"My father has honored me with his confidence as long as I can remember, sir!" and, "See you—I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"
Strange that his elfin queen—his carved ivory Princess—should bear the same name as the woman the Guardsman had gossiped of—the beautiful, evil creature with the eyes like Brazilian tourmalines. And, what particular color in Brazilian tourmalines might have been intended? Some were purple, others pink, and yet others reddish-brown. The woman who had dropped her parasol on the staircase at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color. With the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken from her rustling silks and laces, and the languid echo of her caressing voice.
Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy slumber. And, as the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh lapsed this way and that, and his chin burrowed deeper into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied the corner-seat facing the sleeper,—shading his eyes from the lamplight with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and, leaning forward, stared in the young man's unconscious face, with small, suspicious, unwinking eyes. Now the eyes looked round so sharply, that every waking man in the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance of slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:
"Private von Valverden!"
"At your service,HerrSergeant."
"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"
"Undoubtedly,HerrSergeant!"
"Gut!" said the Sergeant. "But what is his calling? Is he of the newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles so?"
"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but if he be on the staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us without aLegitimation, and a letter from someone in authority."
The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his sharp little eyes more suspiciously than ever. Valverden went on:
"Doubtless he has them—I saw him show a paper to the Halt Commandant at Berlin, and theHerrColonel himself spoke to him and told him he might travel as far as Bingen by this train. And I happen to know that four London newspaper correspondents have been accredited by the King upon the instance of Count Bismarck; one being appointed to accompany the Crown Prince, another being permitted to accompany the Second Army, while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."
The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:
"Gut, gut!but is this fellow one of them?"
"If he be not,HerrSergeant, he will get no farther than Bingen, for doubtless the Commandant there will be on the lookout for persons whose credentials are not of the best."
The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up his full-bearded countenance suspiciously:
"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout, Private von Valverden? See you, I have had my suspicions since yesterday, and I tell you..."
Every waking ear in the neighborhood, and there were now a good many, pricked with curiosity as the Sergeant half-rose, and, inclining his inflamed countenance and bearded lips toward the ear of his selected confidant, continued in a hoarse rumbling undertone:
"Two of thoseverdammteEnglish newspaper-scribblers that have got on the blind side of Their Excellencies and His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief were at the station at Berlin picking up information the very day we entrained. Well do I know that paunchy little one with the big beard, who has, they say, as many Orders as a Field-Marshal, and who will venture to thrust himself upon Our Moltke in his study, and accost His Excellency Count Bismarck upon the very doorsteps of the Reichstag itself. They got off three trains ahead of us, paying for men and horses and trucks, to Cologne; and if this fellow were not a knave, would he not have gone with them?Ach, ja! It would have been so! But they did not even know him, though he pretended to touch his cap to them.... I tell you he turned as red as beetroot when they passed him without a glance.Nu, nu!he is an unlicensed meddler, if not a French spy, speaking English. Do they not teach it at their Lycées? And he has got on the blind side of the Commandant at Berlin and theHerrColonel. But I, Sergeant Schmidt, have my weather-eye open, and it sticks in my gizzard that our so-glorious Moltke, let alone His Majesty, should with so much civility these quill-driving vagabonds encourage; when they say the French Emperor has given orders that, should the like of them about the heels of his Army Corps be caught sniffing, they are to be shot."
"Possibly the Napoleon has more deficiencies to be ashamed of than we have,HerrSergeant!"
Taking a deep breath, the Sergeant blew himself out to the utmost of his capacity and bellowed:
"Himmeldonnerwetter!are you going to insinuate in my presence that the Prussian Army has anything at all to be ashamed of? Now you've waked this rascal with your racket, maybe you'll sit on his head while I go through his pockets. Here, Braun and Kleiss, catch hold of his arms and legs!"
Waking in the chiaroscuro of the smoke-filled, lamplit troop-carriage to find himself in the brawny grip of the aforesaid Braun and Kleiss, P. C. Breagh fought for freedom, yelling as one possessed, and lashing out with all his might. In the heat of the scrimmage that followed, as a muscular arm in a coarse blue sleeve came round his neck from behind and choked him into silence, somebody said in his ear:
"Keep still ... not hurt you! Only going ... search!"
