Part 20

“But we have a message for our father, who is the gardener yonder,” spoke up Jean, with a jerk of his thumb towards the château.

“Well, you can give it to the sentry at the gate, if he’ll take it. But be quick!”

The children darted up the avenue between the poplars. At the entrance gate, which stood open, sure enough they found a red-coat posted.

“We bring a message for our father, who is the gardener here,” said Jean, hardily.

The sentinel made him repeat it, and answered in execrable French. “Well, I suppose there is no harm in letting you carry it, if the message is urgent. Your father’s somewhere in the garden; I saw him pass that way a minute ago. But you must promise to be back within five minutes.”

“Lord, now,” added the sentry, smiling down at them, “I left just such a pair as you at home, not two months ago. I’d be sorry, much as I love them, to see them anyways here.”

“I like that man,” said Pauline, as she and Jean passed into the yard. The place was empty, save for two soldiers—Lunsbrugers—in green uniform, who were carrying a bench from the chapel towards the small gate of the garden.

“But we have no message for papa,” said Pauline, “unless we tell him that Antoine’s mother has twins.”

“And he won’t be in a hurry to hear that.” Just then a dull noise sounded afar to the southward, and the ground seemed to shake a little. “We will first seek Philomène.”

He had hardly spoken the words when something screamed in the air above and struck the edge of the stable-steps with a terrific crash. The children, frightened out of their lives, dashed for the ladder of the pigeon-house—the nearest solid object to which they could cling. Across the smoke, as they clung and turned, they saw the sentry very coolly shutting the gate. Four or five green-coats ran out of the chapel to help him, but paused a moment as a second and a third shot whistled wide overhead. Then they rushed forward, heads down, to the gate, which was quickly shut and barred. They had not seen the children, who now, climbing up the ladder, stayed not until they had squeezed through the square hole of the platform and crawled into the pigeon-house, where they lay panting.

It was, of course, quite foolish to seek shelter here. For the moment they would have been far safer in the courtyard below, under the lee of the outbuildings. A ball, striking the pigeon-house, would knock it to shivers at one blow. But they had climbed in pure panic, and even now, without any excuse of reason, they felt more secure here.

As a matter of fact the danger was lessening, for with these first shots the artillery to the southward, beyond the trees, had been finding its range and now began to drop its fire shorter, upon the garden below the château. Through their pigeon-holes Jean and Pauline overlooked almost the whole stretch of the garden, the foot of which along the brick wall was closely lined with soldiers—tall red-coats for the most part, with squads of green-jackets here and there and a sprinkling of men who carried yellow knapsacks. They had broken down the cups of the buttresses during the night and laid planks from buttress to buttress, forming a platform that ran the entire length of the wall. Along this platform a part of the defenders stood ready with bayonets fixed in their muskets, which they rested for the moment on the brick coping; others knelt on the flower border close beneath the platform watching at apertures where a few bricks had been knocked out. There were green jackets and yellow, too, in the grove beyond, posted here and there behind the breech-holes—a line of them pushed forward to a hedge on the left—with a line of retreat left open by a small doorway.

This was all that Jean and Pauline could see of the defence; and even this they took in hurriedly, for the round shot by now was sweeping the garden terraces and ploughing through the flower-beds. It still passed harmlessly over the wall and the soldiery lining it; and the children could see the men turn to watch the damage and grin at one another jocosely. Pauline wondered at their levity; for the hail under which they stood and the whistling noise of it, the constant throbbing of earth and air and the repeated heavy thuds upon the terrace were enough to strike terror into anyone.

She cried “O—oh!” as a tall orange-tree fell, shorn through as easily as a cabbage stump.

