The surgeon began to turn down his shirt-sleeves and button his cuffs, saying, “You’re lucky to have a pain in your legs.” Turning to the Turco, he added, “Lift him!” And the giant rifleman picked me up and laid me in a long chair by the window.
“Your case is one of those amusing cases,” continued the surgeon, buckling on his sword and revolver; “very amusing, I assure you. As for the bullet, I could have turned it out with a straw, only it rested thereexactlywhere it stopped the use of those long legs of yours!—a fine example of temporary reflex paralysis, and no hemorrhage to speak of—nothing to swear about, young man. By-the-way, you ought to go to bed for a few days.”
He clasped his short baldric over his smartly buttoned tunic. The room was shaking with the discharges of cannon.
“A millimetre farther and that bullet would have cracked your spine. Remember that and keep off your feet. Ouf! The cannon are tuning up!” as a terrible discharge shattered the glass in the window-panes beside me.
“Where am I, doctor?” I asked.
“Parbleu, in Morsbronn! Can’t you hear the orchestra, zim-bam-zim! The Prussians are playing their Wagner music for us. Here, swallow this. How do you feel now?”
“Sleepy. Did you say a day or two, doctor?”
“I said a week or two—perhaps longer. I’ll look in this evening if I’m not up to my chin in amputations. Take these every hour if in pain. Go to sleep, my son.”
With a paternal tap on my head, he drew on his67scarlet, gold-banded cap, tightened the check strap, and walked out of the room. Down-stairs I heard him cursing because his horse had been shot. I never saw him again.
Dozing feverishly, hearing the cannon through troubled slumber, I awoke toward noon quite free from any considerable pain, but thirsty and restless, and numbed to the hips. Alarmed, I strove to move my feet, and succeeded. Then, freed from the haunting terror of paralysis, I fell to pinching my legs with satisfaction, my eyes roving about in search of water.
The room where I lay was in disorder; it appeared to be completely furnished with well-made old pieces, long out of date, but not old enough to be desirable. Chairs, sofas, tables were all fashioned in that poor design which marked the early period of the Consulate; the mirror was a fine sheet of glass imbedded in Pompeian and Egyptian designs; the clock, which had stopped, was a meaningless lump of gilt and marble, supported on gilt sphinxes. Over the bed hung a tarnished canopy broidered with a coronet, which, from the strawberry leaves and the pearls raised above them, I took to be the coronet of a count of English origin.
The room appeared to be very old, and I knew the house must have stood for centuries somewhere along the single street of Morsbronn, though I could not remember seeing any building in the village which, judging from the exterior, seemed likely to contain such a room as this.
The nearer and heavier cannon-shots had ceased, but the window-sashes hummed with the steady thunder of a battle going on somewhere among the mountains. Knowing the Alsatian frontier fairly well, I understood that a battle among the mountains must mean that our First Corps had been attacked, and that we were on the defensive on French soil.68
The booming of the guns was unbroken, as steady and sustained as the eternal roar of a cataract. At moments I believed that I could distinguish the staccato crashes of platoon firing, but could not be certain in the swelling din.
As I lay there on my long, cushioned chair, burning with that insatiable thirst which, to thoroughly appreciate, one must be wounded, the door opened and a Turco soldier came into the room and advanced toward me on tip-toe.
He wore full uniform, was fully equipped, crimson chechia, snowy gaiters, and terrible sabre-bayonet.
I beckoned him, and the tall, bronzed fellow came up, smiling, showing his snowy, pointed teeth under a crisp beard.
“Water, Mustapha,” I motioned with stiffened lips, and the good fellow unslung his blue water-bottle and set it to my burning mouth.
“Merci, mon brave!” I said. “May you dwell in Paradise with Ali, the fourth Caliph, the Lion of God!”
The Turco stared, muttered the Tekbir in a low voice, bent and kissed my hands.
