The Maids of Paradise
by Robert W. Chambers · English · Gutenberg #28295 · 616,908 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Maids of Paradise
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Maids of Paradise
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Release date: March 9, 2009 [eBook #28295]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28295
Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAIDS OF PARADISE ***
E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 28295-h.htm or 28295-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/8/2/9/28295/28295-h/28295-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/8/2/9/28295/28295-h.zip)
THE MAIDS OF PARADISE
A Novel
by
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Author of "Cardigan" "The Conspirators" "Maid-at-Arms" etc.
Illustrated
[Illustration: "'LOOK THERE!' SHE CRIED, IN TERROR" [See p. 81]]
[Illustration]
New York and London
Harper & Brothers
Publishers 1903
Copyright, 1902, by Robert W. Chambers.
All rights reserved.
Published September, 1903.
PREFACE
As far as the writer knows, no treasure-trains were actually sent to
the port of Lorient from the arsenal at Brest. The treasures remained
at Brest.
Concerning the German armored cruiser _Augusta_, the following are the
facts: About the middle of December she forced the blockade at
Wilhelmshafen and ran for Ireland, where, owing to the complaisance of
the British authorities, she was permitted to coal.
From there she steamed towards Brest, capturing a French merchant
craft off that port, another near Rochefort, and finally a third. That
ended her active career during the war; a French frigate chased her
into the port of Vigo and kept her there.
To conclude, certain localities and certain characters have been
sufficiently disguised to render recognition improbable. This is
proper because "The Lizard" is possibly alive to-day, as are also the
mayor of Paradise, Sylvia Elven, Jacqueline, and Speed, the latter
having barely escaped death in the _Virginius_ expedition. The
original of Buckhurst now lives in New York, and remains a type whose
rarity is its only recommendation.
Those who believe they recognize the Countess de Vassart are doubtless
in error. Mornac, long dead, is safe in his disguise; Tric-Trac was
executed on the Place de la Roquette, and celebrated in doggerel by an
unspeakable ballad writer. There remains Scarlett; dead or alive, I
wish him well.
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.
Ormond, Florida, _Feb. 7_, 1902.
[Illustration: To E.M.C.]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. At the Telegraph 3
II. The Government Interferes 21
III. La Trappe 34
IV. Prisoners 50
V. The Immortals 65
VI. The Game Begins 87
VII. A Struggle Foreshadowed 110
VIII. A Man to Let 136
IX. The Road to Paradise 159
X. The Town-Crier 171
XI. In Camp 180
XII. Jacqueline 195
XIII. Friends 207
XIV. The Path of the Lizard 229
XV. Forewarned 253
XVI. A Restless Man 265
XVII. The Circus 280
XVIII. A Guest-Chamber 303
XIX. Trécourt Garden 318
XX. The Semaphore 339
XXI. Like Her Ancestors 353
XXII. The Secret 381
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'LOOK THERE!' SHE CRIED, IN TERROR" _Frontispiece_
"'ACROSS THAT MEADOW,' SAID THE YOUNG GIRL" _Facing p_. 22
"TO RIGHT AND LEFT, PRUSSIAN LANCERS WERE RIDING" " 62
"A COMPANY OF TURCOS CAME UP" " 74
"'HALT! HALT!' HE SHOUTED" " 84
"EVERY BRIDGE WAS GUARDED" " 124
"SISTERS OF CHARITY WERE GIVING FIRST AID" " 132
"I WAS ON MY KNEES" " 298
PART FIRST
THE MAIDS OF PARADISE
I
AT THE TELEGRAPH
On the third day of August, 1870, I left Paris in search of John
Buckhurst.
On the 4th of August I lost all traces of Mr. Buckhurst near the
frontier, in the village of Morsbronn. The remainder of the day I
spent in acquiring that "general information" so dear to the
officials in Paris whose flimsy systems of intelligence had already
begun to break down.
On August 5th, about eight o'clock in the morning, the military
telegraph instrument in the operator's room over the temporary
barracks of the Third Hussars clicked out the call for urgency, not
the usual military signal, but a secret sequence understood only by
certain officers of the Imperial Military Police. The operator on duty
therefore stepped into my room and waited while I took his place at
the wire.
I had been using the code-book that morning, preparing despatches for
Paris, and now, at the first series of significant clicks, I dropped
my left middle finger on the key and repeated the signal to Paris,
using the required variations. Then I rose, locked the door, and
returned to the table.
"Who is this?" came over the wire in the secret code; and I answered
at once: "Inspector of Foreign Division, Imperial Military Police, on
duty at Morsbronn, Alsace."
After considerable delay the next message arrived in the Morse code:
"Is that you, Scarlett?"
And I replied: "Yes. Who are you? Why do you not use the code? Repeat
the code signal and your number."
The signal was repeated, then came the message: "This is the
Tuileries. You have my authority to use the Morse code for the sake of
brevity. Do you understand? I am Jarras. The Empress is here."
Instantly reassured by the message from Colonel Jarras, head of the
bureau to which I was attached, I answered that I understood. Then the
telegrams began to fly, all in the Morse code:
_Jarras._ "Have you caught Buckhurst?"
_I._ "No."
_Jarras._ "How did he get away?"
_I._ "There's confusion enough on the frontier to cover the escape of
a hundred thieves."
_Jarras._ "Your reply alarms the Empress. State briefly the present
position of the First Corps."
_I._ "The First Corps still occupies the heights in a straight line
about seven kilometres long; the plateau is covered with vineyards.
Two small rivers are in front of us; the Vosges are behind us; the
right flank pivots on Morsbronn, the left on Neehwiller; the centre
covers Wörth. We have had forty-eight hours' heavy rain."
_Jarras._ "Where are the Germans?"
_I._ "Precise information not obtainable at headquarters of the First
Corps."
_Jarras._ "Does the Marshal not know where the Germans are?"
_I._ "Marshal MacMahon does not know definitely."
_Jarras._ "Does the Marshal not employ his cavalry? Where are they?"
_I._ "Septeuil's cavalry of the second division lie between
Elsasshausen and the Grosserwald; Michel's brigade of heavy cavalry
camps at Eberbach; the second division of cavalry of the reserve,
General Vicomte de Bonnemain, should arrive to-night and go into
bivouac between Reichshofen and the Grosserwald."
There was a long pause; I lighted a cigar and waited. After a while
the instrument began again:
_Jarras._ "The Empress desires to know where the château called La
Trappe is."
_I._ "La Trappe is about four kilometres from Morsbronn, near the
hamlet of Trois-Feuilles."
_Jarras._ "It is understood that Madame de Vassart's group of
socialists are about to leave La Trappe for Paradise, in Morbihan. It
is possible that Buckhurst has taken refuge among them. Therefore you
will proceed to La Trappe. Do you understand?"
_I._ "Perfectly."
_Jarras._ "If Buckhurst is found you will bring him to Paris at once.
Shoot him if he resists arrest. If the community at La Trappe has not
been warned of a possible visit from us, you will find and arrest the
following individuals:
"Claude Tavernier, late professor of law, Paris School of Law;
"Achille Bazard, ex-instructor in mathematics, Fontainebleau
Artillery School;
"Dr. Leo Delmont, ex-interne, Charity Hospital, Paris;
"Mlle. Sylvia Elven, lately of the Odéon;
"The Countess de Vassart, well known for her eccentricities.
"You will affix the government seals to the house as usual; you will
then escort the people named to the nearest point on the Belgian
frontier. The Countess de Vassart usually dresses like a common
peasant. Look out that she does not slip through your fingers. Repeat
your instructions." I repeated them from my memoranda.
There was a pause, then click! click! the instrument gave the code
signal that the matter was ended, and I repeated the signal, opened my
code-book, and began to translate the instructions into cipher for
safety's sake.
When I had finished and had carefully destroyed my first pencilled
memoranda, the steady bumping of artillery passing through the street
under the windows drew my attention.
It proved to be the expected batteries of the reserve going into park,
between the two brigades of Raoult's division of infantry. I
telegraphed the news to the observatory on the Col du Pigeonnier, then
walked back to the window and looked out.
It had begun to rain again; down the solitary street of Morsbronn the
artillery rolled, jolting; cannoneers, wrapped in their wet, gray
overcoats, limbers, caissons, and horses plastered with mud. The slim
cannon, with canvas-wrapped breeches uptilted, dripped from their
depressed muzzles, like lank monsters slavering and discouraged.
A battery of Montigny mitrailleuses passed, grotesque, hump-backed
little engines of destruction. To me there was always something
repulsive in the shape of these stunted cannon, these malicious metal
cripples with their heavy bodies and sinister, filthy mouths.
Before the drenched artillery had rattled out of Morsbronn the rain
once more fell in floods, pouring a perpendicular torrent from the
transparent, gray heavens, and the roar of the downpour on slate roofs
and ancient gables drowned the pounding of the passing cannon.
Where the Vosges mountains towered in obscurity a curtain of rain
joined earth and sky. The rivers ran yellow, brimful, foaming at the
fords. The semaphore on the mountain of the Pigeonnier was not
visible; but across the bridge, where the Gunstett highway spanned the
Sauer, gray masses of the Niederwald loomed through the rain.
Somewhere in that spectral forest Prussian cavalry were hidden,
watching the heights where our drenched divisions lay. Behind that
forest a German army was massing, fresh from the combat in the north,
where the tragedy of Wissembourg had been enacted only the day before,
in the presence of the entire French army--the awful spectacle of a
single division of seven thousand men suddenly enveloped and crushed
by seventy thousand Germans.
The rain fell steadily but less heavily. I went back to my instrument
and called up the station on the Col du Pigeonnier, asking for
information, but got no reply, the storm doubtless interfering.
Officers of the Third Hussars were continually tramping up and down
the muddy stairway, laughing, joking, swearing at the rain, or
shouting for their horses, when the trumpets sounded in the street
below.
I watched the departing squadron, splashing away down the street,
which was now running water like a river; then I changed my civilian
clothes for a hussar uniform, sent a trooper to find me a horse, and
sat down by the window to stare at the downpour and think how best I
might carry out my instructions to a successful finish.
The colony at La Trappe was, as far as I could judge, a product of
conditions which had, a hundred years before, culminated in the French
Revolution. Now, in 1870, but under different circumstances, all
France was once more disintegrating socially. Opposition to the
Empire, to the dynasty, to the government, had been seething for
years; now the separate crystals which formed on the edges of the
boiling under-currents began to grow into masses which, adhering to
other masses, interfered with the healthy functions of national life.
Until recently, however, while among the dissatisfied there existed a
certain tendency towards cohesion, and while, moreover, adhesive
forces mutually impelled separate groups of malcontents to closer
union, the government found nothing alarming in the menaces of
individuals or of isolated groups. The Emperor always counted on such
opposition in Paris; the palace of the Tuileries was practically a
besieged place, menaced always by the faubourgs--a castle before which
lay eternally the sullen, unorganized multitude over which the
municipal police kept watch.
That opposition, hatred, and treason existed never worried the
government, but that this opposition should remain unorganized
occupied the authorities constantly.
Groups of individuals who proclaimed themselves devotees of social
theories interested us only when the groups grew large or exhibited
tendencies to unite with similar groups.
Clubs formed to discuss social questions were usually watched by the
police; violent organizations were not observed very closely, but
clubs founded upon moderate principles were always closely surveyed.
In the faubourgs, where every street had its bawling orator, and where
the red flag was waved when the community had become sufficiently
drunk, the government was quietly content to ignore proceedings,
wisely understanding that the mouths of street orators were the
safety-valves of the faubourgs, and that through them the ebullitions
of the under-world escaped with nothing more serious than a few vinous
shrieks. There were, however, certain secret and semi-secret
organizations which caused the government concern. First among these
came the International Society of Workingmen, with all its
affiliations--the "Internationale," as it was called. In its wake
trailed minor societies, some mild and harmless, some dangerous and
secret, some violent, advocating openly the destruction of all
existing conditions. Small groups of anarchists had already attracted
groups of moderate socialistic tendencies to them, and had absorbed
them or tainted them with doctrines dangerous to the state.
In time these groups began to adhere even more closely to the large
bodies of the people; a party was born, small at first, embodying
conflicting communistic principles.
The government watched it. Presently it split, as do all parties; yet
here the paradox was revealed of a small party splitting into two
larger halves. To one of these halves adhered the Red Republicans, the
government opposition of the Extreme Left, the Opportunists, the
Anarchists, certain Socialists, the so-called Communards, and finally
the vast mass of the sullen, teeming faubourgs. It became a party
closely affiliated with the Internationale, a colossal, restless,
unorganized menace, harmless only because unorganized.
And the police were expected to keep it harmless. The other remaining
half of the original party began to dwindle almost immediately, until
it became only a group. _With one exception_, all those whom the
police and the government regarded as inclined to violence left the
group. There remained, _with this one exception_, a nucleus of
earnest, thoughtful people whose creed was in part the creed of the
Internationale, the creed of universal brotherhood, equality before
the law, purity of individual living as an example and an incentive to
a national purity.
To this inoffensive group came one day a young widow, the Countess de
Vassart, placing at their disposal her great wealth, asking only to be
received among them as a comrade.
Her history, as known to the police, was peculiar and rather sad: at
sixteen she had been betrothed to an elderly, bull-necked colonel of
cavalry, the notorious Count de Vassart, who needed what money she
might bring him to maintain his reputation as the most brilliantly
dissolute old rake in Paris.
At sixteen, Éline de Trécourt was a thin, red-haired girl, with rather
large, grayish eyes. Speed and I saw her once, sitting in her carriage
before the Ministry of War a year after her marriage. There had been
bad news from Mexico, and there were many handsome equipages standing
at the gates of the war office, where lists of killed and wounded were
posted every day.
I noticed her particularly because of her reputed wealth and the evil
reputation of her husband, who, it was said, was so open in his
contempt for her that the very afternoon of their marriage he was seen
publicly driving on the Champs-Élysées with a pretty and popular
actress of the Odéon.
As I passed, glancing up at her, the sadness of her face impressed me,
and I remember wondering how much the death of her husband had to do
with it--for his name had appeared in the evening papers under the
heading, "Killed in Action."
It was several years later before the police began to take an interest
in the Comtesse Éline de Vassart. She had withdrawn entirely from
society, had founded a non-sectarian free school in Passy, was
interested in certain charities and refuges for young working-girls,
when on a visit to England, she met Karl Marx, then a fugitive and
under sentence of death.
From that moment social questions occupied her, and her doings
interested the police, especially when she returned to Paris and took
her place once more in Royalist circles, where every baby was bred
from the cradle to renounce the Tuileries, the Emperor, and all his
works.
Serious, tender-hearted, charitable, and intensely interested in all
social reforms, she shocked the conservative society of the noble
faubourg, aroused the distrust of the government, offended the
Tuileries, and finally committed the mistake of receiving at her own
house that notorious group of malcontents headed by Henri Rochefort,
whose revolutionary newspaper, _La Marseillaise_, doubtless needed
pecuniary support.
Her dossier--for, alas! the young girl already had a dossier--was
interesting, particularly in its summing-up of her personal
character:
"To the naive ignorance of a convent pensionnaire, she adds an
innocence of mind, a purity of conduct, and a credulity which render
her an easy prey to the adroit, who play upon her sympathies. She is
dangerous only as a source of revenue for dangerous men."
It was from her salon that young Victor Noir went to his death at
Auteuil on the 10th of January; and possibly the shock of the murder
and the almost universal conviction that justice under the Empire was
hopeless drove the young Countess to seek a refuge in the country
where, at her house of La Trappe, she could quietly devote her life to
helping the desperately wretched, and where she could, in security,
hold council with those who also had chosen to give their lives to
the noblest of all works--charity and the propaganda of universal
brotherhood.
And here, at La Trappe, the young aristocrat first donned the robe of
democracy, dedicated her life and fortune to the cause, and worked
with her own delicate hands for every morsel of bread that passed her
lips.
Now this was all very well while it lasted, for her father, the
choleric old Comte de Trécourt, had died rich, and the young girl's
charities were doubled, and there was nobody to stay her hand or draw
the generous purse-strings; nobody to advise her or to stop her. On
the contrary, there were plenty of people standing around with
outstretched, itching, and sometimes dirty hands, ready to snatch at
the last centime.
Who was there to administer her affairs, who among the generous,
impetuous, ill-balanced friends that surrounded her? Not the
noble-minded geographer, Elisée Réclus; not the fiery citizen-count,
Rochefort; not the handsome, cultivated Gustave Flourens, already
"fey" with the doom to which he had been born; not that kindly
visionary, the Vicomte de Coursay-Delmont, now discarding his ancient
title to be known only among his grateful, penniless patients as
Doctor Delmont; and surely not Professor Tavernier, nor yet that
militant hermit, the young Chevalier de Gray, calling himself plain
Monsieur Bazard, who chose democracy instead of the brilliant career
to which Grammont had destined him, and whose sensitive and perhaps
diseased mind had never recovered from the shock of the murder of his
comrade, Victor Noir.
But the simple life at La Trappe, the negative protest against the
Empire and all existing social conditions, the purity of motive, the
serene and inspired self-abnegation, could not save the colony at La
Trappe nor the young châtelaine from the claws of those who prey upon
the innocence of the generous.
And so came to this ideal community one John Buckhurst, a stranger,
quiet, suave, deadly pale, a finely moulded man, with delicately
fashioned hands and feet, and two eyes so colorless that in some
lights they appeared to be almost sightless.
In a month from that time he was the power that moved that community
even in its most insignificant machinery. With marvellous skill he
constructed out of that simple republic of protestants an absolute
despotism. And he was the despot.
The avowed object of the society was the advancement of universal
brotherhood, of liberty and equality, the annihilation of those
arbitrary barriers called national frontiers--in short, a society for
the encouragement of the millennium, which, however, appeared to be
coy.
And before the eyes of his brother dreamers John Buckhurst quietly
cancelled the entire programme at one stroke, and nobody understood
that it was cancelled when, in a community founded upon equality and
fraternity, he raised another edifice to crown it, a sort of working
model as an example to the world, but _limited_. And down went
democracy without a sound.
This working model was a superior community which was established at
the Breton home of the Countess de Vassart, a large stone house in the
hamlet of Paradise, in Morbihan.
An intimation from the Tuileries interrupted a meeting of the council
at the house in Paradise; an arrest was threatened--that of Professor
Réclus--and the indignant young Countess was requested to retire to
her château of La Trappe. She obeyed, but invited her guests to
accompany her. Among those who accepted was Buckhurst.
About this time the government began to take a serious interest in
John Buckhurst. On the secret staff of the Imperial Military Police
were always certain foreigners--among others, myself and a young man
named James Speed; and Colonel Jarras had already decided to employ us
in watching Buckhurst, when war came on France like a bolt from the
blue, giving the men of the Secret Service all they could attend to.
In the shameful indecision and confusion attending the first few days
after the declaration of war against Prussia, Buckhurst slipped
through our fingers, and I, for one, did not expect to hear of him
again. But I did not begin to know John Buckhurst, for, within three
days after he had avoided an encounter with us, Buckhurst was believed
to have committed one of the most celebrated crimes of the century.
The secret history of that unhappy war will never be fully written.
Prince Bismarck has let the only remaining cat out of the bag; the
other cats are dead. Nor will all the strange secrets of the Tuileries
ever be brought to light, fortunately.
Still, at this time, there is no reason why it should not be generally
known that the crown jewels of France were menaced from the very first
by a conspiracy so alarming and apparently so irresistible that the
Emperor himself believed, even in the beginning of the fatal campaign,
that it might be necessary to send the crown jewels of France to the
Bank of England for safety.
On the 19th of July, the day that war was declared, certain of the
crown jewels, kept temporarily at the palace of the Tuileries, were
sent under heavy guards to the Bank of France. Every precaution was
taken; yet the great diamond crucifix of Louis XI. was missing when
the guard under Captain Siebert turned over the treasures to the
governor of the Bank of France.
Instantly absolute secrecy was ordered, which I, for one, believed to
be a great mistake. Yet the Emperor desired it, doubtless for the same
reasons which always led him to suppress any affair which might give
the public an idea that the opposition to the government was worthy of
the government's attention.
So the news of the robbery never became public property, but from one
end of France to the other the gendarmerie, the police, local,
municipal, and secret, were stirred up to activity.
Within forty-eight hours, an individual answering Buckhurst's
description had sold a single enormous diamond for two hundred and
fifty thousand francs to a dealer in Strasbourg, a Jew named Fishel
Cohen, who, counting on the excitement produced by the war and the
topsy-turvy condition of the city, supposed that such a transaction
would create no interest.
Mr. Cohen was wrong; an hour after he had recorded the transaction at
the Strasbourg Diamond Exchange he and the diamond were on their way
to Paris, in charge of a detective. A few hours later the stone was
identified at the Tuileries as having been taken from the famous
crucifix of Louis XI.
From Fishel Cohen's agonized description of the man who had sold him
the diamond, Colonel Jarras believed he recognized John Buckhurst. But
how on earth Buckhurst had obtained access to the jewels, or how he
had managed to spirit away the cross from the very centre of the
Tuileries, could only be explained through the theory of accomplices
among the trusted intimates of the imperial entourage. And if there
existed such a conspiracy, who was involved?
It is violating no secret now to admit that every soul in the
Tuileries, from highest to lowest, was watched. Even the governor of
the Bank of France did not escape the attentions of the secret police.