But Jean dragged at her arm. Between the tree tops in a gap of the smoke that hung and drifted beyond the wood—which dipped southward with the lie of the slope and fined away there to an acute angle—the enemy batteries, or two of them, were visible, shooting out fresh wings of smoke on the sullen air, and on a rising ground beyond, dense masses of infantry, with squadrons of horsemen moving and taking up position. Flags and pennons flickered, and from moment to moment, as a troop shifted ground, quick rivulets of light played across lines of cuirasses and helmets. Tens—hundreds—of thousands were gathered there and stretched away to the left (the trees were lower to the left and gave a better view); and the object of this tremendous concourse, as it presented itself to Jean—all to descend upon the château and swallow up this thin line of men by the garden wall. To him, as to Pauline, this home of theirs meant more than the capital, being the centre of their world; and of other preparations to resist the multitude opposite they could see nothing.

Jean wondered why, seeing it was so easy, the great masses hung on the slope and refrained from descending to deliver the blow.

By and by that part of the main body which stood facing the angle where the wood ended threw out, as it were by a puff, a cloud of little figures to left and right, much like two swarms of bees; and these two dark swarms, each as it came on in irregular order, expanding until their inner sides melted together and made one, descended under cover of their artillery to the dip, where for a few minutes Jean lost sight of them.

In less than a minute the booming of the heavy guns ceased, and their music was taken up by a quick crackle of small arms on both sides of the wood. The line of defenders by the hedge shook, wavered, broke and came running back, mingling with their supporters posted behind the beech-boles; under whose cover they found time to reload and fire again, dodging from tree to tree. But still as it dodged the whole body of men in the wood was being driven backward and inward from both sides upon the small door admitting to the garden. At this point the crush was hidden by the intervening wall. The children could only see the thin trickle of men, as after jostling without they escaped back through the doorway. But across the wall could now be seen the first of the assailants closing in among the beech-trunks. A line of red jackets, hitherto hidden, sprang forward—as it were from the base of the wall on the far side—to cover the route. But they were few and seemed doomed to perish when——

Whirr-rh! Over the children’s heads, from somewhere behind the château, a shell hissed, plunged into the trees right amongst the assailants, and exploded. It was followed by another, another, and yet another. The whole air screamed with shells as the earth shook again with their explosions. But the marvel was the accuracy with which they dropped, plump among trees through which the assailants crowded—white-breasted regiments of the line, blue-coated, black-gaitered, sharpshooters closing in on their flanks. The edge of this ring within thirty seconds was a semicircle of smoke and flame along which, as globe after globe fell and crashed, arms tossed, bodies leapt and pitched back convulsively; while even two hundred yards nearer at most, the knot of defenders stood unscathed.

Within five minutes—so deadly was the play of these unseen howitzers—not a blue-coat stood anywhere in sight. A few wounded could be seen crawling away to shelter. The rest of the front and second lines lay in an irregular ring, and behind it the assault, which had swept so close up to the wall, melted clean away. Amid hurrahs the streams of green and yellow jackets, which had been pouring in at the entry, steadied itself and began to pour forth again to reoccupy the wood, gaily encouraged by the tall red-coats on the platform. The hail of shells ceased as suddenly as it had begun.

In the lull Jean found tune to look below him, then through another pigeon-hole which faced the gateway he saw his father crossing the yard with a red-coated officer who was persuading him to leave it.

“Philomène!” shouted the gardener.

The serving-woman came forth from the doorway of the house, bearing a large basin. She emptied it into a sink beside the steps, and what she poured was to appearance a bowlful of blood.

“We are to go, it seems,” called the gardener. “They will try again, and the likes of us will be shot as having no business here.”

“No business?” called back Philomène. “I don’t remember when I had so much.” She disappeared into the house.

“Papa!” shrilled Jean, and pushed Pauline out towards the platform. “For your life, quick!”

“But the ladder has gone!” gasped Pauline.

It was true. Jean shouted to his father again, but the scream of a belated shell overhead drowned his young voice. Someone had removed the ladder. Before he could call again his father had passed out and the sentry, under the officer’s instructions, was barring the gate.

IV

The ladder which alone could help them to descend rested against the curtain of the gate, some two dozen yards away. Why it had been carried off to be planted there, or by whom, there was no guessing. Someone, maybe, had done it in a panic. For a moment it rested there idly: yet, as events proved, it had a purpose to serve.

