XLII
A mud-bedaubed nondescript who toiled at the heels of the Great Headquarter Staff upon a huge velocipede of the big-wheeled, bone-shaker type prevalent at that remote period, met plenty of scowling glances from groups of peasants gathered at the corners of villages and listening by the wayside. Even on territory occupied by German troops, it was not safe for lagging soldiers to drop behind upon the march. To enter roadside taverns or farmhouses with a comrade was imprudent, to venture in alone was perilous, the sight of the German uniform, the sound of the Teutonic gutturals, were so fiercely abhorred. Of the reason for this loathing the Englishman was not ignorant. Marching with the infantry of the German army, he had followed where the Uhlans had passed.
He had slept, the night before the Army of the Red Prince had crossed the river, in a little deserted country château,—an ideal honeymoon nest for lovers, standing in a high-walled garden full of fruit-trees and tangled roses in the middle of a sloping meadow on the banks of the Moselle.
The butt of some Prussian soldier's rifle had served for key to the locked door in the high garden-wall. Those who had gone before had stripped the bushes and espaliers. The house had been entered, and the dainty silk-upholstered drawing-room chairs and sofas had been dragged out into the garden. The piano—a tiny rosewood bijou—probably a wedding present—and the absurd little billiard-table with which Monsieur had disported himself, stood crookedly upon the gravel; a long tear in the green cloth of the one; prints of tumblers, marks of greasy fingers marring the shiny veneer of the other. Bottles that had contained Champagne and Moselle—butts of cigars, empty tobacco-papers and match-boxes were scattered everywhere—over gravel, and grass-plot and the once trim garden-beds. An impromptu café-concert had evidently formed a feature of the bivouac.
P. C. Breagh had slept in a charming bedroom, under rosebud-chintz curtains looped with silken ropes, having carved wooden Cupids, painted pink, instead of tassels. The bed was not as luxurious as it might have been, because the blankets and sheets had been carried off. Opening his eyes in the gray of morning he had seen himself as he lay reflected in a long cheval-glass, and failed, for the moment, to recognize in the bronzed, shaggy, unclean tatterdemalion therein reflected the young Englishman of respectable appearance who had interviewed the German States' Chancellor in the Wilhelm-strasse.
He was not alone in the room, that was the next discovery. A woman, young and swarthy, dressed in the quaint costume of the country, stood upon the other side of the bed, with a kitchen chopper in her lifted right hand. He took in the chopper at a glance, and promptly rolled off the bed upon the side facing the friendly cheval-glass, and stood glowering at the black-eyed girl.
"I have startled Monsieur? A thousand apologies!"
She forced a smile with her curtsey and backed toward the door. P. C. Breagh explained in his French that he was no robber but a harmless traveler, and that she need not be alarmed.
"Monsieur is very kind!" Her chopper-hand hidden under her apron, she explained that she had served as cook in the establishment. Upon the news that M. de Bismarck was coming, tout à coup, Monsieur and Madame had gone away together to Paris. They were noble and very amiable, but old, old, and feeble.... They had left the little château in her care....
"Mademoiselle is not easily frightened?" P. C. Breagh hinted.
Said the black-eyed, modestly:
"I am Angéle—nothing of Mademoiselle. A peasant—like my father, who was gardener for Monsieur and Madame.... I was alone here when the Prussian horsemen came, breaking the doors and shutters.... Everything was spoiled, or taken, wine, linen, the fowls in the poultry-run. Destitution, ruin everywhere!..."
She accentuated her tale of loss by heavings of the bosom, shrugs of the fine shoulders, dramatic gestures.
"Then my father returned and found ... No matter! Both he and I should have been silent and endured everything.... It was not wise, Monsieur, that the old man should have struck a Prussian, even for my sake. For then he was beaten. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see it.... Therefore I have vowed not to sleep again until...." She opened her eyes wide, and smiled, rather grimly, then changed the subject with a wave of the unchoppered and visible hand. Was Monsieur hungry? By searching, a crust of bread might be found in some cupboard, an egg or two—laid by one of the abducted hens in some private corner—a pinch of coffee and sugar sufficient for Monsieur!
"I should be glad of it. But—when you are in such trouble it seems unfair," protested Monsieur. He added, reverting to the language of the country, that he would be happy to pay for the déjeuner.
"But no! A meal for a bird!—Monsieur and Madame will never miss it!" and Angéle curtseyed herself away, with forced smiles.
Left alone, P. C. Breagh bolted the door and finding water in the bedroom jugs, and scented soap upon the washstand, enjoyed the luxury of a comprehensive wash, drying himself, in the absence of towels, upon a pillow-case. A pot of cold-cream, tinted a delicate pink and bearing the label of Piesse and Lubin, he found, and anointed his blistered feet therewith, and not without pangs of conscience—tore up the pillow-case and bandaged them. He would pay the girl for the damage done to her master's property, he told himself.
