"Sad, sad! I had not heard. How did it happen?" asked Moltke, elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.
"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel.... She is as clever and light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful——'
"I know, I know!" said Moltke. "She sucked Straz dry of his store of Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."
Returned the Chancellor:
"By drugging him—or so he vows!—she obtained those copies of his instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the telegrams sent by Prince Antony)—which I was privileged to show you later on. Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to Berlin. Which she did—a special engine having been kept under steam at the Sigmaringen railway station—in time to place the papers in the hands for which they were destined. The exquisite point of the jest is that Straz accompanied her—subsequently discovering how roundly he had been befooled! But upon this point I am not certain.... I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up—Straz—who had vanished—was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a mysterious outrage.'"
"He took the money?" Moltke queried.
"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours previously. Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes. Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin. He is now here in France, and that is all I care to know of him at present. But in the eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that will keep her animosity alive."
"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.
"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that as I looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet Ezekiel:Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men no more!"
The speaker added:
"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter—not destitute of charms, if there be truth in the description given me by her mother, when the woman offered, for a consideration, to sell the girl to me!"
"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning. "Decency demands that such vileness be kept hid!"
Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:
"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress have long ceased to be on nodding terms. To do Madame justice, she flew at higher game than a mere Prussian Minister. Her idea was to influence a future Emperor, in the person of Badinguet's heir."
Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as though an unpleasant odor had afflicted them:
"Pfui!—what beastliness! what abomination! And the boy but fifteen, and childish for his age!"
"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck, "considering his paternity, and the sort of people who habitually surround him." He turned slightly in his saddle as carbine-shots rang out, followed by oaths, shouts, and in the distance behind them muscular blows: "The gendarmery of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in a generalbattue. It should be enforced as an iron rule never to be infringed or departed from, that not only those soldiers, reduced to the level of non-combatants—who attempt to revenge the misfortunes of their Army by acts of violence—but those who witness such acts are to be instantly shot. More, the rule should extend to private persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who do not treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their conquerors!"
His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes blazed under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth clamped downward, giving to the thick mustache a certain appearance of solidity, typical of the man, and suggesting a human mask carved in granite, or cast in bronze and colored with the hues of life. His resonant voice had the clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered by Pagan priests in blood of human victims. And he went on, his clenched right hand beating the measure of his words upon his solid thigh:
"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a profound conviction. Strictness—unmerciful strictness—should be wielded, to bring home to the innocent and the guilty, the feeble as well as the powerful, the horror and hideousness of War. And yet"—his voice assumed a milder tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense corners of the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two days—there have been moments when my bowels melted to water—when Pity and Compunction have gripped me by the throat?"
"Ach-ach!" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear red-rimmed eyes wonderingly upon the heavy features whose ruddy color had faded to grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or hadst made some rough soldier's meal that disagreed with thee. Man's stomach will upon such occasions chide with the very voice of conscience. Unavoidable horrors need not cause twinges. Besides, pity and compunction are felt by my niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's tail.... I am myself agitated by these sentiments when Gusta exhibits to me her chilblains.... In War—especially a recklessly provoked war of attack, such as this—neither pity nor compunction can be tolerated. Grief of heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious preservation of those dear to me. Thou art nearly as favored, for the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight, and Bill—the hero of the astonishing episode thou hast related—has come off the field not only with four—I think Your Excellency mentioned four—rescued comrades, but without a scratch upon his skin?"
The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue brought back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man of Iron. His grim mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust forward, a dull cloud of red swept upward to his temples, chasing the sickly grayish hue. He said, stammering in his characteristic manner:
"Your Ex—Your Excellency and myself have, as you say, been spared the bereavement which will presently plunge the noblest Prussian families into mourning. But Heaven—looking down upon the Gorze Road, now white with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers—or contemplating the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses of our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans—might be inclined to disclaim arch-responsibility for the orders that in one instance hurled suss—six Prussian squadrons upon a French Infantry Division and the combined strength of Frossard's batteries, and in the other, pitted against eight regiments of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's Heavy Brigade."
"Ei!" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with a rosy heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks: "And Heaven would be in the right of it. Von Alvensleben in the first case, General Voights-Rhetz in the second, had been told in such and such an emergency to do thus—and thus. In the Wars of Joshua and David, as recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief generalship. In the War of Germany with France, in this year of 1870, Heaven is pleased to let Moltke have his own way."
Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel on steel.
The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:
"And yet—I quote Your Excellency's own utterance, such use of cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned by Moltke as unjustifiable."
"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable veteran, "only you have not quoted me right. Such use of cavalry by a general is unjustifiable. Unjustifiable—absolutely—unless he wins!" He added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:
"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene of Von Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which, though Your Excellency has omitted to mention it, the French battery was cut to pieces, and an infantry column ridden down. Thus the loss of life in a military sense weighs nothing against the advantage!"
And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock galloped away.
"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck, laughing, as his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join him. "He grew testy on being twitted with our losses in cavalry." He added, as the low hedges bounding the road vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's conflict opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon has lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side. It will now be my business to shorten the royal countenance again. Roon and I resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's story-book, only that we manage better on the whole!" He explained as his cousin professed ignorance of the legend: "Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift, which worked in the same way, but differently.... Thus, Axel had a little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's stirred sour, only neither could remember to use his gift properly. Thus, Ixel would sour the coffee in the pot, spoil the beer, and turn the jelly in the house-mother's pipkins, while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet and make sweet calf's head with cabbages!" He added, laughing: "If a dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should certainly make short work of it. Save for a bowl of the soldier's pea-soup given me by General von Goeben this morning—my stomach would now be as empty as the inside of Louis Napoleon's head!"
The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous afternoon, watched by the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke from the ridge south of Flavigny, was indescribable. Blue Prussian infantry, mingled with Uhlan lancers, Dragoons, and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, covered the wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont. So high were piled the bodies of dead men and dead horses, mingled with that sorrowfuldébrisof shattered arms, scattered accouterments and ownerless headgear, that live men walked through narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and there among them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch of the arm.
Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking for survivors, burial-parties were collecting the German dead. Here and there the narrow lanes that ended nowhere had become crooked thoroughfares, owing to these efforts and the labor of bands of volunteers and peasants working under the Red Cross.
P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers. On the previous day he had helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under the direction of the Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness falling before the gruesome task was ended, he had kept on by torch and lantern-light until brain and muscles gave in. Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back with the Sisters to their convent—had been dried and warmed, fed with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had slept dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's cottage—to wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.
Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with French and German wounded, and every able-bodied resident, willingly or otherwise, impressed into the service of the Red Cross. One single lady of the Sister's acquaintance, whose villa had been forcibly turned into a hospital, had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her maid to guard her bedroom door. Which door, after an interval of trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open, revealing the kicker in the person of a Prussian General, muddy to the whiskers, hoarse from exposure and shouting, and red-eyed from the lack of sleep, who there and then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from her bed, and telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his spurred boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.
This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage received by many other harmless non-combatants. P. C. Breagh had seen an elderly priest savagely hit in the face by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had unintentionally jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier into a cart.
And he had been witness of other outrages. He had seen a wayside cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from the cellar, set up on end, unheaded, and emptied by a party of blue infantry-men. When they had dipped in and filled their water-bottles, they had drunk out of their helmets, and when they could drink no more, they had emptied out the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway, and with brutal jests and laughter watched the red stuff trickle away.
To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection. A blow from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless, and his wife, with her black hair hanging wildly over her shoulders, and her face blurred with tears and pale with terror, was trying to bring him round again.
The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture—made him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm.... It was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified. It was awful—inconceivably awful.... He found himself muttering:
"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"
With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:
"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War—as I gassed—not twenty-four hours ago—could be set down where I stand now, they'd find out, as I have found—that they didn't know what they were talking about.... Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse, curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"
He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental equilibrium. We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a marvel when we find ourselves strong. He found the nausea going and the dimness clearing from his vision. He could even breathe the dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage, stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls—flapping heavily from one place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet, between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"
Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the Babes in the Wood. Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew. Hares, rendered tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men, their natural enemies.
Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to have raged desperately. For it was high-heaped with bodies of the green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats. The black and white lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that brought with it the appalling savor of death....
One had come to work, not to make notes. P. C. Breagh got down from the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin. A bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him. They were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely. A scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made of hurdles and sacks and poles.
Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure. Was it a young girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly clad? A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands were knitted across the narrow bosom. A white linen armlet with the badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain black merino dress. The little, daintily shod feet that showed under the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them. Through the veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side, restlessly seeking....
P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of battle, their own wounded or dead.
She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for the face, it was quite plain. Her look passed over bodies that did not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial. She ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache and the Imperial tuft.