A lull of twenty minutes ensued on the baffled first assault. But the French tirailleurs, beaten back from their direct attack on the wood, collected themselves on the edges of it, and began to play a new and more deadly game, creeping singly along the hedges and by the sunken ways, halting, gathering, pushing on again, gradually enclosing three sides of the walled enceinte. Against the abattis on the high-road they made a small demonstration as a feint. But the main rush came again through the wood and across an orchard to the left of it.

This time, for some reason, the deadly howitzers were silent. This time, after another roar of artillery fire, the defenders in the grove came pouring back with the black-gaitered men close upon them, intercepting and shooting them down by scores.

Then followed half an hour’s horrible work all along the garden wall; work of which (and they should have thanked Heaven for it) the children missed the worst, seeing only the red-coats jabbing across the wall and downwards with their bayonets; the riflemen at the loopholes firing, drawing back, pausing to re-load. The small door had been shut fast, and a dozen men held their weight against it.

Yells and firing sounded all the while from the orchard to the loft. But what was happening there the children could not see. An angle of the house cut off their view in that direction—cut off in fact, their view of the main field of battle, where charge after charge of cavalry was being launched against the few regiments holding a ridge to the left, close under which the château stood.

But for Jean and Pauline the whole fight was for the château—their home, and especially just now for the garden. It seemed incredible that a thin line of red-coats could hold the wall against such numbers as kept pouring up between the beech-boles. Yet minute after minute passed, and the wall was not carried.

Someone shouted close at hand from the gate. They turned that way, each choosing a peephole. A score of blue-coats had actually burst the gate open, and were carrying the courtyard with a rush. But, half-way, as many red-coats met them and swept them out at point of bayonet, forcing the double gate on their backs. Half a dozen others ran with beams to barricade it. Close beside it to the left a man topped the wall and straddled it with a shout of triumph; a red-coat fired slantwise from the pigeon-house ladder and he pitched writhing upon the cobbles. Shakos and heads bobbed up behind the coping whence he had dropped; but the yard now was full of soldiers (Heaven knew whence they had sprung) and so this assault too was driven back.

Shouts arose from the left of the house. Gradually, the assault here being baffled, the men drained off in that direction. The attack upon the wall, too, seemed to have eased. Then came another lull. Then the enemy’s artillery opened fire again, this time with shell. A tall officer stood against the wall, shouting an order, when the first shell dropped. When the smoke of the explosion cleared he was there no longer. There remained only what seemed to be his shadow. It was actually the streak of him beaten in blood upon the stucco.

This new cannonade was designed to set fire to the obstinate buildings, and very soon the roof broke into a blaze in two places. That of the chapel was the first to catch, at the western end. Many of the wounded had been carried there.

The pigeon-house stood intact. Not even a stray bullet had struck it. But now a new danger threatened the children and a surer one even than the fast dropping shells. Smoke from the blazing roof of the main building poured into every aperture of their hiding-place. They fought with it, striving to push it from them with hands that still grew feebler. Of a sudden it blotted out, not the battle only, but life itself for them.

V

“Pauline!”

It seemed to Jean that he was awaking again in the hay-loft. Again he heard the distant crackle of musketry.

“Pauline!”

Pauline stirred. At that moment a bird alighted on a sill before one of the holes and disappeared with a whirr of wings. It was a pigeon returning to roost, frightened to discover his house occupied.

The noise awakened Pauline upright. She sat up on the floor of the loft and asked suddenly:

“But did they break in after all?”

“They? Who?” asked Jean, still confused. But he crept to the opening, as he had crept to the other opening in the dawn.

It was close upon sunset now; but he did not mark this. What he marked—and what brought him back to his senses—was the sight of Philomène crossing the empty courtyard with a bucket. It was the same courtyard, though its outbuildings here and there lacked a roof. It was the same Philomène anyhow, with her waddling walk.

“Philomène!”

“Eh? But, the good God deliver us, how?”

“Fetch the ladder here.”

She fetched and planted it. The two children climbed down to her.

VI

A man came through the broken gateway and stood for a moment gazing around him in the falling twilight at the ruins—a tall sergeant of the Horse Artillery. He caught sight of Philomène and the children and stared at them, harder still.

“Well, I’ve seen things to-day,” he said. “But if you ain’t the unlikeliest. Who belongs here?”

“I could have told you, yesterday,” answered Philomène, in an old voice, following his look around.

“And you’ve seen these things? You?” he asked. His face was dirty—a mask of gunpowder; but his eyes shone kindly, and Pauline, without recognising his uniform, knew him for a friend. “Well, I’m——! But who lives here just now?”

“There’s nobody at home just now but me and the children, as you see,” said Philomène. “Were you looking for somebody?” with another look around. “He will be hard to find.”

The tall sergeant leaned an elbow against the gate. He was tottering with fatigue. “It’s a victory, that’s what it is,” he said; “an almighty victory.”

“It ought to be, God knows,” Philomène assented.

“And—and——But you’ll be busy, no doubt?”

“Moderately.”

“I have to push on with my battery. But there’s no real hurry—the Prussians are after them. Now I thought—on the off-chance, if I could find a friend here——”

“What is it you ask of me, good man?”

“If one of you wouldn’t mind stepping yonder with me. It’s much to ask, I know. But there’s a gentleman—an officer of ours——”

“Wounded?”

“No such trouble for you, good woman. Dead he is, and I helped bury him. But I want to find someone who will mark the place and keep it marked ’gainst I come back—if ever I do.”

“Was he a friend of yours, then?” asked Philomène, while the children stared.

“I wouldn’t altogether say that. He’d have said ‘yes’ fast enough, if you’d asked him. But he was a gentleman; Ramsey by name—Major Norman Ramsey; one of many fallen to-day, but I rode with him in his battery when he charged in slap through the whole French cavalry at Fuentes d’Oñoro. Will you come? ’Tis but a little way.”

His voice pleaded so—it was so strange and womanly, coming from a man of his strength and inches—that they followed him almost without demur, out by the gateway and around the sunken lane at the back of the buildings, where (for it was dark) they had to pick their steps for fear of stumbling over the dead.

Mercifully the way was not far. The tall sergeant halted and pointed to a patch of broken turf, where was a loose mound among broad wheel-ruts.

“You see, I have marked it with a stone,” said he. “But in a few days’ time there may be many around here. I want you to mark this one—it doesn’t matter how, so that you know it and can point it out when his friends ask. He wears his jacket, of course—the same as mine.” The tall man spanned his chest and turned towards the dying daylight, so that the bars of yellow braid showed between his fingers. “Only the facings will be of gold. You see those three trees standing alone? They will be half-way between it and the wall of the château—in a straight line almost; and the lane close here on our left. You cannot miss it.” He felt in his pockets.

“We want no money, soldier,” said Philomène. “We will do our best. Give me your name, that meanwhile we may pray for you and him, out of these many.”

“My name is Livesay, Sergeant, of Bull’s troop. That will mean nothing to you, however.”

“I dare say,” answered Philomène simply, “it will convey more to our Lord God. I had a man once—who was killed—in the Artillery.”

Jean and Pauline stared at the man. Tears, as he stood by the grave, had carved channels of white down his powder-stained cheeks.

“I do not believe,” he said, “in praying for the dead. But I am glad, somehow, there are folks who do. Will you? His name was Ramsey; and the Duke, who has won this battle, broke his heart, curse him!”

“How did he die, sir?” asked Philomène simply.

“He was killed some while ago and far from here,” answered the sergeant. “Of a broken heart, Mademoiselle.”

“It is a sad thing,” sighed Philomène, “to live for the Artillery.”

The sergeant seemed to wish to say more, but turned to shake hands with her. He patted the children lightly on the head, then strode down the slope. A last shaft of sunset cast his long shadow over the heaps of slain.

