Part 46

So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible memories of the Roumanian. She found the porter. He hailed her _fiacre_ from its waiting-place. Madame stepped in gracefully, and was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!

"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called War was actually going on. The speaker resumed:

"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St. Germain.... Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and can endure the noise of the bombardments--Mademoiselle may be quite as safe"--he shrugged and twirled his imperial--"there as anywhere else!..."

A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow, between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of Germany. But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle. Then she thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....

For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something approaching to a panic was brewing.... The Place of the Prefecture was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth. It was whispered that defeat was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M. de Bazaine.... Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.

Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled waters. Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come. Well might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities. Well might the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.

It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.

"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in charge of the bureau. "She gave notice of departure, and asked for the account. Then the gentleman arrived--a handsome man with splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard--my faith! what hair and what a beard! Madame cried out with ravishment upon his entrance, for he would not be announced--he went up at once. Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"

Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question. She was intent upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag. Without money one could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little store of cash. Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's. The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's possession was appalling. She was delivered from the dilemma by a chambermaid with a master-key. As she stole in and seized her bag she heard voices in the next room. Certainly one was Adelaide's and the other male. A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and fierce black eyes of Straz.

"_When the little Queen of Diamonds comes,_" the voice said, "_you shall present me!_" And a chuckle followed on the words that made her cold. Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....

The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes. She learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun. At Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.

Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty station, waiting. She was escaping from even greater perils than she had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate regret.

She had been so happy there.... She would never forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.

The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal drawing-room of the Prefecture.... Lingeringly Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting--ah, me! there had been no farewell!... And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and seen...

Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying. Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane. As she whispered "_Adieu!_" looking up at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on earth again.

It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.

What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child of the Empire!... What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...

So young, so noble, so unfortunate! The pity of it!... He who might have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.

What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!... That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan. The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy....

From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....

What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.

His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.

He was to attain manhood in exile. Transplanted to the soil of a foreign country, he was to develop into the _beau-ideal_ of a youthful King among men. High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine flower of French chivalry. And in the spring of his manhood he was to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.

LVII

Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.

Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours of his absence. Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and German bodies decently interred therein. Huge canvas sacks crammed with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood ready to be carted away. Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had rendered like services to dead Frenchmen. And at the head of a trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:

"CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD. OFFICERS, 6; TROOPS, 200."

a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the body of de Bayard.

The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope. About the cross Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack. None of the heavy clay soil had been thrown back. Waiting some hand to draw Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring back in the brazen face of the sun.

His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open--the blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust. The red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt in search of pocket-book and purse. It was difficult to credit that the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm and soften and relax into a smile.

He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men, even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes. But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking point--got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's Rosary instead.

"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do. If I'm not quite up to your mark, please overlook it! As to being worthy of _her_--_is_ any man breathing? Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be No...."

Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....

Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at the task.

Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished. Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office. You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields of death. The secular priest and the tonsured religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.

To whom should one appeal? Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end. You saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press. An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet through both eyes. Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar. Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith was uplifted--even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration--his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.

Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched. Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief but solemn rite was at an end. Then he looked up at the sky--shaking back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager features--making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross. And the serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.

Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.

Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims. But no merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast. It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost humanly upon his face.

The appeal went home. Stepping over the prone body of its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck. He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:

"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended. In the Name of the Father ..."

As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down heavily. A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a gasp. The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart. All was over. The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and overtook him, crying:

"My Father..." And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:

"Surely, my child. Do you need my poor assistance?"

A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent. And with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic--the face of Voltaire.

There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts. The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there. The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry. In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....

"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"

"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare soutane. And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman. Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the Absolution, the _Libera me_, _Paternoster_ and Collects, and with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the _De Profundis_ that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:

"My poor prayers are for all my children. Now kneel and make your confession. No one will hear you--it is as though we were together in my poor little church."

"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.

The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:

"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged your religious obligations. But to-day is the Octave of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or received Communion since Whitsuntide. Will you tell me that your conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors of the Divine Judgments of God!"

Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his.... He clasped his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very passion of pity and love:

"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life? And what shall I say to Him when I stand before Him, and He asks me: '_Didst thou suffer a sinner to depart whom pleadings might have won?_'"

There was no resisting that passionate entreaty. Another instant, and the barrier of pride broke down. P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw, moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands upon his head.

With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands were withdrawn and their owner went away. How he went and whither he betook himself, his penitent never knew.

LVIII

The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the westering sunshine. Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin. The doors of the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open. Household! goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread, smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in the little, flowery front yards. All the doors stood open, some that had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes. Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter. The hand of the marauder had plainly been at work. P. C. Breagh groaned as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.

Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown upon the floor. The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack, temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books, deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes. But P. C. Breagh's eyes were busied elsewhere. With the ripped-up feather bed from the inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous night. With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate articles of feminine underwear--a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy chemise. He took them up with reverent, shaking hands--looked instinctively for an initial.... There were letters embroidered in dainty Convent-taught stitchery--"J. M. de B."

He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him. He had glanced toward the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had lain. Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse. And a lance driven home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.

Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight. His under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically. He yelped out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could not stop:

"Juliette! Juliette! Where are you? What have they done?... Oh, Juliette!..."

And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief. Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled. The slender thread of a voice replied:

"Monsieur Breagh, I am here! Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you! Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"

And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept out from its hiding-place. Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the eyes of her true worshiper. He choked and made a dive to help her, stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers. And then she was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold. And through the chattering of her teeth he heard--did he really hear her falter:

"I knew--I knew that you would come! When a priest had been found to bless the grave of my father. Not before!... You would never have returned before!"

Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish. He rose up, lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.

"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise. Shall I ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?... Oh, Lord!... Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle poisoned me!... Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"

"It is he who is dead!" She drew her small, cold hands from his that were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the sheet that covered the still form. "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.

"Wouldn't I die for you? If I got the chance!... Don't you know it?... No--how can you know it?"

Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at him to say:

"I do know it! To-day you placed yourself between me and the violence of those Prussians. I have no words to thank you for your courage, sir! Had I words for _him_"--she looked back at my "cousin"--"he would not hear them.... Nor can he be sensible of this----" She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the boldly arching eyebrows. "Yet with all my gratitude I place it there!"

P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would change places with him to get that--and I believe you know it! Cover him up and let me take you away from here...." He added, as she looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe. There must be somewhere!"

"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here than anywhere. You do not think the comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"

"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this--beastliness."

His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.

She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:

"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood. We will hide ourselves in there until the dark. For what are you looking?"

He answered, stirring the _débris_ on the flagstones:

"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack. No!... Except the rags of a spare jacket--they've left me nothing but this."

One stout clasped notebook had suffered little. He thrust it into his pocket and turned to Juliette. She said, with a rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property: