He had never uttered this name, about which so many lonely day-dreams clung, in the hearing of any second person. He could hardly believe that he had done so now as he went on:
"Take my souvenir, and shut your hand over it, and promise me you will never part with it. If you will, I can tell you about Cavaignac—my friend, Mademoiselle!"
She complied with his wish, smiling at the tone of authority. She thought, looking in the beautiful frank blue eyes, that Cavaignac must be proud of his high place in this princely young heart.
"He is brave, Mademoiselle, and handsome and wonderfully clever. Once he gained the second prize for Greek translation at the Concours General. And Greek is horribly difficult. M. Edeline could never teach it me. I find the grammar so dreadfully dull! And yet Alexander the Great was a Greek general, and would have told me all about his campaigns in the Greek language.... I think I must find it hard to study because the figures of people mean more to me than letters and words!... I like better to draw caricatures of my masters than to listen to them!"
Juliette said, with something maternal in her accent:
"That is unwise, Monseigneur.... For the better we learn, the sooner we part with the teacher, do not we?"
He said, in a tone of wounded pride rather than vanity:
"I have always attended carefully to my Military Governor when he gave us lessons in scientific warfare. For a Napoleon must always be a soldier and a strategist.... Riding came easily—anybody can learn to ride well!... When I have pleased my tutors most, my reward has been—unless it was in July or August—a day with the stag-hounds at Fontainebleau, or St. Germain or Compiègne.... The Emperor has given me two magnificent Irish hunters...." He added with naïve boyish vanity: "And the uniform of our Imperial Hunt is splendid, you know.... Gold-laced cocked hat with white plumes, green coat with crimson velvet facings, white leathers and jack-boots. Last night I dreamed I was hunting with Cavaignac ... the brown forest flying by as we galloped through the frosty fern.... The sky was pale red, and a diamond star hung just under the tip of the new moon of November. We were foremost of all when the stag turned to bay at the Pools of Saint Pierre.... Then the horns sounded thehallali, the Chief Huntsman offered me the knife, and I said to him: 'M. Leemans, you will give it to my friend, M. Cavaignac!' ..."
"And then, Monseigneur?..."
He had told the dream with unexpected spirit and fire. That gallop through the wintry forest-rides had been stimulatingly real to Juliette. She had thrilled as the hard-pressed buck had leaped into the pool, and turned with antlers lowered against the ravening jaws of the pack. Now, though she shrank from the thought of the spilled blood—she wanted to hear the rest of it. She wished always to remember this story, told solely for her, by the son of her Emperor....
"Shall I tell you? The end is not as nice as the beginning or the middle...." He hesitated, frowning a little, then took up the broken thread: "I thought I took the knife and held it out to him, and he suddenly snatched it and I felt the blade pierce my heart right through.... He said, with his dark, bright eyes on mine: 'Son of my father's enemy, I slay despots, not animals!' ... And I felt the hot blood bubbling in my throat as I answered: 'You have killed a great faith and a great love!'"
It was rhetoric of a bombastic, youthful kind, but not without pathos. His lips quivered. He nipped them together, and blinked away the stinging salt moisture that had risen in his bright eyes. Juliette said, aching to console him:
"Dreams go by contraries, according to my schoolmates of the Convent. Your friendship with M. Cavaignac will not be severed by the blade of a hunting-knife."
He shook his head.
"Or rather it is by my hand that the stab will be given.... Yet how could that be, when I like him so very, very much? ... Is it not strange, I have never spoken to Cavaignac, and yet I would have chosen him for my companion above all others, before even Espinasse or Chino Murat!..."
"I think I understand..." Juliette said, feeling the tug of his craving for affection and sympathy, realizing the loneliness that had found relief in hero-worship, and heartily pitying her Emperor's son. "When the heart speaks, one cannot shut one's ears; one must listen always.... Among hundreds of faces there is one that paints itself upon the memory ... there is one voice that makes good music when others only tire the ear.... There is one nature that seems more open, fresh, and candid than others.... Without knowing that you do so, you continually compare it with them.... And when you are sad or lonely, you would wish that person to be near you.... You remember his gray eyes with specks of brown and golden in them, and the curly hair, and the pleasant lips. You regret that when you met him you were not more charming, more amiable.... You feel chagrin to remember that you were neither of these things.... You would like to hold out the hand as they do in England, and say, 'Pardon, pardon, that I misunderstood you, my friend!'"
