Part 13

"Now," said Geiger-Hans, looking up, "here is an experience for your English-bred youth. Fate has annihilated the centuries; you have beheld the passage of the Huns! _Pouah!_ what a wild-beast trail they have left behind them! To think that Napoleon should have gone to seek these wolves and jackals in their steppes, and spread the Cossack over the face of Europe!"

He sprang out of the ditch; and the grey, much injured in feeling, snorting and sullenly upheaving its haunches, was induced to follow. A roll of far-off musketry crepitated up to them from the plain.

"Do you hear?" said Geiger-Hans. "And do you know what that means?"

"They are fighting on the other side of the hill," said Steven, spurring towards the crest.

"Yes, it is perhaps worth your youthship's attention. Do not, however, flatter yourself that you are viewing a battle. A mere skirmish, _un combat_, nothing more; one of the hundred or so that takes place now, week in, week out, on the marches of the mighty conqueror's lands. For a small kingdom, little brother Jerome can flatter himself to have gathered to it, from without and within, a considerable collection of enemies--Cossacks hanging like jackals on the flanks of the great army; Prussians from the north, Saxons from the east, peasants and students from his own villages and cities. This raid is scarce like to appear in the _Gazette_, but it is enough, for the combatants! The dead yonder are as dead as though they had fallen at Austerlitz or the Moskowa. Hark, at the snap of the musket--that is the sound of the Empire cracking! 'Tis the Empire cracking," repeated the musician, running alongside, his hand at the stirrup-leather. "And the little House of Westphalia is doomed to fall, as the cottage falls on the hillside from the earthquake that has wrecked the city.... A back-wave from Moscow have we here to-day."

They had halted on the crest, and their gaze plunged into the open valley. A canopy of blue smoke hung over the fields that spread between their knoll and a little town, some half-mile distant. The mist was pierced with slow-moving lines of bayonets which flashed back the sunshine; it was traversed with colour.

Geiger-Hans ran a knowing eye over the scene:

"Aha! What did I tell you? Those are Prussians, holding the townlet," said he. "Contrast their sober uniform with Jerome's scarlets and greens, his plumes and gold lace. There go our runaways! See them draw up behind yonder crimson platoon--Brother Jerome's Grenadiers of the Guard, for he must ape big brother Napoleon.... Look, our friends the Cossacks roll back together like a swarm of hornets at the foot of the hill; they find themselves cut off from their Prussian allies--and if the Hussars but rally in time, we may see the _roles_ of the drama reversed in a minute."

He fell abruptly silent: something had flown between his head and Steven's as the latter bent towards him from his saddle--something that droned a strange song as it passed and puffed a cold breath on their cheeks.

"What was that?" asked Steven, starting.

"That was a stray Death," said the musician, placidly. "What say you--shall we seek cover?"

"Let us see the thing out!" cried Steven.

"There will be more lead loose," said Geiger-Hans, glancing up with an odd expression. "Death flies on a capricious wing when this sort of game is played."

"Why, then," answered the bridegroom, with his smile of bitterness, "that might be the simplest solution of all; at least, I should not be deeply mourned."

"If that be your mind towards bullets," said the fiddler, with a shadow of sarcasm, "for once your youth and my age are in harmony. But what if you were to tie your horse behind some forest trees? There is no need of offering him up also to our altar of despair--and he might be of use to one of us, when the day is over."

Steven admitted the suggestion without a word. Presently both men sat upon a high bank, their legs dangling into space.

"How inspiring!" said the fiddler. He unslung his instrument. "Did you hear that volley? It came from troops trained under Bonaparte, I'll wager my fiddle-bow. Here the insurgents respond. See those puffs of white smoke in and out of the line under the village wall! Not a gun together. Loose shooting ... but good hatred! I'll back it in the long run! Drums! shouts! The bayonet charge. What did I tell you? here come our Huns back again ... what's left of them. I am inspired! Hark you, this is the song of the fight.... First come the Grenadiers, cool and scornful, musket on breast, arms folded; they march like one man. '_I have served, under the Eagle; I have been of the Guard of the Great Emperor. To Moscow I have been ... and back: to-day it is sunshine: it is child's play, but I would rather be back on the ice with my Emperor. To me he is the Little Corporal: I am one of the old lot. It is I and mine who put the crown on his head. To Jena we went singing:_

"'"We'll go and bring a kingdom home, To give little brother Jerome."

_He said little brother should have a little kingdom of his own--well, what is this rabble that would undo his work? ... It was warm work at Jena, comrade--oh, and it was cold at Moscow!'..._

"'_Aim at the Old Guards, kerls_' (says the Prussian to his gunners). '_Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!_'

"'_I have to come out to fight for the Fatherland_' (says the peasant lad); '_my mother put a green sprig in my hat. I shall put a notch on my musket-stock for every Frenchman I have killed, and shall show it to my children when Gretel and I marry._' ... _Oh, but the Old Guard shoots steady! Green sprig is down on the meadow; his comrades jump over him, one steps on his hand, but he feels nothing. Poor little Patriot; he has not even struck one blow for the Fatherland, but his red blood is sinking into the soil! How bright will bloom the flower of liberty in the land thus watered!_"

The fiddler wielded his bow with a kind of frenzy, and his battle music rose above the clamour of the distant combat, the scramble and clatter of the Cossacks up the hills, their defiant calls and grunts.

The remnant of the wild horde had reached the summit again in mad disorder, seeking the forest shelter at the first available point. A flight of bullets came singing through the air among them: the company of grenadiers, marking the routed enemy against the sky-line, had flung a last contemptuous volley after them. The savages squealed and ducked, clinging to their shaggy steeds in fantastic attitudes; a few were struck; one fell; his nearest comrade caught up the reins of his mount and, with exultant yell, led it away with him. The dead man was dragged a few yards till his inert foot fell loose of the hempen stirrup and he lay, a heap of discoloured rags, among the stones. Fear was on no man's face, but grins of defiance undaunted. Their war-cry was still of triumph.

Geiger-Hans sprang to his feet on the bank. He waved his bow, then drove it across the strings to a new song, shrill and mocking--a song of scorn for the fugitive:

"_Spread your dark wings and fly, obscene birds! Yet exult as you go: the scent of Death is in the air. In a little while you may gorge--but to-day the stricken Eagle can still beat back the carrion crows. Fly, flap your wings--caw--caw!_"

Steven stared amazed at his companion, and listened spellbound. The musician was like a man possessed. His grizzled locks seemed to stand out from his face, his left hand danced along the strings, his right arm worked with fury. If ever catgut and wood mocked and insulted, that possessed instrument of Geiger-Hans' did so that day of the combat of Heiligenstadt, in the teeth of the defeated Kalmuck. "_Caw, caw!_" it shrieked, catching the very guttural of the last belated Cossack, who struggled in rear of his comrades on a wounded horse. The man turned back in his sheepskin saddle, fury in his bloodshot eyes, poised his weapon over his head, measuring his distance.

"Take care!" cried Steven, leaping from the bank. But louder and shriller played Geiger-Hans. The savage hurled the lance; and Steven, flinging himself forward, with arms extended, caught the blow. He rolled back upon the player and both came to the ground together. The music fell mute. Shouting victory, the Cossack forced his bleeding nag into the brushwood.

* * * * *

"If Madame Sidonia were here," said the fiddler, with emphasis on the married title, "what a hero you would be to her!"

He had bound Steven's shoulder--the wound was an ugly gash enough--ministered to him with the wine of the country from a flask of his own, and water from the brook. The contest for the village, between King Jerome's troops and the raiders, was yet undecided, and fitful sounds of battle were still growling in the valley.

