Part 48

Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.

He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall--she served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.

The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....

What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?

Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be sure to know, because their murderer would be there....

"_Ting...._"

What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images that crowded in her brain? It loosed the iron band that was bound about her aching temples. It melted the icy armor that was riveted about her torn and sorrowful heart....

"_Ting-ting!_"

She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened, breathing quickly. Again came the silvern tinkle.

"_Ting-ting-ting! ..._"

Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear fell from her like a pall all snow-wet. She rose up among the rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the sleeper, and roused him cautiously. He awakened, and said through the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:

"Who is it?..." And then instantly remembered, and passionately kissed the warning hand.

"_Ting-ting, ting-ting!..._"

"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.

She snatched away the hand. He rose to his knees and listened.... Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray. White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:

"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"

No more was said. They took hands and went out of the hovel, and passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the littered street of Petit Plappeville.

At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a lantern-flame, moved toward them. Their shadows were thrown sidewise upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls. The bell tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World. The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping of wooden-soled country shoes.

Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides. The stout figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta, wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.

At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left hand. His right arm was folded over his breast. As Juliette sank down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt down beside the girl.

The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them in silence. His round face looked puckered and anxious. He said, as his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:

"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this unhappy village?"

Juliette was praying. P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:

"Yes, my Father. The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left their houses.... There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of Madame Guyot. He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through with one of their lances. He lies within there! May his soul rest in peace!"

The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death. Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:

"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am going. A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord. Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."

He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.

"_Ting!_"

They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered, murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.

Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there hung one star of blazing emerald.

When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.

"_Ting!_"

As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway. He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his companions:

"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here. Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than one light!"

Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.

A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off. Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper:

"This is the Château Malakoff. Perhaps you remember?... And all those broken bottles.... The soldiers drank the wine...."

Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went. Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to ascend.

They went upstairs.

The door of the death chamber stood open. From within, came the murmuring sound of the priest's voice. Red-eyed servants knelt in prayer about the threshold. The master of the house was just within the door. His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry and wrathful. Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned her to kneel beside her:

"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit.... They were only married a year!"

Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present when the priest elevated the Host. A little later she broke down again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after administering the Viaticum. And then in a gray pool of quiet that ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with astonishment and terror and anger in it:

"_Mon mari!... Mon mari!... Au secours!... Les Prussiens----_"

And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and sorrowful. He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the women. And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed, clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace. Only two great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering candlelight. And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.

And then--they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence, was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin Boisset.

"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of Seulvent. They will not return until the Prussians have left the neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these men when they are full of wine.... We will stop as we pass, and tell them what has happened.... Then you had better come back with me to my presbytery. The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be coffee and bread!"

"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there would not be even bread and coffee. But I have my hiding holes of which I tell nobody. And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could not say where they were!"

That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down. It stood next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good Curé's heart. After _déjeuner_ he explained that he was going to visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.

He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand. P. C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.

Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen. The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered, staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty black. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand with something shining in it. The piece of gold given him by Juliette.

He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place. He followed, to find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry--a ladder that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against the whitewashed wall.

"Couldn't I do that? I'm a good deal stronger than, you are.... Halloa!... Lucky I was there!"

P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder. He said quite reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit of timber:

"Why have you followed me? Is it that you wish to speak to me privately? If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the nerves!"

P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.

"But certainly she shall have a Mass. Though five francs will be more than sufficient. Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find the necessary francs of change. You see, we are poor in this neighborhood ... it is to be expected!" The good Curé smiled, and added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my _confrères_--even richer than some of my superiors. Therefore, if you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer Mass." He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his features. Describe his person, if you can!" ...

P. C. Breagh recalled and described. When he had done, the Curé said, in a tone of quiet conviction:

"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is not only my superior.... He ranks above the angels.... Monsieur has spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"

Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C. Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into the worn flagstones. He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue were stiff. The priest went on:

"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars. As a Catholic, Monsieur has learned of him. But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur does not know?... A year before his holy death.... Since it has happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered.... He has succored the wounded.... He has appeared, just as he was when alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have departed in joy and peace.... In the world this will not be credited. It does not matter!... What matters is, that those who perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on behalf of souls.... He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven----"

He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:

"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!... How could I be so forgetful!... No! it is not to be replaced against the wall. It is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the edge of that trap-door.... Since Monsieur has been favored with a vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence. Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"

And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.

It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed it in.

"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.

"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the church below him at the earliest break of day.

Said the Curé:

"My child, it was I. A member of my parish was dying--I came to the church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle.... I forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence here had been betrayed!... But all is well! and a cart of brushwood will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its load when it is driven on. It is going to a farm near Audun--from there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed. It is said that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor, now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan." He added as white teeth flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully: "You will please yourself as to serving again! You have already suffered greatly for our country!"

The soldier said roughly:

"I would die for her with a good heart!... But I will not fight again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold and betrayed!"

"Well, well!... _Au revoir_, my child, and may Our Lord protect you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down the ladder. "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence, and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke. The curls of vapor can be seen rising between the shingles. I observed it when we had workmen here in Spring!"

Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder, unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear bright autumn air.

"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust where use did not maintain its brightness. "He was taken prisoner in yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift for himself, with others in the same condition. One of them--in whose company this man was--had concealed a pistol, and had the daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck--or General Moltke--I am not sure which! But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were massacred in cold blood. This man by a miracle--escaped!... How, I know not! He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover his resurrection from the grave."

They went back into the presbytery. The priest went to look for the fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece. She came out of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little queenly head.

Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:

"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded.... See you well, I would like to meet that man!"

"Why, Mademoiselle?"

"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"

He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.

"See you well--if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to the man who saved France!"

Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice say with a sigh in it:

"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but were!..."

She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:

"There is something of my mother in me--more than a little! How dared I scorn her--I, who can speak and look like this?" And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"

For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of men.

This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.

Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by their covert of black lashes.... Her will bent heavily on his, weakened by his worship of her. In another instant he would have asked what she wanted him to do.