And before he had rallied his wits sufficiently to realize that the warning was in English, a pair of extra-sized hands had deftly emptied the pockets of the old brown Norfolk jacket, relieved him of the cherished binoculars, a brand-new revolver, and a purse and letter-case that had been hidden in his bosom next the skin. Then, a soiled newspaper having been spread upon the carriage-bench and the pieces of conviction arranged upon it, Sergeant Schmidt, surrounded by an audience of admiring inferiors, commenced to interrogate their owner:
"What is this?" He held up the well-used briar-root. "A pipe, and yet it might be used to conceal dispatches or tracings. A pistol also. On the principle of the French mitraille, with many barrels. Prisoner, answer! Where did you get this?"
Returned P. C. Breagh, scarlet and breathing shortly:
"I bought it in Berlin from a pawnbroker in the Landsberger-strasse. By what right..."
Someone behind hacked him on the ankle, driving home the axiom that silence was wisdom, and he subsided, boiling within, as the Colt, a nearly brand-new six-barreled weapon, seen and purchased, together with its box of three hundred cartridges, for seven of P. C. Breagh's cherished sovereigns, was laid by, while the Sergeant, breathing stertorously, examined the contents of the purse. He snorted, letting the bright coins run through his greedy fingers like yellow water:
"Nine pieces of gold. French coins, too, or call me a sheepshead!"
"At your service, Herr Sergeant," put in the smooth, well-bred voice of Valverden, following on the ominous murmur that had greeted the Sergeant's announcement; "the money is as English as this revolver is American. Prove the first for yourself. When has the French Emperor figured in a woman's hair andcorsage?"
A guffaw went up. P. C. Breagh, recognizing the voice which had spoken from behind him, realized that here was a friend in need. But an attempt at speech on his part was frustrated by an ominous tightening of the muscular arm that had previously half-strangled him. The Sergeant, his fiery pot-zeal rather damped by frequent set-backs, snapped-to the purse and said, keeping it tucked in one capacious palm, as he shook out the contents of the letter-case:
"So! He is cunning, like many another of his kidney. Yet it may be here is proof sufficient to show him a rogue! Who here reads French?"
"I do,HerrSergeant." Once again the well-bred voice of Valverden. The Sergeant grunted surlily:
"There is another here ... Private Kunz!"
The spectacled soldier who read Homer in the original, and who had been violently displaced when the muscular Braun and the athletic Kleiss had obeyed the order to pinion the suspected one, shot bolt upright in his distant corner, saluted and said in a meek voice:
"At your service,HerrSergeant!"
"Private Kunz, canst thou read French?"
"Zu befehl, HerrSergeant!" The spectacled private added as the Sergeant passed him over the contents of the letter-case: "But these letters are not in French. Two are in English, and one is in German."
The Sergeant scowled and thundered:
"Thou art an ass!"
"At your service, Herr Sergeant," mildly agreed the spectacled soldier, "but Private Count von Schön-Valverden, who understands the French and English languages, will corroborate my statement if you will kindly refer to him."
"'Kindly refer.' ... 'Corroborate my statement.' ..." The Sergeant, purple in the gills, and with bolting eyes, loosened his collar-hook before he launched into profanity: "Potzblitz! Never did I meet with language to equal thine. What wert thou as a civilian before thou didst enter the Army?"
"Graduate of the University of Würzburg,HerrSergeant," faltered the spectacled Guardsman, "andPrivat-docentin Chemistry and Philosophy. Occupying the post of assistant to Herr Weber, Dispensing Chemist, of Strahlsund, near Stettin."
"Sehrgut, Private Kunz," said the Sergeant, conscious of the grins lurking behind the respectful faces about him. "Tell us plainly, and without lying or skipping, what are these papers the fellow has got on him? Put him back on the seat, Braun and Kleiss, and sit on either side, each taking a wing. Now, Kunz, do thou begin!"
And the little sheaf that had been transferred from the horny clutches of the Sergeant, to the yellow-stained sensitive-looking fingers of the chemist's assistant, was subjected to the scrutiny of the weak eyes behind his large round spectacles, as sleepy-looking Westphalian villages of cottages with tall tiled roofs, grouped about squat, low-spired churches; and leagues of rye and barley, almost ready for the sickle, streamed by the half-glazed windows, all black in shadow and white in the clear, pure radiance of August's crescent moon.