The winds blustered in the tree-tops; they had swept the sky from west to east more blue than there is colour to describe. There was a wonderful pulse of growing things about them. Every grass-blade shook in lusty individual life. The leafage was full of bright-eyed, feathered broods, planning the autumn flitting. The whole forest hummed with the minute creatures of Nature's fecundity.... In the plain, openly and with tumult, the masters of earth were strewing its fair face with Death.

"If Madame Sidonia were here!" repeated the fiddler, and cast a sly look at the young man's face over the last knot of his bandage.

Steven frowned and was silent.

"They will go on tearing each other to pieces down there till night. What say you? Shall not grey steed retrace his steps and carry Master Bridegroom back where he should be?"

"No!" cried the other, scarlet leaping to his livid face. "A thousand times no! I am not yet the base thing she deems me."

The musician subdued a sigh.

"What a noble thing is true pride!" quoth he, picked up his fiddle and began to examine it carefully.--"Heavens!" he cried, "if you had broken it! Can a man fling himself upon another in such inconsiderate fashion when there's a Stradivarius between them!"

"Had it not been for my want of consideration," said Steven, with some pique, "I think the precious instrument would hardly have known the touch of your fingers again."

The fiddler laughed out loud, as if the boyish outcry had pleased him; then, as suddenly, grew grave.

"My friend," said he, "the steel has not been tempered, I fear, the lead has not been cast, that will reach this heart.... Ah, Lord!"

It was an exclamation of uttermost weariness. He picked at his strings and tightened them with absent fingers. Then he flashed a smile at his companion:

"You are amazed, are you not, at my ingratitude? What! Here have I, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, preserved the existence of this wretched tramp at the risk of my noble, valuable one--here have I shed my blue blood to save his muddy fluid, and the creature has not even a 'Thank you'! ... Comrade," went on the musician, and his eye dilated, his countenance assumed a lofty mien, "I would not shame myself and you by such a word as 'Thanks'! The creature that would not give himself to save his fellow-creature when he can is not worth the name of man."

Steven, abashed that he had indeed thought himself heroic, blushed again and, looking down, began idly plucking with his unhurt right hand the wood-violets that grew in patches on the bank. The fiddler followed his movements, then his eye suddenly grew fixed, his jaw dropped. Slowly the healthy colour ebbed from his cheek and left it ashen. Steven, looking at him, was astonished and alarmed.

"For heaven's sake!" he cried, "are you ill?"

The fiddler stretched out his hand and culled the posy from the other's grasp. The touch of his fingers was as cold as death.

"Violets!" said he, in a sort of whisper. "There is blood on them!" He shuddered from head to foot.

"Perhaps all the mystery is but that he is a poor mad gentleman," thought Steven, It was an idea which could not fail to recur to him in the company of this fantastic being; but never had it seemed so justified.

*CHAPTER XIX*

*THE MELODY IN THE VIOLETS*

"_What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,_ _Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?_ _A wayfarer by barren ways and chill_ _Steep ways and weary, without her thou art...._" ROSSETTI.

Geiger-Hans laid the flowers on his knee and, still staring at them with the eyes of mingled horror and grief, gathered his instrument to his embrace and drew from it a strain the like of which Steven had never heard. Low and simple it was, with even a delicate lilt, as of the shadow-dance of bygone joys, yet so heart-rending that, after a moment or two, the listener felt tears rising to his eyes and a catch at his throat, and cried on his companion to stop.

The musician laid down his fiddle and turned his drawn countenance upon his companion.