The boy's blue eyes rounded. His fair brows puckered in perplexity. Too well-bred to interrupt, he listened with increasing surprise.
"Pardon that I regarded you as a brusque, untidy boy, when you had been robbed, and were homeless, and suffering from hunger. For Monica's sake, you hid it. And I applaud that noble silence! I admire you with all my heart!..."
The Prince broke in:
"But Cavaignac has not been robbed, and who ever said he was hungry? He lives with Madame, his mother ... they are not rich, certainly! As Madame is a widow and he an only son, he is exempt from military service. He is to embrace the profession of Literature—he will write great books or great plays, or edit a newspaper.... And I would like to help him to climb to the very top of the ladder.... Secretly—because he would never accept anything that came from me!... Am I stupid, Mademoiselle?"
She said with warmth that covered a slight confusion, caused by that slip of the tongue an instant before:
"Ah, no, indeed! but very kind and generous. Perhaps, if it were possible, M. Cavaignac would be proud and glad to know you were his friend. It may be that the affection he inspires in you, he returns, though he does not own it. There can be no harm in thinking this, at least!"
The Prince said, with animation:
"I saw him, I am convinced, when we left Saint-Cloud, outside the station near the Gate of Orleans. He stood apart from the soldiers and the people.... He was all in black, and had grown older and taller. He looked at me earnestly, and slightly raised his hat as the carriage drove up. I saluted in answer, and the Empress asked me: 'Who is that grave young man? Do you know him?' I said: 'My mother, I have never spoken to him in my life!' ... You would have thought the Empress very brave, if you had seen her, Mademoiselle. Nobody could have guessed she had been weeping. Though the night before we left for Metz ... when she came to me in my bed..."
His lips twitched, and one big tear brimmed over and splashed on the sleeve of his piou-piou's uniform. He flushed bright red, and whisked it off as though it were a wasp that would have stung.
"She brought me a new medal to hang on the collar I wear always." He slid a finger inside the edge of his stiff military stock, and hooked up an inch of gold chain. "It has on one side a figure of Our Blessed Lady crushing the head of the serpent, and on the other there is the Cross with two hearts. The Holy Father has blessed it; it was sent to Rome purposely.... Mothers are anxious when their sons are called upon Active Service.... It is natural, is it not?"
Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress. She bent her head in assent. The boy went on, shrugging his slender shoulders:
"For me—I like better to have soldiers about me than a lot of people in embroidered tail-coats. If I had been twenty, I should have been at Wörth with the Duke of Magenta.... I would have died at the head of my troops rather than have consented to that shameful retreat.... 'Over my body!' ... that is what I would have said to them.... 'Do you wish me to dishonor the blood of Napoleon the Great?'"
He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey hearthrug, a boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian mirror that hung above the carved stone mantelpiece. The outpouring had relieved the nervous tension; the red flush had died out of his fair temples, the smooth forehead was no longer disfigured with a scowl.
"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz, I would have asked nothing better. But instead of staying to fight the Prussians, we drove away when they came in sight. It was ignominious.... It made me feel horribly!... And the Emperor would not show it, but I know he suffered, too. Then the camp was beastly.... There was no pretense of discipline. Their officers could hardly restrain the mobilists. There was even mutiny among those who had returned from Alsace-Lorraine—the Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"
His agitation made him stutter as the words came pouring from him.
"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!—to be avenged for all their losses and misfortunes!... I understood why they were difficult.... They did not understand why we did not march at once to the northeast frontier. No more did I.... I was unreasonable, like them! But now we are advancing—soon, soon, you will hear something!... We will effect a junction of our Army with M. de Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out of France!"
He was walking up and down, swinging his arms, gesticulating, grinding his heels into the arabesques of the Aubusson carpet at every turn.
"Then there will be great popular rejoicings—the Emperor will receive his due—there will be no more misunderstandings. For the Emperor is terribly misunderstood, Mademoiselle, and he is no longer young or strong.... He has so many bitter enemies.... I have heard him say so, weeping—the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."