Item, a worn letter in English handwriting of the legal kind, dated in the January previous, and directed to P. C. Breagh, Esq., Care of Frau Busch, Jaeger-strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen.Item, a passport issued some ten days previously, to the same person on application at the London Foreign Office, on disbursement of the sum of Two Shillings, and authorizing him, on payment of the proper dues and at his own risk, to proceedviaOstend to Berlin.Item, another passport, procured as a last resource—granting the said P. C. Breagh permission on the part of the Berlin Foreign Office, and as a strictly non-combatant British subject, to transfer himself,viaBelgium and Luxembourg, to French territory. Lastly, a half-sheet of tough Chancellory note-paper, covered with the large, closely-set, vigorous handwriting of the man who was meant when newspaper-editors and politicians, diplomats and monarchs, guttersnipes and generals, talked of Prussia. What would happen when that came under the spectacles of the ex-chemist's assistant? P. C. Breagh thirsted to know.
What happened was, that the Sergeant, rendered impatient by delay on the part of the spectacled one, grabbed at the documents and dropped them on the unclean floor. The half-sheet of Chancellory note was picked up by Valverden. He gave it one glance and said, smoothly and with an indefinable change in the tone of the voice that P. C. Breagh had thought so friendly:
"I would put this paper back with the rest and return them to their owner, Herr Sergeant, and prosecute no further inquiries, if I were you."
"Nu? ...Was? I cannot read the crabbed stuff that is written and printed on the other papers," grunted the Sergeant. "But this seems wholesome German.... What says it, then? Tell us, you, since thatgimpelin glasses can make nothing of it, for all his brag."
Valverden obeyed and read:
"The bearer of this is an Englishman, named Patrick Carolan Breagh, speaking German with a slight accent. Height five feet nine inches, age 23. Hair reddish and curling, complexion fresh, much freckled. Short, straight nose, gray eyes with dots of yellow, chin square, slightly cleft. Further his desire to proceed with our troops, if possible. I can personally vouch for his honesty and good faith.
signature of Otto von Bismarck
"BERLIN,"July, 1870."
P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next moment his aching wrists were released from the huge, hard grip of Privates Braun and Kleiss, and the muscular legs that had affectionately twined about his own, were withdrawn. Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the Sergeant handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and note-case. Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm, returned the half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the signature that had worked the miracle, without words, and looking coldly in its owner's face.
"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan. "But I'd no notion of the rather serious turn things were going to take. However, all's well that ends——"
His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:
"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the French Secret Service. Admitting that our own side act advisedly in employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy is—a spy!"
"But, hang it! you don't suppose——" Carolan choked out after a moment of angry bewilderment. And with the Sergeant's piggish little eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:
"I suppose nothing. Excuse me from further conversation."
The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other articles. Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only a glare. Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was performed in unbroken silence. P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to Coventry by one and all.
Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion that personage's document exhaled.
So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,—and in the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.
Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the metal roads. Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property. Strings of barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic stream out of harm's way.
Conveyance by railway—of a kind—was to be had upon terms prohibitory to all but the opulent. And disheveled ladies, pale or red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt Commandant—with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but for places on some Northward-going train....
Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian side-drums. P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his cage, asking:
"You have aLegitimationto proceed with the troops to Kreuznach? No? Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity of ascertaining why you were originally permitted. Here is the Commandant."
Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle, some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches—thrust upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was conscious of cutting a sorry figure. Conscious, too, of Valverden's supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.
No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.
Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University career foregone. It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory and took the starch out of his self-conceit.
Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden had gossiped with him as an equal—the other Guardsmen had been friendly in their rougher way. The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory note had changed everything. "As though one had blossomed out in plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly. "And I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only work upside down!"
Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment. The Sergeant had grunted. Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the other way. Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of his forage-cap. Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant, had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.
He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden. Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior, his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world. Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?
The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo! Had not scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.
Then why on earth.... But at this juncture the Halt Inspector returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes, unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum—and whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.
For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger, who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine. What Mr. Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram Street. But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask questions—which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested on Herr von Rosius.
"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use of the Guard Infantry? Show me yourLegitimations-Kartand military ticket, if you have one!—You have neither? ... Then how did you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to enter amilitär-zug? It is inconceivable that you should have managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"
Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh. He had wild ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the second—one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses disposed of that for good.
At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.
"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for. Longer by a yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin. Faith! and I stared at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld ye? Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings the place was Fleet Street. Now, on your honor, was it? Speak, or forever after hold your tongue!"
"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!" A great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C. Breagh.
The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty, topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots. Had you met him cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the Mother Country, you would have taken him—but for the revolver-pouch that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that, with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his shoulders—for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the good old English kind. But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the capacious chest:
"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on! For the life of you, don't refresh my memory! What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky at the start of a new campaign! Not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg, or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing House Square! Am I right now?"
"You've hit the nail, sir! You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr. Sala—and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he remembered my name and presented me to you!"