For it was certain that somebody in the imperial confidence had
betrayed that confidence in a shocking manner, and nobody could know
how far the conspiracy had spread, or who was involved in the most
daring and shameless robbery that had been perpetrated in France since
Cardinal de Rohan and his gang stole the celebrated necklace of Marie
Antoinette.
Nor was it at all certain that the remaining jewels of the French
crown were safe in Paris. The precautions taken to insure their
safety, and the result of those precautions, are matters of history,
but nobody outside of a small, strangely assorted company of people
could know what actually happened to the crown jewels of France in
1870, or what pieces, if any, are still missing.
My chase after Buckhurst began as soon as Colonel Jarras could summon
me; and as Buckhurst had last been heard of in Strasbourg, I went
after him on a train loaded with red-legged, uproarious soldiers, who
sang all day:
"Have you seen Bismarck
Drinking in the gay café,
With that other brother spark--
Monsieur Badinguet?"
and had drunk themselves into a shameful frenzy long before the train
thundered into Avricourt.
I tracked Buckhurst to Morsbronn, where I lost all traces of him; and
now here I was with my orders concerning the unfortunate people at La
Trappe, staring out at the dismal weather and wondering where my
wild-goose chase would end.
I went to the door and called for the military telegraph operator,
whose instrument I had been permitted to monopolize. He came, a
pleasant, jaunty young fellow, munching a crust of dry bread and
brushing the crumbs from his scarlet trousers.
"In case I want to communicate with you I'll signal the tower on the
Col du Pigeonnier," I said. "Come up to the loft overhead."
The loft in the house which had now been turned into a cavalry
barracks was just above my room, a large attic under the dripping
gables, black with the stains of centuries, littered with broken
furniture, discarded clothing, and the odds and ends cherished by the
thrifty Alsatian peasant, who never throws away anything from the day
of his birth to the day of his death. And, given a long line of
forefathers equally thrifty, and an ancient high-gabled house where
his ancestors first began collecting discarded refuse, the attic of
necessity was a marvel of litter and decay, among which generations of
pigeons had built nests and raised countless broods of squealing
squabs.
Into this attic we climbed, edged our way toward a high window out of
which the leaded panes had long since tumbled earthward, and finally
stood together, looking out over the mountains of the Alsatian
frontier.
The rain had ceased; behind the Col du Pigeonnier sunshine fell
through a rift in the watery clouds. It touched the rushing river,
shining on foaming fords where our cavalry pickets were riding in the
valley mist.
Somewhere up in the vineyards behind us an infantry band was playing;
away among the wet hills to the left the strumming vibrations of wet
drums marked the arrival of a regiment from goodness knows where; and
presently we saw them, their gray overcoats and red trousers soaked
almost black with rain, rifles en bandoulière, trudging patiently up
the muddy slope above the town. Something in the plodding steps of
those wet little soldiers touched me. Bravely their soaked drums
battered away, bravely they dragged their clumsy feet after them,
brightly and gayly the breaking sun touched their crimson forage-caps
and bayonets and the swords of mounted officers; but to me they were
only a pathetic troop of perplexed peasants, dragged out of the bosom
of France to be huddled and herded in a strange pasture, where death
watched them from the forest yonder, marking them for slaughter with
near-sighted Teutonic eyes.
A column of white cloud suddenly capped the rocks on the vineyard
above. Bang! and something came whistling with a curious, bird-like
cry over the village of Morsbronn, flying far out across the valley:
and among the pines of the Prussian forest a point of flame flashed, a
distant explosion echoed.
Down in the street below us an old man came tottering from his little
shop, peering sideways up into the sky.
"Il pleut, berger," called out the operator beside me, in a bantering
voice.
"It will rain--bullets," said the old man, simply, and returned to
his shop to drag out a chair on the doorsill and sit and listen to the
shots which our cavalry outposts were exchanging with the Prussian
scouts.
"Poor old chap," said the operator; "it will be hard for him. He was
with the Grand Emperor at Jena."
"You speak as though our army was already on the run," I said.
"Yes," he replied, indifferently, "we'll soon be on the run."
After a moment I said: "I'm going to ride to La Trappe. I wish you
would send those messages to Paris."
"All right," he said.
Half an hour later I rode out of Morsbronn, clad in the uniform of the
Third Hussars, a disguise supposed to convey the idea to those at La
Trappe that the army and not the police were responsible for their
expulsion.
The warm August sunshine slanted in my face as I galloped away up the
vineyard road and out on to the long plateau where, on every hillock,
a hussar picket sat his wiry horse, carbine poised, gazing steadily
toward the east.
Over the sombre Prussian forests mist hung; away to the north the sun
glittered on the steel helmets and armor of the heavy cavalry, just
arriving. And on the Col du Pigeonnier I saw tiny specks move, flags
signalling the arrival of the Vicomte de Bonnemain with the "grosse
cavalerie," the splendid cuirassier regiments destined in a few hours
to join the cuirassiers of Waterloo, riding into that bright Valhalla
where all good soldiers shall hear the last trumpet call,
"Dismount!"
With a lingering glance at the rivers which separated us from German
soil, I turned my horse and galloped away into the hills.
A moist, fern-bordered wood road attracted me; I reasoned that it must
lead, by a short cut, across the hills to the military highway which
passed between Trois-Feuilles and La Trappe. So I took it, and
presently came into four cross-roads unknown to me.
This grassy carrefour was occupied by a flock of turkeys, busily
engaged in catching grasshoppers; their keeper, a prettily shaped
peasant girl, looked up at me as I drew bridle, then quietly resumed
the book she had been reading.
"My child," said I, "if you are as intelligent as you are beautiful,
you will not be tending other people's turkeys this time next year."
"Merci, beau sabreur!" said the turkey-girl, raising her blue eyes.
Then the lashes veiled them; she bent her head a little, turning it so
that the curve of her cheeks gave to her profile that delicate
contour which is so suggestive of innocence when the ears are small
and the neck white.
"My child," said I, "will you kindly direct me, with appropriate
gestures, to the military highway which passes the Château de la
Trappe?"
II
THE GOVERNMENT INTERFERES
"There is a short cut across that meadow," said the young girl,
raising a rounded, sun-tinted arm, bare to the shoulder.
"You are very kind," said I, looking at her steadily.
"And, after that, you will come to a thicket of white birches."
"Thank you, mademoiselle."
"And after that," she said, idly following with her blue eyes the
contour of her own lovely arm, "you must turn to the left, and there
you will cross a hill. You can see it from where we stand--"
She glanced at me over her outstretched arm. "You are not listening,"
she said.
I shifted a troubled gaze to the meadow which stretched out all
glittering with moist grasses and tufts of rain-drenched wild
flowers.
The girl's arm slowly fell to her side, she looked up at me again, I
felt her eyes on me for a moment, then she turned her head toward the
meadow.
A deadened report shook the summer air--the sound of a cannon fired
very far away, perhaps on the citadel of Strasbourg. It was so
distant, so indistinct, that here in this peaceful country it lingered
only as a vibration; the humming of the clover bees was louder.
Without turning my head I said: "It is difficult to believe that
there is war anywhere in the world--is it not, mademoiselle?"
"Not if one knows the world," she said, indifferently.
"Do you know it, my child?"
"Sufficiently," she said.
She had opened again the book which she had been reading when I first
noticed her. From my saddle I saw that it was Molière. I examined her,
in detail, from the tips of her small wooden shoes to the scarlet
velvet-banded skirt, then slowly upward, noting the laced bodice of
velvet, the bright hair under the butterfly coiffe of Alsace, the
delicate outline of nose and brow and throat. The ensemble was
theatrical.
"Why do you tend turkeys?" I asked.
"Because it pleases me," she replied, raising her eyebrows in faint
displeasure.
"For that same reason you read Monsieur Molière?" I suggested.
"Doubtless, monsieur."
"Who are you?"
"Is a passport required in France?" she replied, languidly.
"Are you what you pretend to be, an Alsatian turkey tender?"
"Parbleu! There are my turkeys, monsieur."
"Of course, and there is your peasant dress and there are your wooden
shoes, and there also, mademoiselle, are your soft hands and your
accented speech and your plays of Molière."
"You are very wise for a hussar," she said.
"Perhaps," said I, "but I have asked you a question which remains
parried."
She balanced the hazel rod across her shoulders with a faintly
malicious smile.
"One might almost believe that you are not a hussar, but an officer
of the Imperial Police," she said.
[Illustration: "'ACROSS THAT MEADOW,' SAID THE YOUNG GIRL"]
"If you think that," said I, "you should answer my question the
sooner--unless you come from La Trappe. Do you?"
"Sometimes."
"Oh! And what do you do at the Château de la Trappe?"
"I tend poultry--sometimes," she replied.
"And at other times?"
"I do other things, monsieur."
"What things?"
"What things? Mon Dieu, I read a little, as you perceive, monsieur."
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"Oh, a mere nobody in such learned company," she said, shaking her
head with a mock humility that annoyed me intensely.
"Very well," said I, conscious every moment of her pleasure in my
discomfiture; "under the circumstances I am going to ask you to
accept my escort to La Trappe; for I think you are Mademoiselle Elven,
recently of the Odéon theatre."
At this her eyes widened and the smile on her face became less
genuine. "Indeed, I shall not go with you," she said.
"I'm afraid I'll have to insist," said I.
She still balanced her hazel rod across her shoulders, a smile curving
her mouth.
"Monsieur," she said, "do you ride through the world pressing every
peasant girl you meet with such ardent entreaties? Truly, your fashion
of wooing is not slow, but everybody knows that hussars are headlong
gentlemen--'Nothing is sacred from a hussar,'" she hummed,
deliberately, in a parody which made me writhe in my saddle.
"Mademoiselle," said I, taking off my forage-cap, "your ridicule is
not the most disagreeable incident that I expect to meet with to-day.
I am attempting to do my duty, and I must ask you to do yours."
"By taking a walk with you, beau monsieur?"
"I'm afraid so."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then," said I, amiably, "I shall be obliged to set you on my
horse." And I dismounted and went toward her.
"Set me on--on that horse?" she repeated, with a disturbed smile.
"Will you come on foot, then?"
"No, I will not!" she said, with a click of her teeth.
I looked at my watch--it lacked five minutes to one.
"In five minutes we are going to start," said I, cheerfully, and
stood waiting, twisting the gilt hilt-tassels of my sabre with nervous
fingers.
After a silence she said, very seriously, "Monsieur, would you dare
use violence toward me?"
"Oh, I shall not be very violent," I replied, laughing. I held the
opened watch in my hand so that she could see the dial if she chose.
"It is one o'clock," I said, closing the hunting-case with a snap.
She looked me steadily in the eyes.
"Will you come with me to La Trappe?"
She did not stir.
I stepped toward her; she gave me a breathless, defiant stare; then in
an instant I caught her up and swung her high into my saddle, before
either she or I knew exactly what had happened.
Fury flashed up in her eyes and was gone, leaving them almost blank
blue. As for me, amazed at what I had done, I stood at her stirrup,
breathing very fast, with jaws set and chin squared.
She was clever enough not to try to dismount, woman enough not to make
an awkward struggle or do anything ungraceful. In her face I read an
immense astonishment; fascination seemed to rivet her eyes on me,
following my every movement as I shortened one stirrup for her,
tightened the girths, and laid the bridle in her half-opened hand.
Then, in silence, I led the horse forward through the open gate out
into the wet meadow.
Wading knee-deep through soaking foliage, I piloted my horse with its
mute burden across the fields; and, after a few minutes a violent
desire to laugh seized me and persisted, but I bit my lip and called
up a few remaining sentiments of decency.
As for my turkey-girl, she sat stiffly in the saddle, with a firmness
and determination that proved her to be a stranger to horses. I
scarcely dared look at her, so fearful was I of laughing.
As we emerged from the meadow I heard the cannon sounding again at a
great distance, and this perhaps sobered me, for presently all desire
of laughter left me, and I turned into the road which led through the
birch thicket, anxious to accomplish my mission and have done with it
as soon as might be.
"Are we near La Trappe?" I asked, respectfully.
Had she pouted, or sulked, or burst into reproaches, I should have
cared little--in fact, an outburst might have relieved me.
But she answered me so sweetly, and, too, with such composure, that my
heart smote me for what I had done to her and what I was still to do.
"Would you rather walk?" I asked, looking up at her.
"No, thank you," she said, serenely.
So we went on. The spectacle of a cavalryman in full uniform leading a
cavalry horse on which was seated an Alsatian girl in bright peasant
costume appeared to astonish the few people we passed. One of these
foot-farers, a priest who was travelling in our direction, raised his
pallid visage to meet my eyes. Then he stole a glance at the girl in
the saddle, and I saw a tint of faded color settle under his
transparent skin.
The turkey-girl saluted the priest with a bright smile.
"Fortune of war, father," she said, gayly. "Behold! Alsace in
chains."
"Is she a prisoner?" said the priest, turning directly on me. Of all
the masks called faces, never had I set eyes on such a deathly one,
nor on such pale eyes, all silvery surface without depth enough for a
spark of light to make them seem alive.
"What do you mean by a prisoner, father?" I asked.
"I mean a prisoner," he said, doggedly.
"When the church cross-examines the government, the towers of Notre
Dame shake," I said, pleasantly. "I mean no discourtesy, father; it
is a proverb in Paris."
"There is another proverb," observed the turkey-girl, placidly.
"Once a little inhabitant of hell stole the key to paradise. His
punishment was dreadful. They locked him in."
I looked up at her, perplexed and irritated, conscious that she was
ridiculing me, but unable to comprehend just how. And my irritation
increased when the priest said, calmly, "Can I aid you, my child?"
She shook her head with a cool smile.
"I am quite safe under the escort of an officer of the Imperial--"
"Wait!" I said, hastily, but she continued, "of the Imperial
Military Police."
Above all things I had not wanted it known that the Imperial Police
were moving in this affair at La Trappe, and now this little fool had
babbled to a strange priest--of all people in the world!
"What have the police to do with this harmless child?" demanded the
priest, turning on me so suddenly that I involuntarily took a step
backward.
"Is this the confessional, father?" I replied, sharply. "Go your way
in peace, and leave to the police what alone concerns the police."
"Render unto Cæsar," said the girl, quietly. "Good-bye, father."
Turning to look again at the priest, I was amazed to find him close to
me, too close for a man with such eyes in his head, for a man who
moved so swiftly and softly, and, in spite of me, a nervous movement
of my hand left me with my fingers on the butt of my pistol.
"What the devil is all this?" I blurted out. "Stand aside, father.
Do you think the Holy Inquisition is back in France? Stand aside then!
I salute your cloth!"
And I passed on ahead, one hand on the horse's neck, the other
touching the visor of my scarlet forage-cap. Once I looked back. The
priest was standing where I had passed him.
We met a dozen people in all, I think, some of them peasants, one or
two of the better class--a country doctor and a notary among them.
None appeared to know my turkey-girl, nor did she even glance at them;
moreover, all answered my inquiries civilly enough, directing me to La
Trappe, and professing ignorance as to its inhabitants.
"Why do all the people I meet carry bundles?" I demanded of the
notary.
"Mon Dieu, monsieur, they are too near the frontier to take risks,"
he replied, blinking through his silver-rimmed spectacles at my
turkey-girl.
"You mean to say they are running away from their village of
Trois-Feuilles?" I asked.
"Exactly," he said. "War is a rude guest for poor folk."
Disgusted with the cowardice of the hamlet of Trois-Feuilles, I passed
on without noticing the man's sneer. In a moment, however, he repassed
me swiftly, going in the same direction as were we, toward La Trappe.
"Wait a bit!" I called out. "What is your business in that
direction, monsieur the notary?"
He looked around, muttered indistinctly about having forgotten
something, and started on ahead of us, but at a sharp "Stop!" from me
he halted quickly enough.
"Your road lies the other way," I observed, and, as he began to
protest, I cut him short.
"You change your direction too quickly to suit me," I said. "Come,
my friend the weather-cock, turn your nose east and follow it or I may
ask you some questions that might frighten you."
And so I left him also staring after us, and I had half a mind to go
back and examine his portfolio to see what a snipe-faced notary might
be carrying about with him.
When I looked up at my turkey-girl, she was sitting more easily in the
saddle, head bent thoughtfully.
"You see, mademoiselle, I take no chances of not finding my friends
at home," I said.
"What friends, monsieur?"
"My friends at La Trappe."
"Oh! And ... you think that the notary we passed might have desired
to prepare them for your visit, monsieur?"
"Possibly. The notary of Trois-Feuilles and the Château de la Trappe
may not be unknown to each other. Perhaps even mademoiselle the
turkey-girl may number the learned Trappists among her friends."
"Perhaps," she said.
Walking on along the muddy road beside her, arm resting on my horse's
neck, I thought over again of the chances of catching Buckhurst, and
they seemed slim, especially as after my visit the house at La Trappe
would be vacant and the colony scattered, or at least out of French
jurisdiction, and probably settled across the Belgian frontier.
Of course, if the government ordered the expulsion of these people,
the people must go; but I for one found the order a foolish one,
because it removed a bait that might attract Buckhurst back where we
stood a chance of trapping him.
But in a foreign country he could visit his friends freely, and
whatever movement he might ultimately contemplate against the French
government could easily be directed from that paradise of anarchists,
Belgium, without the necessity of his exposing himself to any
considerable danger.
I was sorry that affairs had taken this turn.
A little breeze began blowing; the scarlet skirt of my turkey-girl
fluttered above her wooden shoes, and on her head the silk bow
quivered like a butterfly on a golden blossom.
"They say when the Lord fashioned the first maid of Alsace half the
angels cried themselves ill with jealousy," said I, looking up at
her.
"And the other half, monsieur?"
"The sterner half started for Alsace in a body. They were controlled
with difficulty, mademoiselle. That is why St. Peter was given a key
to lock them in, not to lock us poor devils out."
After a silence she said, musing: "It is a curious thing, but you
speak as though you had seen better days."
"No," I said, "I have never seen better days. I am slowly rising in
the world. Last year I was a lieutenant; I am now inspector."
"I meant," she said, scornfully, "that you had been well-born--a
gentleman."
"Are gentlemen scarce in the Imperial Military Police?"
"It is not a profession that honors a man."
"Of all people in the world," said I, "the police would be the most
gratified to believe that this violent world needs no police."
"Monsieur, there is another remedy for violence."
"And what may that remedy be, mademoiselle?"
"Non-resistance--absolute non-resistance," said the girl, earnestly,
bending her pretty head toward me.
"That is not human nature," I said, laughing.
"Is the justification of human nature our aim in this world?"
"Nor is it possible for mankind to submit to violence," I added.
"I believe otherwise," she said, gravely.
As we mounted the hill along a sandy road, bordered with pines and
with cool, green thickets of broom and gorse, I looked up at her and
said: "In spite of your theories, mademoiselle, you yourself refused
to accompany me."
"But I did not resist your violence," she replied, smiling.
After a moment's silence I said: "For a disciple of a stern and
colorless creed, you are very human. I am sorry that you believe it
necessary to reform the world."
She said, thoughtfully: "There is nothing joyless in my creed--above
all, nothing stern. If it be fanaticism to desire for all the world
that liberty of thought and speech and deed which I, for one, have
assumed, then I am, perhaps, a fanatic. If it be fanaticism to detest
violence and to deplore all resistance to violence, I am a very
guilty woman, monsieur, and deserve ill of the Emperor's Military
Police."
This she said with that faintly ironical smile hovering sometimes in
her eyes, sometimes on her lips, so that it was hard to face her and
feel quite comfortable.
I began, finally, an elaborate and logical argument, forgetting that
women reason only with their hearts, and she listened courteously. To
meet her eyes when I was speaking interrupted my train of thought, and
often I was constrained to look out across the hills at the heavy,
solid flanks of the mountains, which seemed to steady my logic and
bring rebellious thought and wandering wisdom to obedience.
I explained my theory of the acceptance of three things--human nature,
the past, and the present. Given these, the solution of future
problems must be a different solution from that which she proposed.
At moments the solemn absurdity of it all came over me--the
turkey-girl, with her golden head bent, her butterfly coiffe
a-flutter, discussing ethics with an irresponsible fly-by-night, who
happened at that period of his career to carry a commission in the
Imperial Police.
The lazy roadside butterflies flew up in clouds before the
slow-stepping horse; the hill rabbits, rising to their hindquarters,
wrinkled their whiskered noses at us; from every thicket speckled
hedge-birds peered at us as we went our way solemnly deciding those
eternal questions already ancient when the Talmud branded woman with
the name of Lilith.
At length, as we reached the summit of the sandy hill, "There is La
Trappe, monsieur," said my turkey-girl, and once more stretched out
her lovely arm.
There appeared to be nothing mysterious about the house or its
surroundings; indeed, a sunnier and more peaceful spot would be hard
to find in that land of hills, ravines, and rocky woodlands, outposts
of those cloudy summits soaring skyward in the south.
The house itself was visible through gates of wrought iron, swinging
wide between pillars of stone, where an avenue stretched away under
trees to a granite terrace, glittering in the sun. And under the
terrace a quiet pool lay reflecting tier on tier of stone steps which
mounted to the bright esplanade above.
There was no porter at the gate to welcome me or to warn me back; the
wet road lay straight in front, barred only by sunbeams.
"May we enter?" I asked, politely.
She did not answer, and I led the horse down that silent avenue of
trees towards the terrace and the glassy pool which mirrored the steps
of stone.