“Were you once an officer of our African battalions?” he asked, in the Arab tongue.
“Sous-officier of spahi cavalry,” I said, smiling. “And you are a Kabyle mountaineer from Constantine, I see.”
“It is true as I recite the fatha,” cried the great fellow, beaming on me. “We Kabyles love our officers and bear witness to the unity of God, too. I am a marabout, my inspector, Third Turcos, and I am anxious to have a Prussian ask me who were my seven ancestors.”
The music of his long-forgotten tongue refreshed me; old scenes and memories of the camp at Oran, the never-to-be-forgotten cavalry with the scarlet cloaks, rushed on me thick and fast; incidents, trivial matters69of the bazaars, faces of comrades dead, came to me in flashes. My eyes grew moist, my throat swelled, I whimpered:
“It is all very well, mon enfant, but I’m here with a hole in me stuffed full of lint, and you have your two good arms and as many legs with which to explain to the Prussians who your seven ancestors may be. Give me a drink, in God’s name!”
Again he held up the blue water-bottle, saying, gravely: “We both worship the same God, my inspector, call Him what we will.”
After a moment I said: “Is it a battle or a bousculade? But I need not ask; the cannon tell me enough. Are they storming the heights, Mustapha?”
“Macache comprendir,” said the soldier, dropping into patois. “There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen nothing but sparrows.”
I listened for a moment; the sound of the cannonade appeared to be steadily receding westward.
“It seems to me like retreat!” I said, sharply.
“Ritrite? Quis qui ci, ritrite?”
I looked at the simple fellow with tears in my eyes.
“You would not understand if I told you,” said I. “Are you detailed to look after me?”
He said he was, and I informed him that I needed nobody; that it was much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles blowing a silvery sonnerie—“Garde à vous!”
“I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos,” he said, proudly, “and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven ancestors were. Have I my inspector’s permission to go?”
He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor70of the bugles rang through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered like a cobra’s.
“Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout,” said I, laughing.
The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his scarlet fez, and, “Salute! O my inspector!” he cried, sonorously, and was gone at a bound.
That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one another’s throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command after command was ringing out in the street below. “Forward!” shouted a resonant voice, and “Forward! forward! forward!” echoed the voices of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.
The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on theirtoug; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime—and nothing, save the immense monotone of the cannonade.
I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand, snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my shoulders, and cried, “Come in!”
A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to my senses under the surgeon’s probe. But at the touch of her fingers on the door outside, I knew her—I was certain that it could be nobody but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.71
She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.
“What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?” she whispered.
“No—oh no. I’m only a fool, and quite hungry, madame.”
She brought the broth and bread and a glass of the most exquisite wine I ever tasted—a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its liquid sunshine.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked, gravely.
“Oh yes—in Morsbronn.”
“And in whose house, monsieur?”
“I don’t know—” I glanced instinctively at the tarnished coronet on the canopy above the bed. “Do you know, Madame la Comtesse?”
“I ought to,” she said, faintly amused. “I was born in this room. It was to this house that I desired to come before—my exile.”
Her eyes softened as they rested first on one familiar object, then on another.
“The house has always been in our family,” she said. “It was once one of those fortified farms in the times when every hamlet was a petty kingdom—like the King of Yvetôt’s domain. Doubtless the ancient Trécourts also wore cotton night-caps for their coronets.”
“I remember now,” said I, “a stone turret wedged in between two houses. Is this it?”
“Yes, it is all that is left of the farm. My ancestors built this crazy old row of houses for their tenants.”
After a silence I said, “I wish I could look out of the window.”
She hesitated. “I don’t suppose it could harm you?”
“It will harm me if I don’t,” said I.72
She went to the window and folded up the varnished blinds.
“How dreadful the cannonade is growing,” she said. “Wait! don’t think of moving! I will push you close to the window, where you can see.”