"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting. For if Chris Brotherton dares to say theThunderboltoffice and Fleet Street are anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be. But I'm interrupting a conversation...." He broke off, saluting the official. "Pray accept my apologies,HerrCommandant, I'll wait while you finish with my young friend."
The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart. Then said the kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the three:
"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a German guardroom. Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English schoolboy who was crazy to see a war. And the Commandant said something about turning tail at the first whistle of aBombensplitter—that's a shell-splinter. Though I'm pretty certain by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"
He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage trucks, clanked into motion again:
"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you. Kreuznach will be their detraining-point—that's all I can tell you. For the reason—and it's an uncommonly sound one!—that the newly mobilized men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints and stretch their new boots a bit. Begad! my own brogues would be the better of a day or two on the trees. But rheumatism and corns are the price one pays for experience—and the privilege of talking like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself. You've no business to be here, boyo! but since you are—use your eyes and brains to observe with—never be ashamed of running away when you can get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's living—don't be dragged into fighting on a side. Forget that you have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry one,—and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral, if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can! Twit me with Bull Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to do, not what I do!'"
He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of relief:
"Seven o'clock. Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria—barrack of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers. Suppose you come back there with me and have a bite and sup?"
Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for youthful bodies and souls. P. C. Breagh would have given a great deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation.... However, it was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.
That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to the big, bare, barrack-like Victoria. It was the Doctor's generous amends for an unintentional slight. Two days previously, at the Potsdam Railway Station, Berlin, when a companion had said to him: "Who's the enthusiastic young admirer who kowtowed to you? English, I should say, and you cut him unmercifully,"—he had answered, out of the whirl of great affairs:
"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path again. It's not my way to hurt a boy."
"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried; and the Doctor had answered:
"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."
Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet. Dust in the air parched the throat and got in the eyes. And the incessant rolling of the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast—and were off, almost on the heels of the first.
Division after Division of Cavalry—Uhlans in light or dark blue piped with red, and shiny black Lancerschapkas, Cuirassiers in white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding speed. Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came rolling after. With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.
On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me to the third of August and we are safe." This was the third of August. And the air was thick with something besides dust.
Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing things that had happened during the pregnant interval. How Forbes of theDaily News, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition, having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the frontier-line.
With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison. And the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier, a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on. These grimy stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche, Hagenau and Strasbourg.
Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the sevencorps d'arméeknown as the "Army of the Rhine." Upon the same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O., reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a Frenchvidette, in a wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went the imaginary frontier-line.
Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison. But about regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights, getting into position on a plateau half-way down.
And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while the Hohenzollerns hastily posted their four companies, one on each of the town's three bridges, and sent one forward on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans, up the Forbach Road, which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it trends to the west;—while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their horses in the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of them hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off the Forbach Road—and the Imperial cannonade was over, the artillerists retired, and nothing more had happened,—though thevidettesand patrols, Gallic and Teuton, had cracked away at each other from high noon till batlight.
Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came to the Victoria, every window of which was crowded with Prussian officers, eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting for breakfast, coffee, beer, wine and tobacco in every key of the human register.
Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the packed and roaring caravanserai—keeping guard over one of the little decrepit iron tables that stood under the dusty acacias—a little table that had a fly-spotted cloth upon it, and a great glass basin filled with sugar cubes, and was further adorned with brown rings made by the bottoms of coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends referred to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.
One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the scarlet, yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack regiment of British Light Dragoons, "a swell of the haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have termed him. With this splendid personage, who was generally referred to as "Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual with fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field, in a white, low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which orange and pink predominated, drab leggings and heavily nailed highlows. A Dolland field-glass was slung from his shoulders, and over a neighboring chair lay a huge box-coat, the multitudinous pockets of which appeared to contain his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag rolled out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the party, and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush with a patent collapsible handle had to be shifted before the sponge could be replaced; just as though Mr. Toole had thought out the costume and the comic business for some traveling Briton in a new farce.
You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness of the contrast of his own travel-stained griminess with the Major's dazzling brilliancy, when that personage shook hands with him and said it was going to be a hot day. Introduced by his kindly patron to the sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:
"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine—picked up at the station—just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of Guards Infantry——"
The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and observed: "And dashed good luck for him!" He added: "Doctor, if you recognized your baggage-van by that confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll admit it's served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"
"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding this morning!" avowed the genial Doctor. "But how was I to know that the Berlin painter who undertook to copy the crest from my family coat-of-arms had got a magnifying eye?"
Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping mustache, and speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian comedy:
"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the antiquity of your race, and so on. For in prehistoric days, I take it, goats were as big as cows are now!"
"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible an explanation. I'll salve my pride of pedigree with it next time I'm taken for a traveling quack, and Prussian soldiers suffering with indigestion apply to me for pills and black-dose." He added, with his pleasant laugh, catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity: "Actual fact, and no embroidery, I assure you! You understand that to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling, I'm exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!" He added, rather pointedly addressing the handsome cavalryman, "I've no special ambition to be shot as a combatant!"
"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly. "And, Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble individual may add his advice to the counsel you've already had from the man, by Jove! who of all men knows best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that 'ere lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin' plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with your saber and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed me this morning in charge of the landlord here, until you come back from the war-path safe and sound. Am I talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"
"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor. "And, Chris, if you'll listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to you, for your own sake. You've too much of what Tower and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not to know you're handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious panoply!"
The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping mustache with a fine white hand that wore a diamond-set signet:
"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness I've worn in sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where bullets are flying in real earnest?"
"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle, "so long as you thirst to do it and don't! That letter 'R' on your shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as cover where those bullets are plentiful. And with your influence, prospects in life, and position, you'd be an ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die at thirty-four."
Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the restless fire in his handsome eyes:
"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things have stood in my light ever since I was an urchin in knickerbockers. I've been Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry, andaide-de-campon the Duke's Staff, and I've never seen an army in the field, or smelt powder, except at Aldershot, or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at carbine-practice. What luck do you call that?"
"Dashed hard!" said Tower.
Brotherton went on:
"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment covered itself with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen no active service since—I've had no chance to find out whether I'm a real soldier, or a kid-glove one."
"Why not have exchanged——" began Tower. The Major shook his head.
"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason. My father, who served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea, was killed on Balaclava Day; and I was an only son. And my mother was a confidential Lady-in-Waiting, and knew where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful ambition was to be cold-watered.... And now that the dear soul has gone, and I'm on the Retired list—after fifteen years of Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and Hyde Park—out breaks the war that I've been sighing for. And, after hovering about theThunderboltoffice till every printer's devil knows me by name, and cooling my heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a writ—I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing—and secured, thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my life!"
He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet and golden uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver, gold-starred, white-plumed helmet, his fine face flushed with the battle-lust. And as he stretched out his hand across the spotty tablecloth, the feasting flies rose in a buzzing cloud.
"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that chance for you, and you know it, Chris, and that it's a pleasure to have you with me," said the genial voice, as the Doctor took the offered hand. "But the military array, my dear fellow! The wampum and war-paint—that's what I kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two." He added: "But here comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread and butter, and something like the cold sliced ham I'm dying for—if only it doesn't happen to be raw! So sit down and we'll fortify ourselves against possible short-commons at Mayence. For that's where the King is, with Moltke and the Great Headquarters. And that's the destination we take rail for at twelve noon."
He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their chairs, and P. C. Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown a rat: "As for the other chiefs, the Red Prince is—no one seems able to tell where—and the Crown Prince is on the frontier. Maybe we'll hear of him at Wissembourg by-and-by!"
"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it," asserted Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of butter, as Tower poured boiling milk and coffee into cups half-an-inch thick.
"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor, liberally piling slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his guests' plates, cutting bread and passing the pickles, "if the authorities panted to have English correspondents at their elbows while they're posting their pawns and pieces for the opening game!"
Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:
"You take it lightly, sir. But for the honor of our profession, we should extort recognition at the hands of these foreigners. We should, as representatives of a great Power, submit to no belittling. Wielding as we do——"
"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a Newspaper Press dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor. "Sure, 'tis we ourselves are the foreigners here—hard as it is of conception to a true-born Briton. And—since we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the forces of United Germany—the least we can do is to extract the necessary information painlessly!"
"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at this moment!" broke out Brotherton, hitting the table, "I feel as if I should go stark, staring crazy! Have I sacrificed what I have sacrificed—and—and borne what I have borne, to trot like a stray tyke at the tail of a moving Army—picking up such scraps as may be thrown me from day to day? I tell you, sir, the mere idea is horrible to me! I cannot put it more mildly. My blood is not yet chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...." He pushed away his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his belt, and taking up the cloak that had been thrown over a neighboring chair. "I will ask you to excuse me! I have not yet received my papers back from the Halt Commandant. I will call upon him now!"