"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"
But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.
"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at midnight, when he thought everyone was asleep, and he was quite alone: 'My God! is this the beginning of the punishment? Must the price of my success be ruin, defeat, disgrace!'... Then I stole away and made a prayer for him and for myself, Mademoiselle.... I say it regularly every night since then."
His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen from him like a tinsel diadem. Chivalry and loyalty, unselfishness and devotion shone from and irradiated the child.
"'My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I pray Thee to take it away, and give it to my father, who needs it so badly.... And, my God, if Thou indeed art angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him Thy pardon, and punish me, instead. All I ask Thee for myself is that I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty bravely, and die when the end of my life comes without dishonor and without fear!' Is that a good prayer, do you think, Mademoiselle?"
Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer, there was a knock at the door, and the equerry came in. He looked eager and vexed, excited and disappointed. Varying emotions seemed to clash in him. But he said, smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward him:
"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"
"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said Monseigneur, with a mischievous look. Then his face changed. "News!" he called out eagerly. "You have dispatches from the Emperor!... Don't play a farce with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram sticking out of your cuff!"
And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of a spoiled princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry and captured the prize.
"From the Emperor at Rheims—no! don't retire, Mademoiselle! You are discreet—not like women who talk! ... You shall share my good news with me.... He says: 'There has been furious fighting at Mars la Tour. Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville. The Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the Emperor will rejoin him on the 27th. As it is not considered advisable to effect a junction with Bazaine, the march of the Army of Châlons is directed upon Sedan.'"
The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile face whitened with disappointment. He repeated, staring blankly at the paper:
"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist Bazaine?...Mon Dieu!... What infamy!... Why am I not a man?"
He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing. He tore the pale green paper into fragments and trampled them beneath his feet. His eyes blazed through the tears that streamed from them as he stammered between his gasps and chokings:
"Cowards!... Traitors!... Disgraced forever!... Is there no honor left in France?"
"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry, as deadly pale as Monseigneur was red. He held open the door with a shaking hand, and Juliette hurriedly quitted the drawing-room. The door shut upon the sobs and outcries. The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping the perspiration from his face:
"You will not speak of this? His Imperial Highness is overwrought and excited. It will pass presently. Let me conduct you downstairs!"
The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the livery of the establishment approached the equerry. It appeared that the lady who had accompanied Mademoiselle had recovered from her indisposition, and departed, leaving no message for her young friend.
"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the equerry. He added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the dispatches we have just received contain proof that your friend has been misled by false intelligence. Colonel le Bayard has not been taken prisoner. He is now in command of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry of General Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the Third Corps in the neighborhood of Metz."
Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him in breathless questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair from its place near the wainscot and making her sit down:
"Rest there one moment.... I will speak to Colonel Watrin. He is now at mess with his officers in the Prefect's billiard-room."
Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's escort, came clanking and jingling from his dinner to confirm the fact as stated by the equerry. The 777th Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's Division of the Third Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly now engaged in the neighborhood of Gravelotte. But as certainly they had not come into contact with the enemy previously to the fifteenth of the month.
The fifteenth!—the very day on which Adelaide had baited her trap with an imprisoned father.... Joy at the discovery, indignation at having been so easily cajoled into captivity, brought back the red to Juliette's pale cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.
This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise over her daughter a certain degree of maternal authority. The supreme obedience, the first duty was to the father, that was clear. Now she was going straight to him, wherever he might be. She was strong enough, for his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.
Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her? It was unthinkable that even so hardy an offender should venture into the presence of one so wronged.... Meet his look!... Read in his face his scorn of perfidy! Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.
We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this very move upon occasion. But she had not met Mademoiselle de Bayard then. Since the encounter had taken place she had realized that the establishment of maternal influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.
Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid, obstinate little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law over again. For than this girl, sprung of her own flesh, whose veins were filled with her blood, nothing could be more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent creature of impulses and desires and appetites....
Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and established while his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin unwed. Why had Adelaide hindered her marriage to M. Tessier? Pacing the Turkey carpet of the Prefect's library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly. That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the Prince Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of the girl and the inexperience of the boy.
