Chapter 3

“Excellent wine, Herr Baron,” said the prince, who, like his comrade, drank profusely of the best in the cellar. “Your Rudesheimer Berg '94 is _kolossal._ Very friendly of you to save it for us. We Germans know good wine. What?”

“You have that reputation,” answered the baron.

“And say,” added the count, “let us have a couple of bottles more, dear landlord. You can put it in the bill.”

“I shall do so,” said the baron gravely. “It shall be put in the bill with other things.”

“But why,” drawled the prince, “does _la Baronne_ never favor us with her company? Still very attractive--musical probably--here is a piano--want good German music--console homesickness.”

“Madame is indisposed,” answered the baron quietly, “but you may be sure she regrets your absence from home.”

The officers looked at each other with half-tipsy, half-angry eyes. They suspected a jest at their expense, but could not quite catch it.

“Impudence,” muttered the count, who was the sharper of the two when sober.

“No,” said the prince, “it is only stupidity. These Walloons have no wit.”

“Come,” he added, turning to the baron, “we sing you a good song of fatherland--show how _gemuthlich_ we Germans are. You Belgians have no word for that. What?”

He sat down to the piano and pounded out _“Deutschland ueber Alles,”_ singing the air in a raucous voice, while Ludra added a rumbling bass.

“What do you think of that? All Germans can sing. _Gemuthlich._ What?”

“You are right,” said the baron, with downcast eyes. “We Belgians have no word for that. It is inexpressible--except in German. I bid you good night.”

For nearly a fortnight this condition of affairs continued. The baron endured it as best he could, obeying scrupulously the military regulations which necessity laid upon him, and taking his revenge only in long thoughts and words of polite sarcasm which he knew would not be understood. The baroness worked hard at the housekeeping, often cooking and cleaning with her own hands, and rejoicing secretly with her husband over the rare news that came from their daughter in England, from their boy at the front in West Flanders. Sometimes, when the coast was clear, husband and wife walked together under the beech-trees and talked in low tones of the time when the ravenous beast should no more go up on the land.

The two noble officers performed their routine duties, found such amusement as they could in neighboring villages and towns, drank deep at night, and taxed their ingenuity to invent small ways of annoying their hosts, for whom they felt the contemptuous dislike of the injurer for the injured. They were careful, however, to keep their malice within certain bounds, for they knew that the baron was in favor with the commandant of the district.

One morning the baron and his wife, looking from their window in a wing of the house, saw with surprise and horror a score or more of German soldiers assembled beside the beech-avenue, with axes and saws, preparing to begin work.

“What are they going to do there?” cried he in dismay, and hurried down to the dining-room, where the officers sat at breakfast, giving orders to an attentive corporal.

“A thousand pardons, Highness,” interrupted the baron; “forgive my haste. But surely you are not going to cut down my avenue of beeches?”

“Why not?” said the prince, swinging around in his chair. “They are good wood.”

“But, sir,” stammered the baron, trembling with excitement, “those trees--they are an ancient heritage of the house--planted by my grandfather a century ago--an old possession--spare them for their age.”

“You exaggerate,” sneered the prince. “They are not old. I have on my hunting estate in Thuringia oaks five hundred years old. These trees of yours are mere upstarts. Why shouldn't they be cut? What?”

“But they are very dear to us,” pleaded the baron earnestly. “We all love them, my wife and children and I. To us they are sacred. It would be harsh to take them from us.”

“Baron,” said the prince, with suave malice, “you miss the point. We Germans are never harsh. But we are practical. My soldiers need exercise. The camps need wood. Do you see? What?”

“Certainly,” answered the poor baron, humbling himself in his devotion to his trees. “Your Highness makes the point perfectly clear--the need of exercise and wood. But there is plenty of good timber in the forest and the park--much easier to cut. Cannot your men get their wood and their exercise there, and spare my dearest trees?”

Ludra laughed unpleasantly.