Masses of scarlet geraniums, beds of living coals, glowed above the
terrace. As we drew nearer, the water caught the blaze of color,
reflecting the splendor in subdued tints of smothered flame. And
always, in the pool, I saw the terrace steps, reversed, leading down
into depths of sombre fire.
"And here we dismount," said I, and offered my aid.
She laid her hands on my shoulders; I swung her to the ground, where
her sabots clicked and her silver neck-chains jingled in the silence.
I looked around. How intensely still was everything--the leaves, the
water! The silent blue peaks on the horizon seemed to be watching me;
the trees around me were so motionless that they also appeared to be
listening with every leaf.
This quarter of the world was too noiseless for me; there might have
been a bird-note, a breeze to whisper, a minute stirring of unseen
life--but there was not.
"Is that house empty?" I asked, turning brusquely on my companion.
"The Countess de Vassart will give you your answer," she replied.
"Kindly announce me, then," I said, grimly, and together we mounted
the broad flight of steps to the esplanade, above which rose the gray
mansion of La Trappe.
III
LA TRAPPE
There was a small company of people gathered at a table which stood in
the cool shadows of the château's eastern wing. Towards these people
my companion directed her steps; I saw her bend close to the ear of a
young girl who had already turned to look at me. At the same instant a
heavily built, handsome man pushed back his chair and stood up,
regarding me steadily through his spectacles, one hand grasping the
back of the seat from which he had risen.
Presently the young girl to whom my companion of the morning had
whispered rose gracefully and came toward me.
Slender, yet with that charming outline of body which youth wears as a
promise, she moved across the terrace in her flowing robe of crape,
and welcomed me with a gesture and a pleasant word, which I scarcely
heard, so stupidly I stood, silenced by the absolute loveliness of the
girl. Did I say loveliness? No, not that, but something newer,
something far more fresh, far sweeter, that made mere physical beauty
a thing less vital than the colorless shadow of a crystal.
She was not only beautiful, she was Beauty itself, incarnate, alive,
soul and body. Later I noticed that she was badly sun-burned under the
eyes, that her delicate nose was adorned by an adorable freckle, and
that she had red hair.... Could this be the Countess de Vassart? What
a change!
I stepped forward to meet her, and took off my forage-cap.
"Is it true, monsieur, that you have come to arrest us?" she asked,
in a low voice.
"Yes, madame," I replied, already knowing that she was the Countess.
She hesitated; then:
"Will you tell me your name? I am Madame de Vassart."
Cap in hand I followed her to the table, where the company had already
risen. The young Countess presented me with undisturbed simplicity; I
bowed to my turkey-girl, who proved, after all, to be the actress from
the Odéon, Sylvia Elven; then I solemnly shook hands with Dr. Leo
Delmont, Professor Claude Tavernier, and Monsieur Bazard,
ex-instructor at the Fontainebleau Artillery School, whom I
immediately recognized as the snipe-faced notary I had met on the
road.
"Well, sir," exclaimed Dr. Delmont, in his deep, hearty voice, "if
this peaceful little community is come under your government's
suspicion, I can only say, Heaven help France!"
"Is not that what we all say in these times, doctor?" I asked.
"When I say 'Heaven help France!' I do not mean Vive l'Empereur!'"
retorted the big doctor, dryly.
Professor Tavernier, a little, gray-headed savant with used-up eyes,
asked me mildly if he might know why they all were to be expelled from
France. I did not reply.
"Is thought no longer free in France?" asked Dr. Delmont, in his
heavy voice.
"Thought is free in France," I replied, "but its expression is
sometimes inadvisable, doctor."
"And the Emperor is to be the judge of when it is advisable to
express one's thoughts?" inquired Professor Tavernier.
"The Emperor," I said, "is generous, broad-minded, and wonderfully
tolerant. Only those whose attitude incites to disorder are held in
check."
"According to the holy Code Napoléon," observed Professor Tavernier,
with a shrug.
"The code kills the body, Napoleon the soul," said Dr. Delmont,
gravely.
"It was otherwise with Victor Noir," suggested Mademoiselle Elven.
"Yes," added Delmont, "he asked for justice and they gave him ...
Pierre!"
"I think we are becoming discourteous to our guest, gentlemen," said
the young Countess, gently.
I bowed to her. After a moment I said: "Doctor, if you do truly
believe in that universal brotherhood which apparently even tolerates
within its boundaries a poor devil of the Imperial Police, if your
creed really means peace and not violence, suffering and patience, not
provocation and revolt, demonstrate to the government by the example
of your submission to its decrees that the theories you entertain are
not the chimeras of generous but unbalanced minds."
"We never had the faintest idea of resisting," said Monsieur Bazard,
the notary, otherwise the Chevalier de Grey, a lank, hollow-eyed young
fellow, already marked heavily with the ravages of pulmonary disease.
But the fierce glitter in his eyes gave the lie to his words.
"Yesterday, Madame la Comtesse," I said, turning to the Countess de
Vassart, "the Emperor could easily afford to regard with equanimity
the movement in which you are associated. To-day that is no longer
possible."
The young Countess gave me a bewildered look.
"Is it true," she asked, "that the Emperor does not know we have
severed all connection with the Internationale?"
"If that is so," said I, "why does Monsieur Bazard return across the
fields to warn you of my coming? And why do you harbor John Buckhurst
at La Trappe? Do you not know he is wanted by the police?"
"But we do not know why," said Dr. Delmont, bending forward and
pouring himself a glass of red wine. This he drank slowly, eating a
bit of black bread with it.
"Monsieur Scarlett," said Mademoiselle Elven, suddenly, "why does
the government want John Buckhurst?"
"That, mademoiselle, is the affair of the government and of John
Buckhurst," I said.
"Pardon," interrupted Delmont, heavily, "it is the affair of every
honest man and woman--where a Bonaparte is concerned."
"I do not understand you, doctor," I said.
"Then I will put it brutally," he replied. "We free people fear a
family a prince of which is a common murderer."
I did not answer; the world has long since judged the slayer of Victor
Noir.
After a troubled silence the Countess asked me if I would not share
their repast, and I thanked her and took some bread and grapes and a
glass of red wine.
The sun had stolen into the corner where we had been sitting, and the
Countess suggested that we move down to the lawn under the trees; so
Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier lifted the table and bore it down
the terrace steps, while I carried the chairs to the lawn.
It made me uncomfortable to play the rôle I was playing among these
misguided but harmless people; that I showed it in my face is certain,
for the Countess looked up at me and said, smilingly: "You must not
look at us so sorrowfully, Monsieur Scarlett. It is we who pity you."
And I replied, "Madame, you are generous," and took my place among
them and ate and drank with them in silence, listening to the breeze
in the elms.
Mademoiselle Elven, in her peasant's dress, rested her pretty arm
across her chair and sighed.
"It is all very well not to resist violence," she said, "but it
seems to me that the world is going to run over us some day. Is there
any harm in stepping out of the way, Dr. Delmont?"
The Countess laughed outright.
"Not at all," she said. "But we must not attempt to box the world's
ears as we run. Must we, doctor?"
Turning her lovely, sun-burned face to me, she continued: "Is it not
charming here? The quiet is absolute. It is always still. We are
absurdly contented here; we have no servants, you see, and we all
plough and harrow and sow and reap--not many acres, because we need
little. It is one kind of life, quite harmless and passionless,
monsieur. I have been raking hay this morning. It is so strange that
the Emperor should be troubled by the silence of these quiet
fields--"
The distress in her eyes lasted only a moment; she turned and looked
out across the green meadows, smiling to herself.
"At first when I came here from Paris," she said, "I was at a loss
to know what to do with all this land. I owe much happiness to Dr.
Delmont, who suggested that the estate, except what we needed, might
be loaned free to the people around us. It was an admirable thought;
we have no longer any poor among us--"
She stopped short and gave me a quick glance. "Please understand me,
Monsieur Scarlett. I make no merit of giving what I cannot use. That
would be absurd."
"The world knows, madame, that you have given all you have," I said.
"Then why is your miserable government sending her into exile?" broke
in Monsieur Bazard, harshly.
"I will tell you," I said, surprised at his tone and manner. "The
colony at La Trappe is the head and centre of a party which abhors
war, which refuses resistance, which aims, peacefully perhaps, at
political and social annihilation. In time of peace this colony is not
a menace; in time of war it is worse than a menace, monsieur."
I turned to Dr. Delmont.
"With the German armies massing behind the forest borders yonder, it
is unsafe for the government to leave you here at La Trappe, doctor.
You are _too neutral_."
"You mean that the government fears treason?" demanded the doctor,
growing red.
"Yes," I said, "if you insist."
The Countess had turned to me in amazement.
"Treason!" she repeated, in an unsteady voice. "Is it treason for a
small community to live quietly here in the Alsatian hills, harming
nobody, asking nothing save freedom of thought? Is it treason for a
woman of the world to renounce the world? Is it treason for her to
live an unostentatious life and use her fortune to aid others to live?
Treason! Monsieur, the word has an ugly ring to me. I am a soldier's
daughter!"
There was something touchingly illogical in the last words--this young
apostle of peace naïvely displaying her credentials as though the mere
word "soldier" covered everything.
"Your government insults us all," said Bazard, between his teeth.
Mademoiselle Elven leaned forward, her blue eyes shining angrily.
"Because I have learned that the boundaries of nations are not the
frontiers of human hearts, am I a traitor? Because I know no country
but the world, no speech but the universal speech that one reads in a
brother's eyes, because I know no barriers, no boundaries, no limits
to human brotherhood, am I a traitor?"
She made an exquisite gesture with half-open arms; all the poetry of
the Théâtre Français was in it.
"Look at me! I had all that life could give, save freedom, and that I
have now--freedom in thought, in speech, in action, freedom to love as
friends love, freedom to love as lovers love. Ah, more! freedom from
caste, from hate and envy and all suspicion, freedom to give, freedom
to receive, freedom in life and in death! Am I a traitor? What do I
betray? Shame on your Emperor!"
The young Countess, too, had risen in her earnestness and had laid one
slender, sun-tanned hand upon the table.
"War?" she said. "What is this war to us? The Emperor? What is he to
us? We who have set a watch on the world's outer ramparts, guarding
the white banner of universal brotherhood! What is this war to us!"
"Are you not a native of France?" I asked, bluntly.
"I am a native of the world, monsieur."
"Do you mean to say that you care nothing for your own birthland?" I
demanded, sharply.
"I love the world--all of it--every inch--and if France is part of
the world, so is this Prussia that we are teaching our poor peasants
to hate."
"Madame," said I, "the women of France to-day think differently. Our
Creator did not make love of country a trite virtue, but a passion,
and set it in our bodies along with our other passions. If in you it
is absent, that concerns pathology, not the police!"
I did not mean to wound her--I was intensely in earnest; I wanted her
to show just a single glimmer of sympathy for her own country. It
seemed as though I could not endure to look at such a woman and know
that the primal passion, born with those who had at least wept for
their natal Eden, was meaningless to her.
She had turned a trifle pale; now she sank back into her chair,
looking at me with those troubled gray eyes in which Heaven itself had
set truth and loyalty.
I said: "I do not believe that you care nothing for France. Train and
curb and crush your own heart as you will, you cannot drive out that
splendid earth-born humanity which is part of us--else we had all been
born in heaven!"
"Come," said Bazard, in a rage-choked voice, "let it end here,
Monsieur Scarlett. If the government sends you here as a spy and an
official, pray remember that you are not also sent as a missionary."
My ears began to burn. "That is true," I said, looking at the
Countess, whose face had become expressionless. "I ask your pardon
for what I have said and ... for what I am about to do."
There was a silence. Then, in a low voice, I placed them under formal
arrest, one by one, touching each lightly on the shoulder as
prescribed by the code. And when I came to the Countess, she rose,
without embarrassment. I moved my lips and stretched out my arm,
barely touching her. I heard Bazard draw a deep breath. She was my
prisoner.
"I must ask you to prepare for a journey," I said. "You have your
own horses, of course?"
Without answering, Dr. Delmont walked away towards the stables;
Professor Tavernier followed him, head bent.
"We shall want very little," said the Countess, calmly, to
Mademoiselle Elven. "Will you pack up what we need? And you, Monsieur
Bazard, will you be good enough to go to Trois-Feuilles and hire old
Brauer's carriage?" Turning to me she said: "I must ask for a little
delay; I have no longer a carriage of my own. We keep two horses to
plough and draw grain; they can be harnessed to the farm-wagon for our
effects."
Monsieur Bazard's hectic visage flushed, he gave me a crazy stare,
and, for a moment, I fancied there was murder in his bright eyes.
Doubtless, however, devotion to his creed of non-resistance conquered
the impulse, and he walked quickly away across the meadows, his
skeleton hands clinched under his loose sleeves.
Mademoiselle Elven also departed tip-tap! up the terrace in her
coquettish wooden shoes, leaving me alone with the Countess under the
trees.
"Madame," said I, "before I affix the government seals to the doors
of your house I must ask you to conduct me to the roof of the east
wing."
She bent her head in acquiescence; I followed her up the terrace into
a stone hall where the dark Flemish pictures stared back at me and my
spurred heels jingled in the silence. Up, up, and still up, winding
around a Gothic spiral, then through a passage under the battlements
and out across the slates, with wind and setting sun in my face and
the sighing tree-tops far below.
Without glancing at me the Countess walked to the edge of the leads
and looked down along the sheer declivity of the stone facade.
Slender, exquisite, she stood there, a lonely shape against the sky,
and I saw the sun glowing on her burnished red-gold hair, and her
sun-burned hands, half unclosed, hanging at her side.
South, north, and west the mountains towered, purple as the bloom on
October grapes; the white arm of the semaphore on the Pigeonnier was
tinted with rose color; green velvet clothed the world, under a silver
veil.
In the north a spark of white fire began to flicker on the crest of
Mount Tonnerre. It was the mirror of a heliograph flashing out across
leagues of gray-green hills to the rocky pulpit of the Pigeonnier.
I unslung my glasses and levelled them. The shining arm of the
semaphore fell to a horizontal position and remained rigid; down came
the signal flags, up went a red globe and two cones. Another string of
flags blossomed along the bellying halliards; the white star flashed
twice on Mount Tonnerre and went out.
Instantly I drew a flag from my pouch, tied it to the point of my
sabre, and stepped out along the projecting snout of a gargoyle.
Below, under my feet, the tree-tops rustled in the wind.
I had been flagging the Pigeonnier vigorously for ten minutes without
result, when suddenly a dark dot appeared on the tower beneath the
semaphore, then another. My glasses brought out two officers, one with
a flag; and, still watching them through the binoculars, I signalled
slowly, using my free hand: "This is La Trappe. Telegraph to
Morsbronn that the inspector of Imperial Police requires a peloton of
mounted gendarmes at once."
Then I sat down on the sun-warmed slates and waited, amusing myself by
watching the ever-changing display of signal flags on the distant
observatory.
It may have been half a minute before I saw two officers advance to
the railing of the tower and signal: "Attention, La Trappe!"
Pencil and pad on my knee, I managed to use my field-glasses and jot
down the message:
"Peloton of mounted gendarmes goes to you as soon as possible.
Repeat."
I repeated, then raised my glasses. Another message came by flag:
"Attention, La Trappe. Uhlans reported near the village of
Trois-Feuilles; have you seen them?"
Prussian Uhlans! Here in the rear of our entire army! Nonsense! And I
signalled a vigorous:
"No. Have you?"
To which came the disturbing reply: "Be on your guard. We are ordered
to display the semaphore at danger. Report is credited at
headquarters. Repeat."
I repeated. Raising my glasses again, I could plainly see a young
officer, an unlighted cigar between his teeth, jotting down our
correspondence, while the other officer who had flagged me furled up
his flags and laid them aside, yawning and stretching himself to his
full height.
So distinctly did my powerful binoculars bring the station into range
that I could even see the younger officer light a match, which the
wind extinguished, light another, and presently blow a tiny cloud of
smoke from his cigar.
The Countess de Vassart had come up to where I was standing on the
gargoyle, balanced over the gulf below. Very cautiously I began to
step backward, for there was not room to turn around.
"Would you care to look at the Pigeonnier, madame?" I asked, glancing
at her over my shoulder.
"I beg you will be careful," she said. "It is a useless risk to
stand out there."
I had never known the dread of great heights which many people feel,
and I laughed and stepped backward, expecting to land on the parapet
behind me. But the point of my scabbard struck against the
battlements, forcing me outward; I stumbled, staggered, and swayed a
moment, striving desperately to recover my balance; I felt my gloved
fingers slipping along the smooth face of the parapet, my knees gave
way with horror; then my fingers clutched something--an arm--and I
swung back, slap against the parapet, hanging to that arm with all my
weight. A terrible effort and I planted my boots on the leads and
looked up with sick eyes into the eyes of the Countess.
"Can you stand it?" I groaned, clutching her arm with my other hand.
"Yes--don't be afraid," she said, calmly. "Draw me toward you; I
cannot draw you over."
"Press your knees against the battlements," I gasped.
She bent one knee and wedged it into a niche.
"Don't be afraid; you are not hurting me," she said, with a ghastly
smile.
I raised one hand and caught her shoulder, then, drawn forward, I
seized the parapet in both arms, and vaulted to the slate roof.
A fog seemed to blot my eyes; I shook from hair to heel and laid my
head against the solid stone, while the blank, throbbing seconds past.
The Countess stood there, shocked and breathless. I saw her sleeve in
rags, and the snowy skin all bruised beneath.
I tried to thank her; we both were badly shaken, and I do not know
that she even heard me. Her burnished hair had sagged to her white
neck; she twisted it up with unsteady fingers and turned away. I
followed slowly, back through the dim galleries, and presently she
seemed to remember my presence and waited for me as I felt my way
along the passage.
"Every little shadow is a yawning gulf," I said. "My nerve is gone,
madame. The banging of my own sabre scares me."
I strove to speak lightly, but my voice trembled, and so did hers when
she said: "High places always terrify me; something below seems to
draw me. Did you ever have that dreadful impulse to sway forward into
a precipice?"
There was a subtle change in her voice and manner, something almost
friendly in her gray eyes as she looked curiously at me when we came
into the half-light of an inner gallery.
What irony lurks in blind chance that I should owe this woman my
life--this woman whose home I had come to confiscate, whose friends I
had arrested, who herself was now my prisoner, destined to the shame
of exile!
Perhaps she divined my thoughts--I do not know--but she turned her
troubled eyes to the arched window, where a painted saint imbedded in
golden glass knelt and beat his breast with two heavy stones.
"Madame," I said, slowly, "your courage and your goodness to me have
made my task a heavy one. Can I lighten it for you in any manner?"
She turned towards me, almost timidly. "Could I go to Morsbronn
before--before I cross the frontier? I have a house there; there are a
few things I would like to take--"
She stopped short, seeing, doubtless, the pain of refusal in my face.
"But, after all, it does not matter. I suppose your orders are
formal?"
"Yes, madame."
"Then it is a matter of honor?"
"A soldier is always on his honor; a soldier's daughter will
understand that."
"I understand," she said.
After a moment she smiled and moved forward, saying:
"How the world tosses us--flinging strangers into each other's arms,
parting brothers, leading enemies across each other's paths! One has a
glimpse of kindly eyes--and never meets them again. Often and often I
have seen a good face in the lamp-lit street that I could call out to,
'Be friends with me!' Then it is gone--and I am gone--Oh, it is
curiously sad, Monsieur Scarlett!"
"Does your creed teach you to care for everybody, madame?"
"Yes--I try to. Some attract me so strongly--some I pity so. I think
that if people only knew that there was no such thing as a stranger in
the world, the world might be a paradise in time."
"It might be, some day, if all the world were as good as you,
madame."
"Oh, I am only a perplexed woman," she said, laughing. "I do so long
for the freedom of all the world, absolute individual liberty and no
law but that best of all laws--the law of the unselfish."
We had stopped, by a mutual impulse, at the head of the stone
stairway.
"Why do you shelter such a man as John Buckhurst?" I asked,
abruptly.
She raised her eyes to me with perfect composure.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I have come here from Paris to arrest him."
She bent her head thoughtfully and laid the tips of her fingers on the
sculptured balustrade.
"To me," she said, "there's no such thing as a political crime."
"It is not for a political crime that we want John Buckhurst," I
said, watching her. "It is for a civil outrage."
Her face was like marble; her hands tightened on the fretted
carving.
"What crime is he charged with?" she asked, without moving.
"He is charged with being a common thief," I said.
Now there was color enough in her face, and to spare, for the
blood-stained neck and cheek, and even the bare shoulder under the
torn crape burned pink.
"It is brutal to make such a charge!" she said. "It is shameful!--"
her voice quivered. "It is not true! Monsieur, give me your word of
honor that the government means what it says and nothing more!"
"Madame," I said, "I give my word of honor that no political crime
is charged against that man."
"Will you pledge me your honor that if he answers satisfactorily to
that false charge of theft, the government will let him go free?"
"I will take it upon myself to do so," said I. "But what in Heaven's
name is this man to you, madame? He is a militant anarchist, whose
creed is not yours, whose propaganda teaches merciless violence, whose
programme is terror. He is well known in the faubourgs; Belleville is
his, and in the Château Rouge he has pointed across the river to the
rich quarters, calling it the promised land! Yet here, at La Trappe,
where your creed is peace and non-resistance, he is welcomed and
harbored, he is deferred to, he is made executive head of a free
commune which he has turned into a despotism ... for his own ends!"