"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in civilian company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful, emptying his coffee-cup, and reaching for the white felt hat and the box-coat.
"Come back about ten—I may have a scrap or two of news worth hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable good temper; and with a horsey touch of the hat on Tower's part, and a sulkily dignified salute from the Major, the tall soldierly figure in its scarlet and blue and gold, and the less dignified personality in the clothes that might have been worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went away together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of officers, who had been crowded out of the Hotel.
"I'm glad Tower's gone with him. He's in a frame of mind that won't make for pleasant relations with Prussian transport-officers," quoth the Doctor, looking after the retreating couple with something like a twinkle and something like a sigh. "But he's a grand fellow!—a splendid fellow is Brotherton!—even if he sometimes reminds me of the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy, all the world is wrong except thee and me, and thou is a little wrong sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"
And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at the idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his breakfast again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on the strong ham-sausage and weak coffee, with the words:
"Bad policy—neglecting rations. Must stoke when fuel for the human engine is to be had, if you're going to chronicle the deeds of an army that fights as it marches. And when you've cleaned your plate, and drunk another cup of coffee, you shall tell me why you came here and what you want to do."
He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had stated the nature of his aims and ambitions; touching upon his discouragements as briefly as might be:
"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed that you'd set your heart on something of the kind, when I saw you tumble out of that troop-wagon with a note book sticking out of your jacket-pocket. And so old Knewbit financed? Sporting of him!—and he deserves that his letters should be worth reading. Call 'em 'Experiences of a Tyke at the Tail of an Army.'" He added, his bright brown eyes twinkling through their gold-rimmed glasses. "For that's where you've got to be!"
He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted iron chair and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety back his folded arms, short and strong, with small muscular hands, sunburned like his bearded face and thick bull-neck.
"I am not joking, my young acquaintance. Can't you understand that to keep abreast with even a secondary Staff in the war-field you have to sweat out money at every pore? And—without gold for transport or thalers fortrinkgelt—or seasoned knowledge to help you even if your pockets were full, what can you accomplish? I tell you frankly—nothing at all! But if you'll follow on the fringe of a Division, marching with the hangers-on and officers' servants—you'll get many a scrap of useful news and many a meaty bone of valuable information tossed to you day by day. And even with the rear of the Army Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head and bloody bones—take the assurance from me. Will you—with the advice?"
The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that the little one hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as he said, blinking as though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland Railroad had got into his eye:
"Yes, sir, and thank you! I shall never forget how good you've been to me!" and got reply:
"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you are, more by luck than grace, use your eyes and stuff your memory with things worth keeping. Now as my time is precious,—is there anything more you want to know?"
"Only one thing.... I have been puzzled by an—an incident that happened to a—fellow in my own position." P. C. Breagh boggled horribly: "Was regularly set on getting to the Front—hadn't a notion how to set about it—when he—accidentally—managed to get hold of a—kind of official authorization. An informal pass, certifying the bearer as trustworthy—written and signed by Count Bismarck himself...."
"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking the ash off the huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it seems to me!"
Said P. C. Breagh:
"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper. It seemed to smooth away every difficulty. But later, when he found himself in touch with Prussian Army men—they,—not only the gentlemen privates qualifying for commissions, but the common rankers,—dropped him like a hot potato once they knew! And—I'd like to know the reason why they cut me—I mean him?—because they supposed him to belong to the Secret Intelligence Department? 'A spy is—a spy! Excuse me from further conversation!' His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the hateful words.
"I—understand." The Doctor stroked his beard. "And previously this young Englishman and the rank-and-file of the Guard Infantry"—P. C. Breagh kept as straight an upper-lip as was possible—"had chatted together upon friendly terms?"
"That was it. He had got on splendidly with them—one fellow especially. And—it hurt, being suddenly sent to Coventry!..."
"And does it strike you"—there was infinite sagacity in the clear brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position, prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth—on the eve of hostilities with France?"
A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped. His eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle. He exploded:
"Oh, hang it! I never thought of anything so—so beastly.... I wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em.... But that Government should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army—of course I never thought of that. It's not—cricket, is it, sir?"
The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting party of officers not far off. He said, lowering his voice:
"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you? 'Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse. Go up mill-dam, fall down whoppo, dat blank verse.' Prussian military authority may hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction. Though they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord! By the way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather luckily for your ambitions!—where did you come across him? 'An English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!'"
P. C. Breagh explained:
"He did know something of me, sir!—though it was the merest chance—our meeting. Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my landlady's. And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the Declaration of War."