“You do not yet understand us, dear landlord. We Germans are a hard-working people, not like the lazy Belgians. The harder the work the better we like it. The soldiers will have a fine time chopping down your tough beeches.”

The slender old man drew himself up, his eyes flashed, he was driven to bay.

“You shall not do this,” he cried. “It is an outrage, a sacrilege. I shall appeal to the commandant. He will protect my rights.”

The officers looked at each other. Deaf to pity, they had keen ears for danger. A reproof, perhaps a punishment from their superior would be most unpleasant. They hesitated to face it. But they were too obstinate to give up their malicious design altogether with a good grace.

“Military necessity,” growled the prince, “knows no private rights. I advise you, baron, not to appeal to the commandant. It will be useless, perhaps harmful.”

“Here, you,” he said gruffly, turning to the corporal, “carry out my orders. Cut the two marked beeches by the gate. Then take your men into the park and cut the biggest trees there. Report for further orders to-morrow morning.”

The wooden-faced giant saluted, swung on his heels, and marched stiffly out. The baron followed him quickly.

He knew that entreaties would be wasted on the corporal. How to get to the commandant, that was the question? He would not be allowed to use the telephone which was in the dining-room, nor the automobile which belonged to the officers; nor one of their horses which were in his stable. The only other beast left there was a small and very antique donkey which the children used to drive. In a dilapidated go-cart, drawn by this pattering nag, the baron made such haste as he could along twelve miles of stony road to the district headquarters. There he told his story simply to the commandant and begged protection for his beloved trees.

The old general was of a different type from the fire-eating dandies who played the master at Azan. He listened courteously and gravely. There was a picture in his mind of the old timbered house in the Hohe Venn, where he had spent four years in retirement before the war called him back to the colors. He thought of the tall lindens and the spreading chestnuts around it and imagined how he should feel if he saw them falling under the axe.

Then he said to his petitioner:

“You have acted quite correctly, _Monsieur le Baron,_ in bringing this matter quietly to my attention. There is no military necessity for the destruction of your fine trees. I shall put a stop to it at once.”

He called his aide-de-camp and gave some instructions in a low tone of voice. When the aide came back from the telephone and reported, the general frowned.

“It is unheard of,” he muttered, half to himself, “the way those titled young fools go beyond their orders.”

Then he turned to his visitor.

“I am very sorry, _Monsieur le Baron,_ but two of your beeches have already fallen. It cannot be helped now. But there shall be no more of it, I promise you. Those young officers are--they are--let us call them overzealous. I will transfer them to another post to-morrow. The German command appreciates the correct conduct of you and _Madame la Baronne._ Is there anything more that I can do for you?”

“I thank your Excellency sincerely,” replied the baron. Then he hesitated a moment, as if to weigh his words. “No, _Herr General,_ I believe there is nothing more--in which you can help me.”

The old soldier's eyelids flickered for an instant. “Then I bid you a very good day,” he said, bowing.

The baron hurried home, to share the big good news with his wife. The little bad news she knew already. Together they grieved over the two fallen trees and rejoiced under the golden shadow of their untouched companions. The officers had called for wine, and more wine, and yet more wine, and were drinking deep and singing loud in the dining-room.

In the morning came an orderly with a despatch from headquarters, ordering the prince and the count to duty in a dirty village of the coal region. Their baggage was packed into the automobile, and they mounted their horses and went away in a rage.

“You will be sorry for this, dumbhead,” growled the prince, scowling fiercely. “Yes,” added Ludra, with a hateful grin, “we shall meet again, dear landlord, and you will be sorry.”

Their host bowed and said nothing.

Some weeks later the princely automobile came to the door of the chateau. The forester brought up word that the Prince Barenberg and the Count Ludra were below with a message from headquarters; the commandant wished the baron to come there immediately; the automobile was sent to bring him. He made ready to go. His wife and his servant tried hard to dissuade him: it was late, almost dark, and very cold--not likely the commandant had sent for him--it might be all a trick of those officers--they were hateful men--they would play some cruel prank for revenge. But the old man was obstinate in his resolve; he must do what was required of him, he must not even run the risk of slighting the commandant's wishes; after all, no great harm could come to him.

