CHAPTER XX

To Paulette, the fourth of August meant the sudden ending of all her happy anticipations, for, shortly after the declaration of war, Maurice had been taken prisoner.

When the news came to the château, she refused to believe it; such a thing was impossible! Maurice was to fare forth and fight for France, he was to fly her colors from his helmet as did the knights of old! But he had been obliged to fight the invaders of his own country. The Germans had come! The Germans had conquered! Maurice was a prisoner!

Paulette had never known in all her short life what denial meant. To her parents, her word and whim was law, and her brother idolized her. Her every wish had been gratified. She insisted now that they demand her lover's freedom. She could not be made to understand the futility of even asking. It was impossible that what she wanted so ardently, should be kept from her.

There came a letter, meagre, bloodless, sternly emasculated by the Teuton censor, but it contained one word that sent the blood from her lips--"Wounded." Other letters followed, but they were pitifully empty, so lacking in everything that she wanted to know, that they were more a source of grief than comfort. After awhile, even these stopped.

Old Nanine, the Breton woman, who had nursed Paulette and her brother, shook her head over the shadows under her eyes, the listless droop of her mouth, the hollows in the delicate oval of her cheeks.

The girl was filled with a flame of deep, bitter rage that consumed her day and night. The tears that came to the relief of other women, were denied her. Hate, that most terrible of the children of War, was born in her breast.

"Now dearie," crooned Nanine, "don't take it like that! It can't be long before the French will have driven the _Boches_ away, and the young Monsieur will be back again. Come, calm yourself! What a picture you will be for him to see when he comes, if you go on so."

But Paulette refused to be comforted. The sunniness of her nature changed into a brooding sullenness. She grew to hate the very name of the Germans, and little by little her resentment fastened itself on Marie, her Austrian sister-in-law.

In the midst of her grief and despair, one day one of her school friends, a girl of her own age, came to the château. She wore the white coif of the trained nurse with its little red cross of mercy bound about her forehead. She was filled with wonderful tales of bravery and suffering, and in a flash Paulette knew that this was the work which would fill her time and her heart while waiting for Maurice, and perhaps enable her to help him. She began to dream that it might be her hands that would nurse him back to health. She must make those hands as skillful as possible. She threw herself into the necessary studies with feverish energy.

Though the General had passed the retiring age, he had been recalled to active service and was absent most of the time. When he did come home, it was only for hurried visits. The household was completely changed. One by one, those of the men servants who were young enough, had been called to the colors and had marched away. Old Nanine had seen her two eldest sons go, big, strapping fellows of whom she was justly proud. In company with so many other French mothers, she had said good-bye to them for the last time. Jean had fallen in one of the first skirmishes and Pierre had received his death wound a few weeks later. Now the youngest, Jacques, had just left for the front. Her heart was very heavy, but she stifled her own sorrow to comfort the grieving Paulette.

Madame de la Motte busied herself from early morning to night, gathering supplies and looking after the families of those who had gone with the army.

Of the men about the château, none were left excepting Joseph, the gardener, stooping under his sixty heavy years, and the new butler.

This man was tall and thin, perhaps forty-five, his hair graying at the temples, his dark, watchful eyes looking out steadily from under heavy brows. He was so well spoken of in the letters of recommendation which he presented, that Madame de la Motte considered herself fortunate to have found him.

Antoine--this was his name--and old Nanine, did not agree very well. The Breton peasant distrusted and disliked every one whose ancestry she did not know. Her broad, good-humored face would set in wooden lines when she and Antoine encountered one another, and if he took her to task about even the smallest thing, she would shower upon him a volley of sturdy Breton abuse. So usually the mild and quiet-spoken Antoine avoided her as much as possible.

Nanine was a privileged character. She came and went as she pleased in the household, although her own home was the gate house just at the entrance to the château grounds. Here she lived, with an orphan girl named Angéle, who was to marry Jacques when he came back from the war.

To this cottage of Nanine's, Paulette came nearly every day. She brought her letters as she received them from Maurice, and the two girls would read them over and over, Angéle pointing out where the censor had blotted out a phrase, Paulette, through her tears, trying to supply it. And Jacques' letters were gone over in the same way. When the news came that he, too, was taken prisoner and sent to Belgium, they spent much of their time hoping that he would be near Maurice, and so these two girls, one at each end of the social scale, bridged the gap that separated them and became one in a sorrow common to both. For grief, as well as war, knows no caste.

Old Nanine, her wide Breton skirts billowing about her, the huge wings of her great white Breton cap framing her broad face, trudged back and forth with Paulette on her errands among the peasants, her heart heavy with the sorrow that comes to every mother of men, when men are waging war. She would not trust the girl alone on her own familiar roads, for the armies were nearing their quiet village.

So the days went by, those dreadful August days. Into almost every household about them came the sad news that some loved son who had marched away so bravely, would never return. The faces of the women grew wan and sad. Joy had gone from the world.

And now the air began to tremble with an ominous intonation, a sound filled with grim menace that continued day and night, a harbinger of death and destruction, of devastation and terror. A sound that was never to cease in the long months that followed, sometimes swelling into a deep, distant roar, sometimes dying away in a dull, intermittent muttering.

It was the voice of the guns!