It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.
"Phew! So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their Reserve andLandwehr. Clever—uncommonly! Possibly it's not business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of information. And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall annex your nugget—do you hear? In return—I've a pass for an extra groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance, the cowardly beggar! And—supposing you're not too proud—I'll take you with me as far as Mayence."
"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"
"Leave thanking for the present." He pulled out the gold chronometer, secured by its twisted thong. "Ten o'clock, and here come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 'with a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not craft enough to color.' No news to be had? No starting for Mayence before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the authorities?"
"Deuce a scrap!"
"Devil a minute!"
They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting. They had got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper, after, to do him justice, very little delay. But of intelligence, not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial Guards.
"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."
At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray. He said, his quick eye noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in his hand:
"Those officers have heard—something that is not Ancient History. And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows; they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's indifferent grub!"
It was true. In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room, men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached, staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.
"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel von Pestel...."
"Something up...." Towers adjusted his eyeglass. Brotherton, catching a sentence shouted by an officer of ajägerbattalion to another green-coat leaning from a window on the second-floor, jumped as though he had been prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming face upon his friend:
"A telegram has come in... There has been serious fighting at Saarbrück. Did they lie to us at the station, then? Officers and gentlemen——"
"Softly, Chris!" The Doctor's hand upon his arm checked him on the verge of a fiery outburst. "I fancy they've a right to hold back intelligence dispatched from Headquarters when the senders mark the wire 'Delay.'"
"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant. Details would be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding with a peculiar smile, "Or at least I, in my inexperience, am inclined to think so."
Came the quick answer:
"You can have details now—without troubling the Commandant! Full—well, as fully as I got them—under a strict undertaking of secrecy for four hours—at six o'clock this morning!"
Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been crimson. Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills of excitement coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:
"Bravo, Doctor! And you had it up youi sleeve all the time. 'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss Le Grange says at Astley's in theSpecter's Bride."
"There's not so much to unfold. But from, eight thousand to ten thousand French troops made an attack on Saarbrück yesterday. Some battalions of the 8th Prussian Army Corps had augmented the original garrison, and their nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the rear. A mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"
Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off. Brotherton gloomed heavily. The Doctor went on:
"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the heights, with the Imperial Staff, to see the show—an astonishing spectacle it must have been. Frossard, in the center with supports drawn from the Second Corps—Marshal Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from the Third. And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who crossed the river at Saarguemines."
Queried Tower:
"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one drop the bone, he didn't stick to it?"
The Doctor returned:
"No—and that's the puzzle of the whole affair. The whole glorious display resolved itself into a cannonade, with occupation of the heights on the left bank, and nothing further. Though the French foreposts actually occupied the three bridges and held the town."
Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:
"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy. Got up to blood the young'un—cockerel of the Walk Imperial. Geewhillikins!—What telegrams Nap must have fired off to St. Cloud!"
"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long before they get to us," said the Doctor, shrugging. "Where are you off to, Brotherton?"
Brotherton returned—and the tone was offensive, if the words were not:
"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think necessary—wire the news to Printing House Square."
The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:
"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the authorities. They bridled my tongue, but left my pen unhampered. Knowing, of course, that the British Public must wait for its news until breakfast-time to-morrow. Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"
The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as the livid mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled his ordinarily calm and placid visage:
"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear me. I was asking you what you meant, by G——! in stealing a march on the man you've called your friend?"
The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed glasses. Anger darkened his handsome sunburnt face. He drew himself up and said, speaking simply and with dignity:
"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'? By taking the apology they give one here for a cold tub at cockcrow and going over to the Hauptmann's office with our papers while you and Tower were sleeping like——"
"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower. "And so we were. And it's a case of the early bird—and not the first time, I'll swear—by thousands! And, Brotherton—you ought to apologize. You were simply infernally rude just now!"
Said the Major loftily:
"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with unfairly. I do not withdraw the words I used. But I comprehend that my senior in the service of the paper is not anxious to share the credit of the earliest intelligence with regard to what is taking place on the frontier just now."
"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry for!"
"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of Prussia!"
The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look of generous sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer, handsomer face, with the stamp of arrogance and vanity and pride marring its manly beauty, confronted each other in silence, until, with an impatient snarl, Brotherton swung round upon his heel.
"Look here!—look here!—where the merry hell are you off to?" Tower spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the splendid scarlet tunic. "Not going to part company for a misunderstanding—hey?"