For whom did she seek? A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her path? Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might bring to an end that anguished search.... The impact seemed so imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to her. He got out in a gasping croak:
"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake, don't touch it—it's a live shell!" ...
She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who uttered it had spoken in his own tongue. The edge of her skirt brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous death. But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken limber—would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh. Even as the slight figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of Juliette.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard.... Madame..."
"Ah, it is you—it is you!" she said gaspingly.
And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.
They were so cold, so cold and tiny. They stirred in his grasp like little half-frozen birds. She freed one, and put aside the heavy veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness.... She said—in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:
"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten me. Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!—for the love of charity—do not desert me! Me, I am in the greatest extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now. In the midst of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who is all the world to me.... For that I may find him living I do not dare to hope..."
P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:
"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"
She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:
"Not my husband. My father, sir. It is since a week that I returned from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the Prussians. The intelligence was false—I afterward learned. How—I cannot now tell you. At this moment, and in the presence of all these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful, I can remember nothing very well. But this—that I have come from Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."
"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without papers?..." His face expressed the blankest surprise.
"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel. When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of which I returned to Verdun. From Verdun, in a train full of French wounded—in afiacrepart of the way—in a peasant's cart the remaining distance—I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain. But at Plappeville they detained me. A great battle was raging.... What thunder of guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation, wounds, and death did I not behold!..."
She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips. And P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder at the courage that bore the frail creature up.
"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread. News came before day, brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz. I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment, the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. The reply was: 'Three regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor. You will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.' I cried out then, for the words had pierced me like sharp iron. I would have run out of the house to find my father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through the village on the way to this terrible place. They brought me with them—'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the brassard of the Rouge Croix.' This they put upon me, and then they bring me with them. Now I know not where they are, but I have found you. Help me, monsieur—and I will pray for you until I die!"
She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands together—would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him the better, if he had seemed to delay. But he caught fire at her flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:
"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search for him—and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of the uniform?"
Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details of the Chasseur's uniform—noting the crest embroidered on the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:
"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."
Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the previous day had raged—the billows of the sea of Death had beaten fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped sharply—from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them—stooped to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:
"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of you!"
For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.
She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely peaked and shrunken:
"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable horror:
"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."
She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.
It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust. But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have known....
Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted again—never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee—but I could not help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come. For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."
She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.
"Help! Some drink!Donner!how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.
P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough Teutonic gutturals:
"Hereabouts or near. Begin this—widening the way until carts can get through to be loaded....Kreuzdonnerwetter!is that a dog up there?"
Another voice answered:
"No,HerrSergeant. It is either a nun or a woman!"
The Sergeant thundered:
"You silly sheepshead! Aren't nuns women? But youverdammteCatholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky. Turn her out of that—nun or woman!"
With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette. He thrust his head forward, peering down from his eyrie. The crouching little shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog. Near her stood a soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry. It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil farewell. Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard. He bellowed to the ex-chemist:
"Speak to her! Ask what is her business."
The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to put a question. She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then resumed her previous attitude. Interrogated from below, Private Kunz responded:
"She is deaf, or mad. She only shakes and stares at one!"
The Sergeant bellowed:
"Shout in her ear, fool! You are not courting your sweetheart! Tell her to get up and move out of this!"
Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his superior. She gave no sign of having heard. Copper-red with indignation, the Sergeant commanded:
"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"
Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted savagely to the ex-chemist:
"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!—do you hear?"
The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian "needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather then—and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.
"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"
From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now, you would have paid with your life for your interference. German military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned aside."
P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."
"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"
P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes that blazed tigerishly:
"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."
"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"
At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the Sergeant and his men.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.
"Excellency, she does not hear you! The shock has been too terrible," Carolan was beginning. He was brusquely interrupted with:
"People usually listen when I speak to them." And the curt command was issued—in French, suave and polished:
"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to me!"
The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted. He turned her head with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other female thing.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"
This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched face his way. In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard. Then slowly, as though his powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her feet before him. He said, in cool, incisive accents:
"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier. I myself had the privilege of seeing how he died. I wish such a man had served a better master!..."
She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the sentence:
"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands now!"
His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation. He said in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:
"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion. The battle-field is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls.... In your own best interests I counsel you to return home." He added—and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer—or under the escort of this young Englishman.... I will promise you that your father's body shall be treated with respect!" His heavy eyes fell on the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude of salute. "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he added, grimly enough.