She was gazing at me with dilated eyes, hands holding tight to the
balustrade.
"Did you not know that?" I asked, astonished.
"No," she said.
"You are not aware that John Buckhurst is the soul and centre of the
Belleville Reds?"
"It is--it is false!" she stammered.
"No, madame, it is true. He wears a smug mask here; he has deceived
you all."
She stood there, breathing rapidly, her head high.
"John Buckhurst will answer for himself," she said, steadily.
"When, madame?"
For answer she stepped across the hall and laid one hand against the
blank stone wall. Then, reaching upward, she drew from between the
ponderous blocks little strips of steel, colored like mortar, dropping
them to the stone floor, where they rang out. When she had flung away
the last one, she stepped back and set her frail shoulder to the wall;
instantly a mass of stone swung silently on an unseen pivot, a yellow
light streamed out, and there was a tiny chamber, illuminated by a
lamp, and a man just rising from his chair.
IV
PRISONERS
Instantly I recognized in him the insolent priest who had confronted
me on my way to La Trappe that morning. I knew him, although now he
was wearing neither robe nor shovel-hat, nor those square shoes too
large to buckle closely over his flat insteps.
And he knew me.
He appeared admirably cool and composed, glancing at the Countess for
an instant with an interrogative expression; then he acknowledged my
presence by bowing almost humorously.
"This is Monsieur Scarlett, of the Imperial Military Police," said
the Countess, in a clear voice, ending with that slightly rising
inflection which demands an answer.
"Mr. Buckhurst," I said, "I am an Inspector of Military Police, and
I cannot begin to tell you what a pleasure this meeting is to me."
"I have no doubt of that, monsieur," said Buckhurst, in his smooth,
almost caressing tones. "It, however, inconveniences me a great deal
to cross the frontier to-day, even in your company, otherwise I should
have surrendered with my confrères."
"But there is no question of _your_ crossing the frontier, Mr.
Buckhurst," I said.
His colorless eyes sought mine, then dropped. They were almost stone
white in the lamp-light--white as his delicately chiselled face and
hands.
"Are we not to be exiled?" he asked.
"_You_ are not," I said.
"Am I not under arrest?"
I stepped forward and placed him formally under arrest, touching him
slightly on the shoulder. He did not move a muscle, yet, beneath the
thin cloth of his coat I could divine a frame of iron.
"Your creed is one of non-resistance to violence," I said--"is it
not?"
"Yes," he replied. I saw that gray ring around the pale pupil of his
eyes contracting, little by little.
"You have not asked me why I arrest you," I suggested, "and,
monsieur, I must ask you to step back from that table--quick!--don't
move!--not one finger!"
For a second he looked into the barrel of my pistol with concentrated
composure, then glanced at the table-drawer which he had jerked open.
A revolver lay shining among the litter of glass tubes and papers in
the drawer.
The Countess, too, saw the revolver and turned an astonished face to
my prisoner.
"Who brought you here?" asked Buckhurst, quietly of me.
"I did," said the Countess, her voice almost breaking. "Tell this
man and his government that you are ready to face every charge against
your honor! There is a dreadful mistake; they--they think you are--"
"A thief," I interposed, with a smile. "The government only asks you
to prove that you are not."
Slowly Buckhurst turned his eyes on the Countess; the faintest glimmer
of white teeth showed for an instant between the gray lines that were
his lips.
"So _you_ brought this man here?" he said. "Oh, I am glad to know
it."
"Then you cannot be that same John Buckhurst who stands in the
tribune of the Château Rouge and promises all Paris to his chosen
people," I remarked, smiling.
"No," he said, slowly, "I cannot be that man, nor can I--"
"Stop! Stand back from that table!" I cried.
"I beg your pardon," he said, coolly.
"Madame," said I, without taking my eyes from him, "in a community
dedicated to peace, a revolver is an anachronism. So I think--if you
move I will shoot you, Mr. Buckhurst!--so I think I had better take
it, table-drawer and all--"
"Stop!" said Buckhurst.
"Oh no, I can't stop now," said I, cheerfully, "and if you attempt
to upset that lamp you will make a sad mistake. Now walk to the door!
Turn your back! Go slowly!--halt!"
With the table-drawer under one arm and my pistol-hand swinging, I
followed Buckhurst out into the hall.
Daylight dazzled me; it must have affected Buckhurst, too, for he
reached out to the stone balustrade and guided himself down the steps,
five paces in front of me.
Under the trees on the lawn, beside the driveway, I saw Dr. Delmont
standing, big, bushy head bent thoughtfully, hands clasped behind his
back.
Near him, Tavernier and Bazard were lifting a few boxes into a
farm-wagon. The carriage from Trois-Feuilles was also there, a stumpy
Alsatian peasant on the box. But there were yet no signs of the escort
of gendarmes which had been promised me.
As Buckhurst appeared, walking all alone ahead of me, Dr. Delmont
looked up with a bitter laugh. "So they found you, too? Well,
Buckhurst, this is too bad. They might have given you one more day on
your experiments."
"What experiments?" I asked, glancing at the bottles and retorts in
the table-drawer.
"Nitrogen for exhausted soil," said the Countess, quietly.
I set the table-drawer on the grass, rested my pistol on my hip, and
looked around at my prisoners, who now were looking intently at me.
"Gentlemen," said I, "let me warn you not to claim comradeship with
Mr. Buckhurst. And I will show you one reason why."
I picked up from the table-drawer a little stick about five inches
long and held it up.
"What is that, doctor? You don't know? Oh, you think it might be some
sample of fertilizer containing concentrated nitrogen? You are
mistaken, it is not nitrogen, but nitro-glycerine."
Buckhurst's face changed slightly.
"Is it not, Mr. Buckhurst?" I asked.
He was silent.
"Would you permit me to throw this bit of stuff at your feet?" And I
made a gesture.
The superb nerve of the man was something to remember. He did not
move, but over his face there crept a dreadful pallor, which even the
others noticed, and they shrank away from him, shocked and amazed.
"Here, gentlemen," I continued, "is a box with a German
label--'Oberlohe, Hanover.' The silicious earth with which
nitro-glycerine is mixed to make dynamite comes from Oberlohe, in
Hanover."
I laid my pistol on the table, struck a match, and deliberately
lighted my stick of dynamite. It burned quietly with a brilliant
flame, and I laid it on the grass and let it burn out like a lump of
Greek fire.
"Messieurs," I said, cocking and uncocking my pistol, "it is not
because this man is a dangerous, political criminal and a maker of
explosives that the government has sent me here to arrest him ... or
kill him. It is because he is a common thief,... a thief who steals
crucifixes,... like this one--"
I brushed aside a pile of papers in the drawer and drew out a big gold
crucifix, marvellously chiselled from a lump of the solid metal....
"A thief," I continued, "who strips the diamonds from crucifixes,...
as this has been stripped,... and who sells a single stone to a Jew in
Strasbourg, named Fishel Cohen,... now in prison to confront our
friend Buckhurst."
In the dead silence I heard Dr. Delmont's heavy breathing. Tavernier
gave a dry sob and covered his face with his thin hands. The young
Countess stood motionless, frightfully white, staring at Buckhurst,
who had folded his arms.
Sylvia Elven touched her, but the Countess shook her off and walked
straight to Buckhurst.
"Look at me," she said. "I have promised you my friendship, my faith
and trust and support. And now I say to you, I believe in you. Tell
them where that crucifix came from."
Buckhurst looked at me, long enough to see that the end of his rope
had come. Then he slowly turned his deadly eyes on the girl before
him.
Scarlet to the roots of her hair, she stood there, utterly stunned.
The white edges of Buckhurst's teeth began to show again; for an
instant I thought he meant to strike her. Then the sudden double beat
of horses' hoofs broke out along the avenue below, and, through the
red sunset I saw a dozen horsemen come scampering up the drive toward
us.
"They've sent me lancers instead of gendarmes for your escort," I
remarked to Dr. Delmont; at the same moment I stepped out into the
driveway to signal the riders, raising my hand.
Instantly a pistol flashed--then another and another, and a dozen
harsh voices shouted: "Hourra! Hourra! Preussen!"
"Mille tonnerre!" roared Delmont; "the Prussians are here!"
"Look out! Stand back there! Get the women back!" I cried, as an
Uhlan wheeled his horse straight through a bed of geraniums and fired
his horse-pistol at me.
Delmont dragged the young Countess to the shelter of an elm; Sylvia
Elven and Tavernier followed; Buckhurst ran to the carriage and leaped
in.
"No resistance!" bellowed Delmont, as Bazard snatched up the pistol I
had taken from Buckhurst. But the invalid had already fired at a
horseman, and had gone down under the merciless hoofs with a lance
through his face.
My first impulse was to shoot Buckhurst, and I started for him.
Then, in front of me, a horse galloped into the table and fell with a
crash, hurling his rider at my feet. I can see him yet sprawling there
on the lawn, a lank, red-faced fellow, his helmet smashed in, and his
spurred boots sticking fast in the sod.
Helter-skelter through the trees came the rest of the Uhlans, shouting
their hoarse "Hourra! Hourra! Preussen!"--white-and-black pennons
streaming from their lance-heads, pistols flashing in the early dusk.
I ran past Bazard's trampled body and fired at an Uhlan who had seized
the horses which were attached to the carriage where Buckhurst sat.
The Uhlan's horse reared and plunged, carrying him away at a frightful
pace, and I do not know whether I hit him or not, but he dropped his
pistol, and I picked it up and fired at another cavalryman who shouted
and put his horse straight at me.
Again I ran around the wagon, through a clump of syringa bushes, and
up the stone steps to the terrace, and after me galloped one of those
incomparable cossack riders--an Uhlan, lance in rest, setting his wiry
little horse to the stone steps with a loud "Hourra!"
It was too steep a grade for the gallant horse. I flung my pistol in
the animal's face and the poor brute reared straight up and fell
backward, rolling over and over with his unfortunate rider, and
falling with a tremendous splash into the pool below.
"In God's name stop that!" roared Delmont, from below. "Give up,
Scarlett! They mean us no harm!"
I could see the good doctor on the lawn, waving his handkerchief
frantically at me; in a group behind stood the Countess and Sylvia;
Tavernier was kneeling beside Bazard's body; two Uhlans were raising
their stunned comrade from the wreck of the table; other Uhlans
cantered toward the foot of the terrace above which I stood.
"Come down, hussar!" called an officer. "We respect your uniform."
"Will you parley?" I asked, listening intently for the gallop of my
promised gendarmes. If I could only gain time and save Buckhurst. He
was there in the carriage; I had seen him spring into it when the
Germans burst in among the trees.
"Foulez-fous fous rendre? Oui ou non?" shouted the officer, in his
terrible French.
"Eh bien,... non!" I cried, and ran for the château.
I heard the Uhlans dismount and run clattering and jingling up the
stone steps. As I gained the doorway they shot at me, but I only fled
the faster, springing up the stairway. Here I stood, sabre in hand,
ready to stop the first man.
Up the stairs rushed three Uhlans, sabres shining in the dim light
from the window behind me; I laid my forefinger flat on the blade of
my sabre and shortened my arm for a thrust--then there came a blinding
flash, a roar, and I was down, trying to rise, until a clinched fist
struck me in the face and I fell flat on my back.
Without any emotion whatever I saw an Uhlan raise his sabre to finish
me; also I saw a yellow-and-black sleeve interposed between death and
myself.
"No butchery!" growled the big officer who had summoned me from the
lawn. "Cursed pig, you'd sabre your own grandmother! Lift him, Sepp!
You, there, Loisel!--lift him up. Is he gone?"
"He is alive, Herr Rittmeister," said a soldier, "but his back is
broken."
"It isn't," I said.
"Herr Je!" muttered the Rittmeister; "an eel, and a Frenchman, and
nine long lives! Here, you hussar, what's the matter with you?"
"One of them shot me; I thought it was to be sabres," said I,
weakly.
"And why the devil wasn't it sabres!" roared the officer, turning on
his men. "One to three--and six more below! Sepp, you disgust me.
Carry him out!"
I groaned as they lifted me. "Easy there!" growled the officer,
"don't pull him that way. Now, young hell-cat, set your teeth; you
have eight more lives yet."
They got me out to the terrace, and carried me to the lawn. One of the
men brought a cup of water from the pool.
"Herr Rittmeister," I said, faintly, "I had a prisoner here; he
should be in the carriage. Is he?"
The officer walked briskly over to the carriage. "Nobody here but two
women and a scared peasant!" he called out.
As I lay still staring up into the sky, I heard the Rittmeister
addressing Dr. Delmont in angry tones. "By every law of civilized war
I ought to hang you and your friend there! Civilians who fire on
troops are treated that way. But I won't. Your foolish companion lies
yonder with a lance through his mouth. He's dead; I say nothing. For
you, I have no respect. But I have for that hell-cat who did his duty.
You civilians--you go to the devil!"
"Are not your prisoners sacred from insult?" asked the doctor,
angrily.
"Prisoners! _My_ prisoners! You compliment yourself! Loisel! Send
those impudent civilians into the house! I won't look at them! They
make me sick!"
The astonished doctor attempted to take his stand by me, offering his
services, but the troopers hustled him and poor Tavernier off up the
terrace steps.
"The two ladies in the carriage, Herr Rittmeister?" said a
cavalryman, coming up at salute.
"What? Ladies? Oh yes." Then he muttered in his mustache: "Always
around--always everywhere. They can't stay there. I want that
carriage. Sepp!"
"At orders, Herr Rittmeister!"
"Carry that gentleman to the carriage. Place Schwartz and Ruppert in
the wagon yonder. Get straw--you, Brauer, bring straw--and toss in
those boxes, if there is room. Where's Hofman?"
"In the pool, Herr Rittmeister."
"Take him out," said the officer, soberly. "Uhlans don't abandon
their dead."
Two soldiers lifted me again and bore me away in the darkness. I was
perfectly conscious.
And all the while I was listening for the gallop of my gendarmes, not
that I cared very much, now that Buckhurst was gone.
"Herr Rittmeister," I said, as they laid me in the carriage, "ask
the Countess de Vassart if she will let me say good-bye to her."
"With pleasure," said the officer, promptly. "Madame, here is a
polite young gentleman who desires to make his adieux. Permit me,
madame--he is here in the dark. Sepp! fall back! Loisel, advance ten
paces! Halt!"
"Is it you, Monsieur Scarlett?" came an unsteady voice, from the
darkness.
"Yes, madame. Can you forgive me?"
"Forgive you? My poor friend, I have nothing to forgive. Are you
badly hurt, Monsieur Scarlett?"
"I don't know," I muttered.
Suddenly the chapel bell of La Trappe rang out a startling peal; the
Prussian captain shouted: "Stop that bell! Shoot every civilian in
the house!" But the Uhlans, who rushed up the terrace, found the great
doors bolted and the lower windows screened with steel shutters.
On the battlements of the south wing a red radiance grew brighter;
somebody had thrown wood into the iron basket of the ancient beacon,
and set fire to it.
"That teaches me a lesson!" bawled the enraged Rittmeister, shaking
his fist up at the brightening alarm signal.
He vaulted into his saddle, wheeled his horse and rode up to the
peasant, Brauer, who, frightened to the verge of stupidity, sat on the
carriage-box.
"Do you know the wood-road that leads to Gunstett through the
foot-hills?" he demanded, controlling his fury with a strong effort.
The blank face of the peasant was answer enough; the Rittmeister
glared around; his eyes fell on the Countess.
"You know this country, madame?"
"Yes, monsieur."
"Will you set us on our way through the Gunstett hill-road?"
"No."
The chapel bell was clanging wildly; the beacon shot up in a whirling
column of sparks and red smoke.
"Put that woman into the carriage!" bellowed the officer. "I'm
cursed if I leave her to set the whole country yapping at our heels!
Loisel, put her in beside the prisoner! Madame, it is useless to
resist. Hark! What's that sound of galloping?"
I listened. I heard nothing save the clamor of the chapel bell.
An Uhlan laid a heavy hand on the shoulder of the listening Countess;
she tried to draw back, but he pushed her brutally into the carriage,
and she stumbled and fell into the cushions beside me.
"Uhlans, into your saddles!" cried the Rittmeister, sharply. "Two
men to the wagon!--a man on the box there! Here you, Jacques Bonhomme,
drive carefully or I'll hang you higher than the Strasbourg clock. Are
the wounded in the straw? Sepp, take the riderless horses. Peloton,
attention! Draw sabres! March! Trot!"
Fever had already begun to turn my head; the jolting of the carriage
brought me to my senses at times; at times, too, I could hear the two
wounded Uhlans groaning in the wagon behind me, the tramping of the
cavalry ahead, the dull rattle of lance butts in the leather
stirrup-boots.
If I could only have fainted, but I could not, and the agony grew so
intense that I bit my lip through to choke the scream that strained my
throat.
Once the carriage stopped; in the darkness I heard somebody whisper:
"There go the French riders!" And I fancied I heard a far echo of
hoof-strokes along the road to La Trappe. It might have been the
fancy of an intermittent delirium; it may have been my delayed
gendarmes--I never knew. And the carriage presently moved on more
smoothly, as though we were now on one of those even military
high-roads which traverse France from Luxembourg to the sea.
Which way we were going I did not know, I did not care. Absurdly
mingled with sick fancies came flashes of reason, when I could see the
sky frosted with silver, and little, bluish stars peeping down. At
times I recognized the mounted men around me as Prussian Uhlans, and
weakly wondered by what deviltry they had got into France, and what
malignant spell they cast over the land that the very stones did not
rise up and smite them from their yellow-and-black saddles.
Once--it was, I think, very near daybreak--I came out of a dream in
which I was swimming through oceans of water, drinking as I swam. The
carriage had stopped; I could not see the lancers, but presently I
heard them all talking in loud, angry voices. There appeared to be
some houses near by; I heard a dog barking, a great outcry of pigs and
feathered fowls, the noise of a scuffle, a trampling of heavy boots, a
shot!
Then the terrible voice of the Rittmeister: "Hang that man to his
barn gate! Pig of an assassin, I'll teach you to murder German
soldiers!"
A woman began to scream without ceasing.
"Burn that house!" bellowed the Rittmeister.
Through the prolonged screaming I heard the crash of window-glass;
presently a dull red light grew out of the gloom, brighter and
brighter. The screaming never ceased.
"Uhlans! Mount!" came the steady voice of the Rittmeister; the
carriage started. Almost at the word the darkness turned to flame;
against the raging furnace of a house on fire I saw the figure of a
man, inky black, hanging from the high cross-bar of the cow-yard gate,
and past him filed the shadowy horsemen, lances slanting backward from
their stirrups.
The last I remember was seeing the dead man's naked feet--for they
hanged him in his night-shirt--and the last I heard was that awful
screaming from the red shadows that flickered across the fields of
uncut wheat.
For presently my madness began again, and again I was bathed to the
mouth in cold, sweet waters, and I drank as I swam lazily in the
sunshine.
My next lucid interval came from pain almost unendurable. We were
fording a river in bright starlight; the carriage bumped across the
stones, water washed and slopped over the carriage floor. To right and
left, Prussian lancers were riding, and I saw the water boiling under
their horses and their long lances aslant the stars.
But there were more horsemen now, scores and scores of them, trampling
through the shallow river. And beyond I could see a line of cannon,
wallowing through the water, shadowy artillerymen clinging to forge
and caisson, mounted men astride straining teams, tall officers on
either flank, sitting their horses motionless in mid-stream.
The carriage stopped.
"Are you suffering?" came a low voice, close to my ear.
"Madame, could I have a little of that water?" I muttered.
Very gently she laid me back. I was entirely without power to move
below my waist, or to support my body.
She filled my cap with river water and held it while I drank. After I
had my fill she bathed my face, passing her wet hands through my hair
and over my eyes. The carriage moved on.
[Illustration: "TO RIGHT AND LEFT, PRUSSIAN LANCERS WERE RIDING"]
After a while she whispered.
"Are you awake?"
"Yes, madame."
"See the dawn--how red it is on the hills! There are vineyards there
on the heights,... and a castle,... and soldiers moving out across the
river meadows."
The rising sun was shining in my eyes as we came to a halt before
a small stone bridge over which a column of cavalry was
passing--Prussian hussars, by their crimson dolmans and little, flat
busbies.
Our Uhlan escort grouped themselves about us to watch the hussars
defile at a trot, and I saw the Rittmeister rigidly saluting their
standards as they bobbed past above a thicket of sabres.
"What are these Uhlans doing?" broke in a nasal voice behind us; an
officer, followed by two orderlies and a trumpeter, came galloping up
through the mud.
"Who's that--a dead Frenchman?" demanded the officer, leaning over
the edge of the carriage to give me a near-sighted stare. Then he saw
the Countess, stared at her, and touched the golden peak of his
helmet.
"At your service, madame," he said. "Is this officer dead?"
"Dying, general," said the Rittmeister, at salute.
"Then he will not require these men. Herr Rittmeister, I take your
Uhlans for my escort. Madame, you have my sympathy; can I be of
service?"
He spoke perfect French. The Countess looked up at him in a bewildered
way. "You cannot mean to abandon this dying man here?" she asked.
There was a silence, broken brusquely by the Rittmeister. "That
Frenchman did his duty!"
"Did he?" said the general, staring at the Countess.