She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that moment, all, "Oh, Mademoiselle!" and "Ah, Monseigneur!"... The girl should have been permitted to celebrate her nuptials with this dull young husband of her father's choosing.... Then a few years later would have come the opportunity. She ground her teeth, thinking how her precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust her.... Ah, Heaven! how one shuddered at the recollection, almost into the clutches of the Wielder of the Bowstring, the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of the Looking-Glass....
Straz.... At the sight of him her heart had stopped beating. In imagination those strangling silken folds had closed, shutting out light and breath....
How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his. "So," his jeering smile had said, "my Sultana and her slave have met again. Did I not prophesy truly, sweet one, tell me? when I said you would never again look in your toilette-mirror without remembering me!"
Her nerves were raveled to threads—her will was weakening.... Despite her hatred and her overwhelming fear of the man, she knew that he was her master. That if he fixed those eyes upon her and beckonedCome!she would have to obey....
Was he still here? The book-lined walls seemed closing in on her. The atmosphere was suffocating ... she must escape from this place or go mad.
The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly ministrations with smelling-salts and red lavender. Adelaide opened the library door a little way, and looked forth cautiously. Except the two Cent Gardes on duty at the foot of the principal staircase, there was nobody stirring in the hall or vestibule.
As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a flagged rear passage-end was opened. The Prince's equerry came out with the Chief of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale green paper was in the equerry's hand. Both officers' faces were pale. Colonel Watrin's was livid and distorted with emotion. He said to his companion in a low voice, and with a despairing gesture:
"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!... All is over!... The Empire is lost!"
Then he went back. The red baize door shut upon him. The equerry came through the passage, entered the hall, and went quickly up the stairs. He was going to break to the Emperor's son the news of some terrible disaster ... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "All is over!... The Empire is lost!"
With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the truth and comprehended the situation. What did she in the galley of a ruined, sinking Empire? What advantage was to be gained by reconciliation with Henri de Bayard now? And with Straz in the neighborhood, what madness to remain here....
As for the girl, she was possessed of money. Let her go to her father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....
So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible memories of the Roumanian. She found the porter. He hailed herfiacrefrom its waiting-place. Madame stepped in gracefully, and was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!
"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called War was actually going on. The speaker resumed:
"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St. Germain.... Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and can endure the noise of the bombardments—Mademoiselle may be quite as safe"—he shrugged and twirled his imperial—"there as anywhere else!..."
A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow, between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of Germany. But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle. Then she thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....
For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something approaching to a panic was brewing.... The Place of the Prefecture was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth. It was whispered that defeat was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M. de Bazaine.... Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.
Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled waters. Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come. Well might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities. Well might the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.
It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.
"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in charge of the bureau. "She gave notice of departure, and asked for the account. Then the gentleman arrived—a handsome man with splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard—my faith! what hair and what a beard! Madame cried out with ravishment upon his entrance, for he would not be announced—he went up at once. Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"
Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question. She was intent upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag. Without money one could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little store of cash. Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's. The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's possession was appalling. She was delivered from the dilemma by a chambermaid with a master-key. As she stole in and seized her bag she heard voices in the next room. Certainly one was Adelaide's and the other male. A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and fierce black eyes of Straz.
"When the little Queen of Diamonds comes," the voice said, "you shall present me!" And a chuckle followed on the words that made her cold. Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....
The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes. She learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun. At Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.
Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty station, waiting. She was escaping from even greater perils than she had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate regret.
She had been so happy there.... She would never forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.
The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal drawing-room of the Prefecture.... Lingeringly Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting—ah, me! there had been no farewell!... And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and seen...
Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying. Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane. As she whispered "Adieu!" looking up at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on earth again.
It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.
What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child of the Empire!... What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...
So young, so noble, so unfortunate! The pity of it!... He who might have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.
What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!... That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan. The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy....
From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....
What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.
His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.
He was to attain manhood in exile. Transplanted to the soil of a foreign country, he was to develop into thebeau-idealof a youthful King among men. High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine flower of French chivalry. And in the spring of his manhood he was to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.
Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.
Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours of his absence. Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and German bodies decently interred therein. Huge canvas sacks crammed with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood ready to be carted away. Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had rendered like services to dead Frenchmen. And at the head of a trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:
"CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.OFFICERS, 6;TROOPS, 200."
a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the body of de Bayard.
The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope. About the cross Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack. None of the heavy clay soil had been thrown back. Waiting some hand to draw Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring back in the brazen face of the sun.
His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open—the blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust. The red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt in search of pocket-book and purse. It was difficult to credit that the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm and soften and relax into a smile.
He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men, even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes. But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking point—got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's Rosary instead.
"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do. If I'm not quite up to your mark, please overlook it! As to being worthy ofher—isany man breathing? Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be No...."
Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....
Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at the task.
Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished. Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office. You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields of death. The secular priest and the tonsured religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.
To whom should one appeal? Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end. You saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press. An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet through both eyes. Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar. Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith was uplifted—even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration—his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.
Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched. Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief but solemn rite was at an end. Then he looked up at the sky—shaking back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager features—making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross. And the serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.
Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.
Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims. But no merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast. It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost humanly upon his face.
The appeal went home. Stepping over the prone body of its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck. He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:
"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended. In the Name of the Father ..."
As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down heavily. A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a gasp. The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart. All was over. The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and overtook him, crying:
"My Father..." And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:
"Surely, my child. Do you need my poor assistance?"
A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent. And with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic—the face of Voltaire.
There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts. The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there. The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry. In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....
"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"
"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare soutane. And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman. Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the Absolution, theLibera me,Paternosterand Collects, and with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of theDe Profundisthat followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:
"My poor prayers are for all my children. Now kneel and make your confession. No one will hear you—it is as though we were together in my poor little church."
"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.
The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:
"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged your religious obligations. But to-day is the Octave of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or received Communion since Whitsuntide. Will you tell me that your conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors of the Divine Judgments of God!"
Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his.... He clasped his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very passion of pity and love:
"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life? And what shall I say to Him when I stand before Him, and He asks me: 'Didst thou suffer a sinner to depart whom pleadings might have won?'"
There was no resisting that passionate entreaty. Another instant, and the barrier of pride broke down. P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw, moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands upon his head.
With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands were withdrawn and their owner went away. How he went and whither he betook himself, his penitent never knew.
The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the westering sunshine. Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin. The doors of the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open. Household! goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread, smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in the little, flowery front yards. All the doors stood open, some that had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes. Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter. The hand of the marauder had plainly been at work. P. C. Breagh groaned as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.
Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown upon the floor. The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack, temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books, deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes. But P. C. Breagh's eyes were busied elsewhere. With the ripped-up feather bed from the inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous night. With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate articles of feminine underwear—a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy chemise. He took them up with reverent, shaking hands—looked instinctively for an initial.... There were letters embroidered in dainty Convent-taught stitchery—"J. M. de B."
He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him. He had glanced toward the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had lain. Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse. And a lance driven home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.
Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight. His under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically. He yelped out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could not stop:
"Juliette! Juliette! Where are you? What have they done?... Oh, Juliette!..."
And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief. Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled. The slender thread of a voice replied:
"Monsieur Breagh, I am here! Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you! Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"
And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept out from its hiding-place. Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the eyes of her true worshiper. He choked and made a dive to help her, stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers. And then she was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold. And through the chattering of her teeth he heard—did he really hear her falter:
"I knew—I knew that you would come! When a priest had been found to bless the grave of my father. Not before!... You would never have returned before!"
Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish. He rose up, lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.
"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise. Shall I ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?... Oh, Lord!... Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle poisoned me!... Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"
"It is he who is dead!" She drew her small, cold hands from his that were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the sheet that covered the still form. "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.
"Wouldn't I die for you? If I got the chance!... Don't you know it?... No—how can you know it?"
Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at him to say:
"I do know it! To-day you placed yourself between me and the violence of those Prussians. I have no words to thank you for your courage, sir! Had I words forhim"—she looked back at my "cousin"—"he would not hear them.... Nor can he be sensible of this——" She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the boldly arching eyebrows. "Yet with all my gratitude I place it there!"