The tower in which my room was built projected from the rambling row of houses, so that my narrow window commanded a view of almost the entire length of the street. This street comprised all there was of Morsbronn; it lay between a double rank of houses constructed of plaster and beams, and surmounted by high-pointed gables and slated or tiled roofs, so fantastic that they resembled steeples.
Down the street I could see the house that I had left twenty-four hours before, never dreaming what my journey to La Trappe held in store for me. One or two dismounted soldiers of the Third Hussars sat in the doorway, listening to the cannon; but, except for these listless troopers, a few nervous sparrows, and here and there a skulking peasant, slinking off with a load of household furniture on his back, the street was deserted.
Everywhere shutters had been put up, blinds closed, curtains drawn. Not a shred of smoke curled from the chimneys of these deserted houses; the heavy gables cast sinister shadows over closed doors and gates barred and locked, and it made me think of an unseaworthy ship, prepared for a storm, so bare and battened down was this long, dreary commune, lying there in the August sun.
Beside the window, close to my face, was a small, square loop-hole, doubtless once used for arquebus fire. It tired me to lean on the window, so I contented myself with lying back and turning my head, and I could see quite as well through the loop-hole as from the window.73
Lying there, watching the slow shadows crawling out over the sidewalk, I had been for some minutes thinking of my friend Mr. Buckhurst, when I heard the young Countess stirring in the room behind me.
“You are not going to be a cripple?” she said, as I turned my head.
“Oh no, indeed!” said I.
“Nor die?” she added, seriously.
“How could a man die with an angel straight from heaven to guard him! Pardon, I am only grateful, not impertinent.” I looked at her humbly, and she looked at me without the slightest expression. Oh, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to tuck up her skirts and rake hay, and live with a lot of half-crazy apostles, and throw her fortune to the proletariat and her reputation to the dogs. She could do it; she was Éline Cyprienne de Trécourt, Countess de Vassart; and if her relatives didn’t like her views, that was their affair; and if the Faubourg Saint-Germain emitted moans, that concerned the noble faubourg and not James Scarlett, a policeman attached to a division of paid mercenaries.
Oh yes, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to play at democracy with her unbalanced friends, but it was also well for Americans to remember that she was French, and that this was France, and that in France a countess was a countess until she was buried in the family vault, whether she had chosen to live as a countess or as Doll Dairymaid.
The young girl looked at me curiously, studying me with those exquisite gray eyes of hers. Pensive, distraite, she sat there, the delicate contour of her head outlined against the sunny window, which quivered with the slow boom! boom! of the cannonade.
“Are you English, Monsieur Scarlett?” she asked, quietly.74
“American, madame.”
“And yet you take service under an emperor.”
“I have taken harder service than that.”
“Of necessity?”
“Yes, madame.”
She was silent.
“Would it amuse you to hear what I have been?” I said, smiling.
“That is not the word,” she said, quietly. “To hear of hardship helps one to understand the world.”
The cannonade had been growing so loud again that it was with difficulty that we could make ourselves audible to each other. The jar of the discharges began to dislodge bits of glass and little triangular pieces of plaster, and the solid walls of the tower shook till even the mirror began to sway and the tarnished gilt sconces to quiver in their sockets.
“I wish you were not in Morsbronn,” I said.
“I feel safer here in my own house than I should at La Trappe,” she replied.
She was probably thinking of the dead Uhlan and of poor Bazard; perhaps of the wretched exposure of Buckhurst—the man she had trusted and who had proved to be a swindler, and a murderous one at that.
Suddenly a shell fell into the court-yard opposite, bursting immediately in a cloud of gravel which rained against our turret like hail.
Stunned for an instant, the Countess stood there motionless, her face turned towards the window. I struggled to sit upright.
She looked calmly at me; the color came back into her face, and in spite of my remonstrance she walked to the window, closed the heavy outside shutters and the blinds. As she was fastening them I heard the whizzing quaver of another shell, the racket of its explosion, the crash of plaster.