"Very well; I want that carriage, but I won't take it. Give the
driver a white flag, and have him drive into the French lines. Herr
Rittmeister, give your orders! Madame, your most devoted!" And he
wheeled his beautiful horse and trotted off down the road, while the
Rittmeister hastily tied a handkerchief to a stick and tossed it up to
the speechless peasant on the box.
"Morsbronn is the nearest French post!" he said, in French. Then he
bent from his horse and looked down at me.
"You did your duty!" he snapped, and, barely saluting the Countess,
touched spurs to his mount and disappeared, followed at a gallop by
his mud-splashed Uhlans.
V
THE IMMORTALS
When I became conscious again I was lying on a table. Two men were
leaning over me; a third came up, holding a basin. There was an odor
of carbolic in the air.
The man with the basin made a horrid grimace when he caught my eye;
his face was a curious golden yellow, his eyes jet black, and at first
I took him for a fever phantom.
Then my bewildered eyes fastened on his scarlet fez, pulled down over
his left ear, the sky-blue Zouave jacket, with its bright-yellow
arabesques, the canvas breeches, leggings laced close over the thin
shins and ankles of an Arab. And I knew him for a soldier of African
riflemen, one of those brave children of the desert whom we called
"Turcos," and whose faith in the greatness of France has never
faltered since the first blue battalion of Africa was formed under the
eagles of the First Empire.
"Hallo, Mustapha!" I said, faintly; "what are they doing to me
now?"
The Turco's golden-bronze visage relaxed; he saluted me.
"Macache sabir," he said; "they picked a bullet from your spine, my
inspector."
An officer in the uniform of a staff-surgeon came around the table
where I was lying.
"Bon!" he exclaimed, eying me sharply through his gold-rimmed
glasses. "Can you feel your hind-legs now, young man?"
I could feel them all too intensely, and I said so.
The surgeon began to turn down his shirt-sleeves and button his cuffs,
saying, "You're lucky to have a pain in your legs." Turning to the
Turco, he added, "Lift him!" And the giant rifleman picked me up and
laid me in a long chair by the window.
"Your case is one of those amusing cases," continued the surgeon,
buckling on his sword and revolver; "very amusing, I assure you. As
for the bullet, I could have turned it out with a straw, only it
rested there _exactly_ where it stopped the use of those long legs of
yours!--a fine example of temporary reflex paralysis, and no
hemorrhage to speak of--nothing to swear about, young man. By-the-way,
you ought to go to bed for a few days."
He clasped his short baldric over his smartly buttoned tunic. The room
was shaking with the discharges of cannon.
"A millimetre farther and that bullet would have cracked your spine.
Remember that and keep off your feet. Ouf! The cannon are tuning up!"
as a terrible discharge shattered the glass in the window-panes beside
me.
"Where am I, doctor?" I asked.
"Parbleu, in Morsbronn! Can't you hear the orchestra, zim-bam-zim!
The Prussians are playing their Wagner music for us. Here, swallow
this. How do you feel now?"
"Sleepy. Did you say a day or two, doctor?"
"I said a week or two--perhaps longer. I'll look in this evening if
I'm not up to my chin in amputations. Take these every hour if in
pain. Go to sleep, my son."
With a paternal tap on my head, he drew on his scarlet, gold-banded
cap, tightened the check strap, and walked out of the room.
Down-stairs I heard him cursing because his horse had been shot. I
never saw him again.
Dozing feverishly, hearing the cannon through troubled slumber, I
awoke toward noon quite free from any considerable pain, but thirsty
and restless, and numbed to the hips. Alarmed, I strove to move my
feet, and succeeded. Then, freed from the haunting terror of
paralysis, I fell to pinching my legs with satisfaction, my eyes
roving about in search of water.
The room where I lay was in disorder; it appeared to be completely
furnished with well-made old pieces, long out of date, but not old
enough to be desirable. Chairs, sofas, tables were all fashioned in
that poor design which marked the early period of the Consulate; the
mirror was a fine sheet of glass imbedded in Pompeian and Egyptian
designs; the clock, which had stopped, was a meaningless lump of gilt
and marble, supported on gilt sphinxes. Over the bed hung a tarnished
canopy broidered with a coronet, which, from the strawberry leaves and
the pearls raised above them, I took to be the coronet of a count of
English origin.
The room appeared to be very old, and I knew the house must have stood
for centuries somewhere along the single street of Morsbronn, though I
could not remember seeing any building in the village which, judging
from the exterior, seemed likely to contain such a room as this.
The nearer and heavier cannon-shots had ceased, but the window-sashes
hummed with the steady thunder of a battle going on somewhere among
the mountains. Knowing the Alsatian frontier fairly well, I understood
that a battle among the mountains must mean that our First Corps had
been attacked, and that we were on the defensive on French soil.
The booming of the guns was unbroken, as steady and sustained as the
eternal roar of a cataract. At moments I believed that I could
distinguish the staccato crashes of platoon firing, but could not be
certain in the swelling din.
As I lay there on my long, cushioned chair, burning with that
insatiable thirst which, to thoroughly appreciate, one must be
wounded, the door opened and a Turco soldier came into the room and
advanced toward me on tip-toe.
He wore full uniform, was fully equipped, crimson chechia, snowy
gaiters, and terrible sabre-bayonet.
I beckoned him, and the tall, bronzed fellow came up, smiling, showing
his snowy, pointed teeth under a crisp beard.
"Water, Mustapha," I motioned with stiffened lips, and the good
fellow unslung his blue water-bottle and set it to my burning mouth.
"Merci, mon brave!" I said. "May you dwell in Paradise with Ali, the
fourth Caliph, the Lion of God!"
The Turco stared, muttered the Tekbir in a low voice, bent and kissed
my hands.
"Were you once an officer of our African battalions?" he asked, in
the Arab tongue.
"Sous-officier of spahi cavalry," I said, smiling. "And you are a
Kabyle mountaineer from Constantine, I see."
"It is true as I recite the fatha," cried the great fellow, beaming
on me. "We Kabyles love our officers and bear witness to the unity of
God, too. I am a marabout, my inspector, Third Turcos, and I am
anxious to have a Prussian ask me who were my seven ancestors."
The music of his long-forgotten tongue refreshed me; old scenes and
memories of the camp at Oran, the never-to-be-forgotten cavalry with
the scarlet cloaks, rushed on me thick and fast; incidents, trivial
matters of the bazaars, faces of comrades dead, came to me in
flashes. My eyes grew moist, my throat swelled, I whimpered:
"It is all very well, mon enfant, but I'm here with a hole in me
stuffed full of lint, and you have your two good arms and as many legs
with which to explain to the Prussians who your seven ancestors may
be. Give me a drink, in God's name!"
Again he held up the blue water-bottle, saying, gravely: "We both
worship the same God, my inspector, call Him what we will."
After a moment I said: "Is it a battle or a bousculade? But I need
not ask; the cannon tell me enough. Are they storming the heights,
Mustapha?"
"Macache comprendir," said the soldier, dropping into patois. "There
is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen
nothing but sparrows."
I listened for a moment; the sound of the cannonade appeared to be
steadily receding westward.
"It seems to me like retreat!" I said, sharply.
"Ritrite? Quis qui ci, ritrite?"
I looked at the simple fellow with tears in my eyes.
"You would not understand if I told you," said I. "Are you detailed
to look after me?"
He said he was, and I informed him that I needed nobody; that it was
much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion
in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles
blowing a silvery sonnerie--"Garde à vous!"
"I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos," he said,
proudly, "and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven
ancestors were. Have I my inspector's permission to go?"
He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor of the bugles rang
through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered
like a cobra's.
"Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout," said I, laughing.
The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his
scarlet fez, and, "Salute! O my inspector!" he cried, sonorously, and
was gone at a bound.
That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one
another's throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the
window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command
after command was ringing out in the street below. "Forward!" shouted
a resonant voice, and "Forward! forward! forward!" echoed the voices
of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling
of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.
The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant
tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill
whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their
_toug_; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a
clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime--and nothing,
save the immense monotone of the cannonade.
I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand,
snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily
buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my
shoulders, and cried, "Come in!"
A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my
mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to
my senses under the surgeon's probe. But at the touch of her fingers
on the door outside, I knew her--I was certain that it could be nobody
but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift
this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.
She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but
when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen
from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.
"What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?" she whispered.
"No--oh no. I'm only a fool, and quite hungry, madame."
She brought the broth and bread and a glass of the most exquisite wine
I ever tasted--a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its
liquid sunshine.
"Do you know where you are?" she asked, gravely.
"Oh yes--in Morsbronn."
"And in whose house, monsieur?"
"I don't know--" I glanced instinctively at the tarnished coronet on
the canopy above the bed. "Do you know, Madame la Comtesse?"
"I ought to," she said, faintly amused. "I was born in this room. It
was to this house that I desired to come before--my exile."
Her eyes softened as they rested first on one familiar object, then on
another.
"The house has always been in our family," she said. "It was once
one of those fortified farms in the times when every hamlet was a
petty kingdom--like the King of Yvetôt's domain. Doubtless the ancient
Trécourts also wore cotton night-caps for their coronets."
"I remember now," said I, "a stone turret wedged in between two
houses. Is this it?"
"Yes, it is all that is left of the farm. My ancestors built this
crazy old row of houses for their tenants."
After a silence I said, "I wish I could look out of the window."
She hesitated. "I don't suppose it could harm you?"
"It will harm me if I don't," said I.
She went to the window and folded up the varnished blinds.
"How dreadful the cannonade is growing," she said. "Wait! don't
think of moving! I will push you close to the window, where you can
see."
The tower in which my room was built projected from the rambling row
of houses, so that my narrow window commanded a view of almost the
entire length of the street. This street comprised all there was of
Morsbronn; it lay between a double rank of houses constructed of
plaster and beams, and surmounted by high-pointed gables and slated or
tiled roofs, so fantastic that they resembled steeples.
Down the street I could see the house that I had left twenty-four
hours before, never dreaming what my journey to La Trappe held in
store for me. One or two dismounted soldiers of the Third Hussars sat
in the doorway, listening to the cannon; but, except for these
listless troopers, a few nervous sparrows, and here and there a
skulking peasant, slinking off with a load of household furniture on
his back, the street was deserted.
Everywhere shutters had been put up, blinds closed, curtains drawn.
Not a shred of smoke curled from the chimneys of these deserted
houses; the heavy gables cast sinister shadows over closed doors and
gates barred and locked, and it made me think of an unseaworthy ship,
prepared for a storm, so bare and battened down was this long, dreary
commune, lying there in the August sun.
Beside the window, close to my face, was a small, square loop-hole,
doubtless once used for arquebus fire. It tired me to lean on the
window, so I contented myself with lying back and turning my head, and
I could see quite as well through the loop-hole as from the window.
Lying there, watching the slow shadows crawling out over the sidewalk,
I had been for some minutes thinking of my friend Mr. Buckhurst, when
I heard the young Countess stirring in the room behind me.
"You are not going to be a cripple?" she said, as I turned my head.
"Oh no, indeed!" said I.
"Nor die?" she added, seriously.
"How could a man die with an angel straight from heaven to guard him!
Pardon, I am only grateful, not impertinent." I looked at her humbly,
and she looked at me without the slightest expression. Oh, it was all
very well for the Countess de Vassart to tuck up her skirts and rake
hay, and live with a lot of half-crazy apostles, and throw her fortune
to the proletariat and her reputation to the dogs. She could do it;
she was Éline Cyprienne de Trécourt, Countess de Vassart; and if her
relatives didn't like her views, that was their affair; and if the
Faubourg Saint-Germain emitted moans, that concerned the noble
faubourg and not James Scarlett, a policeman attached to a division of
paid mercenaries.
Oh yes, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to play at
democracy with her unbalanced friends, but it was also well for
Americans to remember that she was French, and that this was France,
and that in France a countess was a countess until she was buried in
the family vault, whether she had chosen to live as a countess or as
Doll Dairymaid.
The young girl looked at me curiously, studying me with those
exquisite gray eyes of hers. Pensive, distraite, she sat there, the
delicate contour of her head outlined against the sunny window, which
quivered with the slow boom! boom! of the cannonade.
"Are you English, Monsieur Scarlett?" she asked, quietly.
"American, madame."
"And yet you take service under an emperor."
"I have taken harder service than that."
"Of necessity?"
"Yes, madame."
She was silent.
"Would it amuse you to hear what I have been?" I said, smiling.
"That is not the word," she said, quietly. "To hear of hardship
helps one to understand the world."
The cannonade had been growing so loud again that it was with
difficulty that we could make ourselves audible to each other. The jar
of the discharges began to dislodge bits of glass and little
triangular pieces of plaster, and the solid walls of the tower shook
till even the mirror began to sway and the tarnished gilt sconces to
quiver in their sockets.
"I wish you were not in Morsbronn," I said.
"I feel safer here in my own house than I should at La Trappe," she
replied.
She was probably thinking of the dead Uhlan and of poor Bazard;
perhaps of the wretched exposure of Buckhurst--the man she had trusted
and who had proved to be a swindler, and a murderous one at that.
Suddenly a shell fell into the court-yard opposite, bursting
immediately in a cloud of gravel which rained against our turret like
hail.
Stunned for an instant, the Countess stood there motionless, her face
turned towards the window. I struggled to sit upright.
She looked calmly at me; the color came back into her face, and in
spite of my remonstrance she walked to the window, closed the heavy
outside shutters and the blinds. As she was fastening them I heard the
whizzing quaver of another shell, the racket of its explosion, the
crash of plaster.
[Illustration: "A COMPANY OF TURCOS CAME UP"]
"Where is the safest place for us to stay?" she asked. Her voice was
perfectly steady.
"In the cellar. I beg you to go at once."
Bang! a shell blew up in a shower of slates and knocked a chimney into
a heap of bricks.
"Do you insist on staying by that loop-hole?" she asked, without a
quiver in her voice.
"Yes, I do," said I. "Will you go to the cellar?"
"No," she said, shortly.
I saw her walk toward the rear of the room, hesitate, sink down by the
edge of the bed and lay her face in the pillow.
Two shells burst with deafening reports in the street; the young
Countess covered her face with both hands. Shell after shell came
howling, whistling, whizzing into the village; the two hussars had
disappeared, but a company of Turcos came up on a run and began to dig
a trench across the street a hundred yards west of our turret.
How they made the picks and shovels fly! Shells tore through the air
over them, bursting on impact with roof and chimney; the Turcos tucked
up their blue sleeves, spat on their hands, and dug away like
terriers, while their officers, smoking the eternal cigarette, coolly
examined the distant landscape through their field-glasses.
Shells rained fast on Morsbronn; nearer and nearer bellowed the guns;
the plaster ceiling above my head cracked and fell in thin flakes,
filling the room with an acrid, smarting dust. Again and again metal
fragments from shells rang out on the heavy walls of our turret; a
roof opposite sank in; flames flickered up through clouds of dust; a
heavy yellow smoke, swarming with sparks, rolled past my window.
Down the street a dull sound grew into a steady roar; the Turcos
dropped pick and shovel and seized their rifles.
"Garde! Garde à vous!" rang their startled bugles; the tumult
increased to a swelling uproar, shouting, cheering, the crash of
shutters and of glass, and--
"The Prussians!" bellowed the captain. "Turcos--charge!"
His voice was lost; a yelling mass of soldiery burst into view; spiked
helmets and bayonets glittering through the smoke, the Turcos were
whirled about like brilliant butterflies in a tornado; the fusillade
swelled to a stupefying din, exploding in one terrible crash; and,
wrapped in lightning, the Prussian onset passed.
From the stairs below came the sound of a voiceless struggle, the
trample and panting and clicking of steel, till of a sudden a voice
burst out into a dreadful screaming. A shot followed--silence--another
shot--then the stairs outside shook under the rush of mounting men.
As the door burst open I felt a touch on my arm; the Countess de
Vassart stood erect and pale, one slender, protecting hand resting
lightly on my shoulder; a lieutenant of Prussian infantry confronted
us; straight, heavy sword drawn, rigid, uncompromising, in his
faultless gray-and-black uniform, with its tight, silver waist-sash.
"I do not have you thrown into the street," he said to me, in
excellent French, "because there has been no firing from the windows
in this village. Otherwise--other measures. Be at ease, madame, I
shall not harm your invalid."
He glanced at me out of his near-sighted eyes, dropped the point of
his sword to the stone floor, and slowly caressed his small, blond
mustache.
"How many troops passed through here yesterday morning?" he asked.
I was silent.
"There was artillery, was there not?"
I only looked at him.
"Do you hear?" he repeated, sharply. "You are a prisoner, and I am
questioning you."
"You have that useless privilege," I observed.
"If you are insolent I will have you shot!" he retorted, staring
haughtily at me.
I glanced out of the window.
There was a pause; the hand of the Countess de Vassart trembled on my
shoulder.
Under the window strident Prussian bugles were blowing a harsh
summons; the young officer stepped to the loop-hole and looked out,
then hastily removed his helmet and thrust his blond head through the
smoky aperture. "March those prisoners in below!" he shouted down.
Then he withdrew his head, put on his polished helmet of black
leather, faced with the glittering Prussian eagle, and tightened the
gold-scaled cheek-guard.
A moment later came a trample of feet on the landing outside, the door
was flung open, and three prisoners were brutally pushed into the
room.
I tried to turn and look at them; they stood in the dusk near the bed,
but I could only make out that one was a Turco, his jacket in rags,
his canvas breeches covered with mud.
Again the lieutenant came to the loop-hole and glanced out, then shook
his head, motioning the soldiers back.
"It is too high and the arc of fire too limited," he said, shortly.
"Detail four men to hold the stairs, ten men and a sergeant in the
room below, and you'd better take your prisoners down there. Bayonet
that Turco tiger if he shows his teeth again. March!"
As the prisoners filed out I turned once more and thought I recognized
Salah Ben-Ahmed in the dishevelled Turco, but could not be certain,
so disfigured and tattered the soldier appeared.
"Here, you hussar prisoner!" cried the lieutenant, pointing at me
with his white-gloved finger, "turn your head and busy yourself with
what concerns you. And you, madame," he added, pompously, "see that
you give us no trouble and stay in this room until you have permission
to leave."
"Are--are you speaking to me, monsieur?" asked the Countess, amazed.
Then she rose, exasperated.
"Your insolence disgraces your uniform," she said. "Go to your
French prisoners and learn the rudiments of courtesy!"
The officer reddened to his colorless eyebrows; his little,
near-sighted eyes became stupid and fixed; he smoothed the blond down
on his upper lip with hesitating fingers.
Suddenly he turned and marched out, slamming the door violently behind
him.
At this impudence the eyes of the Countess began to sparkle, and an
angry flush mounted to her cheeks.
"Madame," said I, "he is only a German boy, unbalanced by his own
importance and his first battle. But he will never forget this lesson;
let him digest it in his own manner."
And he did, for presently there came a polite knock at the door, and
the lieutenant reappeared, bowing rigidly, one hand on his sword-hilt,
the other holding his helmet by the gilt spike.
"Lieutenant von Eberbach present to apologize," he said, jerkily, red
as a beet. "Begs permission to take a half-dozen of wine; men very
thirsty."
"Lieutenant von Eberbach may take the wine," said the Countess,
calmly.
"Rudeness without excuse!" muttered the boy; "beg the graciously
well-born lady not to judge my regiment or my country by it. Can
Lieutenant von Eberbach make amends?"
"The Lieutenant has made them," said the Countess. "The merciful
treatment of French prisoners will prove his sincerity."
The lad made another rigid bow and got himself out of the door with
more or less dignity, and the Countess drew a chair beside my
sofa-chair and sat down, eyes still bright with the cinders of a wrath
I had never suspected in her.
Together we looked down into the street.
Under the window the flat, high-pitched drums began to rattle; deep
voices shouted; the whole street undulated with masses of
gray-and-black uniforms, moving forward through the smoke. A superb
regimental band began to play; the troops broke out into heavy
cheering.
"Vorwärts! Vorwärts!" came the steady commands. The band passed with
a dull flash of instruments; a thousand brass helmet-spikes pricked
the smoke; the tread of the Prussian infantry shook the earth.
"The invasion has begun," I said.
Her face was expressionless, save for the brightness of her eyes.
And now another band sounded, playing "I Had a Comrade!" and the
whole street began to ring with the noble marching-song of the coming
regiment.
"Bavarian infantry," I whispered, as the light-blue columns wheeled
around the curve and came swinging up the street; for I could see the
yellow crown on the collars of their tunics, and the heavy leather
helmets, surmounted by chenille rolls.
Behind them trotted a squadron of Uhlans on their dainty horses, under
a canopy of little black-and-white flags fluttering from the points of
their lances.
"Uhlans," I murmured. I heard the faint click of her teeth closing
tightly.
Hussars in crimson tunics, armed with curious weapons, half carbine,
half pistol, followed the Uhlans, filling the smoky street with a
flood of gorgeous color.
Suddenly a company of Saxon pioneers arrived on the double-quick,
halted, fell out, and began to break down the locked doors of the
houses on either side of the street. At the same time Prussian
infantry came hurrying past, dragging behind them dozens of vehicles,
long hay-wagons, gardeners' carts, heavy wheelbarrows, even a dingy
private carriage, with tarnished lamps, rocking crazily on rusty
springs.