P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would change places with him to get that—and I believe you know it! Cover him up and let me take you away from here...." He added, as she looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe. There must be somewhere!"
"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here than anywhere. You do not think the comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"
"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this—beastliness."
His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.
She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:
"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood. We will hide ourselves in there until the dark. For what are you looking?"
He answered, stirring thedébrison the flagstones:
"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack. No!... Except the rags of a spare jacket—they've left me nothing but this."
One stout clasped notebook had suffered little. He thrust it into his pocket and turned to Juliette. She said, with a rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:
"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage. The littleportemanteauand thesac de nuitI brought with me from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men! Is it not deplorable? Pray look, Monsieur!"
But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.
Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly.... She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped. But not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery stoup that hung above the bed.
"He was so good.... He should now be safe in Paradise. But we must always remember him in our prayers!..."
It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to. Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.
"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide! Run! The Uhlans are coming! They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit'seau de vieand wine!'
"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns. You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in store!' Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant running this way and one that.... Madame Guyot caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would be found a refuge. But I refused to leave the house!"
He broke in:
"Think what you risked! Why didn't you escape with her?"
She looked at him wonderingly:
"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you myparoleto stay?"
He could not speak. She went on quickly:
"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge, and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.' But when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine, they care nothing for the Red Cross! Cover me over with a sheet, and hide underneath the bed I lie on. Thus they will think me dead, and possibly go away. The good God may let me save you, though I have often sinned against Him!'"
A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek. She brushed it off and went on:
"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding it. Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from the wall, and laid it on his breast. Then I got under the bed, for I heard men at the door. There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound of breathing. Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock gave way.... They entered.... Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had said to me, 'For your life, do not make a sound!' For my soul, more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."
Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh could see her little throat swelling. Her tragic eyes seemed to have no room for him. He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking place in a dream of uncanny vividness. That he must wake up next moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....
"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language. Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school.... But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot. That was why they tore up clothes and linen—broke the dishes and glasses—behaved as wild beasts, rather than men. That they were drunk, I knew, though I saw their boots and not their faces. The smell of wine and brandy made me desire to be sick.... But when they approached the bed, with what anguish of apprehension I waited.... If I could have screamed, it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the sheet...."
Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs. Her nostrils quivered with each sharply-taken breath. Her tragic upper lip shut down upon its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:
"I heard my own heart beat—so loud it was like thunder. I felt M. Boisset trying to hold the breath.... I prayed to the Mother of God to cover us with Hermanteau. I think she has certainly heard me when the Uhlans put back the sheet.... Alas, how terribly I am to find myself mistaken! When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he is about to go. Then—there is a savage cry!—a groan, hollow and terrible.... The lance comes plunging through the body of M. Boisset, through the palliasse—through the sacking that is underneath—through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with blood.... See!..."
And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish stains. And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:
"The brutes!... The cowardly beggars! Oh, if I had only been there!"
"Of what use?" she said. "They would only have killed you!"
"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try! Why, we're neutral. No Germans would dare——"
She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing down her upper lip:
"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father. They have no pity, these men with panther hearts. How should they, when he has none—that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to idolatry. Contradict me—say that I am wrong—to convince me would be impossible. For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked him in the face."
For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood. And comprehending this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:
"He's a great man—a terribly great man, however you look at him. And he—do you know, he saved my life once!"
She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:
"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this one. How many others have you given to death?'"
Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance. The delicate voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:
"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery. I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."
P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:
"Do you really believe that?..."
She answered simply and directly:
"If I did not, I would not say it.... Now I will shut my eyes and rest a little. I am so very tired, me!"
And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of last year's dead leaves. He asked himself what had she not gone through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!
Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.
But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or shattered—where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a peasant's board.
No wonder Juliette was very tired. Would her reason suffer from the results of this shock? Would she droop and die of the horrors undergone? Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an indomitable and unconquerable spirit? It had looked out of her stern eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron Chancellor.
Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him, to say, with the suddenness of a child:
"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a noble nature. Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have them shot?"
P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so. She said, her heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:
"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away calling that the Franzosen were coming.... Yet when they had gone and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that I view? In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent, white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the village saying his Rosary...."