When he reached the steps he saw the count in the front seat, beside the chauffeur, grinning; and the prince's harsh voice, made soft as possible, called from the shadowy interior of the car:

“Come in, baron. The general has sent for you in a hurry. We will take you like lightning. How fine your beeches look against the sky. What?”

The old man stepped into the dusky car. It rolled down the long aisle, between the smooth gray columns, beneath the fan-tracery of the low arches, out on to the stony highway. Thus the tree-lover was taken from his sanctuary.

He did not return the next day, nor the day after. His wife, tortured by anxiety, went to the district headquarters. The commandant was away. The aide could not enlighten her. There had been no message sent to the baron--that was certain. Major Barenberg and Captain Ludra had been transferred to another command. Unfortunately, nothing could be done except to report the case.

The brave woman was not broken by her anguish, but raised to the height of heroic devotion. She dedicated herself to the search for her husband. The faithful forester, convinced that his master had been killed, was like a slow, sure bloodhound on the track of the murderers. He got a trace of them in a neighboring village, where their car had been seen to pass at dusk on the fatal day. The officers were in it, but not the baron. The forester got a stronger scent of them in a wine-house, where their chauffeur had babbled mysteriously on the following day. The old woodsman followed the trail with inexhaustible patience.

“I shall bring the master's body home,” he said to his mistress, “and God will use me to avenge his murder.”

A few weeks later he found his master's corpse hidden in a hollow on the edge of the forest, half-covered with broken branches, rotting leaves, and melting snow. There were three bullets in the body. They had been fired at close range.

The widow's heart, passing from the torture of uncertainty to the calm of settled grief, had still a sacred duty to live for. She had not forgotten her husband's dream. She went to the cardinal-archbishop to beg the consecration of a little burial-plot at the foot of the greatest of the beeches of Azan. That wise and brave prince of the church consented with words of tender consolation, and promised his aid in the pursuit of the criminals.

“Eminence,” she said, weeping, “you are very good to me. God will reward you. He is just. He will repay. But my heart's desire is to follow my husband's dream.”

So the body of the old botanist was brought back to the shadow of the great beech-trees, and was buried there, like the bones of a martyr, within the sanctuary.

Is this the end of the story?

Who can say?

It is written also, among the records of Belgium, that the faithful forester disappeared mysteriously a few weeks later. His body was found in the forest and laid near his master.

Another record tells of the trial of Prince Barenberg and Count Ludra before a court martial, The count was sentenced to ten years of labor _on his own estate._ The death-sentence of the prince was commuted to imprisonment _in some unnamed place._ So far the story of German justice.

But of the other kind of justice--the poetic, the Divine--the record is not yet complete.

I know only that there is a fatherless girl working and praying in a hospital in England, and a fatherless boy fighting and praying in the muddy trenches near Ypres, and a lonely woman walking and praying under certain great beech-trees at the Chateau d'Azan. The burden of their prayer is the same. Night and day it rises to Him who will judge the world in righteousness and before whose eyes the wicked shall not stand.

September, 1918.

THE KING'S HIGH WAY

In the last remnant of Belgium, a corner yet unconquered by the German horde, I saw a tall young man walking among the dunes, between the sodden lowland and the tumbling sea.

The hills where he trod were of sand heaped high by the western winds; and the growth over them was wire-grass and thistles, bayberry and golden broom and stunted pine, with many humble wild flowers--things of no use, yet beautiful.

The sky above was gray; the northern sea was gray; the southern fields were hazy gray over green; the smoke of shells bursting in the air was gray. Gray was the skeleton of the ruined city in the distance; gray were the shattered spires and walls of a dozen hamlets on the horizon; gray, the eyes of the young man who walked in faded blue uniform, in the remnant of Belgium. But there was an indomitable light in his eyes, by which I knew that he was a King.