The soldiers wheeled these wagons into a double line, forming a
complete chain across the street, where the Turcos had commenced to
dig their ditch and breastworks--a barricade high enough to check a
charge, and cunningly arranged, too, for the wooden abatis could not
be seen from the eastern end of the street, where a charge of French
infantry or cavalry must enter Morsbronn if it entered at all.
We watched the building of the barricade, fascinated. Soldiers entered
the houses on either side of the street, only to reappear at the
windows and thrust out helmeted heads. More soldiers came, running
heavily--the road swarmed with them; some threw themselves flat under
the wagons, some knelt, thrusting their needle-guns through the
wheel-spokes; others remained standing, rifles resting over the rails
of the long, skeleton hay-wagons.
"Something is going to happen," I said, as a group of smartly
uniformed officers appeared on the roof of the opposite house and
hastily scrambled to the ridge-pole.
Something was surely going to happen; the officers were using their
field-glasses and pointing excitedly across the roof-tops; the windows
of every house as far as I could see were black with helmets; a
regiment in column came up on the double, halted, disintegrated,
melting away behind walls, into yards, doorways, gardens.
A colonel of infantry, splendidly mounted, drew bridle under our
loop-hole and looked up at the officers on the roof across the way.
"Attention, you up there!" he shouted. "Is it infantry?"
"No!" bawled an officer, hollowed hand to his cheek. "It's their
brigade of heavy cavalry coming like an earthquake!"
"The cuirassiers!" I cried, electrified. "It's Michel's cuirassiers,
madame! And--oh, the barricade!" I groaned, twisting my fingers in
helpless rage. "They'll be caught in a trap; they'll die like flies
in that street."
"This is horrible!" muttered the girl. "Don't they know the street
is blocked? Can't they find out before they ride into this ravine
below us? Will they all be killed here under our windows?"
She sprang to her feet, stood a moment, then stepped swiftly forward
into the angle of the tower.
"Look there!" she cried, in terror.
"Push my chair--quick!" I said. She dragged it forward.
An old house across the street, which had been on fire, had collapsed
into a mere mound of slate, charred beams, and plaster. Through the
brown heat which quivered above the ruins I could see out into the
country. And what I saw was a line of hills, crowned with smoke, a
rolling stretch of meadow below, set here and there with shot-torn
trees and hop-poles; and over this uneven ground two regiments of
French cuirassiers and two squadrons of lancers moving slowly forward
as though on parade.
Above them, around them, clouds of smoke puffed up suddenly and
floated away--the shells from Prussian batteries on the heights. Long,
rippling crashes broke out, belting the fields with smoky breastworks,
where a Prussian infantry regiment, knee-deep in smoke, was firing on
the advancing cavalry.
The cuirassiers moved on slowly, the sun a blinding sheet of fire on
their armor; now and then a horse tossed his beautiful head, now and
then a steel helmet turned, flashing.
Grief-stricken, I groaned aloud: "Madame, there rides the finest
cavalry in the world!--to annihilation."
How could I know that they were coming deliberately to sacrifice
themselves?--that they rode with death heavy on their souls, knowing
well there was no hope, understanding that they were to die to save
the fragments of a beaten army?
Yet something of this I suspected, for already I saw the long, dark
Prussian lines overlapping the French flank; I heard the French
mitrailleuses rattling through the cannon's thunder, and I saw an
entire French division, which I did not then know to be Lartigue's,
falling back across the hills.
And straight into the entire Prussian army rode the "grosse
cavallerie" and the lancers.
"They are doomed, like their fathers," I muttered--"sons of the
cuirassiers of Waterloo. See what men can do for France!"
The young Countess started and stood up very straight.
"Look, madame!" I said, harshly--"look on the men of France! You say
you do not understand the narrow love of country! Look!"
"It is too pitiful, too horrible," she said, hoarsely. "How the
horses fall in that meadow!"
"They will fall thicker than that in this street!"
"See!" she cried; "they have begun to gallop! They are coming! Oh, I
cannot look!--I--I cannot!"
Far away, a thin cry sounded above the cannon din; the doomed
cuirassiers were cheering. It was the first charge they had ever made;
nobody had ever seen cavalry of their arm on any battle-field of
Europe since Waterloo.
Suddenly their long, straight blades shot into the air, the
cuirassiers broke into a furious gallop, and that mass of steel-clad
men burst straight down the first slope of the plateau, through the
Prussian infantry, then wheeled and descended like a torrent on
Morsbronn.
In the first ranks galloped the giants of the Eighth Cuirassiers,
Colonel Guiot de la Rochere at their head; the Ninth Cuirassiers
thundered behind them; then came the lancers under a torrent of
red-and-white pennons. Nothing stopped them, neither hedges nor
ditches nor fallen trees.
Their huge horses bounded forward, manes in the wind, tails streaming,
iron hoofs battering the shaking earth; the steel-clad riders, sabres
pointed to the front, leaned forward in their saddles.
Now among the thicket of hop-vines long lines of black arose; there
was a flash, a belt of smoke, another flash--then the metallic rattle
of bullets on steel breastplates. Entire ranks of cuirassiers went
down in the smoke of the Prussian rifles, the sinister clash and crash
of falling armor filled the air. Sheets of lead poured into them; the
rattle of empty scabbards on stirrups, the metallic ringing of bullets
on helmet and cuirass, the rifle-shots, the roar of the shells
exploding swelled into a very hell of sound. And, above the infernal
fracas rose the heavy cheering of the doomed riders.
Into the deep, narrow street wheeled the horsemen, choking road and
sidewalk with their galloping squadrons, a solid cataract of impetuous
horses, a flashing torrent of armored men--and then! Crash! the first
squadron dashed headlong against the barricade of wagons and went
down.
Into them tore the squadron behind, unable to stop their maddened
horses, and into these thundered squadron after squadron, unconscious
of the dead wall ahead.
In the terrible tumult and confusion, screaming horses and shrieking
men were piled in heaps, a human whirlpool formed at the barricade,
hurling bodily from its centre horses and riders. Men galloped
headlong into each other, riders struggled knee to knee, pushing,
shouting, colliding.
Posted behind the upper and lower windows of the houses, the Prussians
shot into them, so close that the flames from the rifles set the
jackets of the cuirassiers on fire: a German captain opened the
shutters of a window and fired his pistol at a cuirassier, who replied
with a sabre thrust through the window, transfixing the German's
throat.
Then a horrible butchery of men and horses began; the fusillade became
so violent and the scene so sickening that a Prussian lieutenant went
crazy in the house opposite, and flung himself from the window into
the mass of writhing horsemen. Tall cuirassiers, in impotent fury,
began slashing at the walls of the houses, breaking their heavy sabres
to splinters against the stones; their powerful horses, white with
foam, reared, fell back, crushing their riders beneath them.
In front of the barricade a huge fellow reined in his horse and
turned, white-gloved hand raised, red epaulets tossing.
[Illustration: "'HALT! HALT!' HE SHOUTED"]
"Halt! Halt!" he shouted. "Stop the lancers!" And a trumpeter,
disengaging himself from the frantic chaos, set his long, silver
trumpet to his lips and blew the "Halt!"
A bullet rolled the trumpeter under his horse's feet; a volley riddled
the other's horse, and the agonized animal reared and cleared the
bristling abatis with a single bound, his rider dropping dead among
the hay-wagons.
Then into this awful struggle galloped the two squadrons of the lancers.
For a moment the street swam under their fluttering red-and-white
lance-pennons, then a volley swept them--another--another--and down
they went.
Herds of riderless horses tore through the street; the road undulated
with crushed, quivering creatures crawling about. Against the doorway
of a house opposite a noble horse in agony leaned with shaking knees,
head raised, lips shrinking back over his teeth.
Bewildered, stupefied, exhausted, the cuirassiers sat in their
saddles, staring up at the windows where the Prussians stood and
fired. Now and then one would start as from a nightmare, turn his
jaded horse, and go limping away down the street. The road was filled
with horsemen, wandering helplessly about under the rain of bullets.
One, a mere boy, rode up to a door, leaned from his horse and began to
knock for admittance; another dismounted and sat down on a doorstep,
head buried in his hands, regardless of the bullets which tore the
woodwork around him.
The street was still crowded with entrapped cuirassiers, huddled in
groups or riding up and down the walls mechanically seeking shelter. A
few of these, dismounted, were wearily attempting to drag a heavy cart
away from the barricade; the Prussians shot them, one at a time, but
others came to help, and a few lancers aided them, and at length they
managed to drag a hay-wagon aside, giving a narrow passage to the open
country beyond. Instantly the Prussian infantry swarmed out of the
houses and into the street, shouting, "Prisoners!" pushing, striking,
and dragging the exhausted cuirassiers from their saddles. But contact
with the enemy, hand to hand, seemed to revive the fury of the armored
riders. The débris of the regiments closed up, long, straight sabres
glittered, trembling horses plunged forward, broke into a stiff
gallop, and passed through the infantry, through the rent in the
barricade, and staggered away across the fields, buried in the smoke
of a thousand rifles.
So rode the "Cuirassiers of Morsbronn," the flower of an empire's
chivalry, the elect of France. So rode the gentlemen of the Sixth
Lancers to shiver their slender spears against stone walls--for the
honor of France.
Death led them. Death rode with them knee to knee. Death alone halted
them. But their shining souls galloped on into that vast Valhalla
where their ancestors of Waterloo stood waiting, and the celestial
trumpets pealed a last "Dismount!"
VI
THE GAME BEGINS
The room in the turret was now swimming in smoke and lime dust; I
could scarcely see the gray figure of the Countess through the
powder-mist which drifted in through shutters and loop-hole, dimming
the fading daylight.
In the street a dense pall of pungent vapor hung over roof and
pavement, motionless in the calm August air; two houses were burning
slowly, smothered in smoke; through a ruddy fog I saw the dead lying
in mounds, the wounded moving feebly, the Prussian soldiery tossing
straw into the hay-carts that had served their deadly purpose.
But oh, the dreadful murmur that filled the heavy air, the tremulous,
ceaseless plaint which comes from strong, muscular creatures,
tenacious of life, who are dying and who die hard.
Helmeted figures swarmed through the smoke; wagon after wagon, loaded
deep with dead cavalrymen, was drawn away by heavy teams of horses now
arriving from the regimental transport train, which had come up and
halted just at the entrance to the village.
And now wagon-loads of French wounded began to pass, jolting over
crushed helmets, rifles, cuirasses, and the carcasses of dead horses.
A covey of Uhlans entered the shambles, picking their way across the
wreckage of the battle, a slim, wiry, fastidious company, dainty as
spurred gamecocks, with their helmet-cords swinging like wattles and
their schapskas tilted rakishly.
Then the sad cortège of prisoners formed in the smoke, the wounded
leaning on their silent comrades, bandaged heads hanging, the others
erect, defiant, supporting the crippled or standing with arms folded
and helmeted heads held high.
And at last they started, between two files of mounted Uhlans--Turcos,
line infantrymen, gendarmes, lancers, and, towering head and shoulders
above the others, the superb cuirassiers.
A German general and his smartly uniformed staff came clattering up
the slippery street and halted to watch the prisoners defile. And, as
the first of the captive cuirassiers came abreast of the staff, the
general stiffened in his saddle and raised his hand to his helmet,
saying to his officers, loud enough for me to hear:
"Salute the brave, gentlemen!"
And the silent, calm-eyed cuirassiers passed on, heads erect, uniforms
in shreds, their battered armor foul with smoke and mud, spurs broken,
scabbards empty.
Troops of captured horses, conducted by Uhlans, followed the
prisoners, then wagons piled high with rifles, sabres, and saddles,
then a company of Uhlans cantering away with the shot-torn guidons of
the cuirassiers.
Last of all came the wounded in their straw-wadded wagons, escorted by
infantry; I heard them coming before I saw them, and, sickened, I
closed my ears with my hands; yet even then the deep, monotonous
groaning seemed to fill the room and vibrate through the falling
shadows long after the last cart had creaked out of sight and hearing
into the gathering haze of evening.
The deadened booming of cannon still came steadily from the west, and
it needed no messenger to tell me that the First Corps had been hurled
back into Alsace, and that MacMahon's army was in full retreat; that
now the Rhine was open and the passage of the Vosges was clear, and
Strasbourg must stand siege and Belfort and Toul must man their
battlements for a struggle that meant victory, or an Alsace doomed and
a Lorraine lost to France forever.
The room had grown very dark, the loop-hole admitting but little of
the smoky evening sunset. Some soldiers in the hallway outside finally
lighted torches; red reflections danced over the torn ceiling and
plaster-covered floor, illuminating a corner where the Countess was
sitting by the bedside, her head lying on the covers. How long she had
been there I did not know, but when I spoke she raised her head and
answered quietly.
In the torch-light her face was ghastly, her eyes red and dim as she
came over to me and looked out into the darkness.
The woman was shaken terribly, shaken to the very soul. She had not
seen all that I had seen; she had flinched before the spectacle of a
butchery too awful to look upon, but she had seen enough, and she had
heard enough to support or to confound theories formed through a young
girl's brief, passionless, eventless life.
Under the window soldiers began shooting the crippled horses; the
heavy flash and bang of rifles set her trembling again.
Until the firing ceased she stood as though stupefied, scarcely
breathing, her splendid hair glistening like molten copper in the red
torches' glare.
A soldier came into the room and dragged the bedclothes from the bed,
trailing them across the floor behind him as he departed. An officer
holding a lantern peered through the door, his eye-glasses shining,
his boots in his hand.
He evidently had intended to get into the bed, but when his gaze fell
upon us he withdrew in his stockinged feet.
On the stairs soldiers were eating hunches of stale bread and knocking
the necks from wine bottles with their bayonets. One lumpish fellow
came to the door and offered me part of a sausage which he was
devouring, a kindly act that touched me, and I wondered whether the
other prisoners might find among their Uhlan guards the same humanity
that moved this half-famished yokel to offer me the food he was
gnawing.
Soldiers began to come and go in the room; some carried off chairs for
officers below some took the pillows from the bed, one bore away a
desk on his broad shoulders.
The Countess never moved or spoke.
The evening had grown chilly; I was cold to my knees.
A soldier offered to build me a fire in the great stone fireplace
behind me, and when I assented he calmly smashed a chair to
kindling-wood, wrenched off the heavy posts of the bed, and started a
fire which lit up the wrecked room with its crimson glare.
The Countess rose and looked around. The soldier pushed my long chair
to the blaze, tore down the canopy over the bed and flung it over me,
stolidly ignoring my protests. Then he clumped out with his muddy
boots and shut the door behind him.
For a long while I lay there, full in the heat of the fire, half
dozing, then sleeping, then suddenly alert, only to look about me to
see the Countess with eyes closed, motionless in her arm-chair, only
to hear the muffled thunder of the guns in the dark.
Once again, having slept, I roused, listening. The crackle of the
flames was all I heard; the cannon were silent. A few moments later a
clock in the hallway struck nine times. At the same instant a deadened
cannon-shot echoed the clamor of the clock. It was the last shot of
the battle. And when the dull reverberations had died away Alsace was
a lost province, MacMahon's army was in full retreat, leaving on the
three battle-fields of Wörth, Reichshoffen, and Fröschweiler sixteen
thousand dead, wounded, and missing soldiers of France.
All night long I heard cavalry traversing Morsbronn in an unbroken
column, the steady trample of their horses never ceasing for an
instant. At moments, from the outskirts of the village, the sinister
sound of cheering came from the vanguard of the German Sixth Corps,
just arriving to learn of the awful disaster to France. Too late to
take any part in the battle, these tired soldiers stood cheering by
regiments as the cavalry rode past in pursuit of the shattered army,
and their cheering swelled to a terrific roar toward morning, when the
Prince Royal of Prussia appeared with his staff, and the soldiers in
Morsbronn rushed out into the street bellowing, "Hoch soll er leben!
Er soll leben--Hoch!"
About seven o'clock that morning a gaunt, leather-faced Prussian
officer, immaculate in his sombre uniform, entered the room without
knocking. The young Countess turned in the depths of her chair; he
bowed to her slightly, unfolded a printed sheet of paper which bore
the arms of Prussia, hesitated, then said, looking directly at me:
"Morsbronn is now German territory and will continue to be governed
by military law, proclaimed under the state of siege, until the
country is properly pacified.
"Honest inhabitants will not be disturbed. Citizens are invited to
return to their homes and peacefully continue their legitimate
avocations, subject to and under the guarantee of the Prussian
military government.
"Monsieur, I have the honor to hand you a copy of regulations. I am
the provost marshal; all complaints should be brought to me."
I took the printed sheet and looked at the Prussian coat of arms.
"A list of the inhabitants of Morsbronn will be made to-day. You will
have the goodness to declare yourself--and you also, madame. There
being other buildings better fitted, no soldiers will be quartered in
this house."
The officer evidently mistook me for the owner of the house and not a
prisoner. A blanket hid my hussar trousers and boots; he could only
see my ragged shirt.
"And now, madame," he continued, "as monsieur appears to need the
services of a physician, I shall send him a French doctor, brought in
this morning from the Château de la Trappe. I wish him to get well; I
wish the inhabitants of my district to return to their homes and
resume the interrupted régimes which have made this province of Alsace
so valuable to France. I wish Morsbronn to prosper; I wish it well.
This is the German policy.
"But, monsieur, let me speak plainly. I tolerate no treachery. The
law is iron and will be applied with rigor. An inhabitant of my
district who deceives me, or who commits an offence against the troops
under my command, or who in any manner holds, or attempts to hold,
communication with the enemy, will be shot without court-martial."
He turned his grim, inflexible face to the Countess and bowed, then he
bowed to me, swung squarely on his heel, and walked to the door.
"Admit the French doctor," he said to the soldier on guard, and
marched out, his curved sabre banging behind his spurred heels.
"It must be Dr. Delmont!" I said, looking at the Countess as there
came a low knock at the door.
"I am very thankful!" she said, her voice almost breaking. She rose
unsteadily from her chair; somebody entered the room behind me and I
turned, calling out, "Welcome, doctor!"
"Thank you," replied the calm voice of John Buckhurst at my elbow.
The Countess shrank aside as Buckhurst coolly passed before her,
turned his slim back to the embers of the fire, and fixed his eyes on
me--those pale, slow eyes, passionless as death.
Here was a type of criminal I had never until recently known. Small of
hand and foot--too small even for such a slender man--clean shaven,
colorless in hair, skin, lips, he challenged instant attention by the
very monotony of his bloodless symmetry. There was nothing of positive
evil in his face, nothing of impulse, good or bad, nothing even
superficially human. His spotless linen, his neat sack-coat and
trousers of gray seemed part of him--like a loose outer skin. There
was in his ensemble nothing to disturb the negative harmony, save
perhaps an abnormal flatness of the instep and hands.
"My friend," he observed, in English, "do you think you will know me
again when you have finished your scrutiny?"
The Countess, face averted, passed behind my chair.
"Wait," said Buckhurst; and turning directly to me, he added: "You
were mistaken for a hussar at La Trappe; you were mistaken here for a
hussar as long as the squad holding this house remained in Morsbronn.
A few moments ago the provost mistook you for a civilian." He looked
across at the Countess, who already stood with her hand on the
door-knob.
"If you disturb me," he said, "I have only to tell the provost the
truth. Members of the Imperial Police caught without proper uniform
inside German lines are shot, séance tenante."
The Countess stood perfectly still a moment, then came straight to
me.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
She still leaned forward, looking down into my face. Then she turned
to Buckhurst.
"Do you want money?" she asked.
"I want a chair--and your attention for the present," he replied, and
seated himself.
The printed copy of the rules handed me by the provost marshal lay on
the floor. Buckhurst picked up the sheet, glanced at the Prussian
eagle, and thoughtfully began rolling the paper into a grotesque
shape.
"Sit down, madame," he said, without raising his eyes from the bit of
paper which he had now fashioned into a cocked hat.
After a moment's silent hesitation the Countess drew a small gilt
chair beside my sofa-chair and sat down, and again that brave,
unconscious gesture of protection left her steady hand lying lightly
on my arm.
Buckhurst noted the gesture. And all at once I divined that whatever
plan he had come to execute had been suddenly changed. He looked down
at the paper in his hands, gave it a thoughtful twist, and, drawing
the ends out, produced a miniature paper boat.
"We are all in one like that," he observed, holding it up without
apparent interest. He glanced at the young Countess; her face was
expressionless.
"Madame," said Buckhurst, in his peculiarly soft and persuasive
voice, "I am not here to betray this gentleman; I am not here even to
justify myself. I came here to make reparation, to ask your
forgiveness, madame, for the wrong I have done you, and to deliver
myself, if necessary, into the hands of the proper French authorities
in expiation of my misguided zeal."
The Countess was looking at him now; he fumbled with the paper boat,
gave it an unconscious twist, and produced a tiny paper box.
"The cause," he said, gently, "to which I have devoted my life must
not suffer through the mistake of a fanatic; for in the cause of
universal brotherhood I am, perhaps, a fanatic, and to aid that cause
I have gravely compromised myself. I came here to expiate that folly
and to throw myself upon your mercy, madame."
"I do not exactly understand," said I, "how you can expiate a crime
here."
"I can at least make restitution," he said, turning the paper box
over and over between his flat fingers.
"Have you brought me the diamonds which belong to the state?" I
inquired, amused.
"Yes," he said, and to my astonishment he drew a small leather pouch
from his pocket and laid it on my blanket-covered knees. "How many
diamonds were there?" he asked.
