Had not she also that tense look, those pinched features, all those unmistakable signs that Louise well knew how to interpret? Was it possible that the same doom had overtaken her?
Then Louise forced herself to remember what she would have given her life to forget. With eyes closed, with shuddering soul, she compelled herself to live over again the darkest hours of her life.
... Before daybreak on the 5th of August. The house was silent. The invaders had gone. Louise, a livid spectre in the pale grey dawn, had staggered from her room—passing the dead Amour on Chérie's threshold—and had stumbled down the stairs. There at the foot of the wrought-iron banister lay Mireille, her mouth open, her breath coming in gasps, like a little dying bird.
Louise had raised her, had unwound the long scarf that bound her, had sprinkled water on her face and poured brandy down her throat ... until Mireille had opened her eyes. Then Louise had seen that they were not Mireille's eyes. There was frenzy and vacancy in the pale orbs that wandered round the room, wandered and wandered—until they stopped and were fixed, suddenly wild, hallucinated and intent. On what were they fixed with such an expression of unearthly terror? The mother turned to see.
Mireille's wild gaze was fixed upon a door, the red-curtained door of a bedroom. It was a spare room, seldom used; sometimes a guest or one of Claude's patients had slept there.
It was on this door—now flung wide open and with the red drapery torn down—that Mireille's wild, meaningless gaze was fixed. Louise looked. Then she looked again, without moving. She could see that the electric lights were burning in the room; a chair was overturned in the doorway, and there, there on the bed, lay a figure—Chérie! Chérie still in her white muslin dress all torn and bloodstained, Chérie with her two hands stretched upwards and tied to the bedpost above her head. A wide pink ribbon had been torn from her hair and used to tie her hands to the brass bedstead. Her face was scratched and bleeding. She was quite unconscious. Louise thought she was dead.
Ah! how had she found the strength to lift her, to call her, to drag her back to life, weeping over her and Mireille, gazing with maddened despair from one unconscious figure to the other?... She had dressed them, she had dragged and carried them down the stairs at the back of the house. Should she call for help? Should she go crying their shame and despair down the village street? No! no! Let no one see them. Let no one know what had befallen them....
And—listen! Was that not the clatter of Uhlans galloping down the road?
Moaning, staggering, stumbling, she dragged and carried her two helpless burdens into the woods....
There, the next evening a party of Belgian Guides had found them.