“Sir,” I said, “I am sure that you are his Majesty, the King of Belgium.”

He bowed, and a pleasant smile relaxed his tired face.

“Pardon, monsieur,” he answered, “but you make the usual mistake in my title. If I were only 'the King of Belgium,' you see, I should have but a poor kingdom now--only this narrow strip of earth, perhaps four hundred square miles of debris, just a _'pou sto,'_ a place to stand, enough to fight on, and if need be to die in.”

His hand swept around the half-circle of dull landscape visible southward from the top of the loftiest dune, the _Hooge Blikker._ It was a land of slow-winding streams and straight canals and flat fields, with here and there a clump of woods or a slight rise of ground, but for the most part level and monotonous, a checker-board landscape--stretching away until the eyes rested on the low hills beyond Ypres. Now all the placid charm of Flemish fertility as gone from the land--it was scarred and marred and pitted. The shells and mines had torn holes in it; the trenches and barbed-wire entanglements spread over it like a network of scars and welts; the trees were smashed into kindling-wood; the farmhouses were heaps of charred bricks; the shattered villages were like mouths full of broken teeth. As the King looked round at all this, his face darkened and the slight droop of his shoulders grew more marked.

“But, no,” he said, turning to me again, “that is not my kingdom. My real title, monsieur, is _King of the Belgians._ It was for their honor, for their liberty, that I was willing to lose my land and risk my crown. While they live and hold true, I stand fast.”

Then ran swiftly through me the thought, of how the little Belgian army had fought, how the Belgian people had suffered, rather than surrender the independence of their country to the barbarians. The German cannonade was roaring along the Yser a few miles away; the air trembled with the overload of sound; but between the peals of thunder I could hear the brave song of the skylark climbing his silver stairway of music, undismayed, hopeful, unconquerable. I remembered how the word of this quiet man beside whom I stood had been the inspiration and encouragement of his people through the fierce conflict, the long agony: _“I have faith in our destiny; a nation which defends itself does not perish; God will be with us in that just cause.”_

“Sir,” I said, “you have a glorious kingdom which shall never be taken away. But as for your land, the fates have been against you. How will you ever get back to it? The Germans are strong as iron and they bar the way. Will you make a peace with them and take what they have so often offered you?”

“Never,” he answered calmly; “that is not the way home, it is the way to dishonor. When God brings me back, my army and my Queen are going with me to liberate our people. There is only one way that leads there--the King's high way. Look, _monsieur,_ you can see the beginning of it down there. I hope you wish me well on that road, for I shall never take another.”

So he bade me good afternoon very courteously and walked away among the dunes to his little cottage at La Panne.

Looking down through the light haze of evening I saw a strip of the straight white road leading eastward across the level land. At the beginning of it there was a broken bridge; in places it seemed torn up by shells; it disappeared in the violet dusk. But as I looked a vision came.

The bridge is restored, the road mended and built up, and on that highway rides the King in his faded uniform with the Queen in white beside him. At their approach ruined villages rejoice aloud and ancient towns break forth into singing.

In Bruges the royal comrades stand beside the gigantic monument in the centre of the Great Market, and above the shouting of the multitude the music of the old belfry floats unheard. Ghent and Antwerp have put on their glad raiment, and in their crooked streets and crowded squares joy flows like a river surging as it goes. Into Brussels I see this man and woman ride through a welcome that rises around them like the voice of many waters--the welcome of those who have waited and suffered, the welcome of those to whom liberty and honor were more dear than life. In the _Grande Place,_ the antique, carven, gabled houses are gay with fluttering banners; the people delivered from the cruel invader sing lustily the _Marseillaise_ and the old songs of Belgium.

In the midst, Albert and Elizabeth sit quietly upon their horses. They have come home. Not by the low road of cowardly surrender; not by the crooked road of compromise and falsehood; not by the soft road of ease and self-indulgence; but by the straight road of faith and courage and self-sacrifice--the King's High Way.