"One hundred and three," I replied, incredulously, and opened the
leather pouch. Inside was a bag of chamois-skin. This I stretched wide
and emptied.
Scores of little balls of tissue-paper rolled out on the blanket over
my knees; I opened one; it contained a diamond; I opened another,
another, and another; diamonds lay blazing on my blanket, a whole
handful, glittering in undimmed splendor.
"Count them," murmured Buckhurst, fashioning the paper box into a
fly-trap with a lid.
With a quick movement I swept them into my hands, then one by one
dropped the stones while I counted aloud one hundred and two diamonds.
The one hundred and third jewel was, of course, safely in Paris.
When I had a second time finished the enumeration I leaned back in my
chair, utterly at a loss to account for this man or for what he had
done. As far as I could see there was no logic in it, nothing
demonstrated, nothing proven. To me--and I am not either suspicious or
obstinate by nature--Buckhurst was still an unrepentant thief and a
dangerous one.
I could see in him absolutely nothing of the fanatic, of the generous,
feather-headed devotee, nothing of the hasty disciple or the impulsive
martyr. In my eyes he continued to be the passionless master-criminal,
the cold, slow-eyed source of hidden evil, the designer of an
intricate and viewless intrigue against the state.
His head remained bent over the paper toy in his hands. Was his hair
gray with age or excesses, or was it only colorless like the rest of
his exterior?
"Restitution is not expiation," he said, sadly, without looking up.
"I loved the cause; I love it still; I practised deception, and I am
here to ask this gentle lady to forgive me for an unworthy yet
unselfish use of her money and her hospitality. If she can pardon me I
welcome whatever punishment may be meted out."
The Countess dropped her elbow on the arm of my chair and rested her
face in her hand.
"Swept away by my passion for the cause of universal brotherhood,"
said Buckhurst, in his low, caressing voice, "I ventured to spend
this generous lady's money to carry the propaganda into the more
violent centres of socialism--into the clubs in Montmartre and
Belleville. There I urged non-resistance; I pleaded moderation and
patience. What I said helped a little, I think--"
He hesitated, twisting his fly-box into a paper creature with four
legs.
"I was eager; people listened. I thought that if I had a little more
money I might carry on this work.... I could not come to you,
madame--"
"Why not?" said the Countess, looking at him quickly. "I have never
refused you money!"
"No," he said, "you never refused me. But I knew that La Trappe was
mortgaged, that even this house in Morsbronn was loaded with debt. I
knew, madame, that in all the world you had left but one small roof to
cover you--the house in Morbihan, on Point Paradise. I knew that if I
asked for money you would sell Paradise,... and I could not ask so
much,... I could not bring myself to ask that sacrifice."
"And so you stole the crucifix of Louis XI.," I suggested,
pleasantly.
He did not look at me, but the Countess did.
"Bon," I thought, watching Buckhurst's deft fingers; "he means to be
taken back into grace. I wonder exactly why? And ... is it worth this
fortune in diamonds to him to be pardoned by a penniless girl whom he
and his gang have already stripped?"
"Could you forgive me, madame?" murmured Buckhurst.
"Would you explain that stick of dynamite first?" I interposed.
The Countess turned and looked directly at Buckhurst. He sat with
humble head bowed, nimbly constructing a paper bird.
"That was not dynamite; it was concentrated phosphorus," he said,
without resentment. "Naturally it burned when you lighted it, but if
you had not burned it I could easily have shown Madame la Comtesse
what it really was."
"I also," said I, "if I had thrown it at your feet, Mr. Buckhurst."
"Do you not believe me?" he asked, meekly, looking up at the
Countess.
"Mr. Buckhurst," said the young Countess, turning to me, "has aided
me for a long time in experiments. We hoped to find some cheap method
of restoring nitrogen and phosphorus to the worn-out soil which our
poor peasants till. Why should you doubt that he speaks the truth? At
least he is guiltless of any connection with the party which advocated
violence."
I looked at Buckhurst. He was engaged in constructing a multi-pointed
paper star. What else was he busy with? Perhaps I might learn if I
ceased to manifest distrust.
"Does concentrated phosphorus burn like dynamite?" I asked, as if
with newly aroused interest.
"Did you not know it?" he said, warily.
But was he deceived by my manner? Was that the way for me to learn
anything?
There was perhaps another way. Clearly this extraordinary man depended
upon his persuasive eloquence for his living, for the very shoes on
his little, flat feet, as do all such chevaliers of industry. If he
would only begin to argue, if I could only induce him to try his
eloquence on me, and if I could convince him that I myself was but an
ignorant, self-centred, bullet-headed gendarme, doing my duty only
because of perspective advancement, ready perhaps to take
bribes--perhaps even weakly, covetously, credulous--well, perhaps I
might possibly learn why he desired to cling to this poor young lady,
whose life had evidently gone dreadfully to smash, to land her among
such a coterie of thieves and lunatics.
"Mr. Buckhurst," I said, pompously, "in bringing these diamonds to
me you have certainly done all in your power to repair an injury which
concerned all France.
"As I am situated, of course I cannot now ask you to accompany me to
Paris, where doubtless the proper authorities would gladly admit
extenuating circumstances, and credit you with a sincere repentance.
But I put you on your honor to surrender at the first opportunity."
It was as stupidly trite a speech as I could think of.
Buckhurst glanced up at me. Was he taking my measure anew, judging me
from my bray?
"I could easily aid you to leave Morsbronn," he said, stealthily.
"O-ho," thought I, "so you're a German agent, too, as I suspected."
But I said, aloud, simulating astonishment: "Do you mean to say, Mr.
Buckhurst, that you would deliberately risk death to aid a police
officer to bring you before a military tribunal in Paris?"
"I do not desire to pose as a hero or a martyr," he said, quietly,
"but I regret what I have done, and I will do what an honest man can
do to make the fullest reparation--even if it means my death."
I gazed at him in admiration--real admiration--because the gross
bathos he had just uttered betrayed a weakness--vanity. Now I began to
understand him; vanity must also lead him to undervalue men. True,
with the faintest approach to eloquence he could no doubt hold the
"Clubs" of Belleville spellbound; with self-effacing adroitness to
cover stealthy persuasion, he had probably found little difficulty in
dominating this inexperienced girl, who, touched to the soul with
pity for human woe, had flung herself and her fortune to the howling
proletariat.
But that he should so serenely undervalue me at my first bray was more
than I hoped for. So I brayed again, the good, old, sentimental bray,
for which all Gallic lungs are so marvellously fashioned:
"Monsieur, such sentiments honor you. I am only a rough soldier of
the Imperial Police, but I am profoundly moved to find among the
leaders of the proletariat such delicate and chivalrous emotions--" I
hesitated. Was I buttering the sop too thickly?
Buckhurst, eyes bent on the floor, began picking to pieces his paper
toy. Presently he looked up, not at me, but at the Countess, who sat
with hands clasped earnestly watching him.
"If--if the state pardons me, can ... you?" he murmured.
She looked at him with intense earnestness. I saw he was sailing on
the wrong tack.
"I have nothing to pardon," she said, gravely. "But I must tell
you the truth, Mr. Buckhurst, I cannot forget what you have done. It
was something--the one thing that I cannot understand--that I can
never understand--something so absolutely alien to me that
it--somehow--leaves me stunned. Don't ask me to forget it.... I
cannot. I do not mean to be harsh and cruel, or to condemn you.
Even if you had taken the jewels from me, and had asked my
forgiveness, I would have given it freely. But I could not be as I
was, a comrade to you."
There was a silence. The Countess, looking perfectly miserable, still
gazed at Buckhurst. He dropped his gray, symmetrical head, yet I felt
that he was listening to every minute sound in the room.
"You must not care what I say," she said. "I am only an unhappy
woman, unused to the liberty I have given myself, not yet habituated
to the charity of those blameless hearts which forgive everything! I
am a novice, groping my way into a new and vast world, a limitless,
generous, forgiving commune, where love alone dominates.... And if I
had lived among my brothers long enough to be purged of those
traditions which I have drawn from generations, I might now be noble
enough and wise enough to say I do forgive and forget that you--"
"That you were once a thief," I ended, with the genial officiousness
of the hopelessly fat-minded.
In the stillness I heard Buckhurst draw in his breath--once. Some day
he would try to kill me for that; in the mean time my crass stupidity
was no longer a question in his mind. I had hurt the Countess, too,
with what she must have believed a fool's needless brutality. But it
had to be so if I played at Jaques Bonhomme.
So I put the finishing whine to it--"Our Lord died between two
thieves"--and relapsed into virtuous contemplation of my finger-tips.
"Madame," said Buckhurst, in a low voice, "your contempt of me is
part of my penalty. I must endure it. I shall not complain. But I
shall try to live a life that will at least show you my deep
sincerity."
"I do not doubt it," said the Countess, earnestly. "Don't think that
I mean to turn away from you or to push you away. There is nothing of
the Pharisee in me. I would gladly trust you with what I have. I will
consult you and advise with you, Mr. Buckhurst--"
"And ... despise me."
The unhappy Countess looked at me. It goes hard with a woman when her
guide and mentor falls.
"If you return to Paradise, in Morbihan,... as we had planned, may I
go," he asked, humbly, "only as an obscure worker in the cause? I
beg, madame, that you will not cast me off."
So he wanted to go to Morbihan--to the village of Paradise? Why?
The Countess said: "I welcome all who care for the cause. You will
never hear an unkind word from me if you desire to resume the work in
Paradise. Dr. Delmont will be there; Monsieur Tavernier also, I hope;
and they are older and wiser than I, and they have reached that lofty
serenity which is far above my troubled mind. Ask them what you have
asked of me; they are equipped to answer you."
It was time for another discord from me, so I said: "Madame, you have
seen a thousand men lay down their lives for France. Has it not shaken
your allegiance to that ghost of patriotism which you call the
'Internationale'?"
Here was food for thought, or rather fodder for asses--the Police
Oracle turned missionary under the nose of the most cunning criminal
in France and the vainest. Of course Buckhurst's contempt for me at
once passed all bounds, and, secure in that contempt, he felt it
scarcely worth while to use his favorite weapon--persuasion. Still, if
the occasion should require it, he was quite ready, I knew, to loose
his eloquence on the Countess, and on me too.
The Countess turned her troubled eyes to me.
"What I have seen, what I have thought since yesterday has distressed
me dreadfully," she said. "I have tried to include all the world in a
broader pity, a broader, higher, and less selfish love than the
jealous, single-minded love for one country--"
"The mother-land," I said, and Buckhurst looked up, adding, "The
world is the true mother-land."
Whereupon I appeared profoundly impressed at such a novel and
epigrammatic view.
"There is much to be argued on both sides," said the young Countess,
"but I am utterly unfitted to struggle with this new code of ethics.
If it had been different--if I had been born among the poor, in
misery!--But you see I come a pilgrim among the proletariat, clothed
in conservatism, cloaked with tradition, and if at heart I burn with
sorrow for the miserable, and if I gladly give what I have to help, I
cannot with a single gesture throw off those inherited garments,
though they tortured my body like the garment of Nessus."
I did not smile or respect her less for the stilted phrases, the
pathetic poverty of metaphor. Profoundly troubled, struggling with a
reserve the borders of which she strove so bravely to cross, her
distress touched me the more because I knew it aroused the uneasy
contempt of Buckhurst. Yet I could not spare her.
"You saw the cuirassiers die in the street below," I repeated, with
the obstinacy of a limited intellect.
"Yes--and my heart went out to them," she replied, with an emphasis
that pleased me and startled Buckhurst.
Buckhurst began to speak, but I cut him short.
"Then, madame, if your heart went out to the soldiers of France, it
went out to France, too!"
"Yes--to France," she repeated, and I saw her lip begin to quiver.
"Wherein does love for France conflict with our creed, madame?" asked
Buckhurst, gently. "It is only hate that we abjure."
She turned her gray eyes on him. "I will tell you: in that dreadful
moment when the cavalry of France cheered Death in his own awful
presence, I loved them and their country--_my_ country!--as I had
never loved in all my life.... And I hated, too! I hated the men who
butchered them--more!--I hated the country where the men came from; I
hated race and country and the blows they dealt, and the evil they
wrought on France--_my France_! That is the truth; and I realize it!"
There was a silence; Buckhurst slowly unrolled the wrinkled paper he
had been fingering.
"And now?" he asked, simply.
"Now?" she repeated. "I don't know--truly, I do not know." She
turned to me sorrowfully. "I had long since thought that my heart was
clean of hate, and now I don't know." And, to Buckhurst, again: "Our
creed teaches us that war is vile--a savage betrayal of humanity by a
few dominant minds; a dishonorable ingratitude to God and country. But
from that window I saw men die for honor of France with God's name on
their lips. I saw one superb cuirassier, trapped down there in the
street, sit still on his horse, while they shot at him from every
window, and I heard him call up to a Prussian officer who had just
fired at him: 'My friend, you waste powder; the heart of France is
cuirassed by a million more like me!'" A rich flush touched her face;
her gray eyes grew brighter.
"Is there a Frenchwoman alive whose blood would not stir at such a
scene?" she said. "They shot him through his armor, his breastplate
was riddled, he clung to his horse, always looking up at the riflemen,
and I heard the bullets drumming on his helmet and his cuirass like
hailstones on a tin roof, and I could not look away. And all the while
he was saying, quietly: 'It is quite useless, friends; France lives!
You waste your powder!' and I could not look away or close my eyes--"
She bent her head, shivering, and her interlocked fingers whitened.
"I only know this," she said: "I will give all I have--I will give
my poor self to help the advent of that world-wide brotherhood which
must efface national frontiers and end all war in this sad world. But
if you ask me, in the presence of war, to look on with impartiality,
to watch my own country battling for breath, to stop my ears when a
wounded mother-land is calling, to answer the supreme cry of France
with a passionless cry, 'Repent!' I cannot do it--I will not! I was
not born to!"
Deeply moved, she had risen, confronting Buckhurst, whose stone-cold
eyes were fixed on her.
"You say I hold you unworthy," she said. "Others may hold me, too,
unworthy because I have not reached that impartial equipoise whence,
impassive, I can balance my native land against its sins and watch
blind justice deal with it all unconcerned.
"In theory I have done it--oh, it is simple to teach one's soul in
theory! But when my eyes saw my own land blacken and shrivel like a
green leaf in the fire, and when with my own eyes I saw the best, the
noblest, the crown of my country's chivalry fall rolling in the mud of
Morsbronn under the feet of Prussia, every drop of blood in my body
was French--hot and red and French! And it is now; and it will always
be--as it has always been, though I did not understand."
After a silence Buckhurst said: "All that may be, madame, yet not
impair your creed."
"What!" she said, "does not hatred of the stranger impair my
creed?"
"It will die out and give place to reason."
"When? When I attain the lofty, dispassionate level I have never
attained? That will not be while this war endures."
"Who knows?" said Buckhurst, gently.
"I know!" replied the Countess, the pale flames in her cheeks
deepening again.
"And yet," observed Buckhurst, patiently, "you are going to Paradise
to work for the Internationale."
"I shall try to do my work and love France," she said, steadily. "I
cannot believe that one renders the other impossible."
"Yet," said I, "if you teach the nation non-resistance, what would
become of the armies of France?"
"I shall not teach non-resistance until we are at peace," she
said--"until there is not a German soldier left in France. After that
I shall teach acquiescence and personal liberty."
I looked at her very seriously; logic had no dwelling-place within her
tender and unhappy heart.
And what a hunting-ground was that heart for men like Buckhurst! I
could begin to read that mouse-colored gentleman now, to follow, after
a fashion, the intricate policy which his insolent mind was
shaping--shaping in stealthy contempt for me and for this young girl.
Thus far I could divine the thoughts of Mr. Buckhurst, but there were
other matters to account for. Why did he choose to spare my life when
a word would have sent me before the peloton of execution? Why had he
brought to me the fortune in diamonds which he had stolen? Why did he
eat humble-pie before a young girl from whom he and his companions had
wrung the last penny? Why did he desire to go to Morbihan and be
received among the elect in the Breton village of Paradise?
I said, abruptly: "So you are not going to denounce me to the
Prussian provost?"
He lifted his well-shaped head and gazed at the Countess with an
admirable pathos which seemed a mute appeal for protection from
brutality.
"That question is a needless one," said the Countess, quietly. "It
was a cruel one, also, Monsieur Scarlett."
"I did not mean it as an offensive question," said I. "I was merely
reciting a fact, most creditable to Mr. Buckhurst. Mon Dieu, madame, I
am an officer of Imperial Police, and I have lived to hear blunt
questions and blunter answers. And if it be true that Monsieur
Buckhurst desires to atone for--for what has happened, then it is
perfectly proper for me, even as a prisoner myself, to speak
plainly."
I meant this time to thoroughly convince Buckhurst of my ability to
gabble platitude. My desire that he should view me as a typical
gendarme was intense.
So I coughed solemnly behind my hand, knit my eyebrows, and laid one
finger alongside of my nose.
"Is it not my duty, as a guardian of national interests, to point out
to Mr. Buckhurst his honest errors? Certainly it is, madame, and this
is the proper time."
Turning pompously to Buckhurst, I fancied I could almost detect a
sneer on that inexpressive mask he wore--at least I hoped I could, and
I said, heavily:
"Monsieur, for a number of years there has passed under our eyes here
in France certain strange phenomena. Thousands of Frenchmen have, so
to speak, separated themselves from the rest of the nation.
"All the sentiments that the nation honors itself by professing these
other Frenchmen rebuke--the love of country, public spirit, accord
between citizens, social repose, and respect for communal law and
order--these other Frenchmen regard as the hallucinations of a nation
of dupes.
"Separated by such unfortunate ideas from the nation within whose
boundaries they live, they continue to abuse, even to threaten, the
society and the country which gives them shelter.
"France is only a name to them; they were born there, they live
there, they derive their nourishment from her without gratitude.
But France is nothing to them; _their mother-land is the
Internationale_!"
I was certain now that the shadow of a sneer had settled in the
corners of Buckhurst's thin lips.
"I do not speak of anarchists or of terrorists," I continued, nodding
as though profoundly impressed by my own sagacity. "I speak of
socialists--that dangerous society to which the cry of Karl Marx was
addressed with the warning, 'Socialists! Unite!'
"The government has reason to fear socialism, not anarchy, for it
will never happen in France, where the passion for individual property
is so general, that a doctrine of brutal destruction could have the
slightest chance of success.
"But wait, here is the point, Monsieur Buckhurst. Formerly the name
of 'terrorist' was a shock to the entire civilized world; it evoked
the spectres of a year that the world can never forget. And so our
modern reformers, modestly desiring to evade the inconveniences of
such memories among the people, call themselves the 'Internationale.'
Listen to them; they are adroit, they blame and rebuke violence, they
condemn anarchy, they would not lay their hands on public or
individual property--no, indeed!
"Ah, madame, but you should hear them in their own clubs, where the
ladies and gentlemen of the gutters, the barriers, and the abattoirs
discuss 'individual property,' 'the tyranny of capital,' and similar
subjects which no doubt they are peculiarly fitted to discuss.
"Believe me, madame, the little coterie which you represent is
already the dupe and victim of this terrible Internationale. Their
leaders work their will through you; a vast conspiracy against all
social peace is spread through your honest works of mercy. The time
is coming when the whole world will rise to combat this
Internationale; and when the mask is dragged from its benignant
visage, there, grinning behind, will appear the same old 'Spectre
Rouge,' torch in one hand, gun in the other, squatting behind a
barricade of paving-blocks."
I wagged my head dolefully.
"I could not have rested had I not warned Mr. Buckhurst of this," I
said, sentimentally.
Which was fairly well done, considering that I was figuratively
lamenting over the innocence of the most accomplished scoundrel that
ever sat in the supreme council of the Internationale.
Buckhurst looked thoughtfully at the floor.
"If I thought," he murmured--"if I believed for one instant--"
"Believe me, my dear sir," I said, "that you are playing into the
hands of the wickedest villains on earth!"
"Your earnestness almost converts me," he said, lifting his stealthy
eyes.
The Countess appeared weary and perplexed.
"At all events," she said, "we must do nothing to embarrass France
now; we must do nothing until this frightful war is ended."
After a silence Buckhurst said, "But you will go to Paradise,
madame?"
"Yes," replied the Countess, listlessly.
Now, what in Heaven's name attracted that rogue to Paradise?
VII
A STRUGGLE FORESHADOWED
I took my breakfast by the window, watching the German soldiery
cleaning up Morsbronn. For that wonderful Teutonic administrative
mania was already manifesting itself while ruined houses still smoked;
method replaced chaos, order marched on the heels of the Prussian
rear-guard, which enveloped Morsbronn in a whirlwind of Uhlans, and
left it a silent, blackened landmark in the August sunshine.
Soldiers in canvas fatigue-dress, wearing soft, round, visorless caps,
were removing the débris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel
and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street
clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on
shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their
officers might enjoy immunity from rain and wind and defective flues.
In the court-yards and stables I could see cavalrymen in
stable-jackets, whitewashing walls and out-buildings and ill-smelling
stalls, while others dug shovelfuls of slaked lime from wheelbarrows
and spread it through stable-yards and dirty alleys. Everywhere quiet,
method, order, prompt precision reigned; I even noticed a big,
red-fisted artilleryman tying up tall, blue larkspurs, dahlias, and
phlox in a trampled garden, and he touched the ragged masses of bloom
with a tenderness peculiar to a flower-loving and sentimental people,
whose ultimate ambition is a quart of beer, a radish, and a green leaf
overhead.