"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned bitterly, freeing himself from the detaining hand, "since the jealousy that hampered me in my military career threatens to mar my prospects now. Where I am going to I cannot tell you—probably you will hear from me, but I cannot promise it. Good-bye! Or—if you prefer it—Auf wiedersehen!"
He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished P. C. Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned with a slight bow, picked up his cap and cloak and strode away over the sun-dried grass and the hot yellow gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates that ended the drive.
"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said the Doctor, his spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter, as the gallant figure in its gorgeous scarlet and golden trappings was swallowed in a crowd of blue uniforms: "If you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of something else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't anxious to share with you, and that is a reputation for not being a hot-headed, unreasonable young ass!"
"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said Tower, wiping his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued silk handkerchief, "and if he comes across any of those Transport swells there'll be the deuce to pay. He's got the bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the ribbons, by George!—and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame himself to a dead certainty. Shall I go after him and try tosootherhim down a bit?"
The Doctor shrugged assent.
"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I have to write a letter or two, and pack, or rout my man out of the servants' quarters to do it. As for you, my boyo!"—he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen, humorous glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the railway grime—"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm, and besides—my absconding Berliner isn't described on his passport as a mulatto!"
Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in the attempt to pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined the Doctor's little party at the station, having apparently recovered his serenity of temper, and abandoned his determination to forswear his senior's company.
Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly distributed among the troops continually parading for departure, and the train-loads of soldiers passing through. And the exodus of panic-stricken visitors, flying from the little up-Rhine watering places, in apprehension of the arrival of the Emperor with his mitrailleuses, continued; until, in another hour, the shrunken finger of the Warlock wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to the transport of men and munitions of war.
Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach came jolting into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the chalk hieroglyphics that signified their official emptiness, P. C. Breagh was destined to behold personages of the loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness, German Serene Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses, with their children and lap-dogs, their maids,chefs, coachmen, lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles without precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation other than that afforded by an empty sack or an armful of straw.
The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of the Third Army Corps—huge men equipped as dragoons—to Mayence, afforded accommodation to the men, horses and vans of the Doctor's party. Long before the fortifications came in sight the roads were blotted out by marching columns, and the fields were dotted with moving transport-trains.
At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with the passage of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and the measured tramping of infantry battalions, the Doctor, stepping from the train, was seized upon by friends. Yet after the first eager interchange of interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.
"And—put this in your pocket—it'll be a help to you if it doesn't hang you. They're lithographed by the Prussian War Department, and every German officer has one. And here's something else, a lot more use than the revolver those chaps stole from you. You'll know better than to use it unless in case of need!"
This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments of France, with certain military routes very nicely marked in red upon it. While the something else proved to be a wicker-covered metal pocket-flask, containing about half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.
The donor added:
"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things for later description, and never be caught taking notes, or fighting on a side! And—be on your guard with women, pretty ones especially. And—there's a scrap of paper in the pocket of the map-cover, may come in handy, at a pinch. No, no thanks! General von Reigen, that's the light blue Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to Tower—tells me Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de Holland. If so, the King won't be far off. He thinks Bismarck has gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it. There goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big buck-nigger on the box. Shows his Highness must be somewhere hereabouts. As for the Crown Prince, nobody will say anything. He's marching—with an end in view. And they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly—and that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their chassepots. Well, they'll have practice enough before long. Good luck, and good-bye!"
The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved to be a five-pound note, placed there by the hand that later penned those wonderful war-letters—under a wayside hedge, at a corner of a plank bivouac-table, on the zinc counter of a wine-shop filled with carousing soldiers—at the ebony and tortoiseshelléscritoireof Madame la Marquise, in the boudoir of the château that had been so sorely battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.
Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had no power to chill the big warm heart that prompted your many deeds of generosity. It molders in a coffin now, and the decorations are dimming with dust in a glass-topped box. But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting for you rewards and honors, in comparison with which the most coveted earthly insignia were vilest dirt and dross.
Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any miller's:
"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt if he tries to kick or bite—I'll creep in under the tilt and take a forty-winks. Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a bit!"
The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel," laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips. For the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.
The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army Corps in trying to find it. Staffs, squadrons, batteries, battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering platforms of rock.
Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are bloody blisters inside the ragged socks. The American who had been so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village, drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up "Murray." His late companion had refused to give in, and perseverance had won its reward. Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach, where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty battalions until he could hobble no more.
The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather luke-warm beer.
The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed. A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite. Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a blazing August noon.
Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.
Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach, south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.
So they marched—as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.
Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.