"That is the melody in the violets, the melody that is never silent in my soul, night or day. You cannot hear it? Why, then, you must listen to the story.--I was once as youthful as you and had also a very noble pride--I had nearly as much reason," said Geiger-Hans, his pale lips writhing in a smile of scorn; "but, as men differ, their same passions vary in motive. It was of little moment to me that I came of an ancient house. (Ah! it pleases you to know so much! You have always guessed it, else had you not frequented me. Let it pass, friend, lest I should blush for you.) No, my pride was the pride of intellect. I knew a vast amount! I learned to lisp English that I might study Bacon and Locke, and to chew German that I might wrangle over Kant. I was the friend of Helvetius and Diderot, the rival of Holbach. We worshipped Voltaire. Reason was our God! In short, I was one of those they called the Encyclopaedists; we dreamed of doing away with old Abuses and replacing all established things by brand-new Perfections. 'Humanity and Freedom!' was our war-cry. With sweet-oil and rose-water our revolution was to be accomplished. You know what we did for France and the world? We set the first stone rolling, a half-century ago, and"--with a tragic gesture he pointed to the valley--"you can hear the echo of it still reverberating down yonder! Freedom we preached: and the whole world is enslaved as never it was before! Reason was our lodestar: and the State was handed over to the lowest intellects to guide it according to their brute passions! Humanity was our watchword: and France was drenched in blood from end to end, and her sons have brought blood and fire to every land in Europe! The blood of that wretched son of the steppes blackening yonder on the road, the blood shed in yonder bullet-riddled village by that very volley that shakes us as we sit, is all offered to the honour of that same trinity of our invention: Freedom, Humanity ... and Reason! Oh, glorious was the path we opened! Had we not just cause for pride?"

He fell silent a second; and Steven dared not speak, so corrosive was the bitterness of his every word, so poignant the emotion written on every furrow of his countenance.

"Oh, it was a golden time!" he resumed. "We philosophized up to the steps of Versailles. Louis made beautiful locks; Marie Antoinette tended snowy sheep; the roses bloomed at Trianon ... and not the wisest of us ever saw the precipice yawn! As for me--even the greatest minds are subject to the everyday passions of humanity--" his lips parted upon an ironic smile--"I fell in love, neither more nor less than the most elementary youngster of the land. She----" He hesitated; then, steadying his voice, proceeded in tones which betrayed the effort of speech: "she was of an old-fashioned Breton stock, and her ideas and mine were as the poles asunder. But upon one common ground, and a fair pasture it was to me, we met and were equal: we loved."

He paused, his breath came quick. "Heaven!" he said, and it seemed as if he knew not that he spoke, "how I loved her!"

He picked up a violet from the heap on his knees, and passed his fingers over it caressingly; his countenance softened. When he began again, it was in gentler accents than Steven had ever heard him use:

"When two people love each other, young man, and when each believes the other to be mistaken in some cardinal point of judgment, the dearest thought they cherish is to bring the Beloved to the truth. I had no doubt but that I could open her mind; she, but that she would redeem my perverted soul. I have told you what a fine pride I had. So noble it was that I was proud of my pride. And being an apostle of Liberty, the idea that a woman should resist her husband, that the weaker vessel should not give way to the stronger, never dawned on my emancipated mind! Well, well--we quarrelled! The fault was mine. Could I not have been content to worship her in her sweet faith! She had a high spirit. I wounded her in a thousand ways. Women have susceptibilities that we, thick-hided, thick-witted, dream not of. Even when we touch them to caress, we bruise. And then, when their pain is intolerable and they turn and strike at us, our wound is that of the most innocent, the most injured! Oh, when my measure was full against her, she insulted me, if you like--much as your little bride this morning insulted your Highmindedness. She said words that my exquisite pride could not endure. Of course, you will well understand (being even such a self-respecting youth as I was then) that I had no choice but to leave her. That was right, was it not?"

Steven, under that terrible gaze, ironic even in its haunting agony, was at a loss how to reply. He muttered something of a woman's duty and wifely submission. The fiddler caught up the words fiercely.