HALF-TOLD TALES

THE TRAITOR IN THE HOUSE

The Guest, who came from beyond the lake, had lived in the house for years and had the freedom of it, so that he had become quite like a member of the family. He was friendly treated and well lodged. Indeed, some thought he had the best room of all, for though it was in the wing, it was spacious and well warmed, and had a side door, so that he could go in and out freely by day or night.

It must be said that he had earned his living on the place, being industrious and useful, a very handy man about the house; and the children had a liking for him because he sang merry songs and told beautiful fairy-tales.

So he was all the more surprised and aggrieved when the Master of the house said to him one night, as they sat late by the fire:

“I suspect you.”

“But of what?” cried the Guest.

“Of caring more for the house that you came from than for the house that you live in.”

“But you know I was at home there once,” said the Guest, “would you have me forget that? Surely you will not deny me the freedom of my thoughts and memories and fond feelings. Would you make me less than a man?”

“No,” said the Master, “but I will ask you to choose between your old home and your new home now. The house in which you lived formerly is become our enemy--a nest of brigands and bloody men. They have killed a child of ours on the highway. They threaten us to-night with an attack in force. Tell me plainly where you stand.”

The Guest looked down his nose toward the smouldering embers of the fire. He knocked out the dottle of his pipe on one of the andirons. Two fat tears rolled down his cheeks; he was very sentimental.

“I am with you,” he said.

“Good,” said the Master, “now let us make the house fast!” [Illustration with caption: 'I will ask you to choose between your old home and your new home now.']

So they closed and barred the shutters and locked and bolted the front door.

Then they lighted their bedroom candles and bade each other good night.

But as the Guest went along his dim corridor, the Master turned and followed him very softly on tiptoe, watching.

Outside the house, in the darkness, there was a sound of many shuffling feet and whispering voices.

When the Guest came to the side door he tried the latch, to see that it was working freely. He moved the bolt, not forward into its socket, but backward so that it should be no hindrance. In the window beside the doorway he set his candle. So the house was ready for late-comers.

Then the Guest sighed a little. “They are my old friends,” he murmured, “my dear old friends! I could not leave them out in the cold. I am not responsible for what they do. Only I must my old affection prove.” So he sighed again and turned softly to his bed.

But as he turned the Master stood before him and took him by the throat.

“Traitor!” he cried. “You would betray the innocent. Already your soul is stained with my sleeping children's blood.” And with his hands he choked the false Guest to death.

Then he shot the bolt of the side door, and barred the window, and called the servants, and made ready to defend the house.

Great was the fighting that night. In the morning, when the robbers were driven off, the false Guest was buried, outside the garden, in an unmarked grave.

February 2, 1918.

JUSTICE OF THE ELEMENTS

So the Criminal with a Crown came to the end of his resources. He had told his last lie, but not even his servants would believe it. He had made his last threat, but no living soul feared it. He had put forth his last stroke of violence and cruelty, but it fell short.

When he saw his own image reflected in the eyes of men, and knew what he had done to the world and what had come of his evil design, he was afraid, and cried, “Let the Earth swallow me!” And the Earth opened, and swallowed him.

But so great was the harm that he had wrought upon the Earth, and so deeply had he drenched it with blood, that it could not contain him. So the Earth opened again, and spewed him forth.

Then he cried, “Let the Sea hide me!” And the waves rolled over his head.

But the Sea, whereon he had wrought iniquity, and filled the depths thereof with the bones of the innocent, could not endure him and threw him up on the shore as refuse.

Then he cried, “Let the Air carry me away!” And the strong winds blew, and lifted him up so that he felt exalted.

But the pure Air, wherein he had let loose the vultures of hate, dropping death upon helpless women and harmless babes, found the burden and the stench of him intolerable, and let him fall.

And as he was falling he cried, “Let the Fire give me a refuge!” So the Fire, wherewith he had consumed the homes of men, rejoiced; and the flames which he had compelled to do his will in wickedness leaped up as he drew near.

“Welcome, old master!” roared the Fire. “Be my slave!”