"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up and was standing in the alleyway:
"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by the daughter." He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your veil!"
She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb. Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle, backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long, vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage eyes resentfully. From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.
But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:
"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to me!"
More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must have carried this, the last message received from his daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed it—as in very truth we know he had—shortly before he died.
"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!—it well may be that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force—would have returned for a last caress—a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her away.
"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested. "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think itconvenablethat a gentleman should carry a lady so!..."
Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant. As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.
What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright. Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.
The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.
Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief. For a franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than willing to hire out his beast. Thus, seated on this humble animal, P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed the previous night.
It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville. To reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between copses, came at last upon its single street.
Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with cries of welcome and open arms. Mademoiselle should have something better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that morning killed a calf. Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter—for some of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun laying—and an omelette with fine herbs. No less than young demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold, English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the person of my Cousin Boisset. Pardon that he cannot rise to salute you, for the Prussians have made it impossible. During the battle of St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....
Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity in spite of his evident pain. His bandaged head and the useless leg roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.
"We were overcome by force of numbers.... The Germans know nothing of scientific warfare.... Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black. At twelve hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred—and the more we killed the more there were to kill. Name of a pipe!—pardon, Mademoiselle!—it was inconceivable! We were compelled at length to cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not possible to butcher any more!—Worst of all, our generals lost their heads, and issued contradictory orders!—Commissariat broke down before the ammunition-service—we had had nothing to eat for two days—then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns.... So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover, being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three whole hours!—Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle—until we were remembered, and ordered to retire. When the order came, few officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left to us. Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds lay dead upon the field. With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old comrades.... Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of saplings I cut down with my penknife. With the day I reached my cousin's house.... You may say 'All this is War'—but what kind of War? is what I ask you.... I—a soldier when has fought and bled for France!"
It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor that is born of grief and fatigue:
"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question.... I am young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much. And now I have experienced what never can be forgotten.... I have sat by the corpse of my father on the battlefield.... I have looked in the face of the great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."
Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery. The wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery voice:
"It is Bismarck's War," she said. "Stone by stone he has built up Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany. He has seen—this huge man of colossal ambitions—that the road to Power greater still leads through the gate of France. And Diplomacy could not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."
"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would never have opened while a French soldier was left alive—if we had not been betrayed! Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week'sCharivari? It reached my battery through one of our officers. It is true—mon Dieu!—it is desperately true. There is the Little Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon. He begs at the street-corner for sous—and even the prostitute turns away from the impostor. 'The End of the Legend!' is written underneath. It is furiously chic and terribly clever—and frightfully true, Mademoiselle. For the Napoleonic legend is done with—finished, for good and all!"
She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out. With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her rosary, she was murmuring a prayer—doubtless for her father's soul. Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion, shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he would have said:
"It is well that women have faith in Heaven. See!—she turns to her beads, the poor little one. She is able to pray!—that is fortunate.... Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"
Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.
Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the company of the beloved. To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine, the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods. To sit opposite that little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have been torture had it not been bliss.
When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.
"You are going?... Back tohim?... To make sure that those soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck? Ah! that is what I have been praying for! Our Lady has put it into your head."
She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom. Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C. Breagh asked himself. He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully questioning:
"You won't leave this place until I come back? Pray do not!... Promise me!"
The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the English words. Juliette answered in the same tongue:
"Monsieur, I give you myparoleof honor. When you come back to this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under themanteauof Our Lady. May she protect and guard you.Au revoir!..."
P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand. She considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad, blistered palm. As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small imprisoned bird. And a dimness came before his eyes, and he hurriedly released her, stammering:
"Take—take care of yourself, won't you? I'll—not be very long away!"
She called him back. He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her. She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with eyes brimful, and quivering lips:
"This ... to be buried with him!... This—for a priest to read the Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!... Oh! if I might come with you!... but no!—I will not be unreasonable. Again, it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"
He trembled at the poignant recollection. She went on, breathing fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to his—laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.
"Me, I have an idea!... There is now in Heaven a great saint who was priest of a little village that lies not far from here.... Since he died, it is eleven years.... I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the Blessed Curé of Ars...."
P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned. She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown sleeve:
"Sacrifice—mortification—the Cross—these things to the holy Curé were the Keys of Heaven. The poorest and simplest of his peasants was not poorer or simpler than he. Even before his death Our Lord gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady regard him with tenderness.... See you well, I will pray to the Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy priest to read the Office for the dead!"
Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her pure underlids. At the sight a wave of tenderness surged up in him, pure of all sensuous passion, knowing only the overwhelming desire to serve, and comfort, and protect.... He bent his head, and kissed the little hand, before he turned and went from her. When he glanced back, midway clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking earnestly after him.
She could think clearly and remember again. The confusion in her overwrought brain gradually subsided. She went back to the fatal days when the news of the defeats of Wörth and Spicheren rushed shrieking through France and Belgium, and the 16th of August brought word of Bazaine's intercepted retreat from Metz. That day a young girl, sitting under the grisly wing of Madame Tessier at thetable d'hôteof the Hôtel de Flandre, in Brussels, had risen up as pale as death and hurried from the room.
The picture was clear-cut, definite as a photograph. She saw the tables in confusion.... French guests uprising, the men exclaiming, and the ladies in tears,—Belgians sympathizing—Teutons exchanging congratulatory eye-glances, and smiles not at all concealed. As the white girl passed the chair from which a German cavalry officer had risen, he whipped the obstacle out of her way with an ogle and a bow. And Juliette, covering her eyes as though the sight of him scorched them, had fled past him.... As she quitted thesalle à manger, the voice of Madame Tessier had reached her, saying grimly to the dandy:
"A civility from one of your nation at such a moment is an insult, Monsieur."
And Madame, with bristling mustaches, had also risen, and gone in search of her daughter-in-law elect, to be arrested at the foot of the grand staircase by a waiter with the intelligence that Mademoiselle had gone to her room to lie down, and begged not to be disturbed.... To which apartment, it being on the third floor, Madame Tessier—having wound up the twelve-o'clockdéjeunerof hot meats and vegetables and salad with coffee and pastry,—did not follow her. Had she braved the ascent, this story would have ended in quite a different way.
Upon this day, that saw the battle of Mars la Tour, Juliette would not have met the elegant, self-possessed, ingratiating lady who had spoken to her so amiably on the previous afternoon. When—Madame Tessier being engaged in changing a Frenchbillet de banqueinto Belgian money—Juliette had inquired for letters at the bureau.
"'Mademoiselle de Bayard.' ... Unhappily there is not a single letter for Mademoiselle de Bayard..." had said the curled and whiskered functionary, taking an envelope from compartment "B" of the green baize-covered letter-rack, and handing it to this lady, who stood immediately behind.
Juliette had found it impossible not to see the address upon this letter:
"To MADAME DE BATE,"HÔTEL DE FLANDRE,"BRUSSELS,"
written in rather a vulgar scrawl. It carried extra stamps, and looked bulky. And the elegantly-gloved hand that was extended to take it, recoiled from the contact as though the envelope had concealed a scorpion.
The owner of the hand had regarded Mademoiselle de Bayard with a piercing and exhaustive scrutiny, even as she slipped the letter into a gold-mounted reticule, and snapped the spring tight. She had observed in soft and well-bred accents:
"Letters from one we love are enhanced in value, when the writer must lay down the sword to use the pen...."
Through a black lace veil so thickly flowered as to suggest a mask, a pair of brilliant eyes glittered at Juliette. What dazzling teeth were revealed by the crimson lips that smiled.... The well-bred voice added, with an entrancing touch of melancholy:
"Under other circumstances, to address Mademoiselle would be held a liberty—the speaker being a stranger. Yet as the wife of a French officer of the Imperial Guard,—I may be pardoned for presuming in my young country-woman an anxiety similar to my own?..."
"Ah, Madame," Juliette had said impulsively, "who is there would not pardon you?"
And she had looked with a young girl's honest admiration at the sumptuous form in the perfectly-appointed dress. When the lady had said, with brilliant eyes fixed on her:
"Were this letter not from my husband, I could wish it had been for you," she continued: "Does Mademoiselle know M. de Baye's regiment? The 777th Mounted Chasseurs...?"
"My father commands it, Madame," Juliette had proudly answered. And an animated conversation would have sprung from this answer, but Madame Tessier turned round rather sharply, and the lady, with a slight, graceful inclination, had glided rather rapidly away.
Later, Juliette had encountered Madame de Baye upon the staircase, and had received another of her brilliant glances, and another of her entrancing smiles. And, being lonely in this strange land, and athirst for interest and companionship, the young girl had woven a little romance out of this passing acquaintanceship.
