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:
"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage. The little portemanteau and the sac de nuit I brought with me from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men! Is it not deplorable? Pray look, Monsieur!"
But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.
Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly.... She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped. But not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery stoup that hung above the bed.
"He was so good.... He should now be safe in Paradise. But we must always remember him in our prayers!..."
It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to. Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.
"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide! Run! The Uhlans are coming! They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's eau de vie and wine!'
"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns. You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in store!' Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant running this way and one that.... Madame Guyot caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would be found a refuge. But I refused to leave the house!"
He broke in:
"Think what you risked! Why didn't you escape with her?"
She looked at him wonderingly:
"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my parole to stay?"
He could not speak. She went on quickly:
"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge, and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.' But when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine, they care nothing for the Red Cross! Cover me over with a sheet, and hide underneath the bed I lie on. Thus they will think me dead, and possibly go away. The good God may let me save you, though I have often sinned against Him!'"
A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek. She brushed it off and went on:
"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding it. Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from the wall, and laid it on his breast. Then I got under the bed, for I heard men at the door. There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound of breathing. Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock gave way.... They entered.... Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had said to me, 'For your life, do not make a sound!' For my soul, more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."
Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh could see her little throat swelling. Her tragic eyes seemed to have no room for him. He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking place in a dream of uncanny vividness. That he must wake up next moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....
"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language. Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school.... But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot. That was why they tore up clothes and linen—broke the dishes and glasses—behaved as wild beasts, rather than men. That they were drunk, I knew, though I saw their boots and not their faces. The smell of wine and brandy made me desire to be sick.... But when they approached the bed, with what anguish of apprehension I waited.... If I could have screamed, it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the sheet...."
Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs. Her nostrils quivered with each sharply-taken breath. Her tragic upper lip shut down upon its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:
"I heard my own heart beat—so loud it was like thunder. I felt M. Boisset trying to hold the breath.... I prayed to the Mother of God to cover us with Her manteau. I think she has certainly heard me when the Uhlans put back the sheet.... Alas, how terribly I am to find myself mistaken! When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he is about to go. Then—there is a savage cry!—a groan, hollow and terrible.... The lance comes plunging through the body of M. Boisset, through the palliasse—through the sacking that is underneath—through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with blood.... See!..."
And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish stains. And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:
"The brutes!... The cowardly beggars! Oh, if I had only been there!"
"Of what use?" she said. "They would only have killed you!"
"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try! Why, we're neutral. No Germans would dare——"
She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing down her upper lip:
"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father. They have no pity, these men with panther hearts. How should they, when he has none—that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to idolatry. Contradict me—say that I am wrong—to convince me would be impossible. For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked him in the face."
For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood. And comprehending this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:
"He's a great man—a terribly great man, however you look at him. And he—do you know, he saved my life once!"
She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:
"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this one. How many others have you given to death?'"
Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance. The delicate voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:
"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery. I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."
P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:
"Do you really believe that?..."
She answered simply and directly:
"If I did not, I would not say it.... Now I will shut my eyes and rest a little. I am so very tired, me!"
And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of last year's dead leaves. He asked himself what had she not gone through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!
Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.
But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or shattered—where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a peasant's board.
No wonder Juliette was very tired. Would her reason suffer from the results of this shock? Would she droop and die of the horrors undergone? Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an indomitable and unconquerable spirit? It had looked out of her stern eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron Chancellor.
Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him, to say, with the suddenness of a child:
"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a noble nature. Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have them shot?"
P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so. She said, her heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:
"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away calling that the Franzosen were coming.... Yet when they had gone and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that I view? In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent, white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the village saying his Rosary...."
She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes widely:
"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my Father! Help for one dying! Help for another in misery!' But he must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed on. Then I crept back under the bed, and then—at last, you came to me. What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."
For once Carolan did not hear her. His thoughts were busy elsewhere. He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the Office at the grave of de Bayard?
And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared the drunken marauders from their prey? And was it not strange that the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and Juliette?... The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might be.
Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness, deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the Colonel's graveside. On the moist surface of the spot where the Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled, wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.
An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by subconscious Memory. A significant phenomenon, remarks my other friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen. While my Catholic terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the stupendous truth contained in that clause of the Credo referring to the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.