She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes widely:
"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my Father! Help for one dying! Help for another in misery!' But he must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed on. Then I crept back under the bed, and then—at last, you came to me. What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."
For once Carolan did not hear her. His thoughts were busy elsewhere. He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the Office at the grave of de Bayard?
And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared the drunken marauders from their prey? And was it not strange that the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and Juliette?... The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might be.
Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness, deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the Colonel's graveside. On the moist surface of the spot where the Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled, wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.
An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by subconscious Memory. A significant phenomenon, remarks my other friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen. While my Catholic terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the stupendous truth contained in that clause of theCredoreferring to the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.
Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P. C. Breagh believed her asleep. Twilight showed nothing but a black shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....
Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his. She said, following up some previous train of thought:
"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless. I speak of the face of my country's enemy.... See you well, Monsieur Breagh ... if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord had saved France!..."
"What would save France?" Carolan asked her. She answered, turning in her rustling couch of leaves:
"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her.... Death, freezing the brain that plans her fall.... Death, overtaking the merciless giver of Death to her children.... Nothing else could now save France!..."
He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of madness. She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:
"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness. Frenchwomen are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.' Yet France has twice been saved by the courage of her daughters.... Remember the holy Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday also, Monsieur!—the courageous citizeness of Caen.... At school I learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal.... 'Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!...' Why has not France a Charlotte Corday now?"
There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack. That a creature so frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible. One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde type. To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the conversation was impossible. The only thing to do was to feign to doze.
He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire. Oblivion descended on him. Pretense became reality. He sank into a very gulf of sleep.
Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the deepening dusk. Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock claimed her as a victim. She was far more near to madness than Carolan had dreamed.
It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows and ravines. Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest sculpturesque shapes.... An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks, bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect; lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.
But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war. In other vaporous pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.
Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.
He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall—she served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.
The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....
What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?
Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be sure to know, because their murderer would be there....
"Ting...."
What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images that crowded in her brain? It loosed the iron band that was bound about her aching temples. It melted the icy armor that was riveted about her torn and sorrowful heart....
"Ting-ting!"
She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened, breathing quickly. Again came the silvern tinkle.
"Ting-ting-ting! ..."
Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear fell from her like a pall all snow-wet. She rose up among the rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the sleeper, and roused him cautiously. He awakened, and said through the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:
"Who is it?..." And then instantly remembered, and passionately kissed the warning hand.
"Ting-ting, ting-ting!..."
"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.
She snatched away the hand. He rose to his knees and listened.... Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray. White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:
"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"
No more was said. They took hands and went out of the hovel, and passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the littered street of Petit Plappeville.
At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a lantern-flame, moved toward them. Their shadows were thrown sidewise upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls. The bell tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World. The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping of wooden-soled country shoes.
Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides. The stout figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta, wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.
At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left hand. His right arm was folded over his breast. As Juliette sank down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt down beside the girl.
The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them in silence. His round face looked puckered and anxious. He said, as his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:
"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this unhappy village?"
Juliette was praying. P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:
"Yes, my Father. The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left their houses.... There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of Madame Guyot. He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through with one of their lances. He lies within there! May his soul rest in peace!"
The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death. Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:
"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am going. A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord. Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."
He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.
"Ting!"
They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered, murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.
Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there hung one star of blazing emerald.
When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.
"Ting!"
As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway. He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his companions:
"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here. Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than one light!"
Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.
A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off. Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper:
"This is the Château Malakoff. Perhaps you remember?... And all those broken bottles.... The soldiers drank the wine...."
Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went. Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to ascend.
They went upstairs.
The door of the death chamber stood open. From within, came the murmuring sound of the priest's voice. Red-eyed servants knelt in prayer about the threshold. The master of the house was just within the door. His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry and wrathful. Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned her to kneel beside her:
"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit.... They were only married a year!"
Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present when the priest elevated the Host. A little later she broke down again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after administering the Viaticum. And then in a gray pool of quiet that ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with astonishment and terror and anger in it:
"Mon mari!... Mon mari!... Au secours!... Les Prussiens——"
And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and sorrowful. He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the women. And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed, clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace. Only two great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering candlelight. And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.