He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell comb he picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs, knapsack in hand. It was four o'clock. The dusty, foot-print and wheel-marked highway beyond the broken door in the garden-wall was strangely bare and lonely. The battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the other side of the village. The troops that would presently follow were not yet upon the road.
The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready. It had been laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little inlaid tables that stood upon the tiny lawn. A truncheon of bread, fairly new, a pat of butter, two eggs, and a bowl of fragrant, steaming milk and coffee—such a meal as P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.
He begged Angéle to share. She replied with a graceful wave of abnegation that she had already eaten. P. C. Breagh expressed regret, muttered his old Rockhampton grace and savagely fell to.
"Monsieur is Catholic?..."
The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had not escaped her. He nodded, with his mouth full, and Angéle turned pale under her swarthy skin. Her guest vigorously beheaded an egg and reached for the coffee-bowl. The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted it to his mouth, brought something back to him. He sipped cautiously—recognized the French equivalent for English rat-poison—spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous grimace, and poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.
Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled cap, crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had vanished round the corner of the little hen-house. He could hear the klop-klop of her varnished cow-leather clogs receding along paths unknown.
Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the intense bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and palate:
"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her. But more than likely her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking in the neighborhood with pitchforks, to speed the unwelcome guest."
He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour had faded from the banquet, and the leathery dryness of mouth and throat foiled him in the effort to finish the egg he had begun. He pocketed the other, abandoned the bread and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty knapsack, and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously new coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near the conservatory door. It bore a cross and an inscription roughly scrawled in letters of white paint:
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JOSEPH MARIE MEUNIER,
AGED 80.
KILLED BY THE PRUSSIANS,
AUGUST, 1870.
———
R.I.P.
And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold and deadly sinking at the heart, the English boy realized that Angéle's father had been murdered, and knew what had been the unendurable injury that had provoked the man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense. Next instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had been meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely smashed the conservatory glass and peppered the walls and trees. The intended recipient of these favors had previously been lame. Now, regardless of blisters and skin cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches, darted down the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.
Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from the column he temporarily marched with. The secret of those haggard eyes and scowling looks was clear to him now. And the discovery of a giant velocipede with the solid rubber tires of the period and a front wheel of four feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently enabled him—previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management of a machine of similar construction to outpace the Red Prince's marching battalions; and—upon highways, keep abreast of his flying cavalry.
Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the Great Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker of the black and white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans bringing up the rear.
There were troops upon the road.... One or two stray batteries of artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going the same way, halted to give a cheer for the King. But the galloping dispatch-bearers with their guards of troopers, bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the Great Staff on the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of dust in its wake.
The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the rear. The prophecy had been verified. He had not yet seen a battle or even a battlefield. But thousands of wounded men, displaying every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes. Ruined châteaux, farms and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered, villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead him home at last.
Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the scorching dust along in clouds.
The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him. By George! if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red underlip.... The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub. The fortune told him by the gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the end, when tute is jasing...."
"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so by a man who knew a bit of Romany. His imagination made a grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War Correspondent.—a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart having been irrevocably given in earlier days. Juliette—still young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity—Juliette in widow's weeds, would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his, gaunt and damp with approaching death. She would hear his story of faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long sleep. And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead face, she would realize that she loved—too late....
He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.
A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at Le Roi de la Prusse, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared unwinkingly before him. Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered, capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his Iron Chancellor by his side.
Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.
Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to the King?
No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five. The hard, somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping, aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache, precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and warm with kindliness.
This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce, prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun:
"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous. Your Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French Empire—played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole world!"
Flavigny was a village.... But the flickering black-and-white pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing.... Three battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head, the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:
"Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!"
And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.
"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once more. "He's a precisian too.... Zum Beispiel, he called to a man in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong shoulder. Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."
"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused his horse to start and rear. He added: "They were hard at it at Mars la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above Flavigny.... To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of battery-emplacements and rifle-pits—our guards are at Doncourt, our 9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers. Now the fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river. I have certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of musketry—French, I judge!—coming from that direction. I should judge that...."
"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!" retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor, and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.
P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the Charivari in all the German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed the hill. Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in astonishment: "Sapristi! the battle is over. I must have turned the handle too fast!"
But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator of a battlefield. The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.
And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all round one. The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills. The deep booming of heavy field-batteries persistently answered. Every now and then the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the mitrailleuse.
These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen skirmishes. Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!