"Ay," cried he. "A woman's duty--wifely submission. Oh, strange how men prate of chivalry, in the exercise of their bodily strength, because of a woman's weakness, and yet never see that, because also of a woman's sensitiveness of soul, a man should take shame to parade the superior strength of his will--that he should spare the delicate spirit as well as the delicate frame. Listen:--my strength of mind was such that it left me no choice but to desert the woman whom I had vowed to protect, to make parade of my manhood by leaving her to live her own life alone, to cast the frail and lovely thing I had held in my arms away from my love and guardianship. No doubt, no doubt, I made some very generous dispositions as regards my fortune--even as you now propose towards Madame Sidonia, and she had her people to go to, even as your wife has: those whom she had given up to come to me. But when the day dawned that I had to look into my heart and read the truth, what did I see? Look into your heart now, and learn the baseness of your own motives. Why do you leave your bride? Why did I leave mine? For what reason, but that she might weep and mourn for me; that she might learn how precious was the jewel she had not appreciated! ... To be revenged ... revenged on the Beloved!"

He flung himself back against the bole of the fir that rose behind him and closed his eyes.

"I left her," he went on, "left France, left Europe. I went to America, the new home of Freedom, the only country on the face of the earth where the goddess was worshipped as she should be. I had vowed not to return till recalled: I was summoned by a voice terribly different from hers. It took three months before the noise of the storm reached me on that far-off shore, and I knew that it must take me at least a month more ere I could reach her. And she was in danger! ... I think it was then I began to go mad--for it is understood that I am mad, is it not?"

He opened his bright eyes and fixed them on Steven, who became so extremely embarrassed that the fiddler broke into unmirthful laughter.

"Mad!" he repeated. His gaze flickered; and, if truth be told, he looked none too sane. Then he sank his head between his hands with a groan. "If only I were a little madder!" he cried. "The story is nearly finished," he went on presently, in a new, toneless voice. "When I landed in France, all the powers of the Hell my superior intellect denied were let loose in the land--Danton, Marat and Robespierre represented the trilogy of Liberty, Reason and Humanity! The prisons were full, the guillotine everywhere restless.... Our Golden Age! ... A fortnight I looked for her. Have you ever sought in vain one you had loved, even for an hour? Dante never devised a more exquisite torture for his deepest circle. My house in Paris had been confiscated for the nation's soldiers; her father's castle in Lorraine had been burnt to the ground. At my old home at Nancy at last I found a trace. She had refused, it seemed, to join in the flight of her people across the Rhine; but, when trouble became threatening, had taken up her post on my estate. That was like her. She had been arrested--so dangerous an enemy of the people! She was in the infamous prison at Nancy. She----" He flung his battered old hat from his head, dashed back his hair, loosened the wide collar at his throat. Breath seemed to fail him. A dark wave of blood rushed to his forehead. "All, all had abandoned her, save one poor girl--a peasant from our farm, whose people were of the local patriots.... This girl was allowed access to the cells. I met her at the prison gates, whither my frenzied search brought me at length. She knew me, though I was a tramp already. At sight of my face, she clapped her hands and broke into wild sobs. I was too late! That morning.... Why do you look at me like that? Do you wonder that I am still alive? That is where the God I denied has His vengeance of me, you see. I cannot die. Oh, I could kill myself, of course! But, mark how deep has the Encyclopaedist fallen.... I dare not, _dare not, lest I lose my chance of meeting her again!_ ... Ah! there is great pity in your eyes.... Her little delicate head--she held it like a queen's. Under the powder, her hair was gold. (I have not even one lock of her hair.) I used to clasp her slender throat between both my hands.... The peasant girl had kept by her to the end. She had stood at the foot of the scaffold, that a last friendly glance might speed that lovely soul. 'She smiled to me,' said the poor creature, sobbing. My eyes were dry.... Then she drew from her bosom a bunch of violets, and said, '_Madame, les avail a son corsage._'..."

Geiger-Hans gathered up the flowers scattered on his knees, and crushed them against his face.

"She always loved violets," he murmured. "These have no scent," he went on dreamily; "but hers, hers--oh, they were sweet!"

"Ah! friend!" cried Steven, and had no further word. Infinite pity indeed was in the look he turned upon the musician. It seemed as if the latter wandered as he spoke again.