At the corners of the walls and blind alleys, placards in French and
German were posted, embodying regulations governing the village under
Prussian military rule. The few inhabitants of Morsbronn who had
remained in cellars during the bombardment shuffled up to read these
notices, or to loiter stupidly, gaping at the Prussian eagles
surmounting the posters.
A soldier came in and started the fire in my fireplace. When he went
out I drew my code-book from my breeches-pocket and tossed it into the
fire. After it followed my commission, my memoranda, and every scrap
of writing. The diamonds I placed in the bosom of my flannel shirt.
Toward one o'clock I heard the shrill piping of a goat-herd, and I saw
him, a pallid boy, clumping along in his wooden shoes behind his two
nanny-goats, while the German soldiers, peasants themselves, looked
after him with curious sympathy.
A little later a small herd of cattle passed, driven to pasture by a
stolid Alsatian, who replied to the soldiers' questions in German
patois and shrugged his heavy shoulders like a Frenchman.
A cock crowed occasionally from some near dunghill; once I saw a cat
serenely following the course of a stucco wall, calm, perfectly
self-composed, ignoring the blandishments of the German soldiers, who
called, "Komm mitz! mitz!" and held out bits of sausage and black
bread.
A German ambulance surgeon arrived to see me in the afternoon. The
Countess was busy somewhere with Buckhurst, who had come with news for
her, and the German surgeon's sharp double rap at the door did not
bring her, so I called out, "Entrez donc!" and he stalked in,
removing his fatigue-cap, which action distinguished him from his
brother officers.
He was a tall, well-built man, perfectly uniformed in his
double-breasted frocked tunic, blue-eyed, blond-bearded, and
immaculate of hand and face, a fine type of man and a credit to any
army.
After a brief examination he sat down and resumed a very bad cigar,
which had been smouldering between his carefully kept fingers.
"Do you know," he said, admiringly, "that I have never before seen
just such a wound. The spinal column is not even grazed, and if, as I
understand from you, you suffered temporarily from complete paralysis
of the body below your waist, the case is not only interesting but
even remarkable."
"Is the superficial lesion at all serious?" I asked.
"Not at all. As far as I can see the blow from the bullet temporarily
paralyzed the spinal cord. There is no fracture, no depression. I do
not see why you should not walk if you desire to."
"When? Now?"
"Try it," he said, briefly.
I tried. Apart from a certain muscular weakness and a great fatigue, I
found it quite possible to stand, even to move a few steps. Then I sat
down again, and was glad to do so.
The doctor was looking at my legs rather grimly, and it suddenly
flashed on me that I had dropped my blanket and he had noticed my
hussar's trousers.
"So," he said, "you are a military prisoner? I understood from the
provost marshal that you were a civilian."
As he spoke Buckhurst appeared at the door, and then sauntered in,
quietly greeting the surgeon, who looked around at the sound of his
footsteps on the stone floor. There was no longer a vestige of doubt
in my mind that Buckhurst was a German agent, or at least that the
Germans _believed_ him to be in their pay. And doubtless he was in
their pay, but to whom he was faithful nobody could know with any
certainty.
"How is our patient, doctor?" he asked.
"Convalescent," replied the doctor, shortly, as though not exactly
relishing the easy familiarity of this pale-eyed gentleman in gray.
"Can he travel to-day?" inquired Buckhurst, without apparent
interest.
"Before he travels," said the officer, "it might be well to find out
why he wears part of a hussar uniform."
"I've explained that to the provost," observed Buckhurst, examining
his well-kept finger-nails. "And I have a pass for him also--if he is
in a fit condition to travel."
The officer gave him a glance full of frank dislike, adjusted his
sabre, pulled on his white gloves, and, bowing very slightly to me,
marched straight out of the room and down the stairs without taking
any notice of Buckhurst. The latter looked after the officer, then his
indifferent eyes returned to me. Presently he sat down and produced a
small slip of paper, which he very carefully twisted into a cocked
hat.
"I suppose you doubt my loyalty to France," he said, intent on his
bit of paper.
Then, logically continuing my rôle of the morning, I began to upbraid
him for a traitor and swear that I would not owe my salvation to him,
and all the while he was calmly transforming his paper from one toy
into another between deft, flat fingers.
"You are unjust and a trifle stupid," he said. "I am paid by Prussia
for information which I never give. But I have the entre of their
lines. I do it for the sake of the Internationale. The Internationale
has a few people in its service ... _And it pays them well_."
He looked squarely at me as he said this. I almost trembled with
delight: the man undervalued me, he had taken me at my own figure, and
now, holding me in absolute contempt, he was going to begin on me.
"Scarlett," he said, "what does the government pay you?"
I began to protest in a torrent of patriotism and sentimentality. He
watched me impassively while I called Heaven to witness and proclaimed
my loyalty to France, ending through sheer breathlessness in a
maundering, tearful apotheosis where mixed metaphors jostled each
other--the government, the Emperor, and the French flag, consecrated
in blood--and finally, calling his attention to the fact that twenty
centuries had once looked down on this same banner, I collapsed in my
chair and gave him his chance.
He took it. With subtle flattery he recognized in me a powerful arm of
a corrupt Empire, which Empire he likened to the old man who rode
Sindbad the Sailor. He admitted my noble loyalty to France, pointing
out, however, that devotion to the Empire was not devotion to France,
but the contrary. Skilfully he pictured the unprepared armies of the
Empire, huddled along the frontier, seized and rent to fragments, one
by one; adroitly he painted the inevitable ending, the armies that
remained cut off and beaten in detail.
And as I listened I freely admitted to myself that I had undervalued
him; that he was no crude Belleville orator, no sentimental
bathos-peddling reformer, no sansculotte with brains ablaze, squalling
for indiscriminate slaughter and pillage; he was a cool student in
crime, taking no chances that he was not forced to take, a calm,
adroit, methodical observer, who had established a theory and was
carefully engaged in proving it.
"Scarlett," he said, in English, "let us come to the point. I am a
mercenary American; you are an American mercenary, paid by the French
government. You care nothing for that government or for the country;
you would drop both to-day if your pay ceased. You and I are
outsiders; we are in the world to watch our chances. And our chance is
here."
He unfolded the creased bit of paper and spread it out on his knees,
smoothing it thoughtfully.
"What do I care for the Internationale?" he asked, blandly. "I am
high in its councils; Karl Marx knows less about the Internationale
than do I. As for Prussia and France--bah!--it's a dog-fight to me,
and I lack even the interest to bet on the German bull-dog.
"You will know me better some day, and when you do you will know that
I am a man who has determined to get rich if I have to set half of
France against the other half and sack every bank in the Empire.
"And now the time is coming when the richest city in Europe will be
put to the sack. You don't believe it? Yet you shall live to see Paris
besieged, and you shall live to see Paris surrender, and you shall
live to see the Internationale rise up from nowhere, seize the
government by the throat, and choke it to death under the red flag of
universal--ahem!... license"--the faintest sneer came into his pallid
face--"and every city of France shall be a commune, and we shall pass
from city to city, leisurely, under the law--_our_ laws, which we will
make--and I pity the man among us who cannot place his millions in the
banks of England and America!"
He began to worry the creased bit of paper again, stealthy eyes on the
floor.
"The revolt is as certain as death itself," he said. "The Society of
the Internationale honeycombs Europe--your police archives show you
that--and I tell you that, of the two hundred thousand soldiers of
the national guard in Paris to-day, ninety per cent. are
ours--_ours_, soul and body. You don't believe it? Wait!
"Yet, for a moment, suppose I am right? Where are the government
forces? Who can stop us from working our will? Not the fragments of
beaten and exhausted armies! Not the thousands of prisoners which you
will see sent into captivity across the Rhine! What has the government
to lean on--a government discredited, impotent, beaten! What in the
world can prevent a change, an uprising, a revolution? Why, even if
there were no such thing as the Internationale and its secret Central
Committee--to which I have the honor to belong"--and here his sneer
was frightful--"I tell you that before a conquering German army had
recrossed the Rhine this land of chattering apes would be tearing one
another for very want of a universal scape-goat.
"But that is exactly where we come into the affair. We find the
popular scape-goat and point him out--the government, my friend. And
all we have to do is to let the mob loose, stand back, and count
profits."
He leaned forward in his chair, idly twisting his crumpled bit of
paper in one hand.
"I am not fool enough to believe that our reign will last," he said.
"It may last a month, two months, perhaps three. Then we leaders will
be at one another's throats--and the game is up! It's always so--mob
rule can't last--it never has lasted and never will. But the prudent
man will make hay before the brief sunshine is ended; I expect to
economize a little, and set aside enough--well, enough to make it pay,
you see."
He looked up at me quietly.
"I am perfectly willing to tell you this, even if you used your
approaching liberty to alarm the entire country, from the Emperor to
the most obscure scullion in the Tuileries. Nothing can stop us now,
nothing in the world can prevent our brief reign. Because these
things are certain, the armies of France will be beaten--they are
already beaten. Paris will hold out; Paris will fall; and with Paris
down goes France! And as sure as the sun shall rise on a conquered
people, so sure shall rise that red spectre we call the
Internationale."
The man astonished me. He put into words a prophecy which had haunted
me from the day that war was declared--a prophetic fear which had
haunted men higher up in the service of the Empire--thinking men who
knew what war meant to a country whose government was as rotten as its
army was unprepared, whose political chiefs were as vain, incompetent,
ignorant, and weak as were the chiefs of its brave army--an army
riddled with politics, weakened by intrigue and neglect--an army used
ignobly, perverted, cheated, lied to, betrayed, abandoned.
That, for once, Buckhurst spoke the truth as he foresaw it, I did not
question. That he was right in his infernal calculations, I was
fearsomely persuaded. And now the game had advanced, and I must
display what cards I had, or pretended to have.
"Are you trying to bribe me?" I blurted out, weakly.
"Bribe you," he repeated, in contempt. "No. If the prospect does not
please you, I have only to say a word to the provost marshal."
"Wouldn't that injure your prospects with the Countess?" I said, with
fat-brained cunning. "You cannot betray me and hope for her
friendship."
He glanced up at me, measured my mental capacity, then nodded.
"I can't force you that way," he admitted.
"He's bound to get to Paradise. Why?" I wondered, and said, aloud:
"What do you want of me?"
"I want immunity from the secret police, Mr. Scarlett."
"Where?"
"Wherever I may be."
"In Morbihan?"
"Yes."
"In Paradise?"
"Yes."
I was silent for a moment, then, looking him in the eye, "What do I
gain?"
Ah, the cat was out now. Buckhurst did not move, but I saw the muscles
of his face relax, and he drew a deep, noiseless breath.
"Well," he said, coolly, "you may keep those diamonds, for one
thing."
Presently I said, "And for the next thing?"
"You are high-priced, Mr. Scarlett," he observed.
"Oh, very," I said, with that offensive, swaggering menace in my
voice which is peculiar to the weak criminal the world over.
So I asserted myself and scowled at him and told him I was no fool and
taunted him with my importance to his schemes and said I was not born
yesterday, and that if Paris was to be divided I knew what part I
wanted and meant to stand no nonsense from him or anybody.
All of which justified the opinion he had already formed of me, and
justified something else, too--his faith in his own eloquence, logic,
and powers of persuasion. Not that I meant to make his mistake and
undervalue him; he was an intelligent, capable, remarkable
criminal--with the one failing--an overconfident contempt of _all_
men.
"There is one thing I want to ask you," said I. "Why do you desire
to go to Paradise?"
He did not answer me at once, and I studied his passionless profile as
he gazed out of the window.
"Well," he said, slowly, "I shall not tell you."
"Why not?" I demanded.
"--But I'll say this," he continued. "I want you to come to Paradise
with me and that fool of a woman. I want you to report to your
government that you are watching the house in Paradise, and that you
are hoping to catch me there."
"How can I do that?" I asked. "As soon as the government catches the
Countess de Vassart she will be sent across the frontier."
"Not if you inform your government that you desire to use her and the
others as a bait to draw me to Paradise."
"Oh, that's it, is it?" I asked, thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Buckhurst, "that's it."
"And you do not desire to inform me why you are going to stay in
Paradise?"
"Don't you think you'll be clever enough to find out?" he asked, with
a sneer.
I did think so; more than that, I let him see that I thought so, and
he was contented with my conceit.
"One thing more," I said, blustering a little, "I want to know
whether you mean any harm to that innocent girl?"
"Who? The Countess? What do you mean? Harm her? Do you think I waste
my thoughts on that little fool? She is not a factor in
anything--except that just now I'm using her and mean to use her house
in Paradise."
"Haven't you stripped her of every cent she has?" I asked. "What do
you want of her now?" And I added something about respect due to
women.
"Oh yes, of course," he said, with a vague glance at the street
below. "You need not worry; nobody's going to hurt her--" He suddenly
shifted his eyes to me. "You haven't taken a fancy to her, have
you?" he asked, in faint disgust.
I saw that he thought me weak enough for any sentiment, even a noble
one.
"If you think it pays," he muttered, "marry her and beat her, for
all I care; but don't play loose with me, my friend; as a plain matter
of business it won't pay you."
"Is that a threat?" I asked, in the bullying tone of a born coward.
"No, not a threat, a plain matter of profit and loss, a simple
business proposition. For, suppose you betray me--and, by a miracle,
live to boast of it? What is your reward? A colonelcy in the Military
Police with a few thousand francs salary, and, in your old age, a
pension which might permit you to eat meat twice a week. Against that,
balance what I offer--free play in a helpless city, and no one to
hinder you from salting away as many millions as you can carry off!"
Presently I said, weakly, "And what, once more, is the service you
ask of me?"
"I ask you to notify the government that you are watching Paradise,
that you do not arrest the Countess and Dr. Delmont because you desire
to use them as a bait to catch me."
"Is that all?"
"That is all. We will start for Paris together; I shall leave you
before we get there. But I'll see you later in Paradise."
"You refuse to tell me why you wish to stay at the house in
Paradise?"
"Yes,... I refuse. And, by-the-way, the Countess is to think that I
have presented myself in Paris and that the government has pardoned
me."
"You are willing to believe that I will not have you arrested?"
"I don't ask you to promise. If you are fool enough to try it--try
it! But I'm not going to give you the chance in Paris--only in
Paradise."
"You don't require my word of honor?"
"Word of--what? Well--no;... it's a form I can dispense with."
"But how can you protect yourself?"
"If all the protection I had was a 'word of honor,' I'd be in a
different business, my friend."
"And you are willing to risk me, and you are perfectly capable of
taking care of yourself?"
"I think so," he said, quietly.
"Trusting to my common-sense as a business man not to be fool enough
to cut my own throat by cutting yours?" I persisted.
"Exactly, and trusting to a few other circumstances, the details of
which I beg permission to keep to myself," he said, with a faint
sneer.
He rose and walked to the window; at the same moment I heard the sound
of wheels below.
"I believe that is our carriage," he said. "Are you ready to start,
Mr. Scarlett?"
"Now?" I exclaimed.
"Why not? I'm not in the habit of dawdling over anything. Come, sir,
there is nothing very serious the matter with you, is there?"
I said nothing; he knew, of course, the exact state of the wound I had
received, that the superficial injury was of no account, that the
shock had left me sound as a silver franc though a trifle weak in the
hips and knees.
"Is the Countess de Vassart to go with us?" I asked, trying to find a
reason for these events which were succeeding one another too quickly
to suit me.
He gave me an absent-minded nod; a moment later the Countess entered.
She had mended her black crêpe gown where I tore it when I hung in
the shadow of death under the battlements of La Trappe. She wore black
gloves, a trifle shabby, and carried a worn satchel in her hands.
Buckhurst aided me to rise, the Countess threw my hussar jacket over
my shoulders and buttoned it; I felt the touch of her cool, little
fingers on my hot, unshaved throat.
"I congratulate you on your convalescence," she said, in a low voice.
"Lean on me, monsieur."
My head swam; hips and knees were without strength; she aided me down
the stairway and out into the pale sunshine, where stood the same
mud-splashed, rusty vehicle which had brought us hither from La
Trappe.
The Countess had only a satchel and a valise; Buckhurst's luggage
comprised a long, flat, steel-bound box, a satchel, and a parcel. I
had nothing. My baggage, which I had left in Morsbronn, had without
doubt been confiscated long since; my field-glasses, sabre, and
revolver were gone; I had only what clothes I was wearing--a dirty,
ragged, gray-blue flannel shirt, my muddy jacket, scarlet
riding-breeches, and officer's boots. But in one of the hip-pockets of
my breeches I carried a fortune in diamonds.
As I stood beside the carriage, wondering how I was going to get in, I
felt an arm slip under my neck and another slide gently under my
knees, and Buckhurst lifted me. Beneath the loose, gray coat-sleeves
his bent arms were rigid as steel; his supple frame straightened; he
moved a step forward and laid me on the shabby cushions.
The Countess looked at me, turned and glanced up at her
smoke-blackened house, where a dozen Prussian soldiers leaned from the
lower windows smoking their long porcelain pipes and the provost
marshal stood in the doorway, helmeted, spurred, immaculate from
golden cheek-guard to the glittering tip of his silver scabbard. An
Uhlan, dismounted, stood on guard below the steps, his lance at a
"present," the black-and-white swallow-tailed pennon drooping from
the steel point.
The Countess bent her pretty head under its small black hat; the
provost's white-gloved hand flew to his helmet peak.
"Fear nothing, madame," he said, pompously. "Your house and its
contents are safe until you return. This village is now German soil."
The Countess looked at him steadily, gravely.
"I thank you, monsieur, but frontiers are not changed in a day."
But she was mistaken. Alsace henceforth must be written Elsass, and
the devastated province called Lothringen was never again to be
written Lorraine.
The Countess stepped into the carriage and took her place beside me;
Buckhurst followed, seating himself opposite us, and the Alsatian
driver mounted to the box.
"Your safe-conduct carries you to the French outposts at Saverne,"
said the provost, dryly. "If there are no longer French outposts at
Saverne, you may demand a visé for your pass and continue south to
Strasbourg."
Buckhurst half turned towards the driver. "Allez," he said, quietly,
and the two gaunt horses moved on.
There was a chill in the white sunshine--the first touch of autumn.
Not a trace of the summer's balm remained in the air; every tree on
the mountain outlines stood out sharp-cut in the crystalline light;
the swift little streams that followed the road ran clear above
autumn-brown pebbles and golden sands.
Distant beachwoods were turning yellow; yellow gorse lay like patches
of sunshine on the foot-hills; oceans of yellow grain belted the
terraced vineyards. Here and there long, velvety, black strips cut the
green and gold, the trail of fire which had scarred the grain belts;
here and there pillars of smoke floated, dominating blue woodlands,
where the flames of exploding shells had set the forest afire.
Already from the plateau I could see a streak of silver reflecting the
intense blue sky--the Rhine, upon whose westward cliffs France had
mounted guard but yesterday.
And now the Rhine was lost, and the vast granite bastions of the
Vosges looked out upon a sea of German forests. Above the Col du
Pigeonnier the semaphore still glistened, but its signals now
travelled eastward, and strange flags fluttered on its invisible
halliards. And every bridge was guarded by helmeted men who halted us,
and every tunnel was barred by mounted Uhlans who crossed their lances
to the ominous shout: "Wer da? On ne basse bas!" The Vosges were
literally crawling with armed men!
Driving slowly along the base of the hills, I had glimpses of rocky
defiles which pierced the mountain wall; and through every defile
poured infantry and artillery in unbroken columns, and over every
mountain pass streamed endless files of horsemen. Railroad tunnels
were choked with slowly moving trains piled high with artillery;
viaducts glistened with helmets all moving westward; every hillock,
every crag, every height had its group of tiny dark dots or its
solitary Uhlan.
Very far away I heard cannon--so far away that the hum of the
cannonade was no louder than the panting of our horses on the white
hill-road, and I could hear it only when the carriage stopped at
intervals.
"Do we take the railroad at Saverne?" I asked at last. "Is there a
railroad there?"
[Illustration: "EVERY BRIDGE WAS GUARDED"]
Buckhurst looked up at me. "It is rather strange that a French
officer should not know the railroads in his own country," he said.
I was silent. I was not the only officer whose shame was his
ignorance of the country he had sworn to defend. Long before the
war broke out, every German regimental officer, commissioned and
non-commissioned, carried a better map of France than could be
found in France itself. And the French government had issued to us
a few wretched charts of Germany, badly printed, full of gross
errors, one or two maps to a regiment, and a few scattered about
among the corps headquarters--among officers who did not even know the
general topography of their own side of the Rhine.
"Is there a railroad at Saverne?" I repeated, sullenly.
"You will take a train at Strasbourg," replied Buckhurst.
"And then?"
"And then you go to Avricourt," he said. "I suppose at least you
know where that is?"
"It is on the route to Paris," said I, keeping my temper. "Are we
going direct to Paris?"
"Madame de Vassart desires to go there," he said, glancing at her
with a sort of sneaking deference which he now assumed in her
presence.
"It is true," said the Countess, turning to me. "I wish to rest for
a little while before I go to Point Paradise. I am curiously tired of
poverty, Monsieur Scarlett," she added, and held out her shabby gloves
with a gesture of despair; "I am reduc
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/28295