Now as she reached her room, trembling and ready to sink with excitement and agitation, a woman stopped her in the corridor, who looked like a lady's maid of the better class. Well mannered, smart and discreet, she dropped Mademoiselle de Bayard an ingratiating curtsey, handing her at the same time a little three-cornered note.
As the messenger plainly waited for an answer, Juliette unfolded the delicately perfumed cocked-hat. This is what she read in a finely-pointed feminine caligraphy, with lasso-loops to all the "g's," "y's," and "h's," and "s's" of the prolonged, old-fashioned kind.
The maid had penned it at the dictation of her mistress, who for an unexplained reason preferred another hand to bait her hook. This is what Juliette read between her heart-beats, striving to check her flowing tears, and the sobs that rose in her throat:
"To you, Mademoiselle, so spirituelle, gentille and amiable, I am fated, alas! to cause the greatest grief. I have received the most terrible news of my husband's regiment. The reports of the Emperor's resignation are false from the beginning. The Army of Metz, Mademoiselle, has encountered Prussian forces.... Where I know not, but with terrible loss! My Victor has been dangerously wounded and conveyed to hospital at Metz. I fly thither on the wings of anxiety and tenderness to receive too possibly! his final kiss. Also I learn that M. le Colonel de Bayard has been taken prisoner.... My pen trembles as I write the words.
"Since I may not tender them personally, receive, Mademoiselle, my condolences and farewells. May Heaven protect you!
"Distractedly and devotedly,"A. DE BATE."
Madame was packing, said the maid upon whom Juliette turned with a breathless inquiry. Without doubt Madame would receive Mademoiselle.... And, having previously been primed with instructions, Mariette, whom not so long ago we encountered in Berlin, conducted Mademoiselle to a door upon the lower landing, and having knocked discreetly ushered the young lady in.
It was a bedroom crowded with trunks and imperials, none of which seemed to have been unpacked. The lovely lady of the veil was standing near the toilette-table in a thoughtful pose which did justice to her figure and the beauty of her profile. She had removed her veil and held it in her hand, as she changed the position of a jeweled comb in her hair.... She looked round as the door opened. Her brilliant eyes, ruddy-brown as Persian sard or Brazilian tourmaline, encountered the tearful eyes of Juliette. She advanced to meet the girl with effusive tenderness, crying:
"Alas, poor little one! From my heart I pity you!..."
She was not so beautiful, unveiled, as she had appeared behind her mask of black lace flowers. The handsome eyes were bloodshot and too prominent. There were faint dusky-red streaks showing through the purchased roses and lilies of her complexion; horizontal marks, resembling the congenital disfigurement known as "port-wine stain." And withal she was an attractive woman of fascinating manners. And her sympathy seemed genuine, and yet—for some incomprehensible reason, Juliette trembled at and shrank from her touch....
"You are too good to receive me—you who are also suffering!..." She tried to collect herself, and not cause distress. "How I pity you I cannot tell you! but at least you have the knowledge that you are returning to your husband's bedside. You will have the sad consolation of seeing him, while I..."
She broke down and sobbed, and the sympathetic Adelaide administered red lavender on sugar, while her maid kept guard on the landing to intercept Madame Tessier should she appear. The cock-and-bull story told the girl would hardly have borne the test of recital before a third person. But Juliette was young, and innocent and unsuspecting, and Adelaide was experienced in the ways of the world, and very old in guile....
"Courage, my child, and above all, have faith in Heaven!" It did not at all suit her voluptuous type, the heroic-pious tone.... "Naturally you will, knowing M. le Colonel a prisoner, leave nothing undone to assuage the miseries of his situation!... Have I guessed right? I venture to think I have!" She patted Juliette's hand and smiled in the drowned blue eyes, from which she gently drew the little soaked handkerchief. "Accompanied by your venerable protectress, you will instantly return to France. You will leave no stone unturned to obtain an interview with the Emperor—you will implore him on your knees to obtain M. le Colonel's exchange.... Presto! the Emperor will set the machinery in motion. He will give back three Officers to the King of Prussia—and Mademoiselle will have her father again! Is it not so, tell me, my little one?"
She held the girl's small hands in hers, and as she marked off each item of her program, she gently clapped the hands together, as in approval or consent. It was a characteristic trick with Adelaide when she meant to be playfully coaxing, and there was imprudence in employing it now. But with the first inchoate stirring of memory in Juliette, caution reawakened in Madame de Bayard. She released the hands, and said in a graver tone:
"Yourgouvernantewill not object to return?"