With a sob Philomène pulled herself together.

“Mark my words, children. The pigeons will be home at their roosts to-morrow and all this will be as if it never had been.”

She turned back to retrace the path, and over the fields of slain the two children followed her, heavy with sleep.

The Face _in the_ Hop Vines

_By_ Charles G. D. Roberts

_King’s (Liverpool) Regiment_

From the low window, framed in hop-vines, came light enough to light to bed so sleepy a traveller as I, so I troubled not at all to find the candle. Sitting idly on the edge of the couch, I pondered on the effort it would require to pull off my boots. A soldier, and hardened to all shifts, I might, indeed, have slept as I was; but the bed was the best in the inn, and I cared not to vex my hostess’s tidy soul by any such roughness of the camp. Even as I thought of it, however, my tired brain was flowing away into dreams.

But on the sudden I sat up straight, very wide awake. My hand went to the butt of my pistol. I had caught a stealthy rustling in the hop vines about the window. Could these Acadians be planning any mischief against me? It was not probable, for they were an open-dealing and courageous folk, and had shown themselves civil during the few hours since my coming to Cheticamp village. Nevertheless, I knew that in a certain sense I might count myself to be in an enemy’s country, and vigilance my best comrade. I sat in the gloom motionless, watching the pale square of the window.

Presently a head appeared close to the glass, and my fingers released the pistol. The head was a woman’s—a young girl’s, it seemed—in the wimpled white cap wherein these girls of Acadia are wont to enshadow their bright faces. Then light fingers tapped on the pane, and with great willingness I threw open the sash. But on the instant, guessing at a mystery of some sort, I held my tongue and kept my face aloof from the outdoor glimmer. For my part, however, I could make out—less, perhaps, by these material eyes than by the insight of the heart—that the face which looked up peeringly into mine was young and alluring.

“Jacques,” she murmured in a voice which my ears at once approved, “is it really you?”

“There’s a mistake here—an interesting mistake,” said my heart to me. But I let no such utterance rise to my lips. No, indeed. But my name is Jack—and no one could be supposed to think of spelling at such a moment. My conscience made no protest as I answered:

“Surely, dear one, it’s Jack. Who else could it be?”

I spoke in a discreet whisper, for all voices in a whisper sound alike; and I blessed my stars that I had perfected my French since my arrival in Halifax. I put out my hand, but failed to find a small one to occupy it.

“Of course, I knew it was you, Jacques,” the bewitching voice responded, “or you don’t suppose I should have come knocking at your window this way, do you?”

“No, I should think not, _chérie_,” I assented heartily, solicitous to cherish the maid’s mistake and prolong the interview to the utmost patience of Fate. “But it was kind of you to come so soon.”

This seemed safe and non-committal, but I trembled after I said it, lest some unknown revelation should be lurking in the words.

“I had to, Jacques, because I was afraid you might come to see me to-night——”

“I was coming,” I interrupted, boldly mendacious, “but I was on the road all night, and thought I had better lie down for a soldier’s forty winks before I called.”

She laughed under her breath provocatively.

“How your French has improved in these two years,” she remarked with approbation. “I used to think you would never learn.”

This was the first time I had seen Cheticamp village, but I felt safe in my reply.

“I was stupid, of course, _mon ange_; but after I was gone I remembered your sweet instructions.”

This was dangerous ground. I hastened to shift it.

“But tell me,” I went on, “what can you mean by saying I am not to come and see you? Surely you are not going to be so cruel, when I’ve been away so long.”

“No, Jacques,” she said, with a decisive shake of her pretty head, “you cannot come. Father is very bitter against you, and there would be a scene.”

I began to feel that I had rights which were being trampled upon.

“But what do you suppose I came to Cheticamp for?” I pleaded.

“Not merely to see me—that I know, Jacques,” came the decided answer. “You could never get leave of absence just for that. You cold-blooded English could never make a woman’s wishes so important.”