Juliette responded:
"Dear Madame, that lady is not my instructress. She is the excellent Madame Tessier, my grandmother's oldest friend."
Adelaide's lip wore the expression of one who sniffs at physic. Had she not been deafened with the recounted virtues of this very Madame Tessier! As she racked her memory for the date of a possible meeting, Juliette continued:
"She is very kind to me. But I fear she will not consent to return to France immediately. She is now upon her way to Mons-sur-Trouille to attend the wedding of her only son. All has been arranged. It is to take place upon the 22d."
A sigh heaved her breast, and her eyelids sank under the burning gaze of Adelaide. But Adelaide was still engaged with Madame Tessier:
"If she has seen me once—and it may well be once!—she certainly has forgotten me!" she commented mentally. Aloud she said:
"But you, Mademoiselle—you are free to return to our beloved country. Under my own guardianship if you will. Do not refuse!... Grant me the privilege!"
Juliette panted:
"Oh, if I might accept!... But this marriage is the obstacle! Because M. Tessier could not return to France for it, my father commanded that I should go. All the more urgently that War had been declared with Prussia, and the regiment had been ordered to join the Imperial Army at Metz."
Madame Adelaide repeated scoffingly:
"This marriage ... this marriage.... Is your presence necessary to legalize the ceremony?"
Juliette cried, opening wide her eyes:
"Alas! yes, Madame!—for I am to be the bride!..."
A shock visibly passed through the nerves of the woman who heard her. She started in her chair and grew livid underneath her powder and rouge. And the dusky marks on her fair skin started into sinister prominence. She was suddenly terrible, and haggard and old....
"So, that was de Bayard's plot.... To marry her!" Adelaide heard an inward voice saying. "Why did you not foresee that, knowing her of age? Nineteen—though she looks like a child, almost.... Her grandmother possessed that physique of an infant, in combination with an iron determination, and a regard of truth that robbed Life of every alleviation, deprived conversation of grace and versatility—reduced the very language of Love to the level of a notary'sprécis...."
All this passed through her brain in an instant. She controlled herself, rose, took the girl's hands again, and kissed her on the brow, saying with sorrowful melodiousness:
"My child, I comprehend! But while I rejoice at the happiness that awaits the daughter, I weep—forgive me that I weep!—for the father in his prison-cell. He is handsome, thy betrothed—and brave—and not a soldier? In a day like this when our France cries out for men?"
Juliette clenched her little hands as the languid irony stabbed her. She cried out, almost beside herself:
"Oh, that is what I feel, and for that I cannot pardon him! Why is he not a soldier? One could esteem him if he were! But oh! Madame,—I despise him, and that makes it the more terrible.... This marriage with a husband whom I have never even seen!"
"Ah, ha!..." she heard a strange voice scream through peals of laughter. "Ah,la, la!—what a clumsy game to play!...Fi donc, M. le Colonel!... So we were to be married in the style of the Old Commander.... 'Pas files a droite!... To the church, quick march!'Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!how droll!..."
She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and said, controlling her frantic merriment:
"Sweet child, forgive me, I am a little hysterical.... The shock of Victor's wound ... my sympathy with your cruel situation.... How could M. le Colonel subject you to a trial so severe?" Feeling herself upon unsafe ground, she dried her eyes again and amended. "That, I comprehend, is a question between yourselves.... When this wedding was arranged M. le Colonel had no comprehension of what would befall him. Yet, for his sake, would it not be wise to delay? Engage the interest of the Emperor before it is too late to reach the beloved captive. Should he be interned in some fortress of East Prussia, how will even a daughter's tenderness reach him amidst those desolate plains—in those caverns of freezing stone!..."
She used her fine voice like a consummate artist of the theater.... Juliette had a vision of her father dying, fettered, ghastly and gaunt with famine, as an engraving of Count Ugolino in his dungeon she remembered to have somewhere seen.... And her secret horror of Charles Tessier, wedded with the feverish longing to return to France and work for the release of her dear prisoner, prompted her to decision now....
"I will go with you, since you are good enough to propose it. But Madame Tessier will never give her consent. Therefore, we must leave here without consulting her, and secretly.... I will write a letter explaining all. Money I have for the railway charges, not much, but I think sufficient!"
Said Adelaide, barely able to hide her triumph:
"Leave the purchase of the tickets to me,ma mignonne! I have a pretty little score to settle with M. le Colonel. We will settle our accounts presently, I promise you! What is the matter now?"
Juliette gasped:
"Alas!—I have no passport! At least, Madame Tessier has both ours...."
"Ah, bah!" said Adelaide. "We will borrow Mariette's.... She can remain here at pasture, and amuse herself with the waiters!..." She burst out laughing at Juliette's look of astonishment, and tapped her under the chin, telling her to go to her room, pack a small hand-bag with necessary articles, change into a dark, plain walking-dress, and rejoin her as soon as might be. She showed a small watch, its back thickly crusted with emeralds, saying:
"Hurry!... You have barely a quarter of an hour."
Then she opened the door, sped her capture with a beaming smile, beckoned Mariette, and this strange colloquy took place between Circe and her tirewoman:
"Did the old woman come nosing upstairs after the little Mademoiselle joined me?"
Mariette replied:
"She did, Madame, but I had locked both Mademoiselle's doors—that leading into the old lady's room, and the one that opens on the corridor,—and put the keys in my pocket. Here they are!"
She held them up, her sallow features expressive with the expectation of a reward earned by intelligence. Said Adelaide, impatiently tapping her handsome foot:
"And then?... And then?..."
"Then I accidentally encountered Madame on the threshold of Mademoiselle's apartment. Seeing her about to knock, I told her that I had seen the young lady descend the stairs, carrying a letter, which I supposed Mademoiselle intended to post at the pillar in the vestibule.... Hearing this the old lady thanked me, and bundled downstairs. She is asthmatic, judging by her wheezing.... She will wait a bit before she climbs up all these flights again."
Adelaide thought a moment, and then gave orders.
"Run you down, hunt up the old woman—help her to search everywhere for the little thing—you understand!... Half an hour will be sufficient to detain her below stairs. In less time Mademoiselle will be safe with me in my apartment.... Then you will give Madame these keys and a little note written by Mademoiselle.... Or—do you know of a waiter who would undertake to do this and hold his tongue?"
Mariette's expression became sentimental. She said, with her head tilted on one side:
"There is one, a Swiss youth, handsome and with the form of an athlete, upon whose fidelity and silence Madame can implicitly rely...."
"For how much?" Adelaide demanded, having no illusions as to the permanence of an unpurchased silence.
Mariette answered:
"I will guarantee Adolphe Madame's for the sum of twenty francs!"
Adelaide gave her a bank-note, and the faithful creature tripped away to split it. Despite youth, beauty and muscles, her Adolphe only got ten francs. But he carried out his instructions and handed Madame Tessier the keys, with a little envelope, containing a hasty line in the handwriting of Juliette:
"Dearest Madame," it said. "This moment I have received grave news of my father, compelling me to leave your side. This marriage must be deferred. Entreat M. Charles to excuse me! I embrace and pray you to pardon.
"J. M. De B."
The little note was penned on the corner of Adelaide's toilette-table. While Madame read it and fainted,—was revived by Mariette and the athletic Adolphe,—scolded herself into hysterics, came out of them and dispatched telegrams; tore the telegrams up and wrote letters,—Juliette was safely hidden in Madame Adelaide's room.
Later on, when Madame Tessier had left the hotel, with her luggage and the trunks and bandboxes of the vanished bride-elect—this time containing the marriage robe, crown and so on,—Madame de Baye sent for her bill and paid it—ordered afiacreand drove to the station, accompanied by her maid, and her maid's sister, a demure little person in black merino, cut convent-style, whose head was draped, after the fashion of some lay novices, with a black silk veil.
The abduction was effected in the simplest fashion.... Not a soul turned to look at the dowdy little figure carrying the hand-bag, its slight proportions half hidden in the sweeping folds of Adelaide's silken train.
The station was crowded with newly-arrived French officers, men of MacMahon's defeated army, who wore their swords, having given theirparoleto their captors not to serve again in the War. Belgian officers fraternized with them,—Belgian ladies of the Red Cross were busily engaged in making much of those who were wounded.... Juliette's heart swelled at the sight of the bandages and crutches, and when the laden stretchers were carried past, the hot tears streamed down her white cheeks behind her screening veil.
The train carried a great many French passengers, as well as an English Red Cross column and a Belgian one. When the engine shrieked, Juliette started as guiltily as though it had been the voice of Madame Tessier, shrilly lamenting